An exaggeration, you say?

Just listen to what high-profile leftists have been openly saying about denying you your right to information on both sides of the political equation.

Former presidential candidate and Obama Secretary of State John Kerry has gotten the most attention recently, mainly because of how bluntly he railed against our most fundamental freedom. But former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has been just as repressive—and more detailed. And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been her usual self as she demands censorship without much specificity.

Kerry made his comments at a World Economic Forum panel on green energy on Sept. 25. A conservative comedian trying to satirize the views of the haughty ruling class could not have come up with better material.

As Kerry put it, “The dislike of and anger over social media is just growing and growing and growing, and it’s part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue,” Kerry lamented, apparently referring to abhorrence of freedom by members of his ilk.

“It’s really hard to govern today!” The problem, he said, was that the internet and social media have liberated people to choose from different sources of information, adding competition. Little over two decades ago, the country was held hostage to the views of the journalists working at three networks and a handful of national newspapers.

Kerry pines for those days. “The referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact, and what isn’t a fact, have been eviscerated to a certain degree, and people self-select, where they go for their news, or for their information, and you get into a vicious cycle,” said the man who came within 19 Electoral College votes of becoming president in 2004. “So, it’s really, really hard, much harder, to build consensus today than at any time in the 40 to 50 years I’ve been involved in this.”

He continued, “There is a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and it’s putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to hammer it out of existence.”

Kerry’s solution?

What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change. … Democracies are very challenged right now, and have not proven that they can move fast enough, or big enough, to deal with the challenges that we are facing, and to me, this is part of what this race, this election is all about—will we break the fever in the United States?

Reich also discussed his desire to hammer persnickety sources of information out of existence with a global audience. Writing in the leading newspaper of the British Left, The Guardian, he engaged in a bit of disinformation himself by mischaracterizing the actions of the man he’d like hammered out, X owner Elon Musk.

Musk and former President Donald Trump “have both floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term,” wrote Reich, whereas, in fact, as Reich admitted himself, all Musk has done is recommend that Trump have in a second term a “government efficiency commission” in which Musk “would be happy to help out.” But apparently unaware that he was committing the same crime he accused Musk to be guilty of, Reich went on with his recommendation for how officials around the world should “rein in Musk.”

The first one was for people to boycott Musk’s electric vehicle, Tesla, and his social media company, X. But Reich wants much more. “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” he wrote. As for the U.S. government, it “should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX,” wrote Reich, who published his screed weeks before the U.S. government had to come to SpaceX, hat in hand, asking it to retrieve two astronauts stranded by NASA.

Ocasio-Cortez has been far less trenchant and specific. The young representative, who’s been repeatedly dinged by left-leaning PolitiFact for spreading falsehoods, also wants to “rein in” media she considers guilty of spreading misinformation.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she posted on social media. “It’s one thing to have different opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false, so that is something that we’re looking into.”

Unfortunately, these unhinged comments by American politicians don’t come in a vacuum.

There is a sustained attack on freedom of information from Brazil to our ally the United Kingdom to next door in Canada. Of course, that makes it all the more important that we speak up for freedom.

Image via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.

Two things immediately stood out. The first is that, yes, despite its protestations to the contrary, the architects of CRT know they must focus intently on those who participate in the teaching profession. If CRT is a tool to be used for “revolutionizing a culture,” as its intellectual godfather, Derrick Bell, once put it, it must be implemented by teachers starting in K-12 and through graduate school.

K-12 teachers, along with students at all levels, were given special ticket prices to the CRT conference at a deep discount, as my colleague and friend Jonathan Butcher pointed out. K-12 principals also were given a special package, though at a smaller discount.

The other unmistakable takeaway is that CRT practitioners are aghast at the resistance they have encountered. The public, parents in particular, saw the attempted takeover of their cultural institutions that gathered speed four years ago and fought against it, much to the chagrin of the CRT elite and their followers.

