The “antiracist” training now often inflicted in the west resembles the efforts to shame and remake people during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
Today’s western cultural revolutionaries are not (yet) going nearly as far as China’s, when people were routinely humiliated, beaten to a pulp, imprisoned, and murdered for “wrong” ideas or background.
In the west of 2023, people with “wrong” politics and background (i.e., white) are merely humiliated, censored, perhaps forced out of a job. But we can now add another similarity to Mao’s era: the possibility that hounded victims will commit suicide, as Richard Bilkszto recently did.
Yes, Mr. Bilkszto killed himself.
In 2021, Kike Ojo-Thompson — hired to conduct “antiracist” struggle sessions that Bilkszto, a fill-in principal in Toronto, was required to attend — blasted him for disagreeing with her officially-approved contention that Canada is “more racist” than
While the issue could be subject to much debate, most of it would likely be pointless. Neither side stands on firm ground.
According to Bilkszto’s eventual lawsuit against the school district, Ojo-Thompson berated, “We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people.” She also accused Bilkszto of being a white supremacist.
Repeatedly.
A workplace agency found that Ojo-Thompson had indeed engaged in “harassment and bullying.” And, perhaps because of his complaint with the agency, the school district declined to renew Bilkszto’s contract. His lawsuit contends that his reputation was “systematically demolished.”
Now that he’s safely dead, do those who punished Bilkszto for uttering the “wrong” view of racial claims now regret their conduct?
No more, I bet, than they regard themselves as the bullies they are.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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