Indeed, removing ideology from classrooms is vital for the liberty of both
I recently attended a dinner party. The attendees were devoted woke progressive types. As the evening grew long, the conversation moved to the subject of Florida and the restrictions the legislature and governor placed on the ability of teachers to touch upon sensitive subjects in their classrooms, such as gender and race. The confidence of the criticism expressed at the table indicated to me that ideology was preventing the party from recognizing that, if the ideas that were restricted were ideas with which they strongly disagreed, such as racist and sexist ideas, then they would have supported the legislation, but because the restrictions instead targeted ideas with which they agreed, the law in question was judged regressive, even reactionary.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displays the signed Parental Rights in Education, aka the Don’t Say Gay bill, flanked by elementary school students during a news conference on Monday, March 28, 2022, at Classical Preparatory school in Shady Hills. (Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times via AP)
I wanted to make this assumption explicit, so I argued that whether one agrees with critical race theory, gender theory, or queer theory, the question of whether these or curriculum based upon associated ideas should be “taught” in public schools (k-12) on principle is the relevant question to ask, not whether the theories are correct. The objection went up that these were not being taught in public schools so the controversy was manufactured. Of course, they are, I countered. I have been teaching critical theory in my sociology classes for more than a quarter century. I know what critical theory is, that it is being taught in public schools in one fashion or another, and then expressed the opinion that it is inappropriate on principle to teach it or anything based upon it in a public school classroom.
When asked my understanding of critical race theory (the tone suggesting that anybody who disagrees with the teaching of or from this standpoint doesn’t actually know what it is), I allowed myself to be (strategically) momentarily taken off message by explaining that, in direct opposition to the legal framework of the American system of law, as well as the ethical foundation of liberalism and the Enlightenment, CRT treats concrete individuals as if they are personifications of abstract racial categories worthy of being held responsible for the alleged actions of other persons dead or living. Blaming a white person for the actions of all white persons past and present is an irrational assignment of guilt contrary to Western jurisprudence and this is precisely what CRT advocates. Critical race theory, I furthered argued, operates on, if not explicitly religious sensibilities, then quasi-religious ones. The same is true for notions conveyed by gender and queer theory—notions such as “authentic selves.” Such notions are with the angels in heavens (or with the devils in hell). As such, these are not things to teach a seven year old, not only because they are abstract and ideological, but because they will confuse children, cause them anxiety, and take them away from the purpose of public education. This, I said, was the motivation behind the Florida law.
There was an attempt to drag the conversation further away from the question of public education’s purpose by seeking, couched in the progressive rhetoric of equity, the weeds of racial inequality. To get the discussion back on the matter of principle, I asked if I could give an example of a curriculum that I thought they would agree should not be taught in public school. I promised them it would be interesting as it was personal (and we know how progressives love “lived experience” stories). They allowed me to give my example and I expressed appreciation of their their charity (I am getting better at these discussions).
Here was my story: Several years ago, my second grader came home from school with a letter from his teacher informing his parents that his class would be participating in Junior Achievement, a program organized by the Chambers of Commerce to draw the attention of children to the righteousness of capitalism. Junior Achievement is pro-corporate propaganda, I explained to the party, in case it wasn’t obvious, the purpose of which is get children thinking in particular ways at a young age. Developmental psychology indicates that that seven years old is a good age to begin deep programming in corporate and other ideology (this is the age when children start doubting myth). Those who want to get our children find their way into their heads by infusing the curriculum with propaganda couched in an age-appropriate way.
I told them that I wrote a letter to the principal of the school explaining why I removed my child from class that day (a difficult decision), and why I did not believe Junior Achievement should be “taught” in school, at least not without equal time for a critique of the standpoint from which the “lesson” hailed: “Junior Achievement is dogma, not enlightenment. It takes capitalism and elevates it to a virtue and then systematically masks the history and reality of the system in order to brainwash children into accepting a system that exploits them. As such, it is out of place in a public educational setting and, really, not befitting a democratic society.” (This is from the actual letter, not verbatim what I summarized for them.)
However, I told the dinner party, Junior Achievement is really out of place in a public educational setting independent of whether capitalism is a righteous or exploitative system, since, as I noted in the first sentence: “Junior Achievement is dogma, not enlightenment.” The deconstruction of Junior Achievement is unnecessary in light of the principle that education is about enlightenment not indoctrination. It is just as unnecessary as having to explain the problems with gender theory and queer theory in an argument for removing these theories from the classroom. I stressed that the fact that we agreed that it is wrong to indoctrinate children with pro-capitalist propaganda should not depend on our opinion about capitalism, but instead on the purpose of public education. Education is not for the purpose of indoctrination whatever the dogma.
I had their attention, so I reinforced the point with another example. I asked those sitting at the table if it would be appropriate to teach children about Christianity? Not a lesson in which Christianity were noted as one of many religions in world history or similar content, I clarified. All that is fine, of course, because it educational. I mean the teaching of Christianity to affirm its message, to compel a captive audience of second graders to recite its scriptures and participate in its rituals. Would this be okay? My group agreed that this would be wrong. Of course. One person even noted the difference between taking a child to church over against enrolling the child in Sunday school. Excellent example, I said (thanks for making my point for me). The first instance is a cultural experience. In the latter, you’re giving up your child to indoctrination. And this is precisely what happens when you give up your child to public schools with curricula that includes affirming dogmas of various sorts. It’s like sending your kid to Vacation Bible School.
Here’s what we did not talk about. The reason that critical theory, accompanied by the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as rainbow and light blue, pink, and white flags, and all the rest of is, find their way into a second grade class room is the same reason Junior Achievement is there—a powerful lobby that knows this is the age where laying a foundation for this or that worldview enjoys a crucial development window, one that makes children resistant to receiving criticisms of lobby’s standpoint or reluctant to speak up about that standpoint, targeting the moment when they are close to, if they are not already, doubting the existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, colonizes the curriculum and captures teachers, administers, and school boards members and directs them on a cushion of virtue to indoctrinate children in whatever the desired mythology is.
The lesson of this story is that it is important to be aware of the prejudices of an audience. For this reason, I did not interfere with the power of principle by explain that both Junior Achievement and CRT hail from the same standpoint: programming the corporate state seeks to install on the wetware of children in order to prepare them for incorporation in the bureaucratic and technocratic structure of late capitalism. These were progressives. That these are the ideas that are taught in corporate bureaucracies and in administrative training sessions do not impress the professional-managerial functionaries of the technocracy order. One has to know their loathings and appeal to those while avoiding their commitment to self-denial about the reality of corporate governance. This was the reason I used Christianity instead of Islam in my second example. There is a risk with progressives, having fully accepted the multicultural dogma, which holds that the other is exotic and the exotic is something to be fetishized and embraced, that they will likely find no problem with children chanting the Islamic slogans and rehearsing the rituals of this regressive ideology.
What is the Vice-President talking about? Equity is resource distribution based on race (and sex, somebody asked, but what does that mean anymore to a Democrat?). Under the Biden-Kamala scheme, white victims of the storm will receive less government support, whereas black victims of the storm will receive more. At least that’s what they say. And just saying it is bad enough.
Race-based distribution of resources is racism. Equality and equity understood in the way progressives define these terms are antithetical principles. I bet you’ve figured that out. Either everybody is treated equality or some group is shaken down on the premise that what they have is unearned, acquired at somebody else’s expense.
