The stated aim of that murderous freak Charlie Manson and his deranged family of dropouts and druggies in committing the brutal slaughter of seven people in 1969 was to incite a race war. The murderers deliberately left bloody graffiti at the murder scenes, attempting to frame the Black Panthers – yet another set of murderous and equally racist freaks active in that period. In Manson’s twisted vision, the Tate-LaBianca murders would set off a brutal race war; black against white, in which whites would be enthusiastically genocided. During this mayhem Manson and his followers would hide out in a vast underground city. They would then emerge to take command over what remained of society. Manson was a particularly noxious racist, unsavory qualities which were veiled by the last putrid remnants of the hippie commune culture, which let his cult family fly under the social radar as it existed in the afterglow of the so-called “Summer of Love” in the formerly golden state of California. (Jim Jones was another one of those super-organized racist-cult freaks of the era, whose’ commune was slightly longer-lasting and successful, until suddenly it wasn’t. Yeah, a supposedly race-prejudice-free socialist commune, with a white leadership cadre and mostly dead black bodies when it all came crashing down some years later.)

Gathering in speed and intensity over the last decade and going to warp speed this last year has been the imposition of CRT, or ‘critical race theory’, which once infested only the ‘studies’ departments in higher miseducation, where it seemed to be safely contained, but which has now spread like a sort of malign fungus throughout corporate, military, and civic America. You must attend this mandatory anti-racism training, or so demands the corporate and managerial higher-ups. You must bow, if you are discernably a shade of pale and of Northern European ancestry; you must acknowledge and apologize lavishly for your many sins against the pure and innocent persons of color; for the institution of slavery (against which fought to the last full measure of devotion many Americans of pale and Northern European ancestry), for being prompt, for being attentive to detail, for attention to conventional good manners and … other stuff. (Link here – and here, and here. And this is just from a day’s harvest on Instapundit.) It’s all too depressing to relate, and frankly, if I was one of those so bidden to attend and forced on pain of a bad performance rating and loss of employment, to publicly lick the socially just and sustainable boots of the trainer administering the class (AKA ‘struggle session’), I’d be sullen and resentful at being forced to participate in the whole humiliating exercise. Especially since a) many persons of darker than Anglo skin color have done very well, especially in sports, entertainment and politics, and b) the dysfunction, ingratitude for blessings received such as welfare, free public education, so many free points given to students of color on academic tests when it comes to college admittance, and c) the straight-up violence dealt out on the street to white and Asian passerbys at the hands of young thugs of color.

Not that all the so-called trainers in this exercise are themselves of color. I have to hand it to Robin DiAngelo for being a person of pallor and yet successfully staking out a richly productive claim on that rich Mother Lode of racial guilt which scammers of color like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been working for lo these many decades, not to mention a straight-up deranged racist like the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan.

One does have to wonder, though – where and what is the endgame of all this racial mummery? Besides the filthy lucre earned by the proponents of it, through best-selling books, speaking fees and flogging instructional modules to corporate and academic clients, of course. The thought occurred to me the other day, upon reading comments by resentful participants in these exercises … that perhaps all this CRT-oriented anti-racism training might be another and more subtle attempt at setting off a new race war. Is CRT the new and more main-line acceptable version of Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter? A fatal provocation, deliberately to set off a fuse of race-based resentments? Discuss as you wish.