Year: 2020

Remember in the 1990s when the progressive left was in full meltdown over the violent actions of anti-government, anti-police right-wing types, that amalgamation of conservative and nationalist movements, far-right militias and survivalists? The name “Michigan Militia” was etched on the public mind. Remember how horrified progressives were to hear the police described as “jackbooted thugs” and their societal function characterized as oppressing the people on behalf of a privileged elite? It sounded crazy. All this talk of the New World Order and something about the “sovereign citizen.”

Imagine the horror if the Michigan Militia took over the streets of our cities, burned down buildings, looted stores, overturned police cars, assaulted black and brown people, physically attacked cops with bottles, clubs, sticks, and firearms, invaded and occupied neighborhoods, and marched through black communities demanding residents get out of their homes—the flags of white supremacy held aloft. Imagine how proud progressives would be to finally see an armed black couple defending themselves and their property against a white mob on the prowl for the black mayor of their beloved city. Imagine that the Michigan Militia received millions of dollars in financial support from corporate America.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are out in the streets engaged in anti-government, anti-police action, characterizing the police as “fascists,” “racists,” and “Nazis” whose function it is to oppress the people on behalf of a privileged elite. “All cops are bastards.” “Fuck the police.” Such anti-police rhetoric is commonplace in these circles. The things I just asked the reader to imagine the right-wing militia doing, Antifa and BLM are actually doing. They are armed, extremist, organized, and violent. Yet the progressive left, when it’s not encouraging the violence, rationalizes it as “chickens coming home to roost.” White people had it coming. “No justice no peace.” Corporations fund the rebellion.

The doublethink ramped up recently when the FBI thwarted an alleged plot (there is a criminal complaint supported by an affidavit by an FBI agent that has yet to be subjected to cross examination) to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI arrested thirteen men, seven of whom were members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group based (of course) in Michigan. In court documents, Michigan law enforcement authorities write that “the Wolverine Watchmen have called on members to identify law enforcement officers’ home addresses in order to target the officers, have made threats of violence to instigate a civil war leading to societal collapse, and have engaged in planning and training for an operation to attack the Capitol of Michigan, and kidnap Government officials including the Governor of Michigan.” Sound familiar? Antifa and Black Lives Matter dox law enforcement officers (leading police and other law enforcement personnel to hide their names on their uniforms). Antifa and BLM are explicitly rebelling to establish a new social order, one without the police. They plan and carry out attacks on city governments. 

The media are associating the alleged Whitmer kidnapping plot with the libertarian anarchist movement the Boogaloo. To learn about this movement, see “The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think,” at Bellingcat. Boogaloo joins Antifa and BLM on the streets for anti-police action. Yet the news media separates them out by claiming they are “fascists” and “white supremacists.” Is this true? No, it’s not.

The Boogaloo movement is neither fascist nor white supremacist. They are for the most part non-racist, libertarian anarchist. In fact, the Boogaloo, like the Proud Boys, has a multiracial membership. The anarchist flag behind Brandon Caserta featured in his anti-government rants is intentional. There are plenty of pictures of Boogaloo members standing alongside Antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors during anti-police protests. The Boogaloo folk do indeed have a gun fetish. Because the movement is open, there is no mechanism for policing membership; a few white supremacists and neo-Nazis have claimed to be fellow travelers, but there are few actually involved, and they appear to be unwelcome. Gun enthusiasm is a powerful attractor.

Why are the people who are supposed to be informing us about such matters writing about it but not bothering to research it? Or are the running interference? If you feel the need to look and see what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about it, be my guest. Just remember that the SPLC is the same organization that claimed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz were Islamophobes. However, I have an advantage. I am a criminologist whose hobby has been for decades keeping up with extremist groups. But it’s not like this information is hard to find. After all, J.J. MacNab, a fellow for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, recently testified before the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism Committee on Homeland Security, on July 16, 2020, and talked about Boogaloo. J.J. MacNab is one of the nation’s leading experts on sovereign citizens, tax protesters, U.S. paramilitary militia groups, and related anti-government extremist organizations. What does she say about them?

MacNab tells us that, among other things, “Guns are common denominator in most anti-government extremist groups. Racism is not. For that reason, you could find the Oath Keepers taking to the streets to protect police from Antifa while Boogaloo members join forces with Black Lives Matter against the police.” As for any fondness for Trump, she said, “The non-racist side of the Boogaloo proponents are the exception in that consider themselves Libertarian and therefore prefer Jo Jorgensen.” Who’s Jo Jorgensen? She is the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. Frankly, I would support Jorgensen myself, but I cannot get past her stance on immigration. It’s pretty much open borders. But isn’t that interesting? White nationalists supporting the open borders candidate. Yeah, that seems likely.

The Boogaloo (that’s the name for the civil war devotees wish to provoke) consider Trump a tyrant—just like the progressive left, Antifa, and BLM do. They see Whitmer as a tyrant, as well. Of course, corrupted by doublethink, the progressive left does not see Whitmer that way. The media is telling the public that Trump inspire the kidnapping plot against Whitmer. But this is untrue. Whitmer’s draconian lockdown is what motivated the protests and plot against her. As libertarian anarchists Boogaloo do not recognize the official government as legitimate, in their minds they were going to affect a citizen’s arrest and try the governor for what they believe were crimes against liberty. It’s a lot like how Antifa and Black Lives Matter pursue justice on the streets.

Do I need to emphasize that I oppose anti-police and anti-government movements? I do. That’s why I oppose Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I am a small “R” republican who believes we need a police apparatus to secure public safety in order to keep citizens safe from crime and violence in order to maintain a functioning democracy. That means I oppose the Boogaloos. I just can’t sit by and corporate propaganda proceed unencumbered by facts.

I am aware that shitposting taken literally can lead to very wrong conclusions about the ideology of a group. Just because libertarian anarchists truck in Nazi tropes doesn’t make them Nazis. They’re being silly. They’re fucking with people. It’s a form of trolling. Most libertarian anarchists are not plotting to hurt anybody. They are keyboard warriors sitting in their parents basement. Many of them are just kids. Too many “experts” of extremism don’t know about shitposting or other activities on the Internet. But they do know how to work the public into a hysteria.

If we find it abhorrent to even consider commandeering a man’s body to keep alive with his organs another man with failing ones, then we must find it abhorrent to commandeer a woman’s body to keep alive a fetus who depends on her organs to exist.

If we believe that the woman can be treated as a human incubator against her will, then we must also believe it is appropriate to hold a lottery to procure kidneys for those who need them. After all, one needs only one healthy kidney to live and most humans have two healthy ones. More than one hundred thousand Americans are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, and around twelve of them die every day because they cannot find a suitable donor.

Based on a right to privacy, which is assumed but not explicit in the Bill of Rights, leaves the reasoning behind Roe vulnerable. However, liberty is blatantly central to the foundation of the republic. (The late jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this point in criticizing Roe.) Personal sovereignty and individualism represent the essence of the American way of life, explicitly identified in our founding documents. It is, moreover, universally true if human rights is to mean anything objectively.

Roe should have been decided on the basis that forcing a man to sustain with his organs the life of another man is paradigmatically tyrannical, a negation of everything for which the American republic stands. Liberty is America’s raison d’être.

I agree with those who argue that because women have the unique burden to bear children equal treatment requires we recognize this unique burden. (Ginsburg made this point, as well.) But there is also a general principle that makes the feminist struggle to secure reproductive freedom at the same time the struggle of men to preserve their freedom. Men are not allies in this fight; they are in this fight side-by-side with women for themselves as humans.