I find it fascinating how, in the 19th century, Democrats, the party of the slavocracy, used racism to extract wealth from the black population, then, after the Civil Rights Act, used racism to extract wealth from the white population. Racism isn’t a problem for this party; they only need to flip the racial hierarchy to keep the scheme going—the scheme to divide the working class by sowing racial resentment.
Had equality been important to Democrats, i.e., if the party were actually principled or represented working class interests, then 1964 would have meant that decisions would be henceforth made on a colorblind basis, since, as individuals, we’re all equal before the law and therefore no individual should be treated on the basis of his skin color—i.e., that, on the basis of race, he should receive more or less than any other person whatever his skin color is.
Democrats have been playing the race-based distribution of resources game since the inception of the party. When were we going to reject their racism and demand the country honor the American Creed of equality established by the republicans who founded this nation?
Pelosi: “We have a shortage of workers in our country … In Florida, some of the farmers and the growers are saying ‘why are you shipping these immigrants up North? We need them to pick the crops down here.’”pic.twitter.com/mJxIQrXXkW
Migrants in Mexico headed towards the United States border
Pelosi is lying or repeating what she’s been told. There is no labor shortage. Real unemployment at the very least approaches eight percent of the work-force. It’s greater than that when considering the redundant population managed by the custodial state—not just the prison system, but the ghettos, too.
A smaller work force drives wages higher—and that’s why Democrats and the corporate elite seek open borders and desire to keep immigrant labor in the southern and western states. It’s also why they portray southern rural and urban working class families as “racist,” “reactionary,” and other nasty things. They delegitimize their concerns while conditioning the masses to lose empathy for them.
Corporations use open borders to draw super-exploitable labor to the United States in order to inflate the industrial reserve army of labor and push down wages for native workers. Half a trillion dollars is annually transferred from the US working class to the capitalist class via the super-exploitation of migrant labor—many more hundreds of billions from foreign labor super-exploited via offshoring. This is the transnational dynamic. This is why globalist push the denationalization agenda (see The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism; The Attack on Nationalism).
While we are shaking our heads at the image we see below, let’s also shake our heads clear of the fog of pathological political correctness and think about the safety of children—and ponder how this happened and where we’ll end up if we keep normalizing this behavior and presentation of self. (And if this dude is trying to make a point, I still worry about the kids. Let’s just hope it is effective.)
The Halton District School Board stands behind the “gender rights” of Kayla Lemieux.
Oakville High School and Halton District School Board in Canada are using that nation’s human rights model (making a mockery of a system that necessary includes the protection of children) to defend an adult male performing kink in front of a captive audience of minors for personal sexual gratification. Yes, this teacher appears this way in front of minors in a public school classroom.
I study psychopathology. The Oakville High School teacher appears to be a textbook case of autogynephilia. To quote from the abstract of a medical science journal: “Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism. Autogynephilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women’s clothing per se.” The abstract continues: “Autogynephilia resembles a sexual orientation in that it involves elements of idealization and attachment as well as erotic desire.”
Perhaps we should feel sorry for this person. However, I think it’s fair to ask whether this public act of sexual fetishism around children is one step away from pedophilic acts with intent likely already present. That’s the criminologist in me talking. As a parent, I’m concerned, as well. Even if this individual is not a MAP, I’m still concerned.
I’m not saying it’s wrong for an adult male to strap on fake tits to cop wood. I’m no prude. As we used to say in the 1970s, “Different strokes for different folks.” (Remember, I’m a fan of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and took part in its rituals in the art district of Coconut Grove, South Florida—or have I not told you about this yet?) I’m saying that it’s wrong to do it in front of a captive audience of children and the school board’s defense of the man indicates the power of gender ideology in disorganizing the consciousness and conscience of otherwise intelligent people.
This is all the @HaltonDSB has to say for themselves? That there is a dress code for students, not for staff, and that we need to use respectful pronouns? A male teacher is wearing kink gear in front of students to sexually excite himself, and this is the pathetic response… pic.twitter.com/Dywxmk1n9U
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Foucault’s Nietzschean analysis of power as substance woven into the very fabric of modernity results from an acutely felt need (having been socialized in something approximating a decent society) to escape the conscience pangs associated with child rape. Read: boy love in Tunisia. The more I read and see and learn, the more I’m convinced that Derrick Jensen is over the target in his carpet bombing of queer theory and its connection to pedophilia and gender ideology.
As it so often does, living history gives us an opportunity to make more connections. I am now speaking of the uprising in Iran against compulsory hijab wearing. Foucault’s despicable defense of the Iranian Revolution, a regime that, as noted in a recent blog on Freedom and Reason, force-transitions gay boys to hijab-wearing brides (and fates lesbians to find love in the secret community of women), only strengthens the connection. Patriarchal heteronormativity manifests in a myriad of (perverse) ways.
Know that Foucault would see the present-day revolt against the murderous hijab in Iran as an atavistic expression of oppressive modernism, getting the truth precisely backwards (as all neo-Hegelian reflex inevitably does). And so it is that a male wearing clownishly massive prosthetic tits in front of students in the high school shop class he teachers becomes a substitute for actual progress for women in the inverted totalitarianism of corporate state society.
In retrospect, we might have guessed this would be the next step in a culture where progressive feminist academics in the West were, in the wake of 9/11, taking their female students to mosques for hijab day to learn how to tie oppression around their heads. (I watched the cult snag not a few young women thanks to the inclusive desire of woke progressivism.)
Women are rebelling against the hijab in Iran
Remember when Ward Churchill caught flak for suggesting the Islamic attack on the World Trade Center was justified in light of New York’s role in world imperialism? Ultimately, it led to his dismissal from the University of Colorado (albeit, technically for alleged academic misconduct). Unknown to most, at that same time, another French postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard, Janet Afary and Kevin B Anderson document in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, wrote something similar, that the 9/11 attack “represents both the high point of the spectacle and the purest type of defiance,” which means, in Baudrillard’s view that “it could be forgiven.” Baudrillard was merely following in Foucault’s footsteps—as was Churchill.
* * *
CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour was scheduled to interview Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in New York. The interview would have come just days after a 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the Iranian Morality Police after being detained for allegedly wearing a hijab too loosely. As noted earlier, wearing the hijab is required of women in Iran. The control of women through compulsory dress codes is an expression of Islam’s deep-seated patriarchal heteronormativity. The Iran president sought to require the hijab of Amanpour (more on that in a moment.)
As noted, patriarchal heteronormativity in Islam also manifests as a homophobic impulse. I really want the reader to grasp this connection. The idea that a boy could be attracted to other boys or like the things that girls like horrifies not only the elites in Iran but the Iranian population at large. Besides being shunned, homosexuality is punishable with death in Iran.
So profound are Iran’s gender norms, in fact, that the regime has adopted the position that gay people are the opposite gender trapped in the wrong physical body (an error of ensoulment, I suppose). To remedy this problem, the regime compels the parents of gay boys into drastically altering their sons’ bodies to appear as a girls’ bodies. The regime even pays for the hormones and surgeries. The surgeries involve castrating the boy and reconstructing his penis and scrotum into a faux-vagina.
I reported this in Elite Hankerings for Obedience. It bears repeating here: many young Iranians and their parents opt for medical intervention not only to avoid being hanged from cranes in public or other serious punishments, but to meet the demands of social pressure—to find some semblance of normal life in Iranian society. To put this another way, Iran has a project to eliminate gay and lesbian people by making them appear as the other sex. It’s a medical alternative to “pray the gay away” (since prayer never works). It’s a radical form of conversion therapy.
