by William McGimpsey

Introduction

Martin Luther King famously said: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those words are taken from the US Declaration of Independence – a document written not to demand equality, but to assert the right of a people to govern themselves. It’s true meaning was about independence, sovereignty, and self-determination. King left that context aside, along with the words that followed immediately after: “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.

Six decades on, and we have inherited a Western Civilisation that is obsessed with equality, but whose people are losing their sovereignty, their self-determination, and who are becoming increasingly alienated from their God-given rights.

I am here to put the Civil Rights Revolution on trial and judge it by its fruits.

This paper offers a critique of the changes it has wrought in Western society in recent decades. It makes an argument for eliminating all civil rights laws promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, and instead restoring traditional liberal freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, conscience and religion.

The basic argument is that the social policy reforms arising out of the string of civil rights crusades that have taken place in the West since the 1960s have overwritten our freedoms, eroded our traditional culture, and can now be empirically demonstrated to be harmful. This paper therefore argues these reforms should be reversed.

A corollary argued here is that the retreat of progressive and liberal academics into postmodernism can be understood, at least in part, as a tactical move designed to shield the Civil Rights agenda from empirical criticism. I am convinced that those who insist on the primacy of their own truth – when the real one is inconvenient or uncomfortable – are not seeking justice, but simply avoiding accountability.

The Civil Rights Revolution

What I call the Civil Rights Revolution refers to the sweeping set of social, cultural, and legal transformations that reshaped the Western World following World War II. Its roots lie in the establishment of the United Nations and the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. European decolonisation followed. Then began the US Civil Rights movement which aimed to eliminate discrimination against African Americans. The moral framework, cultural energy, and protest tactics of that movement inspired the 1960s countercultural revolution across the whole Western World, where traditional hierarchies, moral codes, and social norms were criticised and delegitimised. From there emerged a succession of new civil rights crusades – women’s liberation, gay rights, and transgender rights – each extending the revolution into new domains of life.

Together these reforms replaced older liberal frameworks that protected individual rights, and traditional European and Christian cultures that operated within them, with a new top-down moral and political order built around political correctness and bureaucratic control. The result was a comprehensive reorganization of society’s official values and institutions, enforcing new norms of equality and diversity through law, education, and administration. The rise of speech codes, diversity offices, and human resources departments reflected this shift.

What had begun as a campaign for fair treatment grew into a technocratic apparatus guiding social behaviour, speech, and belief. Even societies with strong traditional ethnic, cultural and religious roots found themselves remade in the image of this new moral order, with elites enforcing conformity under the banner of tolerance and inclusion.

Western Civilisation was transformed. Under the new dispensation, all of our liberal freedoms – freedom of speech, association, contract, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, academic freedom, political freedom, and more – were overridden, only able to be exercised when they were in accordance with political correctness, and not when they ran counter to it.

Table 1 below illustrates the scope of the changes:

We don’t really have freedom if we can only exercise it in the way the politically correct technocrats say we can. And the restrictions they have imposed have caused deep systemic harms across all of society.

Competing Visions: Organic vs Managerial Society

The Civil Rights Revolution spurred a transformation from what earlier Anglo-American thinkers conceived of as an organic society to what James Burnham, in his book The Managerial Revolution, termed a managerial society.

For conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, F. A. Hayek, and later Roger Scruton, social order is not primarily a product of design but of emergence. They saw civilisation as the slow accumulation of custom, language, and moral sentiment – a fabric woven from the countless habits and tacit agreements of ordinary people living together over time.

In this view, society is a living organism that evolves through shared experience and inherited wisdom. Language, myth, and moral norms form its operating system: people act not by constant deliberation, but via the internalised moral grammar of their civilisation; they behave according to its norms without always being able to identify or articulate them.

The modern Left’s project has been to re-code this moral operating system. It portrays inherited norms – loyalty, sexual restraint, national affection, religious faith, gender distinction – not as the accumulated wisdom of a civilisation, but as irrational prejudices. In effect, it has pathologised the moral intuitions that sustained the traditional social order, treating them as errors to be corrected through education, law, or psychotherapy. This inversion was the decisive step in the managerial revolution: the delegitimisation of traditional moral intuitions created a vacuum which was then filled by top-down bureaucratic control.

