Except that Biden is arguably worse that Chamberlain. Maybe a lot worse.
Speaking of Xi Jinping, the leader of the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party, the party that organizes the totalitarian bureaucratic collectivism that enslaves the Chinese people and is striving to bring down the West (with a lot of western elites serving as colonial collaborators), Biden admits: “he doesn’t have a democratic—small-“d”—bone in his body.” Biden prefaces that admission with “I don’t mean this as a criticism.”
I want readers of this blog to think long and hard about what Biden is saying. Internalize it. Think about what Xi and the CCP has done and is doing to the West. Think about what Xi is doing to his own people. Xi is perpetrating genocide against the Uyghur people. Xi is a genocidal authoritarian. Sound familiar? But Biden doesn’t mean that as a criticism.
Joe Biden would be the Neville Chamberlain of our time except that, in Biden’s case, he is arguably the most significant Western actor in the making possible the fusion of Chinese industrial might with Western capitalism and the rise of Xi. He is like Chamberlain having 25 hours of private meetings with Hitler over the course of several years, with these years embedded in many more years of raising Nazi Germany to the level of a world power that threatens democracy globally.
Why, if you go through your house, do you see Chinese technology everywhere? Where did the capital-intensive high-wage manufacturing jobs Americans used to perform go? They’re in the slave labor camps of China. Who made that possible? Joe Biden and people like him.
Workers of America, you have been betrayed. And one of the chief betrayers is now your president. If you voted for him, this is what you voted for.
At some point, capitalism isn’t possible. Think about it. Capitalist production generates surplus value—the difference between what capitalists pay workers and the value workers generate with their labor—realized in the market as profit (this is capitalist accumulation—it’s what drives the circuit). That means, capitalism depends on workers earning wages in order to spend money buying things workers make.
But, soon, there will be no workers. That is what automation and robotization (and artificial intelligence) brings. That means no realization of value as profit. Do you not see the paradox yet? There is no value because there are no workers earning wages in order to buy products made by…machines. Do you see it now? Karl Marx was right.
This is why the transnational project is to convert capitalism into global neofeudalism. The elite want to protect their privilege, but they cannot do it under capitalism. So, they are adapting the Chinese Community Party model of industrial plantations. This is why they have no respect for liberal freedoms such as free speech, assembly, etc. Those freedoms were part of the old liberal capitalist order. The new world order is an authoritarian one where democracy is replaced by technocracy. The “experts” (the new priesthood) will tell your what to do and how to live. The citizen becomes the subject again—like it was under feudalism. The worker becomes a serf.
This is the Great Reset the Party of Davos has promised you. This is what the Democrats bring to the table (you cannot support this party for this reason). This is global corporatism. And under this social logic, you will be a debt-encumbered slave in a global hierarchy without nation-states, i.e. without democratic-republican government. And you will be happy without freedom because all your basic but trivial needs will met and the ethic of equity will absolve you of your sins.
Just remember that the single largest occupation for men is the transportation sector. Self-driving cars will put them out to pasture. Critical Race Theory won’t be of much use to them. The vast majority of them are white.
On September 29, 2020, on this blog, I wrote, “We should be terrified for our republic. We are seeing a color revolution unfolding before our very eyes. This time in the premier First World country. The strategy corporate elite fractions use in the Third World to install governments conducive to their interests is being deployed in America thanks to neoconservatives, progressives, and the Democratic Party.” I reflect on that successful color revolution in this essay, but, perhaps more importantly, I assess potential dangers facing Americans in its aftermath. For those who believe they won on November 3 aren’t satisfied with merely turning Trump out of office. The tens of millions who put Trump in office, and who showed up in even greater numbers to keep him in office, remain. And Trump, or somebody like him, could return. These are problems for elite ambition.
The Color Revolution
According to Revolver News, a color revolution “refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be ‘authoritarian’ and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.”
Part of this strategy is using mass protests to lure the target government into deploying the state apparatus to suppress the protests, coercive action that is then exploited to validate claims that the target government is authoritarian and therefore illegitimate. Crucially, propagandists spin the use of force in a particular direction leveraging an assumed moral understanding. Trump’s use of the National Guard during the riots of 2020, including in Washington DC, marked his authoritarianism, for example, whereas the thousands of troops in Washington DC today are there to “defend democracy” from authoritarianism.
As analysts over at Revolver News have pointed out, the same people running many of the color revolutions overseas have been using the same playbook to overturn the 2016 election. The project to remove Trump from office didn’t begin several months ago. It began years ago when it became clear that the self-aggrandizing businessman from Queens would occupy the White House. We saw elements of this lengthy color revolution in the protests that appeared and reappeared at various points during his presidency. The Pussyhats in 2017, for example. The most notable example, of course, the resurgent Black Lives Matter, joined by Antifa, in 2020. The protests and riots were augmented by manufactured scandals. The deep state’s Russian collusion hoax. An impeachment over a phone call to the Ukrainian president.
In that September 29 blog, I told readers about the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), one of the entities carrying out the color revolution. TIP was one of many collectives determined to see Biden assume the Office of President, thereby putting the corporatist-globalist powers back in the driver’s seat. Publications such as The National Pulse and Revolver News have been eager to tell you about many others and I urge you to avail yourself of their work. However, establishment media, dedicated to the aims of the color revolution, was reluctant to cover any of this in the midst of the contest. At least not in a way that would alert the public to it. But it was only a matter of time before the legacy media would cover it. Elites are prone to brag about their achievements. They like to let people know how clever they are. They like to see credit given where credit is due.
Time Magazine couldn’t wait until the upcoming (this Thursday) impeachment trial was concluded (in the likely second acquittal of Trump). Arguably the premier news and opinion magazine in America published last week a lengthy article, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign the Saved the 2020 Election,” that admits the color revolution elites carried out against Trump. Incredibly, the author of the article, Molly Ball, confesses: “Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.”
Note the use of the word “conspiracy” in the article. Ball just comes right out and says it, her position and status protecting her from being lumped with Alex Jones and the rest of the canceled conspiratorial wingnuts. Ball is on the right side (i.e. the left side), so it’s okay.
“Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans,” Ball details the cabal. “The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–-inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–-in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.” The pact was little noticed because the establishment media avoided tossing it into the echo machine. Ball is now inviting the public to marvel at it.
Ball wants her readers to know the machinations were bigger than they could have imagined. “The handshake between business and labor,” she writes, “was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–-an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.”
That spin, a “vast” and “extraordinary shadow effort” mounted to “protect” democracy, marks the piece throughout—but though it attempts to wrap itself in virtue, to make the conspiracy out to be a noble one, the article tries too hard and gives away the game. Ball wanted so badly for Trump to be tossed out of office that the truth, namely that Biden didn’t win fair and square (this is why it’s such a big deal that Republicans say Biden won fair and square), pokes though the rhetoric. Ball’s skill as a propaganda isn’t sophisticated enough to hide her sympathies. Frankly, it kind of feels like she isn’t really trying to hide it at all.
Ball carefully documents the “vast” and “extraordinary shadow effort” that “touched every aspect of the election.” She tells her readers what I told readers of Freedom and Reason months ago: “They [those who orchestrated Biden’s victory] got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”
Giddily, Ball invites Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program, to tell her readers just what the elite pulled off. “The untold story of the election,” Eisen says, “is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation.” (For more on Eisen, read this article from Revolver News.)
