Year: 2021

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” —Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain

I want to make it clear that I am not making a pro-white argument in the essay. Far from it. I have been clear in my writings about my desire to see race go away. Race is a creation of racism and race thinking keeps the danger of racism alive. When we no longer see each another in racial terms, when we rid our thinking of racial categories, then racism can be relegated to the past. I oppose anti-white racism for the same reason I oppose anti-black racism: racism plays a crucial role in unjust enrichment and it can inspire violence. My argument is the opposite of a racialist argument. I am not arguing for the racial categories I am compelled to use here; these come with a social logic that is part of my society. I am responding to them. My argument would be the paradigm of antiracism if it were not for the corruption of that term by the woke racists who dominate our institutions and shape the prevailing narrative. From their standpoint, when properly understood, antiracism is racism. And so it is.

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If the claim is that some races and ethnicities are disadvantaged as a group because of an oppressive system that systematically advantages some groups over others, that is, group disparities exist because of oppressive social relations, and this is systemic racism, and this claim is taken as fact, then a corollary is that Jewish Americans, who are highly successful as a group, are oppressors. Unless you can show me a law that privileges Jews, this is anti-Semitism. It also follows that the Chinese and Indians in America are oppressors. Here I will demand the same thing of you if you want to avoid being labeled anti-Asian: where is the law that privileges these Asian-American populations? There isn’t one.

Everywhere we turn these days we hear that whites enjoy a racial privilege which explains the alleged advantages enhancing their life chances. Every white person must admit their complicity in the system of white privilege. Peggy McIntosh, of the Wellesley Centers for Women, describes white racial advantage as an “invisible knapsack” of skin color privileges every white person carries on his back throughout his life (see Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism; You are Broken. We Will Fix You; Not All White People Are Racist; The Psychological Wages of Antiracism). The knapsack needs to be invisible for an obvious reason: where is the law that privileges white people? There isn’t one. But there is a desire that every white person wear privilege around his neck like an albatross.

The systemic racism thesis requires faith in unseen structures that undergird an abstract system disadvantaging blacks across societal institutions (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism). This system explains why blacks on average trail whites in almost every category of social life—academic achievement, career success, housing and health care, safety and well-being—with notable exceptions (entertainment, sports). These disparities are not to be explained by cultural differences between whites and blacks as groups. It is not, for example, the fact that three-quarters of black children are born to a household where the father is absent that explains why so many black children fail at school or join gangs. Academic failure and criminal conduct are explained by white power and privilege.

But claiming that all whites as a group are privileged oppressors, that it is their fault that blacks as group find themselves where they are, is the same as saying that Jewish-Americans as a group or that Chinese-Americans as a group are privileged oppressors—that they’re responsible for the suffering of others. In the absence of laws privileging whites, the claim is racist. If one objects with Patricia Bidol-Padva’s widely-assumed formula “racism equals prejudice plus institutional power,” then no argument will have been provided; as an empirical matter, whites as a group do not have such power. That formulation was wrong with respect to race relations when it was rolled out in 1970s. There is no law or institution that privileges white people as a group in this country. This is no less racist of a claim than the claim that Jews run our institutions.

This slogan we have heard for decades that “only whites can be racist” is a rationalization to preserve a complaint that was satisfied in a slew of court decisions and legislative actions in the Civil Rights Era. The corollary that blacks cannot be racist against whites is a Black Power slogan that assumes as given that which requires proving. The assumption is easily disproved: we do not live in an apartheid society. What is Black Power, then, if not “anti-white power,” as Roy Wilkins saw it, or “black supremacy,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. saw it? What is black nationalism or black self-determination if not black separatism? Are Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown the lights to guide us? Or is Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Blaming whites for the disadvantages of blacks and certain ethnic minorities is the same form of the ideology that taught the German worker to believe that Jews were the reason for his suffering because Jews were better off as a group than the German Christian. But Jews in Germany and in America today are better off because they have cultural values conducive to success. They have strong families and teach their children to value education, striving, and law-abidingness. For this, Jews are still loathed for it in some quarters. The same thing is true for Asian-Americans. But you’re not supposed to know this or recognize it unless it can be blamed on whites (see Are Cultural Explanations of Racial Disparities Always Racist? Only By Conflating Race and Culture).

The ideology of systemic racism is designed to obscure the power of culture, but it is also an ideology that disrupts class consciousness. The reason why there is material inequality is primarily economic. It has something to do with ethnicity insofar as not all cultures and subcultures are as good as others in meeting the basic human need for striving and succeeding. There is nothing racist about that fact. However, it has mostly to do with the fact that we live in a capitalist society where those who own capital are privileged by law. The dynamic that chiefly determines the fate of people is the class dynamic. (See What Explains—and Doesn’t Explain—Inequality; Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach; It’s Not a Racist System.)

This is not to say there is no institutional racism in America. Law and policy permits whites to be treated as second-class citizens in admissions to colleges and in applications for work. This matter of law and policy is hailed as a good thing. You risk being accused of racism if your disagree. Taking race into account in college admissions and in hiring is described as a necessary program of positive discrimination, necessary because the institutional and structural power of whites requires negating via some principle contrary to the principle of colorblind treatment, i.e., equal treatment regardless of racial identity. Positive discrimination is recognized as unlawful, so in the United States it is rationalized as “affirmative action” (in the the United Kingdom it’s rationalized as “positive action”). (See The Freudian Slip that Invites Us to Ask the Question: Is it Time to End Race Privilege?)

In the absence of some mechanism that privileges blacks, the argument goes, the intrinsic nature of American institutions and the momentum of history privileges whites; each white person is justifiably told to get in back of the line because of the greater success of whites on average, a statistical abstraction that includes Jews (who are mostly racially white) and increasingly the Chinese (defined as “white adjacent”). Thus, while systems formally privileging whites have been abolished, explicit systems based on abstract race privilege have been developed that thwart the aspirations of concrete white persons for the sake of repairing historic inequities that the white person played no role in creating. This is in the face of whites constituting the largest proportion of disadvantaged persons in America (see They Do You This Way). The bias against group success is increasingly applied to other groups, as well; anti-white privilege is being extended.

Thus, while systemic anti-black racism has largely been eradicated, anti-white racism is becoming systemic. This is no exaggeration. Children of all races are being indoctrinated in anti-white racism in our schools, employees are routinely subjected to anti-white racism in diversity, equity, and inclusion training, and the establishment media daily folls the airways with anti-white sentiment (Are Teachers Really all in on Critical Race Theory? Banning CRT in Public Instruction; California Moves Ahead with Divisive Antiracism Curriculum; CNN’s Maegan Vazquez Defends Racially Divisive Curriculum; The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think). Anti-white racism is being normalized by the widespread and deep institutionalization of fallacious CRT ideas of white privilege and systemic racism and primitive notions of collective guilt and punishment. So, while violence against blacks at the hands of whites is rare in today’s America because anti-black racism is rare (so rare that many hate crimes against blacks are hoaxes—see Hate Crimes, Hoaxes, and Identity Politics, this is not true of the effects of anti-white racism.

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Anti-white prejudice is not just a danger to the culture of striving and success. It represents a physical danger to those considered white, as well to the Chinese and Jews (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite; Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide? Policy Presuming “White Privilege” Violates Equal Protection Under the Law). In light of violence against whites, Jews, and Asians, it’s surprising that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) would publish an essay without critical reflection claiming that the observation that anti-racism in its current form is code for anti-white. That a white supremacist may utter truthful statements is the fallacy the ADL, along with the SPLC, like the most (a type of association fallacy in spirit of reductio ad Hitlerum). But in my essay “The Myth of White Culture,” I show that this is indeed the case: Western civilization is pitched as racist, and Western civilization is depicted as the work of white people, therefore white people are racist. It follows from this that to be anti-racist in the modern sense means to be anti-white. This is what Roy Wilkins was talking about.

To see the danger of the formulation, recall once more the time of Nazi Germany and the way in which widespread antisemitism exposed Jewish shops and Jews themselves to acts of crime and violence by ordinary Germans who believed Jews were privileged oppressors. Germans were socialized to envy Jewish success, to loathe Jewish standards of excellence, to believe that the reason the Jews had it so good—thus rendering invisible millions of poor Jews, as if all Jews were privileged—was the reason the life of the ordinary German was so impoverished and miserable.

We know—at least those of us who approach the subject from a historical materialist standpoint know—that the real reason ordinary German life was so impoverished was because of the structure of capitalist society in this period. That structure prevailed because the bourgeoise was desperate to increase the pace of wealth accumulation, to raise the rate of profit. It was the German bourgeoisie who actually enjoyed unearned power and privilege—protected by law. They were the oppressors. They were the exploiters. They were the ones who organized anti-Semitism and used it as an ideological weapon to confuse the German proletariat. In this way, the corporate state and the culture industry it controlled prepared the German citizen to serve as a weapon in its project to smash working class organizations and scatter popular consciousness and entrench the power of the German banker and industrialist by portraying the Jew as unjustly privileged and responsible for the suffering of the poor and working class German.

This is a tactic called “scapegoating.” It’s deployed to mystify the real cause of a people’s misery by identifying an imaginary one. Jews were scapegoated to distract the ordinary German worker from the real struggle: the class struggle. Jewish group success was used to replace the actual oppressor with a contrived one. Racism and fascism took the place of classism in Nazi Germany, redirecting the anger of those exploited and impoverished by the economic system that favored the banker and the industrialist. The worker was told with whom to be angry by the trusted institutions of their society. The worker was indoctrinated by powerful forces to target the wrong antagonist. I don’t have to tell you what was the result of weaponized anti-Semitism. It’s why we say “Never again.”

Among my several academic publications, two concerned lynching. The first appeared in the Journal of Black Studies in 2004, a comparative piece on lynching and the Holocaust. The second, in Crime, Law, and Social Change, published in 2006, theorizes that the progressive humanization of black people by raising them to the status of equal citizens explains the disappearance of lynching. The common argument underpinning both articles is essentially this: anti-black prejudice explained racial violence that took the form of lynching. Racial violence occurred frequently because anti-black racism had been institutionalized in the major social institutions of America and in its culture and language. It had over years been normalized, even expected. It was easily mobilized for political purposes. The civil rights movement, driven by a desire to more fully realize the American creed of equality before the law, demanded from American’s intolerance of racist ideology and speech. Anti-black racism was pushed out of our institutions and largely out of our language. By deinstitutionalizing anti-black racism, by banishing anti-black racism to the margins of American culture, a form of violence lost its motive and reason. Thus racial violence against blacks has been almost entirely eliminated by putting anti-black racism behind us.

As with anti-black racism, anti-white racism fuels racial violence against whites. A black man driving a car through a Christmas parade is explained by widespread anti-white sentiment that makes racial violence against whites appear warranted and justifiable (Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). Anti-white racism moved Darrell Brooks Jr. to drive his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, swerving side to side targeting people, injuring at least 50 people, killing five elderly people and a child. The authorities describe his actions as intentional. In my essay Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide? (see also Establishment Myths About Race and Violence), I show that, year after year, whites are more likely to be homicide victims at the hands of black perpetrators than blacks are to be homicide victims at the hands of white perpetrators. The same pattern holds for robbery. The disparity is even more striking when one reflects on the fact that most perpetrators of homicide are male and black males constitute around sex or seven percent of the population.

Progressive media silent after Jussie Smollett's guilty verdict https://t.co/aMNOzwwGRW

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) December 27, 2021

Not only do the statistics on violent crime shows this, but the failure of government officials to identify violent action as such, and the systematic neglect by the media to report the story in the same way they report fake accounts of racism (in Kenosha, Washington DC, Chicago, and so on). And when faked anti-black episodes are exposed, the media and politicians go silent. They leave it to Black Lives Matter to declare, “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.” When convenient, the Democratic Party and the establishment media amplify hoaxed cases of anti-black racism, expressions of the very anti-white racism that causes whites to be the target of black nationalist terrorism and disproportionately the victims of interracial crime and violence, from the looting of their stores, burglarizing of their homes, to robbery on the streets. Widespread anti-white racism is a license to target whites for crime and violence.