The desire to control a woman’s reproductive capacity, whatever the ideology, represents a moral double standard. Advocates of restrictions would never willingly agree to a regime that commandeered men’s bodies to exploit their organs for the sake of exclusively preserving individual life. They would find this offensive to morality. But women? It is so easy for too many to disregard their sovereignty. A stealth misogyny lurks there, masquerading as empathy. It’s worst form of objectification; it denies the woman’s humanity.

To be sure, we agree to commandeer bodies to defend liberty in war. This is in itself a difficult moral dilemma. But that’s not a contradiction. On the contrary. The fact that most of us would agree to war in defense of liberty makes the aborted fetus a martyr for human rights. I offer that consolation to those who feel anguish over the aborted.

I have said this before, but I want to reiterate the fact that I am on the left. I have voted for Democratic party candidates and Green party candidates in the past. I have never voted for a Republican in my life. I oppose war and imperialism. I am an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist, an environmentalist, pro civil rights, and gay and lesbian rights all the way. I am a trained sociologist with a specialization in political economy. That makes me about as left as one can be. I say all that because I want readers to understand that what I am writing about this election and the choice we face is not because I am right wing or conservative. It’s because I am objective and refuse to be gaslit by corporate propaganda.

I am fifty-eight years old, and I have never seen the profound depth and intensity of bias in our academic, cultural, and mass media institutions than I have witnessed over the last four years. As the election approaches, the hysteria is reaching a fever pitch. The establishment is carrying one candidate—a corporatist, transnationalist, neoliberal, neoconservative career politician—across the finish line, while vilifying his opponent—a pro-American, democratic-republican, populist, nationalist, free-speech businessman and political novice—in the most over-the-top manner conceivable.

Joe Biden is not merely the most dismal candidate the Democratic Party has put forward in my lifetime, but he is quizzing of the first order, a sell-out to global corporate power and the Chinese Communist Party. The forces animating him—he is a puppet—seek to denationalize our republic while portraying tens of millions of working class Americans as backwards deplorables. Biden and his masters are working to transfer governance of our nation from our political institutions to the banking and corporate apparatus.

The globalists had effective control over the United States for 28 years (and I deeply regret supporting some of its operatives in electoral action). These elites mean to assume total control and crush popular nationalist resistance. They are so eager to get back in the driver seat that they’re waging open information and political warfare on the American population. They’re doing to the United States what they’ve been doing to Third World counties for decades (it’s called a color revolution). If they return to power, that’s what we’re destined to become: a Third World country.

Their cause is global neofeudalism. If Biden wins this election, prepare for serfdom under the new aristocracy of the transnational banking and corporate elite, where an indebted population will be delusioned by consumerism and identity politics. They won’t be free. But they will feel happy. “Their” country will appear diverse in everything but ideas. A cosmetic pretension to justice.

Enjoy your gadgets, clothes, and hair styles.

According to the BBC article, “Pence v Kaine: Who won the vice-presidential debate?” by North America reporter Anthony Zurcher, “It was a scattershot debate marred by frequent interruption, where moderator Elaine Quijado lost control of the discussion for stretches.”

Having your cake and eating it looks something like this: An ambitious woman of color, in debate with a white man, proves the place of accomplished and courageous women of color in the rough and tumble world of political argument when she takes charge of a conversation and interrupts her opponent. But when her opponent interrupts her, which white men do all the time in argument with other white men (as occurred in the Vice-Presidential debate held on October 5, 2016 between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine), the ambitious woman of color can accuse her opponent of “mansplaining” and “microaggressing,” of which he is guilty by virtue of his sex and race.

This is the beauty of identity politics. It is a clever strategy. The woman of color delegitimizes her ideological opponent while scoring unearned debate points via the extra-rational means of ad hominem and red herring, cleverly avoiding answering questions or saying much of anything of substance and asserting superior moral virtue. After the debate, her side, which largely controls the narrative and the major institutions, can distract the public from all her lying and misdirection on critical policy questions by howling about sexism and racism—by portraying her as the victim of white male aggression. Her hefty record as the Attorney General of California and United States Senator notwithstanding. If critics describe her approach and attitude as “abrasive,” “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “smug,” the woke crowd can accuse them of sexism and racism for that, too.

She and her allies can do all this with absolutely no evidence of either sexism and racism and in the face of clear evidence that her opponent would do the same thing if she were a white male (again, as Pence did to Kaine). She and her allies can do this even though her appearance on the national stage—along with many other women of color—is confirmation that sexism and racism are, for the most part, no longer barriers to an ambitious woman’s rise to political power. For they find advantage in a quiver of magical arrows that only individuals lying at the intersection of her identities may wield. There is a caveat: the women of color must hold the correct opinions. We all know that, in the progressive universe, conservative women of color are only one of those things really.

Interesting how we find ourselves four years and a few days later in a similar situation: “For the last week, it’s felt a bit like Donald Trump was routed. His woeful first presidential debate performance was compounded by a series of unforced errors, capped by an early morning Twitter tirade and a damaging New York Times story about his near billion-dollar business losses in 1995. His poll numbers headed south. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s [Pence] primary job—really his only job—was to stop the bleeding and give the [Trump] campaign an opportunity to regroup. Mr Kaine’s goal was to keep him [Pence] from doing that. Mr Pence succeeded. Mr Kaine, while unloading a crate of opposition research on Mr Trump, failed.”

But it is not exactly the same situation, is it? Tim Kaine is a white man. Too bad for him that he couldn’t charge Pence with mansplaining and microaggressing after his poor debate outing.

In invited commentary on infectious diseases in JAMA Network Open, published September 25, 2020, Rohan Khananchi, Charlesnika Evans, and Jasmine Marcelin make several claims about systemic racism’s role in an infectious disease in “Racism, Not Race, Drives Inequality Across the COVID-19 Continuum.” I do not find the article compelling. However it is illustrative of the problems with this type of research.

Demographic disparities are not automatically indicators of racism. If one argues that racism drives demographic differences, then one cannot at the same time a priori define demographic differences as racism. That move conflates the dependent variable (difference/inequality) with the theorized independent variable (racism). The argument becomes circular/self-confirmatory/self-sealing. The argument commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating abstractions in a concrete way, as well as the ecological fallacy (I explain below). That the paper sneaks a claim of lack of fairness or justice into the situation by using the term “inequity” gives away the political agenda. The assumptions made in this article are unscientific.

If the paper were to proceed on a rational basis, it would define racism in a way that allowed for its evaluation as a causal factor (conceptualize/operationalize). The claim that race explains differences in human populations and/or laws/policies based on purported racial differences defines racism. What is the evidence that any human beings supposed in the literature were motivated by racist beliefs? Where are the laws and policies based on this belief? If there were laws/policies in place that segregated medical care on the basis of race, or forced blacks to live in impoverished communities, then institutional/systemic racism might play a contributing role in the demographic inequalities identified. But these systems were dismantled more than fifty years ago in America. Today it is illegal to discriminate against blacks on the basis of race.

The article states that “fundamental causes of COVID-19 inequity include systemically racist policies, such as historic racial segregation and their inextricable downstream effects on the differential quality and distribution of housing, transportation, economic opportunity, education, food, air quality, health care, and beyond.” To be sure, historic racial segregation was based on systematically racist policies. But the operative word here is “historic.” Past policies are not present policies. And while history is not irrelevant to understandings of the present, history is also not the present. Keep in mind that “inextricable” means impossible to disentangle. The pairing of “inextricable” with “downstream effects” is obscurantism. The authors assume as given a foundation that they must demonstrate. This is strange alchemy. An exercise in mystification.

