Among the religiously-conscious, a type of consciousness especially pronounced these days among those who adhere to the ideology of woke progressivism, perceptions are shaped much as they were in the past, most notably in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, a time when Christians attacked individuals with perceived similar characteristics, proclivities, and traits. Homosexuals, Jews, and single women were suspect because of who they were, not what they did, and any one of them or all of them could stand in for something one of them did or might do. If a Jew did something bad, any Jew could take his place on the pyre. All Jews were subject to control and retribution because of who they were. This is the same attitude woke progressivism brings to questions of justice from its standpoint (what it calls “social justice”).
A heinous act is committed by a man against a woman and the narrative on the left is that what happened to the woman was motivated by misogyny, a type of prejudice attributed to all men, a hatred and loathing that ranges from the male gaze to rape and murder. Therefore, all men are responsible for the actions of the perpetrator and thus all men where they can be wrangled (universities, the workplace) require reeducation and reform. Men are naturally sexually attracted to women, see women as objects in their environment, as they do everything else, and this puts women at risk. In this way, members of an abstract demographic category are blamed and shamed for actions they did not perpetrate (and objectification is turned into something untoward).
We see the same thing with race. A white man commits a crime against a black man and the act is construed as motivated by race prejudice. One need not know anything about the crime other than the respective race of perpetrator and victim. The narrative on the left is that racism is systemic, something possessed to some degree by all whites; therefore, all whites are ultimately implicated in, or at least to some degree responsible for that act and all whites have to be reeducated about race so it won’t happen again (which, of course, it will). Even when there is no instance of wrongdoing, the ideology that might result in wrongdoing is always lurking implicit in everything, and therefore reeducation is necessary. Identity is proof of motivation. Phenotypic features are sufficient condition for suspicion. In another manifestation of this thought pattern, each black man can speak for all black men except when he can’t, but no white man can speak for black men.
Ashleigh Shackleford
This is a entirely irrational way of thinking. It takes an anecdote and represents it as if it were a scientific conclusion in the way that a falling rock is an indication of gravitation. It assumes that racism and sexism are aggregate and regular phenomena and that explains actions supposed to result from them. Demographic disparities are by definition racism and sexism. The anecdote becomes proof that heterosexism, racism, sexism, and all the rest of it are systemic without any scientific work. To be sure, persons act on the basis of the beliefs they have about things, but where is the evidence that the beliefs motivating concrete heinous acts are held by all members of a group who happen to be defined as white or who have male gonads (and who identify as such) or who are attracted to members of the opposite sex? A straight white man is not analogous to a Nazi or a Muslim—or progressives. Nazism, Islam, and progressivism are ideologies. White, straight, and male are passive demographic categories. The woke mix qualitatively different things. Moreover, even in the case of ideology, the connection must be made between collectively-held ideas and the concrete action those ideas are supposed to have motivated.
As a straight white man, I am no more responsible for what other straight white men do than I am responsible for what gay black women do. I may be burdened by abstract categories when they move others to discriminate against me, but I am not really a category. I am a concrete individual. I am responsible for my actions. My actions are not intrinsically motivated by the demographic characteristics attributed to me. There are neither empirical nor rational means by which anybody can put me in the realm of culpability for actions taken by another straight white man. There are only irrational means, the same means by which a black man is made to stand in for another black man or all black men and mistreated (or rewarded, for that matter) on that basis. To assume on grounds of race and sexual orientation that I possess a flawed character is race and sex prejudice. To treat me differently on that basis is discrimination based on race and sex.
It is this irrational cognitive style that makes it difficult for progressives to accept that, for example, there is no systemic bias in lethal civilian-police interactions. Newspapers report the death of a black unarmed man at the hands of a white police officer and the manner of death, extraordinarily rare as it is, is portrayed as evidence of a systemic problem demanding reeducation and reform. But the science finds no racism in lethal civilian-police interactions—and scientific findings only matter to those with intense religious commitments when they support the doctrine. When it comes to claims about white privilege, for example, progressives are eager to appeal to statistical averages around abstract aggregates, but for COVID-19 risk assessment it’s all about that suffocating MAGA hat wearer who rejected the vaccine confessing his stupidity from his hospital gurney. This is a special sort of hypocrisy because the soundness of the respective cases actually requires a flip in the level of abstraction (hint: because one is a reification). This is why more than forty percent of progressives think half of those infected by COVID-19 wind up in the hospital. While they sit around laughing at the much smaller proportion of the population that thinks the earth is flat.
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Even when I was sympathetic to elements of critical race theory, I never taught it uncritically in a classroom, let alone supported its imposition in diversity training. I now recognize critical race theory as a toxic ideology, but even when I didn’t, my belief that higher education is no place for demanding conformity to a particular line of political thought always guided my classroom ethics. Nor should critical race theory be represented as a definitive or settled view in training sessions in corporation and government agencies. Not only is critical race theory toxic, but the practice of compelling speech from administrators, students, teachers, and workers is tyrannical. This is what Randall Kennedy misses in his answer to questions about anti-CRT legislation. If it were just a matter of assessing the merits of CRT claims that’d be one thing. But that is not what what’s happening. CRT is being taught as truth and assessment of it is treated as racism. What is more, how can the elementary school environment be an ideal speech situation (see Jurgen Habermas)? It can’t. Perhaps high school could be. But it’s not.
Suppose you are a biology professor at a university who believes in creationism. That could bias the way you treat the subject matter, how you grade students, how you treat your Darwinian colleagues, how your work reflects on the reputation and integrity of the institution. Your colleagues find your beliefs offensive. That are quite disturbed by creationists. They seek uniformity of thought. But you have a right to your beliefs. Second, how does what you believe affect your coworkers if you don’t act on those beliefs? It is already against the law to discriminate on the basis of race. This is about thought control. If the action is illegal, why do you need to brainwash the employee? Why this? If you are going to brainwash employees on race, then why not everything? Why should a person’s right to their own beliefs matter at all? Mix the suppression of ideas with the conflation of concrete individuals with abstract categories and democratic freedoms are sliding into the abyss.
You may have noticed in the righthand side bar of your social media account(s) news items informing you that President Biden’s vaccine mandate enjoys legal precedent. There is a US Supreme Court decision upholding a state law for compulsory vaccination for small pox, a disease that kills a third of those it infects and is even deadlier for children. The Supreme Court case is Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). I write about it here: The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.
What is left out of the story is what that precedent has since justified, most notoriously Buck v. Bell (1927), a decision that upheld the power of states to forcibly sterilize United States citizens for all manner of “ills.” Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized without their consent. But that’s not the only decision that used Jacobson to justify oppressive state action. In Vernonia School District v. Acton (1995), the court used Jacobson to justify the random drug testing of students. More recently, the Jacobson precedent has been cited as a precedent in rulings concerning face masks and home confinement orders. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a court extended Jacobson to cover matters of reproductive liberty. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit leaned on Jacobson to uphold a Texas ban on non-essential medical services and surgeries that included abortions.
Vaccinating the poor in New York police station during the 1872 smallpox epidemic.
Remember that racial segregation in the United States rested on precedent. The personhood enjoyed by corporations rests on precedent. Citing precedent and then moving on, as if law is ever finally settled or uniform in character, is lazy thinking. It’s a way to avoid mounting an argument to justify policy—in this case a policy that strikes at the very core of liberty. What matters is not bad court decisions but fundamental human rights, and none are more central to freedom than personal autonomy, embodied in the right to refuse to take a pharmaceutical agent or undergo surgery. It’s your body. You can refuse medical treatment. It’s your decision in a free society.
