Year: 2021

My dissertation, Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States, was a two-volume 800-plus-page, that I intended to turn into a book after securing tenure. In that work, I was very critical of the criminal justice system. However, since then, a wealth of research has accumulated that shows that many of the things that criminologists believed in the 1990s about this system, especially with respect to race (beliefs that have become commonplace today), are false or undetermined. As this evidence began to accumulate, It became necessary to put that book project on hold. It has been over two decades now. An entirely new picture of the facts has emerged, so the subject matter must be reassessed. I review those facts on Freedom and Reason in numerous entries (I include a few of them in this entry).

It often the case that popular understandings always lag behind science, which is especially unfortunate in today’s climate, since false and misleading claims are influencing tens of millions of well-meaning people to believe and act in ways that are divisive and destructive. Black Lives Matter is the paradigm. As a criminologist, as an intellectual matter, it is distressing for me to see the amount of misinformation there is out there about this topic and the resistance to facts I routinely encounter. The purpose of this particular entry is to review those facts while avoiding the thickets of detailed empirical analysis. Again, there is plenty of detailed analysis on Freedom and Reason. I will deal with two areas here: (1) prison demographics and (2) lethal civilian-officer encounters.

Prison Demographics and Demographics of Criminality

In presenting facts about the demographic profile of US prisons, one might get the impression that the criminal justice system is racist in who it convicts and sends to prison. The outstanding fact is that black males, who comprise around six percent of the general population, make up between 36-38 percent of the prison population.

It is a shocking statistic that critical racist theorists take this as prima facia evidence of systemic racism. But that obscures the causal force behind the statistic. More than 50 percent of all homicides and robberies, and a third of aggravated assaults, are perpetrated by black males. Taking all violence crimes together, roughly 36-38 percent of them are committed by black males. Consider that more than half of all those in prison are there for violent offenses. What is more is that around a third of burglaries are committed by black males. Roughly half of nonviolent prisoners were convicted of serious property crimes, of which burglary is the most serious. (Only around 15 percent of prisoners are drug offenders.) Therefore, when one accounts for demographic overrepresentation in serious criminality, the demographic overrepresentation of black men in prison is explained. (See Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.) 

I want to emphasize to readers that overrepresentation of black men in serious crimes does not mean that most black men engage in criminal activity. Most black men, in fact, do not engage in serious crime. The same is true for poverty and many other statistics where blacks are overrepresented. Most blacks are not poor. Most blacks are not jobless. Overrepresentation means that, in relation to demographic groupings, there is a higher rate of crime, poverty, and joblessness. It is important to always remember this when consuming statistical claims. Moreover, even though a majority of murders and a majority of robberies are perpetrated by black men, only a minority of black men are murderers and robbers.

Lethal Civilian-Officer Encounters and Unarmed Black Men

To take another example, when controlling for demographic overrepresentation in serious criminality, as well as contextual factors, the only studies that find racial disparities in lethal civilian-officer encounters, of which there are approximately one thousand annually, find white police officers are more reluctant to use deadly force when the suspect is black compared to when the suspect is white. In other words, the scientific literature on these encounters, which is extensive and deep, does not support the claim of systemic racism in police shootings. The media does not tell its audience that twice as many white men are killed by the police every year than black men. Or that the overrepresentation of blacks in police shootings is explained by crime and context. (See Manufacturing the Illusion of White Supremacy. See also The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters. Here’s the FAR Podcast version with notes.)

The perception that large numbers of unarmed black men die at the hands of the police every year is also false. The misperception is not merely substantial, but astonishing. A recent study found that a plurality of those who watch mainstream media believe the police shoot around a thousand unarmed black men—and a quarter of those polled believe that around 10,000 or more unarmed blacks are killed by the police annually. The number is actually around a dozen unarmed black men shot by the police in 2019, as typical year. It is worth noting that just because somebody is unarmed does not mean they do not present a danger to civilians or officers. Hands, feet, and automobiles are also deadly weapons. (See More on the Remarkable Ignorance of Progressive Democrats.)

To give you a sense of how far off the facts are those who describe themselves as very liberal or progressive, around 5,000 blacks, mostly men, were killed during the entire period of lynching in the United States—half as many as very liberal or progressive respondents suppose police kill every year in the United States. The misperception works out to about 27 unarmed black men killed every day in America. Is it any wonder why so many people are frightened of the police?

I argue that the reason why it is so easy to believe that the police are more likely to kill black people is because there is faith in the proposition that the United States is systemically racist. This faith belief sets up an expectation that makes the receiver of information more likely to uncritically accept that information and its biased frame.

