Leftists erasing and then rewriting history, denying biology, ignoring real science.
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
I am something of an expert on San Francisco’s public high schools. I have been inside more of them than almost anyone else on the planet. That’s because I spent much of 1985 through 1987 as a near-full-time high school substitute teacher in places like Abraham Lincoln High School, George Washington High School, Galileo High School, Balboa High School, Lowell High School, and the one I lived next to, Mission High School.
Next time I visit San Francisco, most of those schools—and 44 other public schools—will be gone. No, they won’t have been nuked by white supremacist insurrectionist-terrorist Confederate-Nazi Donald Trump voters enraged by election theft. (At least, I hope not.) The schools will have been erased from history—and will have helped erase history—through an Orwellian orgy of re-naming.
On Jan. 26, 2021—a date that will live in infamy among history-conscious San Franciscans—the local school board voted to rename all schools whose namesakes “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That sounds noble and idealistic, albeit a bit longwinded. But it is also unrealistic. Virtually everyone who lived in the societies of earlier centuries participated, in one way or another, in the kinds of oppression that were taken for granted in those days. High achievers, in particular, were complicit in the power structures of their times. Just as everyone today, especially leaders, is complicit in a society that has created the Sixth Great Extinction (a result of habitat loss), stored up thousands of nuclear weapons, engaged in the most awful wars ever, looted resources, exalted usury, launched slow-motion genocide in Palestine, enslaved Third World peoples in sweatshops, stolen the resources of others, and developed soul-crushing Orwellian technology, among other crimes, similarly the people of 1776 were complicit in slavery, slow-motion genocide of Native Americans, exploitation of “free” labor, and other atrocities.
But like people today, the people of 1776, including leaders like George Washington, were not all bad. When we memorialize past leaders, we are participating in an unbroken chain of memory, passed down from generation to generation, preserving an ever-evolving narrative about who we are and how we got to be that way. Hating our own history, symbolically lynching those once considered (flawed) heroes, and annihilating the legacy of the past, is not a healthy response. Nor is it a solution to the problems of the present. Instead, it is a pathological symptom of decadence and decline.
The same “woke” mobs who hate history are equally incensed by biology. The fact that the human species comes in two sexes—male and female—apparently drives them mad. How else to explain the current craze of encouraging delusional men who think they are women to participate in—and easily dominate—women’s sports?
Just a few hours after taking office, Joe Biden signed an executive order called “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” Critics charge that the order “erases women” by allowing men dressed up as women, with or without hormones and mutilation, to “avoid discrimination” in such fields as women’s athletics.
If that order had been in force in the late 1970s, I could have been the Shaquille O’Neal of girls’ high school basketball. But while the fantasy of exerting physical dominance over nine high school girls in basketball uniforms, to the frenzied cheers of a home-team crowd, might have appealed to my immature, hormone-addled teenage self, I am thankful the temptation never arose. In those days, the notion that a goofy guy could don female clothing and join the girls’ team would have been considered not just unchivalrous but downright insane.
Why do liberals hate history and biology so much? Why are they at war with reality? The real reason, I suspect, is metaphysical. The same impulse that has driven our civilization to go to war with nature and compete with asteroids and super-volcanos as scourges of life on Earth has also led us to loathe ourselves and the history that made us what we are.
Liberal-progressive civilization always wants to annihilate what came before. Great thinkers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Devils and other works, clearly saw the demonic hatred of God (i.e., truth or ultimate reality) that was the real motivating force driving progressive liberalism. Dr. E. Michael Jones’s The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit identifies this depraved and nihilistic doctrine with a particular school of religious thought. But Jones paints with too narrow a brush. The hatred of reality tainting the dominant liberal-progressivist worldview of today’s elites transcends particular religions and ethnicities. It has become the ecumenical spirit of the age.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007, Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, public speaker, author, and talk radio host. He lives in rural western Wisconsin.