The western media doesn’t seem to interested in the plight of gay boys in Iran (or gay boys in the West, for that matter). However, they appear to have become interested in the circumstances of Iranian women. Something new must be afoot, since this problem has been around since the 1970s only to be accompanied by crickets (with the exception of the Hitch, which I share below).
Remember this?
Back to Amanpour. The CNN journalist reported on Twitter that she was prepared to question Raisi about it. After all, the incident has triggered protests across Iran. But Raisi demanded Amanpour herself don a hijab, which, to her credit, she refused to do (as the interview was to occur outside of Iran, suggesting that she shamefully would have in Iran—and I have seen her in a hijab). So Raisi refused to participate in the interview.
Not only is the mainstream media covering the story. Antony Blinken of the State Department said on Thursday in response to Amini’s death that the United States has imposed sanctions on the Morality Police and on senior security officials the United States has accused of engaging in serious human rights abuses. Blinken condemned the country’s Law Enforcement Forces of arresting women for “wearing ‘inappropriate’ hijab” and enforcing “other restrictions on freedom of expression.” (The inappropriate hijab is akin to the way dispirited citizens haphazardly wore their cloth and surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. See the image of Busty Lemieux above.)
Again, there must be an ulterior motive in all of this attention, but we will take the attention where we can get it, I suppose. So, how about some attention for gay boys?
* * *
In 1978-79, as the Islamist protests against the Shah of Iran were reaching their peak, two French newspapers, Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur, tapped philosopher Michel Foucault as “special correspondent.” In this capacity, Foucault traveled to Iran and met with leaders of the revolution, including Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on his experience with revolution, which he supported (for this, he was heavily criticized by Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson and the French intellectual community more broadly, which has not let the memory of this affair escape down the memory hole).
Foucault’s love affair with the brutal Islamist regime in Iran is significant because Foucault’s postmodernism, organized around his loathing of the Enlightenment and modernity, affected his political attitudes (spiritual politics, as he would have it) towards his homosexuality, which in turn influenced the construction of queer theory.
Outside of France, the political and cultural left of the greater West, including the United States, has long adored Foucault and postmodernism, which dovetails with the Marcuse-perversion of critical theory, and so we already have part of the story of how we got here. (For an analysis of the Islamic Revolution in Iran see my 2019 essay Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?)
I am going to lean heavily on Michael J. Thompson’s 2005 review of Janet Afary and Kevin B Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism for much of this section. The book is important, but Thompson’s review in particular recognizes the Foucauldian reaction to Marxism, which is useful to my own project of pushing back against the rightwing misrepresentation of the origin of the perversions they rightly decry—the misrepresentation that postmodern critical theory has its roots in the materialist conception of history. On the contrary, as I have documented on Freedom and Reason, the present expression of critical theory that plagues our culture and politics has its roots in Hegelian idealism and resurrects these in spite of Marx’s efforts to correct the dialectic. It is neo-Hegelian, not neo-Marxist.
As I incorporate into my thoughts the intervention of Derrick Jensen concerning the pedophilia of Foucault and the perversions of other progenitors of queer theory (Jensen names Gayle Ruben, Pat Califia, and Judith Butler), I want to take care to specify where these ideas intrude so as not to expose Thompson to the wrath of TRAs. Thompson does not address the problem of queer theory in his essay. Nonetheless, queer theory is an instantiation of the profoundly unscientific, indeed antiscientific stance of the postmodernists. If you have been following these matters, whether you are on the left or right, I hope some lights will turn on.
Thompsons notes in his essay “a growing number of contemporary critics” who have themselves noted “a kind of marriage between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism.” You will recognize this argument in my writings on Freedom and Reason going back several years now (see also John McWhorter)—but not back to 2005. My ignorance of some earlier critiques of postmodernism allowed me (and McWhorter) to independently arrive at similar conclusions.
I would have benefitted from being a bit hipper a bit earlier. At the same time, in my own defense, I have been a vocal critic of postmodernism since the mid-1990s when it became clear that these ideas represented not a legitimate challenge to scientific rationalism but rather carried the potential to confuse people about the character of science with claptrap about “other ways of knowing.” I can now see that it amounts to a new religion.
Thompson cites Meera Nanda’s 2003 Prophets Facing Backward who argues that the postmodernist critique of scientific rationality as a left-wing attack on social domination and power “goes hand in hand with right-wing political and cultural projects.” I understand the spirit of Nanda’s observations, but the comparison is unfair to right-wing political and cultural projects. (For a critique of these ideas from a right-wing perspective, I highly recommend Roger Scruton’s 2017 Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a reworking of his 1985 Thinkers of the New Left.)
Thompson also cites Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s well-known destruction of “the nonsensical approach of postmodern thinkers to science and mathematics” in Fashionable Nonsense (1999), “revealing postmodern thought as lacking any understanding of science or scientific rationality and therefore possessing no real ability to make a substantive critique of it.” Sokal has also associated the postmodernists’ difficulty with the truth with the assertion among those who call themselves liberals that conservative have, among other things, wrongly questioned COVID-19 policies and the 2020 presidential election. (See Alan Sokal descries the place of postmodernism in the alt-Right’s denial of facts, but neglects the Left. Unfortunately, Coyne also dismisses the concerns of conservatives. To his credit, Coyne criticizes Sokal for only focusing on the alleged perversions of the right.)
“These writers,” Thompson writes, “share a common concern to defend reason and science from the dismissive approach of postmodern thought.” The strength of Thompson’s essay is that he grasps the relevance of the critique to reclaiming the left, casting the defense of rationality and science as “a means to revive a left political discourse that can reclaim the political project dedicated to political equality, human rights and social justice.” This is why I have maintained on Freedom and Reason that an authentic left politics is not found in woke progressive ideology—critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and all the other ideologies cynically cribbing the language of science to create a false air of legitimacy while attempting to discredit science to create space for technocratic rule. An authentic left politics can only be found in a rights-based politics of individualism focused on class struggle and economic justice.
I want to make sure the readers are following the line of argument here. History is relevant. Remember the Sokal Affair? This is what first got my attention on this matter. In 1996, Sokal submitted a hoax paper to Social Text, a journal of postmodern cultural studies: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal proposed that quantum gravity was a linguistic and social construction—and Social Text published it! It was Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s suggestion that, if the paper fit within the parameters of leftwing ideological thought, journals in the humanities were likely to publish it that inspired Sokal to give it a try. His stunt inspired James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose to organized a hoax publishing campaign they tagged the “The Grievance Studies affair,” manufacturing pretentious papers on cultural, fat, gender, queer, race, and sexuality studies. They demonstrated that Sokal’s intervention had not slowed down the postmodern perversion of the Western academy.
The “seductions of Islamism” is Afary’s and Anderson’s construction. “Their central argument is that Foucault’s theoretical views allowed him to embrace a politics—radical Islam as it manifested itself in the Iranian revolution of 1979—which was wholly against the goals and imperatives of the tradition of progressive politics,” writes Thompson.
