I feel like every time it seems as if we've reached peak wokery, they kick it up yet another notch.

They're overachievers, I'll give them that.

The latest entrant is health insurance giant Cigna, and its insane, and quite possibly illegal, critical race theory trainings and diversity policies.

You can't say "Brown Bag Lunch"?

And what do they mean by "Religious Privilege"?!

By the way, "insane" which I carelessly used above, is also one of those words Cigna employees are not supposed to utter anymore in polite company."

Fun trivia: When the offensiveness of "Brown Bags" was first raised in Seattle (of course) over seven years ago, Jonathan Turley, a largely liberal constitutional legal scholar had this to say:

I find this perfectly insane.

Time to cancel Jonathan Turley.

What other words does Cigna find offensive?

A lot, it turns out.

The images that follow were pictures that whistleblowers within Cigna took of their computer screens and provided to the Washington Examiner.

Let's start with the slide on "Inclusive Language."

Look familiar?

Take a look at this from a few months ago.

They are all singing from the same hymnal.

"Brown Bag Lunch," "Grandfathered," "Hey Guys," "Off the Reservation," and so on.

While there are differences, these terms keep cropping up everywhere. This is not just Cigna, not just the University of Michigan, this is everywhere and they are cribbing off each other.

Sure, while the University of Michigan did not ban "husband" and "wife," you might recall that an elite private school in New York City did.

For Critical Race Theory trainers, it's like having an à la carte menu of objectionable language, pick one from Column A, and two from Column B (and I'm sure that's on some list, too).

There were some here that were new to me, such as "hip hip hooray." Since the slide did not explain it, I had to look it up. (A little tip for the CRT crazies, sorry, I mean, "stressed non-gender specific individuals": If you have to research why something might be offensive, consider for a moment the possibility that it is not.)

It turns out it has anti-Semitic origins. Maybe.

But probably not.

Turns out our good old American cheer derives from an old anti-Semitic rallying cry, "hep hep." One source claims that "the phrase does have anti-Semitic roots. Rioters in Europe sometimes shouted ‘Hep! Hep!' while on the prowl for Jews… Hitler's storm troopers adopted this jeer."

No one knows this. Maybe Nazis. But who cares what Nazis think.

Supposedly, "Hep Hep" derives from the medieval Latin acronym for Hierosolyma Est Perdita, meaning "Jerusalem is lost," a term that was used during a notorious 1819 German pogrom known as the Hep-Hep Riots.

Oh.

No, not oh. Not at all oh.

There is no "oh" here.

Or maybe that medieval stuff is just fanciful nonsense. The Online Etymology Dictionary says the acronym theory sounds like a myth. And Straight Dope points out that German rioters in 1819 were likely not students of Latin.

Doesn't matter. Cancelled.

We have gone full stupid as a country.

One more thing on language, they also suggest not using "articulate" to describe a non-white person. I agree with that one, it has been used in a condescending manner for too many years by... Joe Biden.

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

If you would like to catch up on what the speech police have been up to, I encourage you to take a look at those two Not The Bee articles above because I want to move on to what makes these Cigna trainings different.

First is the "Religious Privilege." I don't believe I've heard that one put so explicitly.

They are becoming quite emboldened, aren't they?

In fact, they get rather specific, as if they had to.

Here's the slide on "Check Your Privilege."

"Christian privilege."

According to the Washington Examiner:

Lessons include reviews of concepts such as " white privilege," "gender privilege," and something called "religious privilege," which is described as "a set of advantages that benefits believers of a certain religion but not people who practice other religions or no religions at all."

I'm pretty sure when the trainers refer to "a set of advantages that benefits believers," they are not referring to "eternal salvation."

But that's just a guess.

What fascinates me about this is that the only religion you can openly mock without any societal penalty or fear of cancellation is Christianity, in fact you are openly praised and applauded for it.

Now try that with Islam.

Second, and perhaps the most egregious thing to come out of the Washington Examiner's scoop was the apparent explicit discrimination being encouraged and practiced within Cigna as a matter of corporate policy.

Chat logs between an employee and a hiring manager viewed by the Washington Examiner detail an incident where a minority candidate with strong credentials performed exceptionally well in an interview. When that employee suggested to the hiring manager that the company wave the candidate through to the next step in the process, the hiring manager dismissed the candidate under the assumption he was white.

There are two parts to this, one probably illegal, and one extremely revealing.

First, dismissing a candidate based purely on his race.

The second, assuming a qualified candidate could not possibly have been anything other than white.

What?!

It's like they're practicing double racism, the racism against whites is to cover up their racism against everyone else.

This is entirely predictable. You do not end racism by forcing people to think about race all the time and everywhere. You create exactly this. Racists all the time and everywhere.

That is "anti-racist" thinking in practice.

After learning that the candidate belonged to a minority group, the manager said she was excited to hire him, despite learning virtually nothing else about his background.

Racist. Racist from the beginning, and racist to the end.

Was she racist to start? I don't know, but I do know these kinds of trainings don't make things better, they make things worse for everyone, top to bottom, everywhere.

Racism is bad, all of it, the racism practiced by traditional racists, and the neoracism practiced by the "anti-racists." It's all bad.

And it all has to end.