Like Ball, Eisen codes the conspiracy (again, Ball’s words, not mine) in the rhetoric of democratic integrity. However, the tactics Ball identifies and Eisen takes credit for each has an obvious dark side: Changing voting procedures via executive power is illegal in light of the United States Constitution which, in guaranteeing citizens of every state a republican form of government, locates the power to determine election processes in the fifty legislatures that comprise the nation. Voting by mail was a balloting harvesting scheme designed to bypass the layers of security that guarantee that the person casting the vote is actually the person that vote purports to represent. Social media censorship marginalized, punished, and silenced those who warned Americans about the conspiracy that Time now confirms. Ensuring that Trump could not overturn the result was in truth a concerted effort to thwart democratic challenges to certifications of elections where widespread evidence of illegalities, irregularities, and fraud called into question their legitimacy. In the end, a riot at the Capitol stopped the planned challenges to state certifications and Biden was installed as president.
Ball’s words betray her throughout the article. She tells us what the conspiracy was really about, writing that “Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election.” Their own campaign. Of course, not to spoil the election, but to fight back against a massive campaign to remove Trump from office, a campaign that he and those around him could see—as any of us prepared to believe our own eyes could see. Or our own ears! Biden bragged about having “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of politics.” That was no stutter. It was an admission. His mind slipping, he slipped and let known the backroom backslapping. In the end, Ball is telling us, the campaign that sought to remove Trump and install Biden as president was much better organized that Trump’s efforts to fight for his tens of millions of supporters.
The title of Ball’s article needs only one word changed to accurately reflect the evidence she presents: “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Stole the 2020 Election.” I am unsure that the establishment felt it is safe yet to report on the color revolution that removed Trump from office, but Ball couldn’t help herself. And many of the coup leaders were eager to respond to her phone calls and emails. Soon enough, they will all be on the Sunday morning shows gloating. An anti-democratic elite is running the country against the interests of the American people. It had to crush Trump’s America First movement because Trump stood in the way of the managed decline of the American republic. The corporatists and globalists want the people to know they cannot resist transnationalization. They want you to know that you are serfs, not citizens.
The Deviant and Dangerous American
“Get in line” is the message elites are broadcasting. And the elite are now preparing the national security apparatus to focus on the 75 million patriots who voted America First in case they won’t. Academia is already stepping up to the plate to help the establishment translate conservative and rightwing politics into the language of domestic terrorism. Soon, the Confederal battle flag and Thin Blue Line won’t be the only flag that marks you as problematic. Representing the push are academics like Robert Pape, University of Chicago political scientist, and Keven Ruby, Senior research associate of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. In “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists,” published in The Atlantic, they analyze nearly two hundred people arrested in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot and discover “a new kind of American radicalism.” The article, cloaked in scholarly authority, is a clinic in propaganda.
Pape and Ruby are the scholarly type who, from his prison cell under the Fascist rule of Mussolini, social theorist Antonio Gramsci characterized as organic intellectuals. They tell their audience that “a closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more ‘normal’ Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.” A new kind of violent mass movement. Scary words. But one must suspect even the “normal” in these new times. The normal is the deviant in our postmodern world.
Many progressives have convinced themselves that installing Joe Biden as president is the equivalent of defeating Fascism in Europe. You hear in their rhetoric such absurd notions as the Democrats have won a civil war (ponder the irony of that). All this reconciliation talk is as if it were Trump and his supporters who caused the chaos over the last four years. Remember, the core idea of Antifa (which the president tells us is indeed only an idea) is that the mere appearance of conservatives in public is sufficient to justify defending the community from fascists.
The left is ludicrously expressing a desire to “denazify” America by canceling conservatives. In ominous tones, the frightened sheep are told that conservatives (i.e. fascists) have infiltrated the flock. “They are hidden among us disguised behind regular jobs,” Mystery writer Don Winslow warns us. They are our children’s teachers. They work at malls and in doctor’s offices. Their white hoods and white robes and brown shirts can be seen through the lens of antifascism and antiracism. Winslow calls on progressives to form a citizen army, a network of harassers and spies—woke scolds and busybodies—who should report to authorities what their neighbors, colleagues, teachers are up to, what they say on social media, in classrooms, in bars. American needs a new generation Stasi who will deliver up to the government comrades, family, and friends. A million Chicken Littles. See something, say something.
Putting to one side the 75 million Trump voters who have done nothing but maybe put up a yard sign and shared campaign literature (if they were brave enough to risk career and reputation), is it not possible that many, maybe even most of those who were in the Capitol that day (and who were not Antifa or BLM) were carrying their protest over the 2020 election inside the building—the people’s building—in order to be heard by their public servants? Could it be that they were not trying to “overturn a presidential election” by force but rather change through persuasion the minds of those who haven’t considered the facts? Is it not possible that they were there not to overturn the election (which had not actually yet occurred at that point), but to explain why they were not prepared to concede in the face of widespread illegalities, irregularities, and fraud in the 2020 election?
Have my readers watched videos of what transpired on January 6 at the Capitol? I have. They are plentiful. There are people on video acting violently or destructively. We now know that the violence, exaggerated or not, was planned in advance (Trump did not incite a riot). At the same time, the video shows, on some sides of the building, Capitol police inviting in people, even forming ranks to make entry orderly and safe. Pape and Ruby find that only one-tenth of Capitol arrestees could be classified as supporters of gangs, militias, or militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters. Ninety percent of arrestees had no apparent affiliation with any known militant organization. In other words, those were ordinary Americans milling about in the Capitol that day. Yet Pape and Ruby reach a bizarrely different conclusion: its ordinary Americans who represent the greatest threat to the republic.
That Americans wearing Trump gear and flying the US flag were arrested in the Capitol is hardly evidence of guilt of violent or destructive behavior. Nor do their arrests signal insurrectionist motives. They were where they weren’t supposed to be—this much is true. The charges, “entering a restricted building” and “disorderly conduct,” aren’t particularly egregious offenses. The concrete barricades, chainlink fences, and razor wire, and the thousands of soldiers that now make the Capitol look like the Green Zone in Iraq, had not yet been deployed. Perhaps those who entered the building didn’t know they were supposed to be in a building their taxes pay for, a building in which public servants pass laws that affect their families and communities. One might excuse such ignorance given what they were taught in their civics classes or hear from politicians everyday. They certainly couldn’t have missed the way authorities allowed leftwing protestors to get away with almost anything. They must have heard Kamala Harris tell Stephen Colbert that protests not only wouldn’t stop but shouldn’t stop.
But, again, it’s not those who entered the Capitol building that Pape and Ruby are after. The Atlantic piece runs with the worst assumptions about the totality of Trump supporters: “To understand the events of January 6 and devise solutions to prevent their recurrence, Americans need a fine-grained comprehension of who attacked the Capitol. Understanding the ideology and beliefs of those who commit political violence is important, but so is knowing what kind of people they are and what their lives are like.” What kind of people are they? What are their lives like?
Pape and Ruby are warning you not about insurrectionists, but about small businessmen and women and conservative working class people fed up with corporate governance and technocracy, who have suffered the most from the pandemic lockdowns, and who are moved to protest these affronts to their liberty and to democracy in their Capitol in the spirit of patriotic duty. (It is telling that in their research, the researchers found a majority of those arrested hailing from blue or blue-leaning counties.) For Pape and Ruby, society must find a “solution” to this problem—the solution of the politically interested ordinary American. We might call this the problem of the anti-idiot, idiot here used in its original meaning in the context of Ancient Greek politics.
To be sure, we mustn’t downplay the violence that occurred on January 6. I have condemned it on this blog. As I reported, a police officer died from his injuries, a veteran was shot to death, and a woman was trampled. These deaths are tragic. (So are the dozens of deaths caused by Black Lives Matters protests.) However, for the most part, and we must tell the truth about this, the scene that day is comparable to the way public employee union members, upset over Republican legislation undermining collective bargaining, took over the Wisconsin state capitol building in 2011 (see “The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings”). And not just for a few hours. For days. The vast majority of those who entered the Wisconsin capitol building were peaceful. They were angry. I know a lot of people who were there. Several days found me marching around the building. I was angry, too. I’m a union man. Those who entered the structure were good people who wanted to make their voices heard. Marching around and around the building didn’t seem to make the point, so some of them went inside. I didn’t. But I wasn’t particularly upset that others did.