[I apologize for what may feel like too many asides, but I’m really bugged by the reckless use of language here. By “progressive politics,” I believe the authors really, or should, at least, mean liberal politics. Progressive politics is not an adequate euphemism for what the contents of left liberal thinking since progressivism is the politics of the technocratic core of the corporate state. Moreover, the construction “racial Islam” misrepresents the spirit of Islam, which is as a form of extremism. There is nothing radical about extremist ideologies. If we are going to reclaim a viable politics for the left, we need clarify in our language.]
So what are the “seductions of Islamism”? They are the seductions of Foucault. Afary and Anderson explain that Foucault and the Islamists “were searching for a new form of political spirituality as a counter discourse to a thoroughly materialistic world; both clung to idealized notions of pre-modern social orders; both were disdainful of modern liberal judicial systems; and both admired individuals who risked death in attempts to reach a more authentic existence.” (Note the concepts here, for example, “authentic existence.” Sound familiar?)
Thompson writes that Afary and Anderson show that “Foucault’s oeuvre is marked by a discourse that is hostile to grand narratives, totality, and modernity as a whole.” As a consequence, Foucault embraces the “totalizing ideology that radical Islam was presenting to the world, one that still has consequences today both in Iran and in the West.”
Thompson tells us that Foucault and the Islamists “shared three core, overlapping ‘passions’: an opposition to imperialism and colonialism, a rejection of modernity, and ‘a fascination with the discourse of death as a path toward authenticity and salvation’.” Thompson continues: “These three points of commonality would shape Foucault’s interpretation of the Iranian revolution and lead him to interpret the anti-modernism of Khomeini and his coterie as a liberating political impulse against domination, power, and against the Enlightenment rationality and the institutions of modernity that had, in his view, plagued western consciousness, culture and political life.”
One may be excused for finding great irony in all of this. Those familiar with Foucault’s work were likely seduced by his intellectual project to abolish what he called the “fascism of the mind,” a project declared in his 1968 preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in 1968. It is likely that many young people were seduced not by a comprehensive engagement with Foucault’s ideas but through the influence of a professor in a literature, philosophy, or sociology class. It is likely that I played a role in instilling in a young person’s mind the notion that Foucault was on an honorable mission by employing the principle of charity (a pedagogical tactic). They were not told of Foucault’s hostility towards Marxism, and had reinforced their already cultivated aversion to liberalism, as these “narratives of liberation and emancipation” had only, in Foucault’s eyes, “succeeded only in reproducing domination.”
Really, this should have been obvious in Foucault’s best known work, Discipline and Punish, work I use in my class because, while there is certainly something to it, I see clearly now that there’s even more to it—or something else, if that makes my point clearer. By flipping matters upside-down Foucault convinced himself that the negation of Enlightenment in Iran, in cancelling the western project of modernization there, was actually what it wasn’t: an emancipatory moment in the lives of the Iranian people—a moment that represented, to borrow Thompson’s words, “the opening up of a new path that could serve as a guide for merging the spiritual and the political.” And there we have it: the paradigm of woke progressivism—a new religion of extremist politics that sees authentic selves released by the bright knives of surgeons. Or shop teachers with massive fake mammalian protruberances.
What a cluster-fucking several decades postmodernist bollocks has wrought on humanity. Can we at once rise up and bury this shit forever and be sure to bullhorn to the world what a complete catastrophe it’s all been (and always will be)? Fuck critical theory since and including Marcuse. And fuck the post-1950s French intellectual. If it were just babble, whatever. Babies babble. But this is destructive.
And it’s pushed out by real power. Not fantastical power embedded in the warp and woof of modernity (what crap), but real power from above: corporate state power. Next-level crazy doesn’t dominate the academy by accident. And now they are gaslighting you. You’re supposed to see an adult male with giant fake tits and visible nipples standing in front of a classroom full of students as neither mad nor dangerous, but brave and beautiful, as a subject worthy of protection by the Canadian human rights model. And so pedophilia is normalized. And the impressionable want fake tits, too.
I close by returning to the video embedded in the tweet at the top of this page. What’s happening in Iran makes quite obvious the unique matter of women’s rights. Women are oppressed because of who they are and the fact that they are not men. The sexual dimorphism of the species is the basis of the patriarchy, the rights of women overthrown with the emergence of the sate and law.
The women’s right movement has made great progress in dismantling the patriarchy. However, just as the faux-left politics of intersectionality, informed by postmodernist critical theory, has undermined the class struggle, so it is undermining women’s rights. Sex, family, and class antagonisms are the most important factors in driving world history and determining the life chances of concrete individuals.
You might be wondering from where this idea comes that it doesn’t matter what you intend with your words only what the listener hears—you know, this authoritarian and illiberal notion that you have to shut up because somebody might be offended by what you say or write. Words become violence. Words erase identities. Etcetera.
There is a complicated history here, but here’s a piece of it that I bet most of you don’t know—and that some of you will criticize as a leap: the French intellectual Roland Barthes, who was a major voice at the beginning of postmodernist thought. In the late 1960s, Barthes published an essay titled “The Death of the Author,” wherein he argued that a given text has multiple meanings that elude the author. According to Barthes, you are not the source of the meaning in the ideas expressed in your writing or speech.
Roland Barthes at home in Paris
Indeed, since the author is (metaphorically) dead as the source of intended meaning of a text, we now have instead, according to Barthes, the “birth of the reader,” by which Barthes means that the source of meaning in the text is determined by the reader, and since there are many readers (or listeners), there are many readings, and all are equally valid. In fact, after injecting power and intersectionality into everything (thanks Foucault), some readings are more valid that others. If the author is white and male and heterosexual and other terrible things, then his intention isn’t really valid at all—as he is the super-oppressor. What do the oppressed hear?
With this idea, a core tenet in postmodernist thought (who cares whether he intended this), Barthes has stamped external interpretations of what you say with equal or superior validity such that a stupid person who cannot grasp the intended meaning of your words or the dishonest person who imposes upon your words his own agenda, if they lies at the intersection of oppressed identities, can twist your words to harm your reputation and make you fearful of speaking or writing—if you’re the wrong person or hold the wrong view, of course.
For example, you may have for some purpose used the word “nigger” in your writing (or in a joke you told or song you sang or poem you wrote), but if a person hears the word and is offended, then you are responsible not for your intended meaning (I was pushing the envelop at the Comedy Store) but for the listener’s imposed meaning (I have to go on The David Letterman Show and cop to something I didn’t do and tell the audience I will seek therapy because I don’t know why I say words like that). In this way, responsibility for utterances is turned on its head, with the utterer is punished for the listener’s intentions (supposing he has any).
This is why we find ourselves with a blanket ban on the word “nigger” (at least by those who are not black) rather than making any effort at all as to determine in what way and in what context the utterance was made (or walk away if we are too lazy to make the effort). And so we find woke progressives removing from the bookshelves of our nation’s public schools To Kill a Mocking Bird and Huckleberry Finn and a number of other books that contain the word “nigger.” And Dr. Seuss has to go, too, because he drew a Chinese man. And I have to watch Blazing Saddles on network television with a few minutes of dialogue festooned with beeping—a movie that was, at the time, an enlightened smackdown of bigotry. Never mind what Mel Brooks intended. The beeping is intolerable so I change channels.
Brilliant. Let art, language, and literature by some be suppressed by those who don’t get satire or who want to get even with the often imagined deeds of corpses or oppressors by suppressing the freedom of others.
