Year: 2021

The social class location of an individual is determined primarily on the basis of that person’s relationship to the means of production. The class that buys labor is capitalist, the class that sells labor is worker, and so forth. It may be the case that people can, unlike race (a caste relation), leave the working class and become a capitalist, or fall out of the capitalist class and have to work, but this does not change the structure of a society, since there are still those who buy labor and those who sell labor and, overall, those who buy labor, that is, those who earn their income through profits (which are derived from the labor of workers), enjoy more power and privilege. This is reflected in the fact that government policies reflect the interests of the wealthy primarily, whereas the preferences of the general population, which is mostly working class, have little influence on policy (see Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” in Perspectives on Politics, 2014). Moreover, because of inherited affluence, which includes social and cultural location, there is actually very little social mobility.

Concerning the functionalist theory of stratification, which is also the classical economic liberal’s perspective, the claim that poverty has always existed is false. Most human societies down through history were egalitarian. Inequality only emerges with the state and religion around 6,000-8,000 years ago. Humans have been around for at least 200,000 years and possibly date as far back at 800,000. And even before then, their predecessors, who weren’t much different than modern humans, also lived in egalitarian communities. Class stratification is, therefore, in the long view of things, a recent development. Put another way, the natural distributions of intelligence and talents do not explain social class or economic inequality.

With respect to race, this interview with the late Richard Lewontin is excellent. So is this interview with Stephen Jay Gould. Lewontin is a pioneer in genetics research and his argument is the state-of-the-art. Race is a social construct, and it is constructed by the system of racism, which has two aspects: (1) the ideology of racial classification and associated hierarchy; (2) the structure of social and economic and occupational segregation. Race does not exist apart from these aspects. In other words, race is not a natural category, but an invention. Historically speaking, race is a very recent development, emerging with capitalism (which is itself a new system), and is the result of European colonization of the world and the need to control labor populations. Race was very consciously created by the capitalist class, what Barbara Fields has usefully termed “racecraft” (read an interview here). Colonial powers wrote laws defining and dividing populations and developed an ideological system that explained the system of exploitation in terms of innate racial differences.

A similar argument is made with respect to class when it is supposed that people are rich because they have some biological characteristics that allow them to out-compete others. This is Hayek’s argument in his Constitution of Liberty. Hayek avoids the race question, but the claim that class inequality is explained by biology mirrors the racist argument: if people are poor because they are inferior to those who are rich, and if black people as a group are poor compared to white people as a group, and if this is not because of racism but innate differences, then it follows than blacks are racially inferior to whites. But the explanation for why blacks as a group are poorer than whites as a group does not follow from racial differences because race is not a real biological category. Thus the explanation lies in something else. It is the result of political economy, just as class inequality is the result of political economy (see above).

Finally, with respect to gender inequality, it is true that occupation and life choices explain much of it. Women as a sex-class do appear to prefer work in helping professions (teaching, nursing, etc.). Whether this is biological or environmental, i.e. the result of socialization, or both is not that important in explaining gender inequality. To explain inequality between the groups one must ask why occupations in which women are more likely to work are associated with lower pay and less prestige.

One might use the functionalist theory of stratification to explain that the work that men do enjoys higher pay and more prestige because their work is more valuable to society. But the functionalist theory doesn’t work. We can see why from what I said previously. On a functional basis, what is more valuable to the survival and wellbeing of a society than childrearing, childhood education, and keeping the population healthy? How is a CEO maximizing shareholder profit more valuable than those functions? It’s not that the jobs men do commands higher pay and more prestige because these jobs are more important than lower paying and less prestigious jobs. Rather, the consistent factor in all this is that, generally speaking, the jobs that command higher pay and prestige are the jobs in which men are overrepresented.

Clearly another explanation is needed. Even if the differences in occupation and life choices are attributable to biological differences between men and women, there is no reason why this would explain gender inequality. After all, most human societies were matrilineal and egalitarian. It was not until 6,000-8,000 years ago that gender inequality emerges. It is with the emergence of class inequality, the state and law, and religion that we see gender inequality. Economic-class and sex-class inequality appear roughly the same time in history throughout the various civilizations They are historical developments, not natural facts. Same with race, also not a natural fact, which only emerges within the last 500 years as a capitalist strategy to control the working class.

This slogan “Intentions don’t matter” is an attempt to get around the rational requirement that a speech act—or even a physical act—is explained or understood by the intent of the actor. To be sure, the effect of an action is a big part of holding wrongdoers responsible. The Latin term for this is actus reus, the standard definition of which is voluntary action or conduct that is a constituent element of a crime as opposed to the accused’s mental state. Actus reus generally refers to voluntary physical action causing harm forbidden by law (not all physical harm is forbidden). However, intent is a big part of determining not only the severity of punishment, but whether a person is at all responsible for the act that may find him facing punishment. This is called mens rea, and it means “guilty mind.” Mens rea is having as one’s purpose to commit or knowledge of wrongdoing that is a constituent element of a crime over against the voluntary action or conduct of the accused.

These days the slogan “Intentions don’t matter” is aimed at speech. Straightaway, the idea that people are to be punished or disciplined for the impact of their speech is problematic in light of the free speech right. In my case, as a college teacher, there is an extra layer of protection that comes with academic freedom. I have a responsibility to be true to the facts of history as I know them. Furthermore, I have to be free to use words for effect and realism. Not only must I resist the desire to sanitize history (for sanitizing history isn’t merely revising history, which may occur in light of new facts, but the act of suppressing it), but I must also reflect the reality of the people I study, a reality that is conveyed and experienced symbolically. Words indeed matter—which is why we must not censor them.

I show a documentary in class, The FBI’s War on Black America, in which the word “nigger” is used several times. Bull Connor, for example, uses the word in glorifying violence perpetrated against civil rights marchers. I have yet to have a student complain. But, in this climate, every time I show the documentary, I worry just a little. I worry because of cases in which a teacher is disciplined for saying something that affected one or more of his student.

For example, in 2020, Harvard dismissed a Title IX complaint made by a transgender student who accused anthropology professor Arthur Kleinman of sexual misconduct for comments made in a general education class concerning the risk of violence transgender individuals faced in a nonwhite culture after the student expressed support for excluding white people from certain spaces because, “as a transgender woman of color,” it made her feel safer. Kleinman apologized to the class for his comments. Did he feel he had to?

More recently, again at Harvard, human evolutionary biology lecturer Carole Hooven made comments on a Fox News show defending the usage of the terms “male” and “female” to refer to biological sex in medical classes. Graduate student Laura Lewis tweeted that Hooven’s remarks “appalled and frustrated” her and characterized them as “transphobic and harmful.” Lewis countered that transgender men can also be pregnant, which of course is true, since they are biological females. Hence the controversy. (Hooven explains the situation on this podcast.)

In the realm of speech acts, if I use a racial slur in a discussion about the history of racism, my intent is very different than if I use that slur to angrily insult a person or to publicly diminish them. If my intent in referring to male and female in terms of the size of the gametes in a lecture on biological reality is to accurately convey the science of sex differences, not to diminish those who do not conform to traditional gender identities vis–à–vis their sex, it should not change anything to say that it does not matter what my intent is because effect is all that matters. That will only change things if we allow it to. Why would we? Who determines their effects if intent is irrelevant? It must be the person who claims to have been affected.

Therein lies the rub. By reducing words to effect only, and then leaving the truth of intent to the person claiming to have been affected, and emplacing a system that punishes people for their utterances, a person may be punished for the utterances regardless of intent. This is a terrifying world. The person who claims to have been affected determines the truth of another person’s speech act. Based on what? His feelings. Any burden to prove intent has been lifted from the accuser. The “victim” determines what is right and wrong on the basis of his subjectivity. Even if the least of it is the expectation that the person who uttered the offending words will apologize for uttering it, this is unacceptable if we mean to live and work in an objective and rational world.

“Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, ‘Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?’ The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’” This was said on Monday, September 16, 1963, by a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man, who stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club and delivered a speech about race and prejudice.

This is the theme of Andrew Cohen’s 2013 Atlantic essay, “The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing.” He claims that Morgan was forever shunned for saying this. While I do not support forever shunning (any length of shunning, actually), Morgan does deserve severe criticism for making such an argument. For it is not everybody who did this. The people who threw the bomb did this. They alone are to blame. We know it was four members of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan who committed this crime. They were tried for and convicted of the murders.

If the argument is that those who bombed the church did so because of anti-black prejudice, and that, since anti-black prejudice is socially conveyed, we are all responsible for prevailing social conveyances, then the argument still fails, since, while anti-black prejudice may indicate the bomber(s) motive (I think it does), and thus explain the bombing, and while we should condemn anti-black prejudice (although there is no required for individuals to do this), the fact that the prejudice was learned can in no way implicate society in the act, since individuals either choose to perpetrate wrongdoing or they are not responsible for their actions. Actus reus requires that an action is voluntary to be a crime. Society is not a voluntary actor.

It’s rhetoric like Morgan’s that deranges the civil rights struggle. Civil rights becomes a quasi-religion at this point, replete with transcendent notions of collective and intergenerational guilt. That Morgan’s words echo down through history as if they bent the arc of the universe a little towards justice, as Cohen claims, tells us just how much popular understanding of justice has been shifted from one of rational adjudication of the facts to that of magical thinking and superstition. Because we all know that belief in collective guilt is widespread in American society.

This way of thinking is easy because it happens in the context of a culture of believers. Because of ubiquity of religious thinking in the United States, the majority is primed to believe in such magical and superstitious notions as collective guilt, to see individuals whose behavior is not directed by an organization as belonging to abstracts grouping that do direct their actions. Thus, without a directive or chain of command, by virtue being in society, the individual is responsible for actions taken by others. This is the irrational basis of such constructs as white privilege and the demand for reparations.

Those who believe in the supernatural expect to see ghosts—to be haunted by them. They are prone to accept claims that root in the spirit realm of sin and salvation. None of this is true, of course. But, in any case, none of this can be part of a secular system in which religious belief is the prerogative of the individual but the obligation of none. We see in Morgan’s speech (much of which is reproduced in Cohen’s essay) the logic of critical race theory. Critical race theory, a quasi-religious system, eschews the burden to prove intent. And we should shun critical race theory.

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Horrified? That was the ruling of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927), a decision that upheld the power of the state to force women onto an operating table.* The compulsory vaccination rule he refers to is the Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905). That decision upheld state government’s power to compel smallpox vaccination, ruling that, under certain circumstances, citizens are subject to the police power of the state on matters of public health.

At least that is the way it is being used. It was Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only judge to dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, who authored the majority opinion in Jacobson. In his defense, Harlan warned against “arbitrary” or “oppressive” regulation and expressly associated compulsory vaccination with the scourge of smallpox. But the keen sense that could see the future legacy of separate-but-equal failed to anticipate the blunt instrument Jacobson would become in the hands of technocracy.

A 2008 Harvard Law Review article notes that “Jacobson is a foundational public health law case. Its reasoning and logic pervade vaccine law decisions to this day.” And more than vaccines. In Vernonia School District v Acton, 515 US 646 (1995), Jacobson was used to justify the random drug testing of students (despite the Court recognizing the action as constituting searches under the Fourth Amendment). More recently, Jacobson 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. (See The 115-year-old Supreme Court opinion that could determine rights during a pandemic).