Let’s suppose I tell you that well over 95 percent of those killed by the cops are men. Since you do not believe that there is systemic sexism against men in US society, you do not accept this statistic as evidence that police are targeting men. You believe instead (correctly, it turns out) that men are overrepresented in the types of serious criminal offending that increase the likelihood that they will encounter police officers in deadly interactions. (See: The Police are Sexist, too.)

Ideology and Propaganda

One of the frustrations I experience as a criminologist who studies and lectures on the criminal justice system is the way the establishment media, whose journalists surely know better, are more interested in promoting propaganda of a particular political persuasion (corporatist and progressive) that ramps up division and discontent in our society instead of reporting the good news that the US criminal justice system, as the rest of America’s institutions, have never been less racist. To be sure, they seem bent on changing that. The corporate media system is a public relations apparatus serving the interests of the rich and powerful.

Is it possible that the power elite ask us to focus on race in order to distract us from the problem of social class? Just imagine how much a threat the working masses would represent to the ruling corporate class if they came together across the objective lines of class rather than dwelling in imaginary communities of racial division. Is there not an interest in the rich and powerful preventing that from happening? Have they not used racial division all these centuries to this effect? A lot of the activism out there in the streets sounds radical. But how radical can it really be when corporations back it, the mainstream media push it, and the government schools teach it?

Epistemic Commitments and Fallacious Reasoning

For the record, scientifically-speaking, I am Marxian in orientation. I tell my audiences about my epistemic commitments because my comments often strike them as conservative and rightwing. I assure you, I am neither conservative nor rightwing. I am pretty certain that I am to the left of most of the population. I tell readers this, because I want them to know that there are not only two sides to an argument. There are many sides. The operative question going forward is this: which argument has the facts on its side? Always stay true to the facts and the scientific requirement to adjudicate them independent of any given political ideology.

Critical race theory sets up people to ignore and misinterpret facts and to draw wrong conclusions because of the illogic of social justice. With respect to questions of individual versus social justice, we differentiate individual or liberal style justice, with its norms and values of civil rights, equality before the law, presumption of innocence, and rational adjudication of fact, from the style supposed by critical race theory, which emphasizes group rights organized around race, equity in outcome (members of different groups should be held to different standards), presumption of guilt (members of one group are by definition “perpetrators,” while another are by definition “victims”), and treating disparities in outcomes as prima facia evidence of injustice (dispensing with cause and effect). As one can see, the latter commits numerous fallacies—ecological, reification, and self-confirming.

First the people in the streets (des gilets jaunes—the French deplorables), then generals and officers in a letter to Macron demanding he get shit clear in his head, and now the organized populace in a second letter to Macron. Populism is on the rise in the trans-Atlantic realm. Breaking news: Trumpism isn’t a cult of personality.

What’s driving the populist-nationalist spirit of our time? Nothing could be more obvious in the experience of history that cultural pluralism is a disastrous attitude and policy, not only for the host countries, but for the new arrivals who suffer in ethic ghettos maintained by those who wish to control them (the clerics and the patriarchs) and, ultimately, the host society. Cultural pluralism promotes the retribalization of nations on all sides. Islamization will in the end ruin Europe. It is ruining Europe as I write this.

It is not up to the French or the Swedish or the English to accommodate Islamic culture. It is for Muslims integrate with the values of modernity. To be sure, the great barrier is the refusal of Islam to accept secularism as a condition of modern existence. Irrationalist postmodernist sensibilities support such tyrannical notions. But there is no compromise on this point. It simply cannot be tolerated the establishment of a theocracy within the nations of the West. This is no more acceptable than allowing Christians to do the same (thankfully, Christianity comes with the ethic of secularism).

This is not a call to abolish religion or even multiculturalism. People must be free to believe in whatever illusion makes them happy. But they cannot be free to force the rest of us into their illusion. And, while music and food and literature from others cultures may enrich the West, the state and law and the language cannot be plural. All must exist under the overarching national culture. No, this is a call to recommit the West to the values that liberated the individual from destructive tribalism of the ancient world.

Three steps must immediately be taken: (1) end or sharply restrict immigration from Islamic countries (slow the flow sufficient to facilitate successful integration with the norms and values of the West); (2) institute a policy of assimilation that at its core compels the integration of new arrivals with national culture and language with the explicit raison d’état to save western civilization from barbarism; (3) end or sharply limit the transnationalization of capital—which means ending corporate governance, open borders, globalization, and regionalization.