You may be thinking, Andy, is this really that big of a deal? I don’t know, but it seems to me that one of the chief markers of nascent totalitarianism—maybe the chief marker—is conditioned fear to use certain words. When you know which words you can’t use, then you know which words will get you in trouble, and if words get you in trouble, then you have to learn to think differently. They called this “mind-control” when I was growing up. I still do.
In Nineteen Eight-Four, George Orwell called speaking and thinking in a disallowed way “thoughtcrime.” Orwell coined another term in Nineteen Eight-Four: “crimestop.” Crimestop is the mental discipline people develop in order to avoid the punishment meted out by the social controllers. Crimestop is the mark of an obedient person—the self-disciplined person, to put in virtuous terms. Obedient to whom? Disciplined for what ends? It doesn’t sound like freedom to me. So, yeah, it’s that big of a deal.
As for Barthes, is he alone responsible for word policing? No. There are many others. His arguments is an intellectual spin on robbing words of their intended meaning and that’s why I making this connection. I don’t want to diminish the significance of his work. His impact is felt across the Western world and many disciplines. He is taught in college classrooms everywhere. Perhaps he didn’t intend for his work to be taken this way. But if we hold him to his own theory, then he’s dead and readers can interpret his words any way they wish.
It harms a person to force him to say things he doesn’t believe or punish him for saying things others wish not to hear because those actions restrict his cognitive liberty. Cognitive liberty is a right to which all are entitled, even if formally unrecognized by the global community; the entitlement to mental self-determination is the principle underpinning the free speech ethic.
Children pledging allegiance to the US flag. Was their expression of patriotism compelled?
On the other hand, it does not hurt a person to hear something he doesn’t believe or that offends his sensibilities—even if it is meant to degrade him. If he think such utterances hurt him, that’s his problem. Indeed, it is to his benefit that he hear opinions and sentiments with which he disagrees or that make him feel uncomfortable; his personal growth and development depends on it. How are we to change minds if we cannot challenge beliefs and offend sensibilities? How do we build resiliency and tolerance? How cruel it is to leave person stuck in the mud of confusion, bitter and resentful over words.
The demand that any of us speak in a manner desired by others, either by formal social control (laws, policies) or informal social control (bullying, mobbing, shaming), either intends or functions to prevent the development of mutual knowledge through the exclusion of other ways of speaking and, therefore, of thinking. An ignorant man loses opportunities for enlightenment when the arguments with which he is unfamiliar are denied him through speech codes.
Consider the arrests of republicans in Great Britain who took the opportunity of the queen’s death to persuade their fellow citizens (subjects, actually) to abandon the monarchy for a more democratic and secular form of government. Consider that Pay-Pal has shut down the accounts of Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, a non-partisan, mass-membership public interest group in the United Kingdom that stands up for the speech rights of its members, as well as the founder of The Daily Sceptic, a blog Young set up during the COVID-19 pandemic to scrutinize Britain’s lockdown. This action hurts Young for the reasons I gave in the first paragraph.
Moreover, the acts of compelling and punishing speech forces those who would speak in a different way into bad faith; fearful of speaking in the objectionable manner, they lie, prevaricate, or fall silent (Can I Get an “Amen” to That? No, But Here’s Some Fairy Dust). Bad faith creates a deeply unjust situation in which those who disagree with the prevailing speech norms and the structures they mean to impose are enlisted in at least tacitly affirming the ideology that establishes those norms by denying or lying about beliefs that contradict the prevailing ideology.
One of the most serious abridgments of the freedom of speech is at once among the most subtle, and that’s this notion of “inclusion.” Inclusion, which in practice includes the idea of belonging, aims to ensure that every person feels safe to bring their unique selves to the endeavor at hand. Thus inclusion is in the service of establishing diversity in our institutions and organizations. It follows that speech that makes a person feel reluctant to express their unique self is exclusive. Exclusive speech must therefore be suppressed in achieving the goal of an inclusive space for diversity’s sake. The goal of inclusion may lead to bad faith, wherein a person is afraid to speak his mind for fear of sanction, which can include his own exclusion via marginalization, segregation, or termination. Is there a contradiction?
Yes, there is a contradiction. However, the contradiction is “resolved” via the deployment of a rhetoric that manufactures a theory of power that is alleged to justify suppressing the unique selves of some groups as necessary to allow members of other groups to express theirs. In other words, some speech (and therefore certain ideas and sentiments) are excluded so others may feel included.
Whose views are to be excluded and why? There’s a pattern in the West. If you are white, heterosexual, Christian, and especially male, your beliefs, opinions, and sentiments are justifiably suppressed for the sake of others. The justification comes from a supposed theory of power that imagines a world in which white, cis-gendered, heterosexual people, and some gays and lesbians, and some nonwhites—really any one who voices opinions that are contrary to the tenets of woke progressivism, are oppressors; these are opinions and sentiments that do not affirm the beliefs of those allegedly oppressed by them. Opinions and sentiments are thus assigned to the oppressor category and excluded on that basis.
For example, the desire expressed by a small minority (with a lot of allies) that people believe that males identifying as women are women seeks popular affirmation and is offered as necessary in advancing the cause of an inclusive workplace. One might think that it is fundamental to cognitive liberty for a person to reject the premise that a woman, i.e., an adult human female, a scientific designation, cannot by the other genotype, i.e., an adult human male. However, this view is portrayed as a bigoted one, one that makes individuals who wish others to participate in the illusion they wish to establish feel excluded.
Imagine being told to affirm that there is no God but Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him, is His messenger. Is this a violation of your religious liberty? Obviously. Will you be accused of being an “Islamophobe” if you refuse to chant the slogan. Maybe. But you will very likely be accused of being a “transphobe” if you refuse to repeat the slogans of gender ideology. The mark of a free society is the ability to question any ideology and refuse to affirm the slogans of any doctrine without consequence. You cannot force citizens to pledge allegiance to a flag in a free republic. Really, situations should not be contrived in which this end is likely to manifest.
Then there is this absurd problem of how others will use one’s arguments, a question Helen Lewis famously put to Jordan Peterson a few years ago in an interview on British GQ in 2018 (which you can view below), is an attempt to persuade and, if the law or other authority is involved, compel self-censorship. But the notion of holding a person accountable for something somebody else says, besides resting on a fallacious premise, is profoundly illiberal. Freedom demands that each person is responsible for his of her actions and not the actions of others. The attempt to stifle speech because some might use the ideas conveyed to rationalize their behavior should be seen for what it is: a naked attempt to prevent the transmission of arguments, opinions, and sentiments that those who would presume to know better wish others not know.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that won the 1960 Pulitzer prize, and that I put on the reading list a judge asked me to assign a racist white juvenile who came through her court, was ranked seventh on American Library Association’s list of the most banned books as recently as 2020. Why? Because it contains the word “nigger.” Public schools in Burbank, California, banned not only To Kill a Mockingbird, but the district also banned Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. All books that contain the word “nigger.”
When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of Dr. Seuss books to schools around the nation for “National Read a Book Day,” Liz Phipps Soeiro, a school librarian at Cambridgeport Elementary School in Massachusetts, sent them back, writing in The Horn Book blog that “Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.” I feel confident that Soeiro wasn’t alone among progressive librarians in interpreting Trump’s actions as a provocation. NBC News ran a story on my birthday in 2021 explaining “Why Dr. Seuss got away with anti-Asian racism for so long”: the “reckoning has been delayed because of historically ingrained anti-Asian racism, experts say.” Experts say. Must be true then.
