Author: The FAR Platform

The 15 March 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which Australian neo-Nazi Brenton Tarrant shot to death 50 persons and injured 48 others, is an act of rightwing terrorism that demands government action across a range of fronts. Those who planned and perpetrated this action should never again freely move about society and governments must redouble efforts to teach their publics about the problem of ideologies that teach division and hate.

Unlike the 12 June 2016 Pulse massacre (Pulse was a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida), in which media sought to obscure the ideology that inspired Muslim Omar Mateen to murder 49 people and wound 53 others (see Orlando and Religion), mainstream media is readily identifying the ideology that inspired Tarrant’s actions. However, the same agenda that instructed the media to gloss Mateen’s motives is giving a platform to those who reach far beyond the actual causes of the Christchurch killing to implicate rational concern over Islam.

Attorney and playwright Wajahat Ali, writing in The New York Times (15 March 2019), declares: “All those who have helped to spread the worldwide myth than Muslims are a threat have blood on their hands.” Ali, backed by the New Democrat Center for American Progress, produced the documentary Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America (2011). In his NYTimes op-ed, Ali claims the Islamophobic network, made up of think tanks, media personalities, grassroots groups, and right-wing politicians, is global.

In his op-ed, “The Islamophobia that led to the Christchurch shooting must be confronted,” published in the (15 March 2019 edition of) The Guardian, HA Hellyer goes further, arguing that the massacre reflects an broad antipathy that “runs throughout the west.” Recalling the mass killing in Norway perpetrated by ultranationalist Andres Breivik, Hellyer also characterizes anti-Muslim sentiment as “Islamophobia,” a form of hatred with “a long pedigree in western societies,” one he insists “is not restricted to the political fringes.”

Then, today, Nosheen Iqbal, writing for The Guardian, insists that Islamophobia is an “ugly form of racism” and complains that Mark Rowley’s statement that conflating Islamophobia and racism is “clumsy thinking” reflects how “it is far game to diminish the lived reality of Muslims.” She goes on to present two completely irrelevant facts: (1) “the majority of Muslims are not white” and (2) they “have roots in formerly colonized countries.” That there are Muslims that are not white doesn’t make Muslims a race. And, while most Muslims have roots in formerly colonized countries, those countries were colonized by Muslims. It certainly wasn’t Europeans who brought Islam to Indonesia which boasts of the largest population of Muslims in Southeast Asia.

I should pause for a moment and remind the reader that the term “Islamophobia” is an invention of Iranian fundamentalists who designed the term specifically to shame women who refused to submit to the practice of hijab and, more generally, “to declare Islam inviolate,” as Pascal Bruckner put it in his 2011 essay, “The Invention of Islamophobia.” By manufacturing the perception that loathing of a hateful and divisive ideology are racist in character, this despite the obvious fact that “Muslim” no more connotes a member of a race (or even an ethnicity) than “Christian” or “Fascist” does, the term “Islamophobia” is rhetorical weapon used to smear those engaged in irreligious criticism as bigots. “This term,” writes Bruckner, “is worthy of totalitarian propaganda.” Indeed.

It is crucial in our response to rightwing terrorism that we in the West don’t get bogged down in hyperbole or allow ourselves to be sucked into a political project that does not have our interests in mind. To be sure, the threats of rightwing ideology and violence are very real and I take these matters very seriously. In my college course, Freedom and Social Control, I devote a series of lectures to the problems of authoritarianism and hatred, taking to heart UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/43/150 (8 December 1988) calling “upon all governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence.”

However, is it more than unhelpful to suggest, as Ali and Hellyer do, that concern over the character and spread of Islam is responsible for mass murder. The argument implicates those who criticize Islam consistent with their opposition to authoritarian and hateful ideology in the actions of Christian nationalists. It is obvious and despicable that Ali and Hellyer are attempting to leverage the Christchurch massacre to marginalize and delegitimize concerns over Islam and Muslim immigration.

There are powerful forces behind the presence of Ali and Hellyer. I have already identified Ali’s backers (the Center of America Progress spends nearly $50 million a year influencing opinion). Hellyer is no less well-connected, affiliated with the Atlantic Council, an elite planning body associated with the globalist project to transform the interstate system into a transnational capitalist order backed by a global security apparatus. The Atlantic Council receives millions of dollars in donations, including from several foreign countries, to advance their agenda. Hellyer also has a history with Demos, a New Labour organization closely associated with the neoliberal politician Tony Blair. There is a lot wrong with arguments hailing from these quarters and understanding their agenda, which is shared by the media outlets in which these writings appear, sheds light on the motives behind pro-Immigrant and pro-Muslim rhetoric and the frame that reduces criticisms of immigration and Islam to racism and xenophobia.

To be sure, Muslims are not uniformly bent on Islamization of the West, but there are some who are, and Islamization is the overall effect of mass immigration in the same way that European colonization of the world involved the Christianization of societies across the world. Put another way, there is a reason so much of the planet (frighteningly, about half) is Christian or Muslim: these groups have spread their irrational and divisive ideologues worldwide and, on balance, while they have not carried the same effects everywhere, the proselytizing and oppressive traditions of the Abrahamic faith have been bad for human freedom and forward-marching societal development. There is a history here. Religion is not just a personal choice. Religion carries consequences that have proven devastating to humanity.  

