Year: 2020

The California Department of Education announced new anti-racism lessons and teacher training for school districts (Education to End Hate initiative). This comes just days after President Donald Trump announced the 1776 Commission to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 project has been adapted into a curriculum guide for schools. The The 1619 Project Curriculum, promoted by the Pulitzer Center, obsesses over the history of slavery, portraying it as the root of alleged systemic racism in the United States. The project, which is fraught with errors, has gained momentum with the media-hyped moral panic over the debunked claim of racial disparities in lethal officer-civilian encounters (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters).

Facts appear to be unimportant to those pushing the narrative that portrayed the United States as a racially oppressive society. “We have continued to watch unspeakable acts of racism play out on our television screens, whether it be police brutality or those who want to hold on to symbols that represent hate against African Americans that go back to slavery,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a news conference announcing the lessons and trainings. “Sometimes I’m not sure what to do,” he continued. “But in those moments, I’m reminded education continues to be one of our most powerful tools to countering hate.” Translation: The institution of public education is a powerful instrument of indoctrination.

During his September 17 remarks at the White House Conference on American History, President Trump said that the 1619 project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” Decrying the project, he said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”

The president identified critical race theory as informing antiracist curriculum in our schools and workplace trainings. I have critiqued critical race theory in several essays on Freedom and Reason (see, for example, “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” “The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression,” and “Race and Democracy”) as well as discussed its role in racial diversity training programs. “A perfect example of critical race theory was recently published by the Smithsonian Institution,” Trump told his audience. “This document alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were instead aspects of ‘whiteness.’ This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity, and it is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.” (I discuss the document at length in “The Myth of White Culture.”)

As with most of his speeches, the president’s remarks White House Conference on American History were at moments inelegant, but in substance correct. Antiracism “education” socializes children to (1) see and treat people not as concrete individuals but as personifications of racialized categories; (2) assume all blacks are victims of white supremacy; (3) assume all whites are responsible for black despair, immiseration, and suffering; and (4) believe the American Republic was designed to secure and perpetuate the privileges of white power.

These are false teachings. Race is a social construction produced and sustained by racial thinking. There are millions of black Americans in positions of power and privilege. There are millions of white Americans suffering from poverty and in distress. No white person alive today is responsible for anything her or his ancestors did. Any white person who engages in discrimination is potentially subject to consequences under the law. Testifying to the power of its creed, the American Republic abolished the slave trade, chattel slavery, and de jure segregation, while instituting affirmative action. Attempting to deny this history, antiracist teachers sow the seeds of racial antagonisms and resentments in the nation’s children. The harvest of their toil is more social conflict in the future, conflict that harms the interests of all members of the working class. White children are made to feel guilty for things they have not done, while black children are taught that, no matter what they do, they will always face systemic racism. Unless, of course, the “structures of oppression” are dismantled, i.e., the principles of the American Republic are abolished or dead letters.

We won’t get rid of racism by telling little white kids that they’re responsible for the situation of the little black kids sitting next to them (as if their situations are monolithic). That story is a variation on the blue eyed/brown eyed experiment that shows how easy it is to create in-group/out-group conflict. It is unethical. But, also, the function, if not the purpose, of antiracist education is to sow racial division and perpetuate race-based antagonism. We won’t make progress on race relations by teaching our kids—in the face of a grand history of progress—that the republic is incapable of realizing its creed. We will get rid of racism when we teach our children that they are individuals who have a right to expect that they will each be treated equally before the law and that the story of their nation has been one of overcoming racism.

What public instruction should do is teach children the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world, make them aware that they live in a constitutional republic with a bill of rights where every individual is equal before the law, and inspire them to chart a path towards self-actualization and the realizations of their aspirations. To be sure, not every person can rise to the highest stations of their communities (not everybody aspires to reach for these heights), but adults do not help children make the most of themselves by teaching them that they are victims, that all those with their phenotypic features suffer the same fate and at the hands of those who don’t look like them, and that their situation is hopeless until the country they live in is no longer recognizable.

“[I]f you think there’s some biological fact of the matter about what race people actually belong to utterly independent of what race they think they belong to, you’re committed to a view of racial difference as biologically definitive in a way that’s even deeper than sexual difference.”—Adolph Reed, Jr. “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” Common Dreams, June 2015.

In his dissent in Plessy, 163 U.S. 557, John Marshall Harlan writes, “Every one knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white people from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.” He continues: “The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.”

In 1892, in Louisiana, Homer Plessy, a man who passed as white, took a seat on a whites only car. He was told to take a seat on the black car because he was not legally white. To put this another way, he was compelled to remain in and be judged by a state-imposed racial category. He refused and was arrested. The case wound up in the Supreme Court where the justices (save Harlan) used it to establish legal justification for Jim Crow segregation. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) thus lent constitutional authority to the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

In back of segregation is an ideology constructing race as an actual thing such that a person who does not look black could be classified as black on the basis of his ancestry, a test that requires in its policing not only a profound invasion of privacy but also a profound restriction on the right to self-determination. Some entity not only wants to know what persons are—as if there really are races—but insists that people be this thing. It is not that Homer Plessy wanted to be white. He was, like Rosa Parks decades later in challenging segregated buses, a participant in a contrived test case to challenge the 1890 Separate Car Act. But had Plessy wanted to be white, as his skin suggested he was, he could not be. It was this imposed identity that determined which train car he could ride in. In this day and age, would progressives allow Plessy to be white?

One might think that if racial categories are used to discriminate against people, in light of the fact that race is a construct of racism, an ideology that holds that the human species can meaningful be divided into varieties with different aptitudes and sensibilities and ranked accordingly, the abolition of race would be at the heart of the movement for equal rights. Yet despite having abolished de jure segregation more than half a century ago, many, if not most insist on keeping race as a classification system, one that must be imposed even on those who may wish to be a race other than the one identified on her or his birth certificate or entirely raceless. If race isn’t real, why does anybody have to be a race at all? But at the very least, why can they not identify as the race they wish?

“Please understand me. I’m not a white woman with black skin and African hair. I’m a black woman with heart and soul. Getting more and more the body of a black woman is so a wonderful and liberating feeling for me. I don’t want to offend anyone! But I’m not only outwardly a black woman, I’m also with heart and soul a black woman, I swear that by God!” Those are the words of Martina Adam, a German woman whom who transitioned from white to black.

If there is no such thing as biological race, if a black person can be born and raised in Germany, and if a German person can transform herself into the gender she believes she should be, then why can she not also transform herself into the race she believes she should be? I know, asking this question risks an accusation of transphobia. But I have heard the question but I have not heard an answer. To be sure, people think they have provided an answer. Understand, my point here is not the problematize transgenderism. It’s to problematize transracialism.

Based on her words, Martina might be diagnosed with a form of body dysmorphic disorder. Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, “outed” as white, describes the same anxiety. Both believe they are black. They are changing the way they look to belong to the group with which they identify. They want their outsides to match their insides. Is it discrimination when that group doesn’t accept them for who they really are?

Are transwomen women, as the slogan says? Perhaps this is not perfectly analogous because gender has a clear biological basis, whereas race does not. While human populations may not be divisible into races, they are into sexes. Anomalies aside, the species is composed of two distinct genotypes, XX and XY. Chromosomes are not arbitrarily selected.

However, it is one thing to not accept transwomen as women, on the hand, and to destroy a transwoman’s career and life because she used to identify—or be identified—as a man. To be free means to determine for oneself which imaginary community with which one wish to identify. The headlines told us that Dolezal “pretended” to be black, deciding for her with which race she is allowed to identity. Can you imagine the uproar if the headlines told us to think in a similar way about Caitlin Jenner?

Three more women have been outed or have come forward to reveal themselves as white. George Washington University recently suspended professor Jessica Krug after a blog post was published claiming she has, in the words of the news stories surrounding the case “pretended to be Black.” She also went by the name Jess La Bombalera, an activist persona in the Bronx. Krug grew up Jewish but, in her words, “assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She claims to have “gaslighted those whom I love.”

Krug’s outing is triggering a string of what the media is calling “race fakers.” A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student, CV Vitolo-Haddad, who identifies as non-binary and goes by the pronouns “they” and “them,” resigned from from teaching role after admitting to lying about being black. She admitted to being Southern Italian and Sicilian. Then community activist Satchuel Cole admitted to posing as a black person for years in Indianapolis. She was a member of the Indy10 Blacks Lives Matter organization. In 2017, she was spokesperson for the family of Aaron Bailey, shot and killed by police in a traffic stop.

There are many other examples if, falling short of claiming to be black, have acquired a black appearance via surgery, deep tans, and makeup. Critics even identify artificial and textured hair as part of the ruse. The term used to describe such practices is “blackfishing.”

Our society does not give people the choice of picking their race. It popularly, and in some cases legally, insists on maintaining a caste system. So, while you can leave the working class for the capitalist, and you can leave the identity of a man for that of a woman, you cannot leave the white caste for the black caste without being declared a fraud or mentally ill.

This is made all the more interesting given the spectrum of human variation along lines of color and other relevant phenotypic features leads to misidentifying the race of people. Podcaster Dan Bongino, who is Italian, is asked if he is black or has black ancestry. While Bongino does not appear to see advantage or esteem in being perceived as black (it angers him to be mistaken for black), Krug obviously did. She wanted to sit on that car. But because she is not a person of color, she has no right to the advantage and esteem she sought in a different identity. She was riding on the wrong car. I wonder about blacks who “pass” for whites and whether their outing would feel the same way. Were they seen in the Jim Crow days as fraudulently accessing the advantage and esteem of the white car?

Which identities may be taken up and which are forbidden? Who makes these rules? Who polices them? For what purpose? Race is a social construction, yet there are those who work very hard to police it. This suggests that there must be benefits that accrue to it.

There is a politics at work here. Leftwing identitarians exposing individuals passing redefine selected white ethnicities—Arabs and Jews—as nonwhite. The present case is particularly interesting given that Krug is of European Jewish ethnic ancestry. For some purpose here, she is white. Leftwing identitarians will even define a religion as a race when it’s convenient to do so. Christians aren’t a race. Muslims are.