Sam Francis, in Leviathan and its Enemies, describes the managerial society as one in which decision-making is wielded not by families, communities, or business owners, but by professional administrators – the managers of corporations, bureaucracies, and states. Their legitimacy does not arise from tradition, property, or local knowledge, but from technical expertise. The managerial elite governs through procedure rather than custom. It replaces inherited norms with regulations, moral character with compliance training, and spontaneous order with social engineering. By centralizing authority and imposing uniform norms from above, the managerial society is fundamentally anti-subsidiarity: it deprives families, communities, and local institutions of the ability to make decisions for themselves. As such, it is necessarily coercive: a system of free people interacting according to inherited norms has been replaced by systemic grooming to achieve compliance with artificial rules devised by technocrats that often run contrary to the nature of the people being governed – this is the definition of tyranny.

The Civil Rights Revolution was the watershed moment in ushering in this transformation. What began as a moral appeal for equal rights and anti-discrimination, became, over time, the institutional mechanism through which the managerial class consolidated its authority. The civil-rights regime represents the replacement of organic society with managerial society; the substitution of living culture with technocratic control.

Civil Rights and the Nation-State

The Civil Rights Revolution profoundly altered the relationship between citizens, nations, and the state. In the decades following the 1960s, the same moral framework of equal rights and anti-discrimination within nations was extended outward to reshape immigration policy and national identity. The old idea of a nation as a common people defined in ethnic terms and bound together by shared kinship, history, language, culture and religion, gave way to a universalist ethic of equality and inclusion. Western nations came to define legitimacy not through what was in the best interests of their historic peoples, but through adherence to the abstract principles of equality and diversity.

Under the Civil Rights Revolution’s moral influence, the idea of national identity being defined in racial, ethnic or even religious terms came to be seen as exclusionary, unjust, or “racist”. Immigration policies that had once protected the ethnic, cultural and religious identity of nations were relaxed or abandoned, and by the late 20th century, governments across the West were pursuing multiculturalism and mass immigration as moral imperatives – destroying the traditional foundations of their own societies. Nations were reconceptualised as administrative zones managed through law and ideology. The organic nation was being replaced.

The Civil Rights Revolution thus became the moral engine powering the dissolution of the West’s own peoples.

The Tyranny of Equality

The reasoning behind the pursuit of equality for all groups in society is deeply flawed.

Before one can “equalise” anything, one must first identify the groups to be equalised between. But the modern Left has made a habit out of the proliferation of new groups (how many genders are we up to now?) There is, in principle, no limit to how many “group identities” can be socially constructed (i.e. made up by left-wing academics) and portrayed as victims of inequality. Once a new group is defined as “oppressed,” demands are then made to restructure society to eliminate their supposed disadvantage – regardless of whether that disadvantage reflects reality, common sense, or moral boundaries.

Homosexuality and transgenderism, for example, were once considered mental illnesses, but have now been reinterpreted as civil rights movements. This has resulted in established moral, psychological and biological norms being redefined – with normal people forced to internalise and behave according to a new ideological framework originating out of mental illness.

This logic has no clear endpoint. If we can do it for transgenderism, why not schizophrenia? And why couldn’t the process be repeated for every other mental illness, and then for every type of criminal act? Aren’t burglars just people who make different value judgements about the sanctity of private property? Isn’t it wrong that society is systemically oppressive toward people who make this value judgement. And so on, ad infinitum.

Hopefully these examples are enough to illustrate that there is something fundamentally flawed with this entire line of thinking – it is intrinsic and necessary to the functioning of society that we draw distinctions between different types of people and behaviour and have rules, policies, laws and social conventions around treating them differently – parents and children, citizens and foreigners, the law abiding and criminals, and the sane and mentally ill must be treated differently under the law. Society would descend into absurdity and cease to function otherwise. Demands for equality between these groups are driven by nihilism, not a desire for fair treatment.

Equality before the law is not an absolute principle: it must be limited by the maintenance of social order and the common good.

Each successive crusade for equality by a new identity group has advanced its goals in the language of “rights.” This framing allows activists to bypass the ordinary processes of empirical policymaking and democratic deliberation. In the Western moral imagination, a “right” carries absolute moral weight – it is not something to be balanced against competing goods, but something to which others must submit. Once a claim is framed as a right, to question it becomes heresy, and empirical or utilitarian reasoning is silenced.

Rights language transformed policy disagreements into zero-sum moral struggles, justifying censorship, coercion, and the suppression of dissent.

The new “rights” were largely not implemented through victory in the marketplace of ideas. They were most often imposed in dishonest and authoritarian ways involving rhetorical sleight of hand, censorship, and repression. Restrictions on the expression of traditional views were often brought in at the same time as social changes were being rolled out, tilting the playing field in marketplace of ideas and making organisation of a coherent resistance to the changes very difficult.

