Year: 2021

In an interview of MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term “critical race theory,” and who plays a key role in the development of “intersectionality,” explicitly informs America that critical race theory advocates simply want the law to do for freed black people what it did for the slavers. Here’s a link to the image below.

Let that sink in. What did the law do for the slavers? It allowed them to enslave black people. After that, the law allowed whites to enjoy racial privileges that denied blacks opportunities. But whites changed the law to free blacks from slavery (and died in the hundreds of thousands to achieve it—many more lost arms, eyes, and legs). And whites changed the law to end racial privileges more than half a century ago.

Crenshaw tells Reid that criticism of CRT (which the media is painting as entirely hailing from rightwing conservatives) is trying to stop the “racial reckoning.” Pay attention to language. What is a “reckoning”? According to the Oxford dictionary, it means “the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds.” That’s what your thought it meant. Crenshaw has always sought to impose a racial reckoning. This is why she formulated critical race theory those many years ago.

What have I been telling you for years now? Critical race theory is not about realizing the Enlightenment goal of radical individualism and self-government. How could it be? Antiracism not about dismantling racism. Antiracism is about flipping racism around so that whites become the subordinate caste, so that whites become a pariah. Whites are the reason blacks as a group don’t do as well as average of other minority groups. Whites control everything, and they fix things to keep blacks down. Antiracism is about the boomerang—and now the inventor of the perspective openly confesses it.

The goal of civil rights is to make the individuals of all skin colors sovereign and free from discrimination. Civil rights is about realizing fully the American Creed. The struggle against racism is about emancipating each of us from the confines of racial categories. Crenshaw says she only wants what Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted and what Frederick Douglas before King wanted. This is not true. CRT advocates believe discrimination in the past requires discrimination in the present. It seeks to replace negative discrimination with positive discrimination. It already has.

The past is history. It’s over and done. You can’t change it. My two boys aren’t responsible for what their ancestors may have done or failed to do. Whatever happened in the distant past cannot be justification for doing to people today what some did to others back then. It’s an irrational and primitive mode of justice. One might say, it’s biblical—Old Testament biblical. But reason tells us that if something is wrong one way around, it is just as wrong the other way around. Without the golden rule, there is no morality really. There is only the reckoning.

There is one truth uttered in this conversation: CRT is not Marxist. Not even close. CRT is a quasi-religious system. More than this, it is anti-working class. Long before this controversy broke, I was exposing all this on my blog Freedom and Reason. If you want to arm yourself, your friends, and your family against this insidious ideology, go back through my posts and find the arguments that reveal the darkness that lies at the core of this hateful standpoint. My goal in resurrecting Freedom and Reason was to create mutual knowledge and provide the words others may find useful in fighting against the authoritarian left.

In past blog posts about the problems with racial politics in the current moment, among other things, I have focused on the quasi religious character of demands for reparations. In “A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations” I write that “[r]eparations emanates from a mythological worldview, a religious cosmology, from fantastic precepts, where the primitive constructs of collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility dwell.” In “Reparations and Blood Guilt,” I riff on Coleman Hughes observation that the huge wealth gap between Jews and Protestants not only hardly seems to interest anybody, but if a person were to interested in the wealth gap between Jews and Protestants, then he would surely be viewed with suspicion. I ask, rhetorically of course, “Is there not at least a whiff of antisemitism when a Protestant is interested in why Jews as a group do so much better than Protestants do as a group?” Then I suggest the reader translate that the black-white problem. In “For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations,” I credit John McWhorter with the observation that antiracism rests on the construct of original sin and then criticize Ta-Nehisi Coates for pushing reparations.

In today’s blog entry I want to examine those arguments that appeal to legal principles of obligation and unjust enrichment as a justification for affirmative action and reparations, arguments that promote positive discrimination as a method for disrupting presumed patterns of white supremacy. The shorthand for these arguments is the word “equity.” The word is popping up everywhere and I wish to turn it against the antiracists. According to the Oxford Dictionary, equity is the quality of being fair and impartial. What is fair is the rub, of course. But the way equity is used by the progressive left would certainly not suggest impartiality. Quite the opposite. Advantaging or disadvantaging people on the basis of race is hardly an impartial practice. It is, indeed, discriminatory. The Cambridge Dictionary defines equity as the situation in which everyone is treated fairly and equally. But, according to progressives, treating everybody equally leads to disparate outcomes. As Hayek argued in his 1960 The Constitution of Liberty, individual freedom is a great source of inequality. So progressives want us to instead demand and equality of outcome, which of course requires partiality. So we are back there again. Merriam-Webster defines equity as freedom from bias or favoritism. Freedom from bias or favoritism suggests equal treatment. Yet progressives support affirmative action which institutionalizes the practice of racial bias.

What I will show is that, in Ptolemaic fashion, progressive legal scholars and policymakers construct a logic purporting to show that the failure to act in a biased manner is a form of systemic bias. This is the source of the claim that past discrimination justifies present discrimination lest we reproduce past discrimination into the future. It is rooted in an assumption that group disparities are the result of racial injustices and that groups are responsible to other groups for disparities. It’s not even inequalities between individuals (which comes with problems), but inequalities between groups that needs fixing. In this essay, I explore a rationalization in the service of obtaining unjust enrichment for those imagined to be unjustly impoverished.

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Three major species of justice have been identified in the literature. I briefly take each in turn. Retributive justice concerns the application and administration of punishment. Distributive justice concerns appropriateness in the apportionment of burdens and benefits, addressing questions such as whether all people are entitled to the same protections under the law or whether a system of production is fair in its distribution of work and profit. Corrective justice concerns righting wrongs (not in the retributive sense) and repairing breaches caused by past, present, or future action. An example of corrective justice is reparations. Affirmative action is another example (affirmative action is really a part of a larger reparations package blacks have been receiving since the 1960s). For thorough treatment on these species of justice, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice.

In one sense, justice, according to University of Oklahoma philosophy professor Edward Sankowski, writing for The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “is identical with the ethics of who should receive benefits and burdens, good or bad things of many sorts, given that others might receive these things.” This is distributive justice. Its standard formulation in Western civilization is thus: “A liberal political conception of justice will ascribe to all citizens familiar individual rights and liberties, such as rights of free expression, liberty of conscience, and free choice of occupation.” This formulation, according to Sankowski, assumes “sufficient means to make use of their basic liberties,” to which, he notes, “excessive inequalities of wealth and power” stifle access. I agree, and, as I argued in the my last blog post, in “A Note on Desegregation and the Cold War,” the crisis of the moment is the disjunctive departure from the liberal civil rights model that finds the New Left, albeit appealing to the dialectic, utterly incapable on account of race obsession of seizing the opportunity to overcome the contradiction Sankowski identifies by establishing democratic socialism while retaining the liberal political conception of justice. For without this conception of justice, left politics becomes authoritarian and reactionary.

In Sankowski’s view, a broad conception of justice does not take questions of benefit and burden apart from the concrete relations that constitute them. Nor does a broad conception of justice limit itself to legal conceptions of justice. Many are therefore keen to adopt a broader sense of justice, what is called social justice, which questions whether social systems or aspects of them are fair and equitable, that is whether they are materially or substantively just. By these lights, social justice would involve the development of legal strategies and policy regimes that would enlarge the ability of everybody to enjoy the rights and liberties recognized in the law. This bridges the gap between distributive and corrective rights. I am a proponent of social justice defined in this fashion. However, the race identitarianism has something different in mind when he demands social justice.

The social justice argument generally is that public discussions of justice wrongly elevate formal justice principles over substantive justice concerns. This is as theoretically important as it is ethically meaningful to this standpoint. To compare, formal justice concerns equality and impartiality in the application of principles, such as rules or set criteria. One finds these concerns in procedural justice or standards discourse, such as discussions around due process. This form of justice does not require that the principle in question be just or fair, only that the principle or standard is equally applied. Substantive justice, on the other hand, concerns the fairness of the principle or standard. Here is the concern with equity, as well as the relationship between fairness and impartiality. The affirmative action problem rests on this dichotomy and the understanding of this relationship.

Consider two individuals, one black, one white, take an entrance exam to get into college. Formal justice principles obliges ignorance of their skin color in evaluating their applications. However, proponents of affirmative action contend, while it may be formally just to treat them equally in this regard, America’s legacy of racial separation makes it likely that equal treatment will advantage the white person, thus leading to an inequitable outcome. This would be an injustice. The practice of formal equality forgets history or ignores prevailing social structure by assuming a priori two approximately equal parties and then regarding differential treatment as “unfair.” Affirmative action is therefore justified as an intervention to achieve the goal of corrective justice.

We see this in the Harvard College case currently before the Supreme Court. Seven years ago, Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard College alleging that the school’s consideration of race in undergraduate admissions was discriminatory against Asian-Americans. The evidence for discrimination is that Harvard consistently scores Asian-American applicants lower on factors such as “personality traits.” Some Asian-Americans have reporting feeling compelled to act in bad faith by attempting to appeal “less Asian” on their applications. In defending Harvard College affirmative action practices, progressives have argued that, whereas Asian-Americans are only around six percent of the US population, they represent more than one in five students at Harvard. The normalization of discrimination based on presumed group membership and a judgment about appropriate promotional representation of racial groups is the very problem I am tackling in this essay.

But let’s stay with the pro-affirmative action position for a bit longer because I want to steel man my position. The injustice of regarding approximate equality has two problems, according to proponents. First, as Stanley Fish puts it in Affirmative Action: Social Justice of Reverse Discrimination, “The word ‘unfair’ is hardly an adequate description of [the black] experience, and the belated gift of ‘fairness’ in the form of a resolution no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an adequate remedy for the deep disadvantages that the prior discrimination had produced.” Second, treating our hypothetical exam-takers equally will result in inequality because the advantages that the average white person enjoys—better schools, the appropriate cultural knowledge, and so forth—better equip whites as a group to perform well on college entrance exams. (Given the Harvard College case, one can substitute Asian-Americans for whites in the example. The point of limiting Asian-American enrollment in the school was to open space for black applicants.) Substantive justice therefore requires mechanisms that negate (systematic) white (or Asian-American) advantage. Race demagogues argue that, knowing this, insisting on the application of a formal equality principle reflects a desire to perpetuate white privilege. This is how opponents of affirmative action get the label of “racist.” Fear of being so labelled stifles criticism of the policy.