Those were peaceful protestors who entered Michigan statehouse in Lansing in late April, 2020, too. Remember how the media made a calamity over the fact that some of them came armed? (Hardly surprising. It’s Michigan.) Those protestors were angry over Governor Gretchen Whitmer extending her stay-at-home mandate (while her husband went fishing) and they wanted to make their voices heard by the lawmakers who were debating the matter. It didn’t seem Whitmer was listening or cared about what she was doing to their livelihoods.
The way in which the Michigan protestors were depicted in media stories and by progressives in my social circles foreshadowed the way the Capitol trespassers would be depicted several months later. In light of the leftwing protests across the country but a month later, it illustrated perhaps better than anything could the double standard that plagues our nation. Indeed, the scene in Lansing was not unlike the scene in Sacramento of two dozen armed black radicals occupying the state Capitol of California on May 2, 1967, an action now revered by antiracist activists as spreading to the inadequacies of Martin Luther King Jr.’s tactics of nonviolent resistance (see Bad Comparisons and the Call for Racially Differentiated Law Enforcement).
If the double standard is still not clear, recall the more than 300 protesters arrested at the protests over Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings at the Capitol. The mob that descended on the US Senate building on Thursday, October 4, 2018 while lawmakers reviewed the FBI’s report on the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was angry. Why wasn’t that frightening? After US Capitol Police barricaded the front of the Capitol, protesters gathered in the Hart Senate Building atrium. More were arrested at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. What triggered such a calamity? According to CNN, “Christine Blasey Ford came forward with an allegation that Kavanaugh sexually and physically assaulted her while they were both at a party during their high school years more than three decades ago.” In high school. More than three decades ago. The protests didn’t end on that day. Two days later, as the mob pounded on its doors, US Capitol Police arrested 164 people at the Supreme Court.
We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us.
By publishing the Pape and Ruby article, The Atlantic is creating the impression of middle-aged, middle class Americans, hundreds of thousands who peaceably assembled at the Capitol, millions who voted for Trump, joining forces with a handful of right-wing and left-wing extremists who were behaving in a violent and destructive fashion.
One finds a similar, more popular track in the pages of Salon. Lucian Truscott makes it explicit: Republicans are no longer a political party. They’re a mob. Truscott, a writer of fiction like Don Winslow, pursues the same angle as Winslow: “If the people you saw on your television in the violent mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 seemed familiar, that’s because they were. You have seen them before—at Donald Trump’s political rallies, standing in line behind you at the supermarket, driving the car in front of you at the drive-thru, in the pickup line at your kid’s school. If you don’t believe me, Google some videos taken that day. Look at their faces. They’re from every walk of life: middle, lower and upper class, construction workers, shop owners, stockbrokers, husbands, wives, students, off-duty cops and soldiers, accountants, actors, writers, teachers, online media stars, even one recently elected state representative.” He also notes their race. They are white.
This is a campaign of delegitimation. Legacy media like The Atlantic are the propaganda arm of the globalist establishment. They disseminate propaganda developed by organic intellectuals working at our leading universities and think tanks. Their design for the future is clear: stop the nationalist-populist movement that stands in the way of completing the project to effectively institute a one world legal and political system that entrenches the transnational corporate order, what some are describing as the global neo-feudalist order. The plans of the World Economic Forum, the Party of Davos, are not supposed; they are openly proclaimed on its website. This is the “Great Reset.” You will have nothing and you will be happy about it.
The campaign to punish and silence those who continue to pursue election fraud is, like the campaign to portray the tens of millions of Trump supporters as domestic terrorists, a frightening indicator of where we are in this phase of late capitalism. As CNN is reporting, “Voting technology company Smartmatic files $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell over ‘disinformation campaign’.” If this lawsuit is allowed to go forward, it means that private corporations will be able to engage in fraud without consequence by intimidating and bankrupting fact-finders and whistleblowers. This is particularly dangerous because elections are a public matter. We should never allow private power to dictate the terms and conduct of our democracy. The New York Times: “Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation.” USA Today: “Fake news victims are using lawsuits to shut down the lies. Can courts cure this plague?” Words have consequences, Lou Dobbs.
Fact-finding and whistleblowing are of the utmost importance to a healthy democracy. But those who tell the truth are ridiculed and maligned. Consider the case of Peter Navarro. Navarro holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and is a Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Policy at the University of California-Irvine. Author of numerous books, including his China trilogy: The Coming China Wars (2006), Death By China (2011), and Crouching Tiger (2015), he served as Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the White House during the Trump Administration. His analysis of the 2020 election should be the expert arguments and evidence Trump’s defense team brings to trial—that and Molly Ball’s Time piece (which should be given to every Senator on opening day). If that happens, America will have a chance to learn what tens of millions of people already know, that Trump’s claims surrounding the events of 2020 are not “unfounded.” Yet the Washington Post declares the Navarro reports to be “perhaps the most embarrassing produced by a White House staffer.” Translation: don’t bother looking at them.
Another angle of projecting disrepute upon conservatives is coming with the expected push for mandatory vaccination for children for COVID-19. Authorities and experts with close ties to the pharmaceutical giants are already telling us that herd immunity depends on inoculating children. Many conservatives, working from the principle of personal sovereignty, capable of understanding the risks involved in vaccination programs, and correctly grasping that the virus poses so little risk to children that vaccination is unnecessary, will refuse the vaccine. They may be forced to appeal to religious exemptions since the Nuremberg Code doesn’t appear to carry any force under corporate state rule. The technocrats will paint such refusal as yet another threat to the health and safety of the republic from a “new kind of violent radical,” i.e. the ordinary citizen, the backwards and stupid American who has no right to participate in her democracy. Elites will use the perception to destroy exemptions, and then the public will face a barrage of vaccinations. Just don’t virtue signal with vaccine passports on social media. Apparently there are scammers out there.
Obvious Lies and the Deep Truth
These are the tactics used to marginalize Americans living between the coasts, to politically delegitimize them by portraying their patriotism, religious faith, skepticism, and traditional beliefs as threats to the social order of things, an order defined by woke corporate elites and serving their political and material interests. The deplorables must be marginalized to prevent nationalistic and populist sentiment from derailing the transnationalization project, even if it means subverting the Constitution and upending American culture.
Even while she tells a powerful truth, a truth that supports Trump’s complaints, Molly Ball can’t help but repeat lies about January 6. “Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes,” she writes. That is not what was asked of Pence. “[Trump] told them to go to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell.’” It’s as if she has never been to a football gate. The president told the thousands assembled to “peacefully and patriotically” go to the Capitol and make their voices heard. “Fight like hell” is a rallying cry. “Then [Trump] returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as ‘very special.’” Trump did not praise the rioters (just as he did not praise white nationalists and white supremacists after Charlottesville). He praised the thousands of peaceful protestors who came to Washington DC to make their voices heard. That’s what democracy looks like.
Here’s what democracy doesn’t look like: the elite conspiracy Ball documents and details in her article. Color revolutions are not democratic. A color revolution is a strategy to thwart democracy. It is antidemocratic. Ball writes, “Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed.” No, the will of the plutocracy prevailed. The people lost 2020. And they may well lose their country on account of it.
Ball concludes her piece with this: “it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.” Despite the many lies, in the end, Ball once more could not help but tell the deeper truth: Elites put on an election.