Vaccination does not treat disease. The COVID-19 vaccines don’t even confer immunity (see The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). SARS-CoV-2 is not an unusually pathological disease. Coronavirus is not small pox. Sterilization programs were also not for the treatment for disease. As do vaccine advocates, sterilization advocates claimed the practice prevented diseases, social diseases such as alcoholism, criminality, mental retardation, and physical deformity. These interventions—sterilization and vaccines—are not for the sake of the persons targets by the mandate. Sterilization and vaccines are part of the logic of extreme social engineering. It’s not about public health. It’s about power and control. And, in the case of vaccines, it’s about profits.
Jacobson is the legal precedent for both. Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.
Following up on my last blog post Rationalizing the Border Crisis with Hysteria, Lies, and Smears, The Guardian is trying to give the attack on Tucker Carlson legs (see also The “Great Replacement” as Antiracist Propaganda). Martin Pengelly writes, “Claiming the Biden administration was trying ‘to change the racial mix of the country,’ Carlson said: ‘In political terms, this policy is called “the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” Carlson is speaking frankly about the progressive project. “They brag about it all the time,” he says, “but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.” It’s true. They do brag about it all the time.
ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, who is calling for Carlson to be fired, accuses Carlson of engaged in antisemitic and xenophobic speech. “For Tucker Carlson to spread the toxic, antisemitic and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.” But concern over the pace and purpose of mass immigration is not xenophobic. Nor is recognizing the problem of multiculturalism xenophobic. Not all cultures are adequate for maximal human development. Moreover, what makes criticisms of mss immigration “antisemitic”? This is an attempt to attribute to Carlson a paranoid belief held by a small minority of people that Jews are orchestrating multiculturalism. What evidence is there that Carlson is to be counted among this minority?
Carlson’s response is on-point. “The ADL?” Carlson said. “Fuck them.” The ADL, he said, “was a noble organization that had a very specific goal, which was to fight antisemitism, and that’s a virtuous goal. They were pretty successful over the years. Now it’s operated by a guy who’s just an apparatchik of the Democratic party.” He continued: “It’s very corrosive for someone to take the residual moral weight of an organization that he inherited and use it for party.” Carlson is refusing to accept that the progressive worldview about immigration is coextensive with the correct moral position on immigration. He rightly points out that “the great replacement theory is, in fact, not a theory. It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president.” That the point that the progressive establishment is desperate to obscure. The President of the United States himself is celebrating the fact that, if the pace of immigration continues, white people will be an “absolute minority” in the United States. The question for Biden and progressives is why are they so giddy about this? What explains the loathing of the white majority?
In the clip Carlson plays, which I emphasized in my previous post, then vice-president Biden says: “An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who were Caucasian, of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50 percent of the people in America from then and on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s as a source of our strength.” This has not come to pass, but clearly Biden was anticipating it with a joy he could hardly contain. Carlson wondered in his monologue, “An unrelenting stream of immigration. But why? Well, Joe Biden just said it, to change the racial mix of the country[, to] dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.” Carlson noted, “This is the language of eugenics.”
Who pushed eugenics to begin with? The history here is not ambiguous. Eugenics and demographic steering are the offspring of the progressive movement (see Biden’s Biofascist Regime for background). It took a massive populist movement to stop mass immigration the first time, a proletarian movement that establishment historians have ever since tried to portrayed a nativist and racist (see Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class). “[I]n one sentence,” Carlson says, “it’s this: ‘Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that. We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us.’ So there isn’t actually inherently a racial component to it, and it’s nothing to do with antisemitism.”
Mass immigration is a transnationalism strategy to transform the West
Because of the profound shallowness of political understanding on the left, I have to state what should be the obvious: my argument is not a rightwing argument. It’s pro-working class. Carlson is indeed a conservative. But I’m a socialist (see Marxian Nationalism and the Globalist Threat). Despite our distinct political world-views, we both get what’s going on because we have a populist outlook. In contrast, progressivism is corporate state ideology. Multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, as they used to call it, is an ideological component in denationalization politics (see The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate). This all part of the transnational project to incorporate the proletariat of the West into a global socioeconomic order. Mass immigration since the 1960s is part of the managed decline of the American republic and, more broadly, the West (The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism). The power elite don’t want people talking about this, so they try to cancel them.
Desperate to stop awareness of the problem of illegal immigration, the power elite continue the moral panic about white supremacy, an nearly nonexistent phenomenon in modern democratic societies. One voice of reason with whom they are particularly obsessed is popular Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. The Daily Beast is reporting that the Anti-Defamation League is once again calling for Carlson’s firing for going “all-in” on the “racist” “Great Replacement” theory. I blogged about this back in April when the ADL was calling for Carlson’s head (see The “Great Replacement” as Antiracist Propaganda). In that post I told readers about the underlying premise underpinning smears of racism and white nationalism: “Those who promote mass immigration and multiculturalism make culture about race in order to marginalize and silence those who favor rational immigration policies, as well as assimilation and integration.”
Tucker Carlson calls out the Biden Administration’s for betraying the American republic
Carlson doesn’t care what color people are. This isn’t a white nationalist argument. Tucker is concerned about the racist motive behind the push for mass immigration, which is to reduce the number of those of European ancestry. Tucker is not inferring goal from policy. It’s not an interpretation. In the video I shared, you will hear Biden himself say it. Biden is celebrating the prospect of “Caucasians”—this is the racist term Biden uses—becoming an “absolute minority” in the United States. Biden is saying that fewer white people is a good thing. That would be like leaders in Japan inviting in large numbers of people from the Third World because there are too many Japanese in Japan. What’s wrong with the Japanese? What’s wrong with Americans? Imagine saying that there are too many “Negroes” in the United States so we need more European migrants. Sounds racist. The so-called antiracists are advancing a racist project, and if those who are the target of the project complain, then they are the racists. Whites are supposed to agree that they’re the problem and participate in the project to shrink their proportion United States. Carlson isn’t wrong—this is eugenics.
As many readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have been a college teacher for more than a quarter of a century. I teach critical race theory in my law and society classes. CRT is one of the major perspectives in legal studies. I agree that it is important students learn about it—in college. Mostly so they can crush it in debate. It is a deeply flawed standpoint. For this reason, CRT should not be taught in k-12 (Are Teachers Really all in on Critical Race Theory?Maegan Vazquez Defends Racially Divisive Curriculum). Immature minds (and a lot of mature minds, as well) have trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality. As rebellious as some children are, many more of them will believe what their teachers tell them.
In this post, I will explain what critical race theory is and identify its outstanding errors. I will show that it is fraught with major logical problems, manufactures false abstractions, presents with a quasi-religious character, and ultimately constitutes a racist standpoint. Critical race theory is ideology. Its goal is to keep alive race antagonism in post-racist society. If CRT has its way with America much longer, we won’t live in a post-racist society anymore. The corporate class and technocratic apparatus have embraced the standpoint because it is functional to these ends: the imperative of reproducing the political and ideological division necessary for disorganizing the proletariat and perpetuating bourgeois hegemony.