I will not argue in this essay that there is nothing to the problem of inequalities. Quite the contrary. The contradiction between formal and substantive justice is obvious in the political-economic machinery of capitalism and in the perpetuation of class differences. Because of the irreconcilable differences between political-legal equality and private property, the polity and the economy have been formally decoupled and are said to constitute independent spheres of activity. One finds this separation in the oft-articulated dichotomy of political versus civil society. It is a relatively easy task to demolish this political-legal construction on empirical and rational grounds by exposing the actual intrinsic relation between the two spheres and reducing the formal justice principle to its logical contradiction—that is that there is nothing unequal about inequality (this is Hayek’s point in The Constitution of Liberty). Indeed, strict adherence to formal justice requirement reproduces material injustice (for Hayek, this is proof of its goodness). Yet private property is enshrined in the US Bill of Rights alongside the other rights. The contradiction is skirted via the ideological and legal decoupling of the spheres. One of Marx’s main objectives in his work was to show how the political-legal and ideological superstructure produces a false consciousness about the exploitative character of the capitalist mode of production.

Such a decoupling is said to be manifest in the domain of race relations with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before the law, it was legal in parts of the United States to discriminate against individuals on the basis of race. Formal principles, such as equal and unhindered access to vote, the ability to bear witness in a criminal or civil trial, and access to educational institutions, even use of the same facilities, were all constrained or prohibited by the law. While passage of the law approximated formal racial equality, expressed in the liberal principle of “equality of opportunity,” the law had limited impact in reducing the level of material inequity in the United States. Centuries of racial economy had produced stubborn disparities between groups organized by race. Therefore, colorblind principles functioned to reproduce racial disparities in a (de facto) manner similar to the way equal treatment in class relations functions to reproduce economic disparities. Given that racial disparities include economic disparities, the argument can feign a degree of materiality.

Since US legal philosophy generally does not define racial discrimination in group terms (nor should it), the Civil Rights Act did not direct the dismantling of de facto racial segregation (and it is difficult to imagine how society would go about doing such a thing), only the abolition of laws requiring it (the de jure system of Jim Crow). In some of its features, the racial order entrenched. Richard Thompson Ford, in his excellent Harvard Law Review article, “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis,” provides one of the more lucid explanations for how racial inequality is reproduced in the absence of de jure segregation. And Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, in American Apartheid, show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation continues today, in some urban areas to a degree they describe as “hypersegregation.” For this reason, according to critical race thinking, the current body of race-neutral policy, cloaked in colorblind rhetoric and formal justice principles, is in fact a racist program, one that can be detected in institutional practices and government policies. All this is masked by colorblindness. Neil Gotanda, in his 1991 Stanford Law Review article “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind’,” writes that “the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of color-blind constitutionalism—a collection of legal themes functioning as a racial ideology — fosters white racial domination.” (See also Alan David Freeman’s 1978 “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” published in the Minnesota Law Review.)

Central to concerns of substantive justice is the legal concept of unjust enrichment, which is tied to the problem cumulative advantages and disadvantages along racial lines, one remedy for which is reparations. The principle of reparations, along with its sister restitution, grew out of a long standing principle in jurisprudence, part of the body of the law of obligation (see David Ibbetson, A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations). Several progressive scholars have explored this as it is expressed in a racist society and the obligations of those who have benefited from racism. (See, for example, Ian Ayers and Frederick E. Vars’ 1988 “When Does Private Discrimination Justice Public Affirmative Action?” Columbia Law Review, Theodore Cross’s 1984 The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the politics of Nonviolence, Richard Delgado 1996 The Coming Race War?, and Patricia Williams’ 1991 The Alchemy of Race and Rights. See also Dagan Hanokh’s 1997 Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values, István Vásárhelyi’s 1964 Restitution in International Law, Graham Virgo’s 1999 The Principles of the Law of Restitution, and Mari Matsuda’s “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” in Harvard Civil Liberties-Civil Rights Review).

While I understand the material contradiction that underpins class inequality, I have failed to show that racial categories exist on the same ontological plane (and this is not for lack of trying). Bourgeoisie and proletariat exist in objective relation to the means of production; their class categories root in material relations. Racial categories have no materiality in themselves. They are, as Barbara Fields keeps telling us, ideological. For this reason, (real) Marxists argue that the ideology and practice of racism harms all working people and that class unity depends on dismantling racism and abolishing its categories and liberating the individuals so defined by them from them (in much the same way that abolishing religion liberates individuals from religious categories). If white workers ever benefitted from racism it was only relatively and presently only in the realm of statistical abstraction. There are, after all, concretely more poor whites than poor blacks (about three times more, in fact). Yes, as a group, whites enjoy higher wages, nicer neighborhoods, better schools compared to blacks, but, again, these advantages are only as a group, i.e., in the abstract. It is not true for every white person. Not even close. (And the argument that skin color gives whites a psychological advantage over non-white groups has no bearing on the material circumstances, so we can dispense with that bit of rhetoric.)

The critical theory persuasion is keen on the problem of power. So am I. “Neutral principles are always an attempt to create a formal relationship that leaves out the power element in the real relationships,” argues critical legal scholar Morton J. Horwitz, in a 1997 interview with Kim Ann Savelson. “The Supreme Court established freedom of contract as the basis for interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment on the notion that to look at the actual economic power or coercive power of one or the other parties was not neutral. Neutrality required that you eliminate the power element and think of it only in terms of a formal relationship.” But what power? From where? There is certainly something to this in the realm of political economy, but Horwitz is claiming that colorblindness “has the same intellectual function that neutrality had in terms of economic power.” The analogy doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

“Color blindness wishes to eliminate the history of power relations between the races, and assess how we feel about any particular policy, as if today can be a starting point, without looking at how we got here today. As if we don’t talk about the inequalities of entitlements that are given to one or another race, because to do so would be noncolor blind,” Horwitz contends. “It seems to be quite the opposite, that unless you look at the history of how you got to the particular starting point today, you can’t begin to assess what is in truth a color-blind situation, a situation that eliminates the prior benefits, illicit benefits that people got on the basis of race.”

Horwitz is here referring to the problem of cumulative or inherited disadvantages. This is an explanation of grouped racial inequities. But the fact that other racial and ethnic groups that have suffered legal discrimination and institutional exclusion have nonetheless been able to overcome this past to become successful at the group level. The experience of Asian and Jewish Americans, to take the two obvious examples, suggests that this is not, even putting aside the problem of holding individuals accountable for group disparities, complete enough of an explanation to form a cogent basis for legal or policy formulations. To suggest Asian-Americans didn’t suffer terribly in United States history on account of racism is to ignore history. But they overcame all that as a group and are now so successful Harvard College has figured out a way to exclude them. And it is unclear whether the Supreme Court will stop them.

Horwitz’s argument only works logically if class relations and race relations exist on the same ontological plane. Whereas each worker stands in an objective relation to the means of production in such as way as to occupy a common social location with the same material interests, a situation that rests upon an exploitative relationship with members of the capitalist class, where value used by the latter is extracted from the former, individuals do not stand in relation to one another with respect to racial categories in this way. Imagine I can show that Protestants as a group earn higher wages than Catholics. You might ask whether Catholics are the victims of discrimination (or whether Protestants, with that ethic, are better workers), but you would have no basis for confusing religion with economics (and this is not to deny Weber’s thesis). Protestants and Catholics are categories of an ideological system we call religion. In the same way, whites and blacks are categories in an ideological system we call racism. Capitalism is not an ideological system. Like an ecosystem, Capitalism is a system comprised of objective relations that exist beyond consciousness. A man may be alienated from self and nature in a Feuerbachian manner, but he is not falsely consciousness of his religious doctrine. This he embraces, even if he doesn’t understand it. But that same man is very likely falsely conscious of the fact of his exploitation at the hands of the capitalist.

One way to detect the problem in all this is the flip the model of what cuts across what. There are black capitalists who exploit the labor of white workers. Millions of white workers toil in firms where black managers hire and promote them and organize their work. No white worker can challenge his black manager on the basis of race. No white solider can contradict or refuse the orders of the black soldier who outranks him. Race is simply not an authority relation in American institutions. Race gives whites no institutional power over blacks. That black capitalists and black managers derive their incomes from the work of white proletarians points to the absurdity of the claim of white privilege (many other things also point to the absurdity of this claim). Whites do not have a right to assert their race in social relations in the way capitalists have to assert their right to property. A black man may be kept out of the board room. He may not be kept out of the men’s bathroom. As I have pointed out on Freedom and Reason, property rights are an example of actual privilege (see “Systemic Classism: An Actual System of Privilege”). Racial privilege depend entirely on a law recognizing special rights. There is no such law privileging whites. White privilege is a myth.

To approach anything resembling class power, whites would have to organize around race in the way capitalists organize around property. Given that there is nothing intrinsically organic about race as a social grouping that would find it standing outside of intersubjective understanding (race is not physical, natural, nor material), power of this sort would require an legal infrastructure to maintain it. (Barbara Fields does a find job explaining this in a talk delivered March 2001.) And while there was such an infrastructure in the past, it was dismantled more than half century ago. Even with such a political and legal infrastructure in place, whites did not have common interests in their race in the way the capitalist does in his property. White privilege then was a bourgeois weapon to subdue white workers. A new weapon has long since been forged. The argument for reparations falls apart when one considers the absurdity of a white man owing a black man something merely on the basis of demographic identity. There is no material relation that makes this possible. I wonder whether the ethereal and therefore nonfalsifiable character of all this is what explains the persistence of this flawed type of thinking.