The matter of reproductive freedom cannot be ignored by those of us who care about bodily integrity and personal sovereignty—our most fundamental human rights. Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett just refused to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandate presumably on grounds Jacobson established. She gave no reason, but just wait until she gets her hands on an abortion case. If the state can compel the vaccination and sterilization of a person for the sake of others (Buck v. Bell still stands), then does it not follow that a woman can be compelled to carry a fetus to term? You thought it was “your body your choice,” but the abuse of Jacobson may prove otherwise. Did you forget? The Supreme Court has been Catholicized.

The Harvard Law Review article I earlier cited notes that “Jacobson was decided in a different time. It addressed issues about medicine, disease, and society that are no longer relevant today.” Indeed. Why are courts leveraging a precedent from a time when rights and science were in a very different place? Compared to the revolution in rights that followed the horrors of Nazism, freedom for early twentieth century Americans was sharply constrained. It was the Progressive Era, and its technocrats desired totalistic control over the masses. It was during this period that, among other things, alcohol was prohibited, drugs were regulated, and eugenics programs operated in a majority of states. Moreover, today, science has become a quasi religious system (see The Problem of Scientism).

With the emergence of corporate governance in the wake of the Civil War, enabled by the Supreme Court’s recognition of corporations as legal persons, person with the rights of human citizens sans conscience, the regulatory apparatus was soon captured by big business, which, as Richard Grossman has pointed out, is a clever way of distancing progressivism from corporatism; regulatory capture was the point of progressivism all along. For progressives, mass society is too massive for self-government, whether on the plane of individual sovereignty or the populist collective, neither finding the people up to the task, so the management of people becomes the responsibility of a technocratic elite. (The writings of public relations industry pioneers Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann is paradigmatic of the attitude that pervades the organic intellectual space of progressivism.) (See We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears: The Establishment of the Scientific-Industrial Complex; Progressivism—an Excerpt from The 1776 Report.)

That same technocratic desire prevails today. Astonishingly, in the wake of the horrors of Holocaust, where the Nuremberg Code was established to protect the rights of individuals from the power of the state to force medical interventions, and the Declaration of Human Rights to cover many more, courts in the United States are ruling on matters on the basis of an arcane precedent established more than a century ago during a period in US history where censorship, compulsory sterilization, prohibition of contraception, de jure racial segregation, open borders. Justice Barrett’s ruling proceeds without apparent recognition of the horrors of the past, nor with regard for the spirit of our founding or appreciation for the progress of human freedom. Barrett is as blind to the past on this matter as Harlan was to the future. (See On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination.) It seems that the post-WWII period of expansive individual freedom was exceptional.

This blindness is pervasive. A profound disconnect (or dishonesty) appears in the way the establishment media talks about the ethics of vaccine mandates. Liam Drew, in an article for Nature, writes, “Governments can never force someone to get themselves or their child vaccinated—it is a foundational principle of medical ethics that consent must be given for any procedure.” Well said. Yet, in the very next sentence, Drew contradicts the principle he so clearly articulates. “The decision to make vaccination mandatory is therefore a decision to impose some form of penalty on those who do not follow the law.” If one is punished for not doing something, then one is being forced to do something. I believe I can make this point obvious to the reader. If a man straps a bomb on your body and instructs you to rob a bank or suffer death, while you may choose not to rob the bank, no court is going to deny that you were forced to rob a bank if you choose life. One does not consent with a gun to his head. At the very least, we must admit that the person who is punished for exercising his right does not really possess that right. It cannot be said, for instance, that one enjoys a right to freedom of speech if one is punished for his utterances.

What about the scourge of COVID-19? What about it? Every third person died from smallpox, and the rate was even greater for babies. Survivors were often blind and scarred for life. The modern smallpox vaccine, developed in the nineteenth century, is a live virus preparation of the vaccinia virus, which is safe and cross-protective for cowpox, monkeypox, and smallpox (variola). The smallpox vaccine is effective in preventing infection in 95 percent of those vaccinated. Get back to me when SARS-CoV-2 becomes that lethal and there is a vaccine that successful. (See The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg; The Communitarian Nightmare We Feared is Here; Somehow, a Bill of Rights got Locked into the Constitution.)

* * *

Note:

* Holmes, by the way, a man beloved by progressives and pragmatists, is the same man who, in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), in a judgment anticipating the attitude of the People’s Republic of China, used the utterly absurd analogy of “shouting fire in a crowded theater” to explain his reasoning that speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. I note this to establish a pattern indicating Holmes contempt for liberty. (For more, see Fire in a Crowded Theater: Failing Free Speech and the Manufacture of Consent.)

“The apparent homogeneity within races as compared to the ‘obvious’ difference between them stems partly from the fact that our consciousness of racial differences is constantly being reinforced socially because racial distinctions serve economic and political ends.” —Richard Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974)

There are few people more perceptive vis–à–vis the role scientism plays in the cultural and social relations of economic and political power than the late Richard Lewontin (Lewontin passed away July 4, 2021). Anticipating Barbara Fields’ arguments from her domain of social history, Lewontin’s natural history makes it clear that the constructs of racism (scientific or otherwise) manufacture the existence of race rather that discover and clarify it. Race is really an illusion. Like the phantoms of theology, we make race significant by confusing myth with reality.

Although Lewontin was situationally engaged with the persistence of race thinking on the political right, his observations of 1974 speak to the problem with the political left’s rhetoric of race essentialism dominating today’s discourse. Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, and critical race theory are counterproductive to their professed goal of fighting racism because, like the race realism and white supremacy hailing from the right, proponents essentialize race rather than assign it to history or insignificance. By recentering race, by making skin color significant for purposes other than combating discrimination to insure equal treatment across institutions, the antiracist means to resurrect and repurpose systemic racism for economic and political ends.

If progressives really believed in combating racism, they would demand equal treatment for all individuals regardless of the racial categories inherited from the racist past. But that’s not what progressives do. Instead, they insist on living in the past by continually reifying the racial categories scientists such as Lewontin have debunked and transcended. Compounding the problem of reification is the practice of redefining racial—even ethnic and religious—categories to elevate or diminish the presumed power of one or more groups, while strategically expanding the scope of racial oppression in order to enlarge a list of grievances, demand special treatment, and diminish individuals defined as oppressors. As I noted in a recent blog (Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), progressive rhetoric on race is being used to plan the large-scale expropriation of wealth based on racial categories. This has always ever been the purpose of systemic racism.

Every time a progressive charges an “oppressor” with “cultural appropriation” for wearing clothes or playing music associated with a race to which he does not belong, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially and expanded to include nonracial things. It signals the progressive investment in racial categories. By conflating culture with race, the system of racism is not only elaborated, but escapes being assigned to the past by moving the goalposts. Every time a person who personally identifies as a race other than the one to which the (customizable) rules of racism assign her, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. How is one a race imposter if race isn’t really real? Confusing race with ancestry has always been a method of racecraft. Every time a group historically presumed to be white (for example, Arabs or Jews) is redefined racially, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. Every time an ethnicity (for example, Mexican or Palestinian) or a religion (Islam) is treated as a racial category, consciousness of racial differences is being reinforced socially. (See Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?)

Antiracism, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory—these are part of a campaign to make racial distinction serve economic and political ends. Ask yourself how the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with its emphasis on equal treatment of individuals regardless of race, was soon eclipsed by an overarching system of “positive” racial discrimination. The answer is obvious from a class analytical standpoint: the system of corporate governance requires an ideological system and set of political practices disruptive to the class consciousness that might challenge its power. If individuals are no longer focused on racial differences, even if they still believe they see them, they are left to refocus on what most individuals share: their common existence as proletarians exploited in a capitalist system. Racial consciousness has proven to be an effective strategy to prevent this from happening. (Before you accuse me to repurposing a biologist’s argument for economic and political purposes, know that biologists can be Marxist, too. And Richard Lewontin was.)

I close with a note. This blog is inspired by Joseph L. Graves Jr.’s August 8, 2021 article “Richard Lewontin: Race Science for the People,” in Science for the People. Graves argues that Lewontin’s “analysis of the fallacy of racial classification in humans is one of his most important.” I agree (for a summary of Lewontin’s views, see his “Confusion About Human Races”). In his essay, Graves pushes back against the argument that, with the advancement of genetics, race science is regaining legitimacy. He cites, for example, a March 23, 2018 article in The New York Times by Harvard geneticist David Reich “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of Race.”

I will discuss this matter in greater depth in a future blog on Freedom and Reason, but it should suffice here to note that we know from large-scale population genetics studies, as well as from archeology and physical anthropology, that our common sense notions of race align with the geographical distribution of phenotypic features, these the result of evolutionary processes and patterns of migration. It is likely that, despite common sense understandings existing on a different plane from scientific ones, populations around the world, operating from varied worldviews, would arrive at a simultaneously false yet uniformly common understanding of race. For this reason, it is just as unlikely that racial thinking will disappear in light of arguments by preeminent scientists such Richard Lewontin. But this is all the more reason to insist on equal treatment of individuals despite their racial classifications.

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Note (later the same day): The Guardian and other establishment newspapers gleefully spin the new US census numbers. Good news: whites are losing. Bad news for Republicans, who will have to draw their districts even more tightly.

“Non-hispanic whites now account for around 58% of America’s population, a drop from 2010 when they made up 63.7% of the population. It was the first time that the non-Hispanic white population has fallen below 60% since the census began.” The trick is the contrivance “non-hispanic white.” (The idea of non-white Hispanic is meaningful, however.) The trick is also played as “white-only.” (They Do You This Way; How to Misrepresent the Racial Demographics of Mass Murder.)

“The Hispanic or Latino population grew by 23%,” the Guardian tells its audience. But here’s what it doesn’t tell them: two-thirds of Hispanics are white. The facts that Asian population numbers rose even more than hispanic but that Asians are a small percentage of the population, whereas Hispanics are the largest ethnic group, and black population numbers rose considerably less than the Asian numbers, means the white majority did not really shrink by that much, especially if most of the rise in Hispanic numbers were racially white. (Asian and Black are racial categories, Hispanic, like Arab, is an ethic category.) Moreover, overall, America’s population achieved its second lowest decadal growth in US history (good news, but it could stand being even lower).

Update August 10 (a day later): As I predicted, YouTube removed the video. Reason given? You know what it is:

So we turn to Rumble. See below for original blog with commentary and transcript.

Why do I understand science? Because I am a trained scientist who is not deluded by scientism or the army of official experts selected by our corporate overloards over which progressives gush. Dr. Dan Stock understands science, too. You must see the video below.  

I ripped the video because I do not expect it to be available for very long. I will post it to Rumble if YouTube takes it down. We cannot be quiet. We’re in the midst of a big lie. Why are they lying? We’re being governed by sociopaths and Cluster B personality types working through agencies entirely captured by corporate power—so for no good reason. This is not a noble lie. I provide a transcript below the video.

“Oh, I can’t read that.”

“Looks like a doctor’s signature to me.”

“Well, that’s why I can’t read it.”