Pages from Dr. Seuss’ 1937 book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. NBC wants you to note that the spread “includes an image of an Asian man with yellow skin, slanted eyes and a pigtail, holding a pair of chopsticks and a bowl of rice over the text, ‘A Chinaman who eats with sticks.’” Not also that others have skin the same as the pages of the book (nobody is actually that white). Note the yellow rabbits. There do not appear to be many colors to work with. Consider that the story is told from the perspective of a child. How would a child describe the scene given the language he would have had to work with in 1937? How should Dr. Seuss have drawn the man’s eyes?
I recently wrote in Some Notes on Free Speech: “Did you know that censoring content for adults is not the same thing as censoring content for children? That’s because the body of science in child development finds that, because of variation in imagination, sense of self, and degree of maturity in the capacity for abstraction and reason, not everything from the adult world is age-appropriate and that the regulation of childhood experience is important for normal development of children into adulthood.” I wrote further in that blog, “In figuring out the world and their place in it, their role in the system of roles and statuses, children often pretend to be things they encounter in their environment. Children may obsess over certain thoughts. Children are easily influenced and manipulated.”
I did not have in mind To Kill a Mockingbird when I wrote those words. There is nothing in that book or in Huckleberry Finn that a child shouldn’t read or see. To be sure, “nigger” is widely regarded as an offensive word, but To Kill a Mockingbird, a powerful critique of racism in America’s past, affords adults an opportunity to teach children about the history of racial bigotry. Huckleberry Finn humanizes a black man when racism was a problem in America. And Dr. Seuss? There is nothing racist in And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street. However, there are books aimed at children that do not intend to teach them about tolerance and equality or the joy of rhyming and cultivating a playful imagination, but rather to expose them to the adult world of sexuality. “As a general rule, no books should be censored,” I write in Some Notes on Free Speech. “However, in the case of children and material designed to sexualize them, censorship is appropriate.”
I clarify my words today to push back against the argument that the desire to censors books is mostly a right-wing desire—that whereas progressives want to band a book here and there for its racist imagery, rightly from their woke sensibilities (which are wrong from any rational standpoint), conservatives want to purge the library of materials that sexualize children or urge them to doubt their sexuality. An examination of many of the books to which parents are objecting will find explicit depictions of sex acts that are inappropriate for school age children. Where are such things in Dr. Seuss? Moreover, whereas the books progressive seek to ban are books written in opposition to a pernicious ideas, the materials over which conservatives are objection are written to promote an ideology. One would understand if progressives petitioned to have materials supplied by the neo-Nazi organization Storm Font excluded from public school libraries. But Harper Lee?
First time reading this from the Boston Globe: “The statistical paradox of police killings: In the numbers of fatal encounters with the cops, one kind of discrimination masks another.” Aubrey Clayton may be a good mathematician, but his appeal to Simpson’s paradox only matters if the facts are accurate—and they’re not. Clayton is off the mark in his claim concerning racial disparities in civilian-officer encounters. By a lot. Whites are far more likely to encounter police in both police-initiated (including street stops and arrests) and public-initiated contacts (whites are significantly more likely to call police to report a possible crime, for example) than are blacks.
A protester in Philadelphia wore a shirt with the names of people who died in encounters with the police.
What Clayton doesn’t talk about is that police shootings are determined not by racial bias (where is the evidence of this?) but by individual and situation factors, and these factors are more likely to be present on a proportional basis when black suspects are involved. Even then, the police kill twice as many whites as blacks on an annual basis. More than that if you count Hispanics as white, the race two-thirds of Hispanics identify as (Hispanic isn’t a racial category but an ethnic one).
Moreover, even if the facts supported Clayton’s claim, it would not follow that racial bias explained the disparity. Any claim that racial disparity is the result of racial bias must come with clear evidence of racial bias. Disparity is not prima facia evidence of bias. Ever. It’s like this claim that we need to do away with standardized testing because blacks don’t do as well as whites as a group and therefore the tests are racially bias. How about this: blacks don’t do as well as whites as a group because they are not as well prepared for the test as whites? That’s what the evidence shows. Is the lack of preparation racist? The evidence suggests that these effects are produced by class and culture, not race. So probably not. (See John McWhorter’s New York Times article “Lower Black and Latino Pass Races Don’t Make a Test Racist.“)
For the record, civilian-police encounters run in the tens of millions annually. The police kill approximately a thousand civilians a year (again, most of whom are white). The proportion of those civilians who are unarmed is around a dozen–and being unarmed does not make a person not dangerous. The fact is that the probability that a violent offender will be killed by a cop is vanishingly small. Given that the United States is the most criminally violet advanced democracy in the world, Cops show remarkable constraint in interactions with civilians.
“Confessions” was a word game popular in Victorian England. It involved candidly answering revealing questions that went to character. One could learn a lot about a person from reading his answers. In the spring of 1865, Karl Marx played the game (apparently he played the game often, and here we have his answers recorded). He was asked what vice he most hated. His answer: “Servility.” He was also asked his idea of misery: “To submit.”
Scene from the 1984 movie Nineteen Eighty-Four
Reflecting on Marx’s answers over coffee this morning, I realized that this is why, despite being a Marxist and very much a man of the left, I no longer consider myself a socialist: socialism has required servility and submission everywhere it has been tried (or installed, some might insist). Indeed, servility and submission seem to be intrinsic to the logic of socialism. Like Marx, I hate servility and submission.
This is why, I think, the corporate state in its overdevelopment appears more and more like a socialist state: elite control over the economy is not enough for the masters of the universe; they also must comprehensively manage the people reduced to masses, even to the extent that the masses—the proles—must think and talk in a prescribed manner. As with the Soviet Union, even telling jokes under corporate state rule risks reputational damage and loss of livelihood.
Bureaucratic collectivism demands a reduction in the capacity of people to think and speak for themselves. Bureaucratic collectivism requires that the state replace the family. In meeting the needs of the people, the corporate state, like the socialist state, tells the people what those needs are. Bureaucratic collectivism demands servility. It necessitates submission. Right or left, totalitarianism, naked or inverted, makes servants of everybody.
Today, we are witnessing a Great Convergence. The US and China, whatever condemnation a Democrat politician may cobble together in response to a questions about China’s totalitarianism (which is never really considerable, genocide and organ harvesting being an ignorable fact), are partners in organizing the world economy (a project Joe Biden spearheaded, for the record).
For my friends on the right, if you loathe socialism, then you must also loathe the corporate state. It’s the New Fascism. For my friends on the left (not the faux left of woke progressivism, but the actual leftists who still center social class in their understanding of social dynamics), I don’t believe socialism is the solution to the corporate state. I think what you see in the corporate state is what you can expect in the next failed socialist experiment. Unlike Marx, we have a record we may consult.
One might say that the Soviet Union was an exception. Oh, and China, as well. And, of course, Cuba. Etcetera. One might say, “But this time the experiment will succeed!” But it’s the same story everywhere. It never works in the end. Not for the people anyway. For them, it always manifests like the nightmare world of Orwell’s imagination (which is why, as Christopher Hitchens noted, Orwell never needed to spend much time criticizing national socialism—metaphorically criticizing Stalinism was good enough to get across the point).
I have read most of everything Marx ever wrote. I am now convinced that every instantiation of “really existing” socialism was not what Marx would have desired in a social system fit for species-being. Why? Because he most hated servility and considered the state of submission to be the most miserable state of them all. If Marx were alive today, I seriously doubt he would be a socialist. But I know I am not. Not anymore.