The article continues, “Each of these factors is associated with the risk of COVID-19 exposure and severity through direct (e.g., work conditions, crowded housing, carceral overrepresentation) and indirect (e.g., limited access to health information or insurance; increased prevalence of comorbidities; cumulative life-course exposure to discrimination, low socioeconomic status, and other health risk conditions) mechanisms.” However, since the racial and ethnic differences are not about race, according to the article, but about racism, then one would expect to find white people living in these conditions do not suffer the same fate. But the article commits the ecological fallacy by substituting for the situations of concrete individuals aggregate demographic differences.

Controlling for cultural factors (but perhaps not all, since we can draw too fine a distinction between racial groups in this regard), is it true that whites living under near-identical conditions are differentiated from blacks vis-à-vis COVID-19? Do we suppose that “low socioeconomic status” whites living in conditions of crowded housing, with limited access of health information or insurance and increased prevalence of comorbidities, etc., have better outcomes than blacks living in these conditions? (If so, that might suggests actual racial differences). What is the measure of “life-course exposure to discrimination”? Again, that’s an awfully big assumption.

These types of studies are part of a general approach in academic work that operates from an epistemological frame (critical race theory) that manufactures an ontology built upon arbitrary abstractions. At the core of this is the problem of reification in science. Such work proceeds on assumptions that are far too sure of themselves. There is nothing in this article that presents racism as conceptualized and operationalized as either belief in genetic differences in human populations and/or laws and policies based on such purported differences. The structural problems identified are class-based and explicable in terms of the processes of capitalist accumulation. The term “socioeconomic status,” which eschews class analysis, should alert readers to the probable race-centric bias of the research frame. There may be cultural/ethnic differences, as well (for example diet and obesity), but these are unexplored in the study.

There is a twin tragedy with this approach that works to perpetuate capitalist class oppression. First, by obsessing over race, social class as a casual factor is relegated to the outskirts of social consciousness. The real dynamic working behind the scenes to produce differential health outcomes is thus mystified. Second, by obscuring class effects with the rhetoric of systemic racism, poor white people are disappeared. The situation is made to appear as if black people are the primary victims of social oppression, moreover victimized by a system privileging white people. In this way, the woes of the working class are denied and those who exploit and live off their labor, who are both black and white, are absolved of their responsibility in disparate health and other outcomes. Critical race theory works to disrupt class consciousness and entrench the capitalist mode of production.

Yesterday I published an essay (Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism) on the comparable threats of violent extremism to the American republic, comparing two extremist groups who were subjects of the first presidential debate. Watching the establishment media’s take on the debate, I can now affirm what I have been telling people all along—the media positively sanctions left-wing chaos and violence by either denying or justifying it. The purpose of this is to return corporatist forces to power to continue the globalist project. Antifa is an element in a color revolution currently unfolding in the United States. I describe this in a recent essay: Authoritarianism, Supreme Court Hysteria, and the Corrupting Partisan Frame.

The Democratic Party and the corporate media push the narrative that, despite the facts of left-wing violence raging in the streets of America and the establishment by progressives of legal and propaganda apparatuses to dispute the 2020 presidential election, against the backdrop of a perpetual coup against the president (deep state spying, manufactured Russian collusion, an attempt to remove the president via impeachment), the public is supposed to believe that it’s the president who is shaking our faith in our democracy. One angle is to hang around Trump’s neck the albatross of far-right politics and white nationalist sentiment. To install this assumption in the public mind, they fail to demand of Democrats condemn left-wing violence while insisting that Trump condemns right-wing violence—as if the president, unlike Democrats, is using right-wing violence to disrupt the election. In other words, by flipping reality, they hide Biden’s failure to condemn Antifa by misleading the public with a false claim about Trump’s statements on the matter. The maneuver is an obvious attempt to gaslight the public. But because this is not obvious to everybody, it is usefully explained.

Roughly thirty minutes into the first presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Biden said, “Close your eyes, remember what those people look like coming out of the fields, carrying torches, their veins bulging, just spewing anti-Semitic bile and accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. A young woman got killed and they asked the president what he thought. He said, ‘There were very fine people on both sides.’ No president’s ever said anything like that.” Biden is referring to comments Trump made following the Unite the Right rally, held August 11-12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was organized around the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Lee Park. The protestors were met by counter-protestors and the event devolved into chaos and violence. Tragically, a young woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car through a crowd. Field’s action wounded numerous others, some critically. In a bipartisan action taken in September 2017, Congress unanimously approved a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups in the tragedy’s aftermath. Donald Trump signed the resolution.

All along Trump condemned bigotry, hatred, and violence on all sides. But pulled from his many comments on the subject was the opinion that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The media and left-wing groups accused Trump of implying a moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who opposed them. For instance, Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, writing for The New York Times, suggested Trump was “equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville.” The journalists then cited right-wing figures thanking Trump for clarifying the situation before wrapping Trump’s remark in the on-going narrative of Republican politicians making “muscular appeals to white voters, especially those in the South on broad cultural groups” going all the way back to the 1960s. However, while Reagan and Bush condemned white supremacy, the journalists contended, Trump wouldn’t. So racism in the Republican Party moves from dog whistle to bull horn. Biden thus felt emboldened to openly call Trump a racist in the debate.

Yet Trump accurately conveyed the facts on the ground in that notorious press conference. There were, among the right-wing contingent, those who were peacefully protesting the proposed removal of the statues, just as there were those among the counter-protesters who were engaged in violent action. I have many friends—and not just southerners—who oppose the taking down of statues. I am happy to vouch for them. They are very fine people. To be sure, there were white supremacists among the right-wing crowd. But there were also present members of Antifa, as well the armed militia group Redneck Revolt. Just as we see in America’s streets today, there were armed left-wing forces in Charlottesville. By armed, I do not mean just body armor, clubs, helmets, noxious agents, shields, and sticks (as if these aren’t bad enough), but semiautomatic firearms, as well. Many of the left-wingers were also armed with a violent ideology. It is an article of the Antifa faith that anybody it designates as fascist—which in their view cuts a broad swath across the political spectrum—has no right to speech and assembly, while Antifa reserves for itself the right to violently disrupt rightwing and conservative gatherings in the name of “defending the community” (see The Problem with Antifascism). If Antifa, Redneck Revolt, and other left-wing extremists had not showed up at Charlottesville, or had not violently confronted right-wing protestors, would the protests have devolved into chaos and violence? Is it not the goal of anti-fascists to violently confront those whom they designate as a threat to the community?

On August 14, 2017, the president announced that the Justice Department had opened a civil rights investigation into Charlottesville. “I just met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack that killed one innocent American and wounded twenty others. To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.” The president described Heyer’s death and the wounding of several others as an “attack,” a characterization pushed back against the suggestion that this was in some fashion an accident. Trump characterized the violence as “racist” and promised to hold the perpetrators responsible. This framed the events in Charlottesville as an outcome of white nationalism. Moreover, it clarified that white nationalism is racist. The president urged the country to unite in condemning “hatred, bigotry, and violence.” He called racism “evil” and described those who carry out violence in its name “criminals and thugs.” He then called out hate groups by name: the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists.” He described them as “repugnant” and, in so many words, accused them of being disloyal to their country. He emphasized the importance of equality in our national creed, equality under the law and under our Constitution, while emphasizing the importance of the rule of law and the vital government function of ensuring a safe environment so that people can fulfill their destiny.

I quoted at length from Trump’s statement in my last blog so I won’t repeat those passages here. It is worth noting that, in that statement, Trump also said, “In times such as these America has always shown its true character, responding to hate with love, division with unity and violence with an unwavering resolve for justice. As a candidate, I promised to restore law and order to our country, and our federal law enforcement agencies are following through on that pledge. We will spare no resource in fighting so that every American child can grow up free from violence and fear. We will defend and protect the sacred rights of all Americans, and we will work together so that every citizen in this blessed land is free to follow their dreams in their hearts and to express the love and joy in their souls.”