All this progressives have in common with rightwing race identitarians. And we know how that goes. Elizabeth Warren is a “fake Indian.” People are upset when Trump says this. But we didn’t see a lot of people defending Ward Churchill when folks were saying he was a “fake Indian.”

But what is real in any of these things? Should we follow the blood quantum rules (the rules that the folks who saw to it that the University of Colorado fire Churchill denied existed)? Or is it enough that Dolezal’s parents are white to wreck her identity? If we are going to assert race is a real thing, then how shall we determine its presence? Since race is not a biological thing, DNA testing will only tell you a person’s ancestry, not her race.

What does it mean to condemn interracial adoption because white parents can’t teach the children their heritage? I get it that there is asymmetry in group power, but just imagine white people arguing that black people adopting white children is problematic because, “Who will teach the white child his heritage?” For white people, heritage is racism. Maybe we should ask the cops. They seem to know for sure who is who.

There is a strange essentialism at work in identity politics. It draws a hard line at race. The Washington Post pitches in by making sure their readers know Dolezal is a “white woman who posed as black.” She is not a transracial person. That’s not even a thing. (Actually it is.) Consider if she were also transgender. What would the headline be then? Are there white brains and black brains? There’s no want of people asserting it or trying to find it. She fails the blood quantum test? Or is Dolezal white because the social and cultural rules demand white stay in their lane? Are we permitted to make this claim about other identities with reputation intact?

One of the reason Dolezal is so hated is because she moved among black and white populations without anybody knowing. They believe they know race when they see it. But not a single person had a clue. It took her hateful mother to rat her out. She was upset because Dolezal was a race traitor. Dolezal is the one wrecked and gaslighted.

Bottom line, if Dolezal passed, what’s the big deal? Who would have known? Why does it matter? What we are witnessing is selective suspension of belief on the terrain of social construction. The problem is one of reification. It matters to a particular system of imagination. It’s racecraft.

Here’s an idea: stop caring about how people identify and turn your attention to the problem of economic inequality and social class. That’s where you will transverse the terrain of the real.

In a recent blog (The Establishment Media Running Down the US Pandemic Performance) I noted that four counties—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—had death rates comparable to those of the United States. I used the similarities to push back against the establishment media claim that the United States is an outlier in COVID-19 deaths, a claim used to attack the president.

The World Health Organization is expressing concern that COVID-19 cases are rising in Europe (The new Covid-19 case surge in Europe, explained). They have declared it a “very serious situation.” The four countries I used in my comparison are among the affected nations. I present the change over time in four graphs below, obtained by searching “COVID-19 cases [country name].”

We see that COVID-19 cases are on the rise in all four countries, most drastically in France and Spain, where the current number of cases is higher that the previous peak, which occurred months earlier. For these countries, the rise in cases started back in July. For Italy and the United Kingdom, increasing frequencies becomes clear by early August.

With the warning lights going off, we need to step back and ask the most important question: are the increases in cases associated with increasing deaths? After all, if we tested for any virus and found a growing number of cases we would need to have some reason for this to cause alarm other than the mere presence of a virus. Most viruses are not particularly lethal or even consequential. For example, rhinoviruses are common in human societies yet we don’t test for them nor do we panic when we perceive colds are appearing with greater frequency. The next four charts document the frequency of death in these four European countries.

In only one country (Spain) does it appear that deaths are on the rise in any significant number, and this is the country with the greatest number of new cases. To be sure, if deaths follow, a lag in frequency is expected. Yet, in France, where a dramatic rise in cases began in mid-July, we see only a slight uptick on in the second week of September. Moreover, both Italy and the United Kingdom show very little increase in deaths despite a steady rise in cases. Perhaps this will change over time, but at present it does not appear they rise in cases is associated with increasing death.

Let’s take a look at the United States, where frequency of cases has been much greater since June. As you can see, this is associated with a rise in the frequency of deaths, but the visual comparison is striking in how the number of cases of death was much greater during the period with fewer cases of infection than in the period with more cases of infection.

What are we to make of this? Why was there so much greater death in the earlier periods than in the later periods? One reason for this is likely aggressive testing. The more testing authorities do the more cases we uncover, which in turn increases case frequencies. In may be that, in the early months of the pandemic, many more people had the virus that we thought but, with testing constrained, few cases were uncovered, thus producing a much higher case fatality rate, which created the exaggerated perception of the virus’ lethality. As testing ramped up, we began to develop a better understanding of the virus’ true lethality, which was not nearly as great as we initially thought.

This is, of course, assuming the virus has a stable rate of death. Natural history suggests that this is a bad assumption. In nature, the proliferation of virus depends on its successful replication. If, in the replication process, a virus sickens its host to the point where the host cannot effectively spread the virus, then this particular variation cannot spread as effectively as those variations that do less damage to the host. A virus is not trying to sicken or kill its host. It is simply trying to exploit the host’s cellular machinery. With the proliferation of less lethal varieties of SARS-CoV-2, death rates fall while infection rates rise.

It is likely that all of these are simultaneously occurring. There were early on certainly more cases than were detected by testing. The initial case fatality rates were thus based on underreporting of cases. I knew this at the time and reported on it my blog. But the viruses has under evolutionary pressures attenuated over time. It is less lethal than it was before. A rise in cases accompanied by a drastic decline in cate fatality rates should be cause to celebrate, but the establishment media and medical-industrial complex are spinning the statistics in a manner that at least functions to frighten the public. They have switched from death counts to case counts. They are hiding the good news for political purposes.

It may be that the lethality of the virus was magnified by those who were most likely to die from it, namely the old and the infirm. Of the 182,095 deaths recorded by the CDC to date, 104,661, or 57.5 percent, were over age of 74. Including those in the 65-74 age range raises the number to 143,790, increasing the percentage to 79 percent. Including those 55-64 accounts for more than 90 percent of fatalities. Approximately half of all those who died were in long-term care facilities, so it was not just age but health condition. For the other four-fifths of the population, 14,871 died from COVID-related causes. That is two percent of all causes for those age groups. For schools aged children, from daycare through undergraduate, COVID-19 related deaths account for just 1 percent of all deaths for those age groups. (All these stats are from the most recent CDC provisional death reports.)

In late August, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested that only 6 percent of people who died of COVID-19 actually have COVID-19 as the sole diagnosis on their death certificate. This isn’t just an issue when COVID-19 is a factor. Underlying diabetes, coronary artery disease, etc., are common diseases that contribute to mortality, They are triggered by influenza, pneumonia, or some other infectious process. When doctors talk about “triggers,” they mean the proximate cause of death. Unfortunately, the media is not educating the public about proximate and ultimate causes.

If you are healthy, a cold virus won’t kill you. Indeed, getting cold viruses as you mature will protect you against cold viruses throughout your life. This improves your quality of life. But if you are very old, with late-stage cancer, have health problems associated with obesity, etc., with an immune system in decline or depleted, then you might not be able to fight off the cold virus. The cold virus is the proximate cause of your death. But the ultimate cause is something on that list I just enumerated. Eventually, sooner than later, all those with underlying conditions will die and their death will likely be the ultimate cause of their death (if they aren’t hit by a bus, struck by lightning, slip in the bathtub, murdered, etc.). The virus—the trigger— could be a rhinovirus, a coronavirus, or some other virus. The point is that the virus is not the ultimate cause of death because it rarely kills anybody by itself. If it does kill somebody by itself, then a deeper investigation is warranted. The doctors missed something. Or foul play is suspected.

Consider a man who has been shot in the chest. He survives, but the injury exposed him to an antibiotic resistant bacteria that invaded his lungs. Should we absolve the man who shot him of murder because the proximate cause of death is a bacterial infection? No, because the ultimate cause of his death is the gunshot wound to his chest. The man who shot him is responsible for this death. His ultimate passing was triggered by the bacterial infection.

The establishment is using a COVID-19 diagnosis in counting deaths to leave the impression that each of us share the same risk of death if we contract SARS-CoV-2. In fact, most of us who are infected won’t even present with symptoms. Half of us probably already have an immunity to the virus because of a lifetime of exposure to coronaviruses (T-cells exhibit cross-immunity). Indeed, the perception conveyed by the media is so false that any expert who does not make sure the public understands this is lying to them. Virtually everybody the media puts in front of you is lying to you. And they’ve been actively censoring those contradicting the official science on this matter. The good news is that you don’t need to be a virologist to understand the logic of science. You just need to be a scientist or think like a scientist.

Finally, a comparative point. Sweden pursued a different strategy in handling COVID-19. They sought to build herd immunity while mitigating the worst effects of the disease and thus soften its impact. As you can see by the numbers, this was a sound choice. They are not seeing the rise in cases that the other European countries cited are seeing. There almost no deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden, a diverse country of ten million people.

Mr. Justice Strong, Olcott v. The Supervisors, 16 Wall. 678, 694, said: “That railroads, though constructed by private corporations and owned by them, are public highways has been the doctrine of nearly all the courts ever since such conveniences for passage and transportation have had any existence.”

Read this with respect to social media, which, although held privately, function as public utilities. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies are analogous to the railroads and telephone systems.

In Township of Pine Grove v. Talcott, 19 Wall. 666, 676, “Though the corporation [a railroad company] was private, its work was public, as much so as if it were to be constructed by the State.”

In Inhabitants of Worcester v. Western Railroad Corporation, 4 Met. 564: “The establishment of that great thoroughfare [railroads] is regarded as a public work, established by public authority, intended for the public use and benefit, the use of which is secured to the whole community, and constitutes, therefore, like a canal, turnpike or highway, a public easement. It is true that the real and personal property necessary to the establishment and management of the railroad is vested in the corporation, but it is in trust for the public.”

Although the establishment and management of social media is vested in the corporation, it is in the trust of the public, and therefore must submit to the authority of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Just as “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” neither should corporations acting as public utilities. Only time and place restrictions apply. An actor cannot interfere with another actor’s expressions such that his right is diminished.

It is, therefore, wrong for Facebook or Twitter, etc., to censor any post or comment or remove any user who is not violating constitutional norms. Social media companies, like the conductor in a railroad car, must be neutral in the administration of his duties.