For every new civil rights crusade, a corresponding “ism” or “phobia” was invented – racism for African-American civil rights, sexism for women’s rights, homophobia for gay rights, and so on. Those deploying traditional conservative arguments against the new civil rights movements were publicly labelled with one of these terms, and a soft-power infrastructure was mobilised to impose personal costs on them for expressing their views. This includes things like publication of hitpieces in media; attempts to engineer loss of reputation, status, friendships and relationships; attempts to get people fired from their jobs and denied other basic services; and so on.

Intimidating people into silence, shutting them down and shutting them up is not the same thing as winning the argument on the merits – it is just systematised bullying.

Civil Rights; Empirical Harms

The Civil Rights Revolution ended legal segregation and dismantled many formal barriers to education, employment, and political participation. However, the broader consequences over six decades have been a pattern of severe social breakdown across multiple domains.

1. Biological Denialism and the Destruction of Evidence-Based Social Policy

Post-1960s egalitarianism discouraged acknowledgement of innate group differences in ability and behaviour. This includes acknowledgement of racial differences in average IQ, impulse control, and time preference, which have significant correlations with all the normal socioeconomic indicators – rates of crime, poverty, and drug use, educational achievement and average incomes. We can explain a good deal of why different races and ethnic groups achieve different socioeconomic outcomes by pointing to biological differences such as these as the cause (Herrnstein & Murray, The Bell Curve, 1994). Biological denialism also bedevils our public debates around feminism and trans rights.

In the repressive politically correct environment that has obtained in the decades following the Civil Right Revolution, academics and policymakers have instead attributed the disparities to institutional racism and systemic bias. This ideology-based denial of reality has been used as the basis for questionable public policy interventions including affirmative action and DEI: skewing education and employment policy, fostering resentment and inefficiency.

2. The Destruction of Meritocracy

The work of Thomas Sowell (e.g., Affirmative Action Around the World, 2004) illustrates that affirmative action and diversity mandates have often removed more qualified candidates from education and job opportunities. Rather than promoting equality under the law, these policies have created systemic disadvantages for whites, males, heterosexuals, and Christians.

By prioritizing demographic criteria over merit, these policies have also reduced competence and efficiency across society and burdened organizations with compliance costs, undermining their performance.

Sowell also makes an empirical case that affirmative action and diversity mandates harm the minority groups they aim to help, by prioritizing demographic characteristics over merit and channelling students and workers into roles they are ill-equipped for, which undermines their long-term success, fosters dependency on quotas rather than achievement, and generates resentment that can further impede social and professional advancement.

3. The Destruction of Community

Empirical evidence links increased diversity, as a result of mass immigration, to the destruction of social trust and community.

• Robert Putnam (2007) found that greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust, civic engagement, and participation in voluntary associations, even within ethnic groups themselves. He called this the “hunkering down” effect: in more diverse communities, where people share less in terms of ethnicity, language, culture, or religion, residents tend to withdraw from collective activities and social cooperation. Several subsequent studies have confirmed these findings.
• Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell demonstrate in their book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy that declining trust and social cohesion are due to the destruction of familiar national identities, rapid cultural change, and deprivation of economic and social status. As traditional markers of belonging and shared values weaken, people feel alienated from institutions and each other, reducing participation in civic life and fostering political discontent.

4. The Destruction of the Family

The Western World has experienced massive declines in marriage rates and increases in numbers of children being born to single mothers. Birth rates have also plummeted to below replacement levels.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960‑2010 (2012), Charles Murray argued that this is related to the cultural revolution of the 1960s eroding the informal social norms that historically governed family, work, and community life, particularly among lower class white Americans.

Since the 1960s we have also seen the rise in the availability of casual sex; the removal of negative consequences of promiscuity with access to birth control and condoms that lower the risk of STDs; and an increase in alternatives to sex, such as pornography. It is now much easier to achieve sexual gratification without getting married and having children, so people often now choose not to. At the risk of being crude – you don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk for free.

Online pornography is particularly pernicious, now offering any sexual experience you could dream of (and many you can’t) at the touch of a button. Evidence suggests that frequent consumption of porn reduces desire for real sex and relationships, contributes to the development of paraphilias and is related to sexual dysfunction.

The consequences of weakened families are well‑documented: significantly higher rates of loneliness, mental illness, and diminished life satisfaction among those outside stable two‑parent households.