The flawed thinking I am describing here lies in treating as objective aggregates of individuals based on socially-selected characteristics and substituting the situation of the aggregate for the situation of the individual. There are two fallacies at work: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or reification, and the ecological fallacy. Race is not an actual thing like social class or biological sex. Race exists in the mind of racism. It does not stand apart from the ideology that invented it. To treat race as a real thing is to engage in reification. To be sure, acting on the basis of an idea as real can have real world consequences. In the case of race, it can involve discriminating against individuals based on their group identity. But we have all agreed this is wrong, at least in a certain direction. And that agreement is now the law of the land. However, against the principle of the law, affirmative action flips discrimination on its head, doubling down on the reification. The ecological fallacy is at work when supposing that every individual in an aggregate is identical to the statistical average, which is ever only an abstraction. The aforementioned fact of the great number of poor whites and a smaller but significant number of rich and powerful blacks tells us that we cannot substitute the abstraction for the concrete.

If an institution is designing practices that intentionally or purposively select individuals based on race or some other identity category, which necessarily excludes others on that same basis, rather than on their talents and accomplishments, then individuals are not being treated equally (or equitably, as it is defined) and discrimination is occurring. What progressives really mean by equity is positive discrimination, in this case discrimination based on race, and we have already determined that discrimination based on race is unjust. It’s one thing to accommodate an individual on the basis of a disability. Wheelchair ramps, for example, are about equal access. Or to recognize innate sex differences that put women at a disadvantage to men. Men cannot have babies and there is a certain liberty that comes with that. It’s another thing to decide that a qualified Asian-American is not fit for college because there are too many qualified Asian-Americans. The Asian-America is concretely an individual. Why is he being treated in terms of an abstraction? Why is racism acceptable in some instances and not in others? Shouldn’t it always be unacceptable?

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I want to close with some remarks about standards. Affirmative action is a way to get around standards. But there is a movement afoot to change or do away with standards altogether. John McWhorter, writing for the Atlantic, argues in a recent Ideas column that “[b]y ending a requirement that classics majors learn Green or Latin, Princeton risks amplifying racism instead of curing it.” The title of the piece is instructive: “The Problem With Dropping Standards in the Name of Racial Equity.” I will have more to say about the rejection of standards in the face of failure (or, rationalized, for the sake of justice) in a later blog post, but I want to shorthand the problem here with a few notes about the problem of beauty.

The problem with beauty comes from a recognition that what a culture find attractive provides advantages for those who fit or come close to the beauty ideal. Those who do not fit the ideal are keenly aware of what affects some lives in a positive way negatively affects theirs. In other words, beauty, like intelligence and talent, is a type of hierarchy or inequality. One way of approaching a hierarchy is to work harder at trying to reach something approximating the cultural ideal. Culture provides many ways of accomplishing this. Another way to deal with falling short of the standard is to accept one’s lot in life. It’s not as if beauty ideals have been radically variable across time and space, so if one doesn’t want to work at it or can’t achieve it, he can always lower his expectations and suffer the pains of hierarchy. That’s the way it has been for much of human history. Yet another way is to demand culture change its ideals so that those who fall short of them don’t have to change anything about themselves or not have to feel bad about themselves. This is the pipe dream that everybody can be beautiful or that a society will come to an agreement that beauty should not matter.

The pipe dream is an uphill battle. But it is also not a very attractive one. It wears envy on its sleeve. And it’s unfair to others. A person who is beautiful, whether he comes by that naturally or through hard work, and it’s the same with intelligence and talent, doesn’t deserve to be diminished on account of it. Nor is the pipe dream impossible. Soviet-style brutalist architecture was not a society coming to an agreement that beauty shouldn’t matter but arrived there in any case. No pipe dream; it was a nightmare. A totalitarian situation in which the state decided what beauty was. And while corporations shape the standard in the West (albeit too thin), they have at least commodified some of the best cultural ideals (corporations remain destructive in other ways, however).

The critical theory version of equity lies behind the beauty resentment phenomenon—the smashing of standards. Resentment is a destructive force. Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron waits around the corner, just up ahead. We can choose a different path.

In her provocative 1988 Stanford Law Review article, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Mary Dudziak, a law professor at Emory, documents the concern among US elites that Soviet propaganda was having far reaching effects, not only on the freedom’s struggle with world communism, but on capitalist interests in the Third World. These concerns translated into a deliberate elite strategy. Dudziak argues that anticommunist ideology was so pervasive that it set the terms of the debate on all sides of the civil rights issue. Leaning on Dudziak but going a beyond her work, I briefly note a few things about this history in this blog as background for my September 2019 blog entry “The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left.” But, more broadly, I want to suggest here is that attempts to shape civil rights in a direction beneficial to global bourgeois interests, especially by progressive elites, played a role in radicalizing the black movement, producing in the end a situation that has undermined the proletarian struggle for genuine progress.

Cold War thinking as motivation for elites pushing civil rights was often explicit. The Truman Administration argued before the Supreme Court that recognizing the civil rights movement was vital to world peace and national security. In the aftermath of of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court that propelled the dismantling of apartheid, the Republican National Committee issued a statement claiming that the Court decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower Administration’s many-fronted attack on global Communism. Human equality at home is a weapon of freedom.” Following the decision, newspapers in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world celebrated Brown as a “blow to communism.”

There were other less explicit moments in the orchestration of desegregation. Elites were concerned that the civil rights movement could move too fast. Following Eisenhower, the Kennedy Administration took an active role in institutionalizing and, in effect, dampening the intensity of racial struggle. Hegemonic activity of the consensual sort Antonio Gramsci describes in his writings is evident in this process. For example, the Kennedy was successful in persuading the leaders of the 1963 march on Washington to eliminate from its speaker pool radicals critical of the United States political economic system. Several of the speakers were instructed to clean up their speeches and tone down their rhetoric.

Radical historian Howard Zinn contends that the government pursued compromise so they could subvert the movement from within, thus containing civil rights within parameters beneficial to capital. Zinn’s contention is somewhat cynical and incomplete, but it is nonetheless the case that these efforts helped drive radical elements of black struggle underground. However, it did not purge movement politics of them. Black radicals regrouped and retooled their thinking and their tactics. In response, the 1960s saw the shift in the black critique from attacking the legacy of segregation by appealing to the American Creed to a focus on the fundamental structure of political and economic power in what was conceptualized as a racist state capitalism. See “The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left” for details.

But Cold War-inspired compromise was only part of the elite strategy. As Gramsci tells us, hegemony is not only maintained by engineering consent, but also through coercion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a counterintelligence program, better known by its acronym COINTELPRO, comprised of five large-scale programs aimed at neutralizing what the agency perceived as threats to the internal security of the United States. The program was based on the counterinsurgency tactics the national security state (NSA and CIA) was using abroad. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and information made public during federal government oversight hearings conducted by United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, have revealed a particular interest in what the FBI called “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups.” Several groups fell under this label, but the Black Panthers preoccupied the COINTELPRO mind during the years between 1967 and 1971. FBI tactics included disseminating misinformation, deploying agent provocateurs, assisting local police in conducting raids on Panther headquarters, and framing members of the Black Panther Party for unsolved crimes. These actions, while ultimately successfully in crushing the Party, also resulted in the glorification of Black Power. As Medgar Evers put it, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”

The radicalization of the black movement deeply troubled elites. For one thing, it was beyond the limits they had set for racial justice, which was to be kept within the framework of the abolition of de jure segregation and individual discrimination. But particularly disturbing was the connection black radicals were making to imperialism’s victims in the Third World. In the globalization of radical black consciousness, revolutionary forces were developing a critique about the capitalist world system foreign to the traditions of the West, a critique that peddled the rhetoric of the colonial subject, the racialized subaltern. This not only threatened imperialist fortunes everywhere in the world (a good thing) but the legitimacy of the modern nation-state with its values in humanism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism (a bad thing). As these values were the imperialistic values of “white supremacy,” they were in need of overthrowing, as well. Indeed, the cultural theory of the New Left lifted from Gramsci required subverting these values in order to advance the overthrow of western civilization.

Far from putting the legacy of racism behind it, elite machinations fed a dynamic of radicalization that would spawn a new era of racial antagonism. Radicalization occurred in the context of New Left perversions, which pushed civil rights—and politics generally—from its roots in American conceptions of freedom and democracy towards a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values. More than Stokely Carmichael’ belittling characterization of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a “reformer who was good for the image of America,” the New Left eschewed the Old Left’s commitment to orthodox Marxian concepts and politics, and took up instead the anti-American standpoint of such prominent Second and Third World revolutionaries as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. These developments mingled with the nihilistic turn in French philosophy to threaten civilization itself. Given its deeply illiberal character, it is not inaccurate to describe this as a post-civil right politics . It is this character that lies at the foundation of contemporary antiracism and critical race theory. Black Lives Matter is a disjunctive break from the civil rights of Martin Luther King, Jr. The New Left, however much it appeals to the dialectic, because of its obsession with race, is incapable of grasping the West as a contradiction in need of a full becoming—the establishment of democratic socialism in the context of the Enlightenment. Therefore, the critical turn in leftwing politics not only threatened bourgeois interests; it threatened proletarian interests, as well. If it was not clear in the moment, history has revealed Black Power was hardly a revolutionary politics, but a reactionary one.

To return to the premise of this blog to make its conclusion as clear as possible, and to add an additional and crucial point, the same Cold War imperatives that influenced the establishment to join with the civil rights movement and its leader to overcome the systemic racism that had long plagued the United States brought the Cold War home to the US and played a role in turning many black and white Americans against their own country and the West more generally. The great catastrophe in these developments is that they have only helped strengthen the transnational corporate power structure that stands over the world and against a working class made up of the majority of all races. Woke corporations and the technocratic elite have explicitly taken up the language of Black Power and wield it against the proletariat.

On the importance of cognitive liberty and the paralysis of cerebral hygiene. Big Tech and progressives want you to turn off your brain. But true empowerment comes from acquiring a scientific mind.

