The state has become parens patriae. That’s Latin for “father of the people.” Of course, the state must look out for children, the disabled, and the elderly if others cannot. But under the cover of COVID-19 hysteria, the principle is being extended to cover everybody but those in the Inner Party and selected functionaries. You will lose “privileges” (a euphemism for liberties and rights) if you do not do as you are told. Your “privileges” are contingent upon obeying the father. You may have received this form of punishment as a child. It’s the way convicts are treated. We call it “reform” or “rehabilitation” in the criminal justice system. When it’s applied to the general population it bears another name: fascism.
Fascism comes with numerous markers. But you have to know what to look for. “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated!” goes out the slogan. But the hospitals are filling with fully vaccinated people with COVID-19, you point out (because you care to be informed and not appear gullible). So the powers-that-be change the definition of fully vaccinated. You need three shots to be fully vaccinated. Next you will need four shots. And then five shots. And so on. In other words, there are no fully vaccinated people really. There never really were. There are only people who keep getting in line for shots and those who resent being scammed, many of latter whom feel they have no other choice but to go alone. That’s not really a choice, of course. Mandates force people to do what the father tells them.
First, the Ministry of Truth changes the definitions of “immunity” and “vaccine.” Now Minitrue is changing the definition of “fully vaccinated.” Tomorrow Minitrue will tell us the term has always been defined this way. Most of the proles of Airstrip One will take it in stride thanks to doublethink. Empty shelves at the supermarket? The national economy is healthy. And so on. It’s doubleplusgood! “We’re doing our part.” How did Bill Maher put it? “I’m taking one for the team.” (You’re still on the wrong team, Bill.)
Control over information is vital in the establishment of the Ministry of Truth. In a free society, when somebody is saying something that others think is wrong, somebody will usually object and a discussion will ensue and people will learn things. With fact-checking, when somebody is saying something that the powers-that-be think is wrong, somebody in authority will label the post “false” or “partially-false” and there will be no discussion. Those who were likely to discuss matters will instead stand on either side of a claim and watch the powers-that-be determine the fate of whatever the claim may be. Fact-checking dumbs down and limits interaction. It treats social media users like elementary school students who need to be corrected by the teacher. And the teacher only has a bachelors degree and a lesson plan with no depth or detail. And an agenda she learned in professional development camp.
Massive, powerful display of protest against vaccine passports in Bern, Switzerland. The protesters wear yokes to symbolize the desire of the ruling class to treat workers like livestock that they can drug at will.pic.twitter.com/qq9z5gVxef
Because the establishment media won’t show you the protests occurring throughout the world in resistance to the fascist vaccine mandates, I will (see above). Letting people know they are not alone is about manifesting what we call in science “mutual knowledge.” Mutual knowledge is essential for building power among those upon whom illegitimate power is being imposed. When people don’t know that others think like they do, when they believe they are all alone in the world, they start to feel as if they are in the wrong. They can even start feeling like they are losing their sanity. That’s the point of marginalization and ridicule when it’s aimed downwards (power is by definition unequal, so you have no ethical responsibility to resist marginalizing and ridiculing the powerful).
For those of you who recognize what’s happening for what it is—it is fascism—know that you are not losing your mind. The power elite, their attack dogs working the institutions and the irregulars working the popular front, are trying to gaslight you by keeping you in the dark and making you feel alone and wrong. This is a standard strategy of power, characteristic of totalitarian governments who control what you see and hear because they know they increase the likelihood of either controlling what you think or cowing you with this method. Unfortunately, the method is very powerful and it has gotten to quite a lot of our comrades.
You hear and see the gaslighting in memes about “conspiracy theory.” I’m sure you have seen the images of people wearing tinfoil hats and so forth. People who share these memes, while they may seem quite intelligent and compassionate otherwise, are shallow sadists who push corporate state propaganda. You can know them by their works. Consider this article from NBC News by Brandy Zadrozny: “‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users.” It sports an image of a rabbit in a hole surrounded by a steel trap and emoticons strewn about.
NBC News not very subtle image depicting “radicalization” on social media
The story is damned condescending. Here’s the premise: you’re a bunch of proles who can’t think for yourselves—for sure you can’t be trusted to think the right thoughts. I’ve had this trick tried on me—I’ve been “radicalized” because people are just now discovering that I don’t operate according to checked boxes and approved slogans. What are the right thoughts? You can know by what they think the “radicalized” thoughts are. You’ll find there (and them) what Antonio Gramsci conceptualized as “hegemony.” Hegemony comes with both a velvet glove and an iron fist. Just ask yourself, “Who do they platform, promote, stroke, and privilege?” Alternatively, you can ask yourself, “Who do they marginalize, censor, discipline, and punish?”
NBC News is handing readers a template for action. A big part of the reason people will run with this, will become part of the fascist order of things, is because they possess an authoritarian personality. They enjoy lording power over others, and since they have no real power themselves, they stand with the manifestation of power they believe is most efficacious, which in the current period is corporate state power. They are just like those who, in early periods and in other cultures, theocratic ones, stand with the religious clerics in persecuting the disbelievers. They enjoy burning witches. Those who are smeared as “conspiracy theorists” are the disbelievers, the freethinkers. They do not accept the line of the power elite. As it should be in a free world. Be a freethinker. You are not alone.
Freedom is what we are told to run from. “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID,” former vice-president Joe Biden mockingly told a CNN town hall filled with plants. “Experts say vaccines mandates for COVID-19 infringe on individual freedoms, but may be necessary to protect public health,” writes Zaheena Rasheed for Aljazeera, in an article pushed out by the establishment news aggregators. Zaheena reflects the establishment admission that the mandates indeed infringe on individual liberty, which is where freedom lives. But mandates can’t possibly be necessary if (1) the coronavirus does not present a threat to the general population (it does not); (2) the vaccine does not confer significant immunity (it does not); (3) the risk : benefit ratio is to the detriment of children and young adults (it is). The facts make this obvious: there is no public health reason warranting mandates. COVID-19 mandates and passports are profoundly unethical and their advocacy from a public health standpoint is irrational. There has to be an ulterior motive. And it can only be sinister.
We got a dose of the sinister this morning when The New York Post reported that the former vice-president signed a memo blaming COVID-19 for postponement of the scheduled release of the assassination records of President John Fr. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, Texas in 1963, likely the result of a conspiracy according to conclusions reached by the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1979. In 1992, Congress ruled that “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . . . should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” Does it need to be pointed out that 1992 was a long time ago? Friday’s White House memo tells us that “continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”
COVID-19 hysteria has become a master justification for a vast range of corporate state actions that work at cross-purposes with the fundamental tenets of a democratic society. We are seeing the socialization of totalitarian methods of mass social control. Fear and sadism are essential for its successful implementation.
We are seeing truth slowly appearing by percentage point decline (see link below). How low can it go? I’m talking about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. After only a few months, most of the protection goes away. And it wasn’t very good to begin with. Just as Dr. Robert Malone (the inventor of the mRNA platform) told us, this is a leaky vaccine with poor durability. The general population was exploited as a leg in the experimental trial for these vaccines and the trial hasn’t gone well at all. Indeed, it has exposed corporate science as more of religion than science. Tragically—shamefully, really—a multitude still have faith.
Watch the video contained in this story (it has been removed from many social media platform)
Authoritarianism is a giant snowball rolling downhill. Or a mudslide. Pick your metphor. The point is that, once it gets going, it picks up momentum and grows ever larger, increasing its capacity to flatten whatever stands in its path. That’s why you have to stop it early—or make sure it never gets rolling. There are those who will call you Chicken Little (and other names). But the “slippery slope fallacy” is not a fallacy. If a camel is in your tent, you can be fairly certain it started with his nose.
That the threat to democracy, freedom, and rights is the work of progressives in all of this must not escape your attention. It’s not a camel. It’s a donkey. This puts the lie to the claim that authoritarianism is a rightwing, populist, or nationalist phenomenon. Authoritarianism today is for the most part a leftwing, progressive, and globalist juggernaut. It’s one thing when you ask others to take a medicine you have faith in. It’s another thing altogether when governments and organizations mandate those under their control take the medicine. And when those claiming virtue side with oppressive power.
But we mustn’t blame only technocracy. One common feature of authoritarianism irrespective of its ideological stripe is acquiescence of the rank-and-file citizens that enables governments and organizations to implement policies that violate democratic freedoms and human rights. Authoritarianism is not just a character flaw of the elites who would oppress a population, but those who seek such oppression and moreover desire that this oppression to be visited upon others. My comrades, lovers of liberty and rights, don’t seek or side with oppressive power. I know it’s scary, but the enemy is all around us. Don’t let it conscript you into its ranks.
Authoritarianism is a feature of both the sadist and the masochist. I carry empathy for those who suffer under the thumb of power. But I cannot respect those who wish for themselves and others to suffer so. This is not a subjective matter. Oppression is an objective condition and it’s happening all around us. Right now. And all around us are those who welcome it. Support for the COVID-19 vaccine mandates is as clear a signal that can be sent about where people stand. It’s time to start putting people on notice.
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England has suffered a persistent wave of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2
So there’s a new variant in England and the “experts” are calling on the government to lock everything down again. The interesting thing about this is that England is one of the most vaccinated nations in the world, with more than 68 percent of the population fully vaccinated. England has suffered a persistent wave of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. And now there is a more infectious mutation. It’s almost as if (as we see with Vermont) that the greater proportion of the population is vaccinated the more COVID-19 cases there are. It’s almost as if there is a problem with the vaccine (ADE) or something, or at least the vaccine isn’t working (see Mass Vaccination Doesn’t Work).
68 percent of England’s population is fully vaccinated
Have you heard of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). I have been sounding the alarm about this phenomenon for months now (The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). I am noting it again to keep it fresh in your consciousness, so when you hear about it at some point in the media you will be, “Oh, wait, I’ve heard something about that before.” I hope it doesn’t happen, but if we see another surge on the back of the boosters, which will soon be art of these mandates and passports, the phenomenon will be difficult to ignore. (Take a look at that blog of mine, now three months old, and see how predictive it was.)
Of course, part of this could be marketing to push boosters. I imagine an internal company memo that looks something like this: “After extensive focus group testing, the COVID-19 marketing department has determined that the planned novel Greek name for the latest antibody-dependent enhancement did not generate levels of fear response sufficient to move product, so we are relying on the proven fear contagion ‘Delta’ with the modifier ‘even more infectious.’ Notify your subordinates of the change and follow up.” I shared this bit of satire on social media. It may be the best explanation for what we are about to see.
Some politicians are honest. Maybe not all the time. But here is one of those times. This admission completely obviates the argument for mandates. The only rational argument for universal vaccination could be (and there are still hurdles) that it prevents infection and transmission of a virus representing a serious threat to the general population (something like smallpox, which kills a third of those whom it infects). If one argues that you must take a vaccine to protect your person from severe disease and death, then that opens the door to the state controlling what you eat and how much exercise you get and all the rest of it. And that makes you none other than pathetic Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (“6079 Smith W.”) standing in front of a telescreen doing your morning calisthenics to a virtual instructor remotely barking commands. And that’s what we call totalitarianism.
Scene from film version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
* * *
If you’re unvaccinated and haven’t gotten sick from SARS-CoV-2, that doesn’t mean you have avoided infection. It’s unlikely that you haven’t been repeatedly exposed to the virus. You have likely contracted the virus, were asymptomatic, or had mild symptoms, and have acquired natural immunity. That means that many of those vaccinated are already immune. Thus is surely a confounding factor in the statistics on vaccine efficacy. In other words, a significant proportion of those who are vaccinated are not getting sick, even with more infectious variants, because they have natural immunity. There is that other confound, the problem of ADE. The point is, at this point, a rational person can’t have any confidence is what the technocracy is telling you. The public health apparatus has been completely captured by corporate state scientism.