This is particularly true for Islam. Islam, when fully embraced, is an extreme worldview that sees all human thought and action properly driven by deceit and violence under divine command. As such, it is a threat to individual rights and liberties, democracy, and the open society. It is the right of freethinkers to express opposition to the spread of Islam in the same way they openly express opposition to the spread of Christianity. I trust it is obvious to all the absurdity of leveling the charge of “Christophobia” against opposition to the Christianization of society. Indeed, a westerner can go on record dedicated to the proposition that Christianity should be marginalized and hardly expect to suffer accusations of bigotry. Yet westerners find themselves attacked relentlessly over consistently holding themselves to the same standard of critique with respect to Islam.

The attacks on the critics of Islam, are not merely rhetorical. In 1988, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was met with protests from Muslims in several countries and death threats made against his person. The British government had to place Rushdie under constant police protection. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated for his film Submission, the killer leaving a note pinned to van Gogh’s chest threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of such works as Heretic and Infidel, with death. Like Rushdie, Ali required constant police protection for many years. In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting Muhammad. Violence erupted in many Muslim-majority countries and in the West, including attacks on the Danish and other European diplomatic missions. Christian churches and Christian were targeted with violence. In 2015, men raided the offices of the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people for publishing cartoons offensive to Muslims.

An authentic progressive attitude is instantiated by an explicit desire to see the world leave to history superstition and supernatural belief systems and take up a humanist and scientific worldview. This attitude is sorely missing on the left, a politics that has come to be defined instead by postmodernist and deep multiculturalist attitudes towards human freedom and morality. Until the left stands up for free expression and represents the interests of working families, until governments eschew neoliberal restructuring of developed economies, return to a social welfare orientation, and defend religious liberty, the political and cultural right will continue to gather strength. Data show that one of the major sources of new devotees to rightwing populist groups and parties are disaffected social democrats. Rightwing populism thrives in the vacuum left by a impotent left and government failure to meet the needs of its citizens.

It is well known that concern about immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is mostly associated with rightwing populism. This is not because immigration concern or opposition to Islam are intrinsically rightwing. Rather it’s because the left, having substituted for the politics of class the politics of identity, is not speaking to the problems that immigration generally and Islam in particular pose to working class communities in the West. Mystification surrounding the origins of these problems notwithstanding, people know when things aren’t right, and a percentage of them will seek answers to explain their anxiety. When they find rightwing and neoconservative voices to be the only ones speaking to their concerns, they gravitate towards those politics.

To seek a world in which rationalists resist criticizing Islam for fear of being smeared as bigots is to clear the way for further Islamization of the West. A moral people have an obligation to oppose irrational and hateful ideologies. Islam is an ideology with this character. Anti-theism expresses a deep concern for all of humanity — that individuals should be free of the chains of religious doctrine and practice. The attacks on mosques in Christchurch are the projection of the ideology of Christian nationalism, not an expression of anti-theism. Christian nationalism is a hateful ideology analogous to the ideology that drives the Islamic State. It is not analogous to popular concern for, or reaction to the project undermining the material, political, and cultural interests of national proletariats through globalization.

Hellyer’s op-ed in The Guardian is a propaganda piece that seeks to exploit the massacre of human beings to push a pro-Muslim politics. Ali’s NYTimes op-ed, albeit a bit more restrained in substance, nonetheless seeks the same ends. The agenda is keeping the West open to mass immigration and to mischaracterize opposition to Islam. It is wrong to accuse, as Ali does, those who express concern about the problem Islam poses to the West of having “blood on their hands.”

Homosexuals enjoy more freedom in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East. Homosexuals are a persecuted minority in Muslim-majority countries and in their communities throughout the world. Women enjoy more freedom in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East. Women are second-class citizens in Muslim-majority countries and in their communities throughout the world.

The cause of these differences? Islam. Yet a certain brand of leftism adores Islam, especially the more fundamentalist species, while apparently finding nothing redeemable about Israel. Now they are defending anti-Semitic expressions uttered by Islamists. This is the fruit of identitarianism and it is paralyzing the worker movement. I publicly dissociate myself from this brand of leftism. For the record, I will not support any cause or vote for any politician who supports Islamism (and that includes mainstreaming propaganda terms like “Islamophobia”) or tolerates anti-Semitism. These are hateful ideologies and sentiments.

It’s not that there is nothing to criticize with respect to Israeli state policy, the structure of Israeli society, or the situation of Palestinians, especially the occupation. I have been a vigorous critic of all of these things all of my life. The problem is a worldview that carries at its heart loathing of Jews as a people. That insinuates, if not claims explicitly, that Jews possess such power that they steer world history while pulling the wool over western eyes. The problem is a worldview that finds it easy to condemn Christianity while celebrating Islam – condemning patriarchy and heterosexism in one while demanding toleration of patriarchy and heterosexism in the other.

Suspicion, confusion, and hypocrisy are not benign states of being. They feed popular anti-Semitism, which is the motive behind hate crimes throughout the West, are disruptive to working class politics, and destructive to the popular sense of human rights. Moreover, by tainting legitimate criticism of the many with the anti-Semitism of the few, they are counterproductive to the cause of Palestinians.

Over the last several decades, I have watched the trajectory that led so many leftists here. It tracks with the abandonment of real working class politics and the embrace of a multicultural worldview. Some feel like we’re in a moment of promise. But, really, we are at a low point. And low points feed the populist right.

The number of police officers killed by guns is extremely small. Policing doesn’t even crack the top ten most dangerous jobs (groundskeeping was more dangerous in 2018). The Blue Lives Matter rhetoric is propaganda designed to given police officers license to kill. And kill they do, around a 1000 people every year (and maim hundreds more). And blacks are significantly overrepresented in those killings (just as they are in traffic stops).