Here’s how childish anti-Trumpers are. Trump suggested the pandemic was the result of a lab leak (which is almost certain now), but because it was Trump who suggested it, progressives were primed to believe the establishment claim that COVID-19 originated in a wet market in China. Trump derangement syndrome dispossessed folks of their capacity to reason. Remember when Democrats said they wouldn’t take the vaccine if it came out under Trump? There are reasons not to take these vaccines, but Trump being president is not one of them. I cannot imagine making up my mind on the basis of things Trump said. How sad that would be.

Last week an argument appeared on my Facebook newsfeed. It concerned the things in our lives that might make us worry, things we feel powerless to do anything about. By putting those concerns in God’s hands, and following God’s word and direction, we have less to worry about, the person argued. Faith in God translates to contentment and happiness. Those messages that contradict God can be dismissed out of hand. Indeed, why even have to hear them or thinking about them? After all, they may be the work of the Great Deceiver. Faith-belief in scientism performs the same function for progressives that faith-belief performs in the lives of the religious.

There are concerns in a progressive’s life that he feels powerless to change. COVID-19, for example, is a very scary thing—especially when you don’t or can’t understand it. By putting COVID-19 concerns in the hands of the CDC and the FDA, by following their word and direction about what to believe and what to do, and what not to believe and what not to do, the progressives has less to worry about. Messages that contradict the CDC and FDA can then be dismissed out of hand. Big Tech is to be thanked for limiting the proliferation of false preachments on the Internet, for protecting the innocent from the tricks of the evildoers. Trump is the Great Deceiver. Whatever he says alerts the progressives to the location of the truth, because the truth must lie in the opposite direction.

The regulatory agencies, legacy and social media, the culture industry—these represent something like a network of religious institutions. They tell the progressive what the truth is and pt him on the good and righteous path. They are also busy keeping track of the evildoers and keeping them at the margin of the good and righteous society by fact-checking their lies.

Long ago, the American pragmatist William James differentiated between the “once born” and the “twice born.” He described the once born as having a childlike faith in their opinions. Not just faith in the religious sphere. Adherence to any worldview without reason. We must add to this class those apologists who use their intellect to keep themselves from doubting. Once born practice is, in essence, thinking out of reflex or an act of rationalization. Once born persons enjoy a simple, uncomplicated worldview, one that does not cause them much anxiety. Indeed, their certainty in the convictions cushions the pains of the actual world—a world of uncertainty.

The twice born, on the other hand, may believe exactly what they would have believed had they not been born again, but they do so only after rationally examining their convictions, finding rational justification for them, and obtaining a fuller understanding of them. At the same time, the critical examination of belief causes them to give up many of their convictions, and this can be a great source of angst and anxiety. Twice born people are more likely to be unhappy and dissatisfied. They have to live with ambiguity. But they are also less likely to be zealots and bigots.

The twice born allows himself to consider the possibility that COVID-19 was the result of gain-of-function research that leaked from a lab. It’s the mark of the once born mentality to uncritically accept the claim from authority that COVID-19 occurred in nature. The twice born reads the research showing that hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and other interventions are effective in preventing and treating COVID-19. The once born rejects that research out of hand because the authorities told him to. He does what others tell him to do. He doesn’t think for himself.

I could continue with many other examples, but I trust you get the point. Look, I understand the need to not worry. Worry is a terrible thing. I don’t accept the desire to fill that need by practicing the cerebral hygiene of faith-based thinking. You know what is truly empowering? The scientific mind.

Teacher Caleb Wells’ TikTok video has become unavailable. Wells had said in that video that it is racist to oppose critical race theory in the classroom. “When you don’t want to teach about how these systems were designed to oppress people,” he said, “you’re taking the side of the oppressor and being racist.”

Nonsense. To the extent that the system is designed to oppress people, it’s not designed to oppress black people; it’s designed to oppress working class people. Even when there were systems designed to manage populations on the basis of race in a manner that relatively privileged whites—e.g. Jim Crow, which was dismantled more than fifty years ago—those systems were so designed to maintain class power by dividing the proletariat.

One of Wells’ example was the prison-industrial complex. He claimed that mass incarceration is “used to oppress people groups.” Since this was said in the context of a rant about racism, he means black people. As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, more than half of all homicides and robberies, and a third of aggravated assaults and burglaries, are committed by black males. Taking all violent crimes combined, around 36-38 percent of it is committed by black males. Blacks males are only around six percent of the US population. So when we look at prisons, which exist to control crime by removing dangerous offenders from our streets (which mostly benefits working class people, and especially black and brown working class people), and we see that 36-38 percent of the population there is black male, we shouldn’t see a system designed to racially oppress black.

Moreover, looking at the matter historically, it is simply not true that prisons were created to oppress black people. Prisons largely developed outside of the US South and were used to control the white lumpenproletariat. Prisons were a northern phenomenon. Prisons came to the South well after the end of slavery (which this racist country is now celebrating as a national holiday—that’s right, Juneteenth has become official recognized) and became disproportionately black when blacks became overrepresented in serious crime and violence. (see The Line from Slave Patrols to Modern Policing and Other Myths.)

Wells’ other example was the military-industrial complex. This is a truly absurd example. The military apparatus is among the most racially-integrated systems in world history. The hierarchy in operation in the military is achieved rank. A black officer outranks those below him by the same degree as a white officer of the same rank.

I am sure these facts were not what caused Caleb Wells to take down his video.

* * *

Are white progressives racist? After all, they do admit they are. Have you heard them? But there’s an angle. Robin DiAngelo confesses her racism and then soothes her guilt by arguing that all white people are racist like her. When another white person says, “No, Robin, I’m not,” she accuses them of “white fragility” (apparently she coined that term), which becomes proof that they are, like DiAngelo, really racist.

Do people not see the psychology at work here? White progressives suspect that black people are not up to the task of life and so they blame whites for the situation of blacks. Progressives cannot bring themselves to ask why, if Asians and Latinos have overcome historic oppression and disadvantage to become successful minority groups in America, blacks as a group still struggle?

One reason they cannot ask this is because they have a suspicion that this situation may be because of progressive social policies—the ones they used to dress themselves as saviors—that idled the black proletariat, generated urban crime and other pathologies, and disintegrated the black family. The correlation of progressive politics and bad outcomes for black people is rather noticeable (see Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors). Another reason is that critiquing the subculture associated with impoverished black-majority areas has been used to attack conservatives who ask frank questions about it. Progressives can’t take up that line. Instead, they embrace degrading and destructive elements of subculture, pushing these out as popular culture.

To sooth their guilt over viewing blacks as inferior and over their role in (re)producing the conditions in which black suffer, progressives look at other white people and say, “All of you are racist.” No, sorry, we’re not. You’re going to have to handle this one on your own.

* * *

When you and I look at the world and see few white supremacists in it, the antiracist can’t scold us for not seeing the forest for the trees. There are few trees. But he doesn’t let that stop him. This is because he works as the supernaturalists do, where a different style of truth prevails, the truth-style of positing forces that operate behind the seen/scene. In the antiracist worldview, as Brother Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tells us, racism can and does exist without racists. Racism is in the system. It is the system.

The language of “systemic racism” allows the antiracists to grow a forest without trees. No wonder we can’t see it. We are looking for trees! Just as the antiracist forest does not require trees, the system of white supremacy needs no human agency to oppress. White supremacy works like the devil and his demons, making bad things happen in the world. This is supernatural agency.

Of course, for the sophisticated, demons are merely personifications of evil. So how do we see the evil? We need a specialized language. We need doctrine and scripture. We need a testament. We need clerics and institutions in which the clerics may preach and indoctrinate. We need missionaries to take to the streets and bring people to the faith. We need a rhetoric to shame and scold the infidel and punish the apostate. We need to stifle and marginalize the heretic.

Rigid religion works this way: Either you are a believer (antiracist) or a disbeliever and therefore an enemy of the righteous (racist). Nobody is allowed to stand outside doctrine. As Brother Ibram X Kendi tells us, there is no such thing as a non-racist. Those who say otherwise are one with the deceiver.

* * *

We are told by Liz Wheeler in Newsweek that “Critical race theory is repacked Marxism.” Wrong. It’s Hegelian, not Marxist. If it were Marxist it would be about class and capitalism. If it were really Marxist, it would not be promoted and funded by corporations. No authentic Marxist struggle would reject scientific truth or put racism central to its politics.

Critical theory types are calling this Marxism (or neo-Marxism) to trick the left into advancing the corporate takeover of society. Republicans are calling this Marxism because (a) they don’t understand what Marxism actually looks like or (b) they know that the truth—that CRT is the manifestation of transnational corporate power—is too destabilizing to capitalism. They cannot thread that needle. It’s too late for that. What everybody needs to recognize is that democratic-republicanism and the modern nation-state and the interstate system are being dismantled and replaced by global corporate government.

* * *

There’s is massive difference between teaching history honestly (which includes accomplishment and progress) and telling white children they’re racially privileged and black children they’re all victims of racism and that their white classmates are the perpetrators. It’s the difference between social studies and propaganda, between education and indoctrination, between seeking truth and spreading mythology for political-ideological purposes. Progressive educators know what they’re doing. Stop doing it and stop lying about it. (See Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards.)

* * *

The corporate media line in response to evidence that the FBI had infiltrated groups associated with the January 6 riots is to charge investigative journalists at National Pulse, Revolver News, and other outlets with “conspiracism.” But if you know the history of the FBI, it would be far more unusual if the FBI had not infiltrated these groups.

Indeed, if you know the FBI’s history, it’s not far-fetched to consider whether there was a covert operation at the Capitol that day. For sure the riot ensured a Biden victory and pushed the reckoning over election fraud and irregularities into the future where correcting the error becomes ever more unlikely.

A false flag only sounds far fetched if you are ignorant of the long history of FBI operations against working class Americans, for example, COINTELPRO, or of the findings of the Church Committee Hearings. You should get up to speed on the depths and lengths to which the FBI will go to shape outcomes favorable to the power elite.