What of our property rights as they pertain to our utterances and creative works? Back to Olcott: “Very early the question arose whether a State’s right of eminent domain could be exercised by a private corporation created for the purpose of constructing a railroad. Clearly it could not unless taking land for such a purpose by such an agency is taking land for public use. The right of eminent domain nowhere justifies taking property for a private use. Yet it is a doctrine universally accepted that a state legislature may authorize a private corporation to take land for the construction of such a road, making compensation to the owner. What else does this doctrine mean if not that building a railroad, though it be built by a private corporation, is an act done for a public use.”

In other words, while our speech acts can be possessed by the corporations establishing and managing public utilities, they are so possessed not exclusively for private use, but also for public use, and the person to whom these speech acts originally belonged should be compensated in some fashion by the corporation acting in the public trust.

It seems to me that the transaction tacitly entered into between users and owners/managers of social media companies so that the former may speak freely is a fee the former pay the latter that takes the form of user content accessible to advertisers and marketers and the subsequent exposure of the user to corporate messaging. Users of social media should not be told how or on what topics to speak any more than a conversation on a railroad car should be censored by the conductor—even as a matter of company policy, as such a policy is illegitimate on constitutional grounds.

Social media has no more right to censor or label user content between parties voluntarily consenting than a cellphone provider does given analogous circumstances. It is not for corporations providing public accommodations to determine access, participation, and utterances on the grounds of content except where that content represents an actual and imminent threat to the safety of concrete and identifiable persons. Cellphone providers do not police the truth content of user utterances on their services. Nor should social media companies.

The establishment media misleads the public in its campaign to blame President Trump for COVID-19 deaths. For example, CNN’s Jake Tapper cuts Peter Navarro’s mic and tells his audience that the United States is less than 5 percent of the world population, yet has more than 20 percent of the world’s deaths from COVID-19—as if this claim settles the matter.

"Why wasn't the President straightforward with the American people?" CNN's @jaketapper presses White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on President Trump concealing the threat of Covid-19 https://t.co/BfoWL4UaMV #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/iIt5rIvHvV

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 13, 2020

“Okay. Peter Navarro, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today,” says Tapper. Then, with Navarro out of the way, says, “I would just like to remind the American people watching that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and the United States has more than 20 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. That is a fact. It does not matter how many times he insults CNN.” CNN is an entity capable of being insulted?

This is propaganda. By telling his audience that the United States is less than 5 percent of the world’s population, by making us seem small and by assuming all countries are comparable, Tapper leaves the impression of a great disparity between the US and the world.

With 328 million people, the United States is not only the third largest country in the world (only China and India are larger), but it is the nexus of the world economy, with a high volume of international travel and densely packed cities. Moreover, many large countries with lower death rates aggressively deployed therapeutics, for example, hydroxychloroquine, in treating COVID-19 patients. Physicians in Western countries were constrained in prescribing cheap therapeutics by the actions of profit-driven medical-industrial complex, which has captured the regulatory process. And what about relevant demographics and health metrics?

With these factors in mind, let’s do a comparison between the United States and four large European countries—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—that have been similarly affected by COVID-19. Respectively, these countries have experienced 30,950, 35,624, 29,849, and 41,637 deaths. With a combined population of 240 million people, the four countries have experienced a combined 138 thousand deaths. The United States has experienced 194 thousand deaths.

I think you can already see how this is going to go. The percentage of deaths relative to population? The four European countries combined: 0.0575%. The United States: 0.0591%. Virtually the same. However, the percentage of deaths relative to population is even higher in Spain and the United Kingdom than in the United States. The percentage of deaths is the same for Italy and the United States. France’s relatively better numbers brings down the overall number for the four European countries. If I had left France out of the mix, the United States would have fared better in the comparison.

Why doesn’t Tapper inform the public that the United States is comparable to the four hardest hit European countries? That, in fact, the United States has a better than record than Spain and the United Kingdom? Shouldn’t news programming actually focus on informing the public? Clarifying the statistics? Contextualizing the facts? I think you know why they aren’t.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party, which is responsible for unleashing this virus on the world, is not only not the subject of news coverage in the United States, but the public is admonished for even talking about where this virus came from. It’s racist to call it the Chinese virus. The governor of New York, whose state alone experienced 32,629 death (with a population much smaller than each of the four countries I have used for the comparison), refers to the virus as the “European virus.”

Listening to the way Andrew Cuomo has been going on, Trump is to blame for the deaths in the United States. Cuomo angrily threatened Trump’s safety over a planned trip to New York. What is the percentage of deaths in Cuomo’s state? Very high. At 0.167 percent, it is also three times higher than in the four worst-faring European countries. Take the state of New York out of the statistics, and the United States fares much better. So why is the press giving Cuomo a pass? I think you know why they are.

If there are structures that organize social relations by race, then it is morally incumbent upon those who benefit from this organization to work with those who are oppressed by it and work with them to change conditions for all those affected. If the oppressor group refuses to change, then a range of protest actions are justified. If protests are insufficient to bring about change, then violence may be warranted.

The American republic has demonstrated over many decades a remarkable ability to address the problem of the racism it inherited, albeit in one instance with catastrophic war. With the Act of 1807, passed in March, the US Congress gave all slave traders nine months to close down their operations in the United States. As the trade was in black Africans, the system was racist in character. After January 1, 1808, the Act declared it unlawful “to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to service or labour.” Thus, within two decades of its founding, the United States forbade its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Little more than a half century later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing chattel slavery in the United States was proclaimed. Unlike the abolition of the slave trade, this change came after a long-fought civil war that claimed the lives of more than a million Americans, hundreds of thousands of them soldiers. Within a century, segregation by race would be abolished. This time, relatively peacefully. The Civil Rights Movement was a powerful statement of the American creed of colorblindness, that all persons should stand equally before the law.

The United States is now experiencing what the media characterizes as a reckoning on the race question. A narrative of an American history bereft of progress on race relations is promulgated by academics and activists, now taken up by corporations and governments. In this account, all whites are portrayed as complicit in a stealth system of anti-black oppression. All whites enjoy white privilege, which includes a psychological wage by virtue of being born white. White supremacy is America’s original sin. It’s in our national DNA. It is the warp and woof of the American tapestry. Etcetera. The act of denying white oppression, privilege, and sin is tantamount to not merely an admission of racism but to recalcitrance. Whites are being asked to atone for this sin, to renounce oppression, and forfeit their privilege, thus affirming the existence of systemic anti-black racism.

Yet, unlike the history I began with, there are no structures enslaving, oppression, or segregating black Americans. As I detailed, these structures were long ago abolished. Indeed, it is now illegal in the United States to discriminate against black people. More than this, at all levels of government, programs of reparations have existed for decades in the form of affirmative action (positive discrimination). And federal funding for education, housing, etc., disproportionately benefit black Americans. Given this, how have so many Americans come to believe that systemic racism continues to shape American life? Why are so many Americans going along with rhetoric that makes whites out to be racist oppressors and trashes the culture that has made America the envy of the world?

In the place of actual structures of oppression and segregation, which are themselves of course, as with other structures in the world, conveyed conceptually and theoretically, ways of speaking about the world can also creates the perception that imaginary structures are actual and real. Concepts may refer to both real and imaginary things, but the ability of human beings to always determine which are which is variable across time and space, and across persons.

We can see the way this works in theological constructions. Theology creates a universe where imaginary entities and locations and forces—gods, angels, devils, heaven, hell, evil and sin—appear as real things. Via a process of reification, the supernatural is transformed into a perceived reality, where concepts substitute for actual things. Real events are then interpreted within an all-encompassing framework. The framework makes particular sense of the evidence. Constructing a false account of the world is given plausibility by being articulated by authorities. In religion, these authorities are the church, mosque, and synagog, with their ministers, imams, and rabbis respectively. There are prayers, rituals, and scriptures. For a religion to be successful, it must build a congregation, acquire converts to doctrine. This means mounting a successful program of inclusion and indoctrination. When the program is societal-wide, pushed by society’s major institutions, it becomes a powerful force. Those who refuse and resist stand as apostates and infidels. Those who criticize doctrine are heretics.

This description of theology applies to the doctrine of critical race theory, which is the ideology guiding not only Black Lives Matter in street-level action, but also in the anti-racism and diversity training that students, teachers, and workers are compelled to undergo in corporations, government, and universities. In many cases, one does not have a choice but to participate. Employment, grades, pay, and promotion are attached. Knowing what happens to refusers and resisters, many more go along to get along.

The principle targets in this training are white people, who are told that they are racist even when they don’t know it. They suffer from “implicit (or unconsciousness) race bias.” They commit “little murders” against non-whites everyday with their words, with their “microaggressions.” See my last podcast or read my last blog entry (The Myth of White Culture) to learn about the many features of so-called “white culture.” During reeducation, white people will learn to see the structures of racism that have heretofore escaped their perception. They will learn to see the unseen by acquiring a new way to talk about the world—an argot, a jargon. They will be told to go into the world and promulgate this new gospel so that others may see it. They will be told to hold accountable those who refuse and resist the message.

It is promising that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget notified agency heads on September 4 of this year that federal workplaces will no longer be allowed to conduct training that focuses on race theory and white privilege. “It has come to the president’s attention that executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” OMB director Russell Vought wrote in a memo to agency leaders. In the memo Vought notes that “employees across the executive branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism.’”

We can trace back contracts for diversity training at federal agencies to an initiative started through an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2011. The Governmentwide Inclusive Diversity Strategic Plan issued in 2016 as a result of that order focused on a “New Inclusion Quotient,” calling on agencies to “provide training and education on cultural competency, implicit bias awareness and inclusion learning for all employees.”

Antiracism poisons our workplaces by requiring white employees to align their values with a worldview in which the work ethic and all the rest of it are degraded. Listen to Anti-Racism Training Doesn’t Work with Karlyn Borysenko (from the podcast Triggernometry). According to Vought’s memo, workers are being told “that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.” This program of indoctrination is not just harmful to the whites compelled to participate. It is harmful to blacks, as well, as it treats them as members of a group that cannot measure up to the standards of the society in which they live. It says that, in order for blacks to succeed, the standards have to be lowered or whites have to refrain from working with these standards in mind. Anti-racism represents a massive project of social engineering imposed on the American population without their consent. It means to change American culture.

