This—the George Floyd Freakout, the indoctrination in schools and colleges, the submissive endorsement of the irredeemably dishonest, racist and Marxist Black Lives Matter and its fellow travelers, the Red Scare-reminiscent punishing and shunning of dissenters, the political and partisan enforcement of laws as journalists remain silently complicit—you know, this, has begun to make me think I’m in another remake of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” What never made any sense in any of the versions (the original, with Keven McCarthy and directed by Don Siegel of “Dirty Harry” fame was the best) is that aliens could take over the minds and bodies of millions of Americans across the country without anyone figuring it out, and without the news media warning the world with front page headlines and “how to stop the pod people” features. It also seemed absurd that only McCarthy and his friends (or in the much grosser but less creepy re-make, Donald Sutherland and his friends) were the only humans who appeared to have the will and the gumption to try to resist the invasion.
I also have found myself pondering the end of “Three Days of the Condor,” when Robert Redford tells a horrified CIA official that he has passed on evidence of the agency’s lawless and murderous ways to the New York Times. Who or what can be trusted today to blow the whistles when it is the increasingly totalitarian Left moving to take over minds and destroy democracy?
This story (and stumbling on the Sutherland “Invasion” last night) prompted my fevered reverie….
The city of Seattle held an employee training session for white staffers demanding that they ‘undo their own whiteness’ and be accountable to “people of color.” A handout distributed in the session explained that “racism is not our fault but we are responsible;” another declared that white staffers must give up “the land” and their “guaranteed physical safety” in order to be an “accomplice” for racial justice.
This was discovered after Christopher F. Rufo, an editor for City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, filed a public records request regarding the training session. The documents confirm that the Office of Civil Rights hosted a two-and-a-half-hour “Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.” In his article titled, “Cult Programming In Seattle,” Rufo writes,
At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.
Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.”
Rufo notes, “As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.”
Read Rufo’s whole piece, then wonder how Seattle can get away with this. Fox News picked up the story; so far, I haven’t whiffed it on any of the good, progressive news sources. Google News, so far, shows only a few conservative sources like the Washington Examiner expressing any alarm by reporting the story.
More disturbing to me is that there is no indication that the white employees reacted to this Orwellian session as they should have. They had a duty as Americans to stand up, confront the trianers, protest, walk out, and issue a letter to the public. I know that Seattle is a lost cause; too bad. The targets of the indoctrination had an obligation to warn everyone who wasn’t already a pod person that they were in danger.
Don’t tell me it would be hard; I know it’s hard: I’ve done the equivalent on three occasions in my life. (My dad was even more prolific.) Once it got me fired. None were as sinister as what happened in Seattle, and I sure as hell wouldn’t sit there and accept Manchurian Candidate programming like that without 1) stating my objections 2) telling the group that they should walk out with me and 3) telling the story far and wide.
The pod people are here. They’re here. But they only prevail if those dedicated to American values and democracy lack the courage and integrity to do their duty.
Addendum: I just saw Althouse’s post on this, and she emphasizes that the training was “voluntary.” True, participants were “invited” in an email, but my many years in the workforce for various organizations has taught me that when the boss “asks” you to do something, it isn’t truly voluntary.
Ethics Alarms 
The City of Newark demanded that every staff member tune in to its Juneteenth presentation, unless you were actively involved in something else, and you had to log in, so they could keep track of who did and didn’t. This wasn’t the mayor making some kind of announcement, this was speeches and poetry readings about how lousy the black race was treated and how much the rest owed them.
Boy, is that a creepy development. Reminds me of my senior year in HS and our senior “retreat” with a couple of Marist Brother teachers who were into guitar mass/Vatican II Catholicism. They kept us all up past midnight in a common room to try to wear us down and reprogram us. I caused a stink by saying, “Okay. It’s late. It’s time we all go to bed.” The brothers had a fit and talked among themselves and with a few of their converts, but they never said even a word to me and I never got any flack from anyone else in the administration who may have been told about it. Just thinking about it still pisses me off.
Is it a bit of a Freudian slip, or just ironic that the word they chose to describe a white participant was “accomplice”?
Jack wrote:
The pod people are here. They’re here. But they only prevail if those dedicated to American values and democracy lack the courage and integrity to do their duty.
You’re right, of course, in both assertions. But as we have seen, it is easy to “cultify” an apathetic, indifferent, comfortable society. I am not betting on courage being present in sufficient numbers to stave off the inevitable conflict that always seems to accompany cults — think David Koresh and the Branch Dividians, Jim Jones and Shoko Asahra and his Aum Shinrikyo. Violent, tragic outcomes seem to be the only result of such enterprises, and the Cult of Woke is likely to be no different.
I’d like to believe that our democracy is resilient enough to resolve this conflict without violence, but the Leftist takeover of academia, all the large cities in the country, and much of the federal government apparatus suggests that we may, perhaps, have lost too much ground to peacefully resolve the matter without surrender.