You should also invest some time in developing the critical cognitive capacity necessary to analyze the character of the power elite at a given point of time. As the power elite change, so do the targets and tactics of the FBI. The NSA and the CIA are are also part of the permanent administrative apparatus.

There really is a deep state, Virginia. Patriots are not the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. Patriots are the greatest threat to transnational corporate power.

* * *

Democratic Senators and activist groups promoting a false, conclusively disproven narrative about the Pulse shootings for their own benefits. Anti-LGBT animus was not part of that massacre. It dishonors the memory of the victims – & the LGBT cause – to lie about what happened. https://t.co/bhjpeaVSS5

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 12, 2021

In light of Glenn Greenwald’s recent tweet, I can’t go without pointing out that I called out progressives on June 22, 2016 for their reluctance to name the evil behind the Pulse nightclub shooting. I wrote then, “Please tell me about the time a Christian man walked into a gay bar in the United States and killed 49 people while shouting ‘God is great!’”?

The race hustlers are very clever in the way they abuse sociological categories in order to deceive the public with statistics.

For example, in statistics on the intersection of race and poverty, you will be given rates among demographics that show a larger number for blacks than whites. What this conceals is that there are nearly 18 million poor whites in the United States compared to around 9 million poor blacks. That means that there are roughly twice as many poor whites than there are poor blacks in America.

You didn’t have that impression, though, did you? The way the numbers are presented disappear poor whites. In doing so, it hides class effects behind racial categories. Don’t think there is a strategy there?

There is another deception happening in these statistics. When you see tables of the intersection of race and poverty, say by the Kaiser Family Foundation (which I am using here, but I could use any batch), the tables mix race and ethnicity. They list “white,” “black,” and “Hispanic.” But Hispanic isn’t a race. It’s an ethnicity. Most Hispanics are white. In fact, more than 65 percent of Hispanics are white (why are they reracializing whites?).

So in calculating the number of poor whites you have to add 38-plus million Hispanics, a massive number of individuals Kaiser excludes from “white” column. When you add them back in, you find that now nearly 30 million whites are poor. Even if you assume the remaining Hispanics are racially black, that means there are roughly three times more poor white people than poor blacks.

What’s this bullshit about “white privilege”? Do you see how they are dividing us? The reality is that poverty is the result of economic inequality and that is mostly a class issue. If we eliminated poverty for everybody, guess what happens? There are no more poor blacks. But you aren’t supposed to think about that. You’re supposed to get mad at me for “denying black poverty” (which I obviously haven’t done).

These diversity, equity, and inclusivity seminars, tasks forces, workshops—have you noticed they are about everything except social class? Critical race theory and all the other critical theories they’re laying on the children in our schools—are they teaching the kids about class and corporate power? Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, don’t let them do you like this!

* * *

Bonus lie from the powers-that-be: Remember when NPR reported on June 1, 2020, “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op”? Trump was accused of brutalizing protestors in Lafayette Park for a photo op at a Saint John’s Church. That’s the church BLM protestors burned the night before. Turns out, Trump had nothing to do with it.

The Park Police cleared the park hours earlier in order to erect unscalable fencing in order to protect buildings from Antifa and BLM rioters who were on a rampage burning cars and structures and assaulting police officers. The media not only lied about the situation, but they came on talking about how Trump used teargas to soothe his bruised ego after cowering in the White House underground bunker during a night of “peaceful protests.” Funny way of spinning the fact that the President and his family had to be rushed to a bunker because BLM protestors had surrounded the White House and were threatening to break in and assume power. If only we had a name for that sort of thing…

The Inspector General report is out about this and, predictably, it finds this: “The evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install antiscale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31. Moreover, the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day.”

What is NPR (and CNN) doing now that the lie has been exposed? They’re lying more, of course, saying the report doesn’t clear the President. But it does. Read it for yourself. Corporate media is telling you that what you see and hear and read is not really what you see and hear and read. They will tell you what to think. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, don’t let them do you like this!

In this blog, for the sake of analysis, I violate my policy of avoiding language that medicalizes attitudes and conduct. The attitudes and conduct I see today look a lot like what psychiatrists call borderline personality disorder (BPD), also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD), as well as several other disorders that fall into the Cluster B type detailed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). I am not the first person to sense this (Joshua Slocum makes the case that we’re living in a Cluster B world in his controversial series of podcasts Disaffected) and I have long avoided giving in to that part of my mind that has long made this association. But it’s becoming an unavoidable conclusion. At least it is a useful heuristic.

As a life-long atheist, I’m particularly sensitive to belief systems that operate like religions. Having grown up in a religious community (Church of Christ), I am also sensitive to how peers can pressure a nonbeliever into accepting or at least keeping to himself the doubts he has about doctrine. At the same time, there are many religious folks who tolerate the disbelievers in their midst. I appreciate these people very much. They share with me the desire for a free and open society. Except for the faith-belief piece, we have more in common, I think, than they do with the zealots in their ranks. Just because a person is religious doesn’t necessarily mean that he is irrational.

Maybe that last part is wishful thinking. But I do have lots of examples in my life (my father is one of them) of liberal rational religious thinkers. Whatever their disposition, as a civil libertarian, I have always defended the right to religious belief. The problem with religion comes in when it is forced upon others, when others are required to accept the tenets of the faith. This may occur when the government intrudes into the realm of conscience to compel disbelievers to believe or believers to disbelieve. The government should be neutral on matters of religion. Leave me to my beliefs (and disbeliefs). The government should moreover prevent corporations from discriminating against people on the basis of religious faith or irreligious belief. Leave people to their beliefs (and disbeliefs). And, of course, the government should protect those who wish to leave or remain apart from a religion. Religious faith must never be compelled if a society is to be free and open. The imposition of faith-belief is not as bad here in America as it is elsewhere in the world. But it’s bad enough. The government should do more to defend religious liberty.

However, today’s society is marked by secular faith-beliefs that strongly resemble and function like religious faith-beliefs and the government is not only not protecting the people from it but has become the instrument of the zealots—or, more precisely, the instrument of power that finds the zealots useful. There are interesting sociological reasons for popular support for religious-like faith that I may discuss in greater detail in a blog at some point (see A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer for a past analysis). If will suffice here to suggest that quasi-religion may substitute for religion in a secular culture. In today’s blog, I explore the psychological reasons for support for quasi-religion in the present circumstances.

An example of a quasi-religion is critical race theory, a faith-based doctrine that supposes abstract and transcendent relations that burden with blood guilt and original sin a race that represents a physical manifestation of evil marked by a collective will to commit racist acts of commission and omission. CRT literally describes an alleged white institutional culture as constituting a “perpetrator’s perspective,” while portraying all blacks as the victims of it. With this doctrine in back of them, CRT activists demand from whites confession of and eternal atonement for their guilty, evil sin. (I have written extensively on this subject. See, for example, The Metaphysics of the Antiracist Inquisition.)

It would be one thing if critical race theorists shared and affirmed their doctrine in their places of worship or among fellow congregants. As with those who express religious faith, I respect their right to do so. The problem is when the government and government-like entities, such as corporations, make policy using a quasi-religious doctrine and demand citizens and consumers take it up or attempt to persuade them to do so. One sees this in the requirement of employees to attend struggle sessions wrapped in the language of “diversity, equity, and inclusivity” (see “The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What You Think”). As I said, leave people to their beliefs (and disbeliefs). But leave me out of it. No government or corporation should take up a cause like critical race theory and foist it up the public, teach it to children, and so. This act violates our rights of free speech and association. It is not the place of government or corporations to tell citizens and employees what to think. Government exists to protect the rights of individuals, and the right central to a free and open society is cognitive liberty. Compelled speech is a violation of cognitive liberty.

We see the government pushing other doctrines that should also be left to the people to take up if they wish but be free from if they do not subscribe to that doctrine. I wrote about this yesterday in the essay “The New Left Practice of Eschewing Anthropological Truths.” I explained there that, as a libertarian, I defend the right of an individual deciding for her or himself what gender identity he or she wishes to express or, if preferable, to identify with no gender at all. In a free society, men and boys and women and girls are free to identity as the opposite gender or neither, none, or all genders. I have no business telling people how to identify gender-wise any more than it’s my business to tell them which gods to worship. Moreover, consenting adults are free to alter their bodies to appear as the opposite sex or no sex at all. I do not wish to modify my body, but I do not wish for a government that would prevent me from doing so (except perhaps in those cases where modifications are destructive or disabling). Freedom of appearance and expression comprise an ethic, the ethic of inalienable rights. Part of that ethic is the right of free speech, which includes freedom from consequences in conjunction with utterances or silence (if there is a cost to something, it is not free). Yet, as I discussed in yesterday’s blog (and in other blogs), we are seeing in the West the emergence of law and policy punishing individuals for expressing opinions about gender—and for failing to express the “correct” opinion.

Nearly two years ago, Inside Higher Education published an article titled “The Trans Divide.” In the article, a former graduate student and a trans woman, in an open letter on Medium, claims to have been adversely impacted by the opinions of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (sometimes referred to as gender-critical feminists), in her environment. “I am writing this letter because I want people to know that there are real, concrete, macro-level consequences to allowing hate speech to proliferate in philosophy under the guise of academic discussion,” she writes. “In sharing my pain and anger at being forced out of a career that I once loved, I hope to stir some of you to greater action.”

Was this individual being harassed? If so, then this is a case of discrimination and should have been addressed by the institution. Assuming that hurtful comments or questions about being trans aren’t tolerated in other work environments, the complaint was instead that this is not true in academe. “I do not feel safe or comfortable in professional settings any longer,” the student writes. “How can I be expected to attend professional events where people deny and question such an integral part of my identity and act like that is tolerable or normal?” My gender “is not up for debate,” the student writes. “I am a woman. Any trans discourse that does not proceed from this initial assumption—that trans people are the gender that they say they are—is oppressive, regressive and harmful.”