* * *
Remember in 2020 when Chuck Schumer, standing in front of the Supreme Court building, said that Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, “won’t know what hit” them if they voted to uphold abortion restrictions? He said this, too: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”
Schumer wasn’t exactly calling on people to “peacefully and patriotically” let the Supreme Court know how they feel. Phrases like “won’t know what hit them,” “unleashed the whirlwind,” and “pay the price” don’t sound like calls for peaceful protest.
So over-the-top were Schumer’s words, Chief Justice Roberts rebuked the senator. “Statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.” Dangerous, huh? Roberts then said, “All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”
Why didn’t Roberts livestream his tears? Probably because he didn’t cry about it. He also didn’t livestream any tears in 2017 when a mob pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court angry over Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Perhaps Roberts is no drama queen.
Imagine if somebody who said the things Schumer about Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said became the Majority Leader in the United States Senate.
If I have a deep puncture wound, I will get a tetanus booster. If I am bitten by a rabid bat, I will get a rabies shot. Others may get any vaccinations they wish. That includes my own children. I make criticisms of vaccines, of course; I am a rational person who is capable of reading scientific research, and there are many problems with vaccines. Moreover, I am critical of the pharmaceutical industry in the same way I am critical of the fossil fuel industry or any other industry. I am not a religious person; I do not have faith in these institutions. The burden rests on them to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of their products. But I am not principally opposed to vaccination.
Illustration depicting compulsory vaccination drive in New Jersey circa the 1880s (for small pox).
In other words, I am not anti-vaccination or an “anti-vaxxer,” as vaccine skeptics are called. Of course, MedicalNewsToday would like people to think of vaccine skeptics as such. “‘Anti-vaxxer’ refers to people who disagree with the use of vaccines for a variety of reasons,” the website asserts. “For example, some view vaccines as an infringement on their human rights.” To be sure, vaccination per se is not an infringement on human rights. Indeed, if a vaccine is acceptably safe and effective, it is arguably a violation of human rights to deny them to people who want or need them. Where vaccination runs afoul of human rights is when it is compulsory or mandatory. So it depends.
The problem with mandatory vaccination is in the act of compelling people against their will to be vaccinated. Following the Nuremberg Code, I include in my understanding of involuntary participation in vaccination programs any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion. This covers making government benefits or employment in the public or private sector depend on vaccination. These are forms of coercion. I am well aware that there are ethicists who object to my appealing to the Nuremberg code to oppose mandatory vaccination. It’s not that I ignorant of or don’t understand their arguments. It’s that I disagree with their conclusion that compulsory vaccination is compatible with Nuremberg.
The error these ethicists make is in their understanding or depiction of the character of scientific research. The objection that vaccination is not medical research is an absurd denial of the obvious: vaccination, along with every other medical intervention, is and always will be ongoing medical experimentation. Science is never settled. Most vaccines are perpetually in development. Vaccines always carry health risks, potentially serious ones. The benefit and efficacy of most vaccines is and will remain highly variable. This is true for coronavirus and influenza vaccines. Nuremberg requires that, in medical research, the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. Every person has a right to refuse to participate in ongoing medical research.
Nuremberg is based on the principle of personal sovereignty—the right of the person to determine what will happen to his or her body. Consider compulsory sterilization, a historic practice especially appropriate to this discussion because compulsory vaccination was used as the justification for compulsory sterilization in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell (1927). The decision, authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., upheld a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” “for the protection and health of the state.” Holmes writes: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
The principle that the state can do what it will to individuals for the state’s sake is a dangerous notion. The principle could be used to force abortions (there are too many people, or people of a particular kind)—or prevent them (there are not enough people, or people of a particular kind). As free persons, we do not live for the state. We don’t even live for other people. A dozen individuals die everyday in the United States, some of them children, for lack of a healthy kidney, yet we do not conduct lotteries to identify citizens who two healthy functioning kidneys and remove one of them. It does not matter how relatively painless or safe the procedure is.
If a person wishes to be vaccinated, then they can have some peace of mind that they will be protected from infection or disease. But they may not wish that I be vaccinated. Or, rather, they may wish it, but they mustn’t be permitted to compel it. The objection that there are some who cannot be vaccinated and thus need me to protect them only takes us back to the child dying of a dysfunctional or diseased kidney. Tragic as this may be, the state may not use my body to affect the child’s fate. You may tax me to pay for dialysis or a new kidney. You may not remove a kidney from my body against my will.
When objections to compulsory vaccination are covered in the media, one often sees accompanying the stories images such as the one I share below. But those signs are accurate. Vaccines can cause injury and death. Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe (of course a lot of things are and we do them anyway). Compulsory vaccination does violate bodily autonomy. One sees in the opposition to public statements of fact that the anti-vaxxer smear is not a label assigned to people who call for the abolition of vaccines, but a term delegitimizing any person who is skeptical of the claims made by governments, physicians, and pharmaceutical corporations or who asserts personal sovereignty as protection from compulsory vaccination. But, as my own example shows, vaccine skepticism and appeal to human rights is not an anti-vax position.
Almost two decades ago, Wired Magazine published an article by Elliot Borin titled “Forced Vaccines Haunt Gulf Vets.” It led off with this sentence: “Rule No. 1 in the Nuremberg Code for conducting medical experiments: Get the subjects’ consent. But many Gold War soldiers were told, not asked, to take non-FDA-approved drugs—and now suffer from a host of health problems.” The qualifier, “non-FDA-approved” is unnecessary. The FDA is a regulatory body established by progressive policymakers who assumed to legitimacy of corporate governance. The FDA is the paradigm of regulatory capture. Whether the FDA approves or doesn’t approve a drug has no bearing on the ethics of compelling persons to participate in medical research. Besides, it’s not as if the FDA hasn’t disapproved medicines it previously approved.
“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.” —Animal Farm
Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, wrote the following on Facebook: “In all my years of studying U.S. politics, seamy side and all, I never expected to see the name of an American president in the New York Times in a list comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But then, I never expected to see an American president urge a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election, either.”
Right off the bat, a lie is assumed in what Richardson wrote. Trump did not urge a mob to storm the Capitol to overturn an election. It was exactly the opposite. Exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition Congress for a redress of their grievances, hundreds of thousands of protesters were asked to walk in an orderly and nonviolent manner to the Capitol to let their voices be heard concerning white spread evidence of election fraud, illegalities, and irregularities.
The record is clear: The president asked his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. That’s what democracy looks like. If a mentally ill aspiring voice actor in a Buffalo costume heard something else that’s not the president’s fault. Yet a trial looms in the Senate and the words of the QAnon Shaman may be used to convict a man who is no longer president.
For many, if the Senate convicts, it will prove Trump did what he obviously did not: provide an insurrection. (It wasn’t even an insurrection. It was a stunt.) It will stand as a moment when our government manufactured a big lie for history. And for what purpose? How could it be for any other purpose that to weaken authentic popular movements that disrupt establishment power?
George Orwell speaks powerfully to this moment. But so does Franz Kafka. A man is being tried for something he could not possibly have done. And the punishment associated with conviction is removal from an office in which he no long sits. (See “No, You Can’t Try an Impeached Former President.”) The elites are crazy in public.
Richardson illustrates before her adoring fans the point I have been about how progressives live in an alternative reality, one where months of destructive riots over nonexistent racism (at least not the sort they claim) are glorified as the language of the unheard while a peaceful protest over a stolen election held some forty-five minutes from the Capitol justified transforming Washington DC into a green zone and forcing thousands of soldiers to sleep in a parking garage.