When asked about his maxim, Marx answered: Nihil humani a me alienum puto. Asked about his motto, he responded: De omnibus dubitandum. These responses reinforce my confidence that Marx, if he were alive today, would likely consider a different path forward from the one he offered to the world in 1848. This does not diminished his critique and his discoveries. After all, Marx (and Engels) insisted that critical political analysis must be concerned first and foremost with existing conditions in the light of history.
As many of you know, I am a professor at a public university. My semester begins tomorrow (I am teaching four classes this semester—I always teach four classes a semester), and that probably means my blogging will have to give way to class preparation, lecturing, mentoring students, etc. I have been thinking about organizing a series of podcasts arounds my lectures, so we will see how that goes. If this happens, I will use Freedom and Reason to notify readers. Stay tuned! In today’s blog I make a few observations about the desire of elites to control people and the way race is used to thwart class consciousness.
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My iPhone keeps asking me if I want to sign up for a surveillance program that lets me know if I’ve been exposed to coronavirus. Why would I need to be notified if somebody I know caught cold? Why would I want to embed my life in a surveillance program run by the Wisconsin Department of Health? (See Why Coronavirus and Not Other Cold Viruses?When a Virus Goes Viral.) I need that like I need a mRNA shot in my arm.
Every time I open my iPhone I have to see this on my screen.
Remember during the Bush/Cheney years the color-coded terrorism threat assessment chart? The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called it the National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS)—as if it were a method for alerting the public to severe weather conditions. Like the NTAS, “exposure notifications” for COVID-19 is fear mongering. This is not to suggest that Islamic terrorism is analogous to a coronavirus (or to severe weather); it’s to point out the way in which the government uses similar strategies to keep the public in a perpetual state of dread. The technocrats mean to make you afraid of a cold virus, and, for a lot of you, it worked like a charm. Still does. It’s a tactic of control. Tragically, many people like to be controlled. It keep them from having to think for themselves.
The National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Speaking of severe weather, now they’re using climate change to take away your energy and food. Perhaps you have heard (perhaps not in America where the corporate media has buried the story) that Dutch farmers have been protesting the government’s demands they reduce emissions, the resistance described by Prime Minister Mark Rutte as “willfully endangering others, damaging our infrastructure and threatening people who help with the clean-up.” The government’s is planning to cut nitrogen emissions in the agriculture industry in half by 2030. Other countries are discussing implementing similar measures. This policy will not only harm farmers, but it will hurt everybody, as everybody depends on the food farmers grow. It’s almost as if the Dutch government is trying to antagonize the public as a pretext for raising the level of authoritarian control of the population—while driving up food prices and impoverishing the masses.
To be sure, we need to be concerned about global warming, but at the expense of access to nutritious food? How much longer are folks going to do the Chicken Little? I mean, if the climate situation is as bad as they say it is, then the only way out of it is through technological development—and technological development depends on economic growth. Does starving people grow the economy?
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Things got bizarre real quick, didn’t they? Stuff like this doesn’t happen by accident. There are longer trends behind the chaos. How does it happen, for instance, that, in a country that condemns racism, it’s okay to be racist towards whites? In fact, with the possible exception of East Asians, whites are the only racial group folks are allowed to be racist towards. And not just a little bit racist.
Listen to the nonsense coming out of Bernie Sanders’ face at the top of the video. Almost everything he says is demonstrably false. I’m white. I’ve been poor. I’ve even been homeless. I’ve lived in roach-invested cramped apartments. I have gone hungry, I have even begged for money. I have been hassled by the police just for walking down the street, dragged out of a car by cops just for sitting in a car, harassed by cops in front of an arcade talking with friends just for hanging out in front of an arcade talking with friends. These cases may sound anecdotal, but they are experiences shared by millions of other white people.
Fact: there are many more poor whites than there are blacks—by tens of millions (see They Do You This Way). Fact: cops kill twice as many whites than cops kill blacks every year (see The Myth of Racist Criminal Justice Persists—at the Denial of Human Agency). Fact: black people kill more white people than white people kill black people by a lot (see Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?). What on earth is Sanders talking about? How can he be that out of touch with the largest segment of the working class? Isn’t he a democratic socialist? (No, he’s a progressive. That’s why he is out of touch. And that is a charitable spin on his rhetoric.)
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar tells us to watch out for white people. They’re committing most of the murders in the United States, she says. Fact: black men commit most murders (and most robberies) in the United States—not proportionately, but absolutely (see The Myth of Racist Criminal Justice Persists—at the Denial of Human Agency). I won’t go through each clip in this video. It will suffice to say that the video is chockfull of anti-white racism. Watch it for yourself.
This what “anti-racism” is all about—if you haven’t figured that out yet (I’m sure many of you have but are hesitant to say so in public). Just stick “white” between “anti” and “racism” and you’ll have the complete picture. Now you know why, according to race hustlers like Ibram Xolani Kendi (deadname: Henry Rogers), non-racism equals racism. These are word tricks. They mean to confuse you. Racism is not rehearsing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of colorblindness. Racism is centering race by demanding that everybody regard everybody else in terms of racial identity and not as individuals. Racism is the reduction of people to race and treating them on that basis. Racism is saying that every white person enjoys skin color privilege and is either an oppressor or an ally. Colorblindness is the real antiracism.
There is a concerted effort by progressives to paint white people as the greatest threat to democracy and to move whites to self-loathe. Why is that? There’s a claim going around that white supremacy is the most serious problem in the United States. It’s an utterly false claim, so why do they keep saying it? You’ve surely heard that whites enjoy racial privilege. That’s a false claim, too. And that the country is plagued by systemic racism. Another false claim. What’s going on?
The extent of and expressed confidence in what are demonstrable lies tells you that the rhetoric has in back of it power and a project to transform the West by scapegoating white people—to equate western culture with whiteness and use this conflation to dismantle western civilization and that inheres in that sociocultural system: democracy, equality, individualism, liberalism, rationalism, secularism, etc. (See The Myth of White Culture.) The reason is obvious enough: elites are racializing the working class to keep to the proles politically inert (see The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). White workers are “racist” and “fascist”—they’re the “deplorables.” And the US security services—and the same is true in Great Britain—use the racialization of working people to surveil and harass them (MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).
This is what the Orwellianisms—“diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” etcetera—are all about: disempowering the working class by centering race and ignoring class. The working class happens to be majority white, so by centering race, progressives make whites appear as a bunch of oppressors, with social justice representing the strategy for rectifying what is a manufactured situation, fragmenting workers along identitarian groups in the name of race and gender equity. In the end, progressives are undermining what MLK, Jr gave his life for: racial equality. It’s shameful. But it’s functional and so it continues. It continues also because it’s a quasi-religion, and giving up religion risks admitting you are duped or becoming completely lost, and these possibilities terrify the emotionally childish and psychologically insecure.
You surely will have noted that the actual source of inequality in our society, namely social class, is rarely, if ever, mentioned by progressives. Why is that? Don’t progressives like Bernie Sanders stand for the working class? Don’t we “Vote for Democrats because Democrat vote for us”? No. Progressives represent the middle class, not the working class. By “middle class,” I mean the professional-managerial strata of the corporate capitalist state. The working class is the class where most black and brown people toil alongside their white comrades. Remember when Joe Biden said “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids”? Why would he say such a thing? Because he gaffs? Because he’s a stutterer? Because in his mind—as in the minds of millions of progressives—white kids are rich kids and poor kids are the nonwhite kids. Poor white kids don’t exist. They have been erased like the white victims of police shootings (Tony Timpa Can’t Breathe).
