On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and how identity politics and political correctness is a corruption meant to tie people to the government and “enshrine” racist divisions. Video and partial transcript below.
The Civil Rights Movement at its best was a movement not to enshrine the divisions imposed on people by racists, but to rebuke the racists by eliminating those divisions. Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
So how is it that today’s identity politics is about not eliminating but continuing and even enshrining those racist divisions? A National Review survey of 173 colleges found that 46 percent offer segregated orientation programs, and 72 percent host segregated graduation ceremonies. And shame on them. That’s repulsive. It’s disgusting.
And it’s not just racist divisions. It’s any divisions that can be created or discovered among us. Men and women, whose ability to meld into one not despite but because of their differences is the source and joy of human life… are now supposed to turn against one another, fighting over whatever can be found to fight over. Gays and straights are set at odds. Every truth and norm of human life has to be destroyed to serve transgender people – a vanishingly small minority of humans, many of whom may be suffering from a form of body dysphoria.
And of course, the people who urge these divisions on us don’t really care about the groups in questions: blacks, women, gays, transgenders. We know this because if anyone from those so-called identity groups stands against the Left-wing agenda. If any black or woman or gay or transgender supports Republicans or Donald Trump, he or she is excoriated, booed, shouted down, called names and excluded from the identity table.
It must be, then, that the leftism, not the identity stuff, is the whole point, and the division is created in the service of the leftism. We are segregated into groups and turned against one another and then the government is supposed to descend deus ex machina and impose equality and justice on us.
Because of course that’s what leftism is: more government, more top-down solutions, less individuality, less community. Leftism is slavery, and yes, it’s not the slavery of the body we’ve had in the past. But it’s a slavery of the mind. This is what you’re allowed to say and think, this is what you can believe, these are the words you’re allowed to use, the pronouns you’re allowed to use, these are the sexual practices you must approve and celebrate. We’re the government. We know best.
They tell us this is the road to Utopia but in fact, it’s a road that has no end. Just more and more division, more and more hatred between us, more and more government solving our problems by taking our freedom and telling us what to think and who to be.
Americans have been breaking chains for nearly 250 years: the chains of southern slavery, the chains of Jim Crow, the chains of Nazism, the chains of Communism. It’s time to break these new chains, these mental chains, of identity politics and political correctness.
So, I’m watching this yesterday. This is the – A bad idea whose time has come. Reparations. OK. This is all part of what I’m talking about. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this article, I think it was for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates is overrated. I mean he has this kind of vague dramatic way of writing. He’s a very personable guy when he’s talking to people, but he doesn’t reason as far as I’m concerned very well. But he put forward the idea that yes-yes-yes what we need is reparations for slavery and for Jim Crow because of all that accumulated wealth. All that wealth was kept away from people and now needs to be paid back because blacks are behind because of Jim Crow and because of slavery. Never mind that Jews were excluded. Never mind the Irish were excluded, the Italians, never mind all that. Blacks specifically.
So now, of course, the Democrats as they drift further and further to the left have taken this up in the House Judiciary Committee which is Jerry Nadler’s crap show. They are having a hearing on a bill about reparations that would basically create a federal commission to study and report on the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow segregation laws that followed abolition. And who gets the money, you know who would get money to be paid back for this. This Is called H.R. 40 and it’s got a lot of supporters got more than 60 co-sponsor-sponsors. Public endorsement from Pelosi, who has not endorsed a reparations bill before.