“When I was in graduate school, I was seduced by Critical Race Theory, or CRT. CRT incorporates into its analysis of law critical theory, a set of ideas drawn from the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, and the humanities, in particular art and literary criticism. Critical theory is a product of the cultural turn in Marxist thought by [German] scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. However, critical theory was warped by the [French] postmodern turn in the academy, that is the social constructionism of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking devolving to a radical relativism denying the existence of a single reality. Postmodernism functions as a carnival mirror, warping Marxist insight by reducing ontology to the supposed collective consciousness or should-be consciousness of social position (actually the multiplicity of social positions intersecting in a person), thus rejecting the premise of a universal reality and fracturing the truth with the blunt ideology of epistemic relativism. At the same time, postmodernism asserts that knowledge exists in a matrix of power that allows some knowledge forms to dominate others. Thus the claim to a universal method of interpretation, i.e. science, is a reflection of the power asymmetries. Science [in this view] is dominant ideology. Truth claims can therefore have no real external verification for there is no common method with which to evaluate them—except the claim that all knowledge and thus our lives represent a projection of position and power.”
The outlines of what would become critical race theory could be detected in the mid-1970s in the writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of intersectional feminism, as well as those by Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, and other, mostly Afrocentric, legal scholars. The original goal was to identify structures that might explain why black Americans as-a-group continue to trail white Americans as-a-group in every significant social category of life chances. The explanation avoids attributing these problems to black folk (apart from the collaborators among them), placing the burden of racial inequality squarely on the shoulders of all white Americans, even the children, despite the fact that most whites do not control the forces that generate inequality generally (i.e., the capitalist economy) and no living American had a thing to do with slavery.
A major influence on this early work was critical legal studies (CLS), a leftwing legal movement emerging from legal realism, a tradition that criticized legal formalism and leaned on social science for argument and evidence. CLS was given voice by such legal scholars as Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, and Roberto Unger. Kennedy and Klare write in a 1984 Yale Law Journal article that critical legal studies is “concerned with the relationship of legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society.” It has been claimed, for example by Alan Hunt, writing in the pages of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, that CLS is “the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective.” This is not true, however, as German exiles Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer had developed a Marxist critique of the law decades earlier, an important fact to note since CRT adapts CLS to generate an approach that is distinctly contrary to Marxian thought, contradicting assertions made by both conservatives and progressives that CRT is neo-Marxist. (For a good review of CLS, see Jonathan Turley’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to CLS, Unger, and Deep Thought,” published in a 1987 issue of the Northwestern University Law Review.)
By the end of the 1980s, after a decade of stewing in a pot of critical legal studies, postmodernism, and other ingredients, CRT coalesced into a movement that teaches that the system of justice that grew out of European-style jurisprudence—civil rights, due process, individual responsibility, legal innocence, rational adjudication of facts, the state’s burden—amounts to a “perpetrator’s perspective.” The perpetrator’s perspective reflects the ideology of white supremacy, an oppressive force disguised by a rhetoric of neutrality, or “colorblindness.” For this standpoint, the ethic of equal treatment is a stealth method for reproducing social inequality and perpetuating the racial status quo. Liberal notions of the law are racist because liberalism is a European ideology and thus a reflection of white culture, which is racist (for a counterpoint, see The Myth of White Culture). Justice rooted in racism is no justice at all; a system designed to secure a racist order is incapable of rooting out racism. So critical race theorists advocate displacing the perpetrator’s perspective with the “victim’s perspective,” an “antiracist” standpoint that represents racial disparities as prima facia evidence of systemic racism, that is a truth that need no adjudication. The system is responsible, and since this is true, any apparent progress within its parameters is merely a reconfiguring of things to preserve and deepen the system. This assumes that, objectively, all blacks have the same interests. They either identify with the struggle or they are traitors to it—or, charitably, they need to be made aware. Thus, those who speak for the black community do so by presumptive virtue of possessing awareness and the correct interpretation of things.
You might, as I do (see, e.g., Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It), object that the United States abolished the slave trade, fought a war to end slavery, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that ended legal discrimination against black people in public facilities and businesses of accommodation. You might furthermore point out that it was from the West that sentiments of equality, liberty, and rights spread across the world. The Enlightenment liberated humans from slavery the world over. From the CRT standpoint, none of that history matters in the final analysis. If over time there appears to be no evidence of white supremacy, it is only an appearance; in reality, white elites, aided by black collaborators, have plowed racism more deeply into social order. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Recenter history on the black experience, mark the start from 1619, and the “truth” follows: American history is a story about the oppression of blacks for the benefit of the white race. The systemis racist sui generis. It follows that antiracism requires dismantling the system.
From the standpoint of science, the claim that racism is the cause of racial disparities requires evidence in support of the thesis. Antiracists remind us that modern methods of fact analysis are problematic on account of their origins in European civilization. Science is white supremacist. But antiracists still nonetheless feel the need to skirt empirical tests by redefining racial disparities, or more precisely inequities, as racism per se, misusing demographic differences to establish an apparent fact, the effect of which raises all blacks to the status of victims in need of restoration—and all whites as those party responsible for this state of affairs. This is the essence of social justice. CRT has other, more crude tricks. For example, if one argues that racial disparities have other causes, then that person is working from the perpetrator’s perspective and is, by definition, a racist. However vulgar, this trick has cowed a lot of people. But, as we can see in school board meetings and in state legislatures across the country, people (not a few of whom are black) have grown tired of being bullied.
Antiracist politics ask the public to disbelieve what it sees. Apologists for CRT say that it is an academic theory only taught in some law programs around the United States; it has nothing to do with what those parents are objecting to at their school board meetings (State Media Defends Critical Theory). The dishonesty of this argument is part of the character of the new racism that seeks to establish an entirely new subjectivity about race relations. The reality is that antiracism curriculum in public schools, diversity, equity, and inclusion training, workshops on microaggressions, and the like are based on the logic of CRT (see, e.g., The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs). When CRT apologists tell you that what really lies behind the critique of CRT is a racist desire to prevent the teaching of “real history,” they are asking you to forget that our public schools have been teaching “real history” for decades. I’m 59 years old, grew up in the US South, and my history classes in the 1970s were frank accounts of history (see Lies Your Teachers Tell You). Nothing that was known was hidden from us. And what students didn’t learn in school they learned almost every day on TV, which, if not exactly an accurate accounting of history, was nonetheless a history that pushed what would become the CRT line. It’s as if 1977 ABC television miniseries Roots, a celebrated miniseries that won nine Emmy awards, as well as Golden Globe and Peabody awards, its finale remaining the second-most watched in US television history, never happened.
I call the phenomenon of strategic forgetting the “Zinn effect,” after radical historian Howard Zinn. It works like this: Write a book claiming to tell the real history and, if enough authorities get behind it, it becomes possible to make a proportion of the population, especially those who work from perceived grievances, believe they were denied the truth of the past. Alex Haley worked in this tradition, even taking time to reconstruct a genealogy to distort history (his first book The Autobiography of Malcolm X was likewise a confabulation). As for Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, widely used in high school social studies curriculum, Stanford University School of Education Professor Sam Wineburg, one of the world’s premier researchers in the field of history education, puts it succinctly when he observes that Zinn’s crusade was built on “secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.” Zinn’s reclamation of our history is something akin to Charles Dawson’s Piltdown Man. Thus, one of the ways propaganda works is by making people forget what they already knew (see Orwell) or treat historical events and trends of which they are personally ignorant as something nobody knows. The propagandists tell them that a manufactured history is full of things elites don’t want them to know. The objective is to make the target of the propaganda feel historically and socially significant by being in the know and by serving justice as a change agent. The young person searching for meaning and purpose in life gets to have her civil rights moment. The strategy works all the better thanks to the rampant narcism that characterizes late capitalism (see Curtis Adam’s 2002 BBC series The Century of the Self).