I remind you that Richardson is a college professor. A professor of history. Somebody who is trained in the comparative method. I assure you she is no anomaly. Many academics sleep in the same dream. It is the same dream that cocoons pundits and journalists. Even political cartoonists. The New Yorker published a cartoon carrying the title “Meanwhile at Mar-a-Lago.” One might think it was mocking delusional progressives. In reality, the delusion is too deep for self-reflection. Establishment propagandists don’t even realize how their expressions like these give the game away. Those depicted in the cartoon organized a coup to overthrow the government? Really? At the behest of Trump? There are some wild theories out there, but this is about the wildest. It’s so obviously bullshit that a high-profile cartoon meant to convey anti-Trump sentiment winds up making fun of all the people who fell for this insurrection nonsense. And progressives reflexively share it as a meme.
More disturbing that Richardson’s ideological blindness (after reading several of her Facebook posts, I wouldn’t trust her history, for the record) is the reference in her conclusion to former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier. He is the one who made the comparison. He’s the one who moved her to write her Facebook post.
It’s a reflex of deep state habitus. Grenier, a few days ago, told the New York Times that, quoting Richardson, “the United States is facing a violent insurgency and should apply the lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency to head off political violence.” In other words, bring back COINTELPRO. Don’t know what that is? In the mid-1970s, thanks to the Church Committee hearings, our own government documented the existence of a long-running FBI program of “covert action designed to disrupt and discredit the activities of groups and individuals deemed a threat to the social order,” known as COINTELPRO. The FBI included among the program’s many targets organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as local, state, and federal elected officials.
In light of this, it might be surprising to hear such lunacy in self-described leftwing outlets. Loretta Ross’s “The Nazification of the Republican Party” in Counterpunch is an example of how woke ideology deranges people on the left. She sounds just like a cult member. A religious zealot. And Counterpunch published this. After absurdly asserting that the president is a “white supremacist,” Ross writes, “The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth.” Our country was brought to the brink of extinction? By Trump? In what universe?
Of course, Ross is a joke. It remains far more disturbing that the delusion is expressed by deep state actors. Richardson: “Grenier noted that it is a national security imperative to convict the former president and bar him from future elective office. ‘I watched as enraged crowds in the streets of Algiers, as in most Arab capitals, melted away when Saddam Hussein was ignominiously defeated in the Persian Gulf war,’ Grenier wrote. ‘Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after Sept. 11. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump’s veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed.’”
Richardson may not have expected to see this comparison, but, as disturbing as it is, it comes as no surprise to me (and, really, not to her, as her role as cultural manager is to push out establishment propaganda). Globalists see, or at least depict, all those whom they regard as standing in their way in the same light. Prominent enemies are reduced to Hitler. Their supporters portrayed as Brownshirts. It gives the national security apparatus permission to invade and wreck a country. And to make war on American citizens. That Richardson doesn’t see the problem with Grenier’s comparison, indeed leveraging it for her conclusion, tells us a great deal about the bias she brings to her work.
It is becoming progressively easier for people to conflate the Capitol protest with the Capitol riot. Indeed, it appears to have become reflex among so many. Elites are using the conflation to punish those who attended to protest. This is wrong and dangerous. I never conflated the BLM protests, with which I disagreed, with the BLM riots, which I condemned. While I disagreed with the BLM protests (because they rested on a false premise), I defended the right of my fellow citizens to participate in them.
As Americans, we don’t get to defend the First Amendment based on whether we agree with the content of an expression or an action which that amendment protects. An American—a real American—defends free speech and peaceful assembly whatever the content or the grievance. A real American defends the right of his fellow Americans to protest the results of an election whether the affected party is Democrat or Republican—or protest systematic racism whether it exists or not. After all, people have a right to worship God, and he’s not real. Only an un-American authoritarian asshole would think it okay to punish a Christian for his faith. Or censor ridicule of Muhammad. To be sure, punishing those who participated in the Capitol riot is justice. Punishing those who attended the Capitol protest is an affront to the First Amendment. Comparing them to insurrectionists is of course protected speech. But the comparison is a metric of ideological stupidity.
Progressives might ask them how they’d feel about an assembly outside the White House petitioning for a redress of grievances, namely demanding that the Biden Administration ensure the right of the little guy to participate in financial markets and not defend Wall Street as the exclusive club of the oligarchs? Progressives obviously didn’t think the integrity of the 2020 election was a worthy reason to come to Washington DC and peacefully petition the government. Of course they would if the shoe were on the other foot. So how about the integrity of financial markets? Is that a worthy cause? Democrats and progressives have a radically different understanding of equality of judgment. For them, and this is the substance of equity, power comes before justice.
Now the hysteria is over Publix, because an heir of the family that started the business helped fund the January 6th rally. Alex Jones is implicated, as well. The rhetoric is that scoundrels funded an insurrection. First, there was no insurrection. There was a riot. Some of it was organized well before the rally. Other persons took advantage of the situation to sow chaos. It was a riot. For some, it was a stunt. Second, the rally—not the Capitol beach—was entirely in line with the First Amendment. The rioters, not even a couple of hundred strong, stood in contrast to hundreds of thousands peaceful protestors.
Progressives are trying to cancel those funded a rally to raise consciousness about election illegalities, irregularities, and fraud. When conservatives petition government for a redress of grievances, when conservatives exercise their First Amendment rights, they are to be punished. This Esquire headline echoes headlines across the media: “Here Is How Alex Jones, a Trump Campaign Fundrasier and a Grocery Store Heiress Helped Plan the Jan. 6th Rally.” It’s all about the “the rally before the deadly attack on the Capitol.” (You would never hear about the Black Live Matters rallies before deadly riots.) Conservatives are punished because they are not supposed to participate in the political process. Progressives can’t win on ideas because they’re with the corporate elite and there is a rising populist consciousness in this country. Progressives do not represent working people. On the contrary, they work to suppress the working class voice. There is a widespread myth on the left that progressives represent the proletariat. Progressive ideology is the ideology of corporate governance. If lefties don’t get that through their collective head, they will never understand why they keep losing.
This is the crazy costal elitism, progressivism, identity politics, and globalist corporatism provoke. This is a red country with blue cities. And the cities are disaster areas. But it’s the Americans in the heartland who are the problem. However many tens of millions of them there are, their opinions and values don’t count. They are in the way. Since Republicans represent them, that party must be delegitimized and marginalized. De-Nazified. The government needs to “rein in” social media, by which actors like Sandy Ocasio mean excluding conservative voices. Of course, social media is already doing that. But it is not total, and progressives envision one-party/one ideology rule.
The instinct here is profoundly totalitarian. They are pushing us towards a future not unlike the dystopia of Airstrip One. If you don’t know what that means, see George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you haven’t read that book, it is time that you did.
This is not an endorsement of William Lind, but I was asked whether the video The History of Political Correctness is accurate. Honesty demands that I answer yes. Indeed, it’s an excellent summary of the history of critical theory and the Frankfurt School.
However, the video misses what ultimately lies behind critical theory. Because the analysis hails from the political right, it sees Marxist ambition behind critical theory. This is the great failing of rightwing politics, and occurs because it is unable to work outside the capitalist standpoint. The right operates primarily from a petty bourgeois standpoint and does not grasp that big capital operates from neither right nor left, but remains free to choose from whatever side of the political divide advances its interests in the moment. Presently that is the progressive leftwing sensibilities of the coasts of the United States.
Political correctness and identity politics do not represent a Marxist takeover of Western institutions. There is no widespread teaching of class consciousness and class struggle in the institutions of the West. There are business departments on college campuses across the nation teaching students how to better exploit labor, capture markets, and maximize profits. Departments preparing students to overthrow capitalism? Not so much. Hardly at all. But there are plenty of women’s studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. The one notable thing none of them have in common is a concern for class struggle. Despite Jordan Peterson’s fevered dreams, postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the like are not Marxism or really even like Marxism.
