When a tree dies, or when we run across decaying wood in a forest, our first reaction is to think we should remove it. However, the ecology of the forest is such that saproxylic organisms, including fungi and insects, depend on the dead wood that naturally generates the dynamics of the forest. The fact is, however, that there is a real obsession to eliminate it as soon as possible because it seems dirty and like it will attract pests. The biggest problem associated with dead wood is that dead wood plays a very important role in forest life. The forest needs dead trees and decaying wood to live. The point of this ecology lesson is that what humans think is done in good taste is not always the best way to go. Sometimes nature has a way of taking care of things that completely eclipses human vision or understanding. Sometimes what seems obvious and right to humans is just dead wrong.

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The transition is rough because it is still not fully understood. The Democrat party used to be the party of the little guy and the Republican party was the party of big business. Now, in the last 25 years it has changed. The Democrats used to be liberal, but now they are aligned with big business and everyone who is not a white man. Yet, not only are they still liberal, they are ultra-liberal in the extreme. The Republicans are now not really conservatives the way they used to be and they aligned with the working and middle class, especially the little white guy that got left behind in the reorganization of the old liberal and conservative factions, the old Democrat and Republican parties.

So, now the ultra-liberal, marginalized person is with big business? Now the little white guy got left behind, good and stranded, until Donald Trump came along to save him? What the hell happened?

The thing is no one was warned exactly. It happened in little movements and stages here and there. First, the manufacturing base began leaving the country in the 90s. Meanwhile the United Nations began disseminating policy laden with buzzwords like globalization, multiculturalism, and diversity. Soon came sustainability, global warming, climate change, and green energy. We started to hear talk about a global world without borders in which everyone would be the same because everyone was exactly the same. Morality was only cultural relativism. White was no longer right – it was plain wrong because everybody is just as right as everybody else in the new world order.

In the 80s and 90s, Affirmative Action hit, but it hit nowhere as hard as in academics. In higher education, white men soon became an endangered species, especially in the social sciences. By the mid-90s, jobs and positions of power were being handed out like candy on college campuses across the nation to anyone who was black, hispanic, female, gay or lesbian - an intersectional combination of the above was the most potent force of all - anyone but a white man. If you were a white man, then you and everything about your world was put on notice, was suddenly labelled as politically incorrect. It did not matter if a person had not published or if they were not very good – if they qualified and looked the part, they were given the position and as much power as they could assemble for themselves merely because they were not white men. Trust me – I was there – I know.

My dad was Swiss and my mom was Colombian. As I entered the job market coming out of grad school, and when I inquired as to whether I was Affirmative Action I was told I was “not Affirmative Action enough” and I knew exactly what that meant. Translation: I pass easily as a white man – they were looking for brown skin, sombreros, marginalized, victimized, outsiders – it was the new identity politics and you had to look the part. It was the most superficial kind of racism that ever existed. If you look like a white man, you go to the back of the line, and that is the new formula for eradicating racism in America. I had some good reasons for leaving academics back in 1999.

Interestingly, most people have no idea how profoundly the liberal identity politics of college campuses in the 80s and 90s has crept into society at large. It might help if more people were aware of some of the books and articles that had influenced this movement. It is more than just angry women or angry black people demanding their rights. There has evolved an entire ideology of ex post colonial defamation in the extreme.

New classics of leading edge Black thinkers formed a new canon of empowerment revolving around works such as Franz Fanon (1963), The wretched of the earth, in which the evils of colonialism were explicated and the need for Blacks to receive reparations from their former colonial slave masters was explicitly pronounced. Then there was bell hooks (1992) who wrote Representing whiteness in the black imagination, in which it was carefully explained that no white person would ever be able to understand the trauma harbored by the Black mind to this day from the social memories of slavery – it would never be eradicated and no white person would ever understand it, see it, or be able to make up for it.

Then there was a piece by a white woman, Peggy McIntosh (1988), White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack, which struck the perfect chord that ultimately served to unite all of humanity against the white man. In this piece McIntosh explained that white men have privilege, they have too much privilege, and the worst part of it is that they are not even consciously aware of how much privilege they have, and there is no way to ensure that they have superseded their own privilege.

The stark theme of these works is that white men are not even consciously aware of how evil they are and how evil they have been. The theme is that if left to their own devices, evil white men will continue to run the world at everyone else’s expense. What was required was a real movement, a real revolution that would pull the white man out of civilization by the roots. The white man himself could not be relied upon to participate or help because he was, by definition, too ensconced in his own privilege to be able to understand. He was a helpless colonial idiot savant who was afflicted with his own evil sadistic desire to subjugate everyone else to his will.

Now, I am skimming here admittedly, but take even just the three pieces I have cited, mash them together, and you have the beginnings of an ideological framework for a liberal movement that wants to eradicate western civilization as we have known it. This is, in no uncertain terms, an ideology that would seek to remove the white man from power, tear down the world he had built, and build it back up again the way they wanted it to be. Translation: Screw the White Man.

It's the circle of life - take a deep breath …

~End Part 1 - Part 2 Thursday~