The only hope for a peaceful and just future for all human beings is to bring a halt to the denationalization of Europe while pursuing the aggressive implementation of policies that detribalize civil society through the reinstitution of a civic nationalization that insists on borders and human rights. What’s true for Europe is true for America. The United States liberated the West from fascism once before. The United States can lead the way in liberating the West from clerical fascism. We cannot do this with the Democratic Party at the helm and corporatists and progressives commanding our institutions. Reform must be sought here, as well.

Human rights comes from the realization of our species-being and the establishment of structures that foster the self-actualization of each individual in a culture of tolerance. This can only happen in nation-states embedded in an international system of law that respects national sovereignty based on democratic-republican, humanist, liberal, and secular values.

Free states of existence can only be realized by liberating individuals from imagined communities or at least guaranteeing the conditions that allow people to confront false consciousness and give them the freedom to decide whether their personalities shall remain limited by backwards culture-ideology or whether they will escape from their cultural cage and enter the greater freedom of modernity and reason. This requires the modern, rational nation-state.

For those who refuse to come out of the darkness, perhaps they would be happier back home with their fellow fanatics. France and Sweden and England should actively encourage the recalcitrant to escape from freedom. The focus should be on the men. I do not wish this fate on women and children.

The loose use of the word “privilege” is creating a lot of confusion out there in our societies. To clarify, a privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

In medieval Europe, feudal lords enjoyed a privilege called droit du seigneur (or jus primae noctis, as a specific form of the general right), which gave the lord the right to have sexual relations with the serfs living on his estate. This is likely a myth, but, if true, it would constitute an example of a privilege.

Here’s a real example: During Jim Crow, only people could drink from certain water fountains or sit at certain lunch counters. Under the doctrine “separate but equal,” whites has access to facilities from which blacks were barred. This constituted a race privilege.

Today, and this has been true for decades, there are no white-only spaces. Indeed, such a space, if it existed, would be illegal and dismantled. In fact, there is not a single institution or system in the United States that bars black people from entering on account of their race. In other words, there is no institutional or systemic racism in America. (At least to that benefits whites.)

However, there is a form of privilege that does persist. If I do not own and control the means of production to produce for myself, and if I am not allowed free access to these means, then I must sell my labor (rent my body) to those who do for survival (or maybe the government will provide me with assistance). This situation is the consequence of the right by law of individuals or groups to privately own and control productive capital. Albeit difficult, it is possible to acquire this privilege and, in doing so, change one’s class position. One can lose this privilege, too (just ask all the small business men and women who lost the privilege thanks to lockdowns).

In other words, while there is no race-based system in America, there is a class-based system. We’d call is “systemic classism” except that materiality in law and objective fact makes it a system by definition (we can, of course, differentiate “capitalist institutions” from other institutions.) Isn’t it interesting that those who are pushing the rhetoric of white privilege are financed and promoted by those who enjoy class privilege? It’s almost as if there were an effort to distract the people from something. You know, change the conversation.

On this business of my whiteness. You want me to be less white. Great. I don’t try to be less white because I don’t care about my whiteness in the first place. My skin color has no value to me, subjectively or objectively. It’s just skin. I don’t walk around asserting my whiteness or taking pride in it. I have never benefitted from it.

I went from hungry and homeless in Miami to tenured professor at a public university and it had nothing to do with my skin color. it was because I worked hard. Did I get some help from my mother? Sure. But not because she is white. But because she is a good mother. I sacrificed a lot of time—time with family and friends—to get to where I am. I literally made myself sick getting here. It’s others who make a big deal out of my existence as a white man, who want to diminish me on account of my skin color.

No white person speaks for the “white community.” If any white man presumes to speak for white people, know that he does no speak for me. There is no such the “white community.” I am insulted by the very idea that you think I am automatically part of a community because of my skin color. My being white tells you nothing about me. I could be a capitalist or a worker. I could be a gay man or a straight man. I could be a Christian or an atheist.

I will be happy when you decide to stop seeing me as a white man and instead see me as a human being, as an individual, as a man who earned what he has. Maybe you can start this whole “less-white” business by you seeing me as less white. Don’t ask me to stop “acting white” or “being white,” whatever those are supposed to mean. Stop treating me as if I am white. It’s not a real thing. You have the power to make this happen without involving me at all. Just change your thinking and your behavior. Work on yourself.

Yes, I know that all that is not what’s driving the obsession with whiteness. You want me to be white so you can berate me for it because that gives your life meaning and purpose and maybe some else—appropriating the value I do have, perhaps? Making me an enemy of something to build solidarity for project? So you can virtue signal to your woke friends? I regret folks taught you that this was important and useful. It’s not. It’s divisive and hateful.