“Guilty as charged. Dr. Dan Stock 5777 West Seminole North McCordsville, Indiana.

“To address your combat: gee, it’s hard to believe we’re 18 months into this and still having a problem! And I would suggest the reason we still have a problem is because we’re doing things that are not useful, and we’re getting our sources of information from the Indiana State Board of Health and the CDC, who actually don’t bother to read science before they do this.

“I’m actually a functional family medicine physician. That means I am specially trained in immunology and inflammation regulation, and everything being recommended by the CDC and the State Board of Health is actually contrary to all the rules of science. So, things you should know about coronavirus and all other respiratory viruses: they are spread by aerosol particles which are small enough to go through every mask. By the way, the literature that supports all of that is in a flash drive that we’ve presented to you. It has been given to the Secretary. As a matter of fact, it quotes at least three studies that are sponsored by the NIH to that exact fact, even though the CDC and the NIH have chosen to avoid—to ignore—the very science that they paid to have done. That is why you keep struggling with this. It is because you cannot make these viruses go away.

“The natural history of all respiratory viruses is that they circulate all year long waiting for the immune system to get sick through the winter or become deranged, as has happened recently with these vaccines, and then they cause symptomatic disease because they cannot be filtered out. And they have animal reservoirs. And this is very important point—no one can make this virus go away. The CDC has managed to convince everybody that we can handle this like we did Smallpox where we could make a virus go away. Smallpox had no animal reservoirs. The only thing that it learned to infect was humans. That’s why we were able to make that virus go away. That will not happen with this any more than it will with influenza, the common cold, respiratory syncytial virus, adenoviral respiratory syndromes, or anything else that has animal reservoirs. So, the reason you can’t do this is because you’re trying to do something which has already been tried and can’t be done.

“Equally important is that vaccination changes none of this—especially with this vaccine—and I would hope this Board would start asking itself before it considers taking the advice of the CDC the NIH and the [Indiana] State Board of Health, ‘Why we are doing things about this that we didn’t do for the common cold, influenza, or respiratory syncytial virus?’ and then ask yourself, ‘Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of the summer when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?’ And to help you understand that, you need to know the condition that is called ‘antibody-mediated viral enhancement.’ That is a condition done when vaccines work wrong, as they did in every coronavirus study done in animals on coronaviruses after the SARS outbreak, and done in respiratory syncytial virus, where a vaccine used in a vulnerable individual—done the wrong way, which by the way, cannot be done right—for a respiratory virus which has a very low pathogenicity rate, causes the immune system to actually fight the virus wrong, and let the virus become worse than it would have with native infection. And that is why you’re seeing an outbreak right now. In fact, in that flash drive you’re going to have coming to you, and in the emails with six extra, will be a study showing that 75 percent of people who had COVID-19 positive symptom cases in the Barnstable, Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated. Therefore, there is no reason for treating any person vaccinated any differently than any person unvaccinated.

“You should also know that no vaccine—even the ones I support and would give to myself and my children—ever stops infection. In 2014 there was an outbreak of mumps in the National Hockey League. The only people who came down with symptoms were the people who were unvaccinated, or unknown vaccine status. Boy, that sounds like a great argument for vaccines but a question that you should ask yourself—knowing that half of the people who came down with symptomatic disease had no contact with an unvaccinated or unknown vaccine status individual—is, ‘Where did they get the disease?’ And the answer was: ‘From the vaccinated individuals.’ No vaccine prevents you from getting infected. You get infected. You shed pathogens—this is especially true of viral respiratory pathogens—you just don’t get symptomatic from it.

“So, you cannot stop spread. You cannot make these numbers that you’ve planned on get better by doing any of the things you’re doing, because that is the nature of viral respiratory pathogens. And you can’t prevent it with a vaccine, because they don’t do the very thing you’re wanting them to do. And you will be chasing this the remainder of your life until you recognize that the Center for Disease Control and the Indiana State Board of Health are giving you very bad scientific guidance, and instead read the articles that are going to come on the email, and are on this flash drive, and listen to the people in this audience here tonight, who actually have recognized the advice they are getting from the CDC and the NIH is counterfactual. And that’s why you’re still fighting this with this vaccine that supposedly was going to make all of this go away, but it suddenly managed to make an outbreak of COVID-19 develop in the middle of the summer when Vitamin D levels are at their highest, by the way.

“The other thing that would be necessary for any vaccine restriction to be considered is: if there were no other treatment available. And I can tell you, having treated over 15 COVID-19 patients, that between active loading with Vitamin D, Ivermectin, and Zinc, that there is not a single person who has come anywhere near the hospital and we already have studies that show that if you achieve a 25 hydroxy Vitamin D level greater than 55, your risk of COVID-19 death will drop down to through one quarter of the population average for the United States. And there are active treatment trials included on that flash drive that show the same is true. So if you were going to discriminate based upon vaccine you should also discriminate based upon 25 hydroxy Vitamin D level, Zinc taste test response, and probably previous infection, since there are also studies on that flash drive that show that people who have recovered from COVID-19 infection actually get no benefit from vaccination at all—no reduction in symptoms, no reduction in hospitalization, and suffer two to four times the rate of side effects if they are subsequently vaccinated.

“Therefore, the policies that you are basing on are totally counterfactual. I don’t blame this Board for that, because I know you aren’t scientists and you thought it was reasonable to listen to the CDC, NIH and the Indiana State Board of Health, but I would encourage that instead you listen to the people out here in this audience, and read what’s on that data drive. And if anybody here on this Board has any questions about anything on that, I will happily come back and sit with you individually if you would like me to explain the science behind this. And if you’re worried about being sued by somebody because you don’t follow the guidance of the CDC and the NIH, I will tell you, you have a free ‘pro bono expert testimony’ at your disposal. I will testify in defense of this Board turning down all these recommendations—for free—at any time, in any court. Thank you.”

AP News reports Apple to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse. When I first heard about this I thought, “This cannot possibly be true.” You mean, I take a photo of my 3-year-old daughter taking a bubble bath and upload it to the Cloud and Apple-deployed AI scans my phone to detect child porn and, if my account is flagged, a human being will look at my naked daughter and alert the authorities? “Apple unveiled plans to scan US iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups.” So the answer is yes. That answer is horrifying and I do not find at all convincing AP News reassuring the reader that “[p]arents snapping innocent photos of a child in the bath presumably need not worry.” Presumably?

Apple’s tool designed to detect “known images of child sexual abuse” is called NeuralHash. It “will scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud,” AP News reports (emphasis mine). “If it finds a match, the image will be reviewed by a human. If child pornography is confirmed, the user’s account will be disabled and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified.” The depth of surveillance doesn’t end there. “Separately, Apple plans to scan users’ encrypted messages for sexually explicit content as a child safety measure.” So if I engage in fantasy role-playing with others, an Apple-deployed program will scan my text and, if it sounds like child porn, then Apple turns me over to the authorities?

Not everybody AP News consulted for the story is applauding. “Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, warned that the system could be used to frame innocent people by sending them seemingly innocuous images designed to trigger matches for child pornography. That could fool Apple’s algorithm and alert law enforcement.” Green told AP News, “Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily.” In other words, Apple’s system can be manipulated to engage in a high-tech form of swatting. It is not hard to imagine corporate and state actors using this tactic to harass opponents by raising suspicions about them with law enforcement agencies. It’s not like the deep state hasn’t done things like this before.

* * *

USA Today is reporting that Dr. Anthony Fauci expects ‘a flood’ of COVID-19 vaccine mandates after full FDA approval. I have blogged about the problems surrounding this on Freedom and Reason (On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination; The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg). What I want to draw attention to today is this myth Fauci repeats that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This is a slogan designed to keep alive what is becoming quite obviously a counterproductive vaccine program. The evidence suggests that in fact it is the vaccinated who are prolonging the pandemic. Fauci knows as well as anybody that the vaccines are not efficacious in conferring immunity (only the virus can do that) and that the recent rise in cases (see above chart) is, at least in part, fueled by vaccinated people infected with SARS-CoV-2 exposing others to the virus.

Today, on Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic, pathologist Dr. Kevin Homer provided a paradigm of what skepticism about all this should look like. CDC policy has Homer scratching his head. In the past, he explains, if a person had a virus, then one presumes he has developed immunity to the virus and therefore does not need a vaccine. Why expose a person who has survived a virus to the additional risks of a vaccine? If virus-acquired immunity was in question, tests can be be performed to confirm this. Gathering these data also provides facts for determining the extent of herd immunity. Moreover, as Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA platform, tells us, if you are healthy, there is no need to take the vaccine, as the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the disease. (See “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom? Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?)

I have written about the risks these vaccines pose to human health (The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). Perhaps the most risky thing about the mRNA platformed vaccines is the technology’s very mechanism of action, that is teaching cells to manufacture the spiked protein that causes COVID-19. The spike protein and a dysfunctional immune response to it lies at the root of the inflammation of the body’s organs and the problem of clotting blood associated with the advanced stage of the disease. This is why many vaccine recipients presents as a victim of long haul COVID-19. Since SARS-CoV-2 is not a sufficient condition to cause COVID-19, rather the spike protein is, indigenous production of the spike protein may prime the vaccinated for disease. Moreover, since the mRNA vaccines only teach the body this trick and do not confer immunity to the virus, those vaccinated with this technology are prone to become viral factories, endangering others.

“This is a dystopian world we’re living in,” Fauci remarked. As is his reflex, portraying the vaccine hesitant as ignorant and stupid, Fauci said if them that “they are being misled.” Certainly the public is being mislead. COVID-19 is a global propaganda operation. Ironically, standing outside the ideological bubble of progressivism tends to make one immune from the effects of the operation. The very people Fauci and other elites treat as irrational believers of rightwing conspiracy theories are the ones who are demonstrating the proper degree of skepticism. As for the hybristic progressive, elite propaganda portraying populist-nationalism as beyond the pale works best on those who put their political identity and virtue projection before the values they profess.

* * *

A tip to The National Pulse has unearthed an 21-page document from April 2017 entitled “9 Solutions to Secure America’s Elections” wherein a Biden-linked group, Center for American Progress, chaired by chief Democratic Party strategist John Podesta, and featuring Stacey Abrams, demands “robust” audits of elections. Why? Because of the wide array of problems associated with machine voting and the importance of election integrity in ensuring confidence in American democracy. Among other things, the Center for American Progress reveals that voting machines are hackable even without Internet access.

I encourage you to read The National Pulse article, but I want to share a few passages from the Center’s paper.

“Voting machines that record votes and tally them are run on software that is vulnerable to cyberintrusions. Well-resourced hackers, whether funded by foreign governments or criminal syndicates, have the access, ability, and motivation to infect computerized voting machines and tallying systems across America. This can occur even if the machines are not connected to the internet. Attackers, for example, can deploy software such as Stuxnet and Brutal Kangaroo to target offline voting machines.” The authors emphasize: “Even with strong chain-of-custody practices, hackers can remotely infiltrate an electronic machine’s operating system, and without paper-ballot records, it is impossible to know whether a hack occurred or if votes were changed.” Actually, this is not precisely true. It is more difficult. But there is a record of activity stored on the machines, which is why a forensic audit that includes inspection of machines is vital for ensuring election integrity.