And the summer school was indeed organized by the elite most wounded by popular rejection. It was led by Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia and UCLA. She is not just one of the key founders of the movement, but actually gave CRT its name at the discipline’s founding conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989.

Crenshaw also invented the concept of “intersectionality,” by which the CRT founders mean that people can be discriminated against based on different attributes—their race, gender, able status, etc.

Also on hand to teach CRT was Cheryl Harris, another CRT founder and also a law professor at UCLA; Gloria Ladson-Billings, who perhaps has done more than anyone else to spread CRT’s ideas among the teaching profession; and Michael Eric Dyson, whose accomplishments do not equal those of the other three, but who’s much better known by the public because of his repeated media appearances. All in all, 40 academics, some very well known, were advertised to appear.

These CRT summer schools started in the long hot summer of 2020, when the whole country was aflame in the Black Lives Matter riots. It looked to the CRT folks then that the world was their oyster, as many leaders of cultural institutions were ready to surrender and accept many CRT principles.

But the oyster has gone bad and begun to stink up the room. In 2020, the summer school organizers saw the moment as a “great opportunity.” Those who led this year’s summer school, however, regard the present moment with a growing sense of dread.

In their triumphant 2020 announcement, the summer school organizers proclaimed that “the enduring racial inequalities laid bare by the casual murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery … have loosened the grip of colorblindness as the officially sanctioned anecdote to persistent racial injustice.” The 2020 summer school was held “to capture the significance of this opportunity.”

One must hasten to explain that, though most people think colorblindness is very much a good thing and an aspirational goal, it is anathema to CRT.

CRT is a body of work that depicts racism not as an individual act or attitude, but as a “systemic” problem. Racism, it preaches, is embedded in the ordinary business of society, and keeps the oppressor group (whites, males, Christians, heterosexuals, but also Jews, Asian Americans, or anyone else that generally meets with success) in power and wealth, while keeping members of victim groups subjugated. To reverse this dynamic—a goal derived entirely from Marxian concepts—CRT practitioners believe that government and industry must pursue color-conscious action.

Contrast the optimism in the summer of 2020 with this year’s foreboding summer school. The description to this year’s opening plenary meeting on July 28 said, “Our kick off plenary for CRT Summer School focuses on Tennessee ?as the ‘tip of the spear’ for the nationwide backlash against racial ?justice and democracy.” Every session revolved around this idea.

As Crenshaw said to radio host Kaye Wise Whitehead in a video advertising the event, “We started this in the middle of the summer of reckoning, recognizing that critical concepts, like structural racism and implicit bias and intersectionality were all part of the mobilization that we saw in 50 states across the country, demanding accountability. Well, now we are at a point where the backlash against 2020, the backlash against racial justice, has taken the form of suppressing our right to learn, our right to know, our books.”

All of that is hyperbolic, of course. Many, many people have developed antibodies against the attempted takeover of their country by Marxist academics, and their political leaders have responded by passing laws that make it hard to indoctrinate students and teachers with CRT and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates from schools and universities.

These ideas are spread especially in schools of education, where unsuspecting and well-intentioned would-be teachers go to get their credentials.

I spoke to Beanie Geoghegan, co-founder of the group Freedom in Education, who has done a lot of work in this area. When I asked her if education students knew what they were being fed, she said, “Absolutely not.” The professors pushing this stuff “really prey on people who care about children,” she added.

It’s a good thing they are so discomfited at the moment.

For this reason, rank-and-file conservatives may not grasp the importance of the racial changes being proposed by the Census Bureau. That would be a mistake. The Left really cares about the census, which means conservatives should pay attention.

The balkanization of the United States, often along government-fabricated racial and ethnic lines, is one of the building blocks of the cultural Marxist threats in this country. The Census Bureau’s new proposal expands and deepens this racial dispensation.

That’s why I wrote a comment last week to the Office of Management and Budget on the proposals from the Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards. The comment can be found here .

