A Spectre Is Haunting America

Warning from a survivor of Communism

“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism.” With that opening statement by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles in Manifesto of the Communist Party, a seductive and destructive evil spirit was unleashed on humankind. It did not stay long in mainland Europe before it descended on Russia. Later, it went to China, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries. In its wake, more than 100 million people were slaughtered in the name of establishing a perfect world like that popularized by John Lennon’s Imagine.

I was a survivor of Communism in China. Both of my parents were communists. They sacrificed everything to help the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) take over China. But they were deceived. My father was imprisoned during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. My mother had to undergo re-education by working in the factory cafeteria. 

I had a traumatic experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution. After the June Fourth Massacre in 1989, when the Chinese government sent in tanks and soldiers to force students out of Tiananmen Square, I became a political refugee in Canada. In 1995, I immigrated to America to stay away from communism as far as I could. However, I was shocked to my core to find this spectre is now haunting America. 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

In the summer of 2021, I was alarmed by the hiring of a DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) director by the Indiana state government and a DEI director by Carmel Clay School Corporation (CCSC). It reminds me of the political officers who came to my school to ensure that the teachers followed the party’s directives to brainwash us. 

I checked the diversity page of my school district’s website. It listed books such as Robin J. DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. They are recommended readings for middle and high school students. I spent a week studying Kendi’s book and wrote a post to critique his ideology. 

Kendi separates people into two classes: racists and antiracists. He said he was a racist growing up because he believed in Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a color-blind America. But he became an antiracist during his years in graduate school. 

He believes that racism is inherent and systematic in America. His reason is that in many aspects of life, blacks are worse off than whites. His brand of antiracism is to change America fundamentally to achieve race equity between blacks and whites. If you disagree with him, you are a racist by his definition.

He strikes at a core pillar of America which is capitalism. He asserts:

Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. 

His way to achieve equity is through discrimination:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. 

This is reminiscent of Marxists' idea of using proletariat dictatorship to counter bourgeois dictatorship. His ideology is a new variant of Marxism, replacing class with race. 

However, he was invited by many school corporations to indoctrinate teachers with his radical idealogy. Of course, he charged a hefty fee for each talk. Capitalism worked very well for him. 

Critical Race Theory

But he did not invent his idealogy. He was “enlightened” by Critical Race Theory (CRT) during his years as a graduate student. 

The left media outlets keep gaslighting Americans that CRT is an obscure graduate-level course in law schools. But even the CRT theorists themselves claim it is a social movement. In the past three decades, it has influenced many college students in diverse disciplines such as education, political science, women’s studies, ethnic studies, communication, sociology, American studies, and even theology. 

Kimberle Crenshaw, a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, coined CRT in 1989 during a conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced CRT to the field of education as Critical Pedagogy. Britannica gives the following definition:

critical race theory (CRT), intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans. Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjust hierarchies.

Notice that CRT is an “intellectual and social movement.” It is not an obscure academic theory. Its core belief is that “racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States.” The key word here is “inherent.” Britannica defines it as “belonging to the basic nature of someone or something.” To fix something inherent in a system, you must dismantle that system and replace it with another. Do you agree that our law and legal institutions are inherently evil and beyond fixing? What they are advocating is nothing short of a revolution.

As a theory, it may have its place in universities. But, unlike other academic theories, it is taken as fact by many professors who have used it to indoctrinate their students with a worldview of whites against non-whites. 

In the past few years, many school administrators and teachers, perhaps due to their indoctrination in colleges, have adopted it in curricula and textbooks to brainwash school children all the way down to kindergarten.

CRT theorists are also social activists. They want to dismantle America in order to achieve a utopia of an equitable society with equal ethnic group outcomes. They are against capitalism and classical liberalism. They want to destroy Western Civilization, which they view as white supremacy. 

CRT is the application of Critical Theory in race and racism. Britannica describes it in the following way:

Its immediate precursor was the critical legal studies (CLS) movement, which dedicated itself to examining how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginalized. (CLS, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory, may also be viewed as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism, a school of legal philosophy according to which judicial decision making, especially at the appellate level, is influenced as much by nonlegal—political or ideological—factors as by precedent and principles of legal reasoning.) 

Now we see its roots in Critical Theory and Marxism. Britannica gives this definition of Critical Theory:

critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences.

The Frankfurt School

In 1930, Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research, formally called the Institute for the Study of Marxism, at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Under his leadership, he and his colleagues established the famous Frankfurt School. 

Britannica describes the Frankfurt School as follows:

Frankfurt School, group of researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, who applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt; it was the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. Max Horkheimer took over as director in 1930 and recruited many talented theorists, including T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.

The members of the Frankfurt School tried to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy but which also utilized the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. They used basic Marxist concepts to analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems. This approach, which became known as “critical theory,” yielded influential critiques of large corporations and monopolies, the role of technology, the industrialization of culture, and the decline of the individual within capitalist society.

So we now see CRT’s roots in Marxism through Frankfurt School. CRT’s worldview is Marxist, which sees people in two classes: the oppressors and the oppressed. Like classical Marxists, CRT theorists also advocate the dismantling of the existing society in order to achieve their vision of a better one. 

In the 30s, when Hitler came to power, Horkheimer and his colleagues immigrated to America, and the Frankfurt School was transplanted to Columbia University. From there, they influenced many American students and intellectuals, especially the 60s radical student activists. 