Meanwhile, race politics are used by our common corporate masters to control us. So, while your obsession with my skin color is your problem, it turns out that it’s my problem, too. But don’t stop seeing me as a white man just to do me a favor. Stop seeing me as a white man to disrupt the racecraft that’s screwing you, that’s keeping you down. Stop being a tool of the ruling class.

And if you’re in the professional-managerial class like me and don’t see yourself as a member of the working class, why not become an ally of the working class like me? The working class needs allies.

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Update! I publish this blog, open Facebook, and see that Adam Carolla dropped a video on privilege on PragerU. Check it out: Who Has Privilege? Neither the downs nor the ups in my life have been on account of my race. I wouldn’t say that’s a form of privilege, but it’s nice not to burdened with a false belief that somehow race explains all the bad shit that I’ve experienced in my life. I know what explains it. But I’m not going to whine about it on social media. All you need to know is that I didn’t sit around blaming society for my situation. I reckoned my faults and did something about it. I’m still working on it. Nobody’s perfect. Even if race had something to do with it, what would I get out of dwelling on that?

In yesterday’s blog, “‘Whatever that number is’: Vaccine Hesitancy, Common Sense, and Stigmatizing Christians,” I noted a relationship between watching establishment media and misperception of basic facts, with progressive Democrats most likely to consume and believe establishment media being most misinformed on key issues, which strongly suggests establishment media is a propaganda operation disseminating misinformation and, really, disinformation.

Today, I am sharing a study, “How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing?” carried by the website Skeptic, that shows how misinformed progressive Americans are about the number of unarmed black men killed by police every year. Progressives are so badly misinformed, in fact, that it would be comical if not tragic, since their ignorance feeds popular support for a regressive political movement. The irony appears lost on those who run around telling everybody to “listen to the science.” Progressives actually believe things that, if one knows even a little about policing in America, are impossible.

How many unarmed blacks were killed by the police in 2019? As few as around a dozen (most sources I have seen). Around two dozen at the top end estimate (according to this source, but this is an extreme outside estimate). However, over half (53.5 percent) of those reporting “very liberal” political views (i.e. progressive) estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed in the year. Nearly a quarter said it was about or more than 10,000. That’s translates to more than two dozen unarmed blacks a day. That’s twice as many blacks killed annually than during entire period of lynching!

How off are these perceptions? Police annually kill around 1,000 suspects in total, 96 percent of them armed, and around a quarter of them black. In other words, three quarters of progressives are wildly wrong about all the relevant facts. Liberals aren’t much better at estimating police shootings of unarmed civilians. Who was most accurate in their perceptions on the matter? Conservatives (with very conservative not far behind). But they’re supposedly mouth breathing white supremacists, rubes, and snake handlers.

As I pointed out in yesterday’s blog, this is also the case with estimates of hospitalizations from COVID-19, with 41 percent of progressives Democrats believing half or more of those infected with COVID-19 wind up in the hospital. This is astounding. How is it even possible to be this ignorant? For those of us on Facebook and Instagram, we are daily inundated with posts virtue signaling masks, vaccine cards, and calls for mandatory vaccination. Who makes these posts? We know the answer. And they presume to tell us about science and policy?

There are a lot of folks upset with me because I keep repeating facts, such as: police kill twice as many whites than blacks every year; controlling for crime and circumstances, racial disproportionately in lethal civilian-officer encounters is explicable and therefore does not suggest systemic racism; controlling for crime and circumstances, police are more reluctant to shoot black suspects than white suspects; the number of unarmed suspects killed by the police every year is very small. I keep repeating these facts because I know the establishment media, which knows these facts, too, is misleading their audience. They are lying.

I’m a teacher, and it is my role to not only correct my students’ misunderstandings, but also the public’s misunderstandings. I can’t allow lies and myths to stand. So you’ll have to hate me, progressives. Scientists don’t like to talk in terms of truth, but there are at least three as-close-to-the-truth-as-it-comes-in-science truths: (1) the earth is not flat; (2) the earth is not at the center of the solar system; (3) the police are not systemically racist.

Finally, a note: Being unarmed doesn’t mean a person is not a threat. It just means they were not threatening the police or somebody else with a weapon. Hands and feet are deadly enough without a weapon. People are beaten to death or permanently injured by hands and feet used as weapons. Don’t assume because a person killed by the police was unarmed that he (or she, although this is extremely rare since females are underrepresented in the most serious violent crimes) was not a threat or that he did not cause his own death by decisions he made in interacting with law enforcement.

CNN has an analysis out today by Stephen Collinson that quotes Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, as saying, “This is a pretty dangerous time to be unvaccinated, but what CDC is signaling is if you are fully vaccinated, freedoms are just becoming safer and safer for people.”

