For the sake of election integrity, the election 2020 process needs thorough studying. I lived through a stolen election. I always get accused of wearing a tinfoil hat for saying this, but Florida was effectively stolen in 2000. I vowed then to never let my fellow Americans forget that. Not that the world would have been that different if Gore had been president. But it might have been. We’ll never know.
Florida’s Secretary of State, Republican Katherine Harris, called the election for Bush. But Gore won the state and thus the election. And not by a little. We know Gore won the state because we had enough time to dig through the ballots and see what happened. Republicans tried to hide the process. They even bullied the vote counters. The media worked the public for them. In the end, Bush prevailed. What followed were wars of choice and economic calamity.
In the aftermath of Bush-Gore, the media successfully convinced four-fifths of the American population to believe the 2000 election to have been an example of how the systems works. They blamed the spoiler Ralph Nader for everything. Third parties are a threat to the two-party system. In reality, it was an instance of the establishment installing their candidate in the White House and legitimizing the hegemony of corporate rule.
The Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative progeny of Cold War liberalism, needed a sure platform from which to manifest its agenda in action—global military power projection. Neoliberals were horrified at Gore’s suggestion that the budget surplus be sequestered and a firewall established between Social Security and political elites. They wanted a Grand Bargain to privative Social Security. Rioters wearing black uniforms possessed a populist-nationalist spirit then, and Gore’s seemingly authentic environmentalism, a powerful element in anti-globalization, made him suspect. Greenwashing is fine, but practical environmentalism is a no-go. Gore might be a risk. Better safe than sorry.
As we have seen with Biden, and saw with Obama, the corporate media was behind Bush. They openly ridiculed Gore. They spun the debates. They transformed Bush’s dismal performances and frequent gaffes into folksy Americanism. Gore was weird. A robot. A wooden boy. A deliberate alpha male. He sighed a lot. To be sure, it would take Obama to dissolve anti-corporatism and anti-globalization with identitarianism and to normalize regime-change wars. The Grand Bargain would have to wait, of course. At least they consumed the surplus and stopped the firewall. But installing Bush in office was an important step in mainstreaming neoconservatism and neoliberalism.
Now the establishment likely has once again their man in office (actually their woman). Neoconservatism, neoliberalism, transnational corporatism, Chinese imperialism—it’s all back on the menu. The globalists are back in the saddle. Everything is good again. Trump was only a temporary disruption. Back to normality.
We’ve seen this story before. The studies of 2020 will occur. But the majority won’t learn about the findings unless they favor the official narrative—or are twisted in favor of it.
There are memes going around telling us that we cannot vote for candidates who hurt the ones we love and care about. We understand who the meme refers to. Its target is Donald Trump and those who may vote for him. But it would be more accurate to ask this question of all those voting for Joe Biden.
Didn’t Biden author the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in the Senate, the draconian crime bill that disproportionately impacted poor and minority members of our society? That wasn’t the half of it.
I bet you don’t remember the Biden-Thurmond crime bill of 1982. It eliminated parole at the federal level, expanded civil asset forfeiture, limited access to bail (a provision the ACLU denounced for standing legal innocence on its head), increased penalties for drugs, and called for a drug czar. Terrifyingly, the bill passed by the Senate and House overwhelmingly but was vetoed by then-president Ronald Reagan. Why? The drug czar bit was too much for Reagan. Really? Yes, really.
Strom Thurmond and Joseph Biden, responsible for the Biden-Thurmond crime bill of 1982
Who’s this Strom Thurmond person? Look into it. Biden eulogized the man in 2003. That’s a eulogy probably worth looking into. Before you go to the polls. Or maybe you already voted? Hey, Biden isn’t big and orange, right?
Biden didn’t let Reagan’s veto deter him. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. The bill eliminated parole, expanded civil asset forfeiture, and restricted access to bail. Biden led in foisting upon the public the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. It lengthened sentences for many offenses. That’s the law that created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity. I am pretty sure you’ve heard of that monstrosity.
Biden finally, got his drug czar with his Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. It is this law that, more than any other, drove up federal imprisonment by lengthening sentences at the federal level.
In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s for being “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough” in his war on drugs. “The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs,” Biden said, “but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam.” That was his inspiration to write the crime bill Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994.
You don’t love the poor and minority members of our society who were sent to prison for long periods of time? What about their children?