One influential figure of the Frankfurt School is Herbert Marcuse. Again Britannica described him briefly:

Herbert Marcuse, (born July 19, 1898, Berlin, Germany—died July 29, 1979, Starnberg, West Germany [now Germany]), German-born American political philosopher and prominent member of the Frankfurt School of critical social analysis, whose Marxist and Freudian theories of 20th-century Western society were influential in the leftist student movements of the 1960s, especially after the 1968 student rebellions in Paris and West Berlin and at New York City’s Columbia University.

Marcuse was influential to the radical students of the 60s. He was referred to as “the Father of the New Left.” Like other Marxists who were disappointed by workers in America who didn’t want Communism, he saw African Americans—the ghetto population as he called it—as the new proletariat. Therefore, the conflict is no longer between the working class and the capitalists; it is between the people of color and the whites. Class struggle is replaced with race struggle. 

The Ghetto Population

He wrote in an essay in 1969 titled “An Essay in Liberation”:

The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance; in this respect, the ghettos can be compared with the faubourgs of Paris in the eighteenth century, and their location makes for spreading and “contagious” upheavals.

Antonio Gramsci and the Long March through Institutions

Another influential figure who inspired Western Marxists and the Frankfurt School is Antonio Gramsci. Britannica gives a brief introduction:

Antonio Gramsci, (born Jan. 23, 1891, Ales, Sardinia, Italy—died April 27, 1937, Rome), intellectual and politician, a founder of the Italian Communist Party whose ideas greatly influenced Italian communism.

He was arrested and imprisoned by Benito Mussolini in 1926 and died in prison in 1937. In prison, he carried out a decade-long wide-ranging historical and theoretical study of Italian society and possible strategies for change. 

Britannica continues with:

Extracts of Gramsci’s prison writings were published for the first time in the mid-20th century; the complete Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) appeared in 1975. Many of his propositions became a fundamental part of Western Marxist thought and influenced the post-World War II strategies of communist parties in the West. His reflections on the cultural and political concept of hegemony (notably in southern Italy), on the Italian Communist Party itself, and on the Roman Catholic Church were particularly important. 

He believed that the ruling capitalist class uses cultural institutions such as family, religion, law, media, and education to maintain power in capitalist societies. Therefore, to have a Communist revolution, communists must first infiltrate and control those institutions. 

Around 1967, Rudi Dutschke, a Communist student activist, coined the slogan “Long March through the Institutions” to describe his strategy to establish the conditions for a revolution. He was inspired by the Long March of the Chinese Communist armies across China in the 30s. Like Gramsci, he believed that Western Communists had to take a long-term approach to start a communist revolution. They had to infiltrate social institutions first instead of a quick and violent revolution like many 60s’ radical student activists wanted. 

The Cultural Revolution

The Chinese Communist Party took Gramsci’s idea and started the infamous Cultural Revolution in 1966. They realized that for them to stay in power, they had to create a new culture and eradicate traditional values and morals. They used college students, who lead middle and high school students, to destroy the so-called Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. 

The students formed groups of so-called Red Guards. They pledged their allegiance not to their country but to Mao only. They were let loose by Mao to turn the country upside down. In August 1966, the so-called Red August, the red guards in Beijing killed 1772 people, most of them were teachers and school administrators, and ransacked 33693 families. 

Mao, sidelined after the disastrous failure of his socialist economic policies, used those students to overthrow the Chinese government led by Liu Shaoqian. Many government and party officials were imprisoned by the red guards. As a result, he became a god-like dictator. 

The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 when Mao died. Those ten years, called “Ten Years of Chaos,” had wiped out traditional Chinese culture. Countless ancient buildings, statues, paintings, and writings were destroyed. No one was safe from tyranny. 

During the Cultural Revolution, almost all of the movies made in the past were banned. There were only the so-called eight Model Dramas and variants. Street names were replaced. Everyone had to read and carry the Little Red Book, a collection of Mao’s quotes. 

After having used the red guards, Mao sent them to the rural areas in the name of getting re-education from peasants. After Mao’s death, many of them wrote about their miserable experiences. Their stories became a literary genre called Scar Literature. 

I started 1st grade in 1970. I wrote about my experience in a Salvo blog. What is happening in America's K-12 schools now reminds me of my experience during the Cultural Revolution. 

I was fortunate because I was still in middle school when Mao died. But all my older siblings had to go to rural areas to work like peasants for several years. When Deng Xiaoping took over China, he took a different approach to embracing the capitalist economy. As a result, China was transformed from a backward agricultural country to a modern one. 

The Spectre of Communism Is Haunting America

Now they are at the last stage of their “Long March through the Institutions.” This new variant of Marxism has taken hold of America’s news media, entertainment industry, higher education, etc. 

It is clear what CRT really is. It is not an academic theory. It is a social movement. It has a Marxist worldview. Instead of the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, they believe the conflict is between whites and people of color. It is a new variant of Communism. It is a secular religion with theorists (theologians), prophets (like Marcuse), and evangelicals (like Kendi). It wants to establish an “equitable” Utopia by destroying Western Civilization and Christianity. 

CRT has already taken over America’s secular higher education and even reached into Christian colleges. Many corporations have DET directors (here and here). Now it is coming down to America’s K-12 schools. Establishing the office of DET directors in public schools is the first step. The second step is to use new textbooks inspired by CRT. 

When enough American voters are indoctrinated in K-12 schools, the neo-Communists will succeed by elections just like how Hitler came to power. Our Republic will fall and our freedom will be lost. 

A spectre is haunting America. It is the spectre of Communism in the new outfit of CRT. We are in an undeclared cultural revolution in America. Our children are in danger. It is up to us parents to save them from this seductive evil ideology. We are fighting a spiritual war against the father of lies.