“A can-do attitude,” “striving toward success,” being “results oriented,” and “operating from principles and conscience.” At first glance, these sound like the kinds of qualities one might appreciate among employees – say, among employees at a nuclear research and development lab.

But no, dear reader. How foolish you’ve been.

Apparently, these things constitute, not a basis for workplace success, but merely of “success in white male terms.” Which, we’re told, not only “limits white males’ ability to hear and understand others” and “dampens their curiosity,” but is also “devastating” to “people of colour, gays/lesbians, women, and non-Christians.” You see, expectations of competence, “hard work” – and a concern for whether actions actually produce the desired result – these things are problematic and to be viewed with suspicion, and ultimately undermined. On grounds that they cause “people of colour” to “feel they are living out of context with who they really are.”

If this sounds a tad unhinged, not to mentioned racist, that can only be because you’re insufficiently schooled in “critical race theory” and the ways of the woke. Happily, Christopher Rufo has risked his mental wellbeing by poking through documents issued at a taxpayer-funded, three-day mandatory training session organised by the aforementioned research lab, Sandia National Laboratories, during which white male executives found themselves subjected to some lovely psychological abuse.

An introductory “thought-work session” encouraged reluctant attendees to associate their whiteness and maleness with “white supremacists,” the KKK, and “mass killings.” As one does, of course. With equal obviousness, employees of pallor were expected to recite – which is to say, confess – an extensive list of benefits of their supposed “white privilege.” Benefits including “the ability to dominate language,” and the fact that “no-one is afraid to come to my garage sale.”

A chief benefit of the aforementioned “privilege” is summarised in the documents as, “I don’t wonder if people judge me on the colour of my skin.” This, then, while white male employees found themselves singled out as morally suspect, and while being overtly and triumphantly judged, and by default found wanting. Complete with orders to produce hand-written apologies – based solely on their maleness and the colour of their skin. And the pernicious racial woo of spiteful bedlamites.