What is the “greater action” that the student hopes to stir? How could it not be to stifle academic freedom and require colleges and universities to affirm the student’s gender theory over against any others that call her theory into question lest they be engaging in oppressing and harming her? Why does this student get to choose which theory is correct and compel everybody else to accede to it? How is this not an expression of authoritarian desire? This person doesn’t seek to persuade people to agree. This person seeks to compel people to agree. What makes it particularly vile is that the rant is couched in the language of victimhood. Playing the victim, the person who desires to control the thoughts and expressions of others skirts the mantle of tyrant. The oppressor becomes the oppressed.

Those who know me know well know that I have been committed to the ethic of inalienable rights all of my life. One will find no case of me arguing against a person’s right to free, personal, and voluntary expressions. Indeed, I have lived a life of personal expression that has frequently run afoul of the social controllers. For much of my life I wore my hair down to my waist and dressed androgynously. I appeared in public in makeup and in ensembles that included stereotypically women’s clothes. I had no problem gender-bending then and I have no problem with it now. I have sharply criticized the prudes who believe in modesty in art, dress, film, literature, and music. My tastes run towards the provocative—David Bowie and Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What is so troubling about the present cultural and political climate, however, is that my ethic of the right of people to freely express themselves and a biography of defending free expression and indulging in offensive art and speech is not for a growing number of people good enough. The demand is building for liberals like me to operate in bad faith by repeating the formulas and slogans of particular faith-based beliefs. That open letter in Medium represents such a demand and its rhetoric is familiar. The ensuing two years have not seen the impulse diminish but grow. Against our wishes, to be acceptable persons, to avoid cancellation, we are supposed to take up the doctrine in question and repeat it uncritically. We are not allowed to be agnostic or silent on matters. Silence is violence.

If I publicly state my political loyalties, I risk being asked why I left this or that item out of the articles of faith. More than once I have been publicly “invited” to finish checking the boxes. I have been chastised in anonymous letters to my residence and comments from anonymous social media accounts for having fallen away from the faith (those letters and comments are often deranged). If I am to avoid apostasy, I am instructed, I must return to the fold (as if I were ever so comfortably ensconced), reaffirm the abstract and transcendent notions, and retake my place as an ally. I have no doubt that, if and when a group who expects this of me can compel it, they will not hesitate. Until then, they will berate, ostracize, and shame me, often in some sideways passive-aggressive manner. The hypocrisy is deep and relentless and, I am beginning to believe, the mark of a personality disorder (s). I know that it is, in the present moment, almost exclusively a leftwing phenomenon. (Ever wonder why the left devotes so much time and energy portraying conservatives as backwards and irrational?)

In his landmark Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm identifies an authoritarian personality. “We usually see a clear difference between the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to submit, obey, or to be humiliated,” he begins. “As natural as the difference between the ruling and the ruled might—in many ways—be, we also have to admit that these two types, or as we can also say, these two forms of authoritarian personality are actually tightly bound together.” Thus, Fromm identifies this personality type as a paired set. “What they have in common, what defines the essence of the authoritarian personality is an inability: the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom.” That the authoritarian pair may present without a specific leader does not change the underlying dynamic of the authoritarian personality. Not all cults have a central figure. Movement ideas organized around the desire to rule, control, and restrain others serve the function of the personal leader.

For the authoritarian personality, liberalism is evil because it protects the right of people to choose not to accept or affirm the doctrine of other persons, to not be ruled, controlled, or restrained by others beliefs in which he has no interest or finds false or repellant for whatever reason (he doesn’t have to explain himself). The refusal to not take up a doctrine is portrayed as an act of aggression by authoritarians, but it is no so. There is a deep insecurity expressed in this attitude. The insecurity flows from an inability to endure freedom, to be independent and self-reliant.

Earlier, when I noted those religious people who tolerate my disbelief, I was referring to those who, secure in their convictions, do not need me to affirm their beliefs. They’re already convinced of the veracity of the doctrine they have accepted or, if they have doubts, they rely upon their own intellect to work through those, work that requires the freedom and openness of a liberal society. The person I am concerned with here, who I will, following Eric Hoffer, label “true believer,” is different. The true believer needs others to affirm his doctrine because, deep down, he is not all that sure of it himself or of his capacity to work it out for himself. As Hoffer pointed out in True Believer, it is not the righteousness of the belief that makes the true believer eager to aggressively intervene in the lives of others so much as it is the righteousness of the personality, the desire not only to appear to intensely believe in something but to demand others also intensely believe in this thing. They seek commitment from the reluctant and the unwilling. This is why the true believer can be as zealous in one doctrine as he is in another. The desire is not peace of mind, but a piece of somebody else’s.

I never wanted to go here, as I find the medicalization and psychiatrization of attitudes and conduct problematic, but the attitude I see a lot these days looks a lot like what psychiatrists call borderline personality disorder (BPD), also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD), and I am compelled by honesty to note it. The DSM checklist in any case usefully describes the type of personality I am seeing all around me. I will pursue it as a heuristic.

The BPD affected person has a distorted sense of self, overwrought emotional responses, and a strong desire to manipulate and control others. He is prone to harming himself and engaging in other dangerous and destructive behaviors (destructiveness is a feature of Fromm’s authoritarian personality). Characteristics of a true believer mentality is a detachment from reality that prepares him to readily adopt idea systems that conjure through formulas and slogans illusions and hyperrealities that his worldview privileges him to see and deconstruct. And if only you could. If only you would. This is why religious-like belief is so appealing to this type. Feeding his need for the fantastic is fear of abandonment and feelings of dread and emptiness. BPD types are easily triggered, finding normal things offensive and demanding others take note of them and their definitions and reorganize their world around them (hence the bizarre construction “microaggression”).

This disorder begins in early adulthood, so perhaps it is no coincidence that we see it in the present circumstances where youth culture has become so obnoxious and overbearing. FoxNews carried a story yesterday of a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution objecting at a school board meeting (as many are now doing) to the teaching of critical race theory. She had seen all this before. Xi Van Fleet told the board that the Cultural Revolution began when she was six years old and “pitted students against one another and their teachers.” Mao gave the youth formulas and slogans, a vocabulary that revealed evil in need of purging. Fleet sees this happening in the United States and it compels her to sound the alarm. Check out the history of Mao’s cultural revolution and you will see what she sees. The Chinese refer to as the “lost decade.” (See Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics.)

Critical race theory and other critical theory and postmodernist teachings are designed to convince a person that everything he knows to be true is really false, that good is really bad, the right is really wrong, all in order to bring him under the control of a project. What is this project? To be sure, strategies differ here and there (Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism appears differently than its more explicit cousins), but the project goal is essentially no different in western-style state corporatism than under the bureaucratic collectivism of the People’s Republic of China or the national socialism of the Nazi Party: an obedient society that sustains the power and privilege of those who stand apart from it by transforming societal relations fundamentally. One can’t go too long without seeing or hearing a demand that a teacher affirm this or that woke formula or slogan that has been taken up by his student for the sake of social justice. So it was in China’s lost decade.

Although the youthful energies we see converging in the current Maoist Cultural Revolution are unlikely to be the phenomenon of birds of a feather flocking together (“They all can’t have this diagnosis, can they?” I ask myself), the cultural force that is driving the zealotry of contemporary true believer syndrome functions like a mass BPD event. Throw in some of the other Cluster B types and you get a more complete picture. Histrionic personality disorder (HPD), characterized by excessive attention-seeking behaviors, usually beginning in early childhood, marked by an excessive desire for approval—that’s in there. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), seen in an inflated sense of self importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, and a lack of empathy for others—that’s in there. The antisocial personality disorder (APD) that lies behind the acts of physically assaulting people and ruining careers over words—that’s in there, too.

How did this mess become a social movement? Social media platforms are gathering places for Cluster B types, where technology gathers and concentrates personalities across great distances and gives them permission to act out. Political-ideology points them in a direction. The so-called “Resistance” triggered by the election of Donald Trump—remember that? Have you seen the videos of people crumpling, wailing and prostrate on the ground in hysterical displays of emotional trauma? Be honest: what do you see there? They weren’t offered therapy for their disorder(s) in their colleges and universities. They were provided counseling for their grief. Faculty were asked to be understanding. They may not be in class today. Give them time. Antifa and Black Lives Matter run amuck over imagined—exaggerated, at best—racist police violence, assaulting and even killing people, defacing monuments and statues, burning down churches and police stations, and invading restaurants and demanding diners to swear fealty to the cult. The panic over COVID-19 and virtue signaling over masks and vaccines. It’s a Cluster B fuck.

In life at the borderline, it’s not good enough to be a tolerant person who defends the rights of people to speak openly and expresses themselves freely. One must to adopt a doctrine. There is no nuance. Your standpoint is beside the point. The principle: You are free to repeat after me. A lot of people who confide in me admit to going along with the mob because they’re terrified by the possibility of being shamed or cancelled. They are appreciative when they learn they may speak freely around me—in those moments away from the world of electronic surveillance. I don’t encourage them to be brave and speak out because I hear the fear in the hushed tones that carry their words and sentiments. The fear is so contagious that the back of my mind sometimes wonders whether theses conversations may actually be covert debriefings aimed at gleaning positions to fortify persecution. (I hope my blog would circumvent such subterfuge. Want to know what I think? Read Freedom and Reason.) Over time, some of those who express trepidation at the coming revolution talk themselves into believing the doctrine and embracing the change in order to negotiate the internal shame of ceding cognitive liberty and conscience to the mob. Many did this before ever expressing trepidation. I get it. Mobs are scary. Human instinct raises the alarm. Tragically, that same instinct often manifests as paralysis. It makes prey of people—in a world where the abusers and gaslighters are portrayed as “victims.”

What is particularly scary about life at the borderline is how state and corporate power have enabled it and legitimize its doctrine of wokeness in our cultural institutions, including academe. “I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Van Fleet told the Loudoun County School Board members. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors.” Van Fleet is not rescuing her child from the compound of a cult. That’s public school! That the state is training children to be social justice warriors clues us into what it’s all for. This is not the spirit of a democratic republic government working by the rule of liberal and secular law. If anything political-ideological is to be properly reinforced there it is citizenship and civic responsibility (the balance should be art, English, history, math, music, and science). No, this is the technocratic work of state bureaucratic corporatism. This is a totalitarian moment. They are trying to get our children. From the looks of it, they already have.