Princeton’s Sean Wilentz succinctly captures the problem in a new critique of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jake Silverstein’s 1619 Project with The New York Times Magazine. “By the time I had finished the entire thing,” he writes of of the 1619 Project initial offering, “the shape and purport of the project as shaped by its editors were clear. (If every essay did not espouse the same framework, all could be assimilated to it.) Instead of trying to instruct the public about the significance of the year 1619, and hence of the foundational importance of slavery and racism to American history, the project promoted a narrow, highly ideological view of the American past, according to which white supremacy has been the nation’s core principle and chief mission ever since its founding. Everything, supposedly, that has happened since to make the United States a distinctive country is rooted in slavery and the subsequent debasement of Blacks. America has not really struggled over the meaning of its egalitarian founding principles: those principles were false from the start, hollow sentiments meant to cloak the nation’s reliance on and commitment to the subjugation of Black people – principles claimed and vindicated, to the extent they have been, by Black Americans struggling pretty much on their own. And now, thanks to The 1619 Project, that suppressed history would at last, for the first time, come to light, with the esteemed imprimatur of the New York Times.” Elsewhere he describes the writing as “historical gibberish.” “The 1619 Project’s claims were based not on historical sources,” Wilentz writes, “but on imputation and inventive mindreading.”
There are several flaws with CRT that should have fated it to obscurity long ago. And it would have if not for corporate state power exploiting the widespread problem of irrationalism in American society, a society unique in its degree of religiosity. One such flaw is the self-sealing character of the system. Antiracism cannot be wrong because it assumes as evidence the conclusion it asserts. One is either inside the charmed circle (and knows the formulas and slogans) or one is an apostate, heretic, of infidel, depending on whether he escaped the loop, denies the loop, or was never in the loop. It is a tribal philosophy. A related flaw is its Manichaeism, or black and white thinking. As Ibram X Kendi tells it, either you’re a racist or you’re an antiracist. Also, he tells us that past discrimination warrants present discrimination. Kendi argues that determining an individual’s fate on the basis of skin color is just and right because determining an individual’s fate on the basis of skin color is unjust and wrong. That’s what reparations is all about. It rests on the premise of blood guilt, that children of today, though they did nothing wrong, must pay for what their ancestors did (see For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations).
CRT’s idealism leads advocates to falsely attribute to all white people a racial privilege. A privilege is ordinarily defined as an exclusive or special right or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. If, as a white man, it can be guaranteed to me a public restaurant free of the presence of black people, then I enjoy an exclusive right. Special rights on the grounds of race were abolished more than a century ago, but CRT needs a problem in order to pursue its “solution,” which is seeking unjust reward on a racial basis, so its advocate redefine terms to manufacture the appearance of a cause that rationalizes the goal. This is how the rhetoric moved from that of “institutional racism” to “systemic racism” after the United States dismantled racist institutions more than half a century ago (an act carried out by white people). It’s a move not unlike shifting the God concept from an entity who walks upon the earth to one that moves in mysterious ways. It is the act of forever perfecting the nonfalsifiable proposition. This move makes critical race theory akin to religious ideology. This quasi-religious character is covered by a veneer of science (which is an admission of sorts) rooted in common fallacies. CRT treats individuals, materially concrete entities, flesh-and-blood human beings, members of the same species, as personifications of racial categories, as projections of ideas, an act of reification, i.e., making an idea out to be a real thing, while treating group-level disparities, i.e., statistical abstractions, as the actual circumstances of concrete persons. CRT thus commits two fallacies: (1) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, i.e., treating abstractions as if they are real things, and (2) the ecological fallacy, i.e., drawing conclusions about individuals from group-level statistics. (See The Problem of Critical Race Theory in Epidemiology: An Illustration.)
But critical race theory is something else, too. The logic of racism operates in the same way. For the white supremacist, all black individuals are personifications of the black race. For example, since blacks are much more likely to be involved in violent criminal offending (and not because police are more likely to enforce the law with respect to black offenders), it must be in the nature of blacks to be violent criminal offenders. The white supremacist thus judges each and every black person based on a perception he has about blacks as a group. Stereotyping is the common word for something approximating the ecological fallacy. The fact is that most blacks don’t engage in violent criminal actions, so the attribution of crime to black individuals is an error. Moreover, most whites don’t engage in oppressive action directed against black people. Nor are they engaged in exploiting black labor for personal gain. Most whites are, therefore, not racist. But, like white supremacy, critical race theory is.
Conservatives tell us that critical race theory is a neo-Marxist standpoint, that it was invented to keep the Marxist project going under a different guise. Why did Marxists do this? Because the class argument failed to take hold popularly, the proletarian revolution never occurred, and so race and other identities have been substituted. A lot of progressives believe this, too. The dispute becomes ideological on the popular partisan political terrain. But both sides are wrong. CRT is not Marxist. It is Hegelian (for reference, see Historical Materialism and the Struggle For Freedom; A Humanist Take on Marx’s Irreligious Criticism; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; Preaching What You Practice: Doing the Race Hustle in the Name of Marx). CRT is thus a form of idealism, treating abstractions as real things and concrete things as mere personifications of abstractions. The standpoint is profoundly unscientific. CRT presents its conceptual architecture as as a reality that subsumes under the power of its logic everything. Like Hegel, it gets things upside down.
I wrote about this on Freedom and Reason back in April in the blog “Whatever that number is”: Vaccine Hesitancy, Common Sense, and Stigmatizing Christians. Bill Maher recently brought it to the attention of Jimmy Kimmel on the latter’s show. Kimmel didn’t know what to do with it. What was it? The remarkable ignorance of Democrats and progressives about the COVID-19 situation.
So that we move on the ground of fact, for the record, the hospitalization rate from or with COVID-19 is between 1-5 percent depending on state and region. This includes incidental positive tests. For example, if you go to the hospital for a colonoscopy and test positive for COVID-19, now you are an official COVID-19 hospitalization case. This means that the actual risk of being hospitalized from COVID-19 is smaller than the official statistics suggest. As part of its strategy of fear porn, the corporate state propaganda system manufactures the illusion of significant hospitalizations rates from COVID-19. As readers of my blog know, for the vast majority of people, SARS-CoV-2 is asymptomatic or presents with very mild symptoms. Of course, you cannot sustain a moral panic with the facts. So the corporate media misleads its audience.
With that in mind, recall that, earlier this year, a study by the Brookings Institute, asking a representative samples of Democrats and Republicans to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations, found that Democrats are remarkably ignorant about the facts. More than quarter (25.6 percent) of Republicans articulated the accurate statistic (which indicates that the propaganda affected them to some extent, as well), whereas fewer than one-in-ten (only 9.8 percent) of Democrats did. Astonishingly, 41 percent of Democrats believed that half or more of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 would be hospitalized. For Democrats, more than a third believe that one out of every two infections results in hospitalization. Taken together, well more than two-thirds of Democrats believed hospitalizations per infection were 20 percent or more. These are wildly inaccurate estimates. Frankly, it’s comical it’s so bad.
Progressives are always bashing conservatives for being backward ignorant rubes. Based on his loathing of those he assumes are unvaccinated, Kimmel said the other day that he wants to deny the vaccine hesitant medical treatment (Biden’s Biofascist Regime). (I bet he wouldn’t say that about fat people, whose risk of serious complications from COVID-19 is much greater than the general population. Or black people, who are much less likely to seek the shot.) But the Brookings Institute study finds that it’s conservatives who have a superior grasp of the risks of COVID-19. And not by a little bit. So who are the backward ignorant rubes in all this? Answer: the people who can’t wait to vaccinate their children against a virus the risk of which for children in effectively infinitesimal. Influenza poses a much greater risk to children than SARS-CoV-2. Progressive parents obviously pose a risk, as well.