Didn’t Biden vote for the Iraq War? You don’t love the people who are killed and maimed in regime-change wars? Didn’t Biden support NAFTA? Hasn’t Biden been at the forefront of organizing the migration of manufacturing from the United States to China? You don’t care about the loss of livelihoods for vulnerable working families?
If you don’t think Biden’s actions hurt the ones you love or care about, then you aren’t paying attention to your surroundings. Or maybe you don’t love and care about the right people. In any case, your attempt to guilt trip your peers is nothing more than a demonstration of doublethink.
When you search COVID-19 cases and deaths in Google, look below the case and death totals so you can see the new case and fatality totals added since the last update. Calculate the case fatality rate (CFR) using those figures. Multiply the CFR by a factor of ten to estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR). Doing this yields rates of 0.5% and 0.05%. That is overall. As we know, death rates for most age groups is much lower than this.
We are interested in the present death rate because we want to calculate risk in real time. Taking the rate from the entire number of cases over several months produces a distortion, even while the overall rate declines with time. The rates of CFR were very high early on for several reasons. One of the reasons was because fewer cases were being diagnosed. Today there is a lot more testing. As a result there are a lot more cases. It looks scary when we see the number of cases going up. But when we realize that the rising number of cases indicates that the virus is much less lethal than we have been told, the rising number of cases has a silver lining.
The relative risk vis–à–vis age is also very important to reckon. The median age of death from COVID-19 is mid-80s. Two-thirds of persons at this age will die next year from something other than COVID-19. In the beginning, COVID-19 was highly lethal to the very old and infirm. It was never extraordinarily lethal to other age groups and healthy individuals. Even for the very old and infirm, most survive the disease, and that number improves everyday. Indeed, early on, more than one-quarter of those hospitalized with COVID-19 died. That figure is now around three percent.
You know your health. Adjust aggregate and relative risks in light of your personal circumstances. I have preexisting health conditions, so I am more cautious than I otherwise would be. But from a public health standpoint, lockdowns make no sense. There is no reason to subject to a population that is not generally at risk from this virus to the draconian rules that have been imposed and are being imposed. Don’t forget, these rules have had severe downstream effects, as I have discussed in past blogs. The authorities understand this. They aren’t stupid. The public needs to start asking questions of the politicians. What has this really been about?
Have you seen the meme putting MAGA hats on historic photographs of white men harassing black men sitting at segregated lunch counters? I provide an example below. With such memes, progressives smear tens of millions of white Americans who are not racist. Moreover, they disappear black Trump supporters, who number in the millions.
Social media meme circulating.
First, members of my family and a great many of my white friends are Trump supporters who move in fully racially-integrated occupational and social circles. They work and eat around black people. Their sons and daughters marry black people. They foster care for and adopt black children. They would never harass a black man eating at a lunch counter. They would share a cup of coffee with him. Or a beer. If they ever saw a black man being harassed, they would intervene. (See video below for an enlightened discussion on civil rights.)
Second, analyzing exit polling data from the 2016 presidential election, 13 percent of black Americans voted for Donald Trump. Racially disaggregating voter turnout from that election finds that the number of blacks who voted for Trump north of two million. And Trump looks to gain more black votes in 2020. Why? Historically low black unemployment, fastest wage gains among blacks in history, criminal justice reform, and immigration restrictions. Trump’s frank talk about the failure of progressives to properly govern black-majority neighborhoods probably has a lot to do with it, as well.
A lot of white progressives dismiss the black vote for Trump by chalking it up to false consciousness. Blacks can’t judge such matters for themselves really. Distrust of the people is deeply rooted in the technocratic attitude of progressive elites. The progressive has been known to call black conservatives “Uncle Toms.” Progressives reflect their candidate’s attitude in this regard. Remember when Biden said, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”? Yeah. He said that. He meant it, too. Progressives don’t even trust black people with navigating the voter verification process.
Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden tells Charlamange on The Breakfast Club that black people who do not vote for him are not really black.
This condescending attitude reflects the progressive worldview generally. Let’s put the left’s constant infantilization of blacks and other groups to one side. Identitarian politics for progressives isn’t so much about race or sex or sexual orientation as it is about partisan loyalties. Progressives want to see the first female president, but not if she is conservative; the identity of conservative women is suspect. They celebrate a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hailing her as a model for girls and young women, but an Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor.