* * *
Finally, I have had enough with these memes about smallpox (for the history there, see The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes). Measles, polio, and smallpox vaccines are irrelevant to the question of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Those other vaccines are not analogous on grounds of public health and you either don’t know why (which I don’t know how you couldn’t) or you’re arguing in bad faith.
The COVID-19 vaccine mandate is analogous to the government mandating influenza vaccines for adults, which we don’t generally do (although there are some alarming tendencies in this direction), and which makes little sense from a public health standpoint. Flu vaccines are leaky and lack durability. They are unnecessary for most people, and widespread usage impedes natural immunity, which is more robust with greater durability.
For children, the COVID-19 vaccine would be analogous to an adenovirus or a rhinovirus vaccine mandate—if those vaccines existed (and one suspects they’re on their way). Mandating a rhinovirus vaccine would be as absurd as the coronavirus vaccine mandate. Rhinovirus (and its ninety-nine serotypes), like coronavirus and other cold viruses, is common and relatively harmless in children. Infection moreover primes and develops the immune system. Influenza is more dangerous for children than any of those viruses including coronavirus.
I don’t get many colds these days, but when I do, I know cross-immunity (or cross-reactivity), where the degree of similarity among families of respiratory viruses is such that prior exposure to one confers at least partial immunity to others, protects me to against other variants and reduces my chances of developing severe disease.
All those adenoviruses, coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses, and even influenza viruses, that I contracted over the years, especially as a kid, means my immune system is strong and ready to withstand most of the bugs it confronts as I head into old age (I will be sixty in a few months). I don’t get many colds and flus these days because of all the colds and flus I got as a kid. I hated them, but that’s the way the immune system works—it must be primed and developed and the unpleasantness of it all is the sign of good work being accomplished.
If vaccines are developed for all the unpleasant bugs we get but survive, and they are widely taken up or mandated, the practice will collectively impoverish the human immune system. The only reason to do such a thing would be to make investors in Big Pharma rich. And that is why they’re doing it for COVID-19 and will for future vaccines if we don’t stop them. Vaccine mandates will be counterproductive to the health of the species.
Public health is not really public health anymore, but a scheme to funnel money to Big Pharma. But there is something much more terrible in all of this. Religion developed in large measure as magical armor to protect against the arsenal of nature where practical science could not. People, scared and superstitious, believed survival required ritual action. Fear of disease comes from the same place, only science—Prometheus unbound—has largely replaced religion as the magical armor. As destructive as it can be, religion never built a hydrogen bomb or hijacked the transcription machinery of the human cell to produce endogenously lethal toxins with injected strands of human-sequenced nucleotides.
In the face of Antifa/BLM protests, Seattle councilmembers pledged to slash the police budget by half but backtracked after police resisted. There was a budget reduction of about eighteen percent, but it minimized the effects by pursuing strategies such as moving parking enforcement out of the budget (Trumm 2020). Not exactly what the activists were seeking with budget reductions.
But that did enough it seems. Perhaps not incidentally, the state of Washington set a record for homicides in 2020, with Seattle’s homicide rate increasing almost 70 percent over 2019 (Westneat 2021). This year looks to be just as bad—if not worse. By the end of August, there were more homicides in Seattle than in all of 2019 (King 2021). Heather Mac Donald warned in The War on Cops (2016) that this is the predictable consequence of depolicing and the “Ferguson effect.”
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Data on lethal police-civilian encounters show that a majority of those killed by the police are white, not nonwhite. Twice as many white men are killed by the police every year than are black men. The Washington Postdatabase, which reports that half of those shot by police are white (the majority of those killed by the police are therefore not persons of color), gets to that statistic by separating out Hispanics from whites. Two-thirds of Hispanics identify as white. (White and black are racial categories, whereas Hispanic is an ethnic category. Most Hispanics are white, while a minority identify as black, American Indian, and Asian.) So, while it is a common belief in American society that the police kill more minorities than whites, it is not true.
Moreover, while it is true that black Americans are shot by police at a disproportionate rate (take care not to confuse statistical abstractions with frequencies), statistical evidence of racial disparities by itself is insufficient to infer causation, in this case racism. It is a common error to conflate racial disparity (in education, housing, income, etc.) with racial bias. When the relevant evidence is considered, researchers do not generally find systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters. I have covered the topic extensively one Freedom and Reason. I provide a few of those sources here for your convenience: Roland Fryer (2019) finds no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are considered when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force, i.e., officer-involved shootings. Joseph Cesario and colleagues (2018) find, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. The authors conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, that exposure to police, given crime rate differences, accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. Brandon Tregle and colleagues (2018) finds that, when focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.
Nor is the claim that US criminal justice overall is systemically racist supported by the facts. We have known this for more than thirty years. In 1987, William Wilbanks published a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers. Among the specific areas considered in his analysis are provisions of counsel, police deployment, use of deadly force, bail decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing patterns, and inmate classification and discipline. Wilbanks finds that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system. Wilbanks summarizes: “At every point, from arrest to parole, there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect” (2) The date of publication is significant, as claims that the Reagan presidency had ramped up and generalized racism again were at a fever pitch. A decade later, Sampson and Lauritsen find “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias” (1997, 331). Keep in mind that, at that time, Robert Sampson was the researcher most critical of “broken windows” and stop-and-frisk (see, e.g., Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). Mac Donald’s The War on Cops, published almost two decades later, confirms these findings.
* * *
Another common belief in circulation is that slave patrols were the forerunner of the modern police. There were slave states that had police agencies at the same time there were slave patrols and the agencies and patrols had different origins and separate functions. The Richmond police department, for example, was one or the first formally organized law enforcement agencies in the nation and was separate from the slave patrols in Virginia. Same with the city of Baltimore in Maryland. Both Virginia and Maryland are southern states. After defeating the CSA in the Civil War, during Reconstruction, the USA abolished slave patrols. The modern police have their origin in industrialization and urbanization and were designed to control the proletariat of all races (see Sheldon and Vasiliev 2018). Modern policing in the United States followed the logic of policing in the Great Britain, which did not practice slavery in the homeland.
Modern police agencies from their inception were bureaucratic in form, made up of full-time employees (not community or militia members), had a chain of command with written rules, procedures, and regulations, and were accountable to a central governmental authority. These agencies do not resemble in form or substance the organization and activities of slave patrols. In contrast, slave patrols were armed white citizens who stopped and questioned slaves about their permits to travel. They were organized and disciplined not in the bureaucratic logic of state governments but were civic organizations apart from the administrative state.
Were both forms of formal social control? Yes. But formal social control systems with policing functions date back thousands of years. We are concerned with the police forces of modernity. Samuel Walker, who you are also reading this semester, locates the origin of modern policing in the London Metropolitan Police in 1929 and the origins of policing in the United States in the 1830s. To be sure, he recognizes that during the time of chattel slavery until Reconstruction, and even during Jim Crow segregation, the police in the southeastern United States were devoted to upholding the racial status quo. For this reason, Walker argues, “[d]iscussions of American police history should generally distinguish between the southeastern state and the rest of the country” (2016, 642).
The narrative about the police originating in slave patrols is a paradigm of how ideology can corrupt historiography. The project, whether by intent or effect, is to make America generally appear as having the same culture and sensibilities as the southeastern United States during the period of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. It’s a political narrative. This is not to say that issues are not political. But in social science we proceed on the basis of objectivity.
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Finally, a point about what we see because of technology and the role of the crowd. It is true that we are taking note of these things because technology—cameras in our phones, cellular communications, social media platforms—allow us to record and share the sights and sounds of civilian-police encounters. However, the risk this poses is that it can make something appear to be a growing problem when in fact they are not. This false perception risks self-fulfilling prophecies. As Mark Fishman (1978) and others since (Barlow, Barlow, and Chiricos 1995; Chiricos 1998; Chiricos, Padgett, and Gertz 2000) have pointed out, in exhaustive research going back years on the phenomenon known as “crime wave as ideology,” mass media feeds moral panic and mass hysteria.
For a recent look at this, see James Walsh (2020). He writes, “Contra claims of their empowering and deflationary consequences, [investigation into this matter] finds that, on balance, recent technological transformations unleash and intensify collective alarm. Whether generating fear about social change, sharpening social distance, or offering new opportunities for vilifying outsiders, distorting communications, manipulating public opinion, and mobilizing embittered individuals, digital platforms and communications constitute significant targets, facilitators, and instruments of panic production” (from the abstract, which is found here. See also conclusion).”
Mass media coverage is not only more abundant, but highly selective. A good example of this is the myth that mass shootings are mostly the work of white men. This myth developed rather rapidly, and knowledge of its appearance expressed even by mainstream media outlets. Before Black Lives Matter, prominent publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian discussed the problem of excluding black victims of mass shootings by not counting mass shootings by black perpetrators in the context of inner-city violence (see, e.g., Beckett 2016).
Indeed, to make it appear as if white men represent most perpetrators of mass shootings, most mass shooting must be excluded from the statistics. What is the definition of a mass shooting? It varies, but it is generally defined as a single incident in which four or more people are shot or killed. In 2020, according to this definition, mass shootings disproportionately occurred in majority-black neighborhoods perpetrated by members of those communities. It is crucial to note that most murder victims are black. Using data tabulated by Statista, of the 17,754 homicides 2020, 9,913 were black. In other words, most (56 percent) of homicides in America were black.
These numbers are startling when considering that most black homicide victims are male and black males comprise only around six percent of the US population. When I tell people these statistics, they admit that they never heard them. This is partly because media coverage does not accurately represent the demographic patterns of homicide in America. A study published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity about 2016 shooting victims in Chicago found that black people killed in predominantly black neighborhoods received roughly half as much news coverage as white people killed in majority-white neighborhoods (White, Stuart, and Morrissey 2020).
The consequences of selective coverage of crime and control in America leads to distortions of popular consciousness. George Floyd’s death by suffocation at the hands of Minneapolis police officers is known worldwide. The nation watched the trial or awaited the verdict. A white police officer was convicted of murder in that case. However, Tony Timpa’s suffocation death at the hands of Dallas police officers is known to a much smaller number of people. Timpa was a white man. Similarities in the two cases are striking. Selective coverage manufactures the appearance that more unarmed black men are killed by the police than unarmed white men. In fact, it is the other way around. Both Floyd and Timpa were unarmed when police officers killed them. No officers were charged in Timpa’s death. The city of Dalla paid no settlement to Timpa’s family. A judge tossed an excessive force lawsuit against the officers. On what grounds? Qualified immunity. Tony Timpa’s death is largely forgotten. And he is hardly the only one. (See McWhorter, 2020.)
The appearance does something else. Presenting excessive policing as a problem primarily for black America mentally circumscribes the perceived scope of excessive use of force by the police to racist acts against black Americans, and thus keeps whites from knowing the full extent of the police violence affecting the white community (while painting for blacks a bleak and fear-provoking picture that circumscribes their movements in society). To the extent that whites are racist, and let’s assume at least some are, they care less about the risk of excessive force by the police visited upon nonwhites. If they believe excessive force will not be visited upon themselves or upon their friends and relatives, they may have less empathy for those they believe do suffer such excesses. This works against what those of who are concerned about reforming policing in American are trying to accomplish.
Words Cited
Barlow, Melissa, David E. Barlow, and Ted G. Chiricos. 1995. Economic Conditions and Ideologies of Crime in the Media: A Content Analysis of Crime News. Crime and Delinquency 41(1):3-19.
Beckett, Lois. 2016. Most Victims of US mass shootings are black, data analysis finds. The Guardian. May 23.
Cesario, Joseph, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill. 2018. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016. Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5).
Chiricos, Ted G., Kathy Padgett, and Marc Gertz. 2000. Fear, TV News, and the Reality of Crime. Criminology 38(3):755-786.