Like the conservative critique, the right libertarian critique also misses the actual force driving leftwing authoritarianism, namely transnationalism, which is a corporatist phenomenon. To hear an example, click on the Twitter link above. The left busybodies identified in that podcast have no power beyond that which is given to it by corporate power. The left—or what passes for the left these days—is a servant of capital. So far, the only person online talking about this who understands international political economy (besides me) is Steve Bannon, who warns conservatives about spreading the false notion that socialism is the problem. (The folks over at Spiked come pretty close to getting at the truth at times.)
Despite what you may have heard, there are very few Marxists in the academy. Most of those who identify as “on the left” work hand-in-hand with corporations to meet their needs for expanded exploitation of resources, workforce development, profit generation, and legitimizing corporate governance. The academy is part of what Antonio Gramsci calls the extended state. Today, that’s state monopoly capitalism. Instead of raising class consciousness, the academy indoctrinates youth in gender and race politics, etc., conditioning them to loathe Western civilization, which is portrayed as irredeemably racist and sexist.
Political correctness and identity politics comprise not a strategy to advance communism (conservatives sound silly when they make this claim), but a strategy used by corporate power to fragment the working class along lines constructed by abstract categories and disrupt the development of class consciousness by involving men and women in divisive identity politics, diverting them from class politics. More than this, because the corporatist project is has as its goal the establishment of a thoroughgoing transnational order, societal and cultural institutions condition the young to associate western civilization of racism and colonialism in order to enlist them in a denationalizing project to cancel democratic-republicanism, erase nation states, and integrate the working classes of the West fully into the global economy, where the state capitalist model of the Chinese Communist Party is inviable.
The New Left is largely a simulation running on corporate power. For example, if racism is functionally useful to elites, and society has overcome racism, then elites will reconstruct a new racism—a simulation—to restore that function. James Lindsay the author of Cynical Theories, usefully calls the effect of the simulation “pseudo-reality.” A jargon and slogans construct the simulacra of racist and sexist oppression that stand in place of the oppression lost to history and struggle—a history that proves the validity of the democratic-republican institutions of western civilization.
The left thus live in a fact-free universe. Search through and find and read my posts where I debunk the Black Lives Matter claim that cops shoot blacks are a disproportionately higher rate than they do whites. Or ask yourself, do those who claim that had a black mob breached the Capitol cops would have mowed them down base that counterfactual on the the nonfact that cops killed scores of black men during the summer riots? The reason one should find the counterfactual so ridiculous is because of widespread support from the so-called white establishment in these cities for the riots. Based on that fact, what we should instead imagine happening in the counterfactual is Democrats apologizing for a black mob beaching the White House. Pelosi would have put on her Kente cloth and took a knee.
However, as W.I. Thomas noted more almost a century ago in his “definition of a situation,” “if men define situations as real they are real in the consequences,” the manufacture of oppression nonetheless carries real effects. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell people they are victims of racism enough and they come to believe it. Tell them western civilization is the source of their oppression, and they will seek to overthrow it.
People who perceive falsehoods as foundational truths are nearly impossible to reason with. Arguing with a congregant of the Church of Woke is like arguing with a fundamentalist Muslim. You aren’t likely to get anywhere. I don’t even try much anymore, frankly. It’s why I almost never intervene on other people’s Facebook or Twitter pages. But when the woke are trying to force the rest of us to live in their simulation, their pseudo-reality, then we have to draw the line and resist.
Since the source of oppression is reproduced by the vocabulary that produces it, which is itself expresses a desire to oppress (“all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”), there is no way out of it on its own terms. So we have to reject the vocabulary and demand of those who would converse with us language that describes reality not constructs it.
Here’s another example. When people talk about “systemic racism” they remind me, as if I didn’t know, that racism can be systemic. I teach race and ethnic relations. I wrote a two-volume 800-plus dissertation on the subject. I know the literature. I know that actual examples of systemic racism—Jim Crow segregation in the United States or apartheid in South Africa—were abolished decades ago. What they are really doing by “reminding” me of this is changing the definition while pretending they aren’t. Systemic must mean something else in their usage. I’m not necessarily suggesting their deceit is intentional. But it doesn’t matter whether it is. It functions the same way—actually, even better if it is reflex.
One more example. On January 20, 2021, Counterpunch published an essay, “The Nazification of the Republican Party,” by Loretta J. Ross. After asserting that the Trump is a “white supremacist,” she writes, “The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth.” The essay is a terrific example of how woke ideology deranges thinking. The degree of delusion in the essay indicates a mentality not unlike that of a cult member or a religious zealot. Democracy was brought to the brink of extinction by a messy riot at the US Capitol? All the milling about of a menagerie if individuals across the political spectrum, some of who were clearly mentally ill, represented an organized plan to overthrow the American government? Ross doesn’t live in the real world. She lives in the simulation.
“I know this,” Ross writes about her expertise on Nazism, “because I teach a course on White Supremacy at Smith College.” Smith College is a private liberal arts women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. The college portrays itself as a paradigm of progressive education, operating without programmatic curriculum or course requirements. It’s to the left of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Unlike Evergreen, it’s a very exclusive fair, its student body populating key roles in the culture industry (which their starting point in economic privilege would have place them anyway). This college is the place where, for using the word “nigger” in a discussion about the word, a campaign of cancellation against Wendy Kaminer was initiated. Students accused her of committing “an explicit act of racial violence.” She remarked to Susan Kruth from The New York Times (read a summary of the article at FIRE), “It’s amazing to me that [students] can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism.” I often express amazement, as well. But it’s not really amazing when you understand what’s going on. These are the sites where the simulation is downloaded and installed on the wetware of human brains.
It is a monumental task to correct the massive error that New Left ideology has wrought on the West. Because it is a corporate-powered simulation, it has been embedded across our institutions—the academy, the administrative apparatus (public and private), the culture industry, the government, the mass media, even churches. The liberal—autonomous, rational, secular, skeptical—is outgunned by the overgrowth of the corporatist establishment. A heretic, this character we should celebrate, the liberal even becomes a pariah. Cast as repressive tolerance, free speech is a rightwing idea. The liberal’s opposition to racism and authoritarianism, and his commitment to individual liberty, make him a racist and a fascist. A strange and powerful alchemy is at work. The situation is very much like the free thinker confronting the religious establishment before the emergence of the secular nation-state. But this history should inspire us. We put the Borg on its back foot before. We can do it again.
One of the things that makes this work difficult is the dependency of so many on the left on security of the Democratic Party. It is amazing to me that a party with such stupid rhetoric impresses so many intelligent people. When I hear progressives say they can once again safely fall asleep in the backseat of the car because their father is driving, I hear in that metaphor a deep and pathological need for a father. You probably saw CNN political director David Chalian gushing: “The contrast on display tonight was so stark, I mean those lights that are just shooting out of the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool, it’s like almost extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.” In case you missed it, here it is in all its cringe-worthiness:
CNN's David Chalian says that the side lights on the National Mall's reflecting pool are like "extensions of Joe Biden's arms embracing America." pic.twitter.com/G88C8UCN3C
It is an authoritarian desire for an adult to wish to fall asleep in the father’s arms. Authoritarianism, one must remember, is not just manifest in those who take control of society and govern as a father, it is also manifest in adults who pine to be treated like children. This is an effect of the progressive technocratic order: learned helplessness. The coddling state. This conditioning has produced a generation of brats who see themselves as victims. This is not a psychologically healthy state of being. For their sake we must object.
I have a much longer essay coming out in the future on the problem of partisan ideology obscuring the force behind identity politics. It will truly be a deep dive. The problem that inspires this work is this: modern conservatives, who are natural allies of the working class, because the working class is conservative and classically liberal, wrongly believe that Marxists have taken over the institutions of US society. How could this be possible in a capitalist society? It’s not. Marxism’s choice of comrades–the working class–stand in opposition to the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. However, simply pointing out that truism is not enough to convince people. So I have been providing in these essays analyses of the structure of progressive ideology and practice and linking it to the functional apparatus securing, advancing, and entrenching a particular fraction of the capitalist class, namely big capital in the form of the limited liability corporation.