“[The problem with electronic voting] is why there needs to be a paper ballot—which is software independent—for every vote cast. A paper ballot offers a record of voter intent, which will exist even if voting machines are attacked and data are altered. Paper ballots or records are necessary both to conduct meaningful postelection audits able to confirm the election outcomes, and to enable post-hoc correction in the event of malfunctions or security breaches.” That bit about enabling post-hoc correction is crucial. To translate, if an audit finds significant discrepancies, the vote should be corrected to reflect the will of the people. (Are you starting to wonder what changed between April 2017 and November 2020?)

“The utility of paper ballots and voter-verified paper records is only useful for ensuring that the outcome of an election is correct if election administrators commit to carrying out robust postelection audits,” the paper continues. “Many jurisdictions are not doing enough to conduct audits on an adequate number of ballots to ensure election accuracy and detect manipulation of vote totals caused by failing machines or hackers.” You will have noticed that, for example in Arizona, when Republicans organize an audit, they are attacked by Democrats and the corporate media for attempting to weaken the legitimacy of the 2020 election by calling into question the process. But only a few years before: “Given these facts, postelection audits—which are robust enough to create strong evidence that the outcome is accurate and to correct it if it is wrong—must be conducted after every election.”

The Center’s paper portrays Democrats as believing that election integrity is crucial to voter confidence in the democratic process. Yet, in 2020, because the correct outcome was secured, i.e., Donald Trump was removed from office, the story is not that confidence in the democratic process is undermined by election integrity. In hindsight, the paper seems not so much a plan of action for robust post-election audits, but instead instructions for how to steal an election. As several news sources have reported, Podesta played Joe Biden in an election war-game that took place ahead of the 2020 election, wherein he refused to concede defeat in the immediate aftermath of a clear Trump election-night victory. This was revealed in a report from the Soros-linked Transition Integrity Project.

According to reporting by Natalie Winters of The National Pulse, the D.C.-based Center for American Progress (CAP) has also repeatedly partnered with the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) on sponsored trips to China and other endeavors for more than a decade. Podesta’s lobbying group recently employed Terry Neal, who subsequently worked to “provide strategic communications advice” for Huawei, a China-based technology company. Podesta’s brother, Tony, is also believed to be lobbying for Chinese Communist-linked tech giant Huawei. This is significant. The US government labels Huawei a “national security threat.” Huawei not only collaborates with the People’s Liberation Army, but provides the Chinese Communist Party backdoor access to its devices and networks.

The COVID-19 pandemic is being used to shift the burden of proof in a manner that is profoundly un-American and anti-Enlightenment. In a rational society, an individual is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There must be a proven crime and the person accused of that crime has no obligation to provide any evidence of his innocence. The government has the burden to prove the case against him. In contrast, authoritarian social orders presume guilt and use that presumption to control the people. Burden shifting under COVID-19 is a means to end. The end is a totalitarian social order made in the image of the People’s Republic of China.

Vaccine passports and other methods of discrimination surrounding the ostensive control of SARS-CoV-2 presume one is sick until the suspect proves to an authority or a power that he is well. To show that he well, he must provide proof of vaccination or submit to tests. Otherwise, he is denied access or othered by being forced to wear a mask. It doesn’t appear to matter to the authorities that researchers have shown that the vaccine does not guarantee that an individual is free of the virus. It is now well known that individuals carry and transmit the virus (The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?). Moreover, PCR tests may wrongly report individuals as sick (false positives), as well as wrongly clear individuals of infection (false negatives).

If determining disease and controlling SARS-CoV-2 isn’t really the point of passports and tests, then what is the point? Passports and tests are elements in a program to condition the masses for life in a totalitarian social order. The coming regime of control will include the total surveillance of individuals moving through restricted spaces. Unelected gatekeepers across private and public spaces will control the fate of individuals. By their nature, bureaucratic systems subject individuals to disciplinary regimes by suspecting them of deviation a priori. Technocratic schemes default individuals to the status of guilty person. In a world where public heath authorities control the movement of people and access to resources, all are presumed disease vectors unless formally shown otherwise.

You see a similar logic with antiracism. As a white person, you are automatically guilty of the oppression of blacks. You guilt is an assignment. Your skin condemns you. Your white ancestry de facto implicates you in unjust enrichment at the expense of black people. To be sure, you cannot prove you’re innocent of this collective and intergenerational crime. But you can confess it, seek forgiveness and atone for it. For many workers, just as they must prove their wellness with tests and vaccines, they must prove their commitment to erasing their presumed racial privilege by testifying to it (which proves the legitimacy of the exercise) and pledging to work to move the project of equity forward. A diversity training session presumes you are a racist in the same way COVID-19 passports and tests presume you are sick. Like a vaccine passport, swearing allegiance to the anti-racism project is about erasing your privacy and your right to be presumed innocent of sickness and racism. It signals that technocratic corporate state power own you. In the nascent totalitarian social order you are by default these things—guilty, sick, and racist—and must account for the problem of your existence as a condition of your status as a serf of the oligarchy.

* * *

We can always count on CNN to provide fine examples of propaganda. Yesterday they delivered this one: The unvaccinated still think Covid vaccines are a risk, survey finds. Of course, the vaccines carry risks. All vaccines do. The vaccines for COVID-19 appear to be particularly risky. The mRNA vaccines turn one’s cells into a factory producing spike protein, which, among other things, inflames the body. For example, because the mechanism of the disease is the toxicity of the spike protein associated with SARS-CoV-2, many vaccine recipients present with the same condition as long-haul COVID-19 patients. But that is not the only example of adverse consequences. One is at risk for a long list of negative health outcomes with this vaccine—autoimmune disorders, blood clots, inflammation of the heart, paralysis, and so one. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, records tens of thousands of serious reactions to the vaccines including thousands of deaths.

CNN knows this, but the impression CNN wishes to leave is that there are no risks to the vaccine, or at least none that would warrant skepticism. The article claims that belief that the risk of the vaccine is greater than the risk of disease is dispelled by overwhelming evidence. But this is untrue. For many demographic groups, there is no evidence that the disease is riskier than the vaccine. Most Americans are not at significant risk from this virus (see “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?). That’s just a scientific fact, one you can determine for yourself by visiting the web site of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But CNN knows their audience, whom they have successfully terrified for more than a year. They misrepresent the facts without consequence.

* * *

USA Today recently published an op-ed by Erin Keith “More police presence won’t save communities. Defunding police will.” Erin Keith is an attorney at the Detroit Justice Center. According to her blurb, her work focuses on combatting racial injustice and economic inequality within the criminal punishment system. Keith’s op-ed is a call to put the black people of Detroit at more danger. She should know better. As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, racial injustice is not a feature of the criminal justice system. However, this quote from her essay is crucial to grasp: “The Detroit of my childhood is one where Black affluence and Black poverty coexisted. A city where local business owners and my doctors and my dentist looked like me, but also where Black hardship was evident.” Inequality does play a role, as the historic and present function of the system its controlling the dangerous classes. It’s not about race. It’s about class. Activists should stop obsessing over racial injustice and start focusing on economic inequality. Racial resentment is a dead end for working people. It’s part of an authoritarian project. Class struggle is the true politics of liberation.

* * *

At its most basic level, hate speech is speech some people find hateful. Everybody I know is allowed to hate some person or some thing or a category of things. I hate Nazis. Is that hate speech? People can agree to define hate speech as abusive, intimidating, or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, but what speech or writing is to be considered abusive, intimidating, or threatening?

Presumably it would be hate speech for a white man to frighten or overawe a black person on the street using racial slurs. However, isn’t it already illegal to intimidate another person on the street whatever the content of one’s speech? Isn’t the problem with intimidation not the content of speech but the act of frightening or overawing a person? Put another way, how does speech expressing prejudice for a person or group of persons intimidate apart from the act of intimidation? Same with threats. A threat is a statement or the presence of an intention to inflict damage, injury, or pain on someone. Beyond specific intent, what in the content of speech indicates this? A person may utter a racial epithet, but what in his utterance constitutes a threat? Isn’t the content indicating a threat independent of other content? Finally, abusive speech is speech a person finds extraordinarily insulting or offensive. For example, a Muslim may find a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban insulting or offensive. So what? He should get over it. And if he cuts off the cartoonists head over the cartoon, it should be the murder that should be punished.

Isn’t enhancing a penalty because of the content of the speech really punishing somebody for speech? Isn’t that thought crime?

* * *

Speaking of hate, Congresswoman Rashid Tlaib recently made a connection between the situation in Palestine and the situation in Detroit. “We also need to recognize—and this is for me as a Palestinian American—we also need to recognize as I think about my family and Palestine that continue to live under military occupation and how that really interacts with this beautiful Black city that I grew up in.”

What is the connection? Tlaib is often not clear in her words (she is, frankly, a stupid and unstable person), but she says a lot here so let’s take a look at it.

“You know, I always tell people cutting people off from water is violence from Gaza to Detroit,” Tlaib said. “And it’s a way to control people, to oppress people. And it’s those structures that we continue to fight against.” What are these structures? Is it the structure of capitalism? The structure of racism? How do structures cut off people from water? Don’t people cut off people from water? Who are those people? Are they capitalists? Racists?

Progressives are supposed to know who she is talking about. “I know that you all understand the structure that we’ve been living under right now is designed by those that exploit the rest of us for their own profit,” she said. Now we are getting down to it. There are people who designed the structure that cuts off people from water. And they do a lot more evil than just that. “I don’t care if it’s the issue around global human rights and our fight to free Palestine or to pushing back against those that don’t believe in the minimum wage or those that believe that people have a right to health care and so much more.”

So there is a group who has designed a structure that explains all these oppressions: the occupation of Palestine, the effort to thwart a minimum wage hike, the effort to prevent universal health care. Tlaib explains: “if you open the curtain and look behind the curtain, it’s the same people that make money and, yes they do, off of racism, off of these broken policies.” She continued: “There is someone there making money and you saw it!” There, behind a curtain. Can you see him? The Great and Powerful Oz? I think Tlaib thinks he is a Jew. Isn’t the Jew behind the occupation of Palestine? The same person who is behind the occupation it behind the situation in Detroit. Tlaib said so.

I have no problem criticizing capitalists. But when you announce a rant with “As a Palestinian American” and tell your audience that the same forces behind the Israeli occupation of Palestine are behind bad things happening to minorities across the world, and then claim that this is all the result of a structure they designed for profit, including the oppression of black people, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to hear a reference to a certain notorious cabal trope. Remember when Tlaib said that the slaughter of millions of Jews gives her a “calming feeling”?

Tlaib sounds like Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. It appears Detroit elected an antisemite.

Today’s blog is a long essay on contemporary totalitarian monopoly capitalism, or what one might identify as the New Fascism. (I would say neofascism, but that term is taken to mean something like the old fascism dislocated in time. The New Fascism, while displaying some novel features, is more like old fascism than neofascism, which is more like petty white supremacy with a Nazi fetish. The New Fascism is systemic rather than idiosyncratic.) Transcending national boundaries, and representing a revolution-from-above, the New Fascism is the emerging social logic and political-ideological character of transnational corporate power and governance, represented in the United States by the Democratic Party and its establishment allies in the Republican Party (neoconservatives and neoliberals), the Big Tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, the extended technocratic apparatus operated by the New Middle Class, i.e., the professional managerial strata, which includes cultural managers (such as academics), pushed by progressive policy and politics. An example of technocratic rule is seen in the medical-industrial complex—the dictatorship of the institutions of public health and associated regulatory bodies captured by the pharmaceutical industry.