The ignorance is explicable and the explanation is instructive: get your ass away from these dumb asses. Rank-and-file progressives are among the most gullible people on the face of the planet. They have a tortured relationship to reason and science, which is to say they eschew one and clumsily parrot the rhetoric of the other—all the while professing to know more that everybody else. Progressives are prepared to believe so-called authorities in their tribe. And they are too stuck up to doubt themselves. Subjected to fear porn, they will panic. It’s why they wouldn’t leave their homes to go vote in 2020 and Democrat and RINO officials had to manipulate the election system to get Biden across the wire.
As I wrote in that April blog, “Given the nonstop fear campaign by mainstream media, with a viewership drastically skewed towards Democrats, the fact that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be outside the propaganda bubble contributes to a more accurate grasp of the relative risks of this virus.” (For More on the Remarkable Ignorance of Progressive Democrats click the embedded link.)
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age.” —Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845)
Karl Marx and Fred Engels, authors of The German Ideology (1845)
Ask yourself: How did Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory become dominant ideas? I hear these are Marxist ideas. Conservatives and progressives alike tell me this. Does anybody believe we live in a socialist society? If you do, then you believe a lie. It’s a lie that is easily exposed. The working class neither owns nor controls the means of production. If you therefore think that by pushing such programs as BLM and CRT you are effecting radical change, you need to educate yourself. The truth is that we live under the hegemony of state monopoly capitalism. The perfection of that hegemony lies in wrapping up those who are inclined to care about justice.
Corporations steer history via the social logic of capitalist accumulation and control over politics and ideas. They control the administrative state. They control the regulatory apparatus. They control the culture industry. They control the academy. It is self-evident that the so-called radical movements of our epoch, once they appear, for example, as antiracist programming in our dominant institutions, are not radical at all, but are indoctrination programs designed to bend alien reason to the dominant narrative, to the ruling ideas of the epoch, and to bring into the fold those for whom capitalist accumulation represents the most exploitative force in history. That’s why workers are forced to say things they don’t believe—things they know aren’t true. That’s why they are forced to do things that violate their autonomy and those of their comrades. This is why too many reflex in the direction of obedience. The process already got to them.
Over decades, Capitalist planners brilliantly established a faux-left politics to divert the people from the path to class consciousness. That’s why the so-called neo-Marxism of today eschews class analysis. Except to accuse the working class of white supremacy, it leaves class outside the parameters of its “critique.” Class isn’t part of its “problematic.” Conservative thinkers believe that Marxism is dissimulated as trickery. But, really, it just isn’t there. The faux-left embraces false consciousness as its politics. It gets the power dynamic backwards. It stands the world on its head. It’s Hegelian. The educator needs educating.
“The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think.” When are you going to become consciousness? When are you going to think? How will you accomplished these feats? Through faith in the establishment?
As I do on a routine basis, I have been going through the COVID-19 statistics over at the Centers of Disease Control. It’s harder to be afraid when you look at facts. Fear is contagious and it feeds on ignorance and the unknown. So I inoculate myself from fear with facts. I relay these facts to you because, maybe, it will help relieve some of the fear you are experiencing.
SARS-CoV-2 with its characteristic coronavirus spikes
A quick comparison point before I move on. The Shanghai (1957-1958) and Hong Kong (1968-1969) flu seasons killed 0.06% and 0.04% of the United States population respectively. COVID-19 2019-2020 season killed 0.09% of the US population. COVID-19 had a lower morality rate on a comparative basis than either Shanghai (the H2N2 strain) or Hong Kong (H3N2) flu.
Okay. Today, I have found something interesting. As you know, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. In some years, influenza has killed more than one hundred thousand people. The Shanghai and Hong Kong flu seasons reached those levels of lethality. So far, among the 652,871 deaths officially associated with COVID-19 recorded by the CDC, nearly half (47%) of them were also associated with influenza and pneumonia.
According to the CDC, 47% of COVID-19 deaths were associated with influenza and pneumonia
Now, a reasonable person looks at that statistic showing that almost have of COVID-29 death cases were also influenza and pneumonia cases and wonders what killed these people exactly. Was it COVID-19 that killed them? Or was it influenza and pneumonia? A competent news reporter would ask somebody in authority about this. I haven’t heard this question asked. Can we expect to find on another or forthcoming CDC page those deaths among deaths attributed to influenza and pneumonia? I believe you will search in vain for this page. If I missed it and you have those data please share them.
Of the 306,957 deaths from COVID-19 and influenza and pneumonia recorded since the beginning of the pandemic, 203,397 were 65 years old or older. That’s 66 percent of the total. We know that influenza and pneumonia are one of the primary killers of the elderly. Does COVID-19 push influenza and pneumonia out of its way to take credit for killing an elderly person? Or does the CDC give COVID-19 the credit? How these deaths are listed is at least in partly subjective. We know that subjectivity is shaped by social forces of various sorts. Is there an agenda at work here?
Of the 1,565 COVID-19 deaths among those <1-24 years of age, 585 were associated with influenza and pneumonia. That’s well more than a third of deaths among those aged <1-24. What killed these young Americans? COVID-19 or influenza and pneumonia? If it was influenza and pneumonia, then this is one of the worst flu seasons on record (for all age categories). But the CDC says that flu activity in 2020-2021 was “unusually low.” Is concealing pediatric flu deaths part of the campaign to push the mRNA vaccine on our youth? After all, there has never been a widespread push to mandate the flu vaccine for young people despite deaths occurring in that population every year. Could large deaths tolls from influenza and pneumonia carry such a campaign? Or are we used to influenza deaths and therefore unafraid?
It all feels deliberate. According to the CDC, “The low level of flu activity during this past season contributed to dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths compared with previous flu seasons.” Yet, according to its own data, 306,957 deaths associated with COVID-19 were also associated with influenza and pneumonia. The CDC statement can only seem true if it effectively conceals influenza and pneumonia deaths from the record by exclusively counting them as COVID-19 deaths. But then why list them in other sources?
We know morality among children is worse from the flu than COVID-19. The CDC reports: “For pediatric deaths, CDC received one report of a pediatric flu death in a child during the 2020–2021 flu season.” Did you catch that? One report. That’s astonishing. The numbers usually range from dozens to hundreds. Does this mean that there was only one pediatric death from influenza and pneumonia that did not have associated with it a COVID-19 diagnosis?
The flu is very destructive to human cells. Children rarely contract the flu and remain symptom free. But children with SARS-CoV-2 are either asymptomatic or experience only mild cold-like symptoms. Indeed, coronavirus, like adenoviruses and rhinoviruses, are among the cold viruses that circulate the planet every year. Most of my readers have had coronavirus infections. And more than one. Children get half a dozen or more colds annually. A child dying with both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza and pneumonia is more likely to die from which of these?
For the record, of the 652,871 deaths associated with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, seven-tenths of one percent were <1-17 years of age. More than eighty percent were 65 years of age or older.
Keep in mind that, despite the numerous mutations, the authorities have decided to report on the COVID-19 pandemic as one continuous affair. This yields higher death counts (imagine racking up influenza and pneumonia deaths in this fashion). This flies in the face of the previous practice of reporting virus numbers in terms of seasons.
More than 90 percent of COVID-19 deaths were associated with significant comorbidities. If we look at deaths for ages <1-14 in 2019-2020, the CDC records 134 cases, or three-one-hundredths of the total death count in that frame (3,358,814 deaths from all causes). If we add the next category, bringing it <1-24, we account for less than two-tenths of the total death count. Again, most of these cases are associated with significant comorbidities.
