#The West’s systematic woke-ism and other commentary

At Spectator USA, Freddy Gray argues that Black Lives Matter and the rest are exactly wrong: “Western society isn’t systemically racist. If anything, it is systemically woke.” Indeed, “our political institutions, our schools and colleges, our corporations are all geared toward destroying systemic racism.” Bizarrely, activists think “the media is part of the evil, neoliberal system that privileges whites and keeps minorities down,” even targeting CNN headquarters when the network “has done its best to portray rioting as benign, arson as peaceful and looting as just.” Sadly, journalists in response “strive ever harder to show fealty to the cause, even if that means jettisoning their responsibility to tell the truth.” None of this “suggests institutional, structural or systemic racism. It suggests the opposite.”

From the right: The Wages of Fake History

In the name of “anti-racism,” rioters are now “tearing down and defacing memorials wantonly,” laments The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann — including “those to abolitionists.” These protesters assume that anyone being celebrated is “probably a racist” — a “prejudiced ignorance” that extends to Abraham Lincoln, “the second all-black volunteer regiment of the Union Army” and abolitionists, among others. Such bias is growing among voting-age adults — because America’s schools “actively teach them to hate their country,” catechizing them in “false information” that will likely “increase racial tensions.” That’s why we need “a new, non-racist boycott, divest, sanction movement — for taxpayer-funded education.” Asks Pullmann: “How many more statues and American minds have to get smashed” before we refuse “these intellectual enemies of our country” any more “public funds”?

From the left: Against ‘Box-Checked’ Veeps

While presidential nominees often look for running mate “candidates who check multiple boxes,” that approach can be “perilous,” warns New York’s Ed Kilgore. If campaigns focus on “itemized strength,” after all, they can miss that “politicians are real live people with flaws.” Take John McCain’s 2008 choice of running mate Sarah Palin, who had “three potentially strong qualities” but ended up being a “goofy low-information extremist.” Campaigns can go to the other extreme and pick “political ciphers” such as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 choice of Tim Kaine, an approach that backfired on her. The best strategy is to choosing someone with “the overall character and skill set” to be “a heartbeat away from the presidency” without “becoming an embarrassment.”

Iconoclast: Gorsuch’s Anti-Trump Torpedo

In the 2016 GOP primaries, Donald Trump appealed mostly to less-religious Republicans, The Week’s Damon Linker notes, and it was “only after Trump had locked down the nomination and pledged to appoint judges to the federal courts who had been verified as reliably conservative” that conservative Catholics and evangelicals rallied to his cause. His nomination of the supposedly rock-solid Neil Gorsuch was key to Trump’s consolidation of this bloc. But now Gorsuch has authored the majority decision in two cases holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act extends to sexual orientation and gender identity, a development that will have “explosive implications” — damaging the “but Gorusch!” ballot-box “rationale” for religious voters who otherwise find Trump’s personal failings reprehensible. “Why should social conservatives show up to vote for a president and a party that repeatedly raises their hopes and then dashes them?”

Historian: Class, Not Race, Divides Us

The left’s mantra of “white privilege”, avers Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, suggests that “class matters not at all.” In fact, “the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables and Joe Biden’s ‘dregs’ have very little in common with those who so libel them but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.” The mostly white wokester class ignores this, with the perverse result that “the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call ‘white privilege’ in others who have never really experienced it.” The real dividing line, rather, is “class” — “the truth that the upscale white progressive dares not utter.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board