It’s as if the president never said any of this, as if he never signed an unanimously approved resolution from Congress condemning white supremacy and racist violence. It doesn’t help the cause of enlisting the federal government in pursuit of justice to demand Trump say the right thing and then, when he does, cynically dismiss his words—then later disappear them. It’s especially crucial that his supporters hear these words and consider deeply where they stand with respect to white nationalism and racist violence. Not only is the media delegitimizing a president for political purposes, but they are working at cross-purposes with the anti-racist message they purport to proclaim. Yet the failure of the establishment to tell Trump’s alleged racist supporters that their president condemned their racist beliefs and actions did not result in rampant racist violence on the streets of America. Instead, it appears to have contributed to rampant anti-racist violence on the streets of America by making the president appear to support white nationalism.

A transcript of the press conference to which Biden was referring how antagonistic the press is to Trump and the way they have used his comments to portray him as a white nationalist. I close with some of the transcript of the spectacle and leave readers with the question: will Joe Biden and the Democrats condemn antifascist violence?

REPORTER: Do you think what you call the alt left is the same as neo-Nazis?

TRUMP: Those people—all of those people, excuse me—I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.

REPORTER: Well, white nationalists—

TRUMP: Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So—excuse me—and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

[In light of what transpired over the summer, Trump’s words are prophetic here.]

TRUMP: But, they were there to protest—excuse me—you take a look the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER: Does the statue of Robert E. Lee stay up?

TRUMP: I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.

REPORTER: Are you against the Confederacy?

REPORTER: On race relations in America, do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office with regard to race relationships?

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So, you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame—yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats—you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.

REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?

TRUMP: No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So, I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country. 

At the outset, I want to make clear that I condemn right-wing violence and have done so throughout my life. As a criminologist and political sociologist, I am quite familiar with right-wing extremism. I know how destructive it can be. I have shelves in my library and space on my computer devoted to books and reports on the topic. My goal here is not to downplay right-wing extremism, but to give my readers some perspective on the relative domestic threats facing the American republic. I focus in this essay on Antifa and the Proud Boys since their names were dropped in last night’s presidential debate (the first of three scheduled). Trump turned some heads when he said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” What he meant is not exactly clear. However, the Proud Boys took it as an endorsement. So did progressives and the media. “The president has denounced white supremacists repeatedly,” Peter Navarro countered in an interview on MSNBC. “You guys just aren’t hearing that.”

Moderator Chris Wallace took sides last night during the debate. At many points he seemed to be a debate participant himself rather than a moderator. And he was almost always directing himself as Trump’s second debate opponent. He asked the president, “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.” Surely Wallace knows that Trump has on more than one occasion condemned white supremacy, calling out racist organizations by name, including the Ku Klux Klan and neonazis. Yet Wallace’s question to Trump assumed the president hasn’t.

In 2017, Trump said of his administration that “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.” He continued: “And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.” He then condemned racism in the strongest possible terms and identified racist groups. “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” He reiterated the American creed: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.” Has Trump changed his views since 2017? Just this month, in introducing his plan to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into black communities, Trump proposed to prosecute the KKK. And last night he answered Wallace in the debate with, “Sure, I’m willing to do that.” He said, “I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.”

However, more startling than Wallace’s question was Biden claiming that FBI director Christopher Wray said Antifa is only “an idea.” Did Wray actually say that? No, he didn’t. “Antifa is a real thing,” Wray is on the record saying. “It is not a fiction.” He had to say this because progressives and the media keep insisting that leftwing extremism is a fiction. What is Antifa, then? “It’s a movement or an ideology,” according to Wray. Wray told Congress that the FBI has documented Antifa engaging in “organized tactical activity” at the local and regional level. “We don’t view how nationally organized something is as a proxy for how dangerous it is.” Wray has also said that the FBI is investigating Antifa’s “funding, their tactics, their logistics, their supply chains and we’re going to pursue all available charges.” “Organized tactical activity” and “supply chains” sound like a lot more than just “an idea.” So either Biden is misinformed or he is downplaying Antifa.

The Democrats and the media, which portray Antifa and Black Lives Matter as peaceful movements in the civil rights tradition, want the public to focus on the Proud Boys, a much smaller group than Antifa. To be sure, the Proud Boys are an obnoxious bunch. They are occasionally violent. I will condemn their violent actions without hesitation and so should Trump. But Biden downplaying Antifa, a violent extremist movement that has made a mess of American cities, is the buried lede coming out of the debate. The real threat to public safety today is not the Proud Boys. It’s Antifa. Antifa is destroying property and assaulting civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Proud Boys are small fry in comparison. This does not mean that law enforcement should ignore them. The more important question is why Democrats, progressives, and the establishment media put so much energy into denying the problem of left-wing extremism and violence. We must allow the Proud Boy’s antics to distract the public from the reality of what it happening in our country.

Part of the way the left confuses the public is by playing loosely with the term “militia,” reserving the term exclusively for the right. What is a militia? When we refer to a militia in terms of insurgent civilian movements, we mean an irregular paramilitary force engaged in insurrection, rebellion, and/or terrorist activities. This describes Antifa as much as it describes the several rightwing militias that we see around the country. Why the failure to accurately describe Antifa in the media? Why the double standard from the Democrats and the corporate media? Because, as I have shown in my blogs, Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the street-level forces of the corporate-led suppression of populism in America.

The Proud Boys have a paramilitary wing: the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, or FOAK. FOAK’s leader is Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman. At the same time, the Proud Boys in no way represent a mass movement on the right like we saw historically with the second KKK (formed in the same year as The Birth of Nation was released (1915), a movie screened in progressive Democratic president Woodrow Wilson’s White House). Indeed, organized white supremacy has been a vanishing problem for decades, exaggerated by alarmist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-defamation League to keep their audiences on edge. These groups publish reports about the proliferation of Proud Boy chapters in various counties, but they never report on the corporate-funded Black Lives Matter chapters proliferating across the West. Yet even these organizations are reluctant to identify the Proud Boys as white supremacist, describing them instead as “misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigration,” to quote the ADL Maybe that’s because the Proud Boys, who describe themselves as Western chauvinists, have black and brown members.

In considering domestic threats, one should look at the character of actual violence in society. Who is doing what? What is the scope of their actions? I have already documented widespread arson, looting, and interpersonal violence perpetrated by left-wing extremists. We should also consider in our assessment violence against law enforcement. In the context of his testimony regarding extremism, Wray has noted that that rate of violence against law enforcement “is up significantly this year from last year.” More police officers were killed in felonious acts so far this year than all unarmed civilians (black or white) killed in 2019. Are the perpetrators of these murders white supremacists? Not that I can tell.

I have to say, folks have been punked a bit with this Proud Boys distraction. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t bring up Gavin McInnes’ men club. Biden brought them up because he knows jack about white supremacist groups (which the Proud Boys aren’t). Except the Klan. Biden knows about the Klan because Robert Byrd, formerly Exalted Cyclops and then the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, was a dear friend of his (and the Clintons, as well). Trump either didn’t know who the Proud Boys were or knew that they’re a joke orchestrated by comedian Gavin McInnes. The media knows this, too. They are gaslighting the public who they know doesn’t know the ins and outs of right-wing extremism.