In summary, while the Civil Rights Revolution ended legal segregation and expanded equality of opportunity for marginalized groups, these gains came at a profound cost, undermining the key pillars of society – family stability, birth rates, social trust, cohesion and community participation, meritocratic institutions, and evidence-based social policy – all of which are necessary for a people to survive and flourish.

The Retreat into Postmodernism

As the social reforms of the mid-20th century matured, the divergence between their utopian promises and empirical results became clear. The progressive intelligentsia, which had grounded its legitimacy in ideological claims about progress, found itself increasingly unable to defend those claims on factual grounds. By the 1970s, the egalitarian project had generated a body of policy outcomes that could not withstand serious empirical scrutiny.

Rather than confront these contradictions directly, much of the Western academic and cultural elite retreated into postmodernism – an intellectual posture that denied the very possibility of objective truth or reason. By declaring all knowledge “socially constructed” and all truth “relative to power,” progressive thinkers could insulate their ideological commitments from external critique. If evidence contradicted the theory, the evidence itself could be dismissed as an artifact of patriarchal, colonial, or capitalist bias. Thus, postmodernism functioned as a tactical defence mechanism – a way to protect the egalitarian project from its own failures.

This shift had profound institutional effects. In universities and other institutions, scholarship ceased to aim at truth and began instead to serve political ends. The role of the academic changed from seeker of knowledge to custodian of ideology. The subjective vocabulary of lived experience, self-identification and social justice, replaced the objective vocabulary of reason, biology and virtue. The result was the birth of a managerial epistemology – increasingly, information was assessed according to whether it preserved the moral legitimacy of the regime (c.f. Jacinda Ardern’s “Podium of Truth” to her claims of mis and disinformation) rather than whether it was true and helped us understand the world.

Postmodernism became the philosophical foundation of the managerial society because it offered the ruling class a ready-made justification for bureaucratic control: if truth is relative, then power alone defines reality, and only those claiming to represent the oppressed can claim moral authority. What began as an intellectual retreat thus became an instrument of governance, shielding the progressive policy agenda from empirical challenge. Western academia shifted away from the pursuit of truth and the production of knowledge, turning instead toward the inculcation of progressive values and the policing of thought.

On a deeper philosophical level, truth acts as a check on power. In fact, truth has a power of its own. For this reason illegitimate authority fears the truth and seeks to limit and constrain it so that it can increase its own power. The attack on objective reality, nature, biology, and traditional or God-given categories, I think, is a symptom of illegitimate power struggling to avoid accountability.

The path to restoration

A fundamental difference between liberal and conservative thought is how each views freedom. Liberals often treat a legal regime of rights as capable of being adopted or imposed regardless of the culture and moral character of the people living under it. To a Conservative this is folly. This was the key insight of the founding work of intellectual Conservatism – Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: you cannot give a people freedom the way you hand out pamphlets. Freedom is not a document; it is a character. It is not a system you impose; it is a way of life you inherit. To be free is not something you are allowed to do. It is something you have been formed, over centuries, to be. A free man is something you are.

Freedom depends on an underlying structure of shared identity – common ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. Without these things, a regime of mutual cooperation cannot be sustained. The failure of the modern civil-rights regime demonstrates this principle: we failed to preserve the ethnic, cultural, and religious foundations of our societies, and now authoritarian measures are needed to maintain order between competing factions. Restoring liberty therefore requires more than repealing restrictive laws or undoing policy mistakes. It requires restoring the shared ethnic, cultural and religious foundations that make freedom viable.

Some of this will return naturally after politically correct repression is removed, and our rights and freedoms are restored, but remigration policies that encourage recent immigrants who do not share our basic identity to leave will also be required. Even after that, in some countries more than one group will remain – African Americans, Native Americans and Whites in the US; Maori and Europeans in New Zealand. The question is, how can these diverse groups best live together in the same country?

The answer is a type of federalism or ethnoreligious pluralism. The removal of politically correct restrictions on freedom of association, contract and political freedom will encourage natural geographic clustering around common ethnicity, culture and religion, which should be welcomed and encouraged. Think of this as Fractal Nationalism – the same principle of self-determination universalised and applied at multiple scales: both within and between nation-states.

This approach, in contrast to forced integration and politically correct repression, protects both freedom and identity, while remaining consistent with the principle of subsidiarity. Liberalism has traditionally advertised itself as being “neutral” between different cultures and value claims. The approach outlined above is consistent with this ideal, whereas forced integration and top-down imposition of one set of values is not – it is necessarily supremacist, privileging some values, cultures and groups over others.

The recommendations that follow therefore set out two complementary agendas: the preservation of traditional identity, and the restoration of our individual liberties.