Chiricos, Ted G. 1998. Media, Moral Panics and the Politics of Crime Control. Pp 58-75 in Criminal Justice System: Politics and Policies, Seventh Edition, George F. Cole and Marc G. Gertz, eds. Wadsworth.
Goode, Erich. 1994. Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction. Annual Review of Sociology 20:149-171.
Fishman, Mark. 1978. Crime Waves as Ideology. Social Problems 25(5): 531-543
Fryer, Roland G. 2019. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy 127(3).
King, Angela. 2021. Seattle gun violence surges in 2021, as police force dwindles. National Public Radio. August 31.
Mac Donald, Heather. 2016. The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Encounter Books.
Sampson, Robert J. and Janet L. Lauritsen. 1997. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States. Crime and Justice 21: 311-374.
Sampson, Robert J. an Stephen Raudenbush. 1999. Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology 105 (3): 603–51.
Sheldon, Randall G. and Pavel V. Vasiliev 2018. Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A History of Criminal Justice in America, Third Edition. Waveland.
Tregle, Brandon, Justin Nix, and Geoffrey Albert. 2018. Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks. Journal of Crime and Justice. 42(6).
Trumm, Doug. 2020. Seattle City Council Passes 2021 Budget with 18% Cut to Police Department. The Urbanist, November 24.
Walker, Samuel and Carol Archbold. 2019. The New World of Police Accountability, Third Edition. Sage.
Walker, Samuel. Governing the American Police: Wrestling with the Problems of Democracy. 2016. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 2016(1): 615-660.
Walsh, James P. 2020. Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction. International Journal of Cultural Studies. March.
Westneat, Danny. 2021. “Don’t have a clue: It turns out Washington state set a murder record in 2020, but no one knows why. The Seattle Times, July 10.
White, Kailey, Forrest Stuart, and Shannon L. Morrissey. 2020. Whose Lives Matter? Race, Space, and the Devaluation of Homicide Victims in Minority Communities. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. September.
Wilbanks, William. 1987. The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System. Brooks/Cole.
“Since this body belongs to me for however long I have it….” —Cher
Colin Powell was crucial to creating the mass perception of credibility that allowed Bush and Cheney to sell the lie of WMD in Iraq used to justify the invasion (War Hawks and the Ugly American). So perhaps it is with some irony that his death from COVID-19, despite being fully vaccinated, represents another blow to the credibility of those who claim that, even while admitting the vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus (the main reason for a vaccine), it will still protect you from severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Not if you have the comorbidities associated with hospitalization and death in those who have not been vaccinated.
Colin Powell is dead
The establishment press warns that the political right is misusing Powell’s death to spread misinformation about the vaccine. They would like for you to deal in the removed world of statistical inference, in the abstraction calculations of risk. To be sure, risk assessment has its usefulness. Indeed, if you step back and look at the actual risks of this disease, you may start to consider why your freedoms are being systematically taken from you. But, in the end, each person is a concrete reality. Each vaccinated person who is injured by the vaccine or who gets sick, hospitalized, or dies despite having sought out or submitted to the jab is a concrete reality. Each concrete person should be in charge of their own health care decisions.
The news of Powell’s demise comes on the heels of the recent admission that, despite having known about this since August of this year, the efficacy of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine in preventing viral transmission is the neighborhood of 30 percent. The good news is that the immunity is more durable than the mRNA vaccines (and a bit higher, as new evidence on Pfizer reveals). In other words, these mRNA vaccines are really crappy if Johnson & Johnsons is more durable. These statistics are worse than for the flu vaccine, itself a crappy corporate product the crappiness of which many of you have experienced first hand.
Mandating vaccines with poor efficacy and poor outcomes makes no sense. Not from the standpoint of the concrete person. These vaccines will not end the pandemic. The only thing that will end the pandemic short of the virus mutating into a harmless bug (which it already is for the vast majority of the people it infects) is natural-acquired herd immunity, which provides north of twenty-five times the immunity that the vaccines provide. Natural immunity is more durable. Moreover, it is an immunity trained on the entire viral signature, not just a protein strand of one component (spike). A significant proportion of healthy people are just going to have to get this thing—and the younger the better.
I was trying to help people understand this on another thread but they kept doing what Gupta does in this video. When I watch this I don’t understand how Gupta, who should understand this, and if I am charitable, cannot wrap his head around something so simple. If hardly any young men go to the hospital for COVID-19 complications of every sort, but 85-90 percent of those young men who suffer heart-related complications from the vaccine wind up in the hospital, then it is obvious that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease for this age cohort. Remember, the younger ages were only relatively recently permitted to get the vaccine. The casualties of COVID-19 have been mounting from the beginning—which the media won’t let you forget. If folks can’t see that the argument is over at this point, then continuing the argument is pointless.
Rogan is right. I am right. You don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to understand simple things like this. Others can see this, too—but they will have to quit rationalizing. And stop shilling for Big Pharma. This vaccine is injuring people who don’t need to take the risk. We have to say this. It’s a moral obligation.
Gupta is perfect for CNN, the greatest source of trusted misinformation in operation today. Have you seen the video compilation of the lies they told about Rogan and ivermectin? I share it below CNN is a 24-7 misinformation machine. Why is it on just about everywhere you go? It’s like Big Brother. There are households with CNN on constantly in the background. Turn it off. It’s making you stupid.
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I understand that Merck is set to receive 712 dollars per treatment course for its COVID-19 antiviral pill from the US government—which means from the US taxpayer (past, present, and future). I also understand that the pill costs a fraction of that amount to produce and is reportedly on track for a price of $12 in India. You could, of course, take ivermectin or HCQ, but you will need to move to Nebraska where they allow doctors to treat patients.
What you need to understand is this: US citizens, by paying so much more than cost for heath care in the United States, subsidize cheap health care around the world. “Why can’t we have socialized medicine in the United States?” Because you have to pay for socialized medicine for Europeans. And you have to carry wealthy elites on your back. And you have to open your borders and take in the Third World with all its health care needs, which immigrants receive for free.
Healthcare in the United States is for-profit. And there is no market, so prices are set for reasons other than competition. You live neither under social democracy nor free-market capitalism. You live in a corporate state arrangement, a liminal state between proletarian and serf. This is late capitalism. It’s not sustainable. And we’re on the road to serfdom.
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Professor of education and human development at George Washington University, explains how she needed “somatic embodied training” to “learn that she was white”.
This is in the style of testimonials religious converts and addicts in recovery share. Please know that I am not knocking religious conversion or addiction work. I am making a social psychological observation. Being white is not a problem as long as society is going to treat people in terms of their racial categories. The problem is treating people in terms of racial categories.
Another problem is the explanation of critical race theory I share below. As I have shown readers of Freedom and Reason, critical race theory is not Neo-Marxist (see Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening). It’s Neo-Hegelian. It’s not aimed at cultural revolution to advance the socialist agenda. Quite the contrary. CRT is a rearticulation of that old tactic of manufacturing racial divisions for the sake of perpetuating capitalist power.
Critical race theory is not Neo-Marxist. It’s Neo-Hegelian. It’s not aimed at cultural revolution to advance the socialist agenda. Quite the contrary. CRT is a rearticulation of that old tactic of manufacturing racial divisions for the sake of perpetuating capitalist power. https://t.co/MWtzPSXBZV
FAIR has become fringe (for a while now). See this article, for example. The organization have lost touch with the ordinary working class American. The framing of this story is highly revealing. The way progressivism, a projection of corporate governance, is portrayed as somehow on the side of workers, that organized labor represents the interests of the working class as a whole rather than serving an extension of the establishment to manufacture consensus among the middle-class professional fraction of the proletariat (represented by the Democratic Party in the US and Labour in the UK)—this is a project to deepen corporate hegemony.
All the assumptions underpinning the frame are no longer valid in a world where transnational capital controls what appears as mass leftwing politics. This piece is an instantiation of my point about the importance of understanding the real bifurcation in western politics as between populism (democratic, liberal, republican) and progressivism (technocratic, authoritarian, globalist). This piece is establishment propaganda. Perhaps unconsciously. But nonetheless in practice.
Related. Must see TV:
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Samuel Huntington, famous (or notorious) for his “clash of civilization” thesis, in his 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies determined that the United States and the Soviet Union represented successful models of imposing order on their populations, in contrast to underdeveloped countries, where the lack of stable authority explained their relative lack of economic and technological progress. Indeed, there was much to admire in the Soviet model, according to Huntington. In contrast, the United States, as evidenced by the chaos of the 1960s (anti-war protests, race riots, second-wave feminism, student radicals), was a nation in decline, and liberty and democracy without authority and obedience was the reason.
Based on these insights, Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Trilateral Commission tapped Huntington to pen a chapter on the “excess of democracy” for The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. Huntington stated directly what conservatives mean in their appeal to military prowess, law and order criminal justice, and the unitary executive: the problem is not “the authority of central government institutions” per se, or its analogs in the corporate world, but the character of the authority that’s emplaced.
The actual concern of the rightwing of the establishment then was not that the cultural left would unleash human nature, which their Hobbesian formulations seemed to suggest, the existence and character of which they accuse the left of denying (not without reason), but that it will substitute one overarching authority with another. Now that the establishment has incorporated the cultural left into the transnational project, the overarching authority comes wrapped in what the cultural conservative feared. And so populism has become a space for refugees—and an opportunity for what remains of the authentic left to expand its working class ranks. (I thought I might end on a hopeful note.)
I received a question from a student several days ago concerning a lecture I gave on Karl Marx and the materialist conception of history. Contextualizing Marx in my approach involves a discussion of those figures who inspired Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, namely Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, as well as the impact of Darwin on sociological thought, especially in the work of Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Darwin and Spencer were contemporaries of Marx. They even lived in the same country (England) and were witnessing and experiencing the same conditions. Although Marx agreed with Darwin on natural history, he rejected the evolutionary approach as useful for understanding human history. Therefore, his theory of historical change and development was much at odds with Spencer’s.
I think readers of Freedom and Reason will benefit from my answer, which follows the question reproduced below (the student’s name withheld) and is only slightly modified for the reader here. The student’s question has in back of it class discussion about social Darwinism as summarized above. Here’s the question (slightly edited to fix punctuation): “I just had a quick question about Thomas Malthus’ argument on systems of inequality. Would being born into a rich family be an example of this, or a continuation of this idea? People born into families with wealth are inherently not equal to those born in impoverished families. Going off that note, do you think he would include racial inequalities into that? Due to the redlining and block busting, African American’s did not have much equity leaving them disproportionately poor, and the effects are still seen today. So, if someone is born into an African American family, they are then at a disadvantage due to the systematic racism that caused inequality in commodities between Whites and African Americans.”
A cartoon capturing the idea of cumulative disadvantage
The logic of Darwinism is that variation in any population is subject to selective pressures in the environment (which includes sexual selection). For natural history (or biological evolution), the variation is gene-based and inherited via the reproductive process shaped by fitness. For social history, the variation is based on social factors. The selective pressure becomes much more complex, however. It is multifactorial. Moreover, applying the logic of natural selection to social history is problematical.
It is true that those born to poor families are more likely to be poor over the life course and in this sense poverty is inherited—not biologically but socially. Intergenerational poverty may therefore be explicable in terms of what we call cumulative disadvantage. This is a matter of social class and property relations. If offspring are allowed to inherit their parent’s wealth, then class inequality will persist. I support inheritance to a degree, since enhancing the life chances of children motivates parents to invest in their own success (this is true whatever the mode of production). At the same time, I believe in taxation and government policy that expands opportunities for all families to succeed. The question is what the appropriate public policy is to make this happen. We are not doing a very good job with this now.
The picture becomes complicated with race. There are wealthy and high-income black families. Tens of millions of blacks enjoy high status position in American society. There are black academics, capitalists, high-wage workers, managers, professionals, etc. At the same time, there are tens of millions of poor whites. In fact, there are many more times the number of poor whites in the United States than poor blacks. Statistically speaking, i.e., in the abstract, blacks are disproportionately poor compared to whites (there are more whites overall than blacks). But we must avoid perpetuating the myth that whites are rich while blacks are poor.