One’s racial identity is suspect if one vote for Trump. Except if he is white. Then he’s acting on the reflexive white supremacy that the good white man recognizes in himself. To be fully black, woman, or gay, one has to subscribe to progressive doctrine and support the Democratic Party. Skin color comes with a politics. If you don’t see that, then you’re deluded or stupid.
The technocratic elite see the popular consensus expressed in democratic elections as routine endorsement of its policies. When the results run contrary to this purpose, the popular will is delegitimized. The people chose poorly, we are told. These are not referenda, after all. They are ritual acts of affirmation.
In 2016, we saw this in the Brexit vote and in the election of Donald Trump. The establishment successfully manufactured the perception that a vote for either indicated a reflex of reactionary stupidity. The Deplorables surprised them.
To meet the reflexive stupidity of the Deplorables, the Resistance was founded. Four years on, the Resistance has a chance to fix popular error. The polls indicate that destiny is on their side.
The United States is facing a situation in which those who claim to oppose corporate power, regime-change wars, and the vast prison-industrial complex are voting for a man who has for decades been at the forefront of pushing these very tendencies.
Globalist Joe Biden
The man the Resistance has or will vote for on Election Day is a career politician who represents for the elite a return to the neoliberal and neoconservative status quo, a globalist who has spent his entire life making sure the establishment knows that he is and will always be its man.
The Resistance is voting to topple a leader—a populist outsider with broad support among working class Americans—who has resisted globalization, ended foreign wars, and led on major criminal justice reform.
That the man the Resistance labors to carry to power has at his back the academic institutions, the corporate establishment, the administrative state, the propaganda apparatus, and the culture industry appears not to convey anything significant to the Resistance.
We are inundated with news stories of the rising SARS-2 cases in the United States and instructed by progressives and pundits to attribute the increase to the failure of the Trump administration to deal in an effective way with the pandemic. His Democratic opponent, former Vice-President and long-time Senator from Delaware Joe Biden, tells us that Trump’s lack of action puts Americans in harm’s way.
However, looking at Canada and major European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), one sees a drastic rise in SARS-2 cases in all of them (see charts below). It feels a bit silly to remind readers that Donald Trump is not the leader of any of these countries, but he’s not. Ask yourself: why is the media not reporting what’s happening in these other countries, all of which employed extensive lockdowns and enjoy comprehensive universal healthcare? Because the establishment agenda is to install globalist Joe Biden as the president of the United States. It’s the same reason they aren’t reporting on the evidence damning Biden as a corrupt politician.
The truth is that SARS-2 is a biological event. It manifests the same tendencies independent of the policies of the countries in which it appears—independent of the policies ostensibly meant to deal with contagion. It rises and falls on its own. It targets the same preexisting conditions. The average age of those die from or with SARS-2 is mid-80s. Lockdowns in free and open societies don’t work. Obviously. The more citizens of these countries have masked up, the more cases of infection there are. That’s not because masks spread the virus. No, it’s because there is no causal relation between the things these governments are doing and the natural history of SARS-2.
But this doesn’t mean that government policy doesn’t carry effects. We know that the downstream effects of shuttering society—the tens of thousands of deaths that will occur from undetected cancers, untreated conditions, drug addiction, suicides, and other acts of self and other harm—are the result of policy decisions. Pandemic preparation in the West never had societies locking down. The character of Western freedom ill-prepares people for social isolation. Tyranny imposed on a free people manifests in bizarre ways. Hysteria over systemic racism is a prime example.
We also know that SARS-2 originated in China. Whether naturally emergent, the result of a gain-of-function experiment accidentally released, or a bioweapon designed by the Chinese military, the Chinese communist state is ultimately responsible. Moreover, if we can believe the reporting from the CCP and WHO, China showed the world the efficacy of totalitarianism in controlling the spread of a virus domestically (see below chart), even while, at the same time, allowing the virus to escape China to infect the world. The corporate media is silent on that matter, as well (even while elites hold up China as a model of pandemic preparedness). To be sure, the devastating consequences of lockdowns are a self-inflicted wound that Western governments perpetrated on its own people. But without SARS-2 this would not have happened.