If you read my blog, you will be familiar with my criticisms of Robin DiAngelo and her concept of “white fragility” (The Psychological Wages of Antiracism; Dividing Americans by Race to Keep America From Democracy) as well Ibram X. Kendi and his instructions on how to be an anti-racist (Reparations and Blood Guilt). But readers should know that their rhetoric comes from corporate psychology. So here’s a bombshell: the chart used by the Smithsonian on whiteness that I took apart on my last podcast (The Myth of White Culture), was adapted from a 1978 book, White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training by Judy H. Katz. It’s not that the Smithsonian chart and her book share points of contact. The verbiage of the chart is lifted from a book that is more than forty years old. (Katz is also responsible for the 2002 book The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity.)

To save all of us time (Lord knows we already wasted enough time reading DiAngelo and Kendi), the book is usefully summarized by Social Work Research and Abstracts. In Katz’s book “a group training program is presented in which white people work together in a nonthreatening environment to alter deeply ingrained, often unconscious racist attitudes and then embark on a program of behavioral change. The program has been used with measurable success in many settings. It can be adapted to the specific setting and needs of the participants. After an introduction explaining the principles on which the program is based, a detailed step-by-step training format is presented. The six group experiences, called stages, center on the following themes: racism, definitions and inconsistencies; confronting the reality of racism; dealing with feelings; cultural differences; exploring cultural racism, the meaning of whiteness; individual racism; and developing action strategies. Instructions and suggestions for conducting each session are provided, along with recommended readings, lists of materials required, and sources of materials.”

Katz’s work has a deep intellectual background. White Awareness hails from applied and organizational psychology, a technology designed to align the consciousness of workers with corporate ideology. As such it is a hallmark of progressivism, the technocratic worldview of the white collar sector. Psychologist Kurt Lewin is the central figure in this. Along with Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, and Lee Bradford, Lewin founded the National Training Laboratories (NLT) Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in 1947 which established the foundations of corporate training regimes, a methodology called T-groups (training groups, or encounter groups or sensitivity training groups), and founded The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. This direction is associated with the human relations movement, led by Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, and Warren Bennis, a movement that has profoundly shaped corporate management strategies. Because the structure of capitalist society compels a population to work for income, individuals are forced into structures that risk producing a subjectivity that is contrary to the material interests of their social class. Human relations and workplace training regimes are designed to proactively integrate workers with this subjectivity.

Deploying various social behavioral and cognitive strategies (small group interaction, role playing, that sort of thing), assimilation is obtained via various brainwashing techniques that leverage the behavioral and cognitive sciences to transform people into compliant corporate citizens. There is an analogy to all this that should, if people grasp the horrifying reality of all this, shake people out of their daze. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the “struggle session,” where a victim was forced to admit to wrongdoing, to confess to some crime, was often conducted at the target’s workplace surrounded by his fellow workers. The encounter session in the corporatist West is essentially a type of struggle session where a “facilitator” conscripts employees into coercing other employees into accepting the functional subjectivity. The parallel should frighten any one who cares about human freedom. It’s not an analogy. Bureaucratic collectivism and corporate bureaucratic organization share an affinity for externally-imposed rationalization—efficiency, predictability, uniformity, and control. The Chinese communist system dovetails easily with the transnational corporatist order. This is not theoretically supposed. We are seeing this convergence occurring before our eyes.

The establishment media is mainstreaming and normalizing the cultural revolution. “In this moment of historical reckoning, many Americans are being introduced to such concepts as intersectionality, white fragility, and anti-racism,” writes David Remnick in introducing his podcast with Isabel Wilkerson for The New Yorker. (See my podcast The Problem of Good White People). But this is not a moment of historical reckoning. Academic jargon shaped by the corrupting ideas of critical theory and postmodernism are constructing a reality that isn’t really real.

The very notion of a “historical reckoning” is mystification. The real reality is that we’re in a struggle between those who believe in republicanism versus those who believe in globalism, those for democracy versus those for technocracy. The question is whether we want to live in a society that protects individual liberty and defends civil rights in the context of a nation state that is answerable to the people and an international legal framework that defends human rights as a universal standard of regard, or live under the tyranny of transnational corporatist rule, a rule that works hand in hand with the Chinese Community Party. That’s the historical moment we’re living in. Black Lives Matter is street-level action in what is a corporatist revolution-from-above. That is the real fascistic threat facing humanity.

What we have been seeing over the last several decades is a shift from Old Left politics, or what we might call, following C. Wright Mills, plain Marxism, what I call classical Marxism, which I have been representing now for years (which seems to have really confused people who thought they knew how to represent my politics in their minds), to New Left politics, or neo-Marxism, which works against the humanism, liberalism, and secularism intrinsic to classical Marxist thought (i.e. the materialist conception of history). This derangement represents the corrupting influence of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and other regressive and authoritarian spirits, particularly those ideas refracted through the prism of French thought. The New Left countermovement against democracy, nationalism, and republicanism dovetails with the bureaucratic corporatist project of globalization, or transnationalization, as well as the bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese Communist Party, in a common desire to denationalize the West and establish a global neofeudalist order.

Critical race theory, and critical theory in general, is part of the landscape in social science. As a social scientist tenured in the university, I teach critical race theory alongside feminist theories, historical materialism, structural-functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and other theoretical systems. However, even when I was sympathetic to elements of critical race theory, I never taught it uncritically in a classroom. I now recognize critical race theory as a toxic ideology, but even when I didn’t, my belief that higher education is no place for demanding conformity to a particular line of political thought always guided my classroom ethics. I would never teach students that there are bad people for refusing to accept, say, structural-functionalism as a grand theory for explaining their lives. Doing something like that on the basis of race would add an extra layer of horror to such a practice. Nor should critical race theory be represented as a definitive or settled view in training sessions in academy, corporations, or government agencies. Not only is critical race theory toxic, but the practice of compelling speech from administrators, students, teachers, and workers is tyrannical. It is entirely antithetical to the educational enterprise.

The latest OMB memo instructs federal agencies to identify all contracts for diversity training that covers “‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.” That’s a start. But we need to reckon the moment we are in. Anti-racism training is part of a much larger problem for the working class, and that is the problem of transnational corporate power. Anti-racism is a project to align popular consciousness with an ideology that elites find beneficial to some ends. That corporate power is backing anti-racist training based on critical race theory tells us that those ends are not in the interests of working people.

Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Richard Thompson Ford, author of The Race Card: How bluffing about bias makes race relations worse,” tells his audience in an op-ed for CNN, “There is no ‘White culture’.” I have written about Ford before (see Race and Democracy; Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice) and appreciate his work, so I was excited to see his essay appear in my news aggregator. 

The matter around which Ford organizes his essay is the exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” The chart introduces the subject this way: “White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States. And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we have all internalized some aspects of white culture—including people of color.” 

See that? People of color are said to have internalized aspects of “white culture.” Let’s be clear about what this means: white cultural notions identified in the chart are not intrinsic to black culture, but an alien, external thing that has wormed it way into the heads of black people, colonizing their minds. Supposed ideational patterns, the products of history and ideology, are hypostatized in the abstraction of racial type. Can one know in the tangle of hundreds of years of shared life what ideas belong to which race? Or should we concern ourselves with which ideas advance collective interests and personal development? Might we find these among the items the Smithsonian identified as common “white culture”?

Here’s the chart:

Rugged individualism sees the person as the primary unit of history. Autonomy, independence, and self-reliance are values embodying individualism and there are rewards for embodying them. An alleged tenet of whiteness is that, having more deeply internalized these values that other groups, white people more readily ascend the ladder of success. In an individualist conception of society, the nuclear family is the ideal social unit. There is a husband and wife. A small number of children have their own rooms. They are expected to be independently minded and responsible for their actions.

In the antiracist worldview, “white culture” makes a fetish of the scientific method—i.e. objective, rational and linear thinking, cause and effect relationships, a focus on quantitative operations. Scientific thinking, which is held by its practitioners to be universal, stands in contrast to postmodernism, which conceptualizes the scientific method not only as one of innumerable narratives that project power, but deny that there is any external, mind-independent reality and truth. There is no reality in itself, only accounts of it, and prevailing accounts of it, as well as the epistemic character of those accounts, alert the observer to the prevailing structure of power. French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued, “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Or, more succinctly: “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.” 

The whiteness of science goes also for Western Judeo-Christian traditions, which are considered primary by white people and nonwhite people who have internalized whiteness. The Protestant work ethic looms large here: the values of hard work, work before play, and accepting personal responsibility for failure. Put another way, white culture prefers an internal locus of control, where success and failure are a function of the character and quality of human agency. This is bound up with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christianity is normative and other religions are considered foreign and their practitioners outsiders. Islam is the alien religion that looms largest here. As I have pointed out in past writings, those at war with white culture makes a fetish of Islam. Paradoxically, the postmodern left has so othered Muslims in its war against the West that it reflexively treats Muslims as people of color, even though Islam is, if we use antiracist rhetoric, a product of a white culture—just not the European one.

In white culture, notions of justice are based on common law, where the logic of law is pragmatically discovered through dispute resolution typically between individuals and small groups, and culpability is shaped by attribution of intentionality. Adjudication of the law proceeds a lot like adjudication of science, with the goal to find truth through an adversarial dialectic. Individualism comes with personal responsibility and just desserts. Those of you who have been following my podcast and blog have heard me talk about critical race theory and the distinction this standpoint draws between, on the one hand, the “perpetrator perspective,” emphasizing individual responsibility and culpability/intentionality, and, on the other, the “victim perspective,” where assertions and feelings expressed are valid by virtue of hailing from an oppressed category. The oppressor advocates the former perspective because it protects his privilege. It isn’t really better, rather it’s the narrative that prevails because the oppressor is in charge and can make it so. Indeed, it is worse, because it is the perpetrator’s perspective. From the victim perspective, justice does not require proving the individual acted intentionally; all that is needed is that some group harm is alleged and supposed to result from the actions of—or the failure to act by—the other group. This is how one gets notions of “white privilege,” where no white person stands outside whiteness (by definition), all are stigmatized by it, and therefore all are responsible for the harm resulting from its wages.

