Hey, Ho,
Western Civ to the Front

| published August 14, 2026 |

By Bob Armstrong
Thursday Review contributor

In the spring of 2021 the psychoanalyst Aruna Khilanani addressed a group of mental health professionals at the Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center. She lectured on the vexing issue of why white people are racist, sexist, homophobic, authoritarian, patronizing, privileged, and creepy. At one point during her talk she confirmed Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's trenchant insight in his 1968 memoir, Soul on Ice, that "revolutionary power grows out of the lips of a pussy." Dr. Khilanani fantasized before her audience about "unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step."

In Douglas Murray's The War on the West (Broadside Books, 2022) this oh-so light-hearted and charming thought of murdering any white person at random is one of many anecdotes he catalogs on the capacity of social justice warriors like Khilanani to...well, let others bite the bullet.

As our spirited girl bounces through her struggle session with a willing pack of progressive health workers falling all over each other solemnly proclaiming their white privilege and white fragility—yet optimistic since the Left is always on the right side of history—one can sense 3,000 years of Western culture going down the drain.

Murray resists this. For example, at one point he goes toe-to-toe with the Jesse Jackson of two generations ago who, in 1987, marched through campus with Stanford students chanting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has gotta go."

And it did go, from Stanford on down through the entire college and university system.

Let's now move from 1987 to 2020 for another less memorable but more revealing chant. On a counter-intelligence visit to the City of Roses shortly after George Floyd's death, Murray witnessed much of the downtown area boarded up, closed, or "barricaded against nightly riots. Portland had become a ground zero for a portion of the U.S. culture war."

About the same time Murray stepped into the street gathering info for The War on the West, I had an appointment at the VA in Portland to check up on my pacemaker. Reading the Oregonian while waiting for the cardiologist, I thought my pacemaker might explode as I burst into laughter over this chant from a band of agitators in Black Lives Matter: "WHITES TO THE FRONT."

Right on, brother!

When the time arrives to smash windows at the Hall of Justice or a Starbucks on behalf of George Floyd, these self-loathing guilt-ridden lefties take their stand in front of a line of riot police. Yet there is not an ounce of courage in this act. All they do is reach the summit of their own hypocrisy. They know the consequences: A slap on the wrist, maybe a few hours in the jail's holding pen. (I offer one suggestion to improve the performance. Change the chant to "Honkies to the front!")

Murray makes the case that there is at least a chance Americans' respect for decency, moderation, and reason may eventually win out over the promulgators on the Left of permanent racism and America as rotten to the core. Toward the end of his book he offers a simple solution which reminded me of the Big Moment every week in the fifties during Groucho Marx's TV show. The contestants on "You Bet Your Life" could win some bonus money if they said the predetermined "secret word" while yukking it up with Groucho.

For Murray the secret word is "gratitude."

Nobody will win any money when they say that word, but there's a fortune awaiting all of us if we recognize "that to live in the West in this time is to enjoy a piece of historical good fortune unlike almost any good fortune in history. You might feel some regret that things happened in the eighteenth century that people are not proud of today. But you might balance that out by feeling some gratitude to be a part of a civilization in which all human life came to be regarded as sacred, in which people are regarded as being endowed with innate dignity, in which peace is the normal state of affairs and where wrongs done in the current day can be remedied through the application of the law."




Bob Armstrong is a journalist and writer, and the author of a new memoir, No Exit From Vietnam, available on Amazon; Armstrong is a frequent contributor to Thursday Review, and his writing has also appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Related Thursday Review articles:

The Chinese Couch Potato; By Bob Armstrong; Thursday Review contributor; July 21, 2026.

250 On The Left: An Examination of Dissent's Summer 2026 Edition; By Bob Armstrong; Thursday Review contributor; June 28, 2026.