First, it isn’t a particularly dangerous time to be unvaccinated. New cases have fallen to levels last seen nearly a year ago when the Democrats were encouraging people to mass gather and promote the project to depolice America’s most dangerous communities. Moreover, half the population has now received at least one dose of the vaccine. If the vaccines are as efficacious as health officials are asserting, combined with the more than thirty million of those who have already been confirmed to have been or are currently infected, an undercount given an unreckoned but no doubt large number unconfirmed infections, we are at or around typical levels of herd immunity.

But, second, consider the disturbing rhetoric of “freedoms becoming safer.” What a bizarre way of putting the matter. Authoritarian, actually. We can’t have our freedoms until they are safe—as judged by unelected technocrats? Put Jha’s statement alongside what Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University, and you see clearly what the thinking is here: “It’s time for the CDC to start embracing this kind of bifurcated strategy [allowing the vaccinated to move about unmasked, while continuing to restrict the freedom of the unvaccinated] and perhaps giving the unvaccinated a hint of what life can be like if they become vaccinated.”

In other words, either you participate in a massive corporate experiment using a novel technology or you will not be allowed to move freely about your own country—a democratic-republic in which you are a citizen with guaranteed constitutional rights. See my blog concerning the ethics of this: The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg. In sum, this is a profound violation of basic human rights and personal sovereignty and liberty.

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a lengthy essay “Faith, Freedom, Fear: Rural America’s Covid Vaccine Skeptics” on vaccine hesitancy that represented skepticism of vaccines as backwards mouth breathing politically rightwing Christianity. The name of URL itself is revealing, identifying “white Republicans” as the collective culprit. Check it out: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/health/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-white-republican.html.

The story, by Jan Hoffman, makes crucial admissions that the Times nonetheless tries to pin on vaccine skepticism and political and religious ideology. First, widely circulating coronavirus variants are damaging to alleged vaccine efficacy. Second, Hoffman lets slip an effective point made by an interviewee that, if these rubes are, as they are depicted, devoted Trump followers, the fact that the vaccines were developed under and pushed by Trump has had no measurable impact on their willing to receive an experiment vaccine is rather revealing. Disconfirming, actually. Far from slavish followers of the former president, the skeptics are independent minded. Most importantly, which goes to independent-mindedness, Hoffman reveals what really lies at the core of vaccine hesitancy: common sense. Many feel the vaccine was rushed, its long-term effects unknown. They recognize that the vaccine—all of them—enjoy emergency use authorization only.

What explains their skepticism? Consider that the hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is between 1-5% depending on state and region. A study by the Brookings Institute asked representative samples of Democrats and Republicans to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations. More than quarter (25.6 percent) of Republicans articulated the accurate statistic, whereas fewer than one-in-ten (only 9.8 percent) of Democrats did. Astonishingly, 41 percent of Democrats believed that half or more of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 would be hospitalized. Taken together, well more than two-thirds of Democrats believed hospitalizations per infection were 20 percent or more, a wildly accurate estimate. Given the nonstop fear campaign by mainstream media, with a viewership drastically skewed towards Democrats, the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be outside the propaganda bubble contributes to a more accurate grasp of the relative risks of this virus, a virus that has killed fewer than two-in-ten of those 65 years of age and younger and fewer than one-in-ten of those 55 and younger.

(Similarly, studies show that Democrats wildly exaggerate the number of underarmed black men shot by the police. Annually, that number if around a dozen. However, large percentages of Democrats believe the number is in the thousands and tens of thousands. Comparatively, Republicans perception is more aligned with the actual facts. Again, this is a measure of propaganda effect. Put another way, the more mainstream media one watches the more ignorant a person is.)

Today, The New York Times ran a story carrying the title “Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe.” The story cites experts who portray the virus as an ineradicable yet manageable threat, stigmatizing the unvaccinated as disease vectors. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, after moving the herd immunity goal posts several times (he did the same with masks), and working from an apparently (and conveniently) changed definition of herd immunity that excludes those already infected, told the Times that the shift in rhetoric was due to a “confused” public “thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is.”

Whatever that number is.

* * *

Update (same day):

USA Today fact checkers. Some wisely pointed out that, according to the CDC, the case fatality rare for the vaccinated who contract COVID-19 is approximately the same as among the unvaccinated who contract COVID-19. “As of April 20, the CDC has indeed reported a total of 7,157 cases of COVID-19 among fully vaccinated people and 88 deaths.” I calculated the rate and, at 1.22 percent, it is indeed roughly the same as the rate for the unvaccinated.