Reflexive defense of police-precipitated murder leads to bizarre conclusions. How does a cop believing somebody has a weapon justify killing a person? How does this work for me? Can I shoot my wife in the back multiple times in my backyard and then tell the cops I thought she had a gun? Let’s make my wife a black man. Does that change things? Are cop allowed to kill people for irrational beliefs but not other people? What is the rational basis for this immunity from reason and decency? (Hint: there is no rational basis; it’s contrary to rational person standard by which we determine mens rea in the law. Indeed, it is especially egregious when cops do it because their job is to protect and defend.)

Six bullets in the back. Chances of conviction at trial: irrelevant. Let the jury do the wrong thing.

Homer Adolph Plessy was the son of French-speaking Creoles. By racial classification standards, he was an octoroon, meaning that he was one-eighth black. His phenotype was white, and he could move about his life as a white person, riding white only train cars, etc. In an effort to strike down racial segregation laws, Plessy was recruited by to Comité des Citoyens to ride in a white-only train car. The group arranged for him to be arrested. 

As we know, in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), the Supreme Court upheld segregation laws (7-1). But Plessy’s situation raises an important question about the racial straitjacket and an individual’s freedom of movement. Plessy could pass for white, but his birth certificate identified him as gens du couleur libre, or a free person of color. Because of what it said on his birth certificate, despite what he looked like or how he may have felt, he was not white by law. 

Decades later, the Supreme Court reversed itself, but the notion of race as essential has remained. When people see a person they have trouble classifying, they are often curious to know what the person “really” is. And when a person attempts to cast off the straitjacket of racial classification, especially when they are deemed not to pass, they suffer repression at the hands of both majority and minority communities. Such is the investment in racial classification by the majority of persons, regardless of racial status. 

When a man wishes to use the men’s room, regardless of what his birth certificate says, there is no problem unless observers doubt whether he is “really” a man. A man born female who can pass for male is in a similar position to Plessy. If there is a system in place that says he cannot use the man’s bathroom because he was born female then there will have to be some law that allows authorities to determine what he “really” is and compel him to use the “appropriate” bathroom (in many Muslim societies, as well as among Orthodox Jews, it would be necessary to know this in order to properly segregate public spaces). 

One solution would be to eliminate segregated bathrooms along lines of gender, just as we have eliminated segregated bathrooms along lines of race. Another would be to allow persons to identify as they wish regardless of what it says on their birth certificates and use whatever bathroom they like. Both are liberating in their own way. 

A person who is able to cast off the straitjacket of assigned gender and choose whatever gender he or she desires—or choose no gender at all—without fear of negative consequences enjoys the power of personal liberty. And it should be the same with race if this is what the person desires. But the final liberation comes when de jure and de facto gender and racial classification systems are eliminated altogether, and individuals can exist as persons independent of imposed identities.

There are individuals who see opportunity in manufacturing victimhood around identity. At a personal level it’s prestige-seeking behavior. As victims they become the center of attention. But it’s more than narcissism that inspires hoaxes like the one Jussie Smollett, star of the popular TV show Empire, recently perpetrated. To be sure, being black and gay, the potential prestige was for Smollett substantial in a culture that values identity over accomplishment. In orchestrating a context for a fake hate crime by faking a letter telegraphing its details, Smollett could star in his own mini-drama, a compelling story about personal sacrifice in the epic struggle against the ubiquitous forces of whiteness and heterosexism. He could do his bit to support the narrative that America, always problematic, is, with the election of Donald Trump, now in the throes of fascist reaction. In the end, however, authorities couldn’t suspend their disbelief. Neither could I.

Identitarians, on the other hand, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. The story slotted too perfectly into the logic of their brand of politics. Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker and Kamala Harris wasted little time in characterizing the hoax as a “modern-day lynching,” Booker telling reporters that “bigoted and biased attacks are on the rise” and using the incident to tout anti-lynching legislation he and Harris introduced in the US Senate (which passed unanimously on February 14). Booker repeated the meme that “since 9/11 a majority of the terrorist attacks on our soil have been right-wing terrorist attacks, a majority of them white supremacist attacks.” Amplifying the senator’s profile as an impressive force in the black community, USA Today implied that Booker’s notoriety made him a potential target of white supremacist violence. “Booker’s social media celebrity has turned him into a household name,” the outlet noted; “with that he became a focus for those unsettled at the sight of an educated, ambitious African-American unapologetically pledging an inclusive, post-Trump America.”

Manufacturing group oppression is an age-old tactic in the area of ideological warfare. Simulating victimhood is part of dissimulating ambition for privilege. Christianity is a useful example. Through the ages, Christians have been deft at weaving a story of persecution and martyrdom to disguise their power. Their big lie was unraveled by Notre Dame professor of New Testament and early Christianity Candida Moss (a practicing Catholic) in The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom. In her book, Moss writes that “the prosecution of Christians was rare, and the persecution of Christians was limited to no more than a handful of years.” Meanwhile, Christianity established itself as the hegemonic ideology of the Roman Empire, a degenerate system then sliding into a fascistic state; Christians used a rhetoric of victimhood and persecution to depict those they marginalized as hateful and oppressive. Christians weren’t fed to lions. They weren’t executed for refusing to deny their savior. They invented a history to advance their authority over others.

The New Church of Identity works with the same playbook. In Smollett The Resistance™ had a would-be martyr whose sacrifice would stand as a testament to the truth that the red MAGA hats worn by Trump supporter represent the new Ku Klux Klan hood. So, on January 22, Smollett received a threatening letter from “MAGA,” which contained crude drawings of a lynching and a hand gun. On January 29, two men, wearing red hats and yelling “MAGA country,” put a noose around Smollett neck and splashed bleach on his clothing. He paid them $3500 up front, plus cash to buy rope, red hats, and bleach, and promised to pay them $500 after the job. The police easily tracked them down and got to the truth of the matter.