We are told “Never again” after widespread antisemitism saw Jewish stores and Jews themselves targeted for acts of crime and violence by Germans prepared to commit these acts by being told that Jews were their oppressors, that they must envy Jewish success, that the reason the Jews had it so good (and so the millions of poor Jews were rendered invisible) was because Christian Germans had it so bad. The same wrong is committed when white and Asian owned stores and whites and Asians are targeted for acts of crime and violence justified because of a belief that blacks are disproportionately poor because they are an oppressed people (see Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect). To be sure, people have a free speech right to defame whites and Asians. Our libel laws work at the individual level. But violent action is moved by ideology. If dominant social institutions consistently and for years blame whites for the problems of blacks, the consequences are predictable.

In a three-month period over the summer of 2020, according the US Crisis Monitor, the Black Lives Matter movement was linked to more than nine in ten riots in forty-nine states across the country. The United States experienced 637 riots between May 26 and September 12. Ninety-one percent of those riots were linked to the BLM movement. The riots incurred more property damage in 2020 dollars than any other riots in American history. The nearly two billion dollars in property damage were accompanied by more than two dozens deaths and countless injuries. Black Lives Matter was heavily financed by transnational corporate power and encouraged by the establishment media which, at the same time, downplayed the violence BLM, often while documenting arson and looting in their videos. (See What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; On Riots and the Postmodern Corruption of the Culture of Protest.)

The riots were organized on the basis of a false claim, fed by establishment media misinformation, about lethal civilian-officer encounters in which the public was told that police officers target black civilians with violence, when in fact, if any racial disparity is found, it shows that police are more reluctant to use violence against black suspects. (See The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter; The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; Establishment Myths About Race and Violence; Disappearing the White Victims of Lethal Police Violence; Establishment Myths About Race and Violence.)

A new form of racism is taking hold, promulgated by such ideologies as critical race theory (CRT), one we are shamed into not speaking about. CRT turns racial animosity around, making whites, in a manner similar to the way Jews were targeted in the Nazi period in Germany and through Europe, the target of envy, loathing, and resentment (Reparations and Blood Guilt; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations; A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations). This targeting is seen in the attribution of privilege to whites as a group. It is seen in the resurrection of such primitive concepts as original sin and collective guilt and retrospective intergenerational responsibility.

Whether history repeats or rhymes, among other things, we record history to learn from it. We are on a very dangerous path in the West, especially in America. We are ignoring one of the most important lessons history has to offer—that organizing around the categories of racial thinking carries with it the risk of ginning up racial antagonisms, and these can go sidewise very quickly and in horrific ways.

The corporate state in the Nazi period prepared the German citizen to serve as a weapon to its end by portraying the Jew as unjustly privileged and responsible for the suffering of the poor and working class German. Today, the corporate state in the progressive period has prepared black and white allies (antifascism, code for fascistic street violence, adds to the chaos of antiracism) to serve as weapons to its end by portraying whites as unjustly privileged and responsible for the suffering of the poor and working class nonwhite. (See The Problem with Antifascism; Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism; Antifa and the Boogaloos: Condemning Political Violence Left and Right; Portland and the Rule of Law.)

Many black Americans resist this weaponization. But just as ordinary Germans who opposed the radicalization and oppression of Jews under Nazism were shamed and otherwise socially coerced into supporting the agenda, blacks who resist anti-white prejudice are also being shamed and coerced into the supporting the corporate state agenda. Side with the class interests of the ordinary American worker and risk being called “Uncle Tom” and “Negro.” Even white progressives like to get in on that action.(See Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism; Democrats Pander While Managing America’s Decline.)

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In closing, I need to repeat my long-standing demand that we refuse to conflate white supremacy with Western culture. White supremacy is a type of racism. Western culture is not a product of a race, but of a place in time. It is the source of autonomy, democracy, humanism, individualism, liberty, republicanism, rights, and secularism—in a word, Enlightenment. The conflation of white supremacy with Western civilization is really an attempt to defame the latter as a delegitimizing step in dismantling the modern nation-state, subvert rational jurisprudence, to replace the individual member of the species with racial genres, and to overthrow the Westphalian system to bring about a transnational corporate state.

So here’s a discussion between Glenn Loury and Amy Wax about the perils of anti-white racism as well as pro-white sentiment.

This afternoon, at East High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the school my son attends, a student let another student in through an unsecured door. The principal, Lori Frerk, in conjunction with the Green Bay Police Department (GBPD), locked down the school. An investigation turned up a gun in one of the student’s locker. After further investigation, Green Bay Public Area Schools (GBPAS) and GBPD determined that there was no intent to harm students or staff.

I wrote the principal seeking follow up. I told her that I am a criminologist and that my son attends East High. She responded with a cut-and-paste from the GBAPS statement I shared in my email to her. I responded asking why the kid had a gun in his locker. I mean, a kid has a gun in his locker, shows up to school, another kid lets him in through an unsecured door, and there is no intent to harm anybody. Nothing to see here. Move on. No. Let’s not move on.

In the meantime… I receive an email from GBAPS that we’re going to virtual learning—again. They can’t keep our public spaces safe, so we go to virtual learning.

The principal’s response: FERPA and confidentiality. FERPA stands for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 USC § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99). But I wasn’t asking about the student’s personal information. I understand FERPA. I was asking why there was a gun on campus. This question is the equivalent of a statement that it was determined that there was no intent to harm others. GBAPS is already speaking publicly about intent. The GBAPS statement even describes the circumstances. If my question violates FERPA, then so does GBAPS’ statement.

That was the substance of what I wrote back. So parents can’t know why there was a gun at the school their children attend. They’re supposed to be satisfied with “further investigation determined the student did not intent to harm students or staff.” Given the scenario, that determination is hard to swallow. That’s why I asked for follow up. It’s my business. I’m not satisfied.

This is the technocracy in action. Elites are running the show and the proles are only supposed to know what the technocrats want them to know. I’m a criminologist with a vested interest in this situation and I’m treated as if I don’t understand the law and I have no right to obtain crucial information about what’s going on at the school my child attends.

According to the Green Bay Press Gazette—”Handgun found in student’s locker at East High School; Green Bay schools grades 6-12 to have online instruction rest of the week—Police are recommending prosecutors charge two students in connection to bringing a weapon into a school. The students were placed in secure detention with the juvenile authority. But they were not planning to use the gun, GBPD said. Well, that’s a little bit more information. But it doesn’t tell me why there was a gun in a jacket in a locker at my son’s high school. I am not feeling very reassured.

This incident follows three social media threats made last week toward another Green Bay High School, Preble. I joked on Facebook that social media threats of violence were becoming the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm to get out of a test. This incident today has put me in a more serious mood. Across the district, twice as many students were absent last week than in a regular week, this, according to district superintendent Stephen Murley, the result of parent and student concern about school safety. They’re right to be concerned. I apologize for my quip.

As some of you know, I have written opinion pieces and testified before the school board in opposition to the trend in physical security in our schools. On June 8, 2018. I published a piece in the Green Bay Press Gazette (picked up and carried by USA Today), titled “Police in schools does not make them safer.” On June 14, I published more radical piece in TruthOut’s Buzzfeed “How Garrisoning Schools With Armed Resource Officers Normalizes Authoritarianism.” In that piece I write, “Instead of controlling guns like every other rational democratic country, communities are asked to model their schools after the garrison, generating profit for weapons and security firms.” Campus Reform and Accuracy in Academia criticized my views.  

I formed that opinion in the midst of sharply declining crime rates due to general strengthening of public safety. I am a libertarian, and the less control we have over the individual the better. I am still committed to libertarian principle. And I am still committed to keeping guns out of our schools (while supporting gun ownership for hunting and personal protection, a view I have more strongly gravitated towards given what’s going on in the country).

However, governments have since abandoned, or at least relaxed, commitment to public safety. This is thanks to antiracism and the woke progressive insanity infecting our urban spaces. All this talk of de-policing and prison abolition and the rhetoric of social justice, i.e., the preaching of ethnic and racial resentment and false attribution of personal failure, is undermining the legitimacy of our social institutions. The predictable consequence of this is social disorganization and demoralization and rising crime and violence.

If your opinions don’t change in the face of evidence, then you have failed the rationality test. Our nation is in the middle of an explosion in criminal violence in the United States. Green Bay, Wisconsin is experiencing a sharp uptick in criminal violence. We can’t move on. We have to get back to what works. End the woke nonsense and return to responsible limited government focused on public safety and values of personal accountability. Those are basic and sound republican commitments. I would have written those editorials a bit differently if I had them to do over again.

I sound like a liberal mugged by reality. Remember that old line? Well, I’m still a liberal. Still mugged by reality, though.

Folks are private messaging me to explain critical race theory to them, so I thought readers of Freedom and Reason would find a blog entry useful. I have blogged about CRT quite a bit here. However, my critique works from a Marxist dialectical position and it’s perhaps not immediately accessible to those not well-versed in Marxist thought (like with Einstein, most people who think they know Marx’s ideas don’t really). Therefore, in this blog entry, I conscript an anti-Marxist/anti-CRT activist to assist me in conveying an understanding of CRT that is more easily digestible. At the same time, I critique the thinking of that activist and his comrades to show why those interested in actual leftwing praxis should reject CRT.

The anti-Marxist/anti-CRT activist who I will use for these purposes is Christopher Rufo. He has authored numerous articles on critical race theory, many of which can be read at City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute. For the present essay, I will use a piece he published at USA Today: “What I discovered about critical race theory in public schools and why it shouldn’t be taught.” He gets a lot right in his work, but he gets one piece wrong and it’s a doozy. He portrays CRT as neo-Marxist. This is somewhat understandable given that CRT claims to be leftwing and appeals to Karl Marx, while Rufo is a right-wing populist at war with progressivism. But CRT is not Marxist but instead a betrayal of leftwing praxis—it’s a deception developed and advanced by cultural managers subservient to corporate state ambitions.

Here’s what Rufo gets right: “Critical race theory is an academic discipline that claims that the United States was founded on racism, oppression and white supremacy—and that these forces are still at the root of our society. Some supporters of critical race theory claim it is merely a ‘lens,’ arguing that ‘race is a social construct’ and that racism is ‘system’ not individual.” Rufo argues that “this is a strategic retreat that fails to grapple with some of the theory’s more controversial concepts.” What are these? Here’s where Rufo’s explanation goes wrong: “Critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dialectic of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and Black [sic]. But the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.” “In simple terms,” Rufo continues, “critical race theory can be seen as a form of ‘race-based Marxism’; they share a common conceptual framework. Critical race theory was derived from ‘critical theory,’ a 20th century ideology sometimes called ‘Neo-Marxism.’”

So, while Rufo is correct about the way the logic of the class struggle is appropriated by CRT with race categories substituted (and then reduced in a vulgar manner to black and white racial terms), he is wrong to call CRT “race-based Marxism.” It is also incorrect to call CRT “neo-Marxist,” which is the way many CRT advocates describe themselves, if not simply “Marxist.”

Moreover, critical theory is not a monolithic system. At first approximation, there are two types. The first is that formulated by such Frankfurt School luminaries as Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer, and Franz Neumann, a synthesis mainly composed of the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud. That type constitutes a powerful critique of the corporate state and its administrative apparatus.

The second is Herbert Marcuse’s brand of critical theory, which was developed synthesizing with the first type the reactionary phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of the Nazi regime in Germany during that totalitarian moment. Marcuse, author of Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, dresses up the gloomy and joyless style of Heideggerian thought in language he finds in Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. 

It is onto Marcuse’s corruption of critical theory that CRT proponents latch. One can see this plainly in the adoption of Marcuse’s concept of “repressive tolerance,” in which the liberal value of free speech is jettisoned for the sake of ideological warfare, censorship moving on the wings of power. Marcuse is thus not properly a neo-Marxist, but a neo-Hegelian thinker (see my essays The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse and Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory?). I will explain what I mean by neo-Hegelian in a moment. It will suffice at this point to identify it as a totalitarian philosophy.