Like other viruses, COVID-19 discriminates. Those who are old with compromised immune systems and those with preexisting conditions who contract SARS-CoV-2 are at special risk from the virus. The vaccine may afford some protection from disease (but not much from infection and transmission). For most of the rest, this virus is unremarkable. Evidence indicates that the vaccine is more dangerous for young men than the virus.
It appears that influenza and pneumonia deaths are buried in the data to make COVID-19 appear more dangerous for young people than it is. We know that the government is mandating vaccines and eager to vaccinate children. That’s millions of shots at twenty dollars an injection. Some have described this strategy as the “noble lie.” It’s not. It is a strategy to funnel money to pharmaceutical corporations. The bottom line for corporate America is not children. The food production system told us that a long time ago. The bottom line is profit.
In a recent scientific study, Israeli researchers compare over 16,000 patients who were previously infected but never vaccinated against another 16,000 who had not been infected but were vaccinated. The study controls for age, gender, health, and time of infection and vaccination. Researchers find that the vaccinated group without prior infection was at much greater risk of contracting COVID-19 than those who had been infected but not vaccinated. What is the risk? There is a 13-fold higher risk of infection with the vaccine compared to reinfection among unvaccinated. The study was conducted during the period when Delta was the prevailing strain.
Why isn’t this the lead story? Why when Fauci was asked about this all he could do is stutter? Why, in the light of the facts, would we suggest teenage boys get vaccinated when their risk of heart disease is six times greater with the vaccine than with natural infection, when natural infection will given them power and lasting protection against reinfection? You know the answer, right? It has a name: corporate profit.
Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Sunday defended the administration’s new Covid vaccine requirements, calling them “an appropriate legal measure” that fit in with traditional safety requirements in schools and workplaces. I discuss this tradition in my essay The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. For more than a century, the United States has used Jacobson to justify law and policy undermining bodily autonomy, including the forced sterilization of American citizens deemed “unfit” to have children. That doesn’t make it “appropriate” any more than the history of racial segregation justifies new rules separating people on the basis of skin color. The United States has a history of establishing and entrenching rules that are profoundly unethical and unjust from a principled standpoint. It’s from that standpoint that we judge their appropriateness not tradition.
The first principle of bioethics is respect for bodily autonomy. To be free, individuals must possess their bodies. To put this another way, when others possess your body, they possess you. In this situation, whatever the creature comforts, you are not free. Maybe that’s okay with you. But it’s not okay with me. But is it okay for you? For years, to the applause of progressives, I have warned audiences about the tyranny of state control over the reproductive capacity of women (see, e.g., Liberty is America’s raison d’être. Preserving Reproductive Freedom for the Sake of the Republic). Yet, progressives, apoplectic over the Texas abortion law, are celebrating Biden’s federal vaccine mandate. At least they aren’t complaining about it. One might have hoped that opposition to the Texas law would have been based on principle. But contempt for democracy and liberty on the left side of the political aisle is truly appalling. Double consciousness notwithstanding, the left have told us with no ambiguity: “We are an unprincipled lot.”
For the record, I operate on principle. I oppose Biden’s mandate on the same grounds that I oppose the Texas law. Both unjustly trespass upon the terrain of bodily autonomy. Of course, Biden’s mandate affects far more people—tens of millions more. It affects not only consenting adults of both sexes, but children who cannot consent to a medical intervention they do not need and that may harm them (see “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?). This makes Biden’s mandate a more pressing concern. Moreover, for those who work from principle, it is ready leverage to lift from the backs of girls and women abortions restrictions. In either case, life and liberty seem not to really matter to conservatives or progressives. The partisan desire to control others is what is at work here. The pro-life crowd will wave around an image of an aborted fetus. The pro-vaccination crowd shares a meme about a COVID-19 patient. But neither image nor meme change the principle in question: a person must be decide for her or himself what happens to her or his body.
In “The Perils of Scientific Obedience: Bioethics under the Spectre of Biofascism,” published in 2009 in Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare (Routledge), Stuart Murray warns us about the increasing “biologization” of bodies and political identities. The trend threatens to bring an end to the rational, autonomous subject. Since his essay was published more than a decade ago, scholars have identified a phenomenon associated with biologization, the neurotic and limiting culture of “safetyism” (see the work of Jonathan Haidt). Safetyism enables biofascism. Both flow from fear and authoritarian desire. (See Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me.)
In his essay, Stuart argues for “the relevance of Milgram’s insights in the context of modern Western healthcare, claiming that the rhetoric of healthcare demands a perilous obedience to scientific authority. This argument extends beyond medicine’s proverbial paternalism; indeed, the rhetoric of healthcare has become internalized as a worldview, and has come to authorize and regulate a limited set of normative terms—a language—in and through which individuals relate to the social world, to themselves, to their bodies, and even to their own genetic material. In other words, healthcare discourses extend seamlessly beyond the medical sphere to touch every aspect of human life and death, increasingly underpinning modern subjectivity and identity—effectively spelling the end of the rational, autonomous subject in the traditional sense of the term.” (See Intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black and “You Have No Other Choice, You Must Go On.”)
CNN reports that “Business Roundtable welcomes the Biden Administration’s continued vigilance in the fight against Covid.” Its CEO, Joshua Bolten, who served as chief of staff to George W. Bush, a president who himself presided over a vast expansion of the national security state, a move conveyed as vigilance in the fight against terrorism, said in a statement, “America’s business leaders know how critical vaccination and testing are in defeating the pandemic.” The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce said they, too, will encourage their members to follow the new rule. The ruling class approves.
What is Biden actually proposing? Biden has issued an expansive rules mandate, a directive cloaked in the name of protecting employee safety but designed to further the transformation of citizens in a federal republic into serfs beholden to corporate power. Biden’s rules mandate all employers with more than one hundred workers require vaccination or routine testing. This affects eighty million Americans. Workers at health facilities receiving federal Medicare or Medicaid will also have to be vaccinated, a rule covering another seventeen million people. Additionally, the mandate requires vaccination for employees of the executive branch and federal contractors. Here, there is no option for routine testing (not that routine testing is an acceptable alternative). Workers will have to be vaccinated or face discipline and likely termination.
All-in-all, Biden’s mandate compels some one hundred million workers to receive a COVID-19 vaccination—this despite growing evidence that the technology neither confers adequate and durable immunity nor prevents serious illness and hospitalization (albeit there is efficacy here). There are, moreover, safety concerns (side effects include anaphylaxis, Bell’s palsy, cardiac and thrombotic conditions, Graves’ disease, Guillain Barre syndrome, and menstrual cycle disruptions). As if this were not troubling enough, the vaccines may be exacerbating the pandemic or could potentially do so.
Robert Malone and Peter Navarro discuss these points in an essay critical of the mandatory vaccine push and come to a frightening conclusion. “The clear historical tendency for viruses crossing over from one species to another is to evolve in a way that makes them both more infectious and less pathogenic over time,” they write. “However, a universal vaccination policy deployed in the middle of a pandemic can turn this normal Darwinian taming process into a dangerous vaccine arms race.” They explain: “The more people you vaccinate, the greater the number of vaccine-resistant mutations you are likely to get, the less durable the vaccines will become, ever more powerful vaccines will have to be developed, and individuals will be exposed to more and more risk.” While these problems may be irrelevant to the ethic of autonomy, where a free individual determines for himself what happens to his body independent of abstract considerations, it raises another ethical issue: compelling individuals to participate in a corporate project that may worsen the situation for their fellow citizens. (See The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; A Pandemic of the Vaccinated; Are We Forgetting Darwin?; Profits Before People: Civilians Denied Cheap and Effective Therapeutics.)