Progressivism is an expression of the technocracy, the ideology of the professional managerial stratum: administrators, teachers, doctors, and so on. This ideology sees abstract demographic categories as tribes and selects a few amongst them to represent the rest at the table—as if once extracted from one’s class location allows them to actually do that. Indeed, they’re expected to do the opposite—represent the interests of the corporate class. This is why a black man who resists wokeness is an Uncle Tom. Remember, if you’re not voting for Joe Biden, you’re not black.
Biden giving a speech before a fascistic backdrop. The only thing added to this image is the word “obey.” Perhaps there was no need to add the word. The image screams obedience.
Have you listened to the now notorious Joe Biden September 1, 2022 speech? It’s very clear what the establishment’s position is going into the midterm elections: Republicans who agree with Biden and the Democrats—“mainstream Republicans”—are acceptable if not approved; populists pushing republicanism (note the lower case) in the face of the administrative state, patriots opposed to the managed decline of the West, to globalization, mass immigration, multiculturalism, and all the rest of it—they are “enemies of state.” Maybe they are. But what is the character of this state? That matters in deciding whether the enemies are really patriots.
Biden’s speech, bellicosely projected before a full-throated fascist aesthetic (in blood red that CNN, in a tacit admission of the mood conveyed, softened to pink), was a rebuke of liberalism and nationalism, the foundations of the American project. Biden represents the interests of the transnational corporate elite. These are not the people’s interests. Democracy in elite parlance is technocracy, the “managed democracy” of the corporate state—the “inverted totalitarianism” of the New Fascism—run by the professional-managerial class (Quotes denote the concepts of the late, great Sheldon Wolin. (See From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis; C. Wright Mills and the New Fascism. See also Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.)
Biden’s speech was an instantiation of the project to make ordinary working class Americans out to be fascists and racists. But the reality is that Biden and his party represent the most authoritarian and illiberal force in America today: the corporate state. But he is right about the desire for a one-party state. Democrats represent the chosen party of corporate power and corporate power wants no rivals. They do mean to destroy any social movement that threatens the globalist establishment. With the rise of a populist-nationalism explicitly aimed at restoring democratic-republicanism, corporate power is desperate to derail the challenge. Not just in America. Populist-nationalism is a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. It is unfortunate that there is no organized political left to offer an alternative to the right-wing style of populist-nationalism.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) September 2, 2022
When asked about culture, history, tradition, etcetera, Martina Big told her interviewers that she’s going to have her nose worked on, too, broadened the way she perceives black noses to be. That will make her appear more black, she believes. Martina says that she likes the way black women look, so she wants to look like one. Put another way, she wants to make a costume of black woman out of her body and wear it around. Martina used to be pretty hot, to be frank about it. Now she’s hideous. I am sorry to be so blunt, but people shouldn’t do things like to their bodies and maybe shaming them will help others avoid repeating their mistake. Martina has, like a growing number of people today, turned herself into a monster. (See Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.)
Martina Big has disfigured herself It is difficult to look at her.
Race, if reduced to physical differences, which is what the term referred to when it appeared in the early twentieth century, based as it was on the development of the science over the previous two centuries (at least), is really about ancestry (albeit there is some genetic affinity with ordinary understanding of phenotypic constellations defined as race). To changes one’s appearance only allows the person to appear as if their ancestry is black, albeit I am not sure Martina has pulled it off; I doubt this woman has black ancestry. In other words, trans-racialism, again, if race is about physical differences, is short-circuited by the fact of genetics and inheritance. To be sure, race, like gender, is to some degree a social construction, but that does not mean it doesn’t have empirical referents. Same with gender. One can claim to be a different race or gender, but they actually can’t. The idea that we’re supposed to affirm their self-identification as another race or gender is a rather bizarre notion—and an oppressive one if the state and law is at its back (which increasingly it is).
I understand why those interviewing Martina are criticizing her, but I honestly don’t know what one means by “black culture”—and I’m a sociologist who studies these things! Culture is associated with shared space and worldview, the conditions of which are determined by a myriad of factors, none of which has anything to do with race … except if you’re a racist, then you explain culture in terms of genetics. Likewise, there’s no white culture. There’s only a culture wherein one finds may find many or few or no white people in it. Western culture is not “white.” It just happens to be the case that western culture emerged in a space where whites were the majority. Western culture does not spring from the genetics of the people who comprise its majority. Again, that is a profoundly racist idea. Western culture emerges from climatic, geographical, historical, and a myriad of other actual forces. Western chauvinists are not racist. They seek to preserve the Enlightenment and its fruits. It has nothing to do with race.
I suppose Martina can appear any way she wishes, but we must say that she is not black in the way that concept is understood. Once more: you can’t change your genetics. They’re fixed. You will always be the race you are born as, whatever you or anybody else thinks of you. You will also grow old and die some day. Life comes with brutal truths. We don’t help people by helping them avoid confronting reality.
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Speaking of drastic body alterations…
As with most Islamic-majority nations, Iran is profoundly homophobic. This deep homophobia goes hand-in-hand with that religion’s extreme patriarchal worldview. The idea that a boy could be attracted to other boys or like the things that girls like horrifies not only the elites in Iran but the Iranian population at large. Besides being shunned, homosexuality is punishable with death in Iran.
However, the regime has adopted the position that gay people are the opposite gender trapped in the wrong physical body. Why else would a boy find other boys sexually attractive? So the regime pushes gay people into drastically altering their body to appear as the opposite gender (what in the West is referred to as “sex reassignment surgery” or “gender affirming care,” terms that assume sex is assigned and that gender needs affirming). The regime will even pay for hormones and surgery. Many young Iranians and their parents opt for medical intervention not only to avoid being hanged from cranes in public or other serious punishments, but social pressure to be accepted in Iranian society. In other words, Iran has a project to eliminate gay and lesbian people by making them appear as the other sex. It’s a medical alternative to “pray the gay away” (since praying doesn’t work). It’s a radical form of conversion therapy.
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I am writing this blog on Labor Day. A friend on Facebook posted this as a reflection on the day:
Meme on Facebook
The meme obscures an essential point about unskilled labor. Unskilled labor exists as the result of industrial capitalism deskilling labor via breaking up the production process, deploying automation and mechanization, and the imposition of scientific management, i.e., Fordism and Taylorism. For example, weaving used to be a skill. With the advent of the power loom, the “weaver” only needed to clear the shuttle when it jammed, or manage other simple tasks, tasks that a five-year-old could do—and often did. Building a car used to be a skill, but Ford fixed it so a person had to put a nut on a bolt as the automobile rolled by. Etcetera.
The beauty of unskilled labor is that workers became interchangeable and needed little training. Skilled workers are valuable—so abstracting labor from the process and turning the worker into a cog in a vast machine transferred that value to the man who owns the machine. Unskilled workers lived in constant fear of being canned at any moment. And if a worker had his arm ripped off by a flywheel, then another worker could take his place the next day, as no skill was involved. An additional benefit was reducing the capacity of workers to think and to grasp the production process as a whole, which may raise consciousness about class exploitation.
freedom and reason 