Corporations, operating on the rationality of monopolization and profit maximization, are open to whatever ideology advances their material interests. Today corporations are woke and take up leftwing ideology. But that hardly means their communist or socialist. The petty bourgeoisie, the small capitalist, does not operate in the same way. My sympathy for the petty bourgeoisie is often misunderstood as support for rightwing ideology. This could not be more wrong. My vision of a proper democratic-republic society in one in which workers, in charge of their firms of scale, work alongside small businesses, craftsmen, etc., and together in a spirit of social improvement manage the affairs of their communities for the benefit of their families. That is the populist vision, and it is neither right nor left. Rather, it is humanist, individualist, democratic, and secular. My arguments are a call for a restoration of the Enlightenment and the nation-state.
Science is not a monolithic thing. There is no one way science works, is the best science or even the only science, that just happens to be the way a particular person wants it to work, because it fits their politics (which are often falsely conscious politics in light of explicit choice of comrades), hypostatizing in theory and concept, dictating methods, and so forth. The cognitive and behavioral sciences prevailing in today’s academy, the context in which so many young Americans and Europeans are being socialized (or, perhaps, more critically, indoctrinated), are the epitome of scientism, i.e. ideology masquerading as science.
To be sure, there is a critical sounding jargon emanating from the universities. But I do not see in the arguments of many young graduate students today a critical understanding of the diversity of scientific thinking and activity or especially the way scientific jargon (positivism) is used to convey a false authority, to advance an ideology to justify and perpetuate and extend and entrench concrete social arrangements beneficial to one group over another. There is no critique. Where is a critique of behavioral and cognitive sciences like the critique of the science that drives corporate exploitation of the environment and the manmade chemical blanket over nature?
I’m not talking about postmodernism or the current iteration of critical theory, which function either to deny truth or manufacture it (e.g., critical race theory, the error of which is more fundamental than scientific error by committing the logical fallacy of misplaced concreteness). I’m talking about a critical understanding of science as a human product that works through paradigms (in a Kuhnian sense) that can be and are commandeered by those in power and cynically used to justify particular relations that exist or that are desired to exist that reproduce social arrangements that do or will benefit the ruling class, which is presently a corporate oligarchy.
What did Marx tell us? Those who control the means of material production at the same time control the means of ideological production. This is a truism. Who controls the university? The administrative state in the service of the power elite. This is a university that exists as part of the social logic of state monopoly capitalism. Where is a theory of power in the argument that advances the scientism promulgated by the (post)modern university?
Science is not one thing at once or through time. There exist paradigms at one point or another. If we were doing science in the 19th century, the aspiring psychologist in graduate school pushing out objective notions of race (which does not in the way it is usually constructed exist apart from racial thinking), to be in alignment with the literature, to graduate with a degree, to uphold the reputation of the discipline, to land an academic position, to be taken seriously at conferences, would have to sound like what we know today as a vulgar racist. He would be working from a set of assumptions, operating inside a paradigm, that would provide for him methods affirming the validity of theoretical concepts that (a) identify races as really existing things and existing in a particular way that can be (b) arranged in hierarchies that vary along lines of moral character, cognitive ability, behavioral proclivity, and so on.
If we take a critical historical view, we can see 19th century race science (racism or racialism) for what it was. To be sure, most of us see it now. But we would have seen it then using the appropriate method. There were people then who could see it how we see it now. Marx, who developed the method, didn’t think Darwin’s theories of speciation applied to human beings in its diversity or especially to their societies (neither did the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Wallace). Marx’s method builds on the same method used to show that religion is also a product of human creativity (Feuerbach). This is anthropology. You cannot reduce the study of society and history to positivist methodology. Why? Because that paradigm is historically situated and tied to concrete relations of power.
The conflation of racism as a thing existing with the thinking and behavior of people the progressive doesn’t like, or whom he thinks need deprogramming, depends on defining racism in a way that avoids confronting the reality that thoughts and behaviors approximating racism exists in the people he does like. That involves a vast body of literature, which he fancies as science, which he brings before us puzzling why we do not accept it, that has replaced what we all recognize as racism. The difference is that I see a vast ideological superstructure that recodes racism as antiracism that replaces the previous system of ideological control that lost its gas in the face of popular movements in the 20th century and then erects a vast edifice of “science” to make it all look objective and true.
The tragedy of the current moment is that popular movements are aligned with the racial thinking that keep the proletariat from class consciousness. These movements are bound up in ideological and practice, what is called progressivism, that rewards those who accept positivism as the way to truth and punishes those who deviate from it, even calling them “racists” and “white supremacists.” And that is not scientific thinking. That is the function of racism always. What is it the French say? “Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” What is needed is a method that allows man to think outside the moment. In historical view, man has to take the longue durée. The materialist conception of history is the required meta-theory of the relationship between social relations and knowledge production.
This post contains an excerpt from The 1776 Report released by The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, January 2021. The report was scrubbed from the White House web pages simultaneous with the installation of Joe Biden as president, so I had to rely on a link from Wikipedia. I may have to update that link again as the problem of memory holing steps up in the age of Big Tech tyranny.
Victor Davis Hanson, emeritus professor at California States University, Fresno and Senior Fellow at Standard University’s Hoover Institution, is one of the historians on the Commission that produced the report. I have over the last few years found Hanson’s observations and interpretations helpful in developing a deeper understanding of the world.
Also on the commission was Carol Swain, who served as Vice Chair. Swain was professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. Raised in poverty, earning a GED while working as a cashier at McDonald’s, Swain obtained her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at chapel Hill. Before finishing her career at Vanderbilt, Swain earned tenure at Princeton. I mention that because the media is trying to tear down her reputation.
While I don’t agree with everything in the document (especially, for example, its advocacy of religion values), it is not what it is characterized as. The establishment media is painting the Commission’s report as racist apologia for slavery and white supremacy. This characterization means to deny the usefulness of the approach, indeed to keep people from considering its arguments.
I believe the excerpt I have selected, titled “Progressivism,” is especially important for people to reflect upon. I have been writing about the dynamic and problem of progressivism for some time now. I have contrasted progressivism with populism in lengthy blogs on Freedom and Reason. I have another piece on progressivism in the cue, but, until then, this excerpt aligns with the spirit of my analysis.
In June 2003, Richard Grossman, in criticizing Bill Moyer’s speech to the Take Back America conference, delivered June 4, 2003, argues that “by lumping Populism with Progressivism, by extolling the Progressive Era’s legacy of regulatory and administrative law, he joins countless 20th century leaders and historians in denying the Populist Movement. What they all work so hard to deny, alas, is the largest democratic mass movement in US history, a massing devoted to building upon the trampled ideals of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
“Populists were farmers, workers and like-minded intellectuals challenging usurpations galore declared lawful by men of property,” Grossman continues. “Populists had no interest in regulating destructive and rights-denying corporate behaviors. Daring to trust their own experiences with banking, railroad, grain, land, insurance, and manufacturing magnates (and their corporations), they had no illusions that permitting and disclosure—the basis of “progressive” regulations—would fix a corporate state.” (See, “Who Were the Populists?”)
The Commission’s report goes beyond Grossman’s arguments, identifying the destructive general effects of progressivism on the ability for people to self-govern and enjoy their natural rights (whether given by god or nature). It packs a lot in a few words. My pending blog will explore these effects is greater detail. Without further ado, here is the excerpt.