I would also like to note the work of two critics of Marcuse for those who wish to follow up on this. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre accuses Marcuse of right Hegelianism, calling him a “pre-Marxist” thinker.” Leszek Kołakowski, a critic of Marxism who, in my view is unconvincing in his argument that Stalinism represented not a deformation of Marxism but its logical outcome (it is beyond the scope of this essay to take up that argument), was nonetheless perceptive in describing Marcuse as anti-Marxist, jettisoning the man’s critique of the Hegelian dialectic (which I take up in the next section) and substituting for the politics of class struggle Freudian notions of love and happiness (there is a very good four-part documentary on this by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self). In the third volume of his Main Currents of Marxism, Kolakowski argues that Marcuse envisions a world “ruled despotically by an enlightened group … realiz[ing] in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and throw[ing] off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.” Sound familiar?

* * *

For Marx, race is ideology, like religion and other forms of alienation. Marx’s treatment of alienation is important to grasp in order to understand the corpus of Marx’s output. For Marx, human beings are distinct individuals who possess a species-being (or species-essence, both of which are translated from the German word Gattungswesen) by dent of sharing the same genome (a biological reality unknown at the time that, like Darwin, Marx anticipated). With the emergence of property and the state, human beings, who had heretofore existed in a state of “primitive communism,” the original form of society confirmed by archeologists and anthropologists as gatherer and hunter arrangements, became segmented into social classes out of which ideologies, such as religion, race, and gender, emerged, to justify unjust social arrangements rooted in exploitative economic structures. History is understood as a succession of such modes of production (ancient, feudalist, and so on), with capitalism (at the time of Marx’s life) being the latest. Race is thus part of the superstructure that facilitates capitalist hegemony. This is why Marx was so exuberant in his letter to Abraham Lincoln upon the occasion of Lincoln’s reelection to the presidency of the United States; Marx saw potential in the resolution of the Civil War: the elimination of racism and the subsequent unification of the world class.

As such, Karl Marx’s thought is the diametric opposite of that which we find in the work of such CRT advocates as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Columbia Law School professor most often credited with establishing the discipline. In contrast to Crenshaw and her ilk, who think in race essentialist terms, Marx is an egalitarian who endeavors in his work to persuade the working class to organize to dismantle the superstructure of race and other ideologies. As I have stressed numerous times in my writings, Marx would be the last person to advocate for organizing political and cultural struggle around race. He would immediately see through the deception of replacing equality, which concerns individuals, with “equity,” which concerns identity groups. Marx was an individualist and a humanist. His work establishes the material foundation for universal human rights. CRT is collectivist and authoritarian. Its work transmits totalitarian sensibilities to those vulnerable to crude feelings of resentment.

What makes Marx’s thought difficult for folks like Rufo to understand is that Marx proceeds by the dialectical method, a convoluted method (not in his hands, of course) developed by a group of German idealist philosophers in the late eighteenth century, its principle advocates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It is Hegel’s approach to the dialectic in particular that Marx takes up. But he does not leave it as he finds it. Inspired by Hegel’s rebellious student Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx transforms the dialectic and draws from it the opposite conclusion. In doing so, Marx establishes the foundation of social science. His great discoveries flow from this method, discoveries that, as Engels declares them, put Marx alongside Newton and Darwin in the pantheon of revolutionary thinkers.

In the preface to the first volume of Capital, his magisterial critique of political economy, Marx writes, “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [a Platonic construction of a mystical artisan fashioning and maintaining the physical universe] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

Marx says it is not nothing else than, but it’s more complicated than this. Marx writes, “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” He explains: “In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things [emphasis mine]. In its rational form [the form Marx would make it take] it is a scandal and an abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors [represented to today by the woke progressive], because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”

Before a reader objects that CRT wants to radically transform the United States, he must check his assumptions. I will take this up in my next blog entry, but quickly here, CRT is designed to prevent radical transformation of the West in the direction sought by Marx, that is, towards democratic socialism and the emancipation of the individual from capitalist control, to instead continue the fundamental societal transformation that began after the Civil War with the emergence of the corporate state and the transnationalist project to establish a new world order founded upon the logic of bureaucratic collectivism upon which will sit the new aristocracy. As I will explain in that pending essay, it was in the defeat of populism and the institutionalization of progressivism that the original struggle between left and right (and the meaning of those words) is negated. It is only now that the populists, however problematic the character of their consciousness, have remerged and are raising consciousness about the pending finalization of the corporatist neo-feudalist global order.

It is crucial to understand this point. Indeed, if you do not understand this you can neither understand Marx nor Hegel and only partially understand the present inflection point. (One of the problems I am attempting to address in my work is how that populism, however welcome it is in light of the alternative, lacks a Marxist character.) In a word, this difference is the linchpin. Hegel writes, “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. The state is the actuality of concrete freedom [i.e. totalitarianism]. The strength of the state is lies in the unity of its universal end with the particular interest of individual [the individual subsumed into the nation in ethnic terms].” Elsewhere, Hegel writes, “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” My commentary in brackets is to make sure you understand what Hegel mystifies. It is progressives who glorify the total state and the destruction of liberalism and republicanism. Their desire marks the terminal point of individual autonomy and liberty.

Marx is telling the reader that Hegel has matters upside-down. Marx is an atheist. He sees, as did Feuerbach, that Hegel’s appeal to God is an expression of alienation. Crucially, Hegel confuses the predicate and the subject. The world is not an expression of God, i.e., ideology, but rather God, i.e., ideology, is an expression of the world. Ideology is a mystification of the world because the world is corrupted by its division into social classes, a condition marked by exploitative relations. The solution to man’s woes is therefore not in religious perfection in a state with such a character (heavens no!), but the overthrow of existing material conditions, which evaporates ideology. As such, man’s consciousness becomes isometric with reality. In other words, the obstacles that mystify knowledge are removed and the lies at once exposed.

Marx explains in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Had Hegel started with the real subjects as the bases of the state it would not have been necessary for him to let the state become subjectified in a mystical way. ‘However, the truth of subjectivity,’ says Hegel, ‘is attained only in a subject, and the truth of personality only in a person.’ This too is a mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of subjects and personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of considering them to be predicates of their subjects, Hegel makes the predicates independent and then lets them be subsequently and mysteriously converted into their subjects.”

Here, Marx brilliantly identifies the problem with idealism: reification, or the problem of misplaced concreteness, a fallacious move that turns abstractions into apparent concrete reality. You can see this explicit in CRT’s race essentialism, which treats individuals as mere personifications of abstract racial categories which are treated as concrete actors. Hence a disparity in a group-level statistical outcome is treated as if it were an individual act of racial discrimination, and, on this basis, a reason for appropriating the wealth produced by individuals seen only in terms of their racial categories—in a word “reparations.” CRT moves as a religion, replete with notions of collective guilt, collective punishment, and original sin.

Marx explains our present-day troubles one hundred and seventy-eight years before the moment: “The existence of the predicate is the subject; thus the subject is the existence of subjectivity, etc. Hegel makes the predicates, the object independent, but independent as separated from their real independence, their subject. Subsequently, and because of this, the real subject appears to be the result; whereas one has to start from the real subject and examine its objectification. The mystical substance becomes the real subject and the real subject appears to be something else, namely a moment of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts from the predicates of universal determination instead of from the real Ens (hypokimenou, subject), and because there must be a bearer of this determination, the mystical idea becomes this bearer. This is the dualism: Hegel does not consider the universal to be the actual essence of the actual, finite thing, i.e. of the existing determinate thing, nor the real Ens to be the true subject of the infinite.” Marx continues, concretely: “Accordingly, sovereignty, the essence of the state, is here first conceived to be an independent being; it is objectified. Then, of course, this object must again become subject. However the subject then appears to be a self-incarnation of sovereignty, which is nothing but the objectified spirit of the state’s subjects.”

As an ideology of the corporate state, critical race theory stands with Hegel and against Marx. CRT, helped by the corruption of Marcuse (whose most notorious student is Angela Davis, a CRT icon), is a regression to Hegel. CRT subsumes the individual into abstract categories organized around a racial ideology that perpetuate alienation. CRT is not a liberation ideology, as it claims, but a thought suppression system. CRT is a specific doctrine in the religion of racism, but it no less racist.

CRT hides its anti-Marxism behind the appeal to neo-Marxism and critical theory (which has fooled Rufo and his comrades), the particular brand of which rose in prominence because the ruling class understood its function in mystifying corporate power and bankrolled it, insinuating it into colleges and universities, embracing it in corporate board rooms, and now forcing it into our public schools. It is being installed in public education in order to raise up a generation subservient to the technocracy, which is what the first type of critical theory, with all its defects, endeavored to warn us about. The power elite seek a generation who will be incapable of knowing there was a time before totalitarian corporate governance by making present and future totalitarianism appear as the air we breathe.

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The logic of the dialectic Marx employs is Hegel’s but with Hegel stood on his feet. This is a metaphor for rationally and empirically accessing the real world to explain illusions, rather than trying to grasp the real world by making its surface appearances the starting point. Critical race theory reverses this move, standing Hegel back on his head. In doing so, CRT turns Marxism upside-down, which is no Marxism at all. CRT cannot be Marxist whatever it says of itself. It must be neo-Hegelian. That’s its logic—as Marx himself showed.

Christopher Rufo and other populists cannot understand this because they do not bother to study Marxism, an endeavor to which I have devoted a lifetime. Of course, it’s not as if Rufo, James Lindsey, Jordan Peterson, and the rest would change their rhetoric if they did know this. So perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe they do know it, but mystify it to protect their turf—which today takes the form of dopamine hits on social media.

This confusing leftwing praxis with progressivism is the great error of populists and progressives alike. For those progressives who fancy themselves Marxists, the neo-Hegelianism they think is Marxism is a feature of their false consciousness. It prepares them for assumption into the corporate state. Believing CRT is stealth Marxism betrays their ignorance of Marxism, but it also exposes their ignorance of the history and purpose of progressivism. Their ignorance of both explains their faith in progressivism as leftwing praxis. I’m trying mightily to educate them, but they are remarkably resistant (it’s the same quality of resistance we see in their belittling of the pandemic truth movement). I’m up against the most basic of obstacles: the desire to not have to admit that what one believes in with all his might is a big lie.

Despite this error on the right, Rufo and his ilk correctly identify the concrete character of CRT—it is racist. Rufo does not believe this because he is right wing. Progressives would like for you to believe this because they desperately want to believe this. Accusing a person of being a witch is also self-serving; it keeps the accuser of question his religion. Rather Rufo believes this because he is not so deluded by progressivism that he can’t see it. Once you get your head out of wokeness, you cannot help not seeing it.

Because they operate from a right-librarian standpoint, populists intuitively understand that the emergence of the corporate state threatens not only individual liberty, but capitalism as we knew it. They can see that CRT is backed by corporate power—and that means something is terribly askew. A defect becomes a virtue. Perhaps no ideology comes without some insight.

To be sure, it sounds rather goofy to suppose a cabal of cultural Marxists is behind critical race theory. But the goofiness is fixed by admitting that CRT and the rest of the woke progressive clown show isn’t Marxists at all. It’s a right Hegelian movement that is ignorant of its origins and reactionary character. Because if CRT were actually Marxist (which it cannot possibly be), then you would likely know nothing about it because it would be nowhere.

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. —the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

As Democrats have done in several past elections over the decades, Republicans disputed the November 3, 2020 election that resulted in a loss for Donald Trump. There is a constitutional process by which such disputes can be resolved. Congress was in the midst of that process when proceedings were disrupted by citizens entering the Capitol building. In the end, the disruption prevented the process from proceeding and Biden was determined to have won enough electors to assume the Office of President.