This is not merely a cracked theory of justice. It is dangerous, and we can see why in the riots occurring on our streets. Here’s what makes it dangerous: From the Western justice standpoint, an individual who harms another individual is held responsible in a process that (ideally) carefully examines the facts in a criminal or civil procedure. Only those persons materially involved in the wrongdoing are held responsible for it. We don’t punish others who look like the wrongdoer in some way; not everybody with blue eyes is responsible on account of the perpetrator having blue eyes—or blonde hair, or freckles, or whatever. Only the perpetrator is held responsible because the perpetrator perpetrated the wrongdoing. If, in contrast, we suppose that every member of a group is responsible for the behavior of individual or individuals presumed to belong to that group, then any individual of that group is a suitable target for retributive or restitutive. The concrete individual is a stand-in for abstract group. Any white man can substitute for any white man. If, furthermore, the harm claimed is abstract, then adjudication in a rational process becomes impossible. All that is left is targeting of individuals on the basis of race. We have a word for that: racism.

There are several other features noted in the chart. Competition. Mastering nature. White culture is said to be action oriented. The majority rules with the caveat that only when whites have power, a caveat failing to acknowledge white minority rule in Rhodesia, South Africa, and, after othering Arabs, Israel (if they don’t other Jews, as well). White culture emphasizes written communication, reason over emotion, privacy, civility, and politeness. The chart identities the Western civilization values of respecting authority, property, and space. White culture is future oriented: planning, delayed gratification, optimistic, promoting progress. Life—work and leisure—is time-oriented, with schedules, the commodification of time. Of course, none of this is white culture. If you want to put a label on it, how about bourgeois culture, at least in many of its elements?

Before turning to a fuller analysis of Ford’s take on “white culture,” I want to expand on the bourgeois culture tag by summarizing an op-ed by Amy Wax, a law professor at University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, law professor at the University of San Diego, “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” published in The Philadelphia Inquirer in the summer of 2017. This op-ed riled up the cancel culture warriors, who drew up a petition (and secured several thousand signatures) to get Wax fired. It didn’t work.

According to Wax and Alexander, bourgeois culture “laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.” Insisting on the relevance of bourgeois culture in a progressive America, Wax and Alexander write, “Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.” I hear a lot of things on the Smithsonian’s white culture list.

If you find bourgeois culture appealing, welcome to the club (Heather Mac Donald has also extolled the the values of bourgeois culture). These are the values that have produced the most advanced civilization in world history. These values emerge from the dynamic of nationalism, an approach to organizing populations in which legal and political structures elevate individuals from subjects to citizens, placing them under the rule of law, and affording them democratic processes to affect change, to expand and entrench democracy itself, detribalizing them by emancipating them from the provincial structures that limit personal development and self-actualization, providing for them a common culture and language and access to common knowledge for problem solving. As I argue in my writing, individualism is the necessary basis for human rights, as it allows individuals to become defined not by the tribe or the religion but by their universal connection with all human beings independent of ideology, i.e. their species-being. This is an objective standard. Group right, in contrast, are destructive to human rights because they assume relative ontology, putting the subjectivity of the tribe or religion before concreteness of individuals and then put those individuals defined by tribe and religion above the individuals of other groups.

Turning now to Ford’s op-ed and the Smithsonian controversy …. After receiving blowback, interim director Spencer Crew apologized and removed the material in mid-July (which had been online since May 31), not because it he considered it wrong and racist, but because it did not contribute to the discussion as planned. Indeed, Crew insisted that the chart was not racist. “We’re trying to talk about ideology, not about people,” he said. “We are encouraging people to think about the world they live in and how they navigate it. It’s important to talk about it to grow and get better.” But while criticizing culture is not inherently racist, condemning a culture because it is said to be white is profoundly racist.

Ford argues that the notion that there is a “white culture” with these features “ignores the contributions and achievements of generations of industrious and self-sufficient Black scientists, philosophers and writers, to say nothing of Black Protestants who made an ethic of non-violence a guiding feature of their lives.” Ford contends, for example, that it is “an insult to suggest that King ‘internalized’ his faith or his ethic of nonviolence because a White power structure imposed them on him.” He points out that “‘White culture’ in fact reflects the ideas, experiences, sensibilities and perspectives of people of all races—especially African Americans whose contributions to American culture are as widespread and profound as those of the stereotypical Mayflower pilgrims.” 

Ford identifies a paradox in the “white culture” narrative: “A defining feature of White supremacy has been to take credit for the labor and accomplishments of other races, whether that labor involved physical toil extracted without wages or intellectual and cultural work copied without attribution. The idea of ‘White culture’ advances this White supremacist project, crediting Whites for the work ethic, when no group of people in human history have worked harder and for less reward than Black people; for the Christian faith, when Black faithful and religious leaders have both furthered and revitalized Christianity and set the tone that Whites have later adopted, for good and for ill; for ‘delayed gratification’ when generations of Black people delayed their own gratification even up to the day they died in the hope that their children might have better lives in a more just society.” He also criticizes the identification of the “written tradition” with “white culture” given that “many renowned White authors incorporated aspects of literary traditions developed by Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks. This isn’t a case of cultural appropriation but of a cultural conversation between people of all races, yielding new forms of expression that no one race can lay exclusive claim to but that all can take pride in.” 

Ford writes that “there is no White culture—only American culture,” because of this “people of color deserve some share of the blame as well as of the credit.” He continues, “We bear some of the responsibility for an ethic of ‘rugged individualism’ that, at its worst, has fostered alienation and selfishness; if the veneration of the nuclear family has stigmatized other ways of caring and physical intimacy, we get some of the blame for that too.” He suspects that the narrative the charts is shaped by a counter-cultural intention to disparage “soulless American capitalism and uptight bourgeois respectability” in order to relieve the burden of shared responsibility for that by supposing these were impositions, but finding that denying black responsibility also denies black accomplishment. This is “insulting and dehumanizing,” he contends. “Because there is no White culture—only American culture—people of color deserve their share of the blame as well as of the credit. That’s what it means to be a vital part of a culture and a civilization—not to have ‘internalized’ it as passive victims but to have been a part of it in all of its glory and horror.” 

“The idea of White culture—indeed the idea that any set of cultural practices belong to any race—ignores or repudiates the defining development of the modern world: the cosmopolitan mixing of older, face-to-face cultures made possible by the expansion of communication and migration,” he writes. “Black Americans are not displaced Africans who could return to an ancestral homeland.” Blacks are “the children of modernity, a new people born in the violent encounter with avaricious and ambitious Europeans who created a new identity and new culture from that trauma. For better and for worse, the United States is our only home: we have no ‘pure’ traditions to go back to. What we have instead are our profound contributions to what remains, for all of its flaws and hypocrisies, one of the most dynamic, inventive and promising civilizations to emerge from the chaos of human history.” 

That Western civilization emerged in Europe, a region inhabited by lighter skinned people, lighter skinned because of an unintended process of human development (the development of large-scale agriculture), doesn’t make it “white.” If history had been such somewhere else, the values of the Enlightenment might have emerged there. But it didn’t. And we can’t change that. We are fortunate that it emerged at all. It’s not just that there is no need to racialize culture, Ford contends that racializing culture is a bad idea. The values of Western civilization are to be preserved and advanced because they are the values that abolished slavery and racism, emancipated women, and achieved equality for gays and lesbians. Western culture is for everybody.

Tragically, though, we see a countermovement prevailing that is racializing the West in order to  delegitimize it on that basis—by promoting hatred and loathing of white people and making all of the good it has done for the world problematic on that basis. This is the central problem with Black Lives Matter and its sister countermovement Antifa, both variations on a synthesis of critical theory, postmodernism, and Mao Zedong thought (for a wonderful summary of the development of the toxic mixture sans Maoism, listen to Social Justice Explained with James Lindsay on Triggernometry). The sentiment is anti-West and sees in rhetoric equating the West with whiteness, an ideology promoted by intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences and progressives in corporations and government, an opportunity to bring down modernity with third worldist and tribalist sensibilities.

Make sure to catch my next podcast, coming very soon, in which I follow up on this episode and blog by telling you where the idea of the Smithsonian exhibit on whiteness came from and show how it represents the basis of diversity and racial sensitivity training.

“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me—the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”—US President Donald Trump at a White House news conference, Labor Day 2020.

“I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” Former Vice President Joe Biden, June 2020, referring to the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, should the election be contested.

The war machine is seeking popular support for its campaign to throw out of office a president who disappoints it leaders by pushing a neoconservative line that the president demeans military service in much the same way the antiwar left does—or at least did. (Is there an antiwar left any more?) As if they care about the troops.

Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg has written a story in his magazine woven entirely from four anonymous sources that claim that President Trump has made disparaging comments about the troops. Trump allegedly called Americans who died in battle “losers” and “suckers.”  CNN claims to have confirmed the story. The sources remain anonymous. Why are they hiding? Trump is a tyrant who retaliates against his critics. So the story goes.

What are these warmongers really mad about? Ending regime-change wars, shifting policy away from the doctrine of endless war, bringing home our troops from overseas, not glorifying military service in the way the warlords believe entrenches the mass reflex for military intervention for the sake of corporate profits. Trump appears to lean in this direction.

A Republican who doesn’t get heroizing the agents of large-scale killing for propaganda purposes, Trump is the worst possible president for the military-industrial complex and the transnational corporations who use the instruments of belligerence to secure their material and strategic interests around the world. They fear they are losing one of their two parties (they know they can always count on Democrats).

What if the president is reluctant to lionize those who are compelled by the conditions of their existence to sign up for service? If he asks what’s in it for working people to report for duty, why is that disparaging of their persons? What if he doesn’t like to see mangled and traumatized persons lying on hospital gurneys or in psych wards? What if the human consequences of the violence self-promoting warmongers demand disgusts him?

