PJTV - Bill Whittle - The Narrative - Political Correctness

An episode of Bill Whittle's PJTV show 'Afterburner' with a discussion of the insidious political narrative of left-wing politics, mainstream media and the education system, from the mid twentieth century to today.
A brief analysis of "political correctness," its origins and its objectives.

PJTV's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Pajamasmedia

Bill Whittle's 'Walking into Mordor': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqNVpACRLaI

An excellent article on PC: Bill Lind's 'Origins of Political Correctness'
http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness

Afterburner

Well, we've got a little walk to take today, folks. We're gonna end up

in the same place we started, but there's a lot of history we need to cover in between.

OK, let's get started.
Do you recognize this man?

This is Rodney King.
Name sound familiar? Well, it should.

He was the victim of a severe beating at the hands of white policemen, and in the early '90s

he was one of the most famous people in America.
Now what about this man?

Do you know who he is? His name is Kenneth Gladney,

and he too was beaten. King is famous and Gladney is almost unknown,

because King's beating -- which was criminal and appalling -- fit a narrative,

and Kenneth Gladney's did not.

Mr. Gladney made the mistake of attending a town hall meeting with Representative Russ Carnahan.

Now, President Obama, facing rising criticism of his radical health care reforms,

promised Congressional Democrats that "If you get hit, we'll punch back twice as hard."

Now, part of that 'punching back' strategy was to have members of the Service Employees International Union

attend these town hall meetings in defense of Obamacare.

Well, three of them, wearing SEIU T-shirts, saw Mr. Gladney handing out flags

that bore the American Revolutionary slogan "Don't Tread On Me."

Now, when Mr. Gladney offered one of the SEIU members a flag, he replied,

"What kind of nigger are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?"

The three union members then proceeded to knock Mr. Gladney to the ground

and repeatedly punch and kick him.

Now, let me answer the question that this left-wing union member asked.

This American patriot, Mr. Gladney, is the kind of person that runs counter to the narrative.

Racial protection, racial sensitivity and victimology only apply to those blacks and minorities

that follow the narrative.

That's why you'll never see Mr. Gladney on the cover of Time or Newsweek or The New York Times.

Now, what do I mean when I say "the narrative?" Well, let's turn to MSNBC.

Greg Gutfeld and the folks at Hot Air are trying to keep alive a remarkable story.

Take a look at this segment run on MSNBC at 10:45 a.m. on August 18th of 2009.

"A man at a pro health care reform rally just outside wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder

and a pistol on his hip. The Associated Press reports about a dozen people in all at that event were visible.

Also, there are questions about whether this has racial overtones.

I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns

strapped to their waists. [inaudible]"

And the gentleman with the assault rifle, representing the angry, ugly face of white racist America

come to lynch the black president? The man whose face we never see, but whose rifle and handgun are used to make the case?

Who is this horrible bigot?

Oh, it's this man.

And what is his hateful, racist, lynch-mob reason for attacking the president of color?

"I'm absolutely, totally against health care. Health care in this way, in this manner --

stealing it from people -- I don't think that's appropriate."

So why was he edited out? Why, in fact, did MSNBC producers choose to cut away from his face and hands --

but keep his rifle and handgun -- to gin up stories of armed, white mobs at town hall meetings

ready to lynch a black president because of racial hatred?

He was edited out because not only didn't he fit the narrative -- he was edited out,

and the American people were lied to by MSNBC, because he ran counter to the narrative,

just as that other American patriot, Kenneth Gladney, ran counter to the narrative.

So what exactly is "the narrative?"

Well, now we have to go for that long walk.

These two men are not politically correct.

Now, we've all heard that term, but what does it mean? Where did it come from?

Most people think it started in the '90s, or perhaps even the '60s. No.

Its origins go back to World War I.

Now, prior to the Great War, Karl Marx predicted that the workers of the world,

united by class consciousness, would arise as one and overthrow national identities

and bring about the paradise on earth of world communism. They considered this not theory,

but science -- accepted fact -- and war would be the trigger.

War came. The biggest, most appalling, most horrific war imaginable came,

but communist revolution only came to agrarian, backwards Russia, which was practically a feudal country,

and not to the modern, capitalist, industrialized nations like England and Germany and the United States,

as communist science had assured the world that it would.

Now, as the dust settled on the Great War, a group of Marxist philosophers

decided to form an institute -- a think tank to analyze what had gone wrong.

It was originally to be called the Institute for Marxism, and would be similar to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.

But some worried that the Institute for Marxism might be a little bit too, um --

well, actually, a little bit too honest.

So they decided instead to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Based at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research opened its doors

on July 22, 1924, and over a short period of time this Marxist brain trust

became known simply as "the Frankfurt School."

The Frankfurt School's problem was very simple. The workers, seduced by the material successes

and general prosperity provided by capitalism, were too blinded --

that's the word they often used, "blinded" -- by this prosperity and relative well-being

to recognize their class consciousness and bring about the communist revolution.

Someone else would have to be the vanguard.
But who?

Now, while these Marxist intellectuals were trying to figure out who the new vanguard of the revolution was going to be,

another problem arose. Nazism was on the rise in Germany.

Many of these intellectuals were Jewish communists, doubly unwelcome in Hitler's Third Reich,

so in 1934 they moved the Institute for Social Research out of Frankfurt

and took refuge in America -- specifically, at Columbia University in New York City.

The Institute for Social Research remained at Columbia until 1951, when it returned to Europe.