In my review of explanations for racial disparities, cumulative disadvantage plays some role. Since blacks were at a disadvantaged in the past, the dynamic of inheritance explains some of the grouped differences. But it does not explain all of it. Probably not most of it.
For one thing, the abstract approach risks the ecological fallacy. For example, incomes differences between white and black makes are partly explained by other aggregate trends. For example, the average respective ages of white males and black males is 50-plus versus under-30, with earnings tied to age. Moreover, we are more than five decades removed from systemic privilege based on race. These were abolished in the 1950s and 1960s.
Other causes of group disparities are
Family breakdown. Not having a father in the home disadvantages children in a myriad of ways. This is true for families of every racial category. However, more than three-quarters of black children grow up without a father in the home, a markedly different pattern than for other racial groups. This problem emerges after the abolition of segregation.
Neighborhood disorganization and crime. Disorder is disruptive to economic development. Blacks are drastically overrepresented in serious criminal offending. These problems are exacerbated by family breakdown—and in turn contribute to family breakdown. Family and neighborhood are deeply interconnected.
Globalization (offshoring) and mass immigration. Cheap foreign labor drives down wages for all workers, as well as displaces native workers. Because of the split-labor market in low-wage sectors, globalization has disproportionately affected native black and brown labor.
The maintenance of a custodial society that pays people not to work and save. Public assistance, while at times necessary, becomes a system of social control in high-poverty areas. Without jobs and income, there is nothing to pass on to children. By idling a segment of the working class, public policy disadvantages future generations in a myriad of ways. Humans learn by example. Idleness and dependency are bad examples.
To address demographic differences, we must therefore look at cultural tradition and public policy in addition to the class and economics question. Unfortunately, political ideology precludes frank discussion of the causes of racial disparities in wealth and income. Progressives lay the blame on racism (indeed, often fallaciously redefining racial disparities as racism itself) and conservatives lay the blame on cultural factors (because they are loathe to blame capitalism). An objective examination of the problem requires a multifactorial approach.
Moreover, a comprehensive account of inequality in the United States requires an explanation that includes the circumstances of whites. I doubt very many people are aware that most poor people in America are white. The media portrays poverty as a black problem, thus distorting the problem of poverty in America. Joe Biden’s famous gaff about poor kids being just as smart as white kids, made in a discussion about black-white differences in poverty, has in back of it the assumption that blacks are poor and whites are not.
Among the solutions to the problem of economic inequality are these: reshoring industries, investment in (real) infrastructure, which includes jobs programs, a radical reorganization of the educational system, which includes training for the reshored industries, and a comprehensive approach to crime reduction.
Must see update to a previous blog at the end of this blog entry.
Mass vaccination doesn’t work, as a comparison between two contrasting states indicates. Vermont is the most vaccinated state in the country, with more than 70 percent of the population fully vaccinated. Despite this, they are in the midst of a the worst COVID-19 surge in the nation. Indeed, COVID-19 cases are more numerous in Vermont than at any time during the entire pandemic for that state.
Vermont is in the midst of a COVID-19 surgeVermont has the highest vaccination rate in country
In contrast, Florida’s last COVID-19 surge peaked almost two months ago. Today, the average per capita new coronavirus cases in Florida are the lowest of any state in the nation. Florida has received extraordinary levels of negative media coverage concerning its rate of vaccination (still less than 60 percent, and only 50 percent when the surge peaked), as well as its reluctance to aggressively pursue masking and other draconian pandemic measures seen in other states. One might wish to pull more states into the comparison, but, frankly, on its face, the Vermont case proves that mass vaccination, aggressive masking, etc., don’t work. I will nonetheless provide Florida’s statistics for comparison.
Florida is over its COVID-19 surgeFlorida has a much lower vaccination rate than Vermont
Why don’t the pandemic measures work? I have explained this in several posts on Freedom and Reason. To recap, the mRNA technology is not a vaccine. It is gene therapy and it does not confer immunity. Those injected with the spike protein are able to contract and spread the virus. Because the mRNA injections may reduce the frequency of severe COVID-19, those who have had the shots and are infected may feel well enough to move about the community and spread the virus. This spread also has implications for pathogenesis and evolutionary paths of mutation (or variants). Moreover, despite reducing the risk of severe COVID-19, those who have been injected are still getting severe COVID-19, are hospitalized, and will die of the disease. Indeed, as the proportion of populations who are vaccinated increase, an increasing proportion of severe COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are those who will have received the recommended injections. Don’t fall for the spin about this. There is an attempt to use this fact to rationalize the failure of the vaccines to protect the population from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It is an indictment of mass vaccination.
As evidence makes clear, natural immunity provides more powerful protection in terms of levels of antibodies (as much as 27 times the early protection associated with the injections), and since natural infection exposes the body to the entire pathogen signature, greater diversity of antibodies. Furthermore, research on a number of therapeutics, for example ivermectin, have demonstrated significant efficacy in preventing the development of severe COVID-19 cases in those who are infected and as a prophylaxis in the general population.
Finally, as noted if the vaccines make it less likely for the infected to suffer symptoms that will keep them at home, they are more likely to be about the community spreading the virus. That’s the obvious reason why we are seeing these patterns The less obvious reason is that the vaccine changes the evolutionary trajectory of the pathogen. It allows more pathological variants to last longer in the population, which increases the likelihood of more deleterious mutations. This is why vaccinating in the teeth of a panic is a bad idea. Pathogens leverage population-wide attempts to defeat them by pursuing alternative selection paths. It’s evolutionary biology 101.
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Scott Hurley of Fox News (local Green Bay) authored a story yesterday with this shocking headline: “Unvaccinated 19x as likely to die of COVID compared to vaccinated in Wisconsin.” The headline is nearly identical to headlines rolled out across the country, the frame provided by the CDC (who you will see in the next section are keen on selectively focusing on data and interpretation). They are trying to scare more people into vaccination.
Read beyond the headline and do some math. Of every 100,000 people who were not fully vaccinated, Wisconsin Department of Health Services data shows that 24.5 died from COVID-19. That’s out of 2,351 positive cases, yielding a case fatality rate (CFR) of one percent. Multiply the CFR by five to determine the approximate infection fatality rate (IFR). This yields an IFR of 0.2 percent or two persons for every 1000 SARS-CoV-2 infections. Instead of putting the headline in those risk terms, the reporter ran with 19 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. Given that people drastically overestimate the number of people who die from COVID-19 (as I have shown on this blog), the headline is fear-mongering.
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The prevalence of type-2 diabetes in COVID-19 patients is as high as 36 percent—more than a third of cases. Insulin resistance is not the only consequence of obesity. These patterns are seen worldwide. So why was the pandemic so bad in the United States? Travelling around continental Europe will really bring this home to you. America’s obesity problem has caught up with us. We have to stop denying biological realities. Postmodernist epistemology is wrecking scientific literacy. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and COVID-19.
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Update on my blog from a month ago, September 15, 2021, Is the CDC Concealing Deaths from Influenza and Pneumonia? I showed that, according to the CDC’s own data, 47 percent of COVID-19 deaths 2020/2021 to date of data collection for chart production associated with influenza and pneumonia.
In my last blog Faking Genius for Power and Profit, I showed you that coronavirus was known by that name since the early 1960s. There has been no routine testing for coronavirus historically. It’s a cold virus, like adenovirus and rhinovirus. They don’t routinely test for those, either. Why? Because they aren’t a big deal.
The authors are telling us that influenza cases are the lowest in recorded history. If so, then how could influenza and pneumonia have contributed to the deaths of more than 300,000 COVID-19 patients? Is it not possible that we have been through one of the most lethal flu seasons but that, because of a test for coronavirus and the act of prioritizing the coronavirus over influenza to push a novel vaccine, mRNA technology developed on the basis of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, research funded by the same crowd (Fauci et al.) who push out the COVID-19 narrative, flu and pneumonia deaths are being portrayed as coronavirus deaths? We can’t say misidentified since the statistic is right there in the table.
We can’t believe masks prevented influenza but not coronavirus. It doesn’t work like that. Influenza didn’t go away. It’s not the lowest level of flu since we starting keeping records. It’s the way the data are represented to the public. The chart I am using is real. You can see it in the blog I cite above. I saved the document in case the CDC purges it. I was shocked to find it, frankly. I was even more shocked to find, when I checked yesterday to see if it was still there, that it is still there—only updated! Here’s the updated chart:
Look at the first line under the blue header bar. Influenza and pneumonia account for 339,190 of COVID-19 deaths as of October 10, 2021. Again, this is the same document as cited in my original blog. Why is the CDC openly publishing these data while simultaneously telling the public that influenza in the United States is at an all-time low?
Reuters headline last Friday: “Delta does not appear to make children sicker; Secondary immune response stronger after infection than after shot.” According to the story, comparing samples of hundreds of children, researchers from Great Britain found that the delta variant does not appear to cause more severe disease in children than earlier forms of the virus. Nor did the alpha variant compared to the “so-called wild, or original, form of the virus, first seen in China.” I quoted from the story to make note of the fact that Reuters uses the adjective “so-called.” Why that adjective? Because Reuters knows like the rest of the journalistic profession that SARS-CoV-2 is most likely the product of human selection and did not arise from the processes of natural selection (carried by a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, China).
Was there ever any indication that the delta variant was more dangerous to children? According to the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP), as of the end of September 2021, 0.1%-1.9% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization. That range covers across-state variation. For reporting states, 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death. The AAP examined 5,899,148 total child COVID-19 cases reported during this period and found that children represented 16.2 percent (5,899,148/36,501,46) of all cases. A conservative estimate would raise the number of cases by a factor of between four and five, in the process drastically lowering the infection fatality rate (IFR). By any measure, COVID-19 is not dangerous to children. And there is zero indication in these data that the delta variant represented a unique threat to children.
You don’t have to be an expert to see that there is no need to routinely vaccinate children (in fact, it might help if you’re not an expert—at least not one employed by a government agency or a pharmaceutical firm). Yet, you have no doubt heard by now, Pfizer has asked the FDA for emergency use authorization to jab children as young as five with its mRNA technology, which introduces into their bodies a genetic sequence associated with a long list of adverse consequences. What’s the emergency? Remember AAP’s review of the data: at worst, three-hundredths of all pediatric COVID-19 cases resulted in death—and the IFR is much smaller number than that. As I reported on Freedom and Reason, pediatric deaths from COVID-19 are almost invariable associated with comorbidities that make children particularly susceptible to severe disease, preexisting conditions that included diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Also on my blog, I citing CDC data showing that influenza is far deadlier for children than COVID-19 (see “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?),.
What emergency?
Since natural immunity greatly reduces one’s chance of reinfection compared to the vaccine, as well as decreases the likelihood of more pathological strains, which the evidence suggests the vaccine increases, vaccinating children is doubly irrational (see The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). It is irrational not only because it exposes children to danger for no reason; it’s also counterproductive given that the younger generation will be, as it has always been, a bulwark against future pandemics by establishing population immunity over the long-term.
Those in charge of this pandemic are screwing the pooch. We know at least a couple of reasons for this. The problem with natural immunity is there’s little money in it. Any rational observer who understands capitalism and the phenomenon of regulatory capture grasps that. Nor is there a lot of money to be made off a healthy population enjoying a robust immune response—at least not for the medical-industrial complex. So expect that the mass vaccination program will expand to include the little ones.
