Our national motto is, “e pluribus unum,” which is Latin for, “Out of many, one.” This motto defines our national character as a people from all places, who were all welcomed to our shores, and who were all accepted as Americans.
Our culture is a reflection of our open and accepting character, for we appropriate what we like from those who join us, mixing it with what we already have. Taco Tuesday is far from an insult to immigrants from Mexico; it is a reflection of the fact that tacos are tasty. Dreadlocks have grown in popularity not to offend the cultures dreadlocks came from, but to show that we appreciate that unique look. Without cultural appropriation, we would have no American culture, but would all be Germans, Irish, Italians, Mexicans, Africans, Muslims, Chinese, etc., reflecting all of the different places and cultures our ancestors came from.
My grand parents on my father’s side were French and German, and on my mother’s side were Dutch. France, Germany, and the Netherlands all have different cultures. If I believed cultural appropriation was somehow bad, that would mean that my parents and grand parents created children who can not claim to be 100% anything, and who are unable to claim any culture as their own. This is absurd. I am an American, with a culture that includes the best of French, Dutch, and German culture, as well as the best from all other cultures, all around the world. I appropriate freely, because ours is a diverse nation of people from all over the world, and out of those many cultures, we create one: e pluribus unum. We do not have diverse cultures (plural) in our country, but rather have a diverse culture (singular), and this is an important distinction, giving each person the freedom to make of our diversity whatever they want, rather than restricting them based on some sense of ‘identity group’.
Today’s left wants to turn our national motto around. Their motto is e unum pluribus, or “Out of one, many.” They tell us that our culture is based on white, paternalistic, Christians, built by white men, for white men, and that our white culture, as well as our white national values, must be torn down and replaced by a disparate peoples who treasure only their differences. Cultural appropriation, upon which this country was built, is not only frowned upon, but openly stigmatized. People are placed into identity buckets and told, based on the bucket they are placed in, what they can think, what they can wear, what they can look like, and what they can do. Anyone who thinks, looks, or acts like anything outside of their bucket is ridiculed, hounded, insulted, and cast out, into a ‘bucket of deplorables.’ That phrase, by the way, was very telling; Hillary Clinton was creating a new identity group for all those who opposed her, and then labeling opposition as evil. The left is very good at this: everyone, to them, has a bucket, and the bucket for those who don’t like their bucket, or who strive to be a unique individual, is the one labeled ‘evil’. The left claims to be about love and compassion, but it is easy to hate evil, and they hate anyone who opposes their sick world view.
Great African American thinkers, like Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, Alan West, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and countless others, are mocked, ridiculed, and insulted. Jessie Jackson once called Thomas Sowell an ‘Oreo’, saying that Thomas Sowell was ‘Black on the outside, but white in the middle.’ Chelsea Handler recently called Ben Carson a ‘Black White Supremacist’ (seen here: Chelsea Handler Tweet), and we see conservative African Americans castigated as being somehow ‘traitors to their group’, all the time. What crime did these people commit that legitimizes attacking them? They thought for themselves, walking out of the buckets that the left created for them. They were then immediately placed into the ‘bucket of deplorables’, and the ‘deplorables’ are all fair game.
Identity politics is evil. The whole concept that a person can be defined by someone else into an identity group – that we, as human beings are not free to define ourselves, but must be defined by others – this is a sick, twisted, perverse form of everything the left likes to call those on the right. Chelsea Handler calling Ben Carson a ‘Black White Supremacist’ was racist and offensive. Calling our society ‘patriarchal’ is sexist and offensive. The left is everything they claim everyone else to be – their views are truly deplorable.
In reality, there are no artificial barriers to female advancement in today’s America. There are no laws holding people of different ethnicities down in today’s America. If someone can show me a barrier, or a specific system that holds people down, I will stand with them to oppose it, and in fact I wrote a lengthy piece on American Apartheid doing just that. But it is insufficient and self-defeating to simply throw one’s arms up in the air and yell, ‘Systemic Discrimination’, as if everything about the American Experience was designed, from the inside out, to discriminate. This belief is simply not true, and if someone believes it, how are they ever supposed to do anything in life, other than vote to take the American system apart?
And that, of course, is the point. Today’s left is a movement that wants to take the American system (based on individualism, the enlightenment, and individual freedom) and tear it apart.
We, as conservatives, would find identity politics easy to counter, if we could just turn our backs on those identity groups who align with the right. In theory, this should be easy to do, given that the only identity groups that align with the left are the so-called ‘alt-right’, which are people who agree with the left that white privilege defines our society, but who then want to preserve it; and the handful of Christians who really do want to make the United States a nation only for those with a Judeo-Christian cultural identity. In the case of the alt-right, if you change the word, ‘white’, to any other word, they fit in perfectly with many groups on the left. In the case of the few Christians who want this to be a purely Christian nation, if you change their religion they fit in perfectly with many groups on the left.
Identity politics is an inherently leftist thing, and the Cultural Marxist / Postmodernist propaganda it is based on, can be easily dismantled.
The Muslim Brotherhood wants to make the United States a Muslim-only nation, and they align with the left (you can read their published Strategic Plan for the Subjugation of the United States). If you look at all the groups the left supports, they support gay marriage, while also supporting people who want to throw gay people from buildings; they support women’s rights, while also supporting people who believe in female genital mutilation, sexual slavery, and honor killings. I could go on and on – the left supports different groups who are all diametrically opposed, by focusing solely on having them all work together to destroy our country. When we call them out, saying that they are un-American, and unpatriotic, they get angry, but the truth is that they hate our country and everything it has ever done. Hatred for our country is the only way to hold together disparate groups that have zero chance of otherwise ever getting along.
The left believes that they represent a moral and intellectual elite that can pull itself out from the identity group structure, and then compress the identity groups on the top and bottom together, such that all groups can be made equal, in the middle. That almost sounds nice, until you consider that by pulling themselves out of the identity group structure, the left aims to make themselves the group at the top that oppresses everyone else. Today’s left is no different from any other group that wants to oppress others, and just as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others before them claimed a moral right to oppress others, so today’s left believes this of themselves, today. This belief has killed hundreds of millions of people, so it is not just enough for us to disagree. We have to defeat their agenda and crush their beliefs, wherever we find them.
The fight against identity politics is the most important fight of our age. If we lose, everything our country was founded on, has fought for, or has believed in, will also be lost. We cannot let that happen.