“But public health experts say calculating a death rate from those numbers and comparing it to the general population is misleading.” Really, how so? “To calculate an accurate death rate, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases among vaccinated individuals must be known. But that number isn’t, said Lisa Miller, an epidemiologist and clinical professor at the Colorado School of Public Health.” Oh really? You mean like I have been saying all along on my blog. “We don’t know that [the infection fatality rate] because we’re not out there testing everyone (vaccinated),” she told USA Today. Exactly. Like I have been saying all along.

But—on no—there’s a snag here. USA Today accidentally told the truth. If you apply the same metric, guess what? That’s right, you lower both fatality rates and find that, in the end, vaccination doesn’t provide any greater protection from death. Try it for yourself. Take either case fatality rate and apply any multiple you wish—as long as it’s the same metric. You would have to engage in dishonesty and apply different metrics to show a disparity in infection fatality rates.

Now we understand that the 95+ percent reduction in hospitalizations = 95+ percent of cases do not result in hospitalizations in the first place. You draw the logical conclusion.

One more thing: “It’s important to note that the CDC has said 11 of the 88 deaths among COVID-19 infected, fully vaccinated people were ‘asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.’” Oh, so not everybody who dies with COVID-19 dies from COVID-19. Where have I heard that before?

I recently shared a meme on Facebook. I remarked that it is a powerful meme. It sums up a lot of what I have been arguing of late on Freedom and Reason. If the point of the meme were taken up and to heart—and it is for most people the operating principle—then there would be a lot less crime in America, especially in those neighborhoods most ravaged by criminal violence, and there would be fewer black men standing in the dock and in prison.

Of course, the meme drew criticisms. The argument that the present situation of an individual is to some significant extent the result of choices made in the past smacks progressives of victim blaming. That charge only works for those groups progressives have determined should not be held to account for the harm they cause. Progressives infantilize blacks, seeing them as incapable of making the choices that explain their plight, but rather as puppets on strings, victims of sociological forces. Those belonging to groups progressives despise (which includes groups to which they themselves belong) are not entitled to blame their behavior on those same abstract forces. Members of those groups are not only responsible for their behavior, but are responsible for the behavior of members of the same imagined communities. So when we hear about how poverty drives blacks to commit crime, poor whites are not excused from their wrongdoings. (The Wages of Victimism: Leftwing Trauma Production for Political Ends.)

One criticism of the meme concerned social class, poverty, and demography, in particular the claims that poverty causes crime and that blacks earn less money than whites despite being in the same occupational classes. Taking up the second claim first, certainly at the moment for cop and lawyer, they exist, at least, in different occupational classes. Does that black cop make less than a white cop in his department at his rank? Not likely. But we don’t know the class location of the defendant. You cannot by looking at a person for whom the social role is unknown know for sure to what class he belongs. At the same time, we do know for certain that humans have agency. A human being makes a decision to break the law (“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” Progressives need Victims). I have little doubt the defendant is standing in the dock for breaking the law. Despite the occasional mistake, the system doesn’t arbitrarily take civilians into custody. It is unlikely that anybody forced that young man to do whatever it was that brought him in front of a judge (if he was forced, then he has a defense based on an excuse). As I have argued, demographic claims about individuals commit the ecological fallacy.

As for the claim that blacks are poorer than whites and poverty is the main reason for involvement in criminal activities. But if this were true, given that there are twice as many poor whites than poor blacks, one would not expect to see blacks so starkly overrepresented in serious criminal offending, but rather whites representing the greater proportion of serious criminal offenses. But we don’t see that. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet they account for more than half of all murders and robberies and a third of aggravated assaults (between 36-38 percent of violent crime overall) and a third of burglaries. This is not because blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites compared to relative involvement in criminal activities. These facts hold across statistical measures. They explain black overrepresentation in prisons and jails. (The FAR Podcast: Explaining the Overrepresentation of Blacks in Crime.)

Crime and neighborhood conditions (Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors) and delinquent traditions represent the greater statistical associations not poverty. Those who perpetuate criminal acts are more likely to experience socialization in subcultures that promote crime and violence and teach techniques that neutralize the conscience conducive to adherence to the law, techniques that teach young men that crime is a form of rebellion against injustice (Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect; Marxist Theories of Criminal Justice and Criminogenesis; Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?).

But humans aren’t puppets on strings. They have agency. These associations only increase the statistical likelihood of crime. The truth remains that most people who live in crime-ridden conditions and around the traditions that promote them do not engage in serious crime. Moreover, blacks are statistically more likely the victims of these types of crime. So however much one might say that the conditions prepare the crime, persons must decide to perpetrate the crime. This makes those persons responsible, which is how society may bring them to account. And should. (“If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities.)

