I’ve always felt that the Civil Rights Acts were a Good Thing, but that the rot set in with the first executive orders mandating quotas and affirmative action.

Now comes Richard Hanania (H/T John Derbyshire) who writes that “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.” In other words, the woke phenomenon was already coded in the Civil Rights laws and the ruling class just responded to the moral imperative coded in the laws: racial discrimination is evil and we must fight against it.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race and gender. While most at the time thought this would simply remove explicit discrimination... courts and regulators expanded the concept of “non-discrimination” to mean almost anything that advantages one group over another. An important watershed was the decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate.

Once discrimination was encoded in law as a Bad Thing, it was natural for all Good People to go to work to eliminate discrimination from the land.

And how does a ruling class of Good People go about this Noble Task? It goes about it by using its influence and power in elite institutions from the courts to the universities to the bureaucracy to the media -- in everything where educated people are in charge. Thus,

Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens.

Case in point, also noted by Derb, is corporate HR. Back in 1950, there were less than 100,000 people working in corporate HR, mostly men. Now there are over 900,000, and 600,000 of those are women. What does HR do? Mostly, it “micromanage[s] the work force” to make sure that the corporation is following all federal, state, and local guidelines with respect to “disparate impact” and a “hostile work environment.” It is a vital role, for if the corporation gets on the wrong side of the “left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges” -- well, it just doesn’t want to do that.

So, it is just common sense for all corporations to worship at the Church of Woke. And it all starts with the Civil Rights acts and the mandate they gave our educated rulers to educate us about our bigotry.

I really did not want to believe this, because I have been carefully taught to worship at the shrine of the Civil Rights acts. But I now see that I have been worshipping a false god.

But what do we do about it?

In the best of all possible worlds, we would just say that the government’s business is just to protect us from foreign enemies and street thugs, so all we need is a Constitutional Amendment that

Race and gender being social constructions, Congress shall enact no law respecting race and gender.

In other words, as our liberal friends used to lecture us in olden times, it is the worst thing in the world to “legislate morality” on race or anything else.

Imagine an America where wokies stopped “legislating morality” and regulating morality and lawfaring morality and peacefully protesting other people's morality. It isn’t hard to do.

That would be an America that really believed in separating church and state.

But it would not work in our world -- for which the world “totalitarian” was conceived -- a world in which our educated elites like nothing better than mashing religion and politics and economics together into one big moral power project with themselves as the moral virtue-signallers, the powerful political bosses, and the economic wizards, the fearless advocates, the scientific experts... Put Together.

So we have to fight, and I think we need to counter our ruling class’s race war with a class war, a war of ordinary Americans against the malefactors of Big Tech, Big Academy, Big Bureaucracy, Big Media, Big Science, Big CRT.

Viewed in that light we can see that Trump and his mean tweets were the first campaigns in that war. And I suggest that the aftermath of COVID is putting all the malefactors of Big Incompetence in a bad light, so that, in a very short time we will be ready to counterattack.

Think about it. For the last year, Big Bossy has been telling us not to mask, to mask, to lockdown, not to lockdown, to wait for vaccination, to get vaccinated or else. Because Science.

For the last year “our teachers” have refused to teach our kids, and now the first thing they want to do is to teach our kids Critical Race Theory.

The Bigs are pompous, incompetent, overpaid bigots. And it’s time we told them so.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Paul Lowry

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