Progressivism
In the decades that followed the Civil War, in response to the industrial revolution and the expansion of urban society, many American elites adopted a series of ideas to address these changes called Progressivism. Although not all of one piece, and not without its practical merits, the political thought of Progressivism held that the times had moved far beyond the founding era, and that contemporary society was too complex any longer to be governed by principles formulated in the 18th century. To use a contemporary analogy, Progressives believed that America’ s original “software”—the founding documents—were no longer capable of operating America’s vastly more complex “hardware”: the advanced industrial society that had emerged since the founding.
More significantly, the Progressives held that truths were not permanent but only relative to their time. They rejected the self-evident truth of the Declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed equally, either by nature or by God, with unchanging rights. As one prominent Progressive historian wrote in 1922, “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.” Instead, Progressives believed there were only group rights that are constantly redefined and change with the times. Indeed, society has the power and obligation not only to define and grant new rights, but also to take old rights away as the country develops.
Based on this false understanding of rights, the Progressives designed a new system of government. Instead of securing fundamental rights grounded in nature, government—operating under a new theory of the “living” Constitution—should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights.
In order to keep up with these changes, government would be run more and more by credentialed managers, who would direct society through rules and regulations that mold to the currents of the time. Before he became President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson laid out this new system whereby “the functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions,” meaning that this new view of government would operate independent of the people.
Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by “pragmatism” or “science,” though, progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us.
“By turning to bitterness and judgment, distorted histories of those like Howard Zinn or the journalists behind the ‘1619 Project’ have prevented their students from learning to think inductively with a rich repository of cultural, historical, and literary referents.” — The 1776 Report
Vazquez writes, “A commission stood up by President Trump as a rebuttal to schools applying a more accurate history curriculum around slavery in the US issued its inflammatory report on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.” I blogged about antiracism curriculum in “California Moves Ahead with Divisive Antiracism Curriculum” on September 22, 2020. Vazquez’ assertion of greater accuracy is inaccurate.
To read the Trump commission report, click here: The 1776 Report. The New York Times has attempted to to confuse the public with its own headline, “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians.” In fact, the report is a defense of liberalism, not a critique of it. The New York Times continues its habit of conflating liberalism with illiberalism on the left. (One of my favorite historians, Victor Davis Hanson, sat on the commission.)
Vazquez and The New York Times are, of course, talking about fellow journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project which, as several historians have pointed out (Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood), is chock full of falsehood and misrepresentation. At first, the editor of The New York Times Magazine lamely said it wasn’t those things and refused for months to issue any corrections. When he finally relented, his corrections were accompanied by unacknowledged changes revising problematic aspects of the argument.
Announcing the 1619 Project by its accolade “Pulitzer Prize-winning” doesn’t save it. Indeed, awarding shoddy scholarship only casts disrepute on the prize. Trump characterized the 1619 Project as “toxic propaganda.” I don’t like the word “toxic” attached to such matters. Toxic or not, the 1619 project is propaganda.
Nor does going after members of the president’s commission save Vazquez’s rant. She writes, “The commission’s vice chair, Carol Swain, once wrote that Islam “poses an absolute danger to us and our children.” The article in question, Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam,” can be found here. Vazquez quotes Swain as if she were some hack. Swain, a black woman, a single mother, earning a GED while working as a cashier at McDonald’s, obtained a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and, before finishing her career as full professor at Vanderbilt, earned tenure at Princeton.
Trump established the 1776 Commission last fall in response to the Black Lives Matter protests that disrupted cities across the nation. Trump blamed anti-racist school curriculum for the violence that routinely followed the protests, claiming that “the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” I blogged about this extensively, so surf the table of contents of Freedom and Reason.
The president was right. Motive for the protests and riots were clearly articulated in rhetoric uttered by the protestors and rioters. The content of slogans and arguments indicated that BLM was guided by the New Left ideology that has become standard in American universities. I know. I’m a professor of sociology who teaches in a program called Democracy and Justice Studies. I teach, among other things, race and ethnic relations. Critical race theory and identity politics are ubiquitous in the programming.
“Trump’s presidency has been marked by his racist statements and actions,” Vazquez asserts in her article, providing only one alleged example, “his incitement of a mob, which included White supremacists, to storm the US Capitol on January 6 in protest of Biden’s victory.” But Trump didn’t incite the mob that stormed the White House. His speech was an impassioned call for peaceful demonstrations (the text of his speech will be his best defense if his impeachment ever goes to trial). What is more, the timeline of events makes it impossible for Trump to have incited the riot whatever the content of his speech. The presence of white supremacists anywhere has no bearing on Trump. Trump isn’t responsible for white supremacy. He has denounced white supremacy more than any president alive or dead.
Vazquez reports that the “White House statement calls the report ‘a dispositive rebuttal of reckless “re-education” attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.’” This is indeed the message of antiracism and the work of diversity training (see For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations; The Church of Woke: A Moment of Reckoning for White Christians?) “Americans are deeply divided about the meaning of their country, its history, and how it should be governed”—She quotes this from the report as if Trump is the author of this deep divide.
Vazquez flips obvious truths like this throughout her article. “The report’s authors also argue that ‘the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,’ specifically criticizing affirmative action policies.” She then quotes this powerful passage from the report: “Today, far from a regime of equal natural rights for equal citizens, enforced by the equal application of law, we have moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of ‘social justice,’ demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into ‘protected classes’ based on race and other demographic categories.” Is tat note the point of equity. The 1776 Report continues, “Eventually this regime of formal inequality would come to be known as ‘identity politics.’” Identity politics are “the opposite of King’s hope that his children would ‘live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’”
Vazquez habit of quoting from the report as if it invalidates itself continues throughout: “A radical women’s liberation movement reimagined America as a patriarchal system, asserting that every woman is a victim of oppression by men. The Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a white supremacist regime. Meanwhile, other activists constructed artificial groupings to further divide Americans by race, creating new categories like ‘Asian American’ and ‘Hispanic’ to teach Americans to think of themselves in terms of group identities and to rouse various groups into politically cohesive bodies.” Identity politics, the report contends, makes “a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities.”
The report contend that universities are “hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.” It recommends that “states and school districts…reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.” It desires that teachers “convey a sense of enlightened patriotism that equips each generation with a knowledge of America’s founding principles, a deep reverence for their liberties, and a profound love of their country.”
I relied on Vazquez for the quoted passages. However, I have read the 1776 Report. The section on progressivism (pages 12-13) is especially good. The progressive belief that the foundational truths of the republic are relative only to their own time anticipates postmodern epistemology and obviates in principle the need to adhere to the founding documents. Of course, as an atheist, I do not subscribe to the faith elements articulated by the authors. At the same time, attempting to deny that the Christian faith played a significant role in the founding and development of the republic would be absurd. Thankfully, one of the founding principles of the republic was secularism.
As for accusations in other media sources that the report excuses slavery, it is true that slavery is not “a uniquely American evil” and it is important that “the institution be seen in a much broader perspective.” It is a matter of historical facts that the United States was founded in the context of world slavery, the US Constitution abolished the slave trade, and chattel slavery itself was abolished within a century of the country’s founding. Also, I am seeing the claim that the report justifies the compromise that counts black people as three-fifths of a person. But the compromise does not count black people as three-fifths of a person. That is a misrepresentation of the compromise. For purposes of determining the number of representatives for each state in the House (and direct taxes), the compromise was that the government would count only three-fifths of slaves (not all of them from the Southern states). Free blacks, of which there were tens of thousands, were counted on par with whites. It was not about race but about servitude. What is rarely acknowledged is that the Constitution avoids affirming the legitimacy of property in persons. As we know from Madison’s notes, this was intentional.
Vazquez ends her article by reassuring the reader: “The commission does not have authority to enforce the recommendations it has made for educators.”
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