Like the old fascism, New Fascist social logic is profoundly illiberal and undemocratic in character. Working in the manner of Gramscian-style hegemony, the New Fascism produces an authoritarian subjectivity that colonizes lifeworlds across the class structure. The imaginaries of this subjectivity have become so reified that reason and evidence no longer work to persuade those who “believe science is real.” This has been achieved by a constellation of mind control tactics: banning, blacklisting, cancellation, censorship, deplatforming, gaslighting, marginalization, othering, social distancing, stigmatization, and even violence. Corporations have cultivated an army of commissars, organic intellectuals devoted to political education and organization housed in academic, cultural, political, and social institutions. Crucial to this strategy of social control is the irregular army of activists, trained and guided by the progressive intelligentsia, who, on college campuses and across social media platforms, bully, dox, gaslight, intimidate, shame, and assault those who defend democratic and liberal values. In this “woke” view of things, reason and evidence are either indicators of forms of hate and oppression or claimed as the exclusive purview of the technocratic corps. Any tactic used against dissenters is fair game and are either explicitly or implicitly encouraged by elites.

After an introduction framing the problem in terms of group antagonisms functional to the redistribution of wealth, the essay is divided into three sections. The first section covers the United Nations report Agenda for Transformative Change Towards Racial Justice and Equity, a document condemning the trans-Atlantic domain as systemically and violently racist and effectively calling for the expropriation of the white majority. The second section is a critique of Sheldon Wolin’s arguments presented in his 2003 book Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I critique the book in order to adumbrate a framework useful for detecting fascism in contexts beyond its historical forms. Wolin is exemplary of a man willing to risk ridicule and marginalization to alert the citizens of the United States to the emerging totalitarian condition. The third and final section summarizes the Marxist theory of fascism, leaning in particular on Franz Neumann’s conception of “totalitarian monopoly capitalism,” presented in his landmark 1942 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. Working comparatively, I apply the Neumann conception of national socialism to the modern context in light of selected Wolin’s insights to sketch an analysis of the New Fascism. These sections are followed by a brief conclusion. The conclusion is brief because the foregoing makes the problem obvious.

* * *

“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided,” Karl Marx reminds us in Capital (see The Trinity Formula, Volume III). His target of criticism is vulgar economy, but we can apply this truism to other domains of reality. In this essay, I apply it to totalitarian monopoly capitalism, the foundation of national socialism in Nazi-era Germany Franz Neumann conceptualizes in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism but which has not perished in the interim only globalized. The fascism of today is distinguished from its past manifestations by dissimilarities that mask its presence but do not negate it. The way to see the current order of things for what it is really is is by critically examining economic foundation and political imperative, as well as cultural and social logics generated by political-economic systems. For this task I rely on the Marxist method of studying history and social structure, known as the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. (See Historical Materialism and the Struggle For Freedom; The Marxian Theory of History; The Problem of Scientism and its Solution in Historical Materialism.)

Given the unsubtle way fascism advances, there are surface tells that should immediately indicate its presence. One of the notable ways authoritarianism operates is by demonization and scapegoating, tactics that involve identifying an individual or a group in a population around which the state and corporation can generate moral panic and mass hysteria and on which it can blame the hardships of the vulnerable citizen. This way freedom can be exchanged for the illusion of security. To be sure, these tactics are found in other political systems. Theocracies, for example, demonize and scapegoat. However, fascism uses these tactics in a technologically-advanced bureaucratic order. (See The Metaphysics of the Antiracist Inquisition and Scapegoating in the Era of Inverted Totalitarianism for analyses of this in contemporary instantiations. For a conceptual overview of authoritarianism versus libertarianism left and right, see The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism.)

In the case of Nazi Germany, propagandists of national socialism portrayed Jews as a privileged race possessing an outsized share of Germany’s wealth allegedly acquired through the exploitation of the non-Jewish population. This portrayal has become the paradigm tactic of manufacturing and leveraging tribal stigma. The Nazis rode antisemitism to power in 1933. A 1938 Nazi law, “Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property,” compelled Jews to register their wealth with the state. “Aryanization” enabled the expropriation of European Jewry. In Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, historian Götz Aly shows us that “Aryanization was essentially a gigantic, trans-European trafficking operation.”

Readers of this blog may recall an essay I penned last July titled Reparations and Blood Guilt, inspired by the brilliant young intellectual Coleman Hughes, wherein I noted the problem of attempting to account for the wealth gap between Jews and Gentiles in the present trans-Atlantic system. Try that today, I suggested, and see whether you escape suspicion of entertaining an antisemitic trope. Maybe not. Maybe the audience will understand your comparison as providing an explanation for why Jews, like the Chinese and the Koreans, are collectively successful compared to American Indians and blacks. But it is more likely that you will encounter raised eyebrows. To many ears, it will sound like an insinuation.

Yet there appears to be no problem with accounting for the wealth gap between whites and blacks by denying any cultural differences in attitudes to school and work and instead claiming that whites enjoy a racial privilege at the expense of black Americans. An appeal to average differences across a spectrum of economic and social indicators is the standard method of substantiating this privilege, although there is sometimes some extra effort made to reveal various institutional impediments to black wealth accumulation, what Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro characterize in their 1995 Black Wealth/White Wealth as the “racialization of state policy,” citing, for example, de jure segregation. Make these appeals in public and you will be safe from accusations of racism. Object to them and risk a white fragility diagnosis and quite possibility a racist reputation. (See For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations; A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations. See also my most recent blog God is Everywhere—On the Ontology of Systemic Racism and the Faith-Belief of the Progressive.)

Often those who make these arguments, like the Nazi propagandists working the Jewish problem, locate the locus of injustice in the genes of the race accused of perpetrating a great injustice. According to critical race theory, an ideology meeting with opposition from citizens testifying at school boards across the nation, America is a racist country—institutionally, systemically, structurally, and apparently spiritually. Critical race theory conceptualizes the worldview that reproduces this racism as “perpetrator’s perspective.” This perspective is the outlook that embodies the enlightenment principles of reason and evidence in the adjudication of guilt and responsibility of individuals, in which there is a presumption of innocence in any accusation of wrongdoing with the accuser shouldering the burden to show that the accused is culpable and acted intentionally. 

The word “perpetrator” gives away the game. The enlightenment principles are racist, CRT advocates contend, because they work to protect the interests of white people. Until whites publicly confess their sin and devote their lives to the cause of antiracism, living a life of staying in their lane and giving up their privileges, they remain racist. All this may not be enough (it certainly hasn’t so far). As Robin DiAngelo reminds us: “Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It’s the way that we are,” you know, in the same way Jews are greedy, lecherous, menacing, stingy, spiritually stunted. Jews built a world in which those racial traits are realized as power and wealth that accrues to their tribe. It’s just the way they are. It’s hard not to come back to the analogy. (No wonder some Jews are wondering whether they should self-identify as white.)

On the other side, those who see the world through the “victim’s perspective” remain victims until the legal system shifts the burden of proof and implicates an abstract and largely arbitrary aggregate, organized as a demographic category, as automatically and collectively guilty and responsible for their victimhood. The formula cannot avoid yielding the conclusion that all whites are perpetrators and all blacks their victims. This is what happens when those living in academic bubbles hypostatize abstract categories and subsume them into quasi religious theory of racial justice. It is an invitation to hate and violence.

Another of fascism’s surface tells is the presence of street gangs who bully those whose political opinions threaten the designs of the elites restructuring the social order. In today’s fascism, black-clad fascist street gangs go by the name “Antifa” (see The Problem with Antifascism). Admittedly, that the fascist thugs on the streets call themselves by their antithesis does reflect a desire to conceal the true character of actors and actions. But given how transparent their fascism becomes even upon cursory reflection (it helps to be deal with these matters forthrightly), antifascism, like antiracism, amounts to a rather explicit signal of fascism’s return.

All this is given cover by the extended state apparatus. Security state officials and corporate media personalities shower rightwing extremism with attention while shielding Antifa from criticism. President Joe Biden denies Antifa is an organization. They are an “idea,” he informs us. His Attorney General, Merrick Garland, presents the far right as the outstanding threat to American democracy. The US military is scouring its ranks to identify and root out white supremacists. The media generalizes this to conservative America. January 6, 2021 is the new 9-11. Worse, in the eyes of some. Forgetting Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, and 9-11, Biden characterizes 1-6 as the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War. As a result, the public mind is rather unsure of the relative threats confronting them. (See Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism; Antifa and the Boogaloos: Condemning Political Violence Left and Right; Buried Lede: Biden Fails to Condemn Antifa at First Presidential Debate.) To make this clear in one’s mind, consider the dozens of dead, thousands of injured, and millions in property damage perpetrated by antifascists and Black Lives Matter rioters (see Gaslighting Last Summer’s Riots and the Law Enforcement Response). Also, United 93 was aimed at the Capitol.

In this essay, I go beyond the surface tells and show how today’s totalitarian monopoly capitalism, the identity of fascism’s deep structure analyzed by Neumann in Behemoth, despite differences compared to its historical forms, is nonetheless a species of the genre, replete with (albeit rejiggered) racial animosity. I argue that the current manifestation of fascism is a more insidious instantiation because dissimilitude involves a shift in hegemonic strategy that renders its character elusive. An elaborate racialist ideology has been constructed to blame whites for the problems of the modern world in order to rationalize a solution for these (often manufactured) problems: appropriating the wealth of whites and redistributing it to Africans and their descendants, a practice going under the name of, among others, “social justice” (see the World Economic Forum’s July 29, 2020 document The great reset must place social justice at its centre; see also Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment).

Under the New Fascism, the reactionary and ultra-ethnonationalist traits of historic fascism are covered by a rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusivity that feigns an ethic of fairness, dress planners condition the populace to find favorable, even desirable. Beneath the cloak, however, authoritarian desire is realized, as it was in the past, by portraying as perpetrators and oppressors the desired targets of marginalization and oppression. The propagandists have prepared the world to see resistance to expropriation as the work of those who have ever always wanted to be, and who will forever always be, the fascist rabble. All this obfuscates, to lean on Aly’s phraseology, a gigantic, trans-Atlantic trafficking operation in which the wealth disproportionately held by the white majorities across the Europe-based system, but who nonetheless comprise less than ten percent of the global population, is expropriated by transnational political and economic elites who feign redistribution to nonwhites through the form of capital investments and entrenchment of technocratic modes of control.