The much bigger issue here is why Biden and Harris not merely fail to condemn Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but why they promote their actions. Black Lives Matter is a racialist organization. By definition. How is that not completely obvious? The approach of Black Lives Matter is to reduce individuals to demographic categories and treat them on that basis. This is what critical race theory is all about: seeing race before people and making policy decisions based on grouped disparities. It is a cracked academic theory taken to the streets, where it burns buildings and cars, loots stores, and assaults civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Democrats find all this chaos useful.

I am sure readers are familiar with the claim that antifa simply means antifascism. First, this is insulting to the people who took on actual fascism. Fascism of the sort Antifa says it’s fighting is not an actual threat. So Antifa defines anybody who is on the right or conservative as a “fascist” and “white supremacist.” They’re like the witchfynders during the Inquisition. Hitler and fascists are the secular versions of Satan and his demons. Only the first were real and they are no longer with us. But since the modern left is not particularly religious, they can’t name check Satan, so they name check the Proud Boys. Second, Antifa is a highly organized anarchist-communist terroristic countermovement against republican government and liberal values. It is itself fascistic. It is authoritarian and sadistic. Just as antiracists are racists because they organize their politics not around individual freedom and democracy but racialist thinking and action, Antifa is fascistic because it uses the same street-level tactics that the Blackshirts and Brownshirts used during the European fascist period. Moreover, it is in the service of corporatists powers who share its goal of quashing the populist rising to neoliberal and technocratic oppression.

The Anti-Defamation League can’t say for sure, but, as is its habit, CNN can muddy the waters. Case in point: Enrique Tarrio, a member of the Proud Boys, is the leader of the Latinos for Trump movement. Tarrio is Cuban American. He is one of the many non-white members of the group. CNN and Democrats are freaking out because Trump is popular among Latinos. There are a lot of Cuban Americans in Florida. The Democrats must win Florida. That’s why Michael Bloomberg offered to personally pay off criminal fines so people could vote—a practice otherwise known as bribery. 

For some reason the position of Tarrio’s Latinos for Trump that “all guns laws are unconstitutional” has some bearing on the matter, as if opposition to gun restrictions was a white nationalist issue. (CNN should talk to all the black people buying guns and forming militias and see what they think about that.) CNN is also perplexed because, while Tarrio is brown and Proud Boys claims a diverse membership, its central tenets of closed borders and Western chauvinism seems to indicate something else. What exactly strict immigration controls and Western chauvinism has to do with anti-diversity is unclear. We do know that open borders are harmful to the economic interests of black and brown people. But somehow that isn’t anti-working class. The United States is and has been a very diverse country for a very long time, with people of all races and ethnicities distributed throughout the social structure. The same is true for the West generally. To confuse the public over matters of diversity, CNN conflates mass immigration with racial and ethnic diversity. 

Perhaps the most interesting piece of all this it was Biden not Trump who has made the Proud Boys a household name.

We should be terrified for our republic. We are seeing a color revolution unfolding before our very eyes. This time in the premier First World country. The strategy corporate elite fractions use in the Third World to construct governments conducive to their interests is being deployed in America thanks to neoconservatives, progressives, and the Democratic Party. With the debunking of the Russia hoax and the failed attempt by Democrats to remove Trump with impeachment (the Ukraine-Biden affair), the establishment has initiated a new and multi-pronged phase in the permanent coup against the President.

A color revolution is a type of coup in which powerful groups in opposition to a sitting government portray its leaders as authoritarian, corrupt, or otherwise illegitimate, organize mass protests in the streets, develop avenues for election fraud, use intimidation tactics during the electoral process, and dispute election results. The opposition in the current situation has in back of it the massive power of key capitalist forces—the Tech Giants and other corporations comprising the transnational capitalist fraction. The color revolution represents a revolution-from-above being waged by a power elite that represents global neoliberal forces. Those behind what Sheldon Wolin, in his landmark Democracy, Inc., called “inverted totalitarianism,” thwarted by the populist revolt that brought Trump to power, is fighting back with a vengeance.

Democratic operatives are pushing a narrative Bloomberg-funded Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn calls the “red mirage” that contends that, if Trump wins on election night (and 2016 told them that is possible outcome), he did not actually win. “We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Mendelsohn said. According to Hawkfish’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night. “When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said in published reports. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”

To confront this, there is a strategy already in place that one may characterize as “lawfare,” a type of warfare waged by leveraging the courts to dispute the votes cast for the undesirable candidate and find and count votes for the desirable one. To buy time in order to identify ballots for Biden, which we now know are being aggressively harvested via cash and intimidation, and work the courts after election night (Democratic lawyers are working the courts as I write this), the establishment and social media will hold off calling the election, even censoring voices that do. If they can’t find enough votes for Biden, or intimidate electors into switching sides, they will push the process into the House of Representation, where Nancy Pelosi as presiding officer will organize a contingent election in which states will vote for president. Democrats are in a frenzy over Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett because they know that the election chaos will wind up in that body. They want to keep the court at eight members and try to deadlock it.

Organizing the elite operations of the coup is a group called the Transition Integrity Project, or TIP, which presents itself as bipartisan, but is virulently anti-Trump. It is comprised of academics, current and past government officials, journalists, and pollsters in 2019. Members include Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, former chair of the DNC Donna Brazile, former chair of the RNC Michael Steele, and journalists Max Boot (Jean Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations), David Frum (Senior Editor at The Atlantic), and William Kristol (founder of The Weekly Standard), among others.

* * *

The Biden campaign paints the candidate as “Joe from Scranton,” but before serving as Vice-President from 2009 to 2017, Biden was the Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009. Delaware is a unique state with its Delaware Court of Chancery. The Delaware General Corporation Law is the statute governing corporate law in the state. Due to the favorable legal environment, more than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States and more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state. Delaware has for decades been known at the premier corporate haven in America. From this perch, Biden has helped corporatists advance their globalist strategies. Perhaps no politicians has done more to hurt working families in America than Joe from Scranton. 

* * *

Some are wondering what Trump is talking about when he is asking for Biden to be drug tested before the debates. There are several drugs that can improve the cognitive performance of dementia patients. Cholinesterase inhibitors increase the amount of acetylcholine available to neurons. There are three drugs available that work along these lines: donepezil (Aricept), galantamine (Razadyne), and rivastigmine (Exelon). Memantine (Namenda) regulates the activity of glutamate. It helps learning and memory. Side effects include agitation, balance problems, and confusion (which is in evident with Biden). There’s a cocktail that combines donepezil and memantine (Namzaric).

These drugs are effective for mild to moderate dementia. They could get Biden through a debate with the media spinning the results and controlling the selection of soundbites. But drugs won’t keep him going for long. His dementia looks to be pretty far along. A lot of folks are in denial, but it’s obvious. He only does a couple of hours a day of campaigning when he can muster it. Most of his press conferences are fake. As the disease progresses the brain produces a vanishing amount of acetylcholine and the cholinesterase inhibitors will stop working. And most drug produce tolerances. Even with Namzaric, Biden’s dementia will sooner than later leave him disabled. The man is not fit to run for President. Perhaps that will become clearer tonight during the first presidential debate.

Those who fret over Trump not relinquishing power appear to be unaware of the plots to remove him from power (see The National Pulse for coverage)—not to mention dismissive of the strength of the republic to withstand the obstinance of a single man and his followers. I frankly don’t understand how anybody can be ignorant of either. I don’t think they are. Trump may not go quietly (is he ever quiet about anything?). But Trump will go. Maybe not this January. But the January four years from then.

I am fascinated but not surprised by how progressives feign unawareness that Democrats are blatant in their unwillingness to accept the 2020 election result if it doesn’t go their way. For those progressives who really are unaware, here’s Hillary Clinton on whether Joe Biden should concede the election if the Electoral College indicates his defeat.