Add this term to your dictionary: biofascism. Biofascism is where the corporate state controls a population using the technocratic machinery of public health. Biofascism is marked by an obsession with health and hygiene. It divides populations into the clean and the unclean, the fit and the unfit. It coerces individuals into accepting official health guidelines and medical screening and treatment. (The targets are still arbitrary. Will biofascism crush the fat acceptance movement? That depends on whether there is a pharmaceutical intervention. Like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, diet and exercise don’t generate billions for the medical industry.) The obsession over healthcare manipulates a large segment of the population to accept the ideology justifying involuntary medical intervention. This ideology amounts to a New Fascism. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. See also Torches of Freedom, Vaccine Cards, and Our Civilian Lives.)
In a biofascist regime, the extended state apparatus, which includes business firms—indeed, the regime is directed by corporate power—gate-keeps and surveils individuals using ID tags of various sorts, the inconvenience of which will soon see their mass importation into the body. Some tags confer privileges; those who present them have access to resources and spaces denied to those who either have the wrong tag or cannot produce one. Vaccine passports are just one of many instantiations of biofascism (see The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg). As most of you remember, employees of some businesses are shockingly eager to have microchips implanted in their bodies. There are people who still think that microchipping is a “conspiracy theory.” It’s not. Three years ago employees at the Wisconsin company Three Square Market were implanted with a RFID chip to use to access doors, login to computers, etc. The trend is spreading globally. The technology is easily repurposed to store medical records.
Three Square Market implants employees with a RFID chip to use to access doors, login to computers, etc.
The biofascist attitude is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. German national socialism is the most well-known example. An early step in Hitler’s consolidation of power involved the support of doctors, scientists, and professional societies, such as the progressive German Medical Association (GMA), to legitimize the practice of classifying populations in terms of fitness. There are those who will push back and say that the Nazis coerced doctors and scientists to participate in the project. But this is not true. In 2012, the GMA admitted that “the initiative for the most serious human rights violations did not originate from the political authorities at the time, but rather from the physicians themselves.” In the end, Germans were tagged with numbers tattooed on their arms that corresponded to variables on computer cards cataloged by the IBM punched card system (IBM did not have RFID technology back then). As these tags were easily concealed, business firms and government agents required external stigmata. The yellow Star of David marked the Jew. A pink triangle marked the homosexual.
It is vital to the defense of democracy to correctly ascertain the political-ideological character that animates biofascism. There is an extensive history of this character. I cannot do this history justice in a short essay, But I need to get out there a few basic facts about our own experience with biofascism as Americans. I emphasize that my argument is not reductio ad Hitlerum. I am not making an analogy. What I am reporting is actual history.
Note the syringe.
German doctors and scientists were impressed with the US eugenics programs progressive physicians, scientists, and reformers pushed in America to weed out the defective and diseased. (See Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create A Master Race. Black is also author of IBM and the Holocaust snd the Nazi Nexus). The Nazis passed the Nuremberg law which segregated the population. The Party used the military and the police to enforce the rule. Business owners were eager to carry out the measure. Imagine a world where opportunities for employment, entertainment, etc., are based on official and verifiable health status (throw in the file criminal records and all the rest of it). That’s what it was like in Nazi Germany, a nation that took medical tyranny to its logical conclusion. The United States of America under Biden is well down this road.
There is indeed a long history in our own country of biofascism. Germany’s Nuremberg law was based on the California sterilization law. California was not the only American state to have a eugenics program. The practice of eugenics was funded nationwide by progressive philanthropic organizations Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Supreme Court, led by the Oliver Wendell Holmes (a majoritarian who also ruled in favor of the suppression of free speech) upheld hygiene laws (using Jacobson). Progressive administrators, legislators, and policymakers relied on experts (academics, doctors, scientists) for guidance. Selected elites were elevated in standing. Corporate state power determined their selection, as well as who could publish and speak. (Sound familiar?) Government offices established regulatory bodies (the FDA, the USDA, the CDC), wielding administrative law and agency authority to shield and legitimize the medical-industrial complex—all this under the guise of protecting the public, our schools and workplaces. We’re talking about the United States, don’t forget. The fetish for technocracy is characteristic of an authoritarian personality, and the United States had no shortage of such personalities, a type produced not only by disordered character but by the subjectivity generated by state corporatism and technocratic imperative.
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen argues in this book that the Nazi Party depended on the willing participation of rank-and-file Germans for success. The popular attitude that animated them grew out of medieval religious attitudes that had, over centuries, taken the form of secular attitudes. Goldhagen was inspired to study the German ideology because an earlier book, by Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, used the Milgram experiment on obedience to explain police operations, and explanation that fueled the banality of evil thesis advanced by Hannah Arendt. Goldhagen disagreed. Although this was a piece of it, it was not enough to be a cog in the bureaucratic machinery. Those who carried out the desires of the German ruling class were “ordinary members of extraordinary political culture.”
On freedom and reason I have written about scientism and explained how it differs from science. Science is comprised of rigorous methods of producing knowledge that proceeds objectively in the context of free and open inquiry. Scientism, in contrast, is an ideology that pulls about itself scientific jargon to conceal its quasi-religious spirit. When progressives tell us to just “follow the science,” (the crude version: “Don’t even think about it, bro”) this is a call to faith. Scientism does not permit criticism of its “findings,” its producers relying on state power and corporate governance to establish their conclusions as official truth. We see this in the manufacture of COVID-19 policy and the cult of personality surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci. We see it in social media platforms censoring and deplatforming those skeptical of corporate power and product. We also see it in the elevation of critical race theory. Indeed, the New Fascism is like the old fascism in more ways than biologism. Its segregationist desire is apparent in more than hysteria over hygiene.
Corporations were eager to impose hygiene rules in Nazi Germany, so it is not surprising the business associations in the United States are chomping last the bit to impose Biden’s mandates. Private power understands that managing large populations requires deep control over civilians, which includes commanding their bodies. Besides, bossing around workers is fun. It’s not all about money. There are people in this world who are aroused by lording power over others, and they’re disproportionately located in positions of privilege (that’s part of why they are in positions of privilege).
Recall from my last blog post (The Delta Crest and the Campaign to Dull Our Empathy) Jimmy Kimmel saying unvaccinated people shouldn’t be given hospital beds. I told you that Kimmel not the only one. Here’s another one. Prominent shock jock Howard Stern sends a message to those who choose not to be vaccinated that goes something like “Fuck their freedom. I want the freedom to live.”
Stern makes a bizarre argument representative of rank-and-file progressive sentiment. It’s the epitome of narcissist attitude. “Fuck other people’s freedom. I only care about my freedom.” We knew Stern was a self-centered prick. It’s a tick of the cultural manager. But here’s the truly bizarre piece. Presumably Stern is vaccinated. Stern doesn’t believe vaccines will save his life unless everybody else is vaccinated. This type of magical thinking is characteristic of the left. You see, for example, in the claim that responsibility for black suffering rides on the genes of white people. Wokeism is a religion.
Suppose vaccines save lives in the abstract. We live in the concrete world. We know that vaccines don’t save the lives of everybody who gets COVID-19. Fully vaccinated people are contracting COVID and not only winding up in the hospital but also winding up dead. They are spreading the virus to others. How does an abstraction save Stern’s life? He could be out taking pictures, encounter a vaccinated person with COVID-19, contract COVID-19, wind up in the hospital and die.