Prior to that disruption, the President spoke at a rally that occurred entirely within the parameters of the First Amendment. I am not defending the violent actions of the handful who broke the law on January 6, 2021. I do, of course, wish to see their civil liberties and rights protected. However, this essay is a defense of the right of the President of the United States and his supporters to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Conflating the peaceful rally with the riot at the Capitol is an attempt to delegitimize the exercise of First Amendment by those the establishment considers its enemies.

This is protected speech: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” This is not incitement to violence, even if these words were not in association: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” However, certainly those words make obvious the meaning of “fight” in this context: this was (and is) an argument, a conflict, a confrontation, a contest, a disagreement, a dispute, a quarrel, a struggle. We all know this is what the President meant when he uttered these words at the January 6, 2021 rally in the nation’s capitol.

By conflating the massive January 6 rally, a paradigm of activities protected by the First Amendment, with the much smaller crowd that entered the Capitol building, some of whom engaged in activities not covered by the Constitution (most peacefully ambled about the premises), many of them languishing in Washington DC jails denied their right to habeas corpus, the Democrats and the Republicans who have joined them are effectively declaring that the applicability of the First Amendment depends upon who is exercising those rights.

The conflation is embodied in the impeachment brief authored by Democrats, which claimed that Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.” In light of the violent mob action in Washington DC, June 2020, repeatedly portrayed as “peaceful protest” by corporate state media and the Democratic Party, the message was clear: if you are progressive, then you are allowed to exercise your First Amendment right in a myriad of ways not covered by the First Amendment.

If you are a progressive, you are even allowed to occupy buildings. Don’t believe me? What about Madison, Wisconsin 2011? Did you forget that thousands of progressives occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol building for several days. (Did you miss my January 10th, 2021 essay on that? See The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings.) But, if you’re a conservative or a populist, then you are by definition a mob and the First Amendment doesn’t apply. You’re peaceful protests will be conflated with the violent actions of a handful of people who may or may not have been associated with your rally—who may or may not have been part of an “insurrection.”

This is not how rights works. A right is not available to some and not others. Exercising one’s rights to assembly and speech do not dependent upon the political or religious character of their contents. A right is universal and inalienable. The First Amendment concerns such rights. Each and every individual is entitled to them. The January 6 Commission is a project to deny the “deplorables,” that is those who support Donald Trump those rights established by the United States Constitution. This project dovetails with the greater countermovement by progressives to suppress the populist-nationalist movement, see, for example, is the systematic weakening of electoral integrity.

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By the way, if you didn’t see in the text messages from January 6, 2021 that Liz Cheney publicly released in bad faith, that those around Trump, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, were surprised by the behavior of some of those in Washington DC that day, then you missed the most important thing about those text messages.

Our species has been subjected to coronaviruses since at least the 1930s, when this virus was first identified. It likely existed long before it was discovered; it’s not as if humans suddenly started catching cold in the twentieth century! It was shown in the 1960s that the coronavirus is responsible for cold-like illness when test subjects are exposed to the virus. Three strains were named in that decade and, in the 1990s, several variants of coronavirus were named using letters of the Greek alphabet. (I review this history here: Faking Genius for Power and Profit.)

NBC News is reporting today that the “CDC finds first handful of U.S. omicron cases have been mostly mild.” Omicron is a variant indicating evolution of the SARS coronavirus (likely lab-enhanced) towards the typical coronaviruses that you and I have been exposed to our entire lives. It’s also likely that omicron is mild because it’s infecting people previously infected with coronavirus. Previous infection by coronavirus, as with other cold viruses, such as adenovirus and rhinovirus, provides antibodies that are protective against many variants of a virus. As doctors and parents know, children normally get several colds every year and coronavirus is standard among those.

I am telling you this because, while it is true that coronavirus is here to stay and that we will have to live with it, this claim is misleading since the coronavirus has always been with us. We were subjected to an especially virulent form of a virus that we have almost certainly encountered before, which we experienced as a cold, if we experienced any symptoms at all. Even with SARS-CoV-2, the experience of most people is cold-like or asymptomatic. The severity of the disease never warranted the panic with which it has become associated. (I have discussed the reasons for this in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason.)

One difference between previous coronavirus infections and the present situation is that the invention of the PCR test that allows detection of a virus in people with mild symptoms and no symptoms. Testing thus allows a cold virus to be redefined as a serious infection that potentially causes death, even though the risk of death for a healthy individual is near zero. People who experienced no symptoms were told they had a dangerous disease on the basis of a test they would never have otherwise taken if it were not for the COVID-19 panic. Parents are told they must vaccinate children with novel mRNA technology to protect them from a virus that presents no threat to them. And many parents dutifully stood their children in line for jabs.

The combination of the PCR test and general ignorance of coronavirus, along with constant hyping of dire but rare outcomes, allowed authorities and experts to portray the ordinary as extraordinary and generate global panic. If we don’t acknowledge this fact and admit to ourselves that coronaviruses, like adenoviruses and rhinoviruses, are standard cold viruses in our environment, and that they are not only no big deal but necessary for proper development of our immune systems, we will continue to behave in ways that are detrimental to public health. This is especially true for children, who need to be exposed to pathogens to develop normally physiologically and for whom the risk of injury from the vaccine is far greater than risk from the disease itself.

The notion that vaccines are the solution to the problems of diseases is an extreme position that we must resist. We don’t need to vaccinate for viruses generally, as most viruses are mild and we have evolved over millions of years an immune system to deal with them. We do not vaccinate for other cold viruses, such as adenoviruses and rhinoviruses (although I am concerned that Big Pharma will roll out vaccines for those, as well, and a large proportion of parents will line their children up for the jabs). The elderly (those over sixty) and those with certain preexisting conditions could benefit from the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. But most people won’t. And just as people did not need the vaccine for coronaviruses over the last almost one hundred years that we have known about coronaviruses, there will be no need to vaccinate against coronaviruses going forward.

The government agencies, medical-industrial complex, and the corporate media treating coronaviruses as novel and dangerous pathogens in our environment does not stand in place of the science and reason and history that tells us that coronaviruses have been endemic to human populations for almost a century as a known pathogen in our environment and that they are generally harmless (if not annoying). It is irrational to think the authorities of a monopoly capitalist society could stand in place of science and reason. However, it is precisely this irrationality that provides a ready source with which to manufacture modern-day moral panics.

Understanding Moral Panic

One of the most important activities of sociological work is the identification of moral panics and situations of mass hysteria, a problem we call social contagion, where a changed definition of a normal thing or activity in our environment causes a significant proportion of the population prone to irrational thoughts and behavior to panic and think and behave even more irrationally. However, irrationality can serve as means to rational ends. Moral panics are often useful towards certain goals, such as financial gain and obedience to authority.

Moral panics may be generated around almost anything. You may remember the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s, especially remarkable given that they occurs in modern secular societies. The Satanic panic remains one of the most notorious manifestations of mass hysteria in American history. Pushers of the panic asserted without evidence the existence of a terrifying phenomenon they described as “Satanic ritual abuse.” They said it was occurring in daycare centers across North America and even in Europe. Scores of people suffered on the account of the satanic scare, not from ritual abuse, of course, but from the hysteria surrounding it.

There were complex cultural and societal reasons for the satanic ritual scare, but the salient point to make here is that cultural and societal factors, generally inaccessible to ordinary people without social scientific training or curiosity, were interpreted as the presence of transcendent evil by those in authority. In this case, the interpretation was provided by moral entrepreneurs using faith-belief in religion to translate anxiety and trepidation into a meaningful public response. Likewise, there are complex cultural and societal reasons for the present moral panic surrounding COVID-19. These are being translated by moral entrepreneurs, as well, this time by those in business firms and governmental agencies. They generate panic by exploiting popular faith-belief in scientism, a religious-like attitude or ideology among the science-illiterate that leverages scientific-sounding jargon to manufacture gravity around claims that are beneficial to those manufacturing panic.

I called this a moral panic in March of 2020, and nothing has occurred to cause me to change that assessment (see When a Virus Goes Viral). Indeed, just today, reported in the Israel newspaper Haaretz, we hear news that, in an attempt to encourage the children’s vaccination drive, Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, warned his cabinet that two British schoolboys died of omicron. In fact, these boys had died of the virus well before the new variant was reported. Moreover, as statistics across Europe and North America make clear, influenza is far deadlier to children than the most virulent variants of SARS-CoV-2 yet there is no vaccine mandate for the flu vaccine, which despite having a superior safety profile compared to the COVID-19 vaccine, is just as leaky and unreliable. Also today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reported one case of an individual who died with the omicron variant, and then asked the public to put aside reports of mild infection and receive a booster shot of a vaccine that has proven to cover little to no immunity to SARS-CoV-2.

The imposition of external demands and rules has given the present moral panic a hard shell that is difficult to crack. The satanic ritual scare relied upon inner compulsion born of religious faith commitment. But it never gripped a majority of the population, despite lasting years across a fourth of the planet’s geography. The COVID-19 hysteria is not only an expression of an inner compulsion to cower in the face of a virus, but it is global and externally imposed by authorities in both the public and the private sector. The satanic ritual scare is rather insignificant compared to the COVID-19 panic. The actions of governments have greatly magnified the harm caused by the virus, actions that have objectively caused far greater harm across societal institutions—the economy, the family, individual and human rights—that the reaction to fantasized satanic rituals ever could.

But we don’t have to hang onto mass hysteria. To be sure, it feels overwhelming for both those who continue to support the lockdowns, the mandates, and passports, and those who oppose the authoritarianism these impositions signal. But we can learn to let go of the panic, and begin pushing back against it, by understanding that it is just that, a panic, and that those who seek and find in mass hysteria financial gain and obedience to authority do not represent our best interests. We need to reclaim our autonomy and dignity and overthrow the regime of fear. Knowledge is power. But only potentially. You have to act on that knowledge to change the situation.

For those of you who regularly watch CNN, maybe you’re numb to it, but if you pay attention (wake up!) you can’t miss the messages constantly telling you that the programming is brought to you by Pfizer. CNN is Pfizer’s propaganda arm.

This is why you don’t know that SARS-CoV-2 does not produce severe illness in most of those who contract the virus. According to scientific polling, more than 40 percent of progressive Democrats believe half of those who are infected wind up on the hospital. It’s why you don’t know that natural immunity is far superior to that provided by the vaccine.

Do you ever wonder why they never told you that COVID mostly affects people who are overweight and very old and infirm? Why didn’t they tell you about zinc, vitamin D, and all the rest of it? Why didn’t you hear anything critical of the way the corporate state pushed panic and authoritarianism—the lockdowns, masks, vaccines?

You just went along with it as if there were no conflict of interest between Pfizer bankrolling the propaganda that claimed to be objective new programming. What happened to your critical thinking skills? The ideology of scientism trumped them.
You also bought into the Russian collusion hoax. You bought into the Ukraine affair. You bought into the myth of racist police hunting down black men. You bought into the myth of systemic racism and all the rest of the nonsense peddled by the grievance industries.

There is no excuse for abandoning reason, for rejecting critical thinking. We all saw you swallow these big lies whole. You did it in a very public way. You adorned your Facebook profiles with slogans designed by corporate state propagandists. And you attacked and ridiculed those who kept their heads and demanded evidence and reason. We won’t forget this.

The worst offenders have been teachers. Of all people, teachers bear the greatest burden to make sure they aren’t misleading and harming their students. I’m embarrassed for my profession watching all the teachers and professors not merely failing to challenge the propaganda, but taking it up and disseminating it. I didn’t keep a list. But I have a good memory.

I had intended to publish this essay several days ago, but I have been consumed by the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (and other things) and so I had to push it back in the queue. It’s still timely since the popular movement that has put the Democrats on their back foot shows no sign of waning.