Conservatives—indeed, Americans of all stripes—should read what the Census Bureau proposes to do, then read my comment, and add a comment of their own, which they can do here.

Once you get through the bureaucratic gobbledygook (which must be intended by some in the permanent administrative state to confuse the citizenry), you find that what the proposals do is create one more racial category—this one for Americans originating in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and effectively turn an earlier OMB-crafted umbrella ethnic group, “Hispanics,” into its own racial category.

In my comment, I strongly recommend against adoption of these changes. The government’s creation of yet one more minority group out of a population now classified as white would be a monumental mistake. Likewise, “Hispanic” is a government label for people from many races. It is not its own race.

What we really should be doing is scrapping our current racial categorizations altogether.

“Your proposal itself admits the political and non-scientific nature of such categorizing,” I tell the Census Bureau’s Working Group in my comment. Then I quote the proposal, which says: “The categories developed represent a sociopolitical construct designed to be used in the self-reported or observed collection of data on the race and ethnicity of major broad population groups in this country and are not biologically or genetically based.”

“This is indeed a ‘sociopolitical construct’,” I say in my comment, “one that was devised by only one political side, i.e., activists on the Left, in the 1960s and 1970s, as has been amply demonstrated, and then foisted on an unsuspecting nation for the first time in 1977 through OMB’s Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, Standards for Maintaining, Collecting and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (SPD 15).”

“The American people have never voted on whether they preferred to be so categorized,” I add.

Not that the current National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations would necessarily care. Many of its 27 members hail from organizations on the progressive side of the spectrum, such as the Urban Institute, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, and the Alaska Federation of Natives.

And this is actually an improvement from five years ago, when four of the National Advisory Committee’s seats were held by so-called partner organizations from the identitarian Left—Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), the Mexican–American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), and the National Urban League.

The Left’s role in racial categorization is by design and goes back to the creation of such national advisory committees in the 1970s and 1980s, when militants on the Left forced OMB to create these umbrella categories and officialize them through the Census Bureau.

Since then, America has become what sociologist Alice Robbin dubs “an interest group society.” Ethnic affinity groups deeply entrenched in the Census Bureau, she adds, become “influential beyond their numbers in the public policy process, as well as in influencing administrative policy regarding rules for statistical and administrative data collection and reporting.”

Robbin, not a conservative, described the process in this manner: “Federal statistics have created a similarity of identity where none existed, as with ‘Latino’ identity based on shared language rather than culture, and as with an ‘Asian’ identity based on shared discrimination and ethnic stereotyping.”

Do conservatives, now finally waking up to the threat of wokeness, want more of this?

In my comment to the Office of Management and Budget, I tell the working group that “the proposal engages in circular reasoning when it says that ‘federal race and ethnicity standards are inherently complex because they seek to capture dynamic and fluid sociopolitical constructs.’ The federal government cannot be striving to catch up to realities that it has itself created. Once again, these ‘sociopolitical constructs’ were engineered by the government itself.”

The Census Bureau’s proposal states that these actions “do not identify or designate certain population groups as ‘minority groups.’ Additionally, the standards state that these categories are not to be used for determining the eligibility of population groups for participation in any federal programs.”

This is either hypocrisy or ignorance. These standards are used by government at all levels, as well as the private sector, to hand out benefits.

The first executive order that President Joe Biden signed after taking office, on Jan. 20, 2021, the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, put his administration on a path toward race-based policies, all based on the census categories.

Still not interested, conservatives?

Article cross-posted from the Washington Examiner.

The Left, thus, has a two-pronged response to this trend; namely, to limit the choices that Spanish-language listeners have and to smear conservative opinion as misinformation. “[T]here is a massive disinformation problem in Spanish-language media,” tweeted President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, who is now an MSNBC analyst, the day after the midterm elections.

Why not just counter conservative arguments with leftist ones, rather than censor or smear your opponents? Because it’s well-nigh impossible. You try defending socialism, the sexualization of children, the racialization of everything in life, or turning back progress in the name of climate change.