There’s an assumption here we would all do well to ascertain (and it’s not the portrayal of the president as a tyrant). Why is failing to accept the validity of the transaction in question not at the same time a critique of the conditions that compel people, often of little means, to sacrifice their lives for the psychological wage of lionization? It has not long been the practice of elite across the epochs to amass troops by offering them honor and glory on the battlefield, to serve the cause of their country or their people, and to marginalize those who would question the worth of the sacrifice? Wouldn’t robbing them of their legitimizing rhetoric deal a blow to warmongering?

The war-makers and their corporate masters have no country or people in their hearts. The wars they wage—Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.—are not just wars. They’re wars for profit and power. The people who die in their wars die for tragic reasons.

What if the heroes are not those who make war? What if the heroes are those who prevent and stop war? What if our brothers and sisters are more precious to us alive, whole and among us than dead, maimed, and absent?

In this essay, I explain why smart people make such utterly absurd comments as the one tweeted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science: “They have deputized all white people to murder us.” Black Lives Matter is a new religion with all the delusion and zealotry that a new religion brings. Mainstreamed by academia and the establishment media, the phenomenon is metastasizing. My analysis works from a critical political social psychology framework. It dismantles key mythologies that corrupt reason. Tragically, these mythologies are cooked up and promulgated by ideologues in our institutions of higher education. Professors have become preachers of a new religion.

https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1300243270790938624?s=20

In an open letter by twelve University of Wisconsin system professors and staff condemning the shooting of Jacob Blake by an officer from the Kenosha Police Department, the myths of systemic racism and implicit race bias clearly inform the grievances expressed. Without evidence, the signatories compare the shooting of black men by police to the “public lynchings” in the post-Reconstruction era in America (for my views on this see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide), claiming that “these public shootings are meant to instill fear in Black Americans.” Characterizing the shooting of Blake as “attempted murder” (the evidence indicates that the shooting was a lawful use of deadly force), the letter writers substitute for any actual evidence of racial bias in lethal officer-civilian encounters the cliché that “violence toward Black people [is] embedded in the fabric of this country.” You should recognize this way of talking about the matter as mystification.

Their complaints come with something of a demand: more black academics in the University of Wisconsin system. The academics identify the state of Wisconsin’s education system as an agent “in addressing racist behavior and racial inequality in the state” (two very different things), but lament the underrepresentation of black faculty, administrators and students, suggesting that skin color is itself instrumental in addressing social problems. It’s as if they believe white people cannot adequately address the problems of racist behavior and racial inequality in Wisconsin. Presumably they do not envision hiring black conservatives in these positions since the idea behind greater racial representation is the failure of higher education to more completely get behind the ideology the letter writers wish to advance. I have argued on my blog, and I will argue here, that those who share their politics have done well in portraying the United States as a racist country. Apparently they won’t be happy until every American is as deluded as they are.

“We as Black people do not deserve to die because large portions of our society, including law enforcement, feel threatened by our skin color,” the letter asserts. This claim is made despite the fact that all the evidence shows that there is no racial bias in lethal officer-civilian encounters (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters and The Far Podcast on this topic). In the face of the facts, the assertion of systemic racism and implicit race bias are, in various forms, repeated ad nauseam, manufacturing through repetition a false perception about officer-civilian encounters. These false perceptions cause trauma and violence. They lead people to believe they have valid grievances and that violence is a means of redressing them. These results are not hypothetical. The nation has been in a continual state of disarray since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May. The chaos has spread throughout the West despite the fact that most of these countries do not have a history of race relations resembling that of the United States.

The protests and the riots are people responding not to what is known, but rather to what is believed. Those among my readers who know the literature of social psychology might recognize this as W. I. Thomas’ “definition of a situation” theorem, which goes like this: “If men define things as real, they are real in their consequences.” We see this, for example, in religious thinking. Because men define such entities as gods and devils as actual entities, and such places as heaven and hell as actual places, they are moved to engage in ritual actions and commit acts of violence against apostates, heretics, and infidels. Perceived reality affects behaviors and dispositions. The protests and the riots are indeed real. Their justifications are not.

Working people don’t come to such notions organically. Race is not a real thing and, as George Herbert Mead observed, the tendency of human beings is to cooperate along lines of shared material interests. Racial divisioning is an artificial separation. People who know better or at least should know better—we’re talking about academics, after all—choose false perception over reality, as well as divisive rhetoric, because, in addition to actually imbibing in the illusions they peddle, the myths provide opportunities to express self-righteousness, manufacture victimhood status, feed gross, manufacture esteem, and materially enrich selves by deepening in-group/out-group dynamics, amplifying resentment, and fomenting intergroup conflict.

There are deep psychological and emotional investments to be found here. It feels good to cast oneself in the role of the moral superior, as well as play the victim and the sympathy is engenders in others. People want you to feel sorry for them. They are angered when you don’t. Narcissists understand that people pay attention to the grievance makers and admire the redemption seekers where they have been conditioned to believe that such persons are to be reckoned among the worthy victims. Again, this is the way religion works. The claims of religion aren’t true; nonetheless, they are opportunities for self-righteousness, victimhood, egoism, and so on. As such, they are highly attractive to certain people. I feel I hardly need to do a point-by-point comparison to show where Black Lives Matter shares the core features of religious thought and practice (I have already done this work in previous blogs, but it’s rather obvious).

Moreover, like religion, the ideology of systemic racism is functional, only in the present case the ritual of self-blame is dramatically turned outward. Appeals to systemic racism and implicit race bias, both of which are not immediately apparent and thus require a special vocabulary—scripture, if you will—to make real, allow people to escape responsibility for the dysfunctions associated with attitudes, norms, and values that, through alienation and by learning other-blame for personal failures and situations, work against integration and success in the Western way of life. Such cultures in question are, in a word, disintegrationist—presently in an obvious and belligerent way (we see this in Islam, as well). Rather than admit the reason blacks run afoul of the police in disproportionate numbers, namely the fact of black overrepresentation in serious crime and the endogenous factors that lie behind this, the facts are rationalized, producing an ideology that blames racial disproportionality in arrests, convictions, and commitments to correctional programs on abstractions and assertions reified by an elaborate conceptual apparatus generate slogans that devotees need only memorize.

Like good propaganda, the abstractions and assertions are self-referential and therefore self-proving. Pitched as causal forces, when asked to identify these forces as independent variables, proponents of the ideology don’t even bother to attempt operationalizations, rather merely refer back to the fact of disparity, as if it is prima facia evidence for the thing itself. In other words, they substitute for the alleged independent variables the dependent variable. The argument is circular. Implicit race bias must exist because racial disproportionalities exist. What other explanation could there be? (See my recent essays Stop Blaming Police and Focus on Criminality—That Will Make Our Communities Safer and Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?) Again, like religion, the ideology is constructed from articles of faith, asserted as true because the alleged victims “experience it.” Anecdotes feed a thoroughgoing confirmation bias.

When proponents are confronted with the science debunking the ideology, which, in the case of lethal officer-civilian encounters is the entire body of literature, which is not insubstantial, the science is said to be biased. Epistemological demands for logic and objectivity are decried as “white culture,” which is asserted as an actual thing and declared a priori racist. Recently, the Smithsonian removed an exhibit on white culture and, among other things, identified scientific rationality as an element in white supremacy (I will be podcasting and blogging about this soon). This is not a new idea, but one that has been promoted in diversity training exercises for decades. From this it follows that any scientist who proceeds rationally may be subjected to accusations of being rightwing and racist—or, at least, “problematic,” to use the postmodern jargon. Efforts to cancel, censor, deplatform, marginalize, and smear those who tell the truth as science finds it (in all its caution) are rampant as a result. This is a reflection of the authoritarianism that results from advocacy of rationally indefensible claims. Those who threaten to debunk the claims with reason and facts must be shut down.

One of the more terrible things that comes out of practice of myth-making is the manufacture of trauma. To be sure, trauma expressed may be the result of actual oppression and violence. But there is also trauma that results from the belief that one has experienced or is supposed to experience oppression. The paradigm of this was McMartin preschool trial of the 1980s where children were led to believe they were the victims of sexual abuse by the MacMartin family that owned the day care center. Not a single conviction was obtained in a case that lasted seven years. In the end, all charges were dropped. The events described by investigators and prosecutors never happened. But many of the children, now adults, believe the memories investigators planted in their heads actually happened. They are as real to them as if they had happened. The children believe they told the truth and that nobody believed them. McMartin was not the only case but one of many in a moral panic, which include hysteria over Satanic ritual abuse. (I have written about moral panics in several blog entries, most recently about a threatening panic over the return of lynching fueled by the hysteria over systemic racism. See Death by Suicide in the Era of Black Lives Matter: The Beginning of a Moral Panic? Fortunately, that one appears to have weakened over time.)

The dynamic of implanting memories is also found in the ideology of intergenerational and collective trauma. The memories may be real, but, for most or all members of a group, only vicariously experienced, often at several degrees removed from some real experience or a lived experience. In the pages of Frontiers, a journal of personality and social psychology, Glad Hirschberger, of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, pulls from the literature, including work by notable sociologist Kai Erickson (who wrote about mass hysteria in The Wayward Puritan), a comprehensive summary of the notion of collective trauma. He writes that “the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but also elevates existential threat, which prompts a search for meaning, and  the construction of a trans-generational collective self.” To give you an example of the language of social constructionism that underpins this view as well as the main tenets of the theory, I want to share two lengthy passages from Hirschberger’s article (Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning):

“The term collective trauma refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society; it does not merely reflect an historical fact, the recollection of a terrible event that happened to a group of people. It suggests that the tragedy is represented in the collective memory of the group, and like all forms of memory it comprises not only a reproduction of the events, but also an ongoing reconstruction of the trauma in an attempt to make sense of it. Collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space. These subsequent generations of trauma survivors, that never witnessed the actual events, may remember the events differently than the direct survivors, and then the construction of these past events may take different shape and form from generation to generation.

“For victims of collective trauma meaning is established by: (a) passing down culturally-derived teachings and traditions about threat that promote group preservation; (b) these traditions of threat amplify existential concerns and increase the motivation to embed the trauma into a symbolic system of meaning; (c) trauma fosters the sense of a collective self that is transgenerational thereby promoting a sense of meaning and mitigating existential threat; (d) the sense of an historic collective self also increases group cohesion and group identification that function to create meaning and alleviate existential concerns; (e) the profound sense of meaning that is borne out of collective trauma perpetuates the memory of the trauma and the reluctance to close the door on the past; (f) over time collective trauma becomes the epicenter of group identity, and the lens through which group members understand their social environment.”

