This article was first published by The Blaze. When republishing, please provide attribution to The Blaze.
“A pogrom,” the definition goes, “is an organized massacre of a people.” The events of October 7 in Israel are one example of a pogrom. 9/11 was another. A pogrom is limited only by the existence of external authorities — political and moral — that can intervene and check its primal bloodlust. Without such resistances, and with modern means at leaders' disposal, pogroms are primal sparks of genocide.
My fellow Americans and my fellow American Jews: We have a problem. We, the American people, are losing our American minds. We are thinking and behaving badly, at a poison-Ivy-League level, and with trickle-down-scale consequences in the real world, beyond the twilight zone of academia.
At its core, diversity, equity, and inclusion is nothing more than the passion for vengeance and redistribution.
As goes American higher education — particularly elite education — so goes America. We wish it weren’t true, but sadly, it is
The caretakers of our finest schools have consciously stood up a rival to our inherited American experiment. And it’s on full post-American, Palestinian display.
These elite social justice warrior students are victims. But not for the reasons they think. These students are unbearable by design. They were taught to think and act this way by those entrusted with shaping their minds. The intersectional hate-fest on parade at our best schools is not a glitch in the teaching code. It is an intended feature, a product of a self-conscious educational pipeline that now stretches from pre-K to Ph.D.
Their program is our pogrom.
Wake up to the woke
Let’s start with a nod to American free speech. Without it, we would not know what these protesters think of us, or about their extinction plans for our collective American future.
Who are these new Americans? What do they believe and hope to accomplish?
They are anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-white, and anti-meritocratic in mind and heart.
What is “intersectionality”? It’s when each victim group gets to define its position — and each of the other victim groups of this rainbow coalition follows the “river to the sea” lead.
Those who are not members of an aggrieved group, but overwhelmed with guilt for their own inherited privilege, can give their adjacent support and chant the slogans. “Jews for Palestine,” for example — or, as Douglas Murray rendered this madness, “Chickens for KFC.”
Identity politics is minority tyranny against the majority, all in the name of a leveling understanding of equality and a pursuit of social justice that requires the active persecution of the present for the sins of the past. Its logic is racial, ethnic, and religious strife. The doctrine is self-evidently un-American to its core and dangerous. Its logic leads to Bosnian, Rwandan, and Gazan hunger games. This minority tyranny is not good for actual minorities, which explains their growing exodus from this mental and political plantation.
Identity politics thrives on a gaslighting newspeak that is a mixture of moralism and gangsterism. On the moralism side of the equation, the new Americans justify their pogrom by appealing to a debased principle of equality.
Their notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion means the opposite of the plain, shared meaning of those terms. At its core, DEI is nothing more than the passion for vengeance and redistribution.
The individual and personal is out; group identity and group differences are in. DEI renounces all calls for peace and reconciliation as evidence of an unconscious racism, colonialism, and patriarchy — among other evils (it’s hard to keep track of them all).
It’s a “shut up and give us what we want” social-justice Ponzi scheme.
It’s time for Americans to wake up to the woke. The Ivy League’s social-justice vanguard is full of haters.
We need a counterrevolution
Americans, particularly American Jews, are pulling their heads out of the sand. They are rightfully terrified of the graduates of 2024. But this nihilism did not arrive recently or on its own.
Truth be told, we are all complicit in its long, glacial ascent to commanding power. Their revolution has largely been won. They are in charge. Our counterrevolution to theirs is hopefully at the end of its beginning.
Their revolution revealed itself in the student protests and riots of the 1960s. Fortunately, this behavior scared a silent majority of Americans and threatened America’s “commanding heights” interests (the power centers of the public- and private-sector: education, entertainment, media, Wall Street, and the deep state that Eisenhower warned against) enough to send it down to defeat at the ballot box in 1968.
After this electoral and cultural thumping, these educated radicals and those who shaped them pursued a more patient, generational course of social transformation. They would make a “long march” through the university, steadily increasing their numbers on the faculty; with each graduating class, they would increase mind share outside the academy and within the heights of the ranks that had previously rejected them.
What a difference 56 years of deliberate, networked action can make.
What is the mindset of America’s education establishment today? How about entertainment, culture, and media? They are all progressive monocultures, and they have been so for decades. During the COVID and Black Lives Matter scares, big business, Wall Street, advertising, and the permanent bureaucracy — State, Justice, FBI, CIA, which last time around were part of the “permanent opposition” — have become progressive assets. And let’s not forget Big Tech and its willingness to play Big Brother for this new American mind and state.
The graduating class of 2024, unlike the class of 1968, enjoys the backing and support of everything that had previously stopped it and then some. Today, these graduates have enough political clout to affect American foreign policy — so much so that it appears that the U.S. is waging a “color revolution” against Israel’s Prime Minster, Benjamin Netanyahu.
And to make matters worse, the American people — a necessary bulwark going forward if we are to have a snowball’s chance in hell — seem to have become habituated in the intervening years to bending their knee to this growing and spreading madness. Will the silent speak up again, or has it too been co-opted? We will find out soon enough.
We’re all deplorables now
What are we to do, individually and collectively, to stop it?
We need to wake up to it — now! This is a call to liberals, independents, conservatives, and Jews to “wake up to the woke.” We think that by keeping our heads down and staying silent that we can make it go away, or, at least, the revolution will eat the “deplorables” first. But we are all deplorables now.
We need to starve it of public and private funding, our employment, and our votes.
Most importantly, this Palestinian mindset must be starved of respect. We — the too-silent majority — must free ourselves from this mental plantation.
The new radicals’ power derives from our opinion of them. This is the source of their real power — and its real weakness. They see themselves as our moral and social superiors. And they need us to see them that way. Refuse to do so, and their power deflates in real time. Recognizing and calling out its “pogromatic” illiberal logic and its poisoned identitarian fruit will cause it to wither on the public vine.
The new radicals didn’t get to where they are overnight. Taking back the American Mind from these levelers will require an equally long march and commitment.
If the graduating class of 2024 represents the American mind and future going forward, then this experiment in self-government that we inherited — this “shining city on a hill” — is over and out. This is how democracy dies in daylight.
“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” George Soros has declared, “is the United States.” Might the purpose of his supremely destructive philanthropy be to undermine the bulwark from within by seeding a Disunited States of America?
We have all been going along with the program and failing to see its anti-American, “pogromatic” soul. We must remember that Israel is still just “little Satan.” The big prize is bringing down the Great Satan itself: America.
We who don’t want to see that happen need to wake up to the woke. We need to push back mightily against this vision of the world. The hour is late.
Is it too late? Let’s believe and act as if it’s not, while we still can. We have no other choice. The woke program is our pogrom. It’s up to us to stop it.
Guy Shepherd is founder and editor of Planned Man.