Less than two weeks earlier there was another hate crime hoax involving MAGA hats. On January 18, 2019, in Washington DC, a band of American Indian activists led by Nathan Phillips attempted to intimidate a Covington Catholic high school student wearing a MAGA hat. Phillips is a notorious self-promoter and hoaxer who had repeatedly lied about his war record (claiming he served in Vietnam) and, in 2015, claimed Eastern Michigan University students, dressed as American Indians, attacked him. I wrote about Phillip’s latest scam in Sacred Drumming versus the Covington Catholic Kids: Shark Jumping or the Death of Truth? so I won’t recount the details here. It will suffice to say that, not bothering to vet Phillips, the media flipped the story, depicting the student as the perpetrator. More than just this one student, actually. It was a large gathering of high school students waiting for their bus at the Lincoln Memorial. They were condemned en masse, portrayed as a Trump-inspired lynch mob. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, Moveon.org described the situation this way: “A group of teenagers in MAGA hats surrounded and harassed an elder Native American veteran yesterday at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC.” Anne Helen Peterson, holding a doctorate in media studies no less, evoked Eichmann, tweeting: “It’s the look of white patriarchy, of course, but that familiarity—that banality—is part of what prompts the visceral reaction. This isn’t spectacular. It’s life in America.” Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at UC-Riverside, invited violence against the teenager, tweeting: “Honest Question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” Actor Alyssa Milano tweeted: “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.” And thus it appears an scheme was hatched in Smollett’s mind.

Fake hate crimes are a small percentage of hate crimes identified by the FBI. However, the claim that Trump’s election and rhetoric has sharply increased hate crimes is not obvious based on the statistics. The FBI defines a “hate crime” as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” The bureau clarifies that it does not treat hate itself as a crime, being “mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.” A hate crime is thus any crime with an added element of bias. Most hate crime is directed at individuals. By substantial margins, the main targets of racially-biased crimes are blacks, of religious-biased crimesJews, and of sexual-orientation biased crimes gay men.

The FBI has been publishing reports on hate crimes since 2011. In that year there were 7713 victims of hate crimes. In 2012, there was a 7.4% decrease in hate crime victims (7164). In 2013, a 1% increase (7242). In 2014, a 7% decrease (6727). Thus over a four-year period, the nation enjoyed a 13.6% overall decrease in the victims of hate crimes. However, this trend was reversed the following year. In 2015, there was a 6.4% increase (7173) and in 2016, a 5% increase (7615). Thus from its 2014 low of 6727, the nation saw a 12.4% rise in the victims of hate crime rise by the end of 2016. The latest published statistics are from 2017 and indicate a continuation of this trend, showing a 10.9% increase in hate crimes (8,493) from the previous year. Trump’s policies and rhetoric have been blamed for the increase, however the upward trend in victims started in the last two years of the Obama Administration, and it isn’t clear to what we should attribute this increase. Moreover, the percentage of those crimes classified as anti-Hispanic or Latino bias remained unchanged over 2017, as did the number of victims from transgender bias, and the percentage of those classified as victims of anti-Islamic hate crimes decreased by 28% over Trump’s first term as president. One might expect given the president’s rhetoric that the proportions would shift in the other direction.

The sharpest increase in hate crimes involves Jews. Again, it’s not clear what in the president’s rhetoric would inspire that, as he has expressed sympathy and deference towards Israel and the Jewish people. Perhaps his support for Israel—recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, for example—is what has provoked that increase? I discuss the contradictory place in which the Trump phenomenon finds itself with respect to antisemitism in The Trump Mood and Political Violence. Perhaps Trump is more of an effect of the rise in hate than a cause of it? We need more data. While 2018 numbers may tell us a different story, we will have to wait on the FBI to release those data.

Update 9/17/2019: Wilfred Reilly, who holds a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University and a law degree from the University of Illinois College of Law and is on the faculty of Kentucky State University, finds that of the fewer than one in three high profile hate crime allegations are genuine. His examples are Air Force Academy, Eastern Michigan, Hopewell Baptist, Yasmin Seweid, Jussie Smollett, and Yasmin Seweid. He published his findings in Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War (published February 2019, the month I posted this entry). For the book, Reilly assembled a data set of hundreds of hate crime allegations (focused on the past five years), and finds that most of them to be hoaxes on the basis of reports in mainstream national or regional news sources. See this Wall Street Journal article to read more about this. His basic argument is that because racism and bias crimes are actually quite rare, there is a motive to manufacture the illusion that they are problem in order to advance the identity grievance industry.

We say that a person filled with excessive zeal, especially for an extreme religious cause, is a fanatic.

If you are always in religious garb, pining for your next moment to pray or supplicate, choosing your foods according to religiously approved dietary rules, avoiding music and dancing because it’s too worldly, pining for the day when the world bows before the dictates of your religion, or comes to a fiery end, then you are a fanatic.

Trump has declared a national emergency in order to appropriate money from the Defense Department to fund further construction of the security barrier at the Mexico-United States border. The security barrier is a decades-long bipartisan project to control the flow of people and other things entering the United States. Presently, there exists nearly 700 miles of fencing, much of it constructed during the Obama Administration, the result of implementation of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, a bill passed by both parties and signed into law by President George W. Bush. However, construction of the network of barriers started in the early 1990s. The barrier is comprised of chain link, concrete walls, post and rail, sheet piling, and wire mesh structures. (See Democrats are Being Disingenuous on the Role of Security Fencing in Reducing Illegal Immigration and Crime for a history of this.)