I want to close with a note about gaslighting. Gaslighting is not just somebody in your life who is close to you or important to you or in charge of some aspect of your life lying to you or withholding information from you or telling you that you are crazy or bad. Gaslighting is the act of orchestrating a situation that causes a person to doubt what he has known to be true and, more importantly, what he knows everybody else has known to be true for millennia. Gaslighting is a project to destabilize a man’s sense of reality—to disrupt common sense and ordinary truths. It is a stealth form of bullying.

If you suddenly feel like you have been wrong about everything or the most important things in such a way that you are doubting your sanity or your intellect, take a close look at those around you. You may find toxic people there. If you are told that your growth and development, your abandonment of lunatic notions, your “red pill” moment suggests something about your sanity or your intellect, take a close look at those around you. Why are they repeating nonsensical and suspect things while trying to pass them off as great insights or discoveries? Why are they presuming to know obscure “truths” that you don’t or can’t in your ignorant state of being? What makes them so profound that they can suddenly know that what you have always known to be true is not really true after all? Why did it take a new way of talking about the world to make their world appear actual and real? Ask yourself that. Are you in a cult and don’t know it? It’s worth taking some time to find out.

The Biden regime’s 2022 fiscal year budget is out and the policy document replaces the word “mothers” with “birthing people” in a section that, while admitting “[t]he United States “has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, with an unacceptably high mortality rate for Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and other women of color,” has been interpreted by many as erasing mothers by listing a range of measures designed to “help end this high rate of maternal mortality and race-based disparities in outcomes among birthing people.”

The term “birthing people” is newspeak from the realm of trans-rights activism. The rationale from this camp for changing words in this way is about making language less rigid in terms of gender and more inclusive of those who claim to exist on the side of the gender binary opposite of their sex or lie entirely beyond the gender binary. One hears alongside “birthing people” such constructs as “chest-feeding” instead of “breastfeeding” and “people who menstruate” to refer to women. (Ancient warriors wore breastplates, for the record.)

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 6, 2020

You may recall that the “people who menstruate” construct famously upset author J.K. Rowling who, in responding to a story in Devex (a media platform and business recruiter for the globalist development apparatus) titled “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate,” quipped “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people.” (I discuss the attempted cancelling of Rowling in the essay “Witch Finder Boylan: Free Speech and Mass Hysteria.” A longer analysis of the problem with attention to the Biden administration is found in the essay “Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics.”)

Biden’s budget has become another moment in what is typically referred to as the “culture war,” a struggle mostly blamed on the intolerance of conservatives towards human diversity. A story in the Indian Express, “Explained: History of, and row around, US budget using ‘birthing people’ instead of ‘mothers’,” accuses conservatives of using the “‘woke bogey’ to derail important, long overdue conversations.” It singles out Rowling (who is not a conservative) for having been offended by the constructs of “menstruating people” and “menstruators” replacing “menstruating women.” However, “menstruating women” would be a redundant construction, which was the point of Rowling’s objection to a story about “people who menstruate.” Poor reporting here.

Why would we need to say “birthing people”? Because it is not just women who give birth, according to the Indian Express. “Transmen—a person assigned the female gender at birth but who identifies as a man—and genderqueer people—who identify as neither man nor women—also give birth.” Newspeak is confusing to many people. The construct “female” refers to a biological truth. A person may, very rarely, be mistakenly assigned female at birth if there are congenital anomalies. There is a conditions, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where excessive androgen production (male steroid hormone) produces ambiguous or masculinized genitalia and alters brain circuitry so that a genetic female will behave in a more traditionally masculine manner. Androgen insensitivity syndrome, another rare condition, can lead to a genotypic male having the external genitalia of a female. In the Dominican Republic, there are boys known as “Guevedoces” who appear as girls at birth but become boys at the onset of puberty (see “The extraordinary case of the Guevedoces”). However, a female may wish to reject her gender or sex assignment and identify as a boy or a man as defined by the gender binary (Buck Angel, a transsexual, speaks about the various issues surrounding all of this) or identify as a person beyond the gender binary.

The Indian Express notes the case of Freddy McConnell, a writer for The Guardian, who gave birth in the UK in 2018 while identifying as a man. McConnell opted against a hysterectomy because he was interested in having a baby. McConnell lost a legal battle to be officially recognized as the father of his baby. English common law requires those who give birth to be identified as the mother on the child’s birth certificate, a decision upheld at the Court of Appeal in April 2020. The Indian Express reports that “[p]eople argue that since the language of pre- and post-natal care is entirely built around a female mother, it erases such parents.” (The paper assumes language that suggests the possibility of a “male mother.” Other constructs may be imagined, but for any of them one must change the way one talks and thinks about things. Healthline’s article “Can Men Get Pregnant?” is illustrative.) Moreover, the paper notes, a surrogate may give birth to a child but not be the mother of that child. If there is no genetic relation between the woman and the child, I have been told by one person that the surrogate is not a mother at all. She is a “birthing person.” But why not just say surrogate?

The birthing person could be used in the future to incubate embryos created in the lab using a technique where the DNA of a man would be substituted for the DNA inside the woman’s egg. The sperm from the other man would be used to fertilize thst egg and a surrogate would carry the child to term. This is how it was reported by ABCNews in 2006: “The technique, which scientists agree still lies far in the future, would use the egg of a woman. Genetic material inside the woman’s egg would be removed and replaced by the DNA of one of the men. That ‘male egg’ would then be fertilized by the sperm of the other man and a surrogate mother would carry the child to term.” Newspeak would demand an updating of the language used by ABCNews. Indeed, changing language means that the hoops scientists would have to jump through to make this possible would be needlessly pursued, since the egg of a transman, who is by definition a man, could be used instead of an egg from a woman. And, if like in McConnell’s case, the uterus is retained, there is no need for a surrogate.

Working with standard and common sense definitions, a mother is a woman in relation to her child or children. To clarify, a woman is an adult female human being. Traditionally, society has distinguished between birth mothers and adoptive mothers. Women who have given up their child for adoption are still mothers. The birthing was not an imagined event. If the report wanted to be inclusive and express acceptance that there are women who carry babies who don’t identify as mothers (some surrogates and other women who do not identify as such), then the report could have been more inclusive by writing “birthing mothers or persons.” (The construct “birthing females” was suggested to me in a conversation but quickly withdrawn as soon the redundancy was obvious.) As it is, the report is so deliberately politically correct that it concerns maternal mortality rates while, in Orwellian euphemism, eschewed the facts of life. After all, “maternal” refers to mothers, especially during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth. Doesn’t the report therefore need new language for everything related to persons formerly known as mothers and women—while continuing to include mothers in the language? You know, to be inclusive?

This is such a half-assed attempt at newspeak that it’s embarrassing. But this is my government attempting to change the way citizens speak about basic and everyday truths. The implications of such an Orwellian practice are wide ranging if society is to take it seriously. Consider the practice of determining relations by reckoning matrilineal lines of descent, i.e., kinship with a mother. Is this basic anthropological truth to be rendered nonsensical for the sake of a political agenda?

I want to close by make sure readers know that I do recognize the role that surrogates play in allowing parents to have children and that one may not wish to describe that role as “mother.” I can understand why one would distance himself from such a profound emotional relation as that between mother and child by using technical language. Humans rationalize actions in all sorts of ways. The medicalization of social reality in words and practice is carried in the logic of corporate bureaucratic and technocratic relations. As we know, while language reflects reality, it also shapes perception of reality. As Orwell warned us, those who wish to change mass perception of reality are particularly interested in this function of language. Degendering language is colonizing the lifeworld in the same way that racialization is, pushed by corporate state power.

I try to not to be offended by the things others say. However, in this case, I find very troubling my government describing my mother—or women in general—in cold instrumentalist (and postmodernist) language. My mother is a mother and my government should refer to her as such, especially in policy language concerning maternal mortality. It is women who die in childbirth, even surrogates.

To pretend as if there is not a grand attempt to diminish the significance of women in the present epoch is delusional or dishonest. So, if it were just some person saying we should talk this way, I would most likely dismiss it. It is a ridiculous way of speaking and there are plenty of ridiculous people in the world. People believe in a myriad of non-things and use language and formulas to manufacture them and stand them over real things. It’s when they have power that it gets concerning. This is my government doing this. It affects my mother, my sister, and my wife.

At least we are not yet where Canada is. In 2013, in Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the supreme court ruled that truthful speech can nonetheless be restricted if it runs afoul of state-approved language surrounding, among other things, the new norms expressed by prescribed language on gender and sex. In that case, which has become the basis of law and policy in Canada, the judges write, “Truthful statements can be presented in a manner that would meet the definition of hate speech, and not all truthful statements must be free from restriction.” In other words, truth is neither a defense nor an exception.

I want to close with good news from Great Britain. The BBC today carried the following headline: Maya Forstater: Woman wins tribunal appeal over transgender tweets. Forstater did not have her contract renewed at the think tank Center for Global Development in March 2019 after posting a series of tweets questioning government plans to let people declare their own gender. She claimed she was discriminated against because of her beliefs, which include the opinion “that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.” In the initial tribunal, employment Judge James Tayler ruled, in language aligned with the Canadian high court, that Forstater’s approach was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” He concluded that she was not entitled to ignore the rights of a transgender person and the “enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering.” In other words, her truth claim was hate speech and therefore discrimination was justified.

In a higher court, Justice Choudhury said Forstater’s gender-critical beliefs “did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons.” How could they? Thankfully the course corrected the error. But it is terrifying that Forstater was let go and that a lower court upheld that decision because she stated that sex is an immutable characteristic. Have we now the technology to turn the XX genotype into XY? Even if we did, why should a person be punished for words? But let’s not get overconfident about matters. Yes, a higher court has recognized Forstater’s right to express her opinion (the human right of cognitive liberty) and emphasized the truth that saying that a person cannot change her or his sex does not violate that person’s rights. And this is a very important moment. However, it is but one victory in the struggle for liberty. The outcome of that struggle is anything but clear.