The young man in the dock in the meme is not there because he is black. There are many young black men who never stand before a judge. That young man is there because he made a choice. He is not a victim. Indeed, why he is standing there suggests somebody else is.

Another criticism took the form of examples of blacks being pulled over by the cops or having their residences searched despite their class location. (See Policy Presuming “White Privilege” Violates Equal Protection Under the Law). One example was the recent shooting of a man who told his mother over the phone that the police pulled him over for an air freshener. But we know the man wasn’t pulled over for an air freshener. He was pulled over for a traffic violation. The police ran his name and there was a warrant for his arrest. He resisted, endangering the lives of police officers, and in the confusion a police officer mistakenly drew her weapon (she believed it was her taser) and shot and killed the man. He’d still be alive if he hadn’t resisted. (An Avoidable Tragedy: The Accidental Shooting of Duante Wright. See also Dealing with the Police.)

I noted that white people are pulled over by the police all the time. I was myself hassled by the police frequently because of my long hair. It was a tax I paid because long haired young men in the 1970s and 1980s were more likely to deal and use drugs and, rightly or wrong, cops work from typifications (mainly because it functions to reduce crime). Cops perform disproportionate number of investigative stops on blacks for the same reason. However we feel about the practice, the facts show that drivers who cooperate with police face no greater danger from cops on account of race.

The practical function of saying that patterns of arrest and imprisonment are because of racism (they’re not) or that crime is caused by the abstract structures and forces supposed by sociological theorists (maybe part of the explanation but no excuse for lawbreaking) is to simultaneously recast perpetrators as victims while portraying human beings as marionettes, robbing them of agency and denying their responsibility. When progressives do this on the basis of critical race theory, they infantilize blacks while, at same time, not only hold whites accountable for their actions, but also for the actions of other whites, and, even more than this, blame the actions of blacks on whites, who are depicted as privileged and powerful. which, for the vast majority of whites, is untrue (just as it is untrue to say that all blacks are disadvantaged and powerless. I have watched this bizarre manner of thinking develop over several decades, shamefully at times participating in its development. I now sit here deeply concerned that there may be no walking it back.

* * *

If you put on your sociology glasses you can see the abstract theoretical structures and forces pulling at the strings that manipulate them into hurting other people.

When prominent and influential figures teach children, through word and deed, that they and the people around them are not responsible for their situation, that they have no obligation to regard those around them with normal human regard, and that violence is a means to an end in settling matters beyond absolutely necessity, then the result will be a failure of impulse control and violent behavior towards others.

The same is true with civilian-officer interactions. Tell people that the police are racists and are only stopping them because of their race, and that, therefore they are right to resist (after all who shouldn’t resist racist aggression?), and you increase the likelihood of injury and death to both civilian, officer, and bystander. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who defend and rationalize irresponsibility are as responsible for these outcomes as those who encourage them.What we teach our children is central to their ability to regulate their emotions, make wise decisions, and do the right thing.

Family has been the heart of the social order since time immemorial. There’s a reason why family lies at the center of explanations for human behavior. I make that observation for what it’s worth (which is a lot) but also to note the current efforts to disrupt normal family systems. Because there is a reason why we are shamed for suggesting that personal responsibility, family structure, and parenting is a solution to a lot of our problems.

Humans are animals. Under normal conditions, animals regard one another peacefully. Most of the time, animals are cooperative—even across species. To be sure, animals will fight over resources. But, still, conduct is for the most part selected to promote common existence and harmony.

The thing that separates humans from other animals is the development of a conscious moral system. Humans, when properly socialized, have a conscience. They anticipate feelings of regret. This controls impulses. Other animals, when enraged, fly off the handle.

At the same time, most aggression displays do not wind up in serious injury or death of the other member of their species. It is particularly important to teach the human animal to control its impulses and to regard other humans decently. The development of a strong conscience is central to this.

I should confess at the outset that I am a professor who teaches research ethics. I have done so for more than a quarter century. I have organized and chaired human subjects review boards (or institutional review boards) as well as animal use and care committees. What is missing from the discussion about vaccine passports is an understanding of human freedom and medical ethics. I raise Nuremberg in these discussions because of the centrality of that body of international law in governing these affairs. They were developed specifically in response to a totalitarian situation. Vaccine passports contradict international law.