There are similar walls going up around the western world. For example, the Syria–Turkey barrier, a system of fences and walls aimed at preventing illegal crossings and smuggling from Syria into Turkey, people and contraband that then make their way across Europe, enjoys funding from the European Union. Mass migration to Europe has raised crime rates and fueled the rise of rightwing nationalism, a countermovement disruptive to establishment hegemony the neoliberal agenda. But it’s more than this. Migration pressure are growing worse with continued population growth and the coming catastrophe of climate change. The world population is on a path to reach 9-11 billion by mid-century, and almost all that growth will occur in developing countries, especially where pro-birth religions prevail (Islam and Catholicism). (See The Urgency of Population Control and Appreciating the Accomplishments of the Developed World for an in-depth analysis of the problem.) European elites realize that uncontrolled immigration is contrary to their long-term interests. Uncontrolled immigration is also contrary to the interests of the proletarian, so it is a relief to see the establishment coming around to the importance of immigration control. Unfortunately, as I discuss in this essay, US elites are late in coming around to the same understanding.

Those areas along the southwestern border of the United States where security barriers have been emplaced experienced substantial reductions in illegal immigration and significant reductions in associated crime. Despite claims to the contrary, security barriers are highly effective in reducing illegal border crossings. (It is rather curious to see people on the left ape the fallacious argument of the rightwing gun rights crowd that people serious about breaking the law will not be deterred by government efforts to enhance public safety.) But serious problems remain. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 266,000 criminal illegal immigrations over the last two years, including 4,000 homicides. Based on these statistics, 3.5% of the population is committing nearly 12 percent of homicides in the United States every year (see a detailed analysis here: What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?). Considering that central and east Asian populations are underrepresented in violent crime, the disproportionality is largely attributable to immigrants from Central America and Mexico. In other words, demographic realities mean that an even smaller proportion of the population is responsible for a large number of homicides.

It is important to consider why there is so much reluctance among Democrats to appropriate money for more comprehensive border control (such was their opposition that they participated in the longest government shutdown in the history of the nation). For establishment Democrats, reluctance admits the neoliberalism they have advanced for decades. Immigration is a tool capitalists use to undermine the standard of living of and politically disorganize native-born labor. Marxist economist Melvin Leiman documents this history in Political Economy of Racism. “[B]y constantly changing the composition of the working class,” he writes, “[immigration] very effectively prevented the establishment of a stable organizing base.” Leiman shows how this tactic in particular interferes with efforts to forge labor solidarity across racial lines. (For a critical summary of the literature concerning the economic and political impact of immigration see Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class.) The period of immigration control between the mid-1920s and mid-1960s, the result of rank-and-file labor fighting for its class interests, marked by a stretch of growing and widening affluence for ordinary Americans, led to the emergence of strong worker solidarity and class consciousness. Opening the country to large-scale immigration in the mid-1960s was part of a business strategy, working through the Democratic Party, to undermine labor strength and disrupt worker consciousness. Public pressure to control immigration has therefore been crucial to political enthusiasm for border control measures. At the same time, the appearance of controlling illegal immigration is a propaganda element in legitimizing legal immigration, which presently approaches late-18^th/early-19^thcentury levels.

For the new crop of Democrats, the so-called “democratic socialist,” the push for open-borders and the hostility towards law enforcement reflects the power of leftwing identitarianism in muddling thought, paradoxically providing support for globalism, a result of the successful socialization of postmodern conceptions of power. This development functions to advance capitalist interests by recasting worker interests as reflective of white privilege, thus disrupting class consciousness and worker solidarity. As I am sure most readers of blog know, racism is a very old strategy used by bourgeois operatives to defang the working class. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries identity was used by the far right to disrupt leftwing politics. Fascism is the most obvious species of this type of strategy. Walter Benjamin observed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “the growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process.” Here he is referring to the process of divorcing individuals from the means of production under conditions of mass production creating the potential for workers to realize their collective situation of exploitation. “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” he writes. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.” This expression takes the form of fetishes for race and various other identities that divide populations rather than unite them in common struggle. The suppression of the worker’s right is thus obtained via aesthetics, “the production of ritual values,” values and practices that eclipse class (the marketing of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign is illustrative of this dynamic). Consciousness inverted, the progressive Democrat embraces the same sensibilities, albeit on opposite sides of the identitarian divides; and while the politics of the left are not nearly as destructive as fascist politics, they press in the same direction with respect to the harm they cause to class politics. As a result, the cosmetic politics of diversity replace the substantive politics of class. Propagandists then easily slot immigration into the logic of bourgeois antiracism and multiculturalism, which, pushed since the early 20th century (for example by cultural pluralist Horace Keller of the New School, who claimed that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible and strengthened America), has become status quo consciousness, conflating working class interests with nativist sensibilities.

