Crt Quotes

“Because leftists are more likely to believe in the innate, inner quality of all people, they attribute the world's inequalities to outer, structural injustices. In particular, the left sees many power hierarchies as unmerited and exploitative. Leftist morality is rooted in the imperative to equalize, to various extents, discrepancies in power (especially through education). Compared with conservatives, leftists have a lower tolerance for inequality.
In this leftist worldview, evil comes primarily from undeserved inequalities in strength or power: from capitalists who exploit workers, unscrupulous corporations that deceive consumers, colonialists who leach off third-world countries, soldiers and police who abuse civilians, men who mistreat women, humans who disrespect the animals and plants in their environment, and so on.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“The concept of 'anti-racism' is an illiberal notion cloaked in liberal terms. lt sounds bold, virtuous and active. No wonder so many well-intentioned people are declaring themselves to be 'anti-racist' with little understanding of its divisive implications. The worst possible way to tackle prejudice is to reanimate the racial divisions of yesteryear through a heightened emphasis on group identity. The wordplay of the anti-racist movement is sufficiently slippery to make rebuttals seem counter-intuitive. Anti-racism proponents have it backward. In order to oppose racism, one must be opposed to anti-racism.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“A particular lethal combo is when culture of victimization -we were wronged last week, last decade, last millennium- is coupled with a culture of honor's ethos of retribution.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with –truth-, -apology-, -forgiveness-, -reparations-, -amnesty-, and –forgetting-.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, it spread, leaping the species gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“CRT is not up for debate. Critical reading and critical thinking about American history leads directly to "critical race theory." Only this is a misnomer, it's not "theory"; it's facts. It should be called "critical race analysis.”
― Chinyerim Alizor

“Cultural disgust to bizarre new ideas protects low-openness people not only from psychosis, but from maladaptive memes. They may not adopt useful new ideas very quickly, but neither do they join suicide cults.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“And just as some conceptualize racism as an inherent property of all white people, there are those who view trauma as a collective and hereditary condition shared by all members of an historically victimized group.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The prominence of victimhood culture in higher education, especially at elite institutions, indicates that victimhood culture is concentrated among the relatively affluent and successful members of the upper middle class.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The new norm has become so stringent that even suggesting that there is a physical difference between a man and a woman can be considered a violation of sexual integrity.
The Black Lives Matter movement is captured in this as well. The tendency toward increasingly exhaustive standards with respect to racism intensified to little productive end: The chances that such rules truly contribute to the overcoming of the narcissistic superiority feelings that are involved in racism is, in fact, rather small.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism

“The -woke- see people in terms of their group identity rather than their individual qualities. Race, gender and sexuality -as opposed to class or economic disparities- are taken to be the determining factors when it comes to mapping the power structures that undergird society. This is why intersectionality plays such a significant role within the discourse of Critical Social Justice.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“First and foremost, -wokeness- is a belief system underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is constructed through language. Its adherents are convinced that words can be a form of violence and that censorship -either by the state or Silicon Velley tech giants or societal pressure (colloquially known as cancel culture)- is therefore necessary to guarantee social justice.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The religion of Critical Social Justice, in other words, is a hydra with many heads. When one encounters someone who speaks in the familiar slogans of intersectionality, one can almost always predict their opinions on a whole range of other subjects. This is why the shorthand of -woke- has become so useful to encapsulate a range of interconnected identity-obsessed movements.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The map of the Critical Social Justice world is not composed of the coordinate systems of latitude and longitude, but the invisible power structures derived from a Foucaldian understanding of human relations.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Just as the symbol of Christ's crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The struggle for gay rights was about equal treatment before the law and making visible those whose persecution by the state had driven them into the shadows of society. Now that equality has been achieved, Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible and declare their commitment to -diversity and inclusion-.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“It is only through reckoning with the truth that we might seek to ameliorate the many inequalities of our world. For all the emphasis on -lived experience-, objective truth still matters. We should be wary of those who tell us otherwise in order to preserve the delicate scaffolding of their pseudo-reality.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Education, like the job market, is a children’s party game where everyone gets the same prize. Yet many are laboring under the misapprehension that the goal of -equity- can be successfully reached by setting the bar so low that anybody can step over it with ease.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“When racial inequality is considered to be present in all conceivable situations, literally anything can be problematised by activists as racist; recent examples include breakfast cereals, the countryside, cycling, tipping, traffic lights, classical music, Western philosophy, interior design, orcs, punctuality and botany.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it. As platitudinous as this might sound, it is worth reiterating at a time when cultural revolutionaries are promoting a tunnel-visioned approach to history and the arts. An alternative reality based on a denial of the past is no kind of reality at all.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. lt turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame people. And it wasn't just the term "Western" that critics objected to. It was everything connected with it. Even "civilization" itself. As one of the gurus of modern racist "anti-racism," lbram X. Kendi put it, '"Civilization' itself is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn't become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers. If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“This is an unusual language for academics to write in: to boast that a particular collection of academics and teachers are, in fact, academics "with an activist dimension." And as for the admission that CRT seeks not just to understand society but to "transform it"? This is the language of revolutionary politics, not a language traditionally used in academia. But revolutionary activists were exactly those involved in GRT turned out to be.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades. In the place of color blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“When people of color violate edicts of progressive orthodoxy, they become white supremacists. Obviously.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life

“The reason for high rates of black poverty and crime is not -systemic racism-, but the absence of fathers in the lives of so many black families. The research showing that this is true is vast and has been known for decades, even if progressives prefer to ignore it or deny it or blame -systemic racism-.”
― Gad Saad, The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life