The Code requires that any participants in medical experiments and procedures were willing participants, which means they volunteered to be involved. It is crucial in determining voluntary participation that no person consenting to an experiment does so from any coercive element in her surroundings. That is, the willing consenting participant could not be a person compelled to participate because of some adverse contingent force. Contingency means actions dependent on or conditioned by something else. This does not rule out rewards for those who participate in a medical experiment. The absence of a reward is not an adverse condition. But it does rule out any adverse consequence for failing to participate. 

For example, if I offer somebody $100 to participate in a medical experiment or submit to a procedure, they do not lose anything by not participating. But, if I take away their freedom if they don’t participate in a medical experiment or submit to a procedure, then they are losing something for refusing the participate or submit. Loss of freedom is an adverse consequence because humans under normal conditions require and desire freedom. This adverse consequence falls into the category of a punishment. However, there is another adverse consequence that falls into the category of negative reinforcement. 

For example, if I take away the freedom of people—let’s say I make it illegal for them to leave their home or to go without a mask over their face—and tell them that unless and until they participate in a medical experiment or submit to a medical procedure, i.e., receive an vaccine, they will not have returned to them their freedom to leave their home or go about without a mask, then I am coercing them to participate or submit. The consequence for failure to participate or submit is continued unfreedom, an adverse condition. 

Remember, the difference between punishment and negative reinforcement is not the presence or absence of an adverse stimulus. The adverse stimulus in present in both techniques. The difference is whether the adverse stimulus is applied for noncompliance, or whether it is removed for compliance. It is, in either case, coercive, which is why both are fundamentally different from positive reinforcement (or reward). To stop torturing a person who confesses is not to reward the person for his confession, but to coerce him into a confession by stopping the torture if hand when e complies. 

If you don’t understand this, then you don’t understand the first thing about freedom or medical ethics. (See also On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination; What’s the Big Deal With Wearing a Mask? Lots).

A Virginia teacher says critical race theory has damaged community as frustrated parents demand changes, Fox News reports. Monica Gill, an Advanced Placement Government teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia is speaking out about what she calls “Marxist” ideas that have prompted intense infighting among county residents. “We’re told that we’re living in a county that’s suffering from systemic racism and I think that that whole notion has done nothing but damage our community and our school since they began pushing equity.”

Gill is wrong about critical race theory being Marxist. Among other things, CRT is Maoist. Mao, whose ideas and actions are associated with mass death, advocated thirdworldism. To be sure, he called his ideas “Marxist-Leninist,” but they weren’t (Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics). Mao’s ideas aped the jargon of historical materialism, but substituted the peasantry for the national proletarian as the revolutionary vanguard. Marx would never have agreed to struggle on the basis of race relations or racial categories. But that is precisely what Mao did, for example, in his support for black radicalism and race riots in the United States in the 1960s. Marx would have found this abhorrent. He understood that racism and ethnicism as forms of alienation (see Marxian Nationalism and the Globalist Threat; also Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).

Nonetheless, Monica Gill is correct in the longer quote shared above. The claim that the United States is systemically racist is false and divisive. Antiracism is more religion than anything else, and the US Bill of Rights specifically forbids unwanted religious indoctrination. That falls under both the “government shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion” clause and the “free exercise” clause. If you deny the analogy, you have to contend with the “free speech” clause, as well as the “assembly” clause. Ideological and political indoctrination is compelled speech, and compelled speech is entirely contrary to the right to free speech, thought, and association. Mandatory instruction and reception of critical race theory mythology is a blatant violation of the Constitution.

Understand that they are doing this to change our consciousness concerning justice. They are moving to replace the ethic of individual liberty and equality with group-based rights and an ethic of safetyism. If you are compelled to show up to a meeting in which this ideology is promulgated, and you are a fraud to speak up, then sit quietly. Nobody can force you to talk. Diversity, inclusion, and equity training is ideological—political indoctrination. It is not the role of an organization to compel you to believe a particular ideology or adopt and practice a particular politics.

From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Critical race theory is not trying to hide its agenda. It strikes at the foundation of western civilization. It is self-admittedly illiberal and authoritarian, rejecting the ethic of individualism and the principle of equality before the law. It literally defines our liberal traditions as the “perpetrator’s perspective.” It declares all white people responsible for the past and present actions of any one white person.

How such an illiberal and authoritarian doctrine found its way into public instruction ought to terrify you. Have you looked at what your kids are learning? Ask your teachers if this is being taught at your school. Don’t stand for this. Don’t let them get your children. If you’re interested in the facts that prove that critical race theory is false and irrational, subscribe to Freedom and Reason @ andrewaustin.blog. Read the essays here. If you need help in identifying the specific essays on this subject, let me know. We need to organize to resist this assault on the United States republic.