Thus, the Democratic Party appears between neoliberal establishment and leftwing identitarian types, but types that nonetheless support open borders over against the interests of working class families. Moreover, the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 inspired something the left calls “the resistance,” which, born in hysteria, and deftly pushed by the corporate media, committed itself from the outset to categorically oppose Trump’s agenda, even when articulating traditional values of the marginalized authentic left, such as skepticism of imperialist and militarist ambition. Of course, the Trump presidency is straightaway an affront to the establishment. To be sure, Trump is a capitalist, but he is not a globalist. His patriotic sense of nationalism instinctively guides him to oppose endless war, transnational capitalist hegemony, and open immigration policy because these are bad for his country. Thus Trump is disruptive to the smooth hegemony neoliberals have endeavored to emplace, a hegemony that facilitates the dismantling of nation-state and national cultures, replacing them with supranational political-economic authority and multiculturalism. Because western society has achieved the highest standards of living in the world, in part because of the work of the labor movement, and enjoys a political-legal system open enough to allow for democratic sensibilities and practices, it has become the primary target of neoliberal adjustment, a project that devolves popular public functions to elite private control. This project was developed and led by Democrats in the 1960s. For example, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy’s successor of John F. Kennedy, signed into law what was at that time the largest tax cut in U.S. history and followed it with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act), both measures that undermined working class power and affluence and concentrated wealth in the hands of the capitalist class. The project has enjoyed bipartisan support since then. Out of step with the times, Trump is an obstacle to the adjustment of the modern capitalist republic (and it is a failure of the left and concerted efforts by the Democratic Party that it does not have its own representative in that office). Since Americanism is, for many, synonymous with white supremacy, it has been easy to enlist young progressives in the neoliberal and globalist project to discipline the working class. This is not just an American phenomenon. The entire West is yielding to neoliberal ambition and identitarian politics.

This is the ideological backdrop. In the foreground of the dispute are pragmatic-sounding and faux-political objections to Trump’s actions. One objection rests on the claim that there is no crisis worthy of a national emergency. Border crossings are down, opponents claim. What is the emergency? Thanks largely for security fencing and more border control assets, border apprehensions are down since 2000, when 1.64 million were crossing the border annually; however, total southwest border apprehensions climbed from just over 300,000 in 2017 to 400,000 in 2018, representing more than a 33% increase. Crucially, the social profile of illegal immigration has changed, reflecting an increase in families and children. Family unit apprehensions at the border have almost doubled, climbing from 75,000 in 2017 to nearly 110,000 in 2018. “In Arizona,” NPR recently reported, “the number of migrant families and children crossing the border more than doubled last year, straining resources in the U.S. and Mexico.” Apprehensions of unaccompanied children are up 25%, from 40,000 in 2017 to 40,000 in 2018. The changing migration profile requires updates to US border control strategy, especially in making it harder for smugglers to dump families and children in the most dangerous parts of the southwest. The pattern of families traveling in large groups reflects their understanding that crossing in larger groups makes the journey safer. However, the Mexican side of the border is controlled by cartels, and they are leading families to remote spots to avoid detection. Humanitarian work is taking agents away from their law enforcement duties, which gives the cartels more opportunities to smuggle drugs and people into the US. Thus Trump’s motive for building more security barriers echoes the work of progressive European elites in providing funding for security barriers at key points of entry on their own continent. Are these efforts also considered fascist and racist? This is one of the ideological objections to Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency: it’s fascist and racist. Is Sweden now a fascist and racist country because it moved to restrict immigration after the troubles the recent migrant crisis brought its citizens? Hardly. Such hyperbole is meant to prevent the citizens of the United States from demanding what is in their best interests.

As implied above, without economic development and secular institutions in the developing world, migration pressures will only grow. A survey of the situation in these countries tells the observer that the possibility of such developments in the near term are remote. Fencing therefore must be central component to any effective strategy of immigration control. From the NPR story cited above: “Despite the recent influx of migrant families, the Yuma sector is widely considered a border enforcement success story. The number of illegal border crossings in Yuma today is just a fraction of what it used to be in the early 2000s.” Yuma is not the only success story, as I have documented on this blog. Indeed, the reduction of illegal border crossings and the continue problem of illegal immigration supports the argument for stricter border controls. Persons who believe their chances of illegally crossing the border are slim are less likely to make the hazardous journey. The difficulty of getting into the United States reduces the number of persons seeking entry. A recent The New York Times headline reads: “With Trumps Tough Deterrents, Many Asylum Seekers on the Border are Giving Up” (the vast majority of asylum seekers are found to have no legitimate claims to asylum). Leftwing identitarians for whom every migrant is a refugee will read this headline with horror, but it is good news for the American working class. Moreover, illegal border crossings, beyond their inherent criminality, are associated with other forms of crime. A porous border is exploited by drug and human traffickers. Individuals who attempt to illegally cross the border are at risk for exploitation, injury, and death. Border control agents describe a much better situation today a decade after extensive fencing. Before, to use the words of one agent interviewed by NPR, it was “out of control.” Another agent interviewed stated that they were “unable to stop the thousands of trucks filled with drugs and humans that quickly crossed a vanishing point and dispersed into communities all across the country.” (See The Border in 2014 … and Now for details.)

The threats to personal security, working class interests, and a concern for human rights makes illegal border crossings a crisis. A more comprehensive approach to border security, including extending the security barrier, will reduce illegal border crossings (see The Situation at the Border and How to Respond to it). This will save lives and jobs and reduce crime. If not stopped, Trump will extend the barrier using dollars that would otherwise be spent by the military for purposes the public has been conditioned to believe represent true “national security” interests. And while national emergencies are unusual events and should be rare (keeping in mind that, between presidents spanning Carter to Trump, 58 national emergencies have been declared since 1976, with 32 of these still in effect), inaction by Democrats to address the problem at the border is partly responsible for the president’s drastic action. Contrary to the interests of working families, Democrats exploit the president’s unpopularity to obstruct efforts to strengthen border security. They are concerned that any success Trump will have on strengthening US borders will put immigration control in a positive light, and this could very well lead to growing consciousness about the harm of immigration on the standard of living and personal security of working people (for an analysis of the harm see The Immigration Situation) and the need for immigration restrictions.

Be wary of language. It helps identify and communicate features of our shared reality. But it also constructs and reifies unreal things and associations. 

Seeking status and power, people make claims based on manufactured realities. Under the guise of “justice” they assign guilt and responsibility for personal advantage and privilege. They claim special judgment and wisdom based on argot and identity. They disappear the individual into aggregates and assumed associations based on socially constructed identifiers. 