So, instead, the Federal Communications Commission, one of those ostensibly independent parts of the permanent bureaucracy in which Biden gets to appoint the leader, decided Nov. 21 to approve TelevisaUnivision’s sale of the 18 stations to Latino Media Network.

LMN obtained debt financing from Lakestar Finance LLC, an investment group associated with Soros Fund Management, an investment management firm founded by George Soros, a multibillionaire who freely spends his vast wealth on far-left causes. Over time, Soros has transferred $32 billion to his Open Society Foundation, which funds nefarious projects across the globe.

For example, Soros is deeply involved in financing such outfits as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which exists ostensibly to organize domestic U.S. workers, but is in reality a cog in this country’s vast Marxist machinery. The NDWA is open about the fact that it organizes domestic workers because the majority “are immigrants and women of color,” categories targeted by organizers since the New Left in the 1960s.

It was the NWDA that sent one of its top operatives, Alicia Garza, who also co-founded Black Lives Matter, to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown so she could organize with other socialist groups and turn BLM from a movement into a network.

The NWDA also has Jess Morales Rocketto as a political director. It was Rocketto who raised the $80 million to set up LMN, which she founded with Democratic Party activist Stephanie Valencia. Rocketto is now the co-executive chairwoman of LMN’s board.

Why is the Soros-funded NDWA getting involved in messaging? Because as it says about itself, “For NDWA, a strategy focused on changing the beliefs and mental models that help people make meaning of the world is a goal in and of itself.”

Rocketto is a longtime Garza associate, serving in numerous far-left organizations with her, not just the NDWA. The two collaborators co-founded Supermajority , which mobilizes voters on behalf of the Marxist Left.

The NWDA, and Rocketto personally, have encouraged Hispanics to show up for BLM demonstrations, which in 2020 ended up in riots on more than 600 occasions. On July 20, 2020, the NWDA participated in the “Strike for Black Lives,” in which unions took part in a mass strike in 25 cities.

Rocketto also encouraged her Latino followers to take part in the 2020 insurrection, the costliest civil disturbance in U.S. history, and to follow BLM’s leadership overall. She did the same in Ferguson in 2014.

All this will come as a shock to the listeners of Radio Mambi, one of the Miami conservative radio stations that the FCC will now allow Rocketto’s LMN to buy, and in time, eviscerate. Mambi’s audience consists mostly of victims of Marxism, many of them having escaped Cuba and Venezuela.

BLM idolizes the communist dictators of these countries, which means that its new affiliate in Miami, LMN, will take special pleasure in rubbing salt in Mambi’s listeners’ wounds, all courtesy of Soros. LMN will also undoubtedly censor listeners’ news in the same manner as Fidel Castro and Nicolas Maduro. Viewpoint diversity leads to educated choices in the voting booth. We can’t have that.

After all, Hispanic voters in Florida catapulted Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to an unheard-of 20-percentage-point victory this year, with Cuban Americans supporting the governor at a stratospheric 68% rate or higher. This led Psaki, who can discover an acorn when she’s not misinforming about misinformation, to proclaim that “the Latino vote is not the same everywhere! … Socialism does not play there [Florida].”

It sure doesn’t, but it would have been more accurate for Psaki to say that the “Latino vote” doesn’t actually exist. Overall, the Hispanic vote for Republicans was 40-60, something of a high-water mark and a 50% jump from Mitt Romney’s paltry 27% a decade ago. But that explains nothing.

Venezuelan Americans and Puerto Ricans in Florida joined Cuban Americans in voting for the GOP. So did many Mexican Americans in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. But Mexican Americans propelled the Democrats to victory in Arizona and Nevada, which lack the type of powerful Spanish-language conservative radio stations that Florida has.

And that is the reason that BLM acolyte Rocketto (with help from Soros) must stomp on Mambi and the other 17 stations she now controls. If you can’t win the debate, lose the opposition.

This article first appeared at The Washington Examiner, cross-posted via Daily Signal.