Hirschberger also discusses the way in which collective intergenerational trauma affects the perpetrators. The language here will sound very familiar to a lot of readers. “For perpetrators, the memory of trauma poses a threat to collective identity that may be addressed by denying history, minimizing culpability for wrongdoing, transforming the memory of the event, closing the door on history, or accepting responsibility. The acknowledgment of responsibility often comes with disidentification from the group.” In other words, the victim group constructs a narrative of its trauma and, expecting the alleged perpetrator group to validate the narrative, characterizes the failure of such as a continuation of the oppression (you might recognize this as a form of gas lighting). Hirschberger article organizes in a clear and useful way the social psychological elements of what Critical Race Theories identify as the “victims perspective” and the “perpetrators perspective” (see my Committing the Crime it Condemns for an overview). As I have argued in several blogs, this way of portraying the world suffers from reification or hypostatization, wherein an abstraction is treated as if it is a concrete thing. Reification commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. However, reification does produce concrete effects (see The Appeal to Identity: Bad Politics and the Fallacy of Standpoint Epistemology).

For example, the experience of black children and young adults with anti-black racism is most commonly in the past tense since racism has largely been eradicated in the contemporary United States. Children and young adults learn from books, parents, pastors, teachers, and television about what life was like for people who look like them back then. They do not experience what occurred in the past except through being told about it. If they weren’t told about it, they would not experience it. When they are told about it, they are also told that they should feel trauma over it. Thus the trauma experienced is not caused by the concreteness of past events, but by memories constructed from its abstractions, which influencers in positions of authority encourage and, in some cases, insist that they feel the dead past as living trauma. Group identity is then constructed out of these abstractions. Thus trauma is visited upon black children not by white racism, which they do not experience, but by those in their own community steeped in antiracism. We also see this with the elevation of insignificant cultural slights, or faux pas, to the status of microaggression. So rare is racism really that attitudes and behaviors that were not heretofore defined as racism become redefined as so.

The ideas of collective trauma and internalized oppression and collective trauma is a central tenet of social justice education and politics, which explains why it has become so widespread in the West. This technique of implanting memories in children and young adults, of orchestrating an acquired set of attitudes and emotions, produces a victim mentality in which the person sees her or himself as the victim of actions or events he did not actually experience and uses this trauma to define his interactions with others, to condition his choices and responses, a dynamic that will shape his future along a particular trajectory. The dynamic reinforces his belief that he is a victim of imagined crimes committed by a living dead.

We might call the ideology of manufactured victimhood victimism, a shared belief that constructs esteem and confers upon those with special status emotional and psychological wages. To be sure, not all members of a group about which a victim narrative has been fashioned suffer from victimism. Even under conditions of actual hardship, some individuals don’t experience trauma or define themselves as victims. They take things in stride. The myriad of experiences are regarded as part of daily circumstance. There is no reconstruction of the self to embody the victim identity. Whether one is successfully conditioned to be a victim depends on how intensely the expectation is felt, the reward and punishment structure (the contingency schedule, for the behaviorists out there), and how acutely demands for group cohesion and loyalty are perceived. Moreover, there are personality traits that predispose persons to it (see my A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer). The need for attention or recognition is variable across the population.

It is important for those who think they are victims to have others affirm their victimhood. Seeking the support of those around him, through various strategies, including the suspension of disbelief (the default position in abstract things should always be disbelief), the victim enlists others in the project to validate the illusion. The more sure those around the supposed victim are in their belief of victimhood, the more efficacious is emotional blackmail not only demanding outsiders acknowledge their responsibility in their trauma but in relenting to the demands the victim is making. The program of self-denunciation also benefits from personality traits. Thus a dynamic of sadomasochism is initiated (see Such a Beautiful Moment—The Self-Flagellating of White People).

Collective trauma is source of solidarity and defines and intensifies the in-group/out-group division. It feeds conflict and seeks resolution of conflict, to the extent that it does, in the transfer of esteem and material goods and services from the out-group to the in-group. It’s a type of extortion. Esteem is fueled by the perception of self-righteousness, or the moral superiority of the victim, or the oppressed, and the immorality of the perpetrator—the oppressor. The strategy stands normal morality on its head. Despite being the aggressors, victims can move under the cover of sympathy, painting the targets of their violence as the real threat, even portraying the targets of their violence as deserving of the violence perpetrated against them. This is a technique of neutralization that David Matza and Gresham Sykes identify, “denial of victim,” here achieved by swapping places in the victim-perpetrator dyad.

By radically simplifying the world with this rhetoric, by casting conflict as good and evil, literally in this case black and white, the social justice activist washes oppression and violence in a bath of righteousness. You might say that the movement is baptized—not merely cleansed of its sins, but given an immunity of sorts: a permission slip to sin in the name of justice. This invites others—especially those attracted to hate and violence—to join them in “oppressing the enemy.” Offensive violence become justified by future of being redefined as defensive in a false transformational maneuver, while the defensive violence of their targets is likewise redefined as offensive violence. Shielding oneself from interpersonal violence when one has been stripped of the human right to self-defense transforms the victim into the perpetrator. One’s battered face is guilty of having been located in the path of a righteous fist—or rock of molotov cocktail or professional grade firework.

Being concerned with ones own imagined suffering reduces the capacity to feel sympathy for the targets of retribution. The ideology dehumanizes the victims of its bearers. The victims had it coming to them in this warped worldview. Even though the perpetrators of retributive violence were not wronged by any of the individuals they target, because the victims share the skin color of the alleged oppressor group, extracting justice from any of them is warranted, and diminishment of empathy allows them to carry out retribution or restitution without the pangs of conscience. In the case of Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence, state and local governments stopped holding responsible those committing criminal acts on the grounds that those committing them are members of historically oppressed groups. Like employee theft is wages-in-kind, looting is reparations-in-action. Lest they be portrayed as racists and reactionaries, shop owners should stand aside and behold justice. With all of the attention is placed on alleged wrongdoing and the suffering on account of it, final compromise with the alleged oppressor is a remote possibility. A positive sanctioned culture of blaming others for ones personal situation eschews resolution because peace would bring an end to the psychological and emotional wages, not to mention the material stuff, that accrue to the victim.

Through all of this, no time was taken to stop and determine whether the grievances are real or imagined. Is there some objective arrangement or action that oppresses? Or is this subjectively experienced. To actually achieve justice, the righting of wrongs requires actual wrongs. Reform in the name of justice requires an injustice to reform. Thus there needs to be an objective analysis of the wrong, of the injustice. Alas, postmodernism saves the day by asserting there can be no objective judgment of wrongs and injustices since the deny the “lived experience.” Injustice and oppression are how we feel not what really is. But, then, that just proves my argument. Black Lives Matter is set up as a forever thing that can only be forever because it rests on a mythology. There is very little here that needs resolving—but a mythology in need of debunking. In order to do this, we have to assert our right to publicly challenge myths without risking life, property, and reputation. And here postmodernism again intrudes to tell us that the free speech right is a white-serving construct of modernity.

The chaos in the streets, the high levels of violent crime, daily disintegration, are mainly occurring in cities run by progressive Democrats. The riots were prepared by decades of custodial state policies designed by progressives to manage the consequences of rising organic composition of capital and globalization—off-shoring, mass immigration—for the corporate class. The ideology that guides the mob and supplies the propaganda apparatus with woke vocabulary, that shapes our workplaces and school boards—was cooked up in the humanities and social sciences departments of the institutions of higher education in the service of global capitalism. The constant trashing of America and West fuels the violence. Anti-white racism identifies the targets of ginned up resentment. The cosmopolitanism of bourgeoise elitism portrays working class Americans as deplorables and casts their traditionalist sensibilities as fascistic. Elites aim to delegitimize the working class and its politics to derail resistance to the managed decline of the republic. It’s starting to feel as if they have overplayed their hand. At the same time, it also feels as if they won’t be able to put the violence they have unleashed back into Pandora’s box.

To expound on what I earlier said and tie it with the range of actions we see on our streets, it is important to keep in mind that the validity of a grievance determines the legitimacy of an action. A protest is a first amendment activity. Even if the grievance is illusory, and therefore the demonstration invalid, people are permitted, constrained by certain rational rules, to peacefully protest. Protests occur not only over matters of fact. They can be organized by feelings. However, a riot is an illegitimate exercise of violence—this form of violence is not constitutionally or morally legitimate. This is not to suggest that there are no legitimate forms of violence, the pertinent one being rebellion, which can look like a riot phenomenologically. But if a riot is to be elevated to the status of a rebellion it must have valid grievances, i.e., a root cause, and all other means seeking redress of grievances must first be exhausted. Determining root causes is an objective exercise. The current riots do not constitute a rebellion. None of the conditions necessary for ethical justification for Antifa or Black Lives Matter violence have been met. Nor are the protests valid. This is an insurrection. (The federal government exists to enforce the law, repel invasion, and suppress insurrection. What are our leaders waiting for?)

When the claim is made that justice reform provides the justification, as I wrote above, justice reform requires an injustice to reform. The injustice claimed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter is racial bias in patterns of police shootings and incarceration. There is no evidence of systemic racism in these patterns. Forty years of scientific research fails to find evidence of systemic racism in lethal officer-civilian encounters. There are roughly a thousand to twelve hundred lethal officer-civilian encounters in the United States annually. That’s a lot, but keep in mind that we are the third largest country in the world and the most violent advanced country in the world. Of that number of deaths, approximately 250-300 blacks are killed by the police. In other words, blacks are a minority of deaths in this type of violence, most of which constitute the appropriate use of deadly force by an officer of the law. Controlling for crime rates and circumstances any disproportionalities disappear. Leaving aside the drug war, in which substantial reform has already been taking place for years, the racial disparities in corrections reflects patterns of serious crime, as I document on my blog. It is relevant here to know that Trump signed into law a major criminal justice reform bill addressing remaining outstanding issues. We have made substantial progress and are continuing to make progress.