Magic works to the extent that one suspends his disbelief. Inter-generational guilt and demand-making on individuals based on race or other socially-constructed identities are forms of magical thinking. Such notions and practices are primitive and superstitious. They’re atavistic. They’re backwards. They’re rooted in retribution. As such they are not ways forward.

Justice demands addressing the wrongdoings of the living for the sake of the living. Leave the dead to their graves. The deeds of the departed, however explanatory, are not punishable. No child should be called upon to account for the deeds of her ancestors. Enough with these hateful biblical attitudes.

That some areas may be gray doesn’t mean that all areas are gray. There is situational and emergent morality and there is fundamental universal morality. Both must ultimately be reckoned beyond standpoint. I cannot conceive of a situation in which compelling a person to continue a pregnancy is just. My inability to conceive of such a situation is not due to standpoint (I am a man) but rather on recognition—a recognition available to anybody who is prepared to think beyond their cultural, ideological, religious, social position—of universal human rights, specifically the right of persons to own their body and their mind. 

We know slavery is wrong not because some people don’t want to be slaves but because no rational and free person would be if given a choice—but even more than that, because slavery makes bodies sick. There is no standpoint that makes slavery good, only ideologies that justify and rationalize it. Compelling a woman to have a baby is a manifestation of slavery. That the target of this practice is the human female should not change our reckoning of that. Victims don’t determine right and wrong; they are victims because they have been wronged.

So, while I insist that understanding the patriarchy is necessary for understanding why we must continue to fight for women’s rights (which are of course human rights), I cannot agree that the fight should be limited by standpoint, which I am defining here as claims of epistemic privilege by virtue of identity. Indeed, it cannot be without violating other rights, such as the right to think and speak freely and critically. 

This is why I don’t like the rhetoric of “allyship.” I am not an ally in the struggle against racism. I don’t take a backseat in the struggle on account of my skin color or my ancestry. I have no less moral authority on account of these impositions. I am an individual who opposes racism because of its effects on my brothers and sisters across our species, effects that limit them—and that includes me, as well. Just consider the role racism plays in weakening the class solidarity necessary for a mass movement against capitalist exploitation.

When a black person objects to being asked what black people think, that person is articulating a very important standard: demographic categories do not manifest as human agency. To treat a person’s identity as the prime signifier of truth, correctness, or justice is to reduce persons to, to reify abstractions. When a white person purports to tell people what white people think, the person is assuming authority he does not actually have. He is also assuming an impossible task: conjuring thought from a demographic category. What white person can speak for me? Identity politics is a terrific example of why we tell students in statistics classes that averages and aggregates aren’t people. How did this fallacy become operational in our political and moral struggles? What is real are unjust social relations and oppressive social structures. The truth of those lie outside our points of view. In fact, we need to get on the same page about them if we want to effectively deal with the problem they pose to human freedom. 

To claim that power, culture, or standpoint determines truth and justice reduces ontology to epistemology. This is an error. Denying the facts of reality, this claim falsely reduces reality to subjective impressions of it. So while power, culture, and standpoint can make falsehoods and injustices appear true and just, that does not make them so, and part of the truth of this is the relativity of power, culture, and standpoint. If a black person knows things a white person can’t because segmented experience, then that means a white person know things a black person can’t, yet both of blacks and white people exist in the same system of social relations and have access to the same means of ascertaining the truth of that system. Both are members of the human family with limiting racial identities imposed upon them without their consent. Standpoint doesn’t validate one’s view, it limits it. Making a fetish of subjectivism and relativism doubles down on the self-limiting nature of group identities, impoverishing knowledge of the truth of our collective situation. Secular humanism and materialist science provide an objective view of human relations that transcend the limitations of standpoint (which is why I suspect they are marginalized in discussions of morality).

The truth of morality is easy to see in studying nonhuman animals; other animals are not deceived by ideology (since they don’t have any), and, as long as we’re not also so deceived in observing them, they tell us a lot about the truth of our world. Wolves and bears don’t do well in cages. They are stressed and prone to illness. They want to leap and bound about with their wolf and bear brothers and sisters where the neurotransmitter mix is right so they can feel joy and love. That’s where their coats and noses are shiny. For humans, unjust social arrangements are our cages. They limit us. Unjust social arrangements are the sources of our alienation, stresses, and illnesses. 

To compel a person to be part of a tribe by permanently marking his sexual organ limits him. It denies him the full experience of natural history by blunting sexual pleasure (the full extent of joy he could otherwise experience in his one and only life). Justice demands we stop the practice. Religion is not a valid excuse for violating the individual’s right to consent to such a thing. This is what makes religion so poisonous and why multicultural demands to tolerate it are so odious. Such things cannot be culturally negotiable. The person did not choose to be born into an sexually repressive culture. 

Telling a woman she has to bear a child puts her in a cage. To be sure, because of our big and complex brains we can suffer from the illusion that our cages are freedom. After all, without these brains there could be no gods or devils or divine prescription (because these don’t actually exist). But the truth of this unfreedom does not depend on the illusions these unjust systems weave to oppress us. It depends on objective reality of situations and their effects, and the truth of these exist independent of subjectivity created by power, culture, or standpoint. The critical thinker must go beyond his situation, his culture, and all the rest of it in order to access moral truth. Socially constructed morality must always be checked against what we can know trans-culturally/ historically, and we must always strive to know more. Science is the universal system that makes this knowledge possible. And while science may be misused, its practice is progressive, in contrast to religion which, when faithfully followed, is regressive.