Finally, we know this, too. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked no different in terms of controlling the virus. The statistics would have been the same. Not unless a Clinton regime had transformed the United States into a totalitarian society by February 2020. I would like to believe the people would not have stood for such a thing. If I were a believer, I’d pray to God they’re not ready to stand for that in a Biden regime. Or a Kamala Harris regime.
One of the arguments progressives make in pushing their politics is environmental concern. They are excited when they hear presidential candidate Joe Biden and his sidekick Kamala Harris talk about ending fossil fuels. But progressives typically don’t think in terms of interconnections and they are generally ignorant of international political economy and the problem of uneven global development. (We see a similar myopia in the desire to shut down society over SARS-2, a demand that neglects all the downstream effects of shutdowns, such as the thousands of people who will die from cancer and other diseases, as well as from drug abuse and suicide.)
The United States does indeed produce a lot of energy from fossil fuels. We have achieved a substantial degree of energy independence on account of it. However, because of our high level of economic and technological development, our production and use of fossil fuels, thanks to, among other things, carbon capture and storage methods, is efficient and clean compared to that of China, India, Russia, and other economies. If we reduce production of fossil fuels in the United States, we not only give away our energy independence, but we will also come to rely on fossil fuels produced by other countries in the dirtiest way, thus drastically accelerating global climate change.
The truth is that the world economy depends fundamentally on fossil fuels. We cannot produce the energy we need to run the world using geo, hydro, solar, and wind. I am all for these other sources of energy, but we have to be honest about the situation. And while it is conceivable that we could replace fossil fuel with nuclear power, even if we could agree that nuclear comes with little risk (I seriously doubt folks can agree on that—I am not sure I could agree on that), we could not produce the number of reactors we need to reduce emissions to a level sufficient to stop the trend in global warming.
What progressives appear unable to grasp is that progress on the environment comes with technological advancement. We cannot have technological advancement without economic growth. We cannot have economic growth without sufficient sources of energy. We cannot have sufficient sources of energy without fossil fuels. This is the character of the treadmill of production for the foreseeable future. We have to grasp the structure of throughput and the dynamic interrelation of systems parts in developing sound environmental policy. Moreover, without economic development, we also cannot raise the standard of living for those whom progressives purport to speak.
Extinction Rebellion protests in London last year.
After a year of reflection, I now believe that the most immediate path through the climate crisis is the development of technological solutions to conservation and pollution. The United States can lead the way—but only if we have a country. Progressives have us giving up too much in the name of “social justice.” To be sure, much of the promotion of “clean coal” is greenwashing, as I have written and spoken about. I have worked very hard to debunk the claims of the antienvironmental countermovement. But I have come to realized that one of the greatest barriers to rational discussion on economy and environment is the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from climate change zealots, such as Extinction Rebellion. Unlike the panic over systemic racism, global climate change is real. But like systemic racism hysteria, climate apocalypticism is a disruptive and regressive force in modern society. All of these panics—and throw the SARS-2 panic in there—reflect a neurotic worldview that functions as a type of quasi-religious fundamentalism, a secular millennialism, if you will. We have to listen to more rational voices than these.
I have been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the current tendencies we are now experiencing in the West. I have been helped considerably by several prominent thinkers. Among them are Bruce Gilley, cancelled for defending colonialism, James Lindsay and his New Discourses resource and damning critique of social justice, Tom Holland’s thesis of the Great Awokening, Daniel McCarthy of Modern Age and his case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson and the problem with the progressive elites, Heather MacDonald and the diversity delusion, and Thomas Frank’s advocacy of populism. Although there are problems with their arguments, which I note in yesterday’s podcast (see below), their insights helped me make important connections.
These insights inform my historical materialism and political economy specialty. What I have come to see very clearly are two convergent developments that should trouble every freedom loving person. The first is the critical theory, neo-Maoist, postcolonial, postmodernist, race identitarian, Third Worldist tendency currently on the streets burning down America, manifest in progressive politics, and, in the academy, poisoning the minds of the youth of Western societies with a cracked theory of history and social arrangements. It is an utterly incoherent worldview, illiberal in attitude and totalitarian in character. The tendency directs activists and administrators to organize institutions around and assess and evaluate individual thought and behavior on the basis of racial identity.