Remember what Clinton said during the third presidential debate of 2016? Is she now running down our democracy and appalled at the words coming out of her mouth? Do we really believe she cares about the republic?

The threat to the American republic is not Donald Trump. It never has been. The threat to the republic is an establishment beholden to corporate power that is daily turning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into dead letters. That threat is operationally embodied by the neoliberals and neoconservatives who command the Democratic Party. Their hyperbolic rhetoric over Trump betrays concern for the future of their project. It’s not Trump per se that gets them worked up (if is it, then they are exceedingly childish to fall prey to such trolling). It’s populist nationalism that terrifies them. It’s the potential reconstruction of the American ideal that keeps them frenzied.

I am a democratic-republican, but I do not operate in the Democratic-Republican frame. I belong to no church or party. My arguments are never partisan in this way. My choice of comrades are working class and creative entrepreneurial-minded Americans—the people who produce value in human affairs. My commitments are humanist, liberal, nationalist, populist, and secular (mind those small letters). I am a patriotic citizen of the United States and committed to the America ideal, which is very much on the ropes. I don’t worry about Trump. I worry about what happens when the establishment returns to full strength. I don’t know how long the republic can survive that.

I recently explained this in a popular post on Facebook. I wasn’t posting for likes. I was trying to help people understand my arguments, which they appear to have great difficulty doing. That’s because they operate in the Democrat-Republican partisan frame. There’s an election coming up and experience has taught me to prepare people for my arguments, to remind them of my approach to such matters, to try and save them from the freak-out. It’s obvious that they want to understand me as one thing or another. If I am not a Democrat, then I must be a Republican. The dumbest question I ever get goes something like this: “You’re not voting for Obama? So you’re voting for Romney?”

It often seems a futile exercise, I will confess. When people say to me, “Trump is your boy,” or to others, “Andy’s become a Republican,” they are telegraphing the message that they don’t get me. They suggest they don’t care to. That’s okay. I have people who care to get me. More importantly, they show me they cannot think outside of the frame they have been given. This disappoints me because I expect better of them. I care. Of course, they expect things of me, as well. But my politics are obvious in everything I say: I do not subscribe to the “big man” theory of history (Trump is a result not an oracle); I cannot switch parties I have never belonged to; I cannot leave a church of which I have never been a congregant; I cannot leave a faith I have never subscribed to; I don’t use words deceitfully; I strive never to use terms ignorantly or stupidly (if I screw up I admit it); I loathe ideology; I have made my choice of comrades; I am not a contrarian; I have a center of gravity; I don’t imbibe in moral panic.

The partisan frame has made its appearance in spades with the decision of Republicans to go ahead with the confirmation of Donald Trump’s pending supreme court pick in the wake of the death of liberal jurist and feminist hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg from a long battle with pancreatic cancer. That her death was approaching could be understood by anyone who understand the challenge this type of cancer presents. So could the consequences of her reluctance to not step down from the Court during the Obama presidency. Immediately upon her death, Democrats preemptively charged hypocrisy—while immediately accusing Republicans of not allowing Ginsburg to rest in any peace—over Mitch McConnell’s certain decision to proceed with a constitutional-prescribed process. They pretended as if what McConnell did as majority leader of the Senate when Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland came to that body—McConnell did not move the nomination forward—gives the minority party justification for upending the principles of a republican form of government. As if McConnell is their leader. No political party legitimately owns the American republic. McConnell’s maneuvering as leader in accord with his constitutional authority doesn’t obligate any sympathy for the fanaticism of Chuck Schumer and his ilk. Sorry, not sorry, I cannot even appreciate that point of view. The ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg carries no hereditary status beyond her imagined community. Dead justices don’t reserve seats on the Supreme Court. Those seats belong to the people.

Asked in 2016 if the Senate had an obligation to assess Garland’s qualifications, Ginsburg’s answer was very clear: “That’s their job. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” Ginsburg was a consistent and principled jurist. She put the Constitution before politics. As I have said elsewhere, I will have to hear a recording of her contradicting herself before I will believe she was a hypocrite. Ginsburg’s legacy aside, if the roles were reversed, Democrats would fill that seat in a heartbeat—or the party wouldn’t be worth supporting. Does anybody seriously believe Scalia’s dying request would or should be revered? Elections have consequences and Trump was elected in part, if the opportunity arose, to replace one or more Supreme Court justices. And a Republican majority in the Senate would be expected to do the same. The president is president all four years (if the other party fails to removed him from office or he dies or is assassinated or otherwise leaves). The president has the power under the Constitution to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The majority party in the Senate has the authority to bring that nominee before its body in its capacity to advise and consent. That’s what matters. That and this: the Supreme Court needs an odd number to break ties. We can anticipate some tie-breakers coming down the pike before Trump’s term is up.

The fact is that Democrats don’t want another conservative on the Court and they seem too sure of the outcome of the 2020 election. Especially if they can deadlock the Court. They believe, because they have said so, that another conservative on the court is the end of everything good in the world. Don’t progressives tell us to hold our noses and “vote Blue no matter who” at the very least for the sake of the Court? Of course, “Blue no matter who” is more than a strategy. It’s a religious attitude.

There’s the problem with partisan thinking organized around political party: it leaves the subject without the critical independence needed to evaluate objectively the facts before him. He becomes an object, a pawn, not an agent. If one operates with a clear set of interests and from principle, and a party that he has supported betrays those interests or abandons principal, or if it becomes apparent that the party has not operated with those interests in mind or from principle, or that it cannot operate with those interests in mind or from principle, and the partisan follows that party where it takes him, then he abandons interests and principal, sacrificing his agency and autonomy to interests and principle that are not his own. In so doing, he betrays himself and his comrades. In that scenario, the function of the party is as shepherd leading sheep to an undesirable end. The party whose agenda does not align with the interests of a class or classes of people is not for the sovereign person and his comrades a mechanism with which to realize interest and principal in action. Following the crowd often finds a person surrendering to his enemies, doing very bad things in the name of solidarity, or walking over the edge of a cliff.

The partisan frame in the United States corrupts everything. Even science. Matthew MacWilliams, a visiting research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and alleged expert on authoritarianism, illustrates this in an article published yesterday in Politico, “Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of American,” in which he leverages alleged scientific research on authoritarianism to declare millions of Americans essentially fascists. The author’s claim to fame, according to his publisher (St. Martin’s Griffin) is that MacWilliams “was the first researcher to use survey research to establish a link between Trump’s core supporters and authoritarianism.” The blurb continues: “Early in the Republican nominating contest for president, he warned that Trump’s activation of American authoritarians would make his candidacy virtually unstoppable.” MacWilliams conceptual framework, one with pretensions to social psychology, appears to be inspired Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

MacWilliams writes in his Politico article that authoritarians “are more likely to . . . agree that the media is the enemy of the people rather than a valuable independent institution.” In what sense is the media independent? The media is a projection of corporate power. Its product is quite often propaganda in the service of this power. As the purveyor of the corporate life-way, the media represent the class enemy of the proletariat. The institution is elitist in character and its operatives routinely dismissive of the intellect and values of the ordinary citizens. MacWilliams, whose scholarly training is left in a publisher’s blurb at “award-winning practitioner of American politics” and “recognized expert” is insulting to those Americans Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.” Joe Biden calls them “bad people.” MacWilliams cannot simply allow Trump to stand in place of the people he loathes.