Mass vaccination of children is more probable if there is no mass resistance to the mandate. Mass vaccination is profoundly unethical (see Biden’s Biofascist Regime), however much legal precedent may be twisted to justify it. But even without a mandate, some parents will ask a doctor to jab their child. Tragically, there are parents who can’t wait to march their children down to the clinic for jabs and photo and video opportunities to be later or in real time shared with their social media accounts, the resulting cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome or Bell’s Palsy or some other potentially life-altering effect rationalized as mysterious or prideful instantiations of the communitarian ideal. The latter makes vaccine injury into a style of child sacrifice. (See Torches of Freedom, Vaccine Cards, and Our Civilian Lives.) The best we can do if we wish to keep the state from meddling in our own lives is criticize them; we cannot do what they do and demand the state intervene.
If children’s health (physical and mental) mattered, authorities would never have forced them to wear masks, which an industrial hygienist will tell you cannot work—hence the millions of children (and adults) who were infected (see Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected?). With this in mind, we might reflect on the fact that more people have died from COVID-19 since the introduction of the vaccines (and habitual mask wearing) than in all of the period before the government granted manufacturers emergency use authorization. Blaming the increase in COVID-19 deaths (and Joe Biden’s poll numbers, as did White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently) on delta and the unvaccinated is dishonest.
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The pandemic began by authorities leaving the impression that coronavirus is novel and especially pathological across demography, alongside images and video of refrigerated semis and slit trenches to manage the piles of corpses. In fact, human coronaviruses date back to at least the early 1960s, when scientists positively identified the virus in humans. The microbe was classified as a common cold virus and designated B814. It took its place among other common cold viruses, the well-known adenovirus (1953) and the even more well-known rhinovirus (1956). In the 1960s, scientists began cultivating the coronavirus, labeling the grown strain as 229E. Exposing humans to both B814 and 229E produced common cold symptoms. By the mid-1960s, another strain had been identified, labeled OC43. By 2009, the species was known to have four main subspecies: alpha, beta, delta, and gamma. Yes, you read that right.
We can start the story even further back in time. Turns out that coronavirus was known to scientists back in 1930s when it went by a different name, infectious bronchitis virus (IBV). This known reality, certainly known to those who are in the know, is hidden in plain view by the legacy and social media. The point is that, before 2020, coronaviruses were always known as a common cold bug. Fast forward nearly a hundred years later and SARS-CoV-2 is a selectively pathological strain of IBV, likely the product of gain-of-function research conducted in a virology lab in Wuhan, China, in part funded by the United States (Anthony Fauci, an immunologist serving as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President playing a crucial role), with military applications.
The establishment could have avoided the derangement of mass hysteria by affirming what the public already knew, that most of them have likely had one or more coronavirus infections during their lives. Wives across the world have mocked husbands for thinking they were dying with a head cold probably caused by coronavirus. Rightly so. It was no big deal. It’s still no big deal for most people. Today, most of those testing positive for coronavirus report cold symptoms. Much of the rest are asymptomatic. Yes, as noted, people with certain comorbidities, especially obesity and its attendant maladies, as well as compromised immune systems, should avoid contracting SARS-CoV-2. But the majority of the population should have been allowed to go about their lives during this entire period. Why weren’t they? Why did the government obscure reality? Why is the Biden Administration mandating a vaccine most people don’t need?
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As we know, the pharmaceutical companies has been busy manufacturing vaccines alongside their other nostrums (I use that synonym intentionally). The SSRI craze (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), preying on the disequilibriums resulting from the processed food and iron cage that is life under corporate (ir)rationality, generated huge profits. But patents run out and science hits walls and, despite tactics attempting to engender fear using the scary strain names of influenza, the flu could not made quite scary enough to move product (that and the vaccine’s terrible record of efficacy) that planners believed was still a potential growth site of the industry. What to do in the face of shareholder concern? Innovate!
Since modern capitalism works by demand-creation, and fear is a well-known and a powerful pull factor in inducing desired behavior, the problem became one of how to manufacture mass hysteria over a common cold virus, with a vaccine waiting in the wings (you’re naïve if you don’t think Pfizer had the technology ready to go). First, find one about which the public is generally unfamiliar. Who’s heard of coronavirus? (There’s the neuralyzer for the few who have.) Next, modify it to make it especially dangerous for fat and old people and release it into the general population. Several obvious steps follow: obscure the source of its lethality (obesity and compromised or deteriorated immune response), causally reduce the resulting death rate to the virus alone (some sick and old people die from COVID, even those with stage-four cancer or victims of motorcycle accidents, not with COVID), manufacture panic in a scientifically illiterate population with its collective head trapped in a virtual space where the line between the real and the unreal is blurred, territory where even basic biological fact is denied, leverage routine testing to keep the panic going (see the Thomas theorem), quarantine healthy people and force everybody to hide their faces behind masks, then demand people get vaccinated or be routinely tested as presumptive disease carriers or forfeit basic freedoms that were always theirs to begin with.
What I have written above is a description of what has transpired. If I had written such a description of events in a science fiction novel you would have thought it far-fetched. This is like a far-fetched science fiction novel, only the novel if your life. You need not consider every step in the description to become suspicious about what has transpired. You can just ask yourself why the government would mandate a vaccine that does not in fact stop the spread of a virus in order to ostensibly stop the spread of a virus. Or you can ask yourself the related question of why you are not required to present an official immunity card for chicken pox, measles, mumps, polio, or small pox when attending a concert or dining out. Ask yourself why, if you did (and tens of millions did, so don’t feel too stupid), you fell for a big lie. After all, everything that was conspiracy theory yesterday is reality somewhere today and probably everywhere tomorrow.
Conspiracy theories in 2020:
– Covid passports. – Medical apartheid. – Banned from leaving countries. – No work without covid passport.
Reality in 2021:
– Covid passports. – Medical apartheid. – Banned from leaving countries. – No work in Italy without covid passport
So, the government and the medical-industrial complex presented the coronavirus to the public as if it were novel. Yet, as I established above, they have known about coronavirus and its many variants for almost a century now and have been able to test for the virus for decades. They never bothered with routine testing because, well, it’s a cold virus. But that’s all changed. We can go down a rabbit hole and ponder all the reasons why it’s changed. Corporate profits may not be sufficient to explain circumstances. However, I want to get the reader thinking about an obvious feature of pandemic policies: the effect of a large-scale project to prevent virus acquisition and attendant resiliency of the immune system. For the likely result of what the public health experts have instructed us to do is immune system impoverishment for individuals at a crucial stage of physical development. Their directives came with the understanding that younger age cohorts with underdeveloped resistance to viruses and other microbes carry their weak systems into adulthood. They must know that these cohorts will be sickly ones over the life-course. It hard to imagine a more damning indictment of technocratic rule.
Preview of coming attractions
Think through the logic: Kids get half a dozen colds or more a year. Infection primes and develops the immune system at a time when most viruses have minimal pathological effects, thus safely preparing the little ones for adult life. (Safely does imply total risk elimination. Life is by definition risky, even deadly. In fact, eventually, always deadly.) One of the reasons most SARS-CoV-2 infections are asymptomatic or produce only mild cold symptoms in most adults is because of cross-immunity developed during a lifetime of exposure to coronaviruses, especially at an early age. Lockdowns may have fixed that problem by keeping children away from the pathogens they need for proper physical development, albeit the inefficacy of masks may have to some degree hobbled the solution by providing people with a false sense of security. Of course masks and other PPE helped sell the pandemic. It also helped sell masks and other PPE. Capitalism is remarkable in leaving no source of profit unexploited.
lockdowns and social distancing will likely produce a generation of adults whose bodies are less resistant to ordinary diseases. But the impoverishment will occur not only in the realm of physiology. Childhood is not just a critical phase in the physical development of humans, it’s also a critical phase in their emotional and psychological development. And it’s not just the lockdowns and social distancing and hiding of faces that are the damaging directives. It’s the constant drumbeat of fear over a virus that in several states has failed to kill a single child. “Doing our part” is a slogan in a line of ritual totems in a religious-like campaign of fear mongering and trauma-induction. The simulacra of death and disease create the illusion of ubiquitous danger—and they misdirect the populace about the real danger, namely corporate state tyranny. In fascism, the tyrant is portrayed as the savior. In the religion of scientism, in the cathedrals of the medical-industrial complex, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the word made flesh. The people become fanatics.
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If your kid has a deficient immune response, then it is not really safe to have the kid around other kids. Keep the kid at home. Work hard to make up for what the kid will miss from being around other kids. Ask the government for resources to manage your burden—a burden you do not wish to put on other parents and their children because you’re a decent human being who genuinely cares about the health and wellbeing of all children. That’s what the government is there for. No good person would by their actions wish to harm children for a bug that poses no real harm to them. Remind yourself as often as you can that influenza is deadlier to your children (and most of their teachers) than SARS-CoV-2 because it’s true. Truth is confidence-building. That will make you more courageous. And courage is contagious. It will remind you to ask what should be obvious questions: Why wasn’t influenza in our schools an issue before? Where were the lockdowns then? Where were the masks and vaccine mandates? (Expect them to put more cars on the gravy train, so don’t make too big a fuss of it in public—if you are allowed to make a public fuss over anything again. After all, we don’t want them to treat influenza the way they treat coronavirus.)
Here’s something else to consider, and I apologize if I offend some of you by writing this, but one of the significant comorbidity affecting the pathology of SARS-CoV-2 is obesity. Frankly, there are too many obese children in America. Obesity is associated with other conditions, such as juvenile diabetes. However, obesity is a disease process in itself (the only thing holds back that designation are insurance companies not wanting to pay for weight loss treatments). According to the CDC, an examination of children and adolescents from 2017-2018 finds that obesity prevalence among 2-5-year-olds is 13.4 percent. It increases with age cohort: 20.3 percent among 6-11-year-olds and 21.2 percent among 12-19-year-olds. Obesity is more common among certain populations, with prevalence at 25.6 percent among Hispanic children, 24.2 percent among non-Hispanic Black children, 16.1 percent among non-Hispanic White children, and 8.7 percent among non-Hispanic Asian children. Meta-analyses of epidemiological data finds a positive correlation between obesity in childhood and obesity in adulthood. Over all, the CDC finds that obesity prevalence was 42.4 percent in 2017-2018 (having increased substantially from 1999-2000). That study found that, 2017-2018, non-Hispanic Black adults (49.6%) had the highest age-adjusted prevalence of obesity, followed by Hispanic adults (44.8%), non-Hispanic White adults (42.2%) and non-Hispanic Asian adults (17.4%). Could this explain race and ethnic differences in death from COVID-19 that critical race theorists chalk up to systemic racism?
The good news is that obesity can be fixed in most cases through diet and exercise. We need parents to do a better job of helping their children live healthier lives. This is not a call for harassing parents who do a poor job of promoting a healthy lifestyle for their children, but we shouldn’t be hesitant to tell the truth about health in America. If public health matters, then surely poor diet and inadequate levels of physical activity matters. We must also be critical of this notion of body positivity, an Orwellian euphemism for fat acceptance. A fat kid is an unhealthy kid. A healthy kids is outside in the elements playing with other kids with their snotty noses and all the rest of it. Kids should be riding bicycles and skateboarding. Climbing on jungle gyms and in trees. And we might revisit the recommended number of jabs over the life-course—that notorious vaccine schedule. If we do the right things, if we are mindful of science, then there will be fewer kids with impoverished immune systems. There will also be fewer juvenile psychiatric disorders. And fewer fat and emotionally delicate adults.
Like all life on our planet, human beings are evolved creatures (Are We Forgetting Darwin?). Humans didn’t just appear a few thousand years ago. Nature had billions of years to develop resilient and marvelous biological machines can humans. Some humans have only recently figured out some of what makes those marvelous machines tick and, privilege and profit—and hubris—have encouraged some of them (the worst sort) to assume the role of Dr. Frankenstein. Some of them appear to think of themselves as kin to that Titan Prometheus. Gods or not, they work from theory. If the theory’s wrong, they can fall back on the provisional character of science. If the wrong theory finds its way into technology, not every result can be walked back. And medical professionals care little for science or ethics at all (Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds). But what scientists know for sure, before they do anything, is that, just as with cognitive, emotional, and moral development, people need to be around other each other to prime and develop their immune systems. One of the great evils of modern medical science is the propaganda campaign to convince you that without medical science you have suspect protection against the myriad of pathogens that surround you. Just as the manufacturers of acne medicine needed to make adolescents feel insecure about their complexion to move product, so the manufacturers of vaccines need to make the public doubt the genius of nature.