The second development is the transnational corporate powers—in business, culture industry, media—weaponizing this tendency to delegitimize the Enlightenment and democratic republicanism and dismantle the international system to establish a global neofeudalist order with a new aristocracy ruling the masses. It is astonishing to me—an embarrassing for me because I did not immediately see it clearly myself—that academics have been so keen to recognize the problem of the corporate takeover of higher education but have not grasped the regressive character of the critical theory/postmodern tendency they still believe represents radicalism in colleges and universities, even k-12. This should have become obvious when administrators incorporated the tendency in advertising and marketing, curriculum, and in HR (diversity and inclusion) policies. As if corporations would promote anything truly subversive.
The truth is that the critical theory tendency undermines class consciousness. This is a New Left tendency—racialist, antihumanist, illiberal, and Islamist. It is radical in this sense: it is a radical departure from the Old Left politics that emphasize class, humanism, liberalism, and secularism. Why else would corporate elites, who stifled Old Left politics for more than a century, push the New Left tendency? Remember, progressivism is the ideology underpinning technocratic logic of corporate governance.
Who is the presidential candidate of the New Left tendency? It’s Joe Biden. Joe Biden was the United States Senator from Delaware for nearly forty years. The Biden campaign paints the candidate as “Joe from Scranton,” but before serving as Vice-President from 2009 to 2017, Biden was the Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009. Delaware is a unique state with its Court of Chancery. The General Corporation Law is the statute governing corporate law in the state. Due to the favorable legal environment, more than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States and more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state. Delaware has for decades been known at the premier corporate haven in America. From this perch, Biden has helped corporatists advance their globalist strategies. Perhaps no politicians has done more to hurt working families in America than Joe from Scranton. As Senator and Vice-President has promoted mass incarceration, global military action, regime change wars, and surveillance. That this is the man who progressives tell us we must vote for tells us a great deal about their politics.
The split is not between the New Left and corporate power. The arsonists and rioters on our streets are not in opposition to the corporate powers that fund them and push out their message. That’s a contradiction. Antiracism is not a movement. It is establishment politics. The bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese communist state and the state monopoly capitalism of the West intersect in the managed decline of the West. The bulwark against this monstrosity is the small “d” democratic and small “r” republican populist nationalist uprising. It is an uprising against neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and globalism. Perhaps the deaths of democracy, humanism, liberalism, and secularism are inevitable. But there is a force resisting transnational corporatism and it’s represented, with all its imperfections, by the Trump movement. You know it’s a movement because its opposition is the establishment.
The establishment media not reporting on the Hunter Biden story is big time gaslighting. The elite are forcing the people to choose between two narratives: (1) the establishment is covering for Joe Biden (an obvious truth they mean to sound crazy) and (2) there is nothing here, which is straight up a lie. The truth is that the laptop is real, every bit of it, and Joe Biden is eye-ball deep in epic corruption and totally unfit to president (as if that wasn’t obvious already). A massive fraud is being perpetrated on the American public. Biden is a traitor to the American republic.
Shame on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Especially Sanders. Sheepdog par excellence. These quislings portray themselves as super ethical and keen to smoke out corruption. Nonsense. They are enablers of the Democratic Party’s big lie. The Democratic Socialist of America is revealed as a complete deception. Cornel West, Chris Hedges—the whole lot of them are fake populists, faux-socialism at best haplessly working with the transnational fraction of world capitalist power to defeat the working class.
Folks need to move on from this Supreme Court business. The nation has its ninth justice. But before moving on, a reminder on hypocrisy and what lies behind it:
Let history record that it was the Democrats who insisted on hearing Merrick in an election year. Were all the arguments they made then—and they made them confidently and dramatically—made in bad faith? Probably. But let’s take Democrats at their word.
McConnell and Grassley, in that famous Washington Post op-ed, had every reason to believe that Hillary Clinton would be elected president in 2016. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent. Whatever their arguments were about hearing the voice of the people, MccConnell’s party held power in the Senate. (Republicans even held power in the House. It was a divided government between executive and legislative branch.)
Here’s what not being hypocritical would look like: If you say something in 2016, and you say it is on principle, then you have to say the same thing in 2020. It’s principle. It doesn’t change. In 2016, Democrat after Democrat insisted on hearing Merrick in an election year (watch above video). President Obama was a Democrat president. The Republican majority didn’t have to schedule a hearing or a vote for the nominee of a president of the other party. Elections have consequences. Power matters.