Terry McAuliffe, Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, asserted that parents should not tell teachers how to teach. He also denied critical race theory is being taught in Virginia public schools. Denials have been commonplace in the months leading up to the election, but so have admissions and defenses of CRT teachings and expressions of concern that legislation against CRT could have a chilling effect on teacher’s lessons. (See State Media Defends Critical Theory; California Moves Ahead with Divisive Antiracism Curriculum; CNN’s Maegan Vazquez Defends Racially Divisive Curriculum)

It didn’t go well for McAuliffe. He lost to the Republican contender, Glenn Youngkin. And not by a little considering the politics of the state (there are approximately a million more Democratic voters in Virginia than Republican voters). The party rode his coattails into defeat. Democrats had a lot riding on that election. They confess that 2022 depended on it. They understood how significant a loss in Virginia would be. Especially to a Trump-endorsed candidate.

There is a big lie being told about critical race theory. You’ve heard it. It goes like this: “Critical race theory is an esoteric legal theory only taught in elite law schools.” I’m an educator. I am surrounded by educators. I’m an also an expert on critical race theory (CRT). I have a PhD with a specialization in law and society. I was in graduate school in the 1990s when they rolled out the “theory.” I know what’s being taught and I grasp the contradictions (see, e.g., Committing the Crime it Condemns).

CRT sometimes goes under the name of “antiracism.” But this is code for racism. Race-neutrality—or colorblindness, as MLK, Jr.’s dream had it (which Nikole Hannah Jones is now denying)—is the only true antiracism. The antiracism CRT preaches is opposed to teaching children not to think in racial terms; the point of antiracist education from the CRT standpoint is to make sure children do (see Colorblindness versus Colorfulness: The Big Trick). It’s all about raising race consciousness and not at all about promoting colorblindness and individualism. In fact, antiracists believe colorblindness is racist. Think about that. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is racist. We mustn’t allow Nikole Hannah Jones to have her cake and eat it, too.

Critical race theory is a doctrine that programs young minds to believe that whites are as a class race oppressors who, however objectively deprived they are (remember, there are many more poor whites than poor blacks), enjoy unearned privilege and that blacks are oppressed and as a class kept underprivileged for the sake of systemic white advantage.

Not only is this false and hateful doctrine being taught to children, but it is also being deeply embedded in professional training across the country. Indeed, indoctrinating professionals is a crucial step in preparing educational and the other institutions that administer our lives for the practice of indoctrinating children not only in race consciousness, but in the preachment that the white race is the worst race to be. (See The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think). 

Perhaps you have been following the protests at school board meetings and legislation passed or working its way through the process at states across the nation (Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standard). If you listened carefully, you heard the same people who deny that critical race theory is being taught to children decrying restrictions on its teaching on the grounds of the First Amendment.

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Anti-racism is a “religion in all but name” that indoctrinates black people to believe they are “eternally victimized,” argues John McWhorter in his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Like Christianity, CRT advances such religious constructs as intergenerational guilt and collective punishment—judging individuals for what their ancestors or those with the same skin color may have done (See God is Everywhere—On the Ontology of Systemic Racism and the Faith-Belief of the Progressive; The Metaphysics of the Antiracist Inquisition; The Irrational Cognitive Style of Woke Progressivism).

It is amazing that such small thinkers as Ibram X Kendi, Nicole Hannah Jones, and Robin DiAngelo can have such big impacts on our society. But this is the way it is with religious ideology and its analogs. If it were science, they would operationalize their term and study the impact of the phenomenon they abstract according the demands of reason. Observers should declare policies racist because they are associated with racial disparities. That gets the causal order backwards. Racial disparities do not in themselves prove racism. Ask the question: what is racist about the policies? This must first be established, and that requires defining racism in a way that opens claims about it to falsification. Kendi won’t answer the question. What he says is not an answer. It is, as McWhorter has pointed out, a circular argument. This is where we are in our public discourse. This is the nonsense being taught to children in public schools. First they lie about teaching it (they’re still denying it), then they smear critics as racist. 

Kendi, Jones, and DiAngelo are not original thinkers. They are small minds repeating big ideas. The big ideas are drawn from CRT. (For a sampling of my writings on this, see Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; see also Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism). Administrators and teachers are carrying out an agenda that is designed generate antagonisms and sow racial division.

This is the explicit design of CRT. Kendi, Jones, and DiAngelo are public-facing operatives. Instructional materials drawn from CRT directs teachers to indoctrinate students with the following notions: the permanence of racism, the endemic nature of white supremacy in American society, whiteness as property, interest convergence, and a critique of liberalism. Read my blog—deep dives abound there, but I discuss these ideas in this blog and provide additional insights given developments of late.

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The rhetoric of antiracism hides religion behind secular jargon to avoid the demands of the Separation Clause of the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to indoctrinate children in religious faith in public schools. So they insist that antiracist indoctrination is the teaching of history. Not only is antiracism religious thinking, but it’s also racist thinking. How did so many educators become brainwashed to believe that it is imperative to teach racist doctrine to children? Because not only are children brainwashed; their teachers are brainwashed, too. (See Are Teachers Really All In on Critical Race Theory?)

The deep method works through the transformed consciousness of the educator and the administrator. The language of antiracism hides racism by its very name and too few people have the critical thinking skills necessary for understanding what’s happening. That so few people have the necessarily critical thinking skills is a result of public education. The deeply indoctrinated don’t believe what they’re teaching is racist, even while it denigrates entire races of people, mainly white people, but also Asians (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite.), and blames them for the problems of another race, black people, who are in turn taught to blame their problems and situation on whites (and Asians). Replace “whites” with “Jews” and “blacks” with “Germans” and you will see it for what it is (see Reparations and Blood Guilt).

The deep method can also be found in the actions of those teachers who, suspecting or knowing CRT is racist, are pressured by administrators and colleagues to carry out the agenda nonetheless for the sake of keeping the job to which they’ve devoted their lives. This is social coercion, sometimes downplayed as peer pressure, a powerfully influential force in the lives of people whose existence is spent primarily in one institutional activity. Indeed, the ubiquity of CRT in the lives of educators amounts to life in what sociologists call a “total institution.” If you know teachers, k-12 and in higher education, even social life is largely spent around other teachers. It’s a lot like the experience of police officers and other occupations that tend to demand the near totality of the employee’s life. Social life thus revolves around occupational and professional identity.

The deep method involves dissimulating the central teaching (dissimulation is the process of hiding or masking the actual existence or purpose of some thing), which is the destruction of what CRT doctrine presents as “white culture” or “whiteness,” e.g., attacking those attributes that require no talent (admittedly difficult for some people for reasons that have nothing to do with race) but that increase the likelihood of success across the life course, attributes such as such as attitude, body language, energy, organization, passion, preparedness, receptive to and appreciative of feedback.

This is what diversity, equity, and inclusion training is designed to do: render problematic (a postmodernist move) those expectations that treat humans as persons (individualism) and judge them based on a common standard of conduct (equality). The assumption is that so-called “white” standards and values constitute a racist strategy that reproduces “white privilege” and holds down members of others races whose cultures do not value the traditional standards. The goal is to make the objective explanation for failures in life appear as a racist ideology and then use this deceit to explode the prevailing norms of success in order to bring the successful down to the level of the fruits of alleged systemic failure.  

I just learned that my university is conducting a workshop on “white emotionality, a woke term defined as a “complex set of emotional responses to race-focused discussions,” a complex set of emotional responses “that maintain or support racial dominance.” The workshop will “consider the role of white emotionality in teaching and learning.” In these workshop, BIPOCs and their allies condescend to teach their white colleagues how to think and behave, their authority to do so deriving from “historical trauma” and “lived experience” that grant them privileged access to a truth. This is the “epistemic privilege of the marginalized and oppressed.” White people don’t have access to this truth because they see the world through the “perpetrator’s gaze.” White supremacy has blunted their sensibilities. The workshop is designed to interrupt whiteness to refocus the white lens, adjusting the gaze to reflect that of the victim. 

The workshop is a struggle session that redefines resistance to the abstract claims social justice types make that center race in conversations about inequality in a manner that valorizes notions of white privilege and systemic racism as explanations for disparities as illegitimate expressions of white supremacy. This is what critical race theory looks like in action. If a BIPOC says white people are racist and a white person disagrees (which he should, since the vast majority of white people are not in fact racist), then the disagreement is not worthy of consideration but rather is an emotional reaction to his white fragility. White fragility is defined as white people’s inability to accept that they are racially privileged, that their achievements are due to the prevailing system of racial dominance, i.e., white supremacy, and that those achievements came at the expense of black and brown suffering.

* * *

Critical race theory centers race in theorizing history and social relations. Race becomes the pivot upon which relevant history turns. The primacy of race is axiomatic. Social structures in the United States and during the period of British colonization of North America—really, throughout the world, since whites are the colonial masters (hence the affinity with Third-Worldism)—are constituted to manifest and perpetuate white rule and white privilege. Not were—are. In other words, the prevailing social system throughout the period of the European world-system to the present, whatever its appearance, operates intrinsically on the foundation of white supremacy—even if you can’t detect it! Denying it on empirical grounds is an indicator of its presence (that old psychological trick)!

Whiteness (i.e.. white identity) is a “possessive investment” (the thesis in a crude dialectic). White supremacy is in the interests of all white people, and those who define themselves as white or who whites allow to define themselves as such (except blacks who are the perpetual “other” as the negation of whiteness—see Fanon). Blacks can only rise if and only if their interests coincide with whites (“interest convergence”—see Bell) which is always limited and ultimately impossible to sustain because of possessive investment in whiteness, white subjectivity (race obsession projected onto whites), and the political economy of racialized bodies (see postcolonial thinking—Said, for instance).

Since race is centered and not social class, allowing for the jettisoning of historical materialism, all whites regardless of social class standing are privileged by the system. Likewise, all blacks, regardless of their social class standing, are oppressed. It may be that black capitalist exploit white workers, but the latter still enjoy the “wages of whiteness.” By the way, this puts the lie to the conservative argument that CRT is Marxist or neo-Marxist theory. In Marxism, racism, like religion, is an ideology functioning to maintain social class relations by obscuring the material foundation of the social order, found in the mode of production.

Change in social structure across time and space is conceptualized as mere system adjustments functioning to maintain racial hierarchies that systematically advantage whites. In other words, progress in race relations is only apparent, which is why 1619 is purported to be the founding date of relevant history. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” is the principle in operation. Any group that enjoys the same status or higher status as whites becomes “white adjacent” or “honorary white.” Nonwhite races that do not suffer systematic disadvantage—reckoned demographically—are rationalized so as to not contradict the premise of white supremacy. Any blacks and other “people of color” theorized to be systemically disadvantaged who also reject CRT are rationalized as “colonial collaborators,” i.e., “Uncle Toms” (or worse). All contrary evidence is negated by the axiom, a self-sealing fallacy.

Since all progress in race relations is only apparent, system reconfiguration occurs in such a way as to make the alleged source of racial hierarchy more difficult to detect, pushed ever further beneath the surface appearance, hence the need for “critical theory” (Freudian psychodynamics) to uncover it. Eventually, the cause of becomes so hidden that it need not be detected at all but assumed. This is why it is so crucial to get kids CRT early in their cognitive and character development—to build into their foundational worldview the (il)logic that the absence of racism proves the presence of racism. This is also understood by the Chambers of Commerce who build into young minds pro-capitalist assumptions, including even greenwashing, starting in the second grade by hijacking public school curriculum. Same with gender ideology. Racism is moved to an abstract plane to save the accusation from negation and children are taught that is the correct way to think critically about the world.

That whites and the collaborators would say this is all unscientific and illogical just reflect the ideology of white supremacy. But this is quite obviously indoctrination. And it serves the ruling class since it obscures the class relations that will govern the lives and life chances of most public school children in adulthood, destined to become members of the proletariat, if they’re lucky, serfs if things keep moving in the present direction. This is how CRT can appear as part of corporatist hegemony. If it were really radical it wouldn’t appear at all, just as exploitative capitalist relations and the problem of false class consciousness do not appear.