Like science, truth is mostly provisional. At least as a practical matter. But there are some things about which we are certain. One is our wondrous immune systems. Here’s another one: a corporation is not a person with a conscience. One more: Fauci and his ilk are minor intellects crouching in the shadow of the genius of nature.
Read this op-ed in RealClearPolitics by Frank Miele: “Live Free or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters.” Share it. It’s fantastic. A taste: “George Orwell might just as well have never written Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Greatest Generation might as well have never defeated the Nazis. Ronald Reagan may as well have never defeated the Evil Empire of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. What’s the point if I have to surrender my dignity and willpower to the bureaucrats and technocrats and let them stick a needle in my arm to mark me just as a rancher would brand his cattle: owned.”
Readers of Freedom and Reason will hear my thoughts echoing throughout Miele’s op-ed. I have been blogging essays with similar content this since March 2020, albeit not written in quite this way. Content-wise, much of this essay reads as if it came from my blog, but the style is that of an accomplished newspaper editor. I am not making an accusation. I’m not the only person in this world who can see things for what they are and the slippery slope we are on. (Some would wish me to more humbly write that I am not the only person who sees things the way I do, but that is for other people to say about me.) So Miele’s essay comes as comfort. It’s why I ask you to share it (share this essay, as well). It will come as comfort to others, as well. We are not alone!
Without a course correction, we will soon live in a country we will no longer recognize—and that goes for a lot of the people around us. The capacity of the mind to convince itself that the undesirable is not a nascent actuality, to deny and accommodate changed circumstance, is a powerful force in human personality. Indeed, watching minds reshape to fit actions once understood as authoritarian is one of the scariest aspects of this moment we are in. If it were not for others who also see through the web of deceit, life for me would increasingly resemble the vibe of Roman Polanski’s horror film Rosemary’s Baby.
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby
Have you ever heard of Stockholm syndrome? Some say there’s no such thing, but that must be a rationalization, as we can easily see the syndrome at work throughout time and place. We see it big time today. The condition sometimes appears as equanimity, but when not strategically deceitful, equanimity is a sad attempt to dress inaction in virtue. What am I talking about? A mental illness wherein the hostage comes to identify with her captor.
Stockholm syndrome involves the same cognitive and emotional strategy victims pursue when confronted by rising tyranny in a formerly free and democratic society. Changing one’s cognitive and emotional standpoint is one way to deal with the unbearable stress of tyranny’s presence. The strategy is especially likely to occur when the victim feels that resistance to tyranny is not an option due to a belief that either those around her stand with tyrants or believe they cannot successfully do so. The circumstances function like gaslighting; organized circumstances cause her to doubt her ability to grasp the truth of reality and the soundness of principle. It’s a manifestation of auto-gaslighting.
Underpinning Stockholm syndrome is what psychologist Leon Festinger identifies as cognitive dissonance. Festinger observes that human beings naturally seek consistency between attitude and belief, on the one hand, and behavior and actions, on the other. If people believe they cannot act in a manner that aligns with their beliefs, many will change their attitudes to fit their behavior. The simple way to say this is that slogan all of us have heard before. You know the one: “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” In this way, by identifying with the external threat, the victim can manage the stress situation and threat provokes. It’s a defense mechanism.
For those who find it impossible to adopt such a strategy, or who have found themselves of late determined to no longer acquiesce to tyranny, the burden of the stress is amplified by those who have acquiesced, especially those who have come to identify with the captor or tyrant and work to advance his agenda. Brainwashers discovered no more powerful moment in the transformation of a person’s consciousness than when the target discovers that his comrades identify with their common oppressor and find him odd for not doing likewise.
Frank Miele is an experienced editorial writer and I envy this style of writing. I am not saying he is a great writer. But when I read this style I realize how impoverished academic training leaves those in my profession. Different skill set. Miele clearly conveys his point. I write like a nineteenth century German moral philosopher. Since academic spaces have become unbearably woke (and super-exploitative) and I no longer write for them, I am going to keep working at it.
Stay strong. Tyranny is on the rise everywhere. You are not imagining it. What was unthinkable a year ago is now happening. Much of it is already firmly in place. It will take forceful action to dislodge it. But first we have to stop the progression. Resist this. Resist it while you can.
I leave you with the prophetic scene from the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre:
Some readers may find this blog controversial. If so, I submit to you that this is only because we have for decades allowed extremists on both sides of the political-ideological spectrum to conflate culture and race. Culture and race are not the same things. Culture refers to a social system of beliefs, ideas, norms, and values. Race refers to supposed genetic or otherwise essential variation in our species claimed to be meaningfully organized into types that exhibit concomitant variability in behavioral proclivity, cognitive capacity, and moral integrity. Culture is a real thing. Race is not.
White nationalists, for the most part located on the political right, see culture through a racial lens, believing that the ideals and accomplishments of the West (which are profound and vast) reflect the superiority of the white race, into which they collapse selected ethnicities determined to be racially white. White supremacists are particularly committed to an extreme version of Christianity (Christian nationalism or Christianism) and slather other faiths, even Judaism—especially Judaism, for some of them—in loathsome sentiment. Thankfully, white nationalists are a rare and vanishing force in Western society.
More plentiful, and therefore more threatening, are the identitarians on the left, who, also collapsing culture, ethnicity, and religion into race, and defining race in essentialist terms that obscure its racist assumptions, portray Western culture as the expression of white supremacy, and use that portrayal to smear those moderate voices on the left and the right concerned with the integrity of the modern nation-state and the preservation and perpetuation of Western culture, with its democratic-republican commitments and stress on the Enlightenment values and practices of humanism, individualism, liberalism, science, and secularism. Left identitarians label themselves “antiracists,” but, in this system, antiracism is a species of racism.
This essay is a defense of individualism and democratic-republican values over against those extremists on the left and right who elevate group identity above liberty and civil and human rights thus compromising both.I will enter the discussion through the concept of whiteness, which antiracists falsely claim is the prevailing culture of the United States and the West. In fact, the West, especially the United States, is a multiracial space in which nonwhites enjoy the same rights as whites. The Enlightenment values inhering in Western culture—humanism, individualism, liberalism, secularism, etc.—have no color. They are for everybody and the greatest accomplishment of the West is realizing their universality.
* * *
In November of 1998, Jeff Hitchcock, director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, appeared before an audience at the 3rd National Conference on Whiteness at the University of Chicago and delivered a talk titled “Decentering Whiteness.” Hitchcock defines “whiteness” as a term meant “to describe such things as white racial identity, white culture and European Americans as a people.” He clarifies at the start that this is “different and broader from how other people may use the term.” That is perhaps a strange thing to say given that this is how most people who use that term define it. Of course, turf cutting is not uncommon in attempts to make one appear to have novel or superior insight on a subject.
By the time Hitchcock gave his speech, whiteness studies had become an established academic field, one that informs and is informed by antiracist activism. Although W.E.B. Dubois articulated the concept of whiteness in his observation of the race-based psychological wage many decades earlier, Theodore Allen initiated the project with his 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race in which he claimed that British colonists invented whiteness in the late-seventeenth-early-eighteenth century in the American colonies as an hegemonic strategy disorganizing the working class by manufacturing racial loyalties that disrupted class solidarity.
From there, Allen’s view was elaborated in a vast body of literature and numerous academic programs. Perhaps more than any other work, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991, establishes the academic foundation of whiteness studies. George Lipsitz gave the thesis a useful hook in his 1995 essay, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” published in the American Quarterly. The heart of the argument is that, at first, whiteness was narrowly construed to apply to white British workers. Over a period of time, the designation expanded to include other Europeans. Non-Europeans are excluded from the designation. These claims are untrue, it turns out. I debunk the narrative in my essay “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.” The Irish, Jews, and even Arabs have always been white. But ideologies are stubborn and whiteness studies refuses to die.
In this speech, Hitchcock advances a method he calls “decentering whiteness.” One hears such jargon alongside other constructions that echo in the halls of academe, activists workshops, and community organizing campaigns, constructions such as “white privilege” and “white fragility.” (See “Not All White People are Racist”). For those who use these words, as Hitchcock puts it, whiteness “forms the center of our society in the United States.” Because “no single racial or cultural group should control the center,” good people (antiracists) “need to take whiteness out of the center and replace the center with multiracial values.” (If you need help doing this, Hitchcock’s Center for the Study of White American Culture is a fee-based organization to help private and public organizations become antiracist. That’s right, he’s a race hustler.)
What does it mean to say that whites are at the center of our society? “When we talk about being in the center of society,” Hitchcock explains, “by that we mean having access to power, control of resources and having the ability to enforce one’s values.” He then specifies the extent of white racial power. “In the United States we have government, with the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court and these are overwhelmingly white, and for that matter, male, which is itself an element of whiteness.” But it’s not just the government that centers whiteness, i.e., finds the white majority also a majority in its dominant institutions. “We have Fortune 500 companies, which are overwhelmingly controlled by white people. We have white families in control of a disproportionately large measure of the wealth of the country. We have a majority of white people who believe living and working in circumstances that are overwhelmingly white is normal, okay, acceptable, and even worth seeking out.”
By “multiracial values,” Hitchcock means that “no single racial group should control the society’s resources, power and values, and every racial and cultural group should have access to these things.” I agree. And so do the vast majority of Americans. As I have explained numerous times on Freedom and Reason, and this was no less true in 1998, white Americans abolished the slave trade, emancipated black people from chattel slavery, affirmed the right of women to participate in politics, and dismantled the structures of Jim Crow segregation. (See “Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project”; “The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression”; “The FAR Podcast Episode # 21.”) There is neither a de jure or a de facto effort to center white people in America.
Hitchcock’s argument is an exercise of turning the expected and ordinary into the unusual and perverse. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the US population is white. One would expect, then, as a mere matter of course, a majority of people will live and work in environments that are overwhelmingly white. To suggest that this is neither normal nor acceptable implies that acceptable normality excludes a great many whites from life and work—or that maybe there should be far fewer whites. Presently, of the 330-plus millions Americans, approximately 275 million of them, or more than eighty percent, excluding nonwhite Hispanics, are white. Is it any surprise that white people are the majority in our institutions? Moreover, half of the United States population is male (patriarchy’s ubiquity in world history speaks for itself, so I won’t dwell on it albeit it is a problem). Black and other Americans will encounter a lot of white men over the course of their lives. A white majority does not obviate the fact of a multiracial society. The United States is self-evidently multiracial. However, following the progressive left style of thinking, there is an assumption in Hitchcock’s argument that whiteness is cultural and that therefore multiracialism must therefore be multicultural. In other words, culture must not be white because whiteness is racist. It has to decenter whiteness. But western societies are multiracial with a white majority. What’s the problem with a white majority?
There is a trick being played here. Whiteness studies is an expression of anti-white bigotry and white self-loathing that legitimizes such sentients by racializing Western culture and then taking up a righteous struggle against white supremacy. Whiteness studies aims to convince people that black inequality is found in the thought and actions of people—even black people—as a result of enculturation in a white supremacist culture. This is the source of such concepts as “implicit race bias” and “white guilt.” Racial inequality is wrong and therefore the culture that engenders it must go. The institutions of the West—the Enlightenment and rational jurisprudence—are expressions of white culture which in turn makes the West the racist projection of the white race which, according to Allen, is invented. But Western culture is not a proxy for anti-white bigotry. It is as much the case that anti-white bigotry is popularly engendered to struggle against Western culture. Who would want to dismantled Western culture? Transnational corporate power.