Trump ran on putting originalists on the Supreme Court. His party controls the Senate. They scheduled a hearing and a vote. Elections have consequences. Trump and Republicans followed through with their promise. Democrats are contradicting themselves on principle.
What is this about? Democrats aren’t really concerned about hypocrisy (they would have appointed a judge in an election year if Hillary Clinton had been president—this isn’t about principle). The noise they made was really about keeping the Supreme Court out of the hands of those who base interpretation of disputes the philosophy to which Amy Coney Barrett subscribes, namely originalism, which progressives equate to racism, sexism, and homophobia. (For them, our founding fathers were horrible people.)
Asked during the confirmation hearings about her method, Barrett said, “I interpret [the Constitution’s] text as text and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time. And it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
The term “originalism” emerged in the 1980s to capture the character of a judicial philosophy that holds that, in resolving legal disputes, the judge must do so in light of the Constitution’s text and the founders’ intentions. If progressives want to change the law, originalists suggest they do the hard work—the work assigned to the legislative branch, which represents the will of the people—of passing and repealing laws rather than depending on an activist judges to inject new meaning into the founding texts on the basis of their ideological views. Supreme Court justices aren’t elected by the people (heaven help us if they ever are). They are there to interpret law, policy, dispute, and judgment in light of the Constitution and other founding texts and other legislative texts and intentions. Just imagine activists judges on the right injecting their ideology into the law and you get the problem with judicial activism.
“Even though you didn’t give a direct answer I think your response did speak volumes,” Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii scolded Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. “Not once, but twice, you used the term sexual preference to describe those in the LGBTQ community. And let me make clear, sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term.”
Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono scolding Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett over her word choice
What was Hirono responding to? “I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said when asked about her stance on preserving protections for members of the LGBTQ community. Correct answer, right? Wrong. Lambda Legal tells us why:
IMPORTANT:
Barrett used "sexual preference" (not "sexual orientation") when discussing her views on marriage equality.
The correct term is sexual orientation. "Sexual preference" is a term often used by anti-LGBTQ activists to imply that sexual orientation is a choice. https://t.co/rT6g95gsG1
After being confronted by Hirono, Barrett apologized. “I certainly didn’t mean and would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense in the LGBTQ community,” she said.
Shortly afterward, John McCormack of the National Review asked an obvious question of Hirono: “Senator, last week at the hearing you mentioned that you thought it was ‘offensive and outdated’ when Amy Barrett used the [term] ‘sexual preference.’ It turns out that Joe Biden said it in May. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it in 2017. Some of your colleagues on the Judiciary Committee said it maybe in 2010, 2012. Do you stand by that criticism?”
Mazie Hirono: Well, of course.
McCormack: Do you think Joe Biden should apologize for saying that in May?
Hirono: Well, look, it’s a lesson learned for all of us. But when you’re going on the Supreme Court and you’ve been a judge, as one of my judge friends said, you should know what these words mean.
McCormack: Should Joe Biden apologize, too, like Amy Coney Barrett did?
Hirono: Joe Biden is not up for the Supreme Court.
McCormack: He’s up for the presidency. So, he shouldn’t apologize?
Hirono: People will decide.
McCormack: You don’t want to call on him to apologize?
Hirono: Oh, stop it. The world is in flames.
There are lots of problems with Hirono’s response. For one thing, telling another person how they are supposed to talk about complex and unsettled matters is arrogant and obnoxious. What does Hirono know about this? Somebody tells her something and she becomes a walking truth scold? Now she’s everybody’s mother? That’s the left these these days. The authoritarian impulse is off the hook with these people. They think they have the right to cancel, bully, hector, and shame others into their ideological frame.
But at its core, the argument misunderstands the idea of preferences at a fundamental level. It is to admit to a profound ignorance of everything we know about the nature of human character to suggest that preference indicates choice. The truth is, we don’t know very much about how people acquire references.
As a professional sociologist, I may have something to contribute here. Those of us who study these things, if we’re honest, admit we really don’t why human beings prefer one thing over another. We know that preferences may persist or vary over time and place. Preference is frequently contextual. It can be shaped by mood. Some days, a person prefers one thing over another thing. On other days, that same person prefers the other thing. Humans navigate their lives via an often ever changing constellation of preferences. All this is observable. How humans come to have preferences? That’s a hard problem. But I do know this: Lambda Legal doesn’t have the answer to this question.