* * *

Understanding today’s fascist formation is pressing in light of the recent United Nations report praising countermovements progressives have organized against the working class in preparing the world for a transformational moment explicitly along racial lines. The June report, Agenda for transformative change towards racial justice and equality, builds on several decades of accumulating anti-white sentiment, attitudes that are currently being mainstreamed and normalized by critical race theory and the prevailing form of corporatist ideology generally, namely progressivism. The authors of the report, housed in the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner’s office, call on the West to “make amends” to Africans and their descendants, representing George Floyd, who died at the end of may of 2020 in the presence of police officers attempting to affect an arrest, as a martyr for the cause of the racial reckoning it envisions. (You may recall that Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi thanked Floyd for making his sacrifice to the cause.) Elites stage the moment by portraying whites as racist perpetrators and blacks as a sacred victim race called by providence to a historic mission to negate white supremacy, a task that requires the dismantling of the modern nation-state (see The Myth of White Culture; see also Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning).

“Stop denying and start dismantling” is step one in the report, a slogan that at once manufactures the sort of truth that only perpetrators deny (the confessional paradox) and indicates what’s to be dismantled. Describing the plan as “comprehensive,” the report calls for “‘whole-of-society’ reforms,” euphemism for revolution-from-above. Because perpetrators cannot be trusted to carry out the plan for social justice, elite planners call for establishing beyond those governments presumed to be white supremacist “independent institutions to monitor and report on how those commitments are met.” In other words, elites mean to sidestep democratically-elected governments and put the project in the hands of technocrats. Evoking the supernatural doctrine of collective epistemic privilege, the technocrats will be drawn from the subaltern strata of the Third World, who, the report tells us, have superior insight because of their existence as the victims of colonialism and history. Deny that and you are a racist. Put another way: subalterns dependably perform the collaborator role. This is not unlike the way a king secures hegemony. We saw this phenomenon during the colonial and imperialist phases of capitalist development. It is now shifting form with globalization.

Determination of inequities that will form the basis of redistribution will be reckoned using “comprehensive data disaggregated by race or ethnic origin, gender, age, and other factors,” which readers of this blog know predictably show group disparities that have no logical bearing on the matters of justice that necessarily exist at the level of concrete individuals and rationally-adjudicated personal accountability. Of course, the explanation for inequalities must already be determined since the “remedy” has already been announced. (See Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards.) The explanation and the remedy are pushed out by the extended transnational state through its various organs—academe, the culture industry, mass media, etc.

The report advances its agenda under the cover of the myth of police violence, manufacturing the perception of unchecked violence against the descendants of Africans by calling for an “end of impunity” without any actual or adequate proof of unchecked racial violence. Authoritarianism proceeds by assertion and disinformation. For example, the report cherrypicks fewer that 200 deaths at the hands of police officers to illustrate a claim that law enforcement officers are rarely held accountable for rights violations and crimes against people of African descent. To give you a sense of the degree of selective generalization, keep in mind that police in the United States shoot roughly one thousand people every year. However, I have already shown that there is no systemic racism in policing shootings (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters). My claims are supported by a wealth of empirical studies. Indeed, there is little evidence of racism in the greater criminal justice system (see Again, The Myth of the Racist Criminal Justice System).

Apparently unaware that black men in the United States, despite comprising only around six percent of the US population, commit more than half of all murders and robberies and more than a third of serious violent crimes overall, Mona Rishmawi of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, denounces the practice of “associating blackness with criminality.” I am not endorsing the view that this association should be made. But the way to change perception of the association between black males and serious crime, which is inferred from well-established empirical patterns, is not by censoring racial disparities in serious criminal offending, but by eliminating those disparities, in part through greater policing. Yet we are seeing a trend across Europe and North America to prevent disclosure and even collection of data indicating minority overrepresentation in crime. (See Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History).

The report demands “reparatory justice” that involves not only “acknowledging the truth” (that, again, it does not establish) but “justice and reparations with regard to enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism and their legacies,” events that occurred centuries ago and were a regular part of the world at the time of America’s founding. Targeting of the Christian West is quite obvious in light of the facts of slavery in world history. (Ask yourself, will Muslims be asked to pay reparations for slavery and the slave trade? Do you know about the Islamic world-system and the creation of modern slavery?) The authors of the report call for the construction of an official account of history that justify its confiscatory agenda: “Create, reinforce and fully fund national and other processes to construct a shared narrative on enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism and their lasting consequences for Africans and people of African descent.” We see here the UN internationalizing Hannah Nikole Jones’ notorious 1619 Project, a project that revises history by centering blacks in the transatlantic narrative while depicting white Europeans as the great historic evil. The anti-European motive behind the project is obvious in the historical narrative it wishes to establish as the truth of the past. (See my Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It and The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic.)

According the Associated Press, “The report, a year in the making, hopes to build on momentum around the recent, intensified scrutiny worldwide about the blight of racism and its impact on people of African descent as epitomized by the high-profile killings of unarmed Black people in the United States and elsewhere.” Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, hails the work of “advocacy groups,” for example Black Lives Matter, saying they provided “grassroots leadership through listening to communities” and that they should receive “funding, public recognition and support.” As we know, while it spread misinformation about the criminal justice system, BLM enjoys an embarrassment of riches in funding, recognition, and corporate support (see Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological).

Commissioner Rishmawi, who practiced law from 1981 to 1991 in the West Bank as a senior member of the human rights organization al Haq, reported, “We could not find a single example of a state that has fully reckoned with the past or comprehensively accounted for the impacts of the lives of people of African descent today.” (Has there ever been or could there ever be a full reckoning with the past anywhere? What would that look like?) In what she characterizes as an “untenable situation, Rishmawi said Bachelet’s team found “a main part of the problem is that many people believe the misconceptions that the abolition of slavery, the end of the transatlantic trade and colonialism have removed the racially discriminatory structures built by those practices,” a belief, she claimed that, upon examination, was found not to be true. But it is a matter of fact the United States not only removed the racially discriminatory structures more than half a century ago, but it also embarked on an extensive program of reparations transferring trillions of dollars to black Americans. As Glenn Loury and John McWhorter explain, not only did the United States already do reparations, reparations is a bad idea.

For what purpose is all this? As if it is not already clear enough, Bachelet emphasizes in a video message the need for acknowledgement of injustices, apologies, educational reforms, memorialization, rehabilitation, and restitution. In other words, a world project to portray white people as a pariah, to demonize and scapegoat them, in order to advance an agenda of expropriation.

UN Human Rights Chief @mbachelet urges immediate, transformative action to uproot systemic racism in new report casting a spotlight on violations of economic, social, cultural, civil & political rights suffered by people of #AfricanDescent 👉 https://t.co/nYLi1Dqj4r#FightRacism pic.twitter.com/RobMCs79CY

— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) June 28, 2021

That the ambitions are greater than fleecing the white majority of the United States is obvious in a recent article in Time magazine, “Racism In America Should Not Take Center Stage in the Global Fight Against White Supremacy.” The author, Chandran Nair, is the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow. His latest book is Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World (expected to be released December 2021). Imagining a surge of white supremacy across the West, Nair cites UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres characterization of white supremacy as one of the biggest challenges facing the world. According to Nair, the source of the surge is “the need to retain white global economic power at all costs.” “[D]ismantling these will not be easy,” he writes, “as they are the very same structures on which the modern world is built.” In other words, the West is inherently racist and must be dismantled and its expropriated by nonwhites.

Nair cites this as an example of the way racist views of Western leaders have factored into major decisions, including acts of aggression: “Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said ‘We think the price is worth it’ after being asked if the death of half a million Iraqi children as a result of sanctions was acceptable.” As detestable as Albright’s words are (and I have publicly criticized them), they have nothing to do with race. Iraqi is a nationality. (To learn about what Iraq was really about, see my War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy.)

Nair feigns shock (or is he ignorant?) that “[g]iven the intensity of the race discussion in the U.S., it is surprising that critical race theory (which describes how social structures and cultural norms help perpetuate white privilege) is not applied at a global level.” He didn’t read the report I have been discussing? That is surprising. But it is also useful to his thesis, since he claims that race is rarely mentioned in “explanations as to why, even in the 21st century, leaders of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund must be nominated by the U.S. and Europe.” Of course, this has nothing to do with race, either—except that Nair wants to dismantle the system of international finance for the sake of his racialist worldview. (I want to dismantle these institutions, as well, but not for the reasons Nair wants to.) Nair writes, “There is poor understanding of how white privilege operates outside the U.S. and Europe. In fact, there is a danger in placing American race-based oppression at the center of global discussions on white supremacy. Let’s be explicit: racial oppression in the U.S. is the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper and more harmful global phenomenon of white privilege that has for too long been conveniently ignored. The application of critical race theory and other insights into structured discrimination would help unravel much about how white privilege operates on the world stage.”

Nair is attempting to explain underdevelopment not on the basis of transnational corporate power and social class dynamics but on the basis of race. People outside the West do not have little because of the world capitalist system or because their cultural value are inadequate for progress, on this view, but rather people outside the West trail the West because they have been kept down by white supremacists who, on account of this, owe nonwhites reparations. I wrote about this in June, 2019, in an essay Reparations and Open Borders, in which I take to task Suketu Mehta who, in his The New York Times op-ed, affirms his support for reparations. It is crucial to the argument Nair and Mehta are making that the modern value of secular and independent nation-states be made the equivalent of white supremacy, since to recognize the intrinsic colorblindness of civil nationalism would be to have the actual explanation for the success of the West, which at once causes their argument to evaporate.

“Ending white privilege can start only if we have a global debate about what has been a taboo subject in international relations and business,” writes Nair. He then reassures us that “Western institutions should not see this as an attack on white people or something rooted in anti-white or anti-Western sentiments.” Yet it is “necessary to expose white privilege everywhere, not just because it is an injustice, but because by working to dismantle it, we will be creating a post-Western world that is fairer, has less conflict, is more united and is better able to respond to the existential challenges facing humanity.” In the same breath, Nair tells us that there is no anti-Western sentiments in his argument but that the modern world, based on white supremacy, must yield to a “post-Western world.” He tells us that this world will be fairer, more harmonious, and more unified. Does anybody looking at the non-Western world today (or anytime in the past) see this utopia manifest? Will we elevate the rights of women by subordinating the modern world to or equalizing it with, for example, Islamic values?

Nair and his ilk are useful idiots. There is a much larger agenda here: a power and wealth grab by global elites, transnational corporations, and world financiers. These elites seek pools of public money to make investments in the third world in order to reap profits without risk or sacrifice. The rate of profit makes clear that capitalism not longer works, so elites have been moving to extract the wealth contained in the high level of economic and social development of western societies—built primarily from the value produced by the entrepreneurs and working classes of the transatlantic system, the vast majority of whom are white.

Elites are pursuing the managed decline of the West. This is a project to turn the citizen proletariat into subject serfs in a corporatist neofeudalist world order in which the global lords will possess their wealth (see Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics). Elites aim to make into modern-day dependents the descendants of those who brought the world out of serfdom. And it won’t only be the descendants of Europeans who will lose their freedom. It will be all those who have only their labor commodity to sell (see Systemic Classism: An Actual System of Privilege). There is another name for the emerging world order: fascism.

