“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.

Heather Mac Donald on post-watershed facts: 

YouTube’s age-restriction policy lists vulgar language, violence and disturbing imagery, nudity and sexually suggestive content, and portrayal of harmful or dangerous ­activities as factors that could lead to an age restriction. None of those categories has any bearing on my talk. I used federal data to show that the claim that police are wantonly killing black men is a product of selective coverage by a politicised press and an elite establishment dedicated to the idea that racism is America’s defining trait. There was nothing racy or ­incendiary about the talk — unless you find criminological ­research titillating — unlike the soft-pornographic and anarchist videos that YouTube allows on its site without age restriction.

Ms Mac Donald’s apparently scandalous video – which was promptly deleted by YouTube and only restored, for consenting adults, following appeals by the talk’s organisers – can be viewed in full here. As Larry Elder adds, 

Not only does [your evidence] give perspective, it’s uplifting. Isn’t it good to know that whatever is going on is nothing to do with “institutional, systemic, structural” racism? Isn’t that good news?

And not entirely unrelated, Coleman Hughes on the life and work of Thomas Sowell: 

Sowell has encountered countless smears, though the usual avenues of attack—accusations of racism, privilege, and all the rest—have not been available. Someone should have told Aidan Byrne, who reviewed one of Sowell’s books for the London School of Economics blog. Doubtless convinced that he was delivering a devastating blow, Byrne quipped: “easy for a rich white man to say.” It’s hard not to laugh at this hapless reviewer’s expense, but many mainstream commentators differ from Byrne only in that they usually remember to check Google Images before launching their ad hominems. The prevailing notion today is that your skin colour, your chromosomes, your sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. And it is generally those who see themselves as the most freethinking—“woke,” while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest and most backward formulas.

A selection of videos featuring Dr Sowell can be found here, here, here, and here. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

“This is us taking the high road. This is us trying to create a world filled with love.”

Ami Horowitz mingles with the bedlamites: 

Feel the love. 

From a needlessly indulgent New York Times piece on Robin DiAngelo and her fellow clown-shoe race-hustlers:

[Marcus] Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.” Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. A perverse and pernicious way, I’d suggest, and an obvious blueprint for degrading, perhaps irreparably, the lives and opportunities of those sufficiently credulous to internalise it. Unless, of course, the cultivation of tardiness, self-absorption, and lack of focus, along with a disregard for deadlines, standards and obligations, and a disdain for reciprocity, will somehow catapult minority students into gainful employment. But such is the way of the woke. Or of “equity transformation specialists,” in Mr Moore’s case.

One might instead argue that this supposedly “white” “obsession” with “mechanical time” – which is to say, basic foresight and punctuality – or just adulthood – has very little to do with oppressing the negro, as Mr Moore claims, and rather more to do with courtesy and treating other people as if they were real, just as real as you, and no more deserving of delays, frustration, or gratuitous disrespect. It seems to me that punctuality is not only about getting things done, about practicality and cooperation, but about getting over yourself. And presumably, Mr Moore – the one reducing black children to strange and otherly beings, unmoored by mere temporal concerns – would prefer his payments for this claptrap, aired to teachers and school administrators, to materialise promptly. Not, say, three weeks late. Or hey, whenever.

Update, via the comments:

For newcomers, more items from the archives:  

The Cupcake Menace. 

Tiny cakes are exploitative, demeaning and emotionally crippling. You didn’t know?   

After telling us at length just how terrible and mind-warping these tiny fancies are, at least among women, Mr Seaton adds, “I don’t want to ban cupcakes.” And yet he feels it necessary to say this, as if banning miniature sponges would be an obvious thing to consider, the kind of thing one does. And after banning them in his own office.

The Humble Among Us. 

Attention, world. Novelist Brigid Delaney wants a nicer flat. 

You see, creative people, that’s people like Ms Delaney, must live in locales befitting their importance, not their budget. You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet. Creative people, being so creative, deserve nothing less than special treatment. I mean, you can’t expect a creative person to write at any old desk in any old room in any old part of town. What’s needed is a lifestyle at some other sucker’s expense. 

Monbiot And The Morlocks. 

The Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass. Things go badly wrong.

George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s more, should you crave it, in the greatest hits. Also, open thread.