These authoritarians, MacWilliams writes, “are also more likely to think . . . that those who disagree with them are a threat to our country.” But this is a sentiment frequently expressed by progressives, the alleged defenders of democracy. Indeed, this article is an instantiation of authoritarian sentiment. Are not progressives constantly decrying conservatives and especially Trump an existential threats to America—a country progressives often condemn as irredeemably racist? Its undemocratic character reason to proceed undemocratically? After all, it’s progressives who, when not promoting riots, rationalize them—even lie about them. MacWilliams himself characterizes violent insurrection, still ongoing, as “peaceful protest.” Just last night in Seattle peaceful protestors beat a police officer about the head with a baseball bat. In Louisville, Kentucky, Larynzo D. Johnson, shot two police officers attempting to disperse a mob at Brook Street and Broadway who had set fires and damaged property. I could generate a very long list of this sort of violence going back for months. Moreover, MacWilliams ignores that fact that it’s the progressives who are pushing corporatism, globalism, and technocracy. Perhaps that’s because he cannot see it. The walls of his frame are blocking his view.

Here are several examples of propaganda from MacWilliams’ article: “[Trump] has sent paramilitary forces from the Department of Homeland Security to quell nonviolent protests, looked the other way when a foreign power interferes in American elections, . . . spent an election year casting doubt on the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system, rather than working to protect it—all without eroding his main base of support.” Trump sent law enforcement officers to protect federal personnel and property from violent insurrectionists. MacWilliams uses the term “paramilitary” to conjure fascist imagery. This is shameful. Russiagate was a hoax, perpetrated by that “valuable and independent institution” in cahoots with the Democratic Party and the deep state. Why did they push Russiagate? To undermine a democratically-elected president. Readers should reflect on the fact that it’s progressives who are casting doubt on our electoral system. They recognize that Democrats have so frightened the people with doom and gloom over COVID-19 (its authoritarian lockdowns and all the rest of it) that the people are scared to go to the polls to vote. Democrats are pushing to forego the secret ballot. And they’re winning. They intend to contest the election all the way to end, hoping Nancy Pelosi can fix it. (Again, see The National Pulse.)

MacWilliams and the progressive rank-and-file live in a partisan dreamworld. “American authoritarians fear diversity,” the expert on authoritarianism writes. “They are more fearful of people of other races, and agree with the statement that ‘sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.’” We hear this type of thinking from progressives all the time, do we not? We are told: White peoples are oppressors. Blacks can’t step outside without fearing white violence. White people should “stay in their lane.” Men should stay in their lane, too. Recall Mazie Hirono, Democrat from Hawaii, telling men to “shut up” and watch the Democrats besmirch the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh. Hirono said, “I just want to say to the men of this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.” Men do not do the right thing, according to Hirono. Not this or that man. Men. And then a perfect illustration of faith-based thinking: “Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed. They need to be believed.” Rarely should you not beware when a person tells you, “You need to believe me.” Cancel culture, censorship, deplatforming—progressives have little tolerance for diversity of opinion. The culture that prevails in our institutions is such that the heterodox are terrified to say what they think. They fear being smeared with the progressive slime of political correctness.

How can anybody be ignorant of the obvious that it’s progressives who routinely express support for the suppression of speech across social media? Those who argue for suppression of speech they don’t like on the grounds that “speech is violence”? Who attempt to compel speech by claiming “silence is violence”? Progressives portray peaceful marches organized by conservatives (which rarely happen) as fascist rallies, then applaud disruption of them and even terrorist violence perpetrated in “defense of the community.” Progressives complain bitterly that not enough attention is paid to the handful of actual white supremacists who cause mischief from time to time while denying the mass leftwing uprising on America’s streets with comical news items that recall a hilarious scene from Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun. Administrators put employees and students through struggle sessions in organizations private and public to change their attitudes—self-appointed thought reformers. I look at the tasks others obligate me to and only see their origins in progressive politics and policy. I would say that even our employee unions are more interested in carrying out the progressive agenda than in representing the labor interests of their members, except that I can now see that as a feature not a bug. I am, after all, a part of the technocratic corps.

Progressives are profoundly illiberal. They are reflexively and deeply intolerant of other opinions. Imagine if right-wingers mobbed Democratic politicians, marched on their homes, occupied neighborhoods, beat people in the streets, burned down and looted businesses. It would of course only be more hysteria by degree; imaginary fascism is enough to work up progressives. But what I just imagined on the political right describes the actual behavior of the political left in protests MacWilliams characterizes as “peaceful.” Today’s left is authoritarian and regressive. Denying that suggests a mental disorder. Indeed, MacWilliams article is a master class in projection. But Doublethink is not crazy in any clinical sense. It’s what can happen with partisan faming.

I wouldn’t want to be guilty of MacWilliam’s offense. The research presented in the article is absurd and I know what it is up to. The studies cited are designed as self-sealing exercises that assume as given that those who support Trump are more likely to be authoritarian. It is argument by definition. It pushes out a perception. The concepts are operationalized in an ideological direction. This is scientism, fake science the object of which is to disguise partisan propaganda as objective knowledge. The work attempts to depoliticize opinion by portraying it as the fruit of scientific labors. These labors work to pathologize conservative values, to locate them “objectively” outside the bounds of normal discourse via a “neutral” and “rational” framework. This type of work is representative of the technocratic impulse. It’s the social logic of the administrative state. Those who do not conform are not merely disagreeable; they are in need of an intervention.

One might think that over the last several decades we have seen a major shift in the interest matrix the major political parties of the United States represent. We certainly see a very different Republican Party today that we saw under the Bush/Cheney administration (effectively continued under Obama/Biden). However, to the extent that the Democrats ever represented working people (for me, that they have never done so became apparent during reconsideration of fact patterns), they are now fully agents of transnational corporate power. Whatever one believed the Democratic Party was before, it is perfectly obvious that it no longer represents the interests of my choice of comrades (see above) or the principles of my country. It follows from this that, beyond my general commitment to objectivity of thought in light of interests and principle (which allowed me to reach these conclusions), I would be a sheep to be shepherded if I framed my thinking in terms of contemporary partisan politics. 

(That I should not say this because some will find it offensive is a desire that I should govern my speech according to the offensive sentiments of others. What was it that Christopher Hitchens said about the shepherd and his flock? The shepherd is not really sheep’s friend whatever his kind words and tender loving care. He is kind to sheep because his intent is to feast on, fleece, or fuck them.)

I will close with a montage of Democratic hypocrisy put together by the GOP. I have to share Republican Party propaganda because the establishment media is only interested in exploiting Republican action in 2016 to leave the Supreme Court understaffed, when, to reiterate, their status as majority party justifies their control of the agenda then and now. But the hypocrisy on the center-left is blatant and massive. In 2016, Democrats cited the Constitution and said the process must go forward. At the time it looked like they were defending the traditions of the republic. Their rhetoric was bold and patriotic. Now we see that they have no interest in that. They’re going back on everything they said and cynically citing Republicans as their authority. If Democrats have any authority, can we rely on it? Check it out:

Scrubbed from its webpage, the Black Lives Matters organization had previously stated in its “About” section: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” This statement cannot be understood independently of the Third Worldist/neo-Maoist ideology that informs BLM’s portrayal of Western civilization as not only a white supremacist project but also a patriarchal one (see “Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics”). The statement dovetails with the also scrubbed Smithsonian exhibit “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States” (see my podcast and blog on The Myth of White Culture—and be sure to check out my previous blog).

Along with the attack on the nuclear family structure, BLM seeks to disrupt traditional and modern gender categories. Much of that language has been scrubbed from the page, as well. Yet the Black Lives Matter slogan is almost always in the streets paired with the Trans Lives Matter slogan. At least among the hard core of the countermovement. It is not enough for BLM to advance the liberal value of seeking equality before the law with special rights for none, the feminist cause of abolishing patrilineal and patriarchal rule, and the libertarian ethic of persons freely choosing their gender identity, all of which I advocate unreservedly, the organization has to attack the two-parent household and sex-based gender roles, human relations one finds cross-culturally that predate modernity and that provide a social-stabilizing function.