* * *

“Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” —Tommy Douglas

Because so many people have been conditioned to hear descriptions of the world the Party of Davos envisions as the work of conspiratorial thinking (of course, there are conspiracies, but this is hardly a secretive cabal, as the audacity of the World Economic Forum makes abundantly clear), I want to assure you that I am not just some guy on the Internet telling tall tales. A tenured political sociologist with expertise in political economy and law and society, I am qualified to make this argument. In 2005, I published, alongside chapters by William Blum and Noam Chomsky, the essay “War Hawks and the Ugly American: the Origins of Bush’s Central Asia and Middle East policy,” in the book Devastating society: the Neo-conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice, carried by Pluto Press (my essay appeared also in the Germanic, Arabic, and Indonesian languages). I teach a range of political sociological courses, including Freedom and Social Control, Power and Change in America, and Law and Society. I have blogged extensively on the problems of corporatism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and technocracy here on Freedom and Reason. (See, for example, The Actual Bifurcation Points: Seeing the World in Real Terms; The Cynical Appeal to Expertise; Why I am not a Progressive.)

I am also not the only qualified person to see the fascist streak running through the United States and the world. Back in 2003, in his Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton politics professor Sheldon Wolin described a system of managed democracy in which corporations effectively assume control of the US government and administrative state. The situation is marked by a shift from the “constitutional imaginary,” which “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable and constrained” to a “power imaginary” that strives to “override the boundaries mandated by the constitutional imaginary.” Wolin sees in these efforts the Hobbesian impulse of “rationalizing the quest for power and giving it political form.” He correctly sees contemporary establishment ideologies, for example neoconservatism, as operating from a Hobbesian worldview.

As with historical fascism, exceeding constitutional limits is accomplished in part through the identification of enemies and manufacture of fear. At the time Wolin developed his model (I was writing my essay on the neocons in the same year), the neoconservatives were obsessed with international terrorism and (selected) rogue nations. The strategy, Wolin explains, simultaneously constrained democracy domestically while projecting the United States globally as “Superpower,” a state that moved beyond the constraints of international law, operating, if you will, in a state of nature. “While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots,” writes Wolin, “Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries.” He contends that the situation “is Nazism turned upside-down, ‘inverted totalitarianism.’” “While it is a system that aspires to totality,” he writes, “it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a ‘master race’ (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the ‘ideal’.”

“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.” —Sheldon Wolin, Democracy, Inc.

This is a managed democracy, the application of illiberal and undemocratic managerial methods to the practice of politics. Managed democracy is a pathology of corporate governance. Progressives embody these politics and thus represent the party of technocratic command and control. Illiberal pronouncements and practices that mark COVID-19 pandemic provides ready examples of technocratic desire. That citizens have dutifully and unquestioningly obeyed the pronouncements of unelected officials in the institutes of public health is shocking not only in the way the latter’s edicts so obviously trampled liberty and thwarted democracy but in how many members of the public were so ready to organize and apply the techniques of social coercion to manipulate their fellow citizens. (Priming for Control: How Mass Psychology is Used to Transform Lifeworlds; A Dark and Authoritarian Path is Paved by Pathologizing Humanity; The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg; What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire; What’s the Big Deal With Wearing a Mask? Lots; The Communitarian Nightmare We Feared is Here; Somehow, a Bill of Rights got Locked into the Constitution.)

Wolin shows how elections in the United States are orchestrated stage-managed affairs, providing only the illusion of choice. Have you wondered why progressives are depicting challenges to the 2020 election as violative of the tradition of peaceful transfer of power even when Trump peacefully made room for the new occupant of the White House? (A Peaceful Transition of Political Power.) Because Trump was not a member of the establishment and his objections to the way the 2020 election was conducted cast doubts on the legitimacy of the status quo. The wrong man won. A populist and nationalist, Trump does not represent the transnationalist interests (The Rate Of Exploitation Under Trump). The establishment portrays him not only as standing outside the structure of global corporatism but beyond the moral pale (The “Fascist” and “Racist” President Trump; The Establishment Push to Derail Trump’s Re-election). And elites have moved to throw the tens of millions Trump fans beyond moral order, as well (Suppressing the Rabble: Portraying Conservatism and Republicanism as Fringe and Dangerous).

Life in a society organized by the imperatives of corporate bureaucracy means that the public is steered in politics the way it is steered in the consumption of goods and services. Market rationalization is reflected in the rationalization of social life. This is an administered life, bureaucracy made cozy even as neoliberal policies produce widespread insecurity, generalized anxiety from which fear and the need for secular religion (what you know as “Wokism”) is more easily engendered. In this scheme, corporations assume many of the functions of government, privatization effectively relocating political power from the citizenry to the boardrooms of large business firms, which, since transnational corporate power drives world development, allows for the social logic of control to globalize. The dynamic of corporate governance is moved by imperatives alien to the stakeholders, imperatives such as efficiency, calculability, uniformity, predictability, and control, all for the sake of stockholder profit. Society is largely managed by unelected administrators and expert managers. A technocratic system has no room for democracy. This is high-tech fascism. (Although he is responsible for much of the perversion of Marxism that marks the New Left and critical theory, the Frankfurt scholar Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a useful analysis of the way in which the masses are controlled by corporate technocratic power. You will find my critique in the following blogs: The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse; Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory? See also the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.)

There is a lot to Wolin’s thesis, but it is not perfect. His identification of Bush and the neoconservatives as the force “effecting the transformation to a fascist-like state” is too partisan. His essay, “Inverted Totalitarianism,” published in The Nation on May Day 2003, is a ready example of how political affinity can lead the smartest people astray. His characterization of Republicans as “a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority” does not anticipate the populist grassroots revolt that would break out on the national scene with the Tea Party (granting some astroturfing*) and, later, with the campaign and election of Donald Trump and the America First movement. Clairvoyance was not necessary here. The signs were there for anybody paying attention during the 1990s (Ross Perot and others and even Trump himself). Charitably, this is at best, albeit useful, a woefully incomplete picture of the political reality. Moreover, albeit perhaps easier to see in hindsight, George W. Bush and the Project for a New American Century crowd (again, see my “War Hawks” essay) were part of the same establishment as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama, which Bush’s rehabilitation by the Democratic Party and the woke media makes clear. After all, the neocons studied at the feet of Democratic Senator Scoop Jackson.

Wolin’s characterization of the Democrats as having “shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism” doesn’t acknowledge the establishment of which Democrats had long been a part—going all the way back to the birth of progressivism, which, as I have shown, is the ideology of corporate governance (see Why I am not a Progressive; America at a Crossroads: Corporations Poised to Take Control of the Republic). “In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party,” writes Wolin, “the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home.” One often sees affinity in disappointment. I see it all around me in the academy among those who can still be critical of political power. For all their insight, they cannot see the Democratic Party for what it is. They still think of it as “their side.” It’s a reflex. Wolin’s disappointment is revealing.

Richard Grossman, director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, understood inverted totalitarianism as progressivism’s triumph over populism, the latter an attempt to bring power back to the people, to make government accountable to concerns closer to them. Grossman lay out his argument in several talks available on the Internet (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”). In his account, progressivism, its institutionalization totalized under the Roosevelt Administration in the crisis of depression and war, vanquished populism, or, more accurately, banished it to conservative circles, and with it labor democracy. This was the roots of the war on labor and the left Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pursued in earnest, laying the groundwork for the aggressive transnationalization of the corporate establishment, successive administrations moving farm and factory overseas and drawing cheap labor here to replace American workers, ceding national sovereignty to the international order of financial innovators. In a word, globalization. (Go back and look at that world rate of profit chart.)

“Bear in mind,” Wolin writes, “that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.” This is true. But it misidentifies the “ruthless, ideological driven party.” It’s not the Republican Party. Certainly not any more, Mitch McConnell not withstanding. The Democratic Party is the tip of the spear of the totalitarian thrust. Wolin’s error here is also one of disciplinary myopia. He is bringing political science to bear on questions that require that tools of critical political economy and political sociology. I am referring to the methods of historical materialism (classical Marxism) of which I earlier spoke and the lens C. Wright Mills focuses on such problems, found in his landmark The Power Elite.

* * *

“Fascism should more appropriately be called ‘corporatism’ because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” This quote is often attributed to Benito Mussolini. I have found no evidence that Mussolini actually said this. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he did. As I will show, the corporatist approach that marks fascism also marks social democratic governance and it always rests upon the foundation of monopoly capitalism. Crucially, fascism is distinguished from other corporatist forms by its erasure of effective multiparty and local democracy, advocacy for and implementation of social policy prescriptions based on ethnicity, race, religion, and other identitarian categories, and aggressively censorious and illiberal attitudes towards speech, through, and association.

What do we mean by “corporatism”? The concept of corporatism in European political thought apprehends and advocates a system in which groups, drawn from various sectors of society (academe, agriculture, banking, clergy, industry, labor), organize society on the basis of their common interests. The idea is that the emergent order will be organic and focus ethnic or national essence. There is a progressive version of this, wherein business, government, and labor are drawn into a tripartite power arrangement. This arrangement is usually referred to as social democratic corporatism or simply social democracy. Technically, then, corporatism does not refer to corporations in the sense of a particular form of business entity, distinguished by legal personhood and limited liability. The terms “corporatocracy” or “corpocracy” are suggested instead to describe a society under the thumb of corporate power.

The terms “corporatocracy” or “corpocracy” are seldom heard, for one thing, because they are hard to pronounce and sound like so much jargon. So people more often refer to corporate rule using the term “corporatism.” This is not necessarily lazy or sloppy terminology. When fascism and national socialism are examined using the materialist conception of history, again, a method in which the ideological, legal, and political components of the superstructure are conceptualized as emergent from and taking a form necessary to secure and advance the interests of economic elites, one can show that corporatist society is at the same time corporatocracy. As I have suggested, this is also true of social democracies. Corporatism is the merger of state and corporate power, with corporate power representing the locus of command and control. We may therefore dispense with cumbersome vocabulary.

In Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, Leon Trotsky describes fascism as an attempt by monopoly capitalism to organize in totalitarian fashion the whole of society. The fascist imperative is to disorganize the proletariat in order to weaken class consciousness and political organization, break labor’s resistance to exploitation, drive down wages, raise the rate of profit, and restore high levels of capital accumulation. Franz Neumann, in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, makes the point that, in a monopolistic system, totalitarian political power is necessary to sustain high levels of profit. He describes national socialism as “totalitarian monopoly capitalism.” (This is why conservatives are so confused about fascism’s character: they do not, or perhaps can not distinguish corporatism and socialism. They are especially thrown by progressive or social democratic corporatism. And they cannot see the People’s Republic of China for that it is, not a communist society but a society organized by totalitarian monopoly capitalism. The left is also confused, seeing progressivism as standing across from fascism, but progressivism is the chief illiberal and technocratic political force in the West of the moment.)

The totalitarian mode of capitalism is marked by the centralization and concentration of capital, organized by a network of banks and corporations supported by the administrative apparatus of the state and major societal institutions—the academy, media (real and make-believe), and religion. But it is also marked by a definite subjectivity. Erich Fromm (in Escape from Freedom) and Theodore Adorno (in The Authoritarian Personality) identify the development and proliferation under these circumstances of an authoritarian personality type that socializes illiberal attitudes and suppresses criticisms of corporate state power, thus facilitating the entrenchment of totalitarian social relations. It is important to grasp this to understand the agency-structure dynamic. (See Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me and A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer for analyses of this tendency in contemporary society.)