Our species-ties are the product of natural history. Just as they are for any other living system, the conditions for self-actualization and well-being are objectively ascertainable. This is why postmodernist and standpoint epistemologies, as well as deep multiculturalism or cultural pluralism, are so troubling to human rights. Either human rights are universal, objectively determinable, and inhering in each individual, or the very possibility of human rights is negated by a multiplicity of power, cultural, and standpoint-dependent clusters making demands on those who have been or whom they designate as existing under their authority.

We won’t get very far arguing about which identities have rights to make claims. We all have a right to make claims as individuals. To illustrate this with a recent example of progress (rather than dwell on the many examples of paralysis), marriage equality didn’t happen because people were prepared to let a group determine the law for themselves. It happened because the principle that no individual should be denied equal access to a social institution on account of their sexual orientation prevailed. It was the appeal to the universality of a right that won the day. The claim that heterosexual couples were entitled to a special right on the basis of their identity folded. Identity politics lost and individual liberty triumphed. We have to defend abortion on the grounds that it violates the universal right of all individuals to control their bodies. The patriarchy in this case is like heterosexism: it is a barrier to individual liberty. That’s something we must together tear down.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes in its preamble: “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” By “members of the human family,” the document means individuals. Human rights adhere in each individual as the birthright of our species ties and therefore demand equality. Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Humans are reasoning and moral beings and should regard each other thusly. Article 2 states that the Declarations enumerated rights are entitlements “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

Crucially, being a member of a group gets you no more or no less of the rights to which everybody is entitled. While the Declaration makes reference to collective entities, such as the nation-state, the associated right, the right to a nationality, resides in the individual. Indeed, there is no logical basis for organic group rights in the Declaration. A group right as distinct from the rights of individuals could abrogate human rights by allowing immunity from the right to not be a slave. To allow the group to control individuals outside of human rights is respect for tribalism, a primitive and oppressive religious construct quite out of line with human rights. Article 6 states: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” This in principle obviates tribalism.

This principle is embraced in the United States tradition. Indeed, more than other countries, the United States aligns its ideals with these principles—indeed it anticipates them in its Bill of Rights!—and the logic of these rights proceeds on the basis of equality. If every individual is in principle a person before the law, then each person has in principle a right to speech, assembly, and all the rest of it. A white teenager from Kentucky standing at the Lincoln Memorial is as equal before the law – a law that regards silence as indicating nothing – as an elderly American Indian activist banging his drum in protest against the presence of white people on what he claims as his sacred lands. In principle, they both have a right to exist in that space and for whatever purpose they decide as long as that purpose is not to physically harm (some would add harass or intimidate) others.

Because each person is endowed with reason (albeit that capacity is still developing in the young of our species because of our long path to maturity), the arguments and claims a person makes—if he is making any—must be reasonable, which means reliance on secular facts and logic. Gender, race, religion, or other identities are no more reasons that arguments are true or false, right or wrong as they are for claiming privileges before the law. Just as an individual in principle should enjoy no special dispensation for the fact that he identifies as an American Indian or is identified as a white person, so his arguments gain no gravity on that basis. He stands as an individual and his reason and conscience shoulder the same burdens as that of every other mature person. The reality that power or identity can make falsehoods and wrongs appear true and right does not change the objective standards for reasoning though arguments and claims made about the world.

What about empathy? Empathy is about understanding what moves a person. It is not a method for determining the truth. Our shared reality is not a matter of perspective or standpoint. To believe otherwise is to do ideological work.

The extent to which postmodern epistemology—in a nutshell, the method that holds that what a person is determines whether she is right or wrong and that how she feels about something determines the truth of a situation or thing—has become accepted by so many people on the left is a testament to the ability of approved cultural managers serving in establishment institutions to shape popular thought, to mislead people from the path to justice. How else would so many persons claiming to speak to justice embrace the irrational and superstitious ethic of intergenerational and collective injury, guilt, and punishment? How else could reasonable and conscientious people assign blame to individuals or excuse their actions with no evidence or justification other than they are members of a group, that they “belong” to an historically imposed or embraced social construction? How else could intelligent people turn the logic of racism into a virtue signaling politics of the left? All this over against the beautiful and obvious logic of human rights.

In a review of Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider in The Guardian, Ben Tarnoff writes, “Collective self-emancipation doesn’t require abandoning one’s identity—if that were even possible—but linking it with those of others in widening circles of solidarity.” Some identities can be left behind. Some can’t. But the widening circles of solidarity is a start. However, one can get there a lot sooner by recognizing the following:

There are two things that either bind all of us or most of together. The first is species-ties. We are all members of the human family. This means that human rights exist in the individual and all individuals simultaneously. The second is our economic position, which for the vast majority of people is proletarian. So while it is true that racism explains why blacks as a group trail whites as a group in every significant social category, the plight of poor black and poor white individuals is an economic system that exploit human labor. This is why lumping by race or some other demographic category and viewing everything through its lens obscures more than it illuminates, something captured well by Valerie Tarico, in an essay published today in AlterNet (“Here’s why Evangelicals and social justice warriors trigger me in the same way”).

As I argued on this blog yesterday: Those of us on the left who still cast our lot with the struggling proletarian masses have to start speaking out against identity politics as its currently manifested (frankly, even if salvageable, I am not convinced of its utility) and that means looking at ourselves. The process of critical self-reflection begins with recognizing this essential and universal truth: If our politics make assumptions about who people are, what they believe, what they do, what they’re responsible for, and what they deserve on the basis of the color of their skin or some other socially constructed category, then our politics aren’t just wrong, they’re antithetical to premise of human rights and the interests of working people.