Which I will not do. I know many others won’t surrender, either.
I’m not really worried too much about “de-programming” the fully Woke converted — there are few enough of them that they could be nothing more than a nuisance under most circumstances. What worries me is their success in achieving their early level of conversion, described by Lindsay as in the Initiation or early Indoctrination Phase. We are not doing enough, as a nation, to open their eyes to the plight they are in, and how far along they are. The article by Kelsey Smoot I recently attacked in an open forum provides the exact template Lindsay described for the Indoctrination Phase, including the self-contradictions and sacrifices demanded of those who have been through initiation.
I don’t know how far this will go, but with the reservation that I may be aping a climate alarmist, I am afraid.
Have whites internalized a sense of racial superiority or have blacks internalized a sense of racial inferiority? Typically those that walk around with a perpetual chip on their shoulder have inferiority complexes.
I think there is some of that, but I also think that it’s a minority. What we have here are people using past race relations as a lever to advance other interests, and I don’t think that’s it’s the result of a feeling of inferiority.
All of this “Woke” crap uses race relations as a transport mechanism for their real agenda, much like we can use phages to insert antivirals into cells. The whole “Woke” dimension, to me, seems like a Trojan horse in which the contagion of anti-capitalism and mind control is hidden. Once you get inside the “walls of Troy” by using legitimate-sounding racial grievances, you propose a solution that requires the rejection of capitalist society and the adoption of a repressive form of socialism who’s most fundamental tenet is control of speech and language.
In other words, this “Woke” cult is a fraud used to expose otherwise good people to a toxic solution in a way that they can stomach, even embrace after sufficient exposure and reinforcement.
Comment of the enitre George Floyd Freakout. Great work, Glenn. BLM are Commies, plain and simple. Virtue signaling and groveling whites are useful idiots.
I think it’s more accurate to describe BLM as thugs with an agenda. Diversity trainers are sugar coated Nazis and any whites who don’t immediately walk out of these indoctrination sessions are cowards and fools.
“Thugs” is pretty subjective. They sometimes come across that way, but most of the thuggish behavior is being done by white anarchists. I’d agree they are shake-down artists, but you have to give them credit in the same way you’d be inclined to give Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH organization credit — they know how to market, sell, and reinforce their shakedowns as an investment in “social justice,” and companies are eating it up to avoid the “Nice company you have there …” consequences.
I think BLM is way too clever for my comfort, and their message packaged in an effective way — “guilting” white people, giving them an easy way out, then exposing them to their agenda a piece at a time. I’m not offering admiration for it, but rather realization of an effective tactic — mostly because so many people are feckless and willing to join the social media mob to prove their chops as non-racist.
It’s frightening how effective it has been. It worries me.
They’re no more thugs than the Bolsheviks and Lenin and Trotsky thugs. They are hard core intellectual commies. And incredibly dangerous.
Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors in 2015 video: “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories…”
Well, Lenin used thugs like Stalin to do the dirty work. There was also the Cheka who Lenin used to murder and torture political opponents as well as other Russians like the kulaks.
Sure they use thugs, but the brains of the outfit are Marxists. BLM is led by intellectuals, dangerous intellectuals who deploy thugs. I think we’re on the same page. I just don’t view BLM as some sort of spontaneous, well intentioned phenomenon. They’re really bad people with a very bad agenda.
I’m inclined to agree. They seem to be fully-committed Marxists, or some hybrid of his teaching.
Agreed, I was challanging the statement.
Understood.
Regarding being “invited”: I was invited to a virtual company wide “conversation” about race. I did not attend – most did not attend. I cannot comment about it all as a result.
I would hope the vast majority did not attend, and thus there was no one to blow the whistle. It may be woke government, but the employees are still unionized, and could easily dodge “voluntary” trainings not spelled out in their contract.
The US Army has succumbed to the pod people. As part of Project Inclusion (also referred to as Operation Inclusion) handouts included a handout that referred to “Make America Great Again” as “covert white supremacy”. There’s a pyramid of words and phrases. (https://trib.al/6x8rvqJ) This wasn’t a rogue email, but part of an official program held by Redstone Arsenal. In addition were “listening sessions”. Alabama was the first stop on this nation wide propaganda tour.
It’s obviously a violation of the Hatch Act or DoD Directive 1344.10. Who in the Army hierarchy thought this was a good idea. I’m also doubtful that someone said, “Alabama is the first state alphabetically, let’s start there.” Heads should roll over this, but it will probably all be taken care of with a tsk tsk and finger shaking.
One of the comments on Althouse’s blog clued me to this factoid:
Chief Seattle Was a Slave Owner
Bonus info from linked site…The Cherokees were slave-holding Confederates.
I remember when Van Jones was criticized for talking about a whitelash in 2016.
He may very well talk about in 2020- and this time, he maybe completely right.