Presumably, it wasn't very far from the Columbia School of Journalism,

which awards the Pulitzer Prize.
But it was while it was here in America

that the Institute, still informally known as the Frankfurt School, did its most important work.

The great insight gained by the Frankfurt School was to divorce Marxism from economics

and marry Marxism to the culture.

And the fruit of this fundamental change in strategy is known as critical theory.

Now, the theory of critical theory is simply to criticize.

I know it sounds silly when you put it so plainly, but really, that's all there is to it.

You see, the Frankfurt School found their new vanguard for the revolution against Western civilization,

and it was going to be the dispossessed.

The beauty, the genius -- the genius! -- of critical theory was twofold.

First, each area of critical theory could appear to be unique and self-contained.

For example, feminism could attack Western culture from the perspective of its oppression against women,

and that oppression must be unique to Western culture.

No mention was made of what the ancient Chinese or the Aztecs or the Persians or anyone else,

how they had treated women. Only the oppression of women in the West was on the table.

Likewise, African-American studies would only criticize American slavery,

as if slavery were unique to America. The genuine horrors of American slavery

and its consequences was a powerful weapon against traditional culture,

as was the example of Rodney King. But to quote the black African King Ghezo,

who said in the 1840s, "The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory

of all their wealth. The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery."

You see, now, a quote like that shows the economic incentive of a black culture

to sell other blacks into slavery purely for economic gain.

Quotes like that make slavery seem less about racism and more about economics,

and quotes like that show that there's a little more than white English-speaking guilt to go around.

It runs contrary to the narrative and it has to be suppressed in schools.

It is politically incorrect.

Preeminent psychologist and Frankfurt School co-founder Erich Fromm

argued that there were no real sexual differences between men and women,

and that the roles they played in traditional Western culture were simply that --

roles assigned to them by the culture.

So now gender studies could launch critical theory attacks and claim

that all of the oppression of homosexuals or women throughout history

were due merely to Western culture and the corrupt patriarchy of Dead White Men.

Dead White Men laid the philosophical foundation for the United States of America.

If capitalism had triumphed where Marxism had failed, the only way left to bring down

this edifice of success and prosperity was to go to the root morality that it was based upon

and attack it from all sides. Gender studies, radical feminism, African studies, Native American studies,

the deconstruction of classical literature to show racism or sexism or whatever other useful -ism

for philosophies that didn't even exist at the time of their writing --

all of these programs and all they do is inculcate and aggravate a sense of rage, separatism and victimology

and assign to the only culture that actually tries to eradicate these injustices

the sole onus of their origins.

Now, I said that critical theory was brilliant strategy in two ways,

the first being that it launched multiple, apparently unconnected attacks against the dominant culture.

But the real source of its power and genius, however, is that the criticism never demands an alternative.

What might have been better, what might have worked in its place,

what alternatives have been tried successfully in the past -- nothing.

That's because they have nothing.

There is no logic, no history and no factual underpinning to their dreams and philosophy.

Everything they believe in has proven to be wrong. It's been drowned in oceans of blood and tears.

But why should mere fact trump ideology? One of the main pillars of the Frankfurt School,

Max Horkheimer, famously wrote, "Logic is not independent of content."

Yes it is. Yes, it is!

Even the idea of facts, logic, reason and history are under attack, which is why Rachel Maddow

will do 30 minutes making fourth-grade jokes about "teabaggers" because that infantile snark

is all she has against common American citizens who are quoting Hamilton and Jefferson and Adams,

chapter and verse, and who are referring to the various clauses of the U.S. Constitution

and asking where these new federal powers draw their Constitutional legitimacy.

You can't argue with that.
You can't even let that come out.

No, let's make teabagger jokes, and let's just mock the rubes instead.

America -- the Frankfurt School's bastion of racism and sexism -- fought a civil war

and lost 360,000 Union dead to eliminate the shameful heritage of slavery.

America has elected a black president and run a female for vice-president twice.

Is there so much as a single black mayor in all of Europe?

Are there even any black people living at all in China? None of that matters.

It's off the narrative -- in the same way that Kenneth Gladney is off the narrative,

the narrative being that President Obama's radical socialization of American health care --

and in fact the entire economy -- is opposed only by a small group of rural, white, ignorant, paid,

gun-toting lunatics driven by a racial hatred for a black president.

That's the narrative. And it will be maintained, even if it means MSNBC producers and executives

have to work throughout the night or over the weekend finding the footage they need

to tell the story, and excising those faces and hands that inconveniently get in the way.

Now, I understand that Mr. Gladney is bringing a lawsuit. Good for him.

If I was this unnamed patriot with the AR-15 -- I can't find his name, because the media

never deemed it worthy to report it -- then I would sue MSNBC for defamation of character

and for using me as a pawn to tell the exact opposite story I was there to tell myself.

You know, there's a line in the movie "Serenity" that I often think of these days,

and that line is "You can't stop the signal."

The truth will get out.

The left has been telling these lies for almost 100 years now,

in order to resurrect a political philosophy that has killed no less than 100 million people

and still will not die.

Now, do I think that Contessa Brewer, Rachel Maddow and the producers at MSNBC are part

of a vast Frankfurt School conspiracy? Of course not.

Contessa Brewer does not strike me as a person who was hired for her deep historical perspectives,

but that's the power of the narrative, you see. It's now so deeply and widely embedded in the culture

that it's simply what people believe.

And if there were any real journalists left in the world, we'd have heard more about the Frankfurt School.

But the signal will get out, even if it's just through the efforts of a few of us sitting here in our basements,

writing in our pajamas.