This problem is rampant on the left. Stern has confused the abstract with the real. Somebody needs to tell the man that he can never be sure he won’t get COVID-19. Suppose the vaccine makes it less likely that Stern will be hospitalized and die. Then it’s a good thing Stern is vaccinated. His chances of getting sick and dying depend on his level of protection against COVID-19 afforded to him by the vaccine he took (good luck with that). But, again, it’s magical thinking for Stern to believe that others being vaccinated is what will afford him the freedom to live. Either the vaccine protects him or it doesn’t.
Stern is not only self-centered. He is also a cruel person. This, too, reflects the rank-and-file progressive attitude. It’s why the corporate media can’t conceal schadenfreude in reporting stories about “anti-vaxers” dying COVID-19, accounts made even more sublime when the dying man (almost invariably obese and middle aged) Winston-like confesses his sins from his death bed. Like Kimmel, Stern believes the unvaccinated should be denied medical treatment. “You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.”
The vaccine is not a cure. There is no cure for COVID-19. There is only immunity, and the vaccine doesn’t guarantee that. Indeed, the statistics suggest one should be skeptical of the power of the vaccine. Fortunately, the vast majority of people who get this virus survive it. They never wind up in the hospital. And the immunity they acquire is much more powerful and durable. But to call for not treat those struggling to breathe? That’s sadism (another marker of the fascist mentality). Kimmel and Stern’s attitudes are those of the authoritarian: irrational thinking, scapegoating, seeing human beings from other tribes as diseased and threatening, wanting to see them subject to state coercion or a miserable death. This is the subjectivity that produces popular support for Biden’s biofascist policies.
Murthy told Meetthe Press that Biden’s mandate was neither illegal nor unusual. “What we cannot allow is for this pandemic to turn us on each other,” he said. “Our enemy is the virus; it is not one another.” Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson followed Murthy and told the host that, while he “appreciated” the surgeon general’s remarks on fighting the virus through increased vaccination, the administration’s vaccine requirement is “an unprecedented assumption of federal mandate authority.” The legal and unusual tradition notwithstanding, and recognizing war and other catastrophic events, Hutchison is correct. “It divides our partnership between the federal government and the states,” the governor said. He then demolished Murthy’s attempt to find common ground: “it increases the division in terms of vaccination when we should all be together trying to increase the vaccination uptake.”
Hutchison could have put this in much more strident terms. I have been on this earth for fifty-nine years and, while I knew it was possible, I never expected to see this level of overt tyranny in my own country during a pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is dangerous for those with compromised immune systems and certain comorbidities. But for the vast majority of people, this virus is asymptomatic or produces mild cold and flu symptoms. As for children, influenza is far more serious than SARS-CoV-2. There is no calamity justifying such extraordinary measures as a mandatory vaccination program. We are in the midst of a pandemic. But we are also in the midst of a New Fascism. And the latter is a far more dangerous development, one that has been in development for decades. I thought elites would keep finessing it. Keep it low key. You know, in light of American resistance to measures designed to undermine liberty and democracy. But elites have moved straight to the iron fist. And many Americans appear to have lost confidence in themselves. Safetyism has undermined the American spirit. The American republic is in deep trouble. Autonomy is in peril.
Where, you might ask, are the labor unions on this? You’d think they were out front in defending the autonomy of their members. Better think again. The National Nurses Union is applauding Biden’s mandate. The American Federation of Teachers stands alongside them. “Safety and health have been our north star since the beginning of the pandemic,” said AFT president Randi Weingarten, her majoritarianism in full expression: AFT’s support for mandates “creates great cheer among two-thirds of our people.” The AFL-CIO is praising mandates, issuing a statement, “The resurgence of COVID-19 requires swift and immediate action, and we commend President Biden for taking additional steps to help put an end to this crisis. Everyone should be vaccinated.” The unions are hitched to the Democratic Party jackass. Union leaders are tight with the progressives. They are the progressives. Who will defend the working class? The Democratic Party is the party, and progressives are the operatives and devotees of the corporate state. You can’t count on them. Our future lies with populist-nationalist and libertarian movements. There is spirit of freedom and skepticism continue to live.
But, really, you don’t need to know epidemiology to figure out what’s going on. As soon as I learned that most people who get this virus have mild cold symptoms or are asymptomatic, I knew that the case numbers underrepresented the true number of infections (On the Pains of Testing and Contact Tracing. It’s Worse than Folly). Many of those infected are simply not going to get tested if they don’t know they are infected or if they believe the media that this virus is on the scale of ebola and all they have are cold symptoms. (Remember, polls show that 40 percent of Democrats believe that catching the virus guarantees hospitalization, when the fact is that only a small proportion of cases require hospitalization. See “Whatever that number is”: Vaccine Hesitancy, Common Sense, and Stigmatizing Christians.) Even flu-like symptoms, which I experienced in March 2020, don’t always move a person to get tested. I considered it, but felt too bad to do anything about it (and there was another concern I will note in a moment). I did what I always do: sweat it out.
If you apply the metrics the CDC uses to estimate influenza cases, which likely undercounts coronavirus cases, since influenza is less contagious, half the population has been infected at this point (“COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?). Many of these individuals got vaccinated (they should have been tested for antibodies—and I don’t buy this nonsense about “super-immunity”). As I have argued, herd immunity towards the known mutants is likely the reason cases dropped dramatically beginning in early January 2021. With the introduction of the vaccines, case numbers soared. Part of this is thanks to mutants that can get around the vaccine. It is also possible that the vaccine is driving mutation.
As Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology, has told us, we cannot vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. We’re going to need therapeutics, and that means standing up to resistance put up by the medical industry to public access to cheap pharmaceuticals, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. We need to stand up to the corporate state and its technocratic corps and demand healthcare that puts people before profits. (See Profits Before People: Civilians Denied Cheap and Effective Therapeutics.)
The United States set a record on September 7, 2001, passing 300,000 cases in a single day
Despite the vaccine setback, I had hope that the latest wave was cresting based on the trend line as we were reestablishing herd immunity. But the number of cases reported today set a new record for daily cases. I don’t mean to depress you. I mean to keep you informed. Trump should have insisted on therapeutics more strongly than he did and not rushed the vaccine. He opened the door to this mess. Biden is worthless. Fauci should be removed and investigated. Public policy in this area has been a disaster.
When everything is said and done, I wonder what percentage of COVID-19 patients ventilators killed? What percentage of the 600-plus-thousand people. Remember when something like 9 of every 10 persons on a ventilator died? When I was considering whether to seek medical attention for my illness in March 2020, which was severe (and I have a history of pneumonia), I shuttered at the thought of being hospitalized, What would they do to me? The medical industry is the third leading case of death in the United States. As it turned out, my experience was typical of my experiences with flu-like illness. I was tired for some weeks after the symptoms passed (which was three days of high fever and profuse sweating). But I have suffered no long-term effects, except for rediscovering the necessity of being skeptical of the claims made by authorities and experts. After all, they’re only people.
Jimmy Kimmel says unvaccinated people shouldn’t be given hospital beds. He’s not the only one. More and more, we are seeing a desire that those who have opted for not taking the shots suffer terrible consequences. What about obese people? If it wasn’t for obesity far fewer people would be seeking hospitalization. Most people who are obese choose to be obese. Diet and exercise works. If you are fat, losing weight will sharply reduce your chance of serious complications from SARS-CoV-2. Why is the media neglecting this issue? However, nobody should be turned away from medical treatment. Doctors can recommend vaccination for the old and unhealthy, just as they can recommend diet and exercise. They cannot refuse treatment for people who need it.
freedom and reason 