Enlightenment and Western standards of ethics, individualism, justice, law, etc., are all but projections of the ideology of white supremacy, designed or functioning to perpetuate white privilege and rule under cover of normality. Being on time is a white supremacist value. Diligence in one’s work, award and promotion based on meritorious activities, peaceful conflict resolution, grammar, punctuation, spelling, style—all values of white supremacy. They advantage whites. The proof is racial disparity. The test discriminate because they are based on white standards. Even math is a white construct. Racism works this way—without any racist motive. Racism operates in the open as not-racism by acting normal.

You can play every ethic and principle this way. Here’s perhaps the biggest of them all: colorblindness. Colorblindness is not really about equality of persons before the law regardless of race, but an ideology under cover of which racism works undetected. You cannot treat everybody the same on racial grounds—that’s unjustly discriminatory. Justice requires privileging blacks to negate the unseen and undetectable force of white supremacy. The workings of the system of individualism perpetuate white privilege. CRT is an Orwellian mindfuck. Everything is its opposite.

Affirmative action, i.e., reparations, are clearly not enough. Racial disparity remains. And that must be a manifestation of white supremacy (you are blaming the victim if you say otherwise). Ultimately, Enlightenment and Western standards must be overthrown and replaced with an entirely different, non-Western social logic, one based on group-level justice, groups defined by race essentialism. In the new system, individuals will be treated not as individuals but as concrete personifications of abstract demographic categories—the fallacy of reification or misplaced concreteness. All whites regardless of merit are to be limited to make room for blacks who would otherwise be excluded on grounds of merit, any gaps explained by the master explanation of white supremacy. From cradle to grave.

Crucially, the hierarchy remains but flipped. Blacks can say whatever about whites. But can whites? No, that would be racist. Blacks can appropriate white culture. But whites? That’s cultural appropriation. Equality of opportunity not equality of outcomes. Racist. We must have equity not equality. We need not diversity of talents but diversity of skin color. We need to be inclusive by being exclusive. And so on. As Ibram X Kendi says, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Sounds eerily like George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Of course, my argument is hopelessly racist because it defends white power, at least from CRT standpoint. By definition, of course. Whites view the world through the lens of the “perpetrator’s perspective,” and this is the governing social logic, manifest in individual justice, legal innocence, burden of proof, rational adjudication of fact, presentation of evidence, etc. The liberal and rational system of individual justice is thus an instantiation—the instrument of racial oppression (which affirmative action rightly contradicts but doesn’t abolish). The correct standpoint of blacks (disagreement among blacks notwithstanding) is the “victim’s perspective,” manifest in group-level justice and intergenerational reckoning. This is the ancient religious doctrine of blood guilt and collective punishment. And blacks who advocate CRT are the clerics of a new religion that blacks who oppose it just don’t get.

Because abstracts groups replace concrete individuals on the plane of justice, justice is reckoned in group terms means using disparities between groups primarily based on race (allowing for intersectionality absent class—see Crenshaw). This means that any disparity between the races is not explained by racism but is racism-by-definition. The persistence of racial disparity is thus used to prove that white supremacy persists—and will persist as long as the prevailing social logic governing the status quo persists. Thus, liberalism is replaced by illiberalism, participatory democracy by the administrative management of things, and the America republic goes away. This is the antithesis of that crude dialectic sans any higher unity.

As John McWhorter recently noted, this is at best sociologically interesting, because we have a front row seat to witnessing a new religion being born. Of course, things won’t end well at the end of this path. And not just because of the racism of CRT. Mostly because our corporate masters will have a most excellent tool to keep the people—white, black, and everything else—the hell away from power.

Is all this what kids are taught directly? Do they read articles by Bell and Crenshaw? No. It’s more insidious than that. CRT informs curricula and orients teachers epistemologically. The kids get various crude versions appropriate to their stage of development. It’s the Junior Achievement version of CRT—which also shouldn’t be in schools. These items are not the same thing as teaching history and social studies. It’s ideological indoctrination. Aren’t teachers opposed to this? They flip it and claim that not teaching CRT is indoctrination—just as not taking into account somebody’s race, not reducing their personality to inherited phenotypic traits, etc., is now racism. Again, in a vulgar dialectic, everything is its opposite.

* * *

Jones’ 1619 Project seeks to frame the nation’s history in terms of chattel slavery. Slavery was inherited by the United States. It was a ubiquitous practice across world-systems for thousands of years. It was already part of the nascent European world-system that emerged in the wake of the declining Islamic world-system that had established the global trade in African slaves. When the United States was established, nowhere in the founding documents does any mention of race or color appear. Moreover, the author of that document, James Madison, declared it wrong for men to own other men.

Nation-building after winning independence from a monarchy required compromise. To appease the former southern colonies, the Constitution had a clause stating that the slave trade may not be abolished prior to the year 1808. This kicked open the door to abolition. Within only a couple of years after that clause sunset the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished and no state was allowed to import slaves. Half a century after that, the domestic system of chattel slavery was abolished altogether and the society in which it had persisted reorganized. Before the 1960s where finished, race segregation had abolished and discrimination declared illegal across the nation. We now live in a society where blacks are found across the class and occupational structure, as well as at every level of political power.

CRT and 1619 deny that progress and preach a mythology about America, namely that all this earth-shaking change is merely the reorganization of racism in order to sustain an increasingly undetectable white supremacy. It is a religious move that casts whites as sinners in a doctrine of original sin who must repent the transgression of their ancestors and assume their position as allies. CRT and 1619 are not simply bad history; this is a racist ideology that demonizes whites and attacks the Enlightenment.

* * *

A Facebook friend of mine vigorously defending critical race theory and testified to the everyday experience of racism. I explained that individual and overt acts of race prejudice should be beside the point for CRT because CRT contends that racism is systemic and invisible until revealed by CRT formulas. However, because CRT is not scientific but religious in character, “lived experience” is a frequent appeal, as we see with the testimonial in religious discourse. The reason why we hear about “personal struggles” with “everyday racism” is because the anecdotal stands in place of the actual when facts fail the argument.

This is especially ironic given that CRT claims that racism works through race neutrality or colorblindness. CRT will admit that social science finds little evidence of racism in society. So, they resort to abstractions that do not depend on empirical generalizations (it’s hard to say they are abstractions at all—more accurately they’re simulacra, idols representing ghosts of things long disappeared). At the same time, they define racial disparities as systemic racism itself (a false tautology). But the “lived experience” or “everyday experience” (personal subjectivity, impressions, assumptions) is always waiting in the pocket as the trump card, as if being black somehow makes one’s “personal truth” uniquely true. This is like the Christian who tells me that God is real because he knows it in his heart and experiences Jesus in his life. 

Let’s steel man the thing by using CRT’s strongest argument: the criminal justice system. We hear the claim that systemic racism governs the criminal justice system. This is one of my areas of expertise. I have reviewed the scientific literature that has been accumulated over the decades. This is no longer an open question. The evidence exonerates the criminal justice system of the charge of racial bias. Racial disparities in crimes reported to the police, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing reflect the overrepresentation of blacks in serious and violent crime. Black men are six percent of the US population yet more than half of all homicides in the United States are perpetrated by black men (most of their victims are other black men). More than half of all robberies in the US are committed by black men. Taking all serious violent crime combined (aggravated assault, homicide, rape, and robbery) black men account for 36-38 percent of perpetrators. Half of those in US prisons are there for these offenses. Black men account for more than a third of burglaries. That’s half of those imprisoned for serious non-violence offenses, or one-quarter of prisoners.

Confronted with the evidence, CRT makes three moves: (1) It blames overrepresentation of black men in serious crime on white privilege. Structural inequality based on white supremacy is the cause. This argument fails immediately because there are three times more poor whites than blacks and whites are underrepresented in serious crime. Not only are they underrepresented proportionally, but despite being approximately 67-73 percent of the population, they commit fewer homicides and robberies than blacks.

(2) CRT moves to redefine the disparities as systemic racism itself and calls for depolicing and the abolition of prisons. The police are slave patrols. Prisons are plantations. And so on. Here we move straight into fake history in support of delusional policies that make black-majority neighborhoods more dangerous to black people.

(3) The final move is to testify to personal experience in dealing with the police, as if the police are somehow able to systematically harass a race of people while escaping empirical evidence of it. But we know, for example in traffic stops, that even when the police treat black and white civilians in a polite and race neutral fashion, a much larger percentage of black drivers will report feeling humiliated and subject to implicit race bias (implicit because there is no evidence for it). This is a perception. The ideology of systemic racism prepares blacks (not everybody falls for it) to perceive normal interactions to be discriminatory.

This is why this is so poisonous in public schools. It trains children to see what is not there. Just like religion does. We see this also in the experience of blacks walking down the street. To be sure, they are disproportionately subjected to Terry stops. But that’s because of neighborhood disorganization and the disproportionate location of blacks in disorganized neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are disorganized because of family breakdown, dropout, idleness, and high rates of crime—actual social facts. The most notorious claim is that of racial bias in lethal civilian-officer encounters. Science debunks this. It’s a myth.

* * *

I have never denied the coexistence of class and race. I have published analyses and arguments about their interactions (see, e.g., Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste). The problem is the centering of race, which is an ideological move in light of the fact that class is the primary force shaping life and life chances for both the capitalist class and the proletariat (They Do You This Way; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment). Most people in the United States are working people, black and white. A handful of families, black and white, enjoy an actual privilege, economic and legal privilege, the privilege of private ownership in a form of property, namely capital.

There are other factors, to be sure (see Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach). Family disintegration, capitalist development, and public policy all play a role. For example, globalization, i.e., offshoring and mass immigration, and the overdevelopment of the welfare state in managing their effects (neighborhood disorganization, idleness, and so forth), have disadvantaged blacks (Know Your Anti-Worker Propaganda). But these policies were not and are not pursued on white supremacist grounds. On the contrary, these policies are deceitfully couched in language of “civil rights,” and progressives and the Democratic Party (and their counterparts in Europe, the social democrats, labor, and socialist parties) have long been the chief organizers of transnationalism and the managed decline of the nation-state and dismantling of democratic republicanism.

Here’s what happened in the United States (and we see this developing in Europe to some degree). When systemic racism was abolished where it persisted in the 1960s, with the civil rights and voting rights, the capitalist class lost one of its most effective forms of ideological control. An alternative system or race thinking was soon stood up, one that rejected the traditional civil rights politics rooted in the American Creed (most notably represented by MLK, Jr.) and pushed instead Black Power politics and critical theory (and postmodernism in time), with its rejection of liberal values, etc., perfected in CRT, picked up by the administrative state and pushed out by the culture industry and establishment media, and it is in the process of being installed everywhere.

McWhorter argues that the antiracism of today is not the antiracism of the 1950s-60s. There was a shift in the discourse of race relations over the 1970s-80s that yielded, to quote from the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book, “a militant ‘Third Wave’ that condemns white people whether they’re leaving Black neighborhoods (‘white flight’) or moving into them (’gentrification’), among other contradictions, and demands the ‘suspension of standards of achievement and conduct’ for Blacks.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion struggle sessions are now occurring across the private and public sectors. Children are being programmed in race thinking in CRT-shaped curricula. All this is backed by corporate power. It is imposed outside of the democratic systems by the corporate state technocracy.

* * *

In a thread about CRT, another Facebook friend objected: “The so-called looming threat of CRT was used quite a bit in the Virginia Governor’s race even though it hasn’t been introduced in that state.” But isn’t the best time to stop racist teaching is before it starts? It may be the best way to prevent the appearance of a new fundamentalism to kill it in the crib.

However, as I noted at the outset, the claim that CRT is not in Virginia schools is false. One gets this impression from the establishment media. It’s a lie and they know it’s a lie. The Virginia Department of Education repeatedly and explicitly refers to CRT in its documents (see the work of Christopher Rufo). Moreover, there are news stories covering teacher training in CRT by the firms installing this ideology in public schools.