Frustrated with the tendency of social media users to uncritically go with what somebody told them somebody else said, I recently wrote on Facebook, “When you don’t read a report or a study or watch a speech or a press conference and let the media tell you what the report said or what was said at the press conference, what you are essentially saying is, ‘Here, you tell me what to think.’” I get it. Technocracy brings with it a popular over-reliance on expertise. At least technocrats (selectively) appeal to it. We hear the demand for such over-reliance in the refrain: “Trust the science.”

The phrase “the science” is a curious one. Notice I italicized the article. When I appeal to the power of science I might put it this way: “trust science.” However I put it, no article will appear. Science is a method of apprehending the world. It is not an entity. It is not the priest or the church. Consider that there were Nazi scientists. There were doctors and experts in fascist regimes forming opinions about a range of things. For example, the Nazis judged some races to be inferior to others. Some of them were hanged at Nuremberg. Apparently their expertise was not above reproach.

In this essay, by opinion, I mean a judgment about something not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. Of course, an opinion may be based on fact or knowledge. You cannot merely say, “Well, that’s your opinion.” Scientists form opinions. Judges form opinions. They have expertise in their fields of study and practice. An expert is a person possessing an authoritative and comprehensive knowledge of or skill in a particular area. A rational person will recognize that not all opinions carry equal weight on the scales of truth. He should also recognize that experts do not always agree on what is truth or likely to be true.

But the appeal to expertise is a common one in our culture. When I question an expert’s opinion, for example on the efficacy or safety of some medical intervention, such as a vaccine or the wearing of masks, I hear from others a criticism that points to my lack of expertise in medicine. How would I know whether the expert is right or wrong if I’m not an expert in that area? They suggest I listen to an expert, the name of whom they often have at the ready. This is an interesting move since, for the most part, those who make the criticism and provide the expert lack expertise in medicine.

There is an interesting paradox here. How does the critic know that the expert he provides is the correct authority if he is not himself an expert in that particular area? By his own lights, if I knew what I was talking about, he wouldn’t know it since he is not an expert. But somehow, he knows more than I do, since he knows which expert I should listen to. He somehow knows I should not be listened to. This expert he provides is not proffered. The expert has the final word on the subject. Listen to Fauci. “You don’t even have to think about, dude.”

If I ask why I should listen to this person, the critic will likely respond that he trusts that the person is knowledgable of and has been trained in that particular area and has been judged to be an expert by some official body or respected authority. But it’s easy enough to point to another person, knowledgable about and trained in that same area, also judged to be an expert by some official body or respected authority, who has a different opinion. We might suggest that different opinions is the way science and medicine get better over time (which is why it is so scary that social media platforms are censoring contrary opinions—even by experts).

When confronted by two experts with differing opinions who does the non-expert choose as the authoritative one? If one takes his time to study the respective opinions of these experts, perhaps even consult the scientific literature on the subject matter, then he might be able to rationally judge which of them has the better opinion. But, short of putting in this work, which people rarely do (who has the time?), it is likely that the non-expert is going to arbitrarily pick one of them. I say arbitrary here not in the sense of random choice or personal whim, but rather for some reason not based on fact or reason. The choice will be ideological. It will be political.

For the non-expert who selects his opinions on a political-ideological basis, the expert selected will be quite naturally the one who agrees with his opinion, which is by definition not an expert one since it is held by a non-expert. By the critic’s own standard, why should we listen to his opinion? By my standard, which is to avoid uncritically relying on an opinion formed merely on the basis of appeal to authority, I shouldn’t listen to his opinion. Not that expertise doesn’t matter. But the critic is not an expert. By this own admission. He knows an expert when he sees one.

But have you noticed that those who chastise others for not “listening to the experts” or “trusting the science” don’t really listen to experts or trust the science? I am an expert in several areas of sociology. Among my areas of expertise are race, crime, and criminal justice. You might use me as an expert opinion on the question of systemic racism in policing, for example. Those who insist on listening to the experts and trusting the science might appeal to my expertise. But in my experience, this only happens when my opinion agrees with their opinion. They want me to say something, but only when what I say is agreeable. When it isn’t, they disregard my expertise. (Hell, as I discuss in a moment, they disregard me altogether.) If a conversation ensures, it proceeds as if the lay person has as much knowledge about or training in my area of expertise. They rarely do.

Sometimes people get mad at me or tell me that they are disappointed in me when I express a disagreeable opinion, even when my opinion is formed on the basis of my expertise and represents a reasonable conclusion from the scientific literature on a subject (which I have been trained to analyze). On occasion (too many these days) I have had faculty (anonymously), family, friends, and students telling me that I am not the person they thought I was or, more generously, that, somewhere, somehow, I lost my way. Some bad opinion has corrupted, polluted, or radicalized me. With expressions of profound dismay, sometimes dressed in feigned empathy, more often aimed with shame, they tell me that they hope I will find my way back to their opinion.

Their opinion. That’s really what their complaint is all about, isn’t it? They thought I upheld their judgment. Far more important than my expertise—for if it were truly important, then they would consider my opinion—is whether my opinion aligns with theirs. At best, my agreeable opinion only served as an expert endorsement of their lay opinion, which is correct regardless of facts and reason. They exploited my esteem to bolster their case. They wanted to wear my authority. When I no longer agreed with them, I was no longer useful to them.

More than this, I became an adversary, one whose expertise could potentially sway those around them, which is all the more reason to dismiss my opinion as issuing from a man lost in the wilderness. “Don’t listen to him. Something happened to him.” The possibility that they may be confused or deluded by propaganda or ideology is skirted by portraying the expert—whose scientific training is fungible across a range of disciplines—as the ideologue. They are not unreasonable for clinging to an opinion this expert finds disagreeable. The expert is unreasonable and others shouldn’t trust him. Because, in faith-belief, it’s all about trust. This does not damage the practice of appealing to expertise because it is a cynical appeal. There are other experts out there who will articulate a more agreeable opinion. Cite them as the authority.

I am no elitist. I want people without expertise to throw themselves into an area and gain useful knowledge about it. If people want to challenge a trained sociologist, then bring it on. Plenty of people are smart and knowledgeable enough about subject areas in which they have little or no training to make for interesting conversations. But the amateur advances knowledge really only if he knows what he’s talking about or knows what he’s doing. And he usually doesn’t. Indeed, one thing expertise is good for is knowing when people don’t know what they’re talking about. But I’m damned here, as well; I am arrogantly lording my expertise over the amateur if I expose his lack of knowledge.

Barbara Sprunt, for National Public Radio, in “The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory,” describes CRT as “an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.” I’m a sociologist who has taught law and society, race and ethnicity, and social theory (among other things) for a quarter century. I teach critical race theory. I understand it. I’m not going to let NPR lie about it.

NPR turns to academics to back up its claim that opposition to CRT is a reflection of right-wing anxieties. They didn’t talk to me. Believe me, academics are among the most deeply indoctrinated people on the planet. As cultural managers, it is crucial to get them on board, and decades have been spent recruiting people into humanities and social sciences to take up and dissiminate New Left and postmodernist doctrines. The truth is that CRT is an illiberal doctrine masquerading as an academic approach. That it prevails in our cultural institutions demonstrates the success of corporate power leveraging the neo-Marxist strategy of the “long march.”

Sprunt quotes Republican Ralph Norman as saying, “Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart—but by virtue of the color of their skin.” Norman is correct. According to CRT doctrine, white people are racist by virtue of their skin color. The only way to lessen one’s racism is to be an ally by proclaiming anti-racism and anti-whiteness. You cannot be non-racist, according to the anti-racist worldview. This is why you are forced into diversity training sessions—you are presumed racist. Denying you are racist is a sign of fragility, which loops back to race privilege, which whites possess at birth.

CRT asserts that our legal system is an institution designed by whites to reproduce white racial power. CRT says MLK, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society is a form of white power. King was, from this view, a naive preacher sucking up to white people. He bought into the American creed, which CRT claims to reveal as racist. CRT rejects colorblindness for law and policy based explicitly on racial categories. CRT is a system of formulas that pull social structures from thin air. Its fallacies make it easy to demolish, but you have to escape the church of the woke to get the critique.

What makes CRT so fundamentally illiberal, and by that I mean authoritarian, is that it equates liberalism, the foundation of law and policy in the West, the ideas that make of free people, with white supremacy. It then demands the dismantling of white supremacy by dismantling the present legal order. CRT seeks to replace Enlightenment notions of individual rights and the presumption of innocence, with the burden of proof lying with those making accusations, with group-based rights, and the presumption of guilt on that basis, with no possibility of denying guilt, thus shifting law and policy away from a equality to equity, where those have less take from those who have more on the basis of racial identity.

If it is unclear from which group wealth is to be appropriated, then let me make it clear: white people owe black people because of things dead white people did to black people a long time ago. It’s a doctrine of original sin, and whites are the eternal sinners. CRT leads us into the absurdity of poor whites enjoying race privilege while rich blacks suffer race oppression. You can only get to that lunatic conclusion by assuming all whites are racist.

The function of CRT is to distract the masses from class struggle and economic inequality by ramping up antagonisms and resentments based on supposed tribal differences. That it’s the Democrats pushing this, while Republicans, especially the populists, resist it, tells you which party best represents the interests of the ruling economic class. That progressives push open borders and populists push back is another clue as to who best represents the ruling economic class. CRT and open borders benefits corporations and the protects the system that secures their power.

We see the same thing in the United Kingdom, where the Labour Party has redesigned its politics to appeal to affluent white progressives and a constellation of minority groups claiming victimhood status over against working class Brits. Populism in the West is pushing back. This is why we hear so much in the corporate media about white reactionaries resisting CRT. But they aren’t white reactionaries. They have liberal instincts.