When you and I look at the world and see few white supremacists in it, the antiracist cannot scold us for not seeing the forest for the trees. There are indeed few trees. But he doesn’t let that stop him. This is because he works as the supernaturalists do, where a different style of truth prevails, the truth-style of positing forces that operate behind the seen/scene. In the antiracist worldview, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tells us, racism can and does exist without racists. Racism is “in the system.” It is the system. The language of “systemic racism” allows the antiracists to grow a forest without trees. No wonder you can’t see the forest. You were looking for trees!
Just as the antiracist forest does not require trees, the system of white supremacy needs no human agency to oppress. White supremacy works like the devil and his demons, making bad things happen in the world. This is a supernatural agency. Of course, for the sophisticated, demons are merely personifications of evil. So how do we see the evil? We need a specialized language. We need doctrine and scripture. We need a testament. We need clerics and institutions in which the clerics may preach and indoctrinate. We need missionaries to take to the streets and bring people to the faith. We need a rhetoric to shame and scold the infidel and punish the apostate. We need to stifle and marginalize the heretic. Either you are a believer (antiracist) or a disbeliever and therefore an enemy of the righteous (racist). Nobody is allowed to stand outside doctrine. As Brother Ibram X Kendi tells us, there is no such thing as a non-racist. Those who say otherwise are in league with the deceiver.
As I have noted several times on Freedom and Reason, people like Hitchcock have taken to living in a reified world constructed from concepts and theories that posit as real things imagined relations and structures falsified by obvious facts. Here’s one of those facts: Most poor people are white. They don’t control a disproportionately large measure of wealthy of the country. Even though there are twice as many poor whites than blacks, blacks nearly equal whites in welfare utilization. Here’s another fact: There are black families who own and control the means of production, employing and controlling workers to whom they extract value in the wage-labor system. More facts: There are blacks in positions of political power, in some cities a majority of those who make the policies that keep black neighborhoods in power and under-protected from the violence crime that plagues their lives. Blacks are prominent in entertainment, sports, and many other walks of life. Again, this was true in 1998 when Hitchcock gave his talk.
American society is already multiracial. It has always been multiracial. And the values associated with America is what guided white people to struggle against racism for the sake of their nonwhite brothers and sisters. It is this that makes the United States the number one target of destination for those seeking a better life for themselves and their families. But if Western civilization is racist, then opposition to developments that threaten Western civilization, such as cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism—those who oppose multiculturalism must also oppose multiracialism and therefore must be racist. Smearing opponents of cultural pluralism with racism is lazy. It’s also wrong. Many people do it out of habit and reflex. Decades of pairing racism with culture and ethnicity in an essentialist fashion has confused millions of people. People like Hitchcock work very hard to keep the confusion going.
* * *
In order to detangle the mess the antiracists have made of things, we need to clarify our terms. Racism is an ideology (and thus indeed a type of culture) that causes people to see selected inherited superficial physical characteristics, such as skin color or eye shape, as indicating different types of humans, and some institutionalize this typology to, or use it to justify, institutions that privilege members of their group while disadvantaging members of others. The manifestations of racism are seen historically inde jure segregation and presently in private and public programs that advance or thwart the aspirations of persons on the basis of ancestry and racial identity. But the subjects of racism, the individuals sorted into racial categories, are not abstractions.
The subjects of racist belief and practice are fundamentally different from the social systems of culture and ethnicity. Those are acquired through inculturation and socialization where, for example, one becomes an Arab or a Muslim. A person does not become this or that race through socialization. Like sex, race is ascribed at birth. Being black requires no special language or thought patterns. We see a black person as is. He may be an Arab or a Muslim. We won’t know until we ask him. Like sex, race, as understood in common sense terms, is an immutable characteristic, even if, unlike sex, it is not an actual biological reality but a social construction. As social systems, culture and ethnicity represent patterns of attitudes, beliefs, habits, norms, and values. A black people can be a constituent of any culture or ethnicity. And he may change cultures and even change his ethnicity. Very few people, including non-racists, believe a person can change his racial identity; however, nearly everybody who does not collapse culture into race, as is the reflex of right and left wing identitarians, believes an individual can adapt to a new culture, learn a new language, change his religion (or abandon religion all together). In the process of changing one’s culture, one can also abandon racial thinking.
I will use myself as an example. I am a white person. I did not choose to be nor do I wish to be white. Whiteness is of no value to me (see “About My “Whiteness’.”) However, if I tell people I am not white, they will think I am mad. I am not allowed to identify as another race or even to go raceless. I cannot change or deny my race as I might my religion or, these days, my gender. My ancestry is varied, but I know my ancestors were mostly Europeans and spoke many languages and practiced different religions (most were Christians, while others were Jewish and any number of religions practiced in Japan). They were mostly white even if the word white was not yet in use. (Names for things do not distinguish them; one will search in vain to find an ancient text that describes the sky as blue.) Upon arriving in the United States, my ancestors assimilated with American culture and became native Americans.
In a blog entry dated 2012, Let’s Recognize White American Culture, Hitchcock admits as much. “Some white Americans claim as their culture the original heritage of the European country or countries from whence their ancestors came. This makes sense for first or second generation white Americans, but the vast majority of white Americans have been here much longer. Often we’re a mix of many ancestral national origins. We can’t speak the original languages, and we have no meaningful relationships with those who remained in Europe. More likely we have gone through generations of assimilation in the United States, and the culture of the United States gives us our language, our customs, and our values.” But then Hitchcock intrudes upon sound history with his anti-whiteness. He declares that the future of the United States “it is not simply ‘American’ culture.” It is, as his blog title tells us, “white American culture.” “Our experience has been more constricted by race, and the historic process of cultural formation has taken place along racial lines,” he writes. It follows, then that there is a “black American culture.” Hitchcock sees multiple cultures in America, that differentiate “the music people listen to, the movies and TV programs they watch, and the foods they eat.” He recognizes that “individuals make individual choices and some people prefer the cultural experience of others. There is a fair amount of fusion and cross-over activity taking place.” “But the larger fact remains,” he contends, that “White Americans have a culture. We have a shared cultural experience. So why don’t we recognize that? And why is it important that we should?”
I am uncomfortable with insisting on a white culture. We might more properly in the domestic case talk about subcultures. It is not clear that there is a monolithic white subculture (I don’t think there is). One is on firmer grounds claiming the existence of a black subculture. But, for Hitchcock, there is a white culture that exists beyond those subcultures we might identify. “Let’s be real,” he writes. “White Americans, as a group, basically control what’s going on in the United States, and so our culture sets the norms.” So here we have it. There is a dominant culture, but it is one constructed and controlled by whites, and to maintain that control, whites set the norms to which all who live in the United States are expected to adhere.
I write about this on Freedom and Reason in the blog “The Myth of White Culture.” I was inspired to write the blog because Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, author of The Race Card: How bluffing about bias makes race relations worse,” told his audience in an op-ed for CNN, “There is no ‘White culture’.” I report on an exhibit at the Smithsonian (which was taken down due to protest) that identified several features common to “white culture.” What are these? Autonomy, common law, competition, delayed gratification, future-oriented, independence, promoting progress, self-reliance and the work ethic, time-oriented, the scientific method, the two-parent family. These are the norms and values Hitchcock wants to decenter. (See “The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs.”)
While I am inescapably white (inescapable because others refuse to give up racial thinking), I am not any of those other cultures or ethnicities. One does not carry cultural or ethnical traits on their genes the way they do the traits for skin color or eye shape. My culture is American culture. I am ethnically America. I am a native of that culture and to the nation. This would be true if I were not white. I stand alongside black and brown people as a citizen of the United States—and as a representative of Western civilization. All those features of white American culture are really features of Western culture and belong to all people regardless of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.
There are white subcultures (plural), that is attitudes, beliefs, preferences, and tastes that have grown in the context of a segregated society. There are attitudes, beliefs, norms and values in my own culture to which I never subscribed. Growing up, everyone around me was a Christian and spoke with a regional accent. I am atheist and have deliberately spoken English in manner that doesn’t give away the location of my upbringing (although I am not ashamed of my upbringing). Growing up in the south, there were many people in my life who were racially prejudiced. I always resisted those attitudes. Yes, while originating among white people, Christianity is not exclusive to white culture (obviously). At the same time, I adhere to the attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values that founded my nation: humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism. I adhere to these because they are just and rational and universal. I expect others who wish to live in my country to do the same whatever the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.
* * *
America is a multiracial society. But it does not follow that it should be a multicultural one. Why, then, do so many people reflexively perceive criticism of and resistance to multiculturalism as a racist dog whistle? This reflex is a specular propaganda achievement in the service of a capitalist class fraction, the transnationalist fraction, that seeks to denationalize the global space and subjugate world labor to corporate governance and technocratic control. What stands in the way of globalist desire is national chauvinism or patriotism, founded upon a deep cultural understanding held in common across individuals regardless of racial designation. The pairing of race and culture and ethnicity is a political-ideological strategy designed to delegitimize those who believe in a common language and shared cultural values by smearing them as racist.
The force leveraging racism to fracture the proletariat is the multicultural progressive left. Leftwing elites portray those who believe in national integrity and support restrictions on immigration for reasons that have nothing to do with race as backwards, bigoted, and xenophobic. At the very least, the pairing functions this way. In any case, few people attempt to clarify the meaning of the terms at play for fear of being accused of what they are condemning. It is therefore vital for the future of the American nation and the Enlightenment project that the truth that culture is not race is reclaimed and widely circulated. Knowing that culture and race are not the same and that their false pairing is a deception that serves narrow economic and political interests is a game changer.
There is a peculiar thing about those who insist on the pairing. You will have noticed that who is smeared as a racist for defending cultural integrity depends on who is insisting on cultural integrity, whether this insistence will metamorphosize into the perception of a call for racial integrity and solidarity, or whether this latter quality will draw the smear of racism. Only some groups are permitted to demand a common language and culture without being so smeared, even when they collapse these thing into race essentialism. Put another way, permission to make demands is attached to and depends upon on those races qualified to do so, those qualifications built into the hegemonic system disrupting common sense understanding.
There are host cultures or nations approved to assimilate new arrivals to the culture and language that supports the nation. Other cultures or nations are racist for insisting on assimilation. Indeed, for some, for some places, to suggest assimilation or integration with the culture that hosts new arrivals is considered a type of cleansing, as cultural genocide or ethnocide. Sometimes, those who racialize ethnicity criticize the term “ethnocide” as a synonym for cultural genocide for confusing culture with ethnicity. However, ethnicity is a cultural phenomenon. So, while not all culture is ethnic in character, all aspect of ethnicity are cultural in essence (at present, in contrast to phenotypic traits selected for constructions of race, there is no scientific evidence for any feature of ethnicity being carried on the genes). But more often the identitarian seeks to collapse cultural genocide and ethnocide into the definition of genocide generally. In considering these terms during the drafting of the 2007 “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” the United Nations eschewed any distinction and defined a wide array of modern nation building practices as “genocide.”
You will have noticed that those who equate assimilation with racism or genocide are either those for whom race is central to identity or adherents to a culture or ideology that is inconsistent with the norms and values of the host nation which is described in racial terms. For example, Islam is incompatible with the norms and values that have made Western societies the freest and most prosperous societies in the world. This ideology is a form of clerical fascism (a fact that seems to escape the left so-called antifascists who embrace Islam yet condemn Christianity and Judaism) that does not recognize the secular imperative, i.e., separation of church and state, indeed that believes that all law must come from God and brought under the control of clerics who interpret scripture. Assimilationists, respecting religious liberty, believe that Muslims are free to be Muslims, but that they should adopt the Western norm of secularism and subordinate their faith to it. Cultural pluralists counter that Muslims have a right to their culture and that Western legal systems should accommodate Islamic norms. When assimilationists insist on cultural integration, they are smeared as racist.