Choices are something different. Preferences shape our choices. But they do not always determine them. We often choose what we do not prefer.
I am not so arrogant as to presume to know why I have the preferences I have. Humans prefer all sorts of things and they have no idea why they prefer them. We didn’t choose them. We cannot presume that being more attracted to blue eyes, blonde hair, and fair skin is genetic. That would presume that people are born with racial preferences. I don’t think that’s true. Maybe it is. I don’t know. Neither does Senator Hirono. Or Lambda Legal. Or GLAAD. At the same time, attraction is not a choice. A person does not choose to be attracted to one thing rather than another. They discover they are. A person makes them feel a certain way. To be sure, they can catalog the characteristics that makes them feel that way, but they cannot explain why those characteristics work for them and others don’t. Or why they persist. Or why they change. It mysterious. And that’s okay.
Because a person doesn’t know why he prefers this over that—or that over this on Tuesdays—does not mean the preferences are innate or that he chooses them. That is a false dichotomy. Genes may be involved. Hormones may be involved. They may not be. If genes or hormones are involved, they may not be all that is involved. Very likely they aren’t all that is involved. Socialization is a powerful factor in shaping preferences.
The argument Hirono is making is an extreme oversimplification of the human conditions that presumes that an open matter is a settled one. The Senator is operating within a frame that holds that something like sexual preference is either totally determined or must be a matter of free will. Determined by what? Is this a genetic model? A behavioral model? Does it matter?
A person may believe that homosexuality is a choice. But to say it is a preference is not to say that it is a choice. It doesn’t even suggest it. Lambda Legal wants to hector people into using words it prefers. It’s on a power trip. It’s the same power trip that lies behind the habit of presuming to speak for others or demanding utterances avoid offending abstract people. But Lambda Legal is wrong. To say something is a preference implies nothing about the origins of the preference. The way those who work in that office hear things does not determine the truth of the things they hear. They aren’t in charge of the meaning of words. Or their usages.
If somebody asks me, “Why do you prefer this?” perhaps the most honest answer I can give is to say, “I don’t know. I just do.” And that should be good enough. It’s not like I did something wrong. I don’t have to explain myself. I’m not a bad person. As long as what I prefer does not hurt anybody else, then it’s an entirely acceptable way of being and behaving.
We really don’t have to accept a master explanation about the constellation of preferences that informs our choices. Not from Mazie Hirono, Lambda Legal, or anybody else. For sure Senator Hirono is unqualified to lecture anybody on such matters. Judge Barrett should not have apologized. Never participate in another person’s effort to humiliate you—or to force into you their newspeak.
Finally, to Hirono’s remark about the state of the world. This is typical of the progressive movement. Barack Obama says Joe Biden has the character to lead us through these dark times and heal us. Child oracle Greta Thunberg, the movement’s climate scold, warns us that she is watching us. Hirono says the world is in flames. What does such apocalyptic rhetoric signal? It’s not obvious?
Of all the reasons to vote against Joe Biden (and there are plenty), the quasi-religious zealotry of the progressive movement is arguably the main one. The faux-moral language signals the core belief of the technocracy: that the elite are called by providence to treat a disease called the common man. Senator Hirono sees Judge Barrett, because Barrett is a conservative, as one among the deplorables. Hirono could not miss an opportunity to lord over Barrett self-assigned moral superiority.
I am very impressed by how intentional this SARS-2 virus is. It has clearly made a choice of comrades and that choice is the same choice progressives make: the downtrodden and oppressed and their allies. There is no uptick in SARS-2 cases associated with the Black Lives Matter protests, the women’s marches, etc. The high priests of the establishment make this very clear. The awokened are magically spared. It’s like the lamb’s blood mark on the doors of Jewish slaves that deterred the creeping death. But the virus follows Trump rallies around the country infecting thousands. Like frogs and locusts pestering Pharaoh. Have you noticed how disproportionately white Trump rallies are? You know, the descendants of the slave masters? The deplorables. They had it coming. This is a virus with a definite tribal preference. Black people and their allies? Off limits. White conservatives? Death to their crippled and elderly. As an old and often tongue-tied man told us, if it wasn’t for Trump, a multitude of people would still be alive today. As legend has it, Moses wasn’t a gifted speaker, either.
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freedom and reason 