I am not concerned with illusions. What people believe doesn’t determine the truth for me. And it shouldn’t for any of you, either. A rational person is concerned with reality—with what is. The difference between sane and crazy is a commitment to what is. The scientific evidence refutes the claims made by those who assert a grievance. Because of the power of the scientific method, which is universally true, and in light of the evidence, arguing that there is racial bias in police shootings, to take the most high profile claim, is the equivalent of arguing that the earth is flat or that it lies at the center of the solar system.

The argument I make does not portray protests as riots. Watch out for that straw man. It’s those who are enabling violence who characterize the riots as protests. The riots are an objective fact. We cannot deny arson, looting, assault, and even murder for the sake of argument—for the sake of our desire to avoid inconvenient truths. We don’t have time to play dumb. These things are real and they are being perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Fox News doesn’t portray the protests as riots. They cover the riots. It’s the other media outlets that portray riots as protests—even while standing in front of burning buildings!

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are clearly insurrectionist. This is politically organized violence against civil authority and an established government. Trump and Republicans have been remarkably patient in the face of the worst civil unrest in America since I was small child. And that was a long time ago! Joe Biden is wrong when he says Trump is fearmongering. The insurrection is real. The violence is real. The homicides are real. The point of the insurrection is to spread fear throughout the population through intimidation and violence. The insurrection is using terrorism—the illegitimate use of intimidation and violence to advance political objectives—in pursuit of its goals. Like trauma-production, fear-production is the work of the left.

Right wingers aren’t storming restaurants and bullying people into declaring their allegiance to a cracked racial theory, a false history, and a reactionary political movement. Right wingers aren’t burning churches, looting stores, attacking police officers, and targeting civilians for harassment, intimidation, and violence on the basis of skin color. Right wingers aren’t denigrating an entire race and blaming them for their perceived personal misfortunes. Right wingers aren’t trying to overthrow the American republic. It’s left wingers doing that. En masse and at massive scale. It’s the left that is authoritarian, bigoted, and racist—and highly motivated. These destructive forces enjoy support from Democrats and progressives, state and local governments, corporations and colleges and universities. Wake up, comrades. Your nation is in trouble. Democracy and justice are in jeopardy.

There is a ritual form of terroristic Islamic violence where a person, most often a male, puts himself in harm’s way and, upon his deliberate and predictable death becomes a martyr. His demise becomes an occasion for the like-minded to come together and chant slogans—“God is Great!” “Death to the Infidel!” “Death to America!” Might we be seeing something like this in the United States? A man’s demise becomes an occasion for the like-minded to come together and chant, “Black Lives Matter!” “Off the pigs!” and “Death to America!” A criminal becomes a left-idealist hero. Murals are painted. GoFundMe accounts are established. The enemy is framed.

If the jihadi wanted to the live, he wouldn’t strap on a bomb vest. He is behaving in a manner that any rational observer can see is likely to result in his death. He has come to believe that his death is part of a struggle of which he is necessarily a part. His actions, he believes, represent resistance to an oppressive power that he damages by damaging himself. He is a brave soul against mighty forces of evil. Many outsider observers agree with him. If it were not for the oppressor, they rationalize, members of the oppressed class would not have to blow themselves up. Is it not conceivable that, in some cases, the man who charges the police officer with a knife or goes for the police officer’s gun is not similarly motivated? If he wanted to live, he would follow the officers orders. He still has his rights. Cop rarely shoot persons submitting to detention or arrest. But the man chooses the different path. The path of martyrdom?

This is not an outlandish suggestion. In criminology there is a name for the phenomenon in which persons behave in a manner that increases the likelihood that officers will shoot them. It’s called “suicide by cop.” A species of victim-precipitated homicide, suicide by cop (or suicide by police) occurs when an individual deliberately elicits a lethal response from a law enforcement officer. It applies to civilian encounters, as well, such as when a man aggresses upon another man carrying an AR 15 and gets shot. If the man had left the armed man alone, he would not have been shot. Assuming he is reasonably intelligent, he would understand that aggressing upon an armed man may result in his death. He has a death wish. He gets himself shot.

There is a popular reluctance to study the behavior of victims in lethal encounters. It stems from the idea that to do so constitutes “blaming the victim.” Blame and explanation are not synonymous. We can hold people blameless while still acknowledging their behavior that elicited the response that killed them. The kid who pokes the dog with a stick doesn’t deserve to be bitten. But when we ask why the dog bit the child, the presence of a stick makes the case different from an unprovoked dog bite. Of course, humans aren’t dogs. Humans have motives behind their actions. Thus responsibility becomes a matter to be considered. And we should consider it if it is relevant to the explanation.

The idea of victim-precipitated homicide has been around for decades and there is quite a substantial literature on it. The literature has to this point suggested two types of motives: (1) the person has planned his suicide by this method; (2) the person decides in the moment that death is preferable to arrest or some other fate. The first may include several of Durkheim’s motives, specifically anomie (distress at loss of normative structure), egoism (distress at loss of solidarity), and fatalism (distress at loss of liberty). The second is more specifically fatalism. Sociologist Émile Durkheim argues that motives lie along an intersecting scale of integration and regulation. One way the group exerts a force on the individual is through internalized beliefs, norms, and values that constitute a collective consciousness or a shared worldview. This concerns how well the person is integrated into the group. The other way the group exerts a force on the individual is through the imposition of external rules. When internalized beliefs and values fail to control the individual’s behavior, social control agents move to control the individual. One can scale up these dynamics. The culture of groups may conflict with the greater culture in which those groups embed. I trust the reader can see the implications for understanding the situation we face today with respect to violent crime.

When I discuss Durkheim’s motives in lectures, I apply altruism, i.e. self-demise because it signifies solidarity to identity or cause, to the explanation of suicide bombing. The jihadi blows himself up because his sacrifice is meaningful to him, but also because he knows it is meaningful to his comrades. He knows they will celebrate his sacrifice. He’s counting on it. It will strengthen faith in the ideology of Islam. The applicability of altruism as a motive to situations where victim-precipitated homicide is significant for advancing the ideology of systemic racism, the belief that America is an evil country, is hardly a stretch. Human beings act on the basis of their beliefs about the world. If the person officers are attempting to take into custody a man who believes he has a role to play in a movement against law enforcement and the greater oppressive culture, then he may knowingly risk his life by disobeying their commands, even violently confronting them. He knows how this will turn out for him and that may be the very reason for his actions.

This analysis does not rule out the other motives. Jacob Blake, for example, had a picture of police officers in a squad car dressed as a pig and a devil on his Facebook page. This suggests an anti-cop attitude. He may have been plugged into the Black Lives Matter movement at some cognitive and emotional levels. But he also may have decided in that moment, given the seriousness of the warrant for his arrest, that death was preferable to being taken into custody. That is, his motive was fatalistic in character. The fact remains that he made choices that put himself in a situation that greatly increased the likelihood that police officers would use deadly force. He was violently resisting arrest and appears to have been armed. His actions are an intrinsic part of the explanation of his injuries.

I teach courses on police and law enforcement. In lectures, both in my courses and in public service events, I tell students and community members that if they want to survive a police encounter—if they don’t have a death wish—to always carefully follow the officer’s commands and not act in a way that suggests to the officer that his life in in jeopardy. Officers have a right to self defense and knows how quickly an encounter can turn lethal. The officer is armed for this reason. The officer wants to go home to family and he knows about police officers who didn’t make it home. Tens of millions of Americans encounter the police every year, and there is rarely any violence associated with these encounters. The vast majority of police officers are decent people doing the necessarily work of law enforcement. If they are matter-of-fact and not particularly friendly it is because that is what their job entails. They use a command voice to keep the peace. The vast majority of civilians follow the officer’s commands. An encounter with a police officer may be tense, however, if the officer suspects criminality, so it is important to know how to behave to make the officer’s job go smoothly while also protecting your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

The organization Flex Your Rights has produced a video, 10 Rules for Dealing with the Police, instructing individuals on how to deal with the police. It has high production value and stars criminal defense attorney Billy Murphy, whom some readers may remember from the TV show The Wire. Watching the video you will learn how to safely interact with a police officer, as well as learn about your constitutional rights. These will come in handy if you are ever detained or arrested. For those bent on violently confronting police officers, I wish there was a video that could help them.

Earlier I noted that victim-precipitated homicide occurs in the civilian realm, as well. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, a teenager from Illinois was attacked by several men who had assembled in Kenosha either to protest or riot the shooting of Jacob Blake (who survived his injuries). The teenager was armed and shot three of them. The following account is drawn from multiple news sources. Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, a registered sex offender for a sex crime involving a minor, chased the teenager and threw something at him. Rosenbaum was shot multiple times and died from his wounds. Anthony Huber, 26, who had a criminal history that included charges of battery and domestic abuse, chased down the teenager and was beating the teenager with a skateboard while the teenager was on the ground. Huber was fatally shot in the abdomen. Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, a member of the People’s Revolution Movement of Milwaukee, who also has a criminal record, was chasing the teenager alongside Huber. Grosskreutz was armed with a pistol, which is clearly visible in video and images. Grosskreutz was shot in the upper arm and survived. He reportedly regrets not killing the teenager. The two dead men are being portrayed as martyrs. Did they think of themselves as heroes in a situation of their own making? Were these redemptive acts?

Jacob Blake, the ritual totem currently at the center of the unrest allegedly over police violence, also had a criminal record. The reason the police were arresting Blake on August 23 was because authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest in July on several charges including criminal trespass to a dwelling and felony third-degree sexual assault, all with domestic abuse as modifiers. The police had been called to the scene of a domestic disturbance (the 911 call indicated a very serious situation) and thus has a legitimate reason for detaining Blake. They were carrying out their duties as sworn law enforcement officers. During the arrest, which became physical and saw the deployment of a Taser, Blake wrestled free and was moving with purpose to a vehicle that may or may not have been his. There were kids in the car. He either still had the knife, was reaching for a gun, or trying to leave the scene with small children in the car, any of these constituting a very dangerous situation. The police officer stopped whatever Blake had planned. Unlike a lot of men who violently confront police, Blake has an opportunity to tell the public about that plan.