That CRT is a corporate front is well-understood by those who study this. Those who constructed CRT are elite academic functionaries for the corporate order. Even the activists are corporate backed. Black Lives Matter is a front for corporate power (see Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter). When the establishment media voice tells its audience that CRT isn’t real, this is propaganda designed to stop thought.

In 2015 the education department under then-governor McAuliffe instructed Virginia public schools to “embrace critical race theory” explicitly to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.” Under Northam (Governor Blackface but that’s okay because he’s a Democrat Northam, the superintendent of public instruction, a man ironically named James Law, sent a memo to the system endorsing “Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.” He called it an “important analytical tool.” Analytical is the wrong word of course. He meant “ideological.” Northam ties the deployment of CRT to the development of public education generally.

Let it be clear: they mean to reorganize public education in a system of reeducation camps. Keep in mind that the Democratic Party in Virginia represents corporate power in that state. These are Clinton’s “New Democrats.” In other words, neoliberals, corporatists. The worst sort of capitalist. Woke functionaries for woke corporate power. The people of Virginia became aware of what is going on and put a stop to it. At least they have begun to fight. Virginia is hopefully a significant moment in what may be the reclamation of liberalism and democratic-republicanism in America. Wokeness is on the ropes. Now we have find that killer instinct.

* * *

Everything I say about this matter is not only understood but desired by those in positions of power. CRT itself claims that blacks are allowed things whites aren’t because racism = prejudice + power and blacks are powerless—a claim contradicted by the fact that the CRT agenda is everywhere. (I just published an essay Calling Their Bluff—Who Has the Power?) I am objecting to the formula, not inventing it. Indeed, much of what I do is simply describe what others are saying and doing. The agenda reaches all the way back to the 1960s. That’s the Black Power formula. It’s been operating in plain sight for decades.

There’s a greater agenda that dates all the way back to the early twentieth century. It’s been Democrats pretty much all the way. Democrats were the party of the slavocracy. Then the party of Jim Crow. And now the party of antiracism. At the core of this is the transnational corporate project to dismantle the Westphalian system (The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). From Wilson to Biden. It’s a largely unbroken and relatively undisturbed agenda: the managed decline of the American republic.

Trump was the biggest monkey wrench ever thrown into the machinery. This explains the hysteria, the impeachments, the color revolution (Antifa, BLM, etc.), the work to thwart election integrity, mass immigration, lockdowns, mandates, and all the rest of it. The elite are determined to get the project back on course. And CRT is a major element of the project.

Again, just describing history. It’s a history too complex for K-12 students. I wouldn’t teach them about the demographic profile of serious crime in America, either, for this very same reason. That’s another problem with CRT. Sure, teach it in college (I do). But K-12 is not the place for complex arguments like this. People feel shamed by such things. Even adults. But we mustn’t risk this with children.

We are talking about what CRT is and what it wants—what those who are using CRT want. To achieve it, and to keep expanding on what they have won (which is a whole lot), they are installing CRT in public school in the same way they installed other pro-capitalist propaganda in public schools. CRT is rapidly becoming hegemonic in public schools on the teaching of the subject of race.

The universities have trained up an army of cultural programmers, controlled by the administrative apparatus, to install on the wetware of our children’s brains an ideology that functions to advance the interests of the capitalist a professional-managerial classes, black and white, that manufactures racial grievances to disrupt proletarian consciousness. Whether it has had no effect or a huge effect, this agenda represents a deleterious mind virus (if we care about liberty and democracy) that should not be allowed to continue infecting our public and private institutions. Parents are waking up. People are waking up. Virginia is an inflection point. Hopefully 2022 will allow us to chart a path out of progressive ideology and technocratic control of our lives.

All this is in the service of progressive Democratic politics. It’s slick the way the Democratic Party keeps an ideology functional to capitalist hegemony going all these decades. First the party of the slavocracy, basing the practice on the myth of black inferiority, then the party of apartheid, draping segregation in the falsehood of “separate but equal,” forced to make this move by the Republicans who defeated the South in war and occupied southern states for years to reconstruct their institutions. Forced to reconstruct racial ideology in the face of the Civil Rights movement and legislation overwhelmingly supported by the Republican Party, the Democrats are today the party of antiracism, an Orwellian recoding of racism to preserve it.

I am writing today to plug you into the struggle in a big way. I hope you will listen. We are rapidly moving towards a totalitarian corporate state, part of a transnational corporatist project, and we need to raise the degree of mutual knowledge to mount a more effective resistance to approaching tyranny.

This is not a conspiracy. It operates in the open and with your tacit consent. You will detect the project in, among other things, the rollout of coercive biomedical regimes in law and policy across the world. Their common appearance and function are not accidental. Power elite are dismantling democratic republican governments across the globe and subjugating the peoples of the world. The citizen is being transformed into subject as the world moves from international capitalism to global corporate neofeudalism. We have seen a form of this game plan before.

For some time now we have lived under what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism” (see his book Democracy, Inc.), a system critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, German Jewish philosophers who escaped the Holocaust, as well as American sociologist C. Wright Mills, warned us about in the 1940s and 1950s. These thinkers identified core elements of the corporate state, the marriage of corporate and state and military and national security power (the power elite), as well as the administrative apparatus, the culture industry, and the propaganda system. To understand how this have been accomplished, see Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony detailed in his Prison Notebooks. Because of the crisis of capitalism and the fall in the rate of profit, we are now moving rapidly towards totalitarianism in its naked form as elites seek to retain their power and privilege. 

To see a historical example of this process, I highly recommend legal theorist Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published in 1942. Crucially, we are not facing Italian-style fascism, but a global corporate state too often confused with a type of transnational socialism. Indeed, this system appears as national socialism that has transcended its nationalist character. But Nazism was never a socialist system, Nazism was a corporate state organized by bankers and industrialists who used successive emergency laws and rulings to dismantle democratic republicanism (the same forces behind the European Union).  Nazism was a manifestation of crisis capitalism that aimed to turn Europe (and eventually the world) into a regional corporatist state. If you have been paying attention and you are honest with yourself, you will find all this familiar.

One of the emergencies manufactured by the Nazis was a series of public health crisis, identifying groups associated with disease (including the virus of oppositional politics) and bringing the population under a regime of health passes. This was a major part of the Nazi strategy. The historic focus on the Nazi experience and the Holocaust has typically been on the Jews, but the Jews were one group among many. The power elite cynically use the Judeocide to shame those who appeal to history to show others what is happening by claiming that no comparison to the Holocaust can be made (while at the same time drawing comparisons to the Holocaust to justify their own designs). The central lesson of the Holocaust for the living is to use that experience to make this comparison. The Nazis were keenly focused on their political enemies, not just the Jews, especially those who raised consciousness about the Nazi tactic of rule by emergency decree, that is mandates and passports, and demonization of subpopulations. 

If you have not yet been introduced to Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, an activist against harmful practices of the biomedical industry, especially focused on voluntary consent and other elements of the Nuremberg Code, which became the recognized standard in the wake of the horrors of the Nazi biofascist regime, and the protection of children, I am introducing you to her today by way of excerpts from a speech she recently delivered in New York City against mass vaccination. Marcia Angell, past editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and senior lecturer at the Harvard Medical School, said of Sharav, “I see her as someone the research establishment badly needs.” Indeed, democracy desperately needs voices like Sharav’s. Angell recognizes, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans in his prophetic farewell address to the nation in 1961, that the research establishment has been captured by corporate power. 

Political scientist Paul Diesing has shown us that there are two types of science: (1) technocratic science and (2) democratic science. The former is under the command of the corporate state and its administrative apparatus. The regulatory apparatus is captured by corporate power both through staffing and funding. Corporate operatives staff the FDA and pharmaceutical and other medical corporations funds the CDC. In a phenomenon we called “regulatory capture,” these regulatory bodies have become industry fronts. The latter type of science is free science protected by the democratic republic for the good of the people. The mass vaccination program is not for the good of the people, but for generating profits for the medical-industrial complex and for the globalist project to dismantle democratic-republican nation-states. As serious as SARS-CoV-2 is, the purpose to which the pandemic is being put is far more serious.

The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican are the political fronts for the corporate state, constituting what some are calling the “uniparty.” An earlier phase in the movement towards totalitarianism was the deepening of the national security apparatus under the Bush/Cheney regimes in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Those attacks were used to implement several elements of surveillance and control, as well as justify US military projection globally (see the Project for a New American Century). The Bush/Cheney neoconservative tactics, combined with the neoliberalism of the Clinton regime, was carried forward by the Obama/Biden regime. The current Biden regime is the marionette of this same power elite.

The propaganda arm of the corporate state, legacy and social media, is not covering this honestly, but there is currently a revolt underway in the uniparty. The media is portraying this as a struggle being the sane and rational majority and the backwards reactionary deplorables. The deplorables are being portrayed as far right, fascistic, and racist. In truth, the revolt is being led by populists and nationalists on the left and the right. They liberals, libertarians, and conservatives (Goldwater and Eisenhower types) standing against the progressives and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) who are the popular face of the corporate state. It is this revolt that elites are desperately trying to suppress. 

You need to push out this content to educate the people. We are standing at the threshold of totalitarianism. Once democracy is lost, it is highly unlikely we will get it back in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. The situation today, dressed in humanitarianism and progressivism, is more dire than it was at the brink of World War Two. Then, an interstate system largely composed of free nations opposed totalitarianism (even while it entrenched the corporate state). Today, the foundation of the interstate system is a global system governed by transnational corporations and world financial organizations linked together through ostensibly international governance. Don’t be fooled by the diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in China. The People’s Republic of China is part of the blueprint for global corporatist neofeudalism. The rattling of sabers against Russia in the Ukrainian situation is part of the manufacture of crises.

This will not be a struggle of nations against nations but states against people. In the United States, the Constitution is being subverted. Across the world international law is being flouted. Those in power who are advancing the corporate state must be thrown out of office. To my American comrades, find out who is running in your states and districts and vote for the candidates who oppose this. Don’t trust party names. Look at the politics. You may not agree with everything a candidate stands for, but don’t let that prevent you from voting for the politician who stands against the corporate state.

See also Biden’s Biofascist Regime; If We Allow This, We are Over; George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism; The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males; Fascism Becoming Under Cover of COVID-19 Hysteria

A headline from CNBC today: “Omicron significantly reduces Covid antibody protection in small study of Pfizer vaccine recipients.” This is what happens when you mass vaccinate into the teeth of a pandemic. It works like the mass-level use of antibiotics prophylactically. Pathogens evolve to get around immunity. Since the mRNA platform only instructs the body to manufacture a toxic spike (or S) protein (which is why there are so many injuries from the product—see Follow Only Approved Science) and doesn’t expose the body to the pathogen’s entire genome, only a few mutations are needed to effectively get around immunity. Only infection can generate a robust immune response (or perhaps a better vaccine, but that takes years and shareholders need bigger dividends).

Omicron has more than 30 mutations in the spike alone, which explains why there is a more than forty-fold reduction in the efficacy in the Pfizer platform. Fortunately, Omicron appears to be milder than previous variants, which is also explained by evolution. To shorthand this, in order to increase their chance of spreading their genome, viruses want to infect their hosts without significantly reducing interactions among hosts. As a result, viruses mutate towards greater contagiousness and lesser severity. Still, they have the hardest time trying to evade natural immunity. In its research, Pfizer finds that those who have been infected enjoy greater protection from severe illness from Omicron. Again, this is because of the more robust immunity conferred by infection. Never to miss out on a chance to move product, however, Pfizer insists that your natural immunity will be even better with one of their boosters.

Guess who told you that the virus would mutate around a leaky vaccine? Me. I told you this several months ago (see links below). I don’t take credit for this. This was what Dr. Robert Malone warned us about from the start of the pandemic. Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA platform. He understood that the vaccine was leaky and not durable. What did Dr. Malone recommend instead of mass vaccination? Vaccinate those at special risk from the virus and use therapeutics to treat serious cases while allowing the rest of the population to contract the virus. We would already have been through this pandemic months ago if people had listened to Dr. Malone and hundreds of other doctors and scientists who told us essentially the same thing. But how could people know this (whether they listen is a different matter) when the media censored this information and deplatformed those who tried to tell us about it?