It should be obvious that religion and race are not the same things. Religious belief, a form of culture, is acquired through socialization. To be sure, once socialized, the Muslim is a culture-bearer, but he was not born a Muslim. While, in some cultures, a person may not be able to safely leave Islam, other cultures allow liberation from backwards cultural attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values. Those societies are the better ones. In contrast, race, constructed from phenotypic characteristics, is a physical stigmata. Again, it does not represent a distinct genotype in the way sex does, nonetheless it still marks the individual as physically different. Yet Muslims, despite being of many races, are increasingly perceived as a race (especially in Europe). What is more, Muslims are often portrayed as an oppressed race. The racialization of Muslims, which is associated with the dewhitening of Arabs (and increasingly Jews), something I have blogged about before and will blog about again in the near future, is part of a project to racialize all human conflict that does not fall under sex and gender (identity and orientation) thereby obscuring the material relations that should actually command proletarian attention, namely social class.
Beyond the agenda, racial thinking points out a very real problem in the West. Racial thinking will order our thoughts until we stop thinking racially. I cannot be an individual apart from my racial identity because of this damned irrational manner of thought. Because of widespread racial thinking, a type of thinking encouraged by our institutions and influential social movement leaders, indeed a type of thinking being taught to our children in government schools, the United States appears as a multiracial society. This is, of course, also true if you believe race is a meaningful biological category.
If American Indians demanded the expulsion of white people from North America, we would recognize the demand as racist and condemn it. The same would be true if blacks demanded a state free of whites and Asians. At least I hope we would recognize these demands as racist. But it would not be racist if an African state, even if the majority was black, insisted that Europeans assimilate to the culture of their state. It may be chauvinist. But chauvinism, defined as a belief in the strength and virtue of one’s own culture, is not a manifestation of racism. What woke progressive would consider a black African insisting on cultural integrity for his nation to be a racist? (I recognize the American Indian example is problematic given the rhetoric concerning stolen lands.)
What is it that drives the patriot to defend his homeland against threats foreign and domestic and to take pride in his country? Chauvinism. The right to a country and a nationality underpins the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So why are some nations entitled to national pride and integrity and others condemned for it? What lies behind the assumption that the countries of the West have no right to cultural and national integrity? It’s pitched as a moral matter, but, when not an expression of envy, it’s a globalist tactic. However, a black-majority African country barring whites from immigrating there, or segregating whites on the basis of racial designation, would be racist. How many woke progressives would agree?
While I advocate immigration restrictions, it has nothing to do with excluding people on the basis of race. Any judgment I make about who we should let in on the basis of culture or religion is for entirely non-racist reasons. I have always advocated policies of multiracialism because I am an individualist. My criteria for entrance to America has nothing to do with skin color but with what impact the immigrant will have on my country. We he adopt our values and submit to the rule of law? Or will he keep his foreign values and loyalties? If the latter, he should be allowed in. If we do not have an effective system of holding him to his word, he should be allowed in. If his presence means a native-born America will have a harder life, he should not be allowed it.
Multiracial societies have existed down through time. In some cases, there is significant racism associated with them. The United States past is one of those cases. In others, racism is minimal or virtually absent. Today, in the United States, racism is minimal—at least as it has been historically understood. However, there is no inherent reason why skin color or eye shape or hair texture should form the basis of group antagonisms. Multiracial situations are only conflictual when racist ideology is present. The United States has, at least for an extended moment, sharply minimized racism and made significant progress in transcending racial thinking to a substantial degree. Given that racial antagonism is preceded by an intensification of racial thinking, progress in struggle for equality is threatened by demands for differential treatment based on ancestry and the portrayal of whites as a pariah race.
But a multiracial society, however antagonistic it is in its internal relations, is very different from a multiethnic society. Superficial multiculturalism is not a problem. Cultural diversity in art, dress, food, music, even religious faith, enriches society. In a free society, the diversity of culture is the property of all. But deep multiculturalism is destructive. Often marked by profound racial thinking, it demands the national cultural bend to its norms and values and attempts to raise cultural and religious belief above the law and over the individual. When some individuals on the basis of race or religion are denied access to public spaces, prevented from appropriating cultural traits, or experience limits on speech and expression, then an oppressive situation is manifest. When Muslims demand that their religious practices, such as wearing the hijab in public schools, be recognized, while non-Muslims are denied hoodies and other head coverings, then multiculturalism threatens the secular basis of a free society.
Doesn’t multiracialism assume racially differentiating the population is meaningful? Yes, unfortunately. The legacy of racial thinking casts a long shadow. However, inclusive multiracialism, or colorblindness, is a step in deracializing thinking. You would think this would be the rallying cry of the left, namely transcending race and struggling on the basis of class. (They seem eager to transcend gender categories, after all.) Yet there are those, especially on the left, who not only resist deracialization, but insist on racial thinking and organizing society along color lines. These same leftists rarely talk about social class. They suppose, on the basis of race, that all whites are privileged and all blacks are victims.
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I’m a sociologist. Maybe that why I can see straight away Hitchcock’s claims as confusing abstract demographic and statistical categories with concrete reality. But other sociologists and social scientists generally don’t always see this (and the proportion who don’t is ever increasing). Indeed, many sociologists have taken to living in a reified world constructed with concepts and theories that posit as real things imagined relations and structures that are falsified by obvious facts. Maybe it’s something else that enables me to see it. Atheism? Marxism?
If you believe thoughts make the world and that, therefore, others are obliged to live in the world you have thought for yourself or that others must think for you lest they deny your existence or your suffering, then you are delusional. Believe whatever you want to believe, of course, but don’t require others to believe it. Ultimately, you cannot be your delusions. As Jared Bauer, co-founder of Wisecrack, said on the podcast Unsafe Spaces a while back: selling your ancestors’ suffering is the least classy thing you can do. You are only a victim of your delusional thinking and those who taught you think like that in order to control you. However elegantly dressed in high-blown rhetoric, you’re a sucker.
As thoughts go, this notion of being on “the right side of history” is quintessentially Hegelian. To be sure, as Mills noted, even if we don’t control the history we make, history is still what we make it. History doesn’t preexist as right for people to declare standpoints for or against it. Ultimate right and wrong lie in the intrinsic and universal facts of the human species and its needs. That’s a Darwinian question. But it’s also a Marxian one. Stepping back and pondering, one will realize how absurd it is to describe the woke left as “Marxist.” Both the progressive left and the conservative right make this error.
Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, etc., are not, whatever they think of themselves, Marxist. They’re Hegelian. They do not see ideas as apprehending the world, but instead see the world as the projection of ideas—and the ideas they demand centering are alienated projections of their social situation shaped by class power. They want their politics to be about power, but they are ignorant of the actual character of power. If they could see, they would grasp that they are in fact not opponents, but agents of prevailing power, which is, again, class power.
It’s idealism that absorbs people into categories of thought and supposes these constructions are essential. Materialists know that the categories of thought are for grappling with the actual structures of reality. For idealists, group abstractions substitute for concrete individuals. It’s an irrational mode of thought. And a reactionary one. CRT believes that a man carries the guilt of his ancestors’ crimes. On the basis of his race, a man is guilty for what others do. That’s not materialism. That’s idealism. And it’s an idealism of the most primitive sort. It’s regression to ancient religious thinking. The woke world is a world of demons and witches. With a materialist turn, if one supposes a man carries on his genes the sins of the past, then the man just becomes another type of racist. Whatever sort of racist you are, calling yourself an “antiracist” won’t save you.
For the true believers, conflating culture and ethnicity with race at once mystifies culture and ethnicity and renders judgment on entire races of people. The attributes of Western civilization are expressions of white supremacy. They are bad because Europeans are white and white people are bad. White people constructed Western culture in the way they did in order to privilege themselves while subordinating nonwhites (never mind that certain groups of Asians outperform Europeans by Western standards).
But culture and ethnicity are not things that exist in the ethereal realm of abstract racial categories and essences. They are anthropological facts, and their attributes, the differential commitments to authoritarianism, egalitarianism, humanism, liberalism, secularism, that is the attitudes, beliefs, habits, norms, and values that differentiate cultures and ethnicities, are carried by concrete individuals who are, sadly, often taught that they must act this way or that or betray the abstract group with which they have been conditioned to identify. Coming out of race thinking is like coming out of religious things because, in the final analysis, they are both ideological systems.
Here’s some of those facts: Most poor people are white (see “They Do You This Way”). They don’t control the wealth or direct the power in their country. Even though poor blacks are less than four percent of the US population, they represent more than one quarter of food stamp recipients. How is black overrepresentation in a major government program servicing the poor systemic evidence of racism? (I can come up with a theory about that, but it won’t be a woke one.) Here’s another fact: There are black families who own and control the means of production, employing and controlling workers to whom they extract value in the wage-labor system. One more: There are blacks in positions of political power, in some cities they are among those who make the policies that keep black neighborhoods in poverty and underprotected from the violence crime that plagues those communities. This was true in 1998 when Hitchcock gave his speech.
American society is already multiracial. It always has been multiracial, in fact. Multiracialism doesn’t carry values but rather reflects a value we hold in America, namely the ethic of individualism. The question is whether the nation can survive multiculturalism, where groups are permitted to stand up separate norms and rules systems in the context of a nation-state. How is each citizen to stand equal before the law when his fate is determined by norms and rules at variance with it? How is the rule of law of a particular quality—humanist, liberal, rational, and secular—to enjoy the cultural integrity necessary for upholding that law if culture bearers with obstinate attitudes refuse to integrate with mainstream culture or if assimilation is equated with racism and neglected or forbidden?
The answer to these question is that it can’t. And that’s why it’s so important to differentiate between, on the one hand, multiracialism, where every person is equal before the law regardless of race, i.e., colorblindness, and, on the other hand, multiculturalism, where the fate of the individual is determined by the cultural system in which she is born and compelled to endure. Multiculturalism is modern-day tribalism. The point of the Enlightenment was emancipation from such tribal arrangements.
Popular anti-worker cartoon distributed on social media
Did you know that half a trillion dollars is transferred every year from the native working class in this country to the capitalist class because of cheap foreign labor? This cartoon is corporate propaganda. It’s a paradigm, so pay attention to what I am going to tell you. This is 100 percent truth.
Here is the cartoon’s angle: the artist maligns the worker (here stereotypically reduced to the hard hat construction white worker) by making it appear as if the worker falsely believes cheap foreign labor (depicted here stereotypically as a dark-skinned person to cast the white work as a racist) wants his cookie. But as you can see by the statistics I cited above, a significant part of the explanation for why the capitalist’s plate is so full of cookies is because he deploys cheap foreign labor not just to super-exploit the foreigner (who gets cookie crumbs), but to drive down the wages of the native worker and confuse his consciousness and disorganize his politics. The capitalist does this not only by importing cheap foreign labor to America, but by off-shoring factories to exploit-processing zones where cheap foreign labor awaits.
The irony is that those most harmed by immigration and off-shoring are black and brown Americans, who are idled in disorganized urban neighborhoods burdened by high rates of poverty and crime. Black Americans are especially affected. Want to guess who maintains the custodial arrangements that idle blacks in America’s inner cities (and warehouse them in its jails and prisons)? The same people who share this cartoon: progressives.
Corporate power wins again and again because people don’t take the time to understand basic political economy and the capitalist mode of production. There is probably no greater action one can take to tell an audience who knows better that you do not know better than sharing this cartoon. I see this cartoon all the time. It makes me furious every time because it reminds me how many people don’t know better.
This is the function of race identitarianism: to substitute a false consciousness about the true nature of capitalist relations. So when you see this cartoon, feel free to use my argument. We have to shut down this fake leftwing reflex and educate people about the true nature of corporate state power. If you actually care about black and brown people, you will call out cartoons like this for what they are: anti-worker propaganda.
freedom and reason 