Seth Smith, a UC Berkeley student, was shot and killed the other day in what appears to be a random act of violence. Police are trying to solve the murder. Smith was a white man. UC’s chancellor Carol Christ e-mailed to faculty, staff, and students a note of condolence that included this paragraph:

We realize this is a difficult time for those of you who knew Seth. It is important to know that individuals may express their grief differently and we need to respect the different ways people react and support each other in the days and weeks ahead. Many of you may have had a close relationship with Seth and are feeling a sense of loss and disbelief. Others, like many of us, are experiencing stress, grief and anxiety related to the coronavirus pandemic and the recent murders of George Floyd, Riah Milton, and other Black Americans.

This is sickening. There is nothing that cannot and will not be racialized and politicized by our ruling class.

That is repulsive. This is the same kind of thing, but merely ridiculous. A reader sends in this announcement from the Campus Recreation department of the University of North Carolina:

They have specific workouts named after dead black people. For example:

MONIKA DIAMOND

Monika Diamond, a 34-year-old Black transgender woman, business owner and LGBT+ activist, was tragically killed in Charlotte, North Carolina on March 18, 2020. Diamond’s death is believed to be the fourth violent death of a transgender or gender non-conforming person in 2020.

From the Human Rights Campaign: “These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners or strangers, some of whom have been arrested and charged, while others have yet to be identified. Some of these cases involve clear anti-transgender bias. In others, the victim’s transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and/or survival sex work. Sadly, 2020 has already seen at least 15 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported.”

Before the workout, follow @humanrightscampaign and read their article: A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the United States in 2019

Last week the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ people are protected from employment discrimination, however there are still few explicit federal legal protections for transgender or gender-expansive people. After the workout, check out Freedom For All Americans and follow @freedom4allusa.

The Monika Diamond Memorial Workout is on YouTube or Instagram.

Here is the workout memorializing a dead black trans woman. It includes “double pushup burpees,” because there’s really no better way to honor a dead black trans woman than by doing double pushup burpees. You cannot make this up:

The man arrested for shooting Monika Diamond is Prentice Bess, a black man who knew Diamond (born Jeremy Whitted). I have searched online and seen no reason to believe that the murder was a bias crime, much less a racially motivated one, as both alleged killer and victim are black. But let’s not let pass a moment to exploit the dead for social justice purposes. These stupid workouts are  “I love my dead gay son” (from the black comedy Heathers) level virtue signaling.

This passage from Live Not By Lies reveals what these totalitarians are up to:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases — the personal is political — captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned [Hannah] Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

This is not innocent, this stuff. Everything in life must be subject to this ideology. Everything.