Crucially, while national socialism, by encouraging resentment of others, draws disaffected labor into its ranks on the basis of racist and ethnic appeals, it is neither proletarian nor peasant in character. Organized by industrial and finance capital, its popular base is the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie, flanked by disaffected workers and peasants in subordinate roles. These popular forces are reactionary in character, opposing liberal values of freedom of association and assembly, cognitive liberty, and the right to privacy. Fascism stands up a force opposed to the proletarian movement that seeks to expand democracy, deepen positive freedom, and develop more fully the human personality. Fascism turns worker against worker.

Working through the dominant cultural, political, and social institutions, banks and corporations are organizing the whole of society in a totalitarian fashion. However, this time, it is not working from a nationalist basis. Transnational capital, that is, global corporate power and high finance, is reordering the world. Centralized political power, which characterized historic fascism, has been dissimulated through neoliberalism, pushing state functions out into the private sphere where they are controlled more directly by corporations, entities that are bureaucratic and undemocratic by nature. Through corporate governance the totalitarian logic of undemocratic bureaucratic organization is pressed more deeply into the system. The fascists have dispensed with dictator and one-party rule and moved to directly control the people, who are, in turn, no long citizens but consumers. (For the importance of the nation-state to human freedom, see Capitalist Globalization and the Promise of Democratic-Republicanism.) Wolin’s argument captures well this aspect of the problem.

The ethnic and racial character of the new fascism is very much evident in ideology and practice. In the current fascist moment, state monopoly capitalism is not appealing to the racial or ethnic majority, but rather to a constellation of racial and ethnic minorities it has assembled and courted over several decades and from whom it foments and expects resentment against the majority. Just as with historic fascism, the new fascism condemns the liberal and uniting ethic of colorblindness for the illiberal and divisive tactic colorfulness (Colorblindness versus Colorfulness and the Big Trick; The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). Weaponizing the subaltern is not a new fascist tactic. Marx and Engels warned the working class of risk of the lumpenproletariat being pressed into reactionary service (Marxist Theories of Criminal Justice and Criminogenesis; Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect). We see this in the high proportion of the violent Antifa and BLM who have criminal records.

Today’s fascism has jettisoned the petty bourgeoisie; since it is globalist, it needs the nationalist attitude no longer. Indeed, nationalism is a fetter on the expansion of corporate power and logic. The nation-state and the international system, depicted as moribund, the nationalist attitude portrayed as at least backwards and chauvinistic, are disintegrating in a project of managed decline. In a delegitimizing move, the new fascism portrays the nationalist as racist, the source of obnoxious white supremacy. Conservatives, nationalists, and populists are portrayed as the irregulars of domestic terrorism force (Suppressing the Rabble: Portraying Conservatism and Republicanism as Fringe and Dangerous). Today, the power elite manufacture enemies not merely by fear mongering over domestic terrorism, but by representing those who do not align their consciousness with the political goals of the establishment as among their ranks. They have transformed the patriot as the enemy of the people. Globalism and multiculturalism are represented as enlightened attitudes ushering in a just and progressive world. The strategy of appealing to the Herrenvolk is jettisoned in favor of one that flatters the “other.” (Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism; Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics.)

Transnational corporate power and its functionaries are denationalizing the world while retribalizing the masses (The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). It has retained the middle class, the professional-managerial strata that runs the administrative state, the corporate bureaucracy, and the culture industry, including the intellectual and propaganda services, in order to manage the masses. The Democratic Party in the US, the Labor Party in the UK, and labor parties throughout Europe have shifted their focus from working class politics to the progressive politics of the middle class, shifting the rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusivity. As with fascism of the past, the middle class is crucial to fascist politics. (See also The New Serfdom and its Useful Idiots: Boots Waiting to Stamp on the Face of Humanity; Nationalists and Patriots: Revisiting Orwell’s Worst Essay; The Greater Evil Facing Democracy.)

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The economic elite situated to shape the apparatus is comprised of one or more capitalist class fractions. Because of the complexity of the system—for example, uneven development across geography and history, cyclical character (business and Kondratyev waves)—there are forces that push against and push around these fractions. Along with periodic crises of cultural-political legitimacy, tied in part to cycles and waves, but also to permanent revolution in the mode of production (driven by, among other things, technological change), state and government under capitalism change appearance. In the current period, transnational capitalist fractions represent established power. Populist-nationalist resistance to globalism is gaining momentum. The latter is portrayed as the fascistic force. But this is not so. It is rather the other way around.

The free market rhetoric of globalism and neoliberalism is the grand deceit of the period. It makes little sense anymore to describe corporate capitalists as bourgeois in character. Marx admired the bourgeois values of the Enlightenment save the institution of private capital, which he regarded as preventing the full realization of the self-actualization of man. Corporations and the new middle class of the professional-managerial strata collectively represent the antithesis of the humanist and liberal values of the bourgeois middle classes, including competitive markets. Intellectuals organic to the corporatist order are authoritarian. In academe, the professoriate is only traditionally intellectual in form. In substance, it moves among the cultural managers in the new fascist order.

Seeing fascism for what it is is useful for exposing the false equivalency between fascism and socialism. We hear this charge from conservatives all the time. It’s what causes them to misapprehend state capitalism as socialism, even communism. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s War Room describing the corporatists as “communists.” But fascism and socialism are not the same animals. This is not because of the location of either along the left-right continuum (really more of a result than a cause). Fascism is corporatism with an illiberal character. This illiberal character now includes progressivism. Fascism now appears as leftwing. Don’t let the historic images of the demagogue mislead you. The New Fascism appears leaderless.

Fascism does not represent a popular revolutionary break with the capitalism. If it is revolutionary at all, it represents revolution-from-above. Socialism, in contrast, is a radically different social organization in which those who produce economic value in society own and control the means of production. Socialism is a popular revolutionary break with capitalism, or revolution-from-below. What we seek is economic democracy in order to elevate the working family and make possible access to the freedoms the bourgeois order correctly holds up as universal rights. But until we can move that agenda forward, we must prevent the corporate takeover of Western republics. This means forming a coalition with those capitalist class fractions that defend nationalist values. The New Left has chosen a different comrade. It stands with the fascistic order of totalitarian monopoly capitalism. The real left cannot afford to make that mistake.

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Note: The Tea Party has astroturf elements. Many of its campaigns were organized and paid for by big industrial and financial interests, funneled through basically three Washington organizations: Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, a partner in Ralph Reed’s lobbying firm Century Strategies. FreedomWorks, headed by Dick Armey, and American Solutions for Winning the Future, headed by Newt Gingrich. Gingrich.

Comedy is an excuse to be racist, says self-appointed commissar Robin DiAngelo, publisher of such pulp fiction as White Fragility and, her latest, Nice Racism. DiAngelo declares it appropriate to “punch up” by mocking white people. But it’s racist to mock nonwhites. That’s “punching down.” We’re supposed to believe that a person who doesn’t get racism gets comedy?

It’s not a double standard. The race power myth applies to comedy as much as it applies to crime. Think about it. Blacks can mock whites and even mock other blacks because blacks are in the permanent down position, and progressives like DiAngelo, the white saviors of the Western world, need to stand over their image of a hunkering black with broken chains and wag their pale fingers at other white people. Murder rates can be at Northern Triangle levels in inner-city black neighborhoods, blacks can loot and assault whites in the name of “social justice,” but you’re a racist for suggesting we might hold violent criminals accountable regardless of race. Meanwhile, being born white is to be complicit in the greatest crimes ever perpetrated—crimes prosecuted more than a hundred and fifty and fifty years ago with reparations attached.

Having told us what racism is, DiAngelo is now going explain comedy to us. If you disagree, then you’re fragile. “Comedy is, I think, an excuse to get to be racist, right?” Is it? “I think TV shows like Family Guy and South Park, and maybe a little bit The Simpsons, allowed white people to be racist self-consciously. Like, ‘I know I’m being racist and therefore it doesn’t count and it’s OK.’” Family Guy and South Park are outrageously funny shows. The Simpsons sometimes a little bit funny.

“I don’t think it’s benign to do it in a joking way,” DiAngelo continues. “And there is a concept in comedy called punching up, not down. So if you want to punch up, there are very different power dynamics and it doesn’t hurt in the same way. It doesn’t invoke a deep, deep centuries-long history of oppression when you poke fun at say, white people. But it’s very, very different when you poke fun at people of color.” Why? I presume the answer is “power.” But, again, why?

George Carlin, Bill Burr, Bill Hicks, and Norm McDonald, four of the greatest comedians to ever walk the earth, punch up, down, and sideways. That’s why they are funny. Nothing is sacred. Who is this woke scold to tell them the rules of comedy? Let me presume to tell you the rules. Here’s one: When you tell a joke and nobody laughs, and that happens the next time you tell the joke, and maybe even after that (you can never quite trust the room so you give another go), then maybe you don’t tell the joke at your next gig. You go for laughs (although it seems that Hicks often went for crickets). Your audience is not laughing because they are not white supremacist.

Antiracists are deeply authoritarian. Have you noticed this? Have you noticed how reflexively illiberal they are? One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is a commitment to puritanical standards that suck the joy out of everything. Comedy is racist. Porn is sexist. Etcetera. Laugh and masturbate and you’re racist and sexist. The woke scold hates it when people are having fun. They are joy-eaters.

I have had humorless scolds come by my office because they heard laugher. “What’s so funny?” I was playing Hicks asking God to make rain for forty days and nights to wash the turds from Bill’s body. Remember how you laughed your ass off at Cheech and Chong (“Mr. Stromberg, is it?”), Don Rickles (“Did I get any black on me?”), or Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles)? Have you seen George Carlin’s bit on fat people at the mall? How about Bill Burr sticking it to feminists?

If woke scolds like DiAngelo had their way they wouldn’t just bleep words. They would memory hole that shit. We’d be like House Christians in China praying in our closets—trying not to laugh too loudly. In a cultural revolution, cultural memory is erased and replaced by a gray world fully of busybodies who tell you what to think and what to say. They take screen shots and record conversations. They know better than you.

Woke activists out in the grassroots be like, “You think Blazing Saddles was funny?” Yes, I do. Here’s why: it makes me laugh. But the joy of humor is not the only point. Freedom to offend is one of the main reasons we have free speech. If you are offended, that only validates the purpose of freedom of speech and expression. You have no right to not be offended because you don’t have to be offended. You can get over that shit. If you love God with all your might, it is no excuse to censor images of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban—or cut off the heads of those who do. You can civilize yourself and recognize the human right to convey thoughts in art, music, and words.

Did DiAngelo explicitly advocate for censoring Mel Brooks? No. But she would if she could and you know I am right about that. She and her ilk believe that a just society is one in which the humor they deem racist—sexist, etc.—is disappeared. They think like the Taliban. Will we allow the woke left to wield the weapons that bring death to liberty? DiAngelo is a cultural manager whose authoritarian desire is reflected in the actions of the corporate censors. Don’t pretend as if the circle of what is allowed for certain identity groups is not drawing ever smaller. The question is, if the nature of such circles is to draw ever more tightly around us, why there is a circle at all.