So here we are two years later with a new variant sweeping the planet. Tragedy compounding tragedy is that they are telling you that the reason the virus is still here is because of the unvaccinated. They are spreading the lie that the mutations occur in the unvaccinated. That’s untrue (Anthony Fauci’s Noble Lying; Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?). They know about antibody-dependent enhancement (The Unpleasantness of Viruses versus the Tyranny of Technocracy). But they are not guided by objective science. They are moved by profit and control (The Delta Crest and the Campaign to Dull Our Empathy; Biden’s Biofascist Regime). They’re asking you to do more of what prolonged this pandemic. This is the definition of insanity: repeating what doesn’t work.

Alongside vaccines and boosters, perhaps there is no greater example of insanity that the wearing of surgical and cloth masks. In What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire, published back in May of 2020, I argued that, if masks work, we shouldn’t promote them generally since they would hamper the spread the of virus and thus interfere with the process of naturally-acquired herd immunity, which we know now (and really knew then) is what is required for moving from a pandemic life to a one where SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants are an endemic part of the human experience, just as it is with adenovirus, influenza, other coronaviruses, and rhinovirus, and all their variants. I also pointed out, as the title of the essay indicates, that the wearing of masks is a reflection of technocratic desire (this is the main function).

In the meantime, I have learned that masks don’t work. In Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected, penned back in September, I leaned on the experts who actually study this stuff, namely industrial hygienists. I have just run across yet another scientific article, Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery, published in 2015, that despite the ubiquitous use of surgical facemarks in surgical practice, used because they “have long been thought to confer protection to the patient from wound infection and contamination from the operating surgeon and other members of the surgical staff” and, moreover, because they are believed to provide “protection of the theatre staff from patient-derived blood/bodily fluid splashes,” that “overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination.” In other words, surgical masks are ritual not science.

Yet a lot of science is sketchy. According to ScienceNews, “A massive 8-year effort finds that much cancer research can’t be replicated.” So as it is in social science, so it is in medical science. Why is science even necessary? In his article, “The world has the tools to end the coronavirus pandemic. They’re not being used properly,” CNN’s Rob Picheta reports: “Pandemics fade out of view as a result of human efforts like vaccine development, contact tracing, genomic analysis, containment measures and international cooperation.” This has almost never been true. The vast majority of pandemics take care of themselves. This is the Promethean spirit of corporate state scientism speaking through its chief propaganda organ.

Meanwhile, in Germany….

A German police squad detains an old woman unable to show them her vaccine pass.pic.twitter.com/P0LM3AjnlZ

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) December 8, 2021

Jordan Peterson in error uses his middle name. Those of you who study the Holocaust will know him by Christopher Browning. Browning’s book is called Ordinary Men. (Read also Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. I have an essay on the subject in the Journal of Black Studies you may find useful. You can find a version of the essay on my blog titled “Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.” I try to make my academic work accessible to a general audience. Don’t ever buy a journal article of mine online. I will not receive a penny from it. Drop me a line and I will see if I can hook you up.)

This 💯
pic.twitter.com/3C7Mt2OwQB

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) December 7, 2021

I want to close this essay with a confession. I misjudged Peterson because I was too embedded in academic culture. At times I criticized him in an ignorant way. But not nearly as ignorant of those around me. Academic culture is corporate state ideology for the professional-managerial strata whose function it is to administer the technocratic order (see Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning). A man like Peterson blows up the narrative they promulgate. They loathe him for this reason.

The further I get away from that damned culture the clearer my mind becomes. I am at the point that I can see that what I was inside appears to be the domain of cluster B personality types who became stuck in the mentality of the high school snob clique. (I have written about this here: Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me and here: Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds and here: The Cynical Appeal to Expertise.) It was not always this way. The deformation of the university is a product of the last fifty years. As we can see, this deformation comes with dangerous potential.

This morning, I received a letter in my email inbox from an organization from which I recently resigned, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), alerting me to the hopeful possibility (from their standpoint) that reparations could make it to the House floor in the form of House Resolution 40. This is important, writes Jennifer Bellamy, Senior Legislative Counsel, because “justice, equity, and basic human dignity have been denied across civil life and civil liberties for centuries” in the United States of America.

Bellamy writes, “Police brutality cuts hundreds of Black lives short every year. Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the mass incarceration system. And Black communities continue to be hit hardest by the impact of the pandemic. If we are ever to address the racial injustices that continue to prevail in this country, then we must confront chattel slavery and its impact—and make strides toward achieving reparatory justice.” She continues, “H.R. 40 is the path forward to achieve this. This bill would establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, its legacy, and make recommendations to Congress for reparations. And right now, we have momentum: H.R. 40 was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee and now has 195 cosponsors.”

As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, statements suggesting that racist police brutality disproportionately takes the lives of black people or that the criminal justice system locks up black people in numbers disproportionate to their involvement in serious crime are contradicted by the evidence. In absolute numbers police kill twice as many white men in civilian-officer encounters every year in America than they do black men, and the disproportionality cited is explained by overrepresentation of black men in serious crimes, which makes black men more likely relative to population size to come in contact with police officers. Moreover, prison demographics reflect crime demographics. Black men perpetrate around 36-38 percent of serious crime in America and comprise around 36-38 percent of prisoners.

As I have reported on Freedom and Reason, black men, who comprise only six percent of the United States population, account for more than half of all murders and more than half of all robberies in the country. Do not mistake the point I’m making here. Most black men in America are law abiding citizens. At the same time, most murderers and robbers in America are black men. Moreover, when it comes to interracial crime and violence (most violence is intraracial), black men kill and rob more whites than whites kill or rob blacks (see my essay Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?).

While the ACLU continually distorts the character of crime and criminal justice in the United States, the establishment makes it hard for prominent individuals to push back against the distortion by pursing a politics of personal and professional destruction. A few days before receiving this email from the ACLU, progressives were beside themselves because Candace Owens repeated facts well known to (if not usually admitted by) professional criminologists. The power elite is furious with Owens because she is blowing up the narrative on violence in America. They are especially angry with her because she is a conservative black woman. Her racial identity is supposed to align her politics with progressives and the cultural and political narrative that whites are the more oppressive and violent race in America.

Here’s an attack on Owens by The Young Turks typical of the way progressives handle truth claims made by black Americans:

The corporate state media and bourgeois hacks like the The Young Turks want the public to believe the greatest threat of crime and violence in the United States comes from white supremacists in order to marginalize the heartland, the majority of American elites wish to associate with bigotry and racism. That isn’t close to being true. There are white supremacists, but they are few in number (however much attention legacy and social media give their occasional small marches). Compare the crime and violence perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter to that perpetrated by white supremacy groups and you can see the problem. Respective criminal wrongdoing isn’t comparable judged by any metric one might use—assault, arson, looting, vandalism, killing.

Because their claims are demonstrably false, and because all whites are lumped together, the lie that white men represent the greatest threat of crime and violence in America defames an entire racial group. This is why the ACLU and House Democrats push reparations. They want to establish a high-profile commission to facilitate a continual discussion that will hold living whites collectively responsible for an ex post facto crime that occurred 156 years ago as of December 18. They wish to decree in law what they cannot establish in fact, namely that whites constitute a criminal class. Anti-white racism is rampant today’s America and it puts lives in danger. (The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?)

There are two things to understand about this libel as a political strategy. First, the corporate state deceives the public into believing that white men represent the greatest threat to public safety, as well as the primary source of human suffering in America in a campaign to turn the nonwhites against the majority of value-producing labor in the nation (white men and white people generally) to disrupt working class consciousness. It would be one thing if any of the claims elites made were true (the truth is never racist). But their claims are false. Second, by constantly blaming white men and white people generally for the problems of blacks (which has nothing to do with most white people), the elite make white people suitable targets for violence, as they become objects of loathing (including self-loathing) and resentment. This is not an accident. It is designed to sow chaos. Weakening public safety aims at amplifying that chaos. Owens is observing the effects of anti-white prejudice.

This is not a new observation—even if the character of criminal predation are somewhat changed. More than a century and a half ago, in various writings, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both recognized and condemned what they called “primitive rebellion.” In an 1844 letter to Marx from Paris, Engels sees in “the rapid increase in crime” among the proletariat, “robbery and murder” as “their way of protesting against” the conditions of their existence, conditions established by class dynamics (this has not changed). Engels describes, hopefully, “At night the streets are very unsafe, the bourgeoisie [the middle class] is beaten, stabbed and robbed; and, if the [lumpen]proletarians here develop according to the same laws as in England, they will soon realize that this way of protesting as individuals and with violence against the social order is useless, and they will protest, through communism, in their general capacity as human beings. If only one could show these fellows the way!”

I need not review the body of writings by these two on this subject (I have surveyed that elsewhere). Engels sums up the spirit in those few sentences. Marx and Engels hoped to see primitive rebellion transformed into communist rebellion. (They were pessimistic about the possibilities, however, failure on which the rule of the capitalist class depended.) What has somewhat changed? The historic character of the United States and anti-white prejudice means that the lumpenproletariat’s targeting carries a racialized character. However, at the core of this is the demoralization of the working class, the roots of which lie in the social condition, antagonized by ideologies dividing the working class. (In addition to Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide, see also Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; Marxist Theories of Criminal Justice and Criminogenesis.)

This is why elites obscure the truth about the Waukesha massacre. Russell Brookes Jr., a black nationalist, drove his car through that Christmas parade to murder white people (Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). It was an act of anti-white terrorism that the establishment means to communicate through inaction. There’s a reason Waukesha police chief Daniel Thompson said in a press conference, “There is no evidence that this is a terrorist incident,” emphasizing moments later: “This is not a terrorist event.” The narrative provides the mechanism by which the obvious is reflexively denied while meaningfully transmitted. Meanwhile, a school shooting resulting from what appears rather obviously to be a case of irresistible impulse (perpetrated by Ethan Crumbley, 15, at Oxford High School in Oakland County Michigan) has been designated an act of terrorism (apparently because it was a terrifying experience), announced by prosecutor Karen McDonald. Charges of manslaughter have been leveled at the parents have been charged and the charges may include school officials. The perpetrator in this case is a white male.

There’s a reason why interracial patterns of perpetrator and victim run in the direction they do—it’s because of the way progressives talk about race. The same narrative to deny the obvious is the same narrative that provides the motive. Using racist dog whistles such as “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” progressives have mainstreamed the 1960s black extremist talk about white devils to such an extent that it becomes part of a population’s background assumptions. They have turned one part of the population against the other in such a way that Owens merely stating facts carries a shocking effect. Inspired by an analogy offer by Coleman Hughes, I discuss the problem of scapegoating a racial or ethnic group this way in my essay Reparations and Blood Guilt (see also Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment).

Tragically, it is black people who suffer the worst of mass neglect of the truth of crime and violence in America, as most homicide victims in the United States are black, their perpetrators overwhelmingly other black men. Glenn Loury has been pleading with the public to recognize this fact on his program The Glenn Show. Owens is an easy target because she’s not a distinguished professor at a major university with Loury’s heft. But Owens and Loury are making the same point: by blaming white people generally for the problems of black people, the real reasons for black suffering are obscured and no concerted effort is made to address the reasons (see It’s Not a Racist System). Here’s the most recent example of Loury’s powerful sentiments on this matter. (It you aren’t regularly watching the Glenn Show you’re understanding of race relations in America is impoverished.)

It’s not that there aren’t white people to blame for the problems black people confront. Most murders perpetrated by blacks occur in progressive-run cities dominated by white officials and professional blacks (see “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities). It’s that the failure to recognize that progressive Democrats, white and black, use black people for political ends while perpetuating conditions harmful to black Americans (for example custodial management and mass immigration). This is the truth the power elite cannot allow to enter mainstream consciousness.