Recommendations

a. Preserve our traditional identity

i. Defend our borders and restore our traditional racial & ethnic makeup

• Reduce immigration to a minimum.
• Favour immigrants from traditional source nations who are racially, ethnically, culturally and religiously compatible.
• Implement Remigration policies to encourage non-white, Muslim, or otherwise incompatible minority groups to return home.

ii. Make Christianity the official public religion

• Return to teaching Bible in Schools.
• Return Christianity to the public square – officially recognise Christian holidays, and encourage prayers and other religious displays in public spaces and official institutions.
• Restore traditional marriage and promote policies that help the family, birth rates, and intergenerational continuity.

iii. Protect our culture and language

• Dewokeify curriculums and teach proper national history, including founding myths, national heroes, and important traditions, in public schools.
• Restore the teaching of Western Civilisation and the Classics in Universities.
• Protect national holidays, cultural festivals, and historical commemorations that transmit culture between generations and pass laws to preserve historical monuments and heritage sites against removal or ideological reinterpretation.
• Proudly display national symbols (flags, monuments) in government buildings, schools, workplaces, and public spaces.
• Pass legislation recognizing traditional national language(s) as the official medium of public education, legal proceedings, and government administration.

iv. Encourage nationalism and local self-determination

• Ensure national and local communities can preserve their ethnicity, culture, faith, and traditions while coexisting peacefully with others, by removing laws requiring forced integration, and instead encouraging ethnic, cultural, and religious clustering.
• Enact legislation to allow voluntary self-segregation of local communities, neighbourhoods, and schools, based on ethnicity, culture, language or religion, protecting these arrangements from anti-discrimination challenges.
• Subsidiarity – ensure legal frameworks support community self-governance at multiple scales – local, regional, and national.

b. Restore our freedoms

i. Restore freedom of speech and viewpoint tolerance

• Repeal all hate speech laws and any other restrictions apart from those preventing direct incitement of violence.
• Limit any government control of editorial content in media: remove restrictions on hate speech and other limitations on expression of opinion. Limit bias and ensure viewpoint diversity in public/state media.
• Defang any soft-power infrastructure used to enforce repressive tolerance (such as the ADL, SPLC, ANTIFA in the US and analogous organisations in other countries).
• Create a new soft-power infrastructure to defend free speech and viewpoint tolerance.

ii. Restore freedom of religion and conscience

• Guarantee the right to practice, manifest, and teach religious beliefs publicly and privately, including in schools, workplaces, and media.
• Protect religious institutions from any laws or policies that penalise or restrict the teaching or expression of religious beliefs.
• Uphold parents’ rights to withdraw their children from school lessons that violate their religious or moral convictions.
• Allow conscientious objection for medical staff regarding abortion, euthanasia, gender-transition, or other controversial procedures.
• Prevent charitable status being denied to organisations on the basis of their religious or moral views.

iii. Restore complete freedom of association

• Abolish all “anti-discrimination” laws and policies.
• Prevent government interference in community groups or religious organizations regarding membership policies.
• Eliminate all government bureaucracies, and funding, contracting and licensing provisions, that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Abolish all admissions quotas or “diversity requirements” to prevent private schools from choosing students freely.

iv. Restore Freedom of Contract

• Eliminate all laws that restrict hiring or firing on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, religion, etc.
• Repeal all laws forbidding landlords from choosing tenants on ethnic, cultural, religious or other grounds.
• End ESG and diversity mandates in corporate law and government contracting.

v. Restore Academic Freedom

• Mandate institutional neutrality: Require universities to take no official political positions, with public funding tied to compliance.
• Guarantee free expression: Mandate free speech codes protecting lawful, controversial, and politically incorrect viewpoints, and safeguard tenure for scholars expressing them.
• End ideological control: Remove government or bureaucratic mandates restricting curricula, research, hiring, or promotion on political or diversity grounds.
• Fund on merit: Allocate research funding solely on scientific and scholarly merit, not political objectives.

vi. Restore Political Freedom

• Rein in security intelligence agencies that unfairly target conservative, nationalist, or anti-progressive groups by labelling them “far right” or “extremist”, surveilling them and seeking to delegitimise and suppress their activities.
• Crack down on foreign interference in our democracies, including by

  requiring registration of entities working for the interests of foreign governments or powers; and publishing regular reports on foreign interference.

• Ensure transparent and secure elections, including by preventing non-citizens from voting.
• Protect freedom of protest – our last line of defence against institutional overreach.