The characterization of BLM presented here comes with a reflexive rebuttal: The quote about disrupting the nuclear family is missing eclipses. The quotation is taken out of context. BLM only wants extended families. They want to see the community take up the role of the family. It takes a village. As if idealized primitive social orderings are appropriate to modern life of liberty. It is enough to share the heart of the ideology confronting America. (Do eclipses even matter in the wake of the statement’s official disappearance?)

From where does this idea of disrupting the nuclear family come? Having declared themselves “trained Marxist,” Black Lives Matters leaders do claim a revolutionary politics. “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors told Jared Ball of Real News Network in 2015. “Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”

Given that the founders are self-described Marxists, BLM’s position on the nuclear family might be read in the spirit of views expressed in the Communist Manifesto, appearing mid-nineteenth century, where the principle leaders of the European communist movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, acknowledge popular trepidation at hearing that Communists want to abolish the family, describing the abolition of these relations as their “infamous proposal.”

To be sure, Marx and Engels own it. But there is some nuance here. The communists argue that the present prevailing family form in the West, the nuclear family, is based on the bourgeois family. They then identify its complement—“the practical absence of the family among the proletarians”—and make a prediction: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

In the communist worldview, the abolition of the family as it is presently known is bound up with the abolition of capitalism. What is more, Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously writes, “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.” This formulation, which has always struck me as self-evident, precludes any significant jettisoning or even skirting of the reality of biological sex differences. After all, Marx and Engels believed in natural history. They were fans of Darwin.

Marx and Engels also argue in that section that, under communism, society replaces home education—“the most hallowed of relations”—with social education. To be sure, there is under bourgeois rule a form of social education. But prevailing curricula, Marx and Engels contend, is designed to deepen false consciousness. “The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education,” Marx and Engels say of their solution; “they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

Given the current state of public education with its social justice curricula (critical race theory, the 1619 Project, etc.), it appears that Marx and Engels did not have to wait for the establishment of communism for education to work against the bourgeoisie family (and that likely would have made them suspicious). However, the BLM interpretation of historical materialism is comically juvenile. The founders of the countermovement are hardly super-versed in Marxism. Rather, their ideology is an approximation to neo-Marxism with some postmodernism and nihilism thrown in. Its racism exposes its anti-humanist orientation. As I said, it is neo-Maoist in character. It means to effect a cultural revolution.

Whatever one thinks of the Black Lives Matter/neo-Marxist take on the family and education, the ambition expressed raises an empirical question: Is disrupting the nuclear family and sex roles and establishing public school curricula that means to invalidate bourgeois values good for children and society? If not, who or what is it good for? There is an historical record we can look at.

For at least eighty years following the abolition of slavery, the nuclear family was the bedrock of black and white majority communities. More than three-quarters of black families were two-parent families and black-majority communities were stable and supportive. Workforce participation among blacks was similar to those of white majority communities. That changed with the full implementation of progressive policy organized as the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. Accompanying the vast expansion of the welfare state during this period, the United States opened its borders to mass immigration in 1965, while promoting globalization, displacing millions of native workers and undermining private sector union density, a trend that coincided with the expansion of public sector unionization, protecting the technocrats of the administrative apparatus. The consequences of these and related policy developments proved devastating for many black people.

Twenty-five years after Johnson, 68 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers. If not for the legalization of abortion, that percentage would likely have been much higher. Today, three-quarters of black families are single-parent families, the vast majority headed by women. Female-headed households are associated with higher levels of poverty. Black unemployment climbed to two and three times that of whites, as businesses relied on foreign labor and left for more dependable environments elsewhere. Rates of crime and violence exploded in black-majority urban neighborhoods. Today, despite being less than six percent of the US population, black males are responsible for more than half of all murders and robberies and around a third of assaults and burglaries. Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods, with rising fatherlessness and joblessness and rampant criminal violence, operated as open-air custodial facilities, conditions secured and perpetuated by progressive regimes that entrenched in city governments across the country, the same progressive regimes that are enabling, even promoting open insurrection in America’s cities.

Responding to the crime and violence explosion caused by the disintegration of the black nuclear family, governments expanded the law enforcement apparatus with considerable effect—and the shame of mass incarceration. Their efforts notwithstanding, in part due to racially-selective underprotection of their residents, levels of crime in these neighborhoods, along with family disintegration, poverty, and unemployment, continue to degrade the quality of life for black people. Paradoxically, Black Lives Matter and its allies push for disrupting public safety, calling on governments to stand down the police. BLM inspired rebellion and government rollback of law enforcement have resulted in markedly higher crime rates, erasing decades of progress. Black people are those most harmed by these developments.

Observers are shocked—some are thrilled—when they hear of BLM’s goal of disrupting the nuclear family. But BLM’s goal is not novel. We don’t have to go way back to nineteenth century European-style communism to find its inspiration. BLM’s political position is inspired by the function, if not the intent, of progressive politics and policy in twentieth century North America. BLM has internalized the social logic of global corporatism, a logic that has no need for families or nations. Progressivism is the technocratic arm of corporate governance, its politics and policies designed to manage populations affected by the inequalities globalization systemically generates in the pursuit of corporate profit.

Ask yourself why it is that when progressives hear criticism of the single-parent household in black-majority neighborhoods they hear an attack on moms and not condemnation of the dads who abandon their children? Why is advocacy for the nuclear family considered reactionary among progressives? One might think progressives are feminists. They say they are. So why aren’t they talking about a man’s responsibility to his children and how wrong it is to leave child-rearing solely to the woman carried financially by the state? Why do they hear as racist discussion of the facts that the police who shot Jacob Blake were there to protect a woman from assault and to serve a warrant for Blake’s arrest for felony sexual assault? Put another way, why does Black Lives Matter negate #MeToo? Why is Black Lives Matter pushing an ideology insisting that men have a right to define what a woman is? Why are women who assert their being as a real and a priori ontological category smeared as “transphobic”? Why is BLM dissimulating its politics by cleansing its web page of objectionable rhetoric? They still believe these things. Why, if Black Lives Matter founders are trained Marxists, do they avoid class analysis and criticism?

BLM and Smithsonian are not the only organizations scrubbing web pages. Remember these words crafted by Nikole Hannah-Jones? “The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative”? The statement now reads: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Hannah-Jones is denying that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with 1619. And she is fully aware of how her denial sounds. In a now-deleted tweet she writes, “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.” She did not mean to draw attention to her act of dissimulation.

Black Lives Matter, the Smithsonian exhibit on whiteness, the 1619 Project—these campaigns are elements of antidemocratic and illiberal propaganda, of the word and of the deed, aiming to delegitimize the American republic and Western civilization with falsehood and violence, namely that the West is intrinsically racist and its institutions and values exist to perpetuate white privilege and are therefore justifiably scheduled for annihilation. History and science are being problematized into ideological battering rams to smash objective knowledge.

Our institutions and values are being delegitimized because transnational corporate power means to denationalize the West to extract its wealth and assimilate the proletarians of these countries into a global neofeudalist order. The modern nation-state as the dynamic unit of world affairs and the family as the fundamental unit of human relations are obstacles to globalist ambition because the social logic of republican political and legal machinery is democratic, humanist, and liberal (and potentially socialist) and the family is the fulcrum of community stability. “Global citizenship” and “it takes a village” share another name: serfdom.