Category: Uncategorized

According to the BBC article, “Pence v Kaine: Who won the vice-presidential debate?” by North America reporter Anthony Zurcher, “It was a scattershot debate marred by frequent interruption, where moderator Elaine Quijado lost control of the discussion for stretches.”

Having your cake and eating it looks something like this: An ambitious woman of color, in debate with a white man, proves the place of accomplished and courageous women of color in the rough and tumble world of political argument when she takes charge of a conversation and interrupts her opponent. But when her opponent interrupts her, which white men do all the time in argument with other white men (as occurred in the Vice-Presidential debate held on October 5, 2016 between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine), the ambitious woman of color can accuse her opponent of “mansplaining” and “microaggressing,” of which he is guilty by virtue of his sex and race.

This is the beauty of identity politics. It is a clever strategy. The woman of color delegitimizes her ideological opponent while scoring unearned debate points via the extra-rational means of ad hominem and red herring, cleverly avoiding answering questions or saying much of anything of substance and asserting superior moral virtue. After the debate, her side, which largely controls the narrative and the major institutions, can distract the public from all her lying and misdirection on critical policy questions by howling about sexism and racism—by portraying her as the victim of white male aggression. Her hefty record as the Attorney General of California and United States Senator notwithstanding. If critics describe her approach and attitude as “abrasive,” “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “smug,” the woke crowd can accuse them of sexism and racism for that, too.

She and her allies can do all this with absolutely no evidence of either sexism and racism and in the face of clear evidence that her opponent would do the same thing if she were a white male (again, as Pence did to Kaine). She and her allies can do this even though her appearance on the national stage—along with many other women of color—is confirmation that sexism and racism are, for the most part, no longer barriers to an ambitious woman’s rise to political power. For they find advantage in a quiver of magical arrows that only individuals lying at the intersection of her identities may wield. There is a caveat: the women of color must hold the correct opinions. We all know that, in the progressive universe, conservative women of color are only one of those things really.

Interesting how we find ourselves four years and a few days later in a similar situation: “For the last week, it’s felt a bit like Donald Trump was routed. His woeful first presidential debate performance was compounded by a series of unforced errors, capped by an early morning Twitter tirade and a damaging New York Times story about his near billion-dollar business losses in 1995. His poll numbers headed south. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s [Pence] primary job—really his only job—was to stop the bleeding and give the [Trump] campaign an opportunity to regroup. Mr Kaine’s goal was to keep him [Pence] from doing that. Mr Pence succeeded. Mr Kaine, while unloading a crate of opposition research on Mr Trump, failed.”

But it is not exactly the same situation, is it? Tim Kaine is a white man. Too bad for him that he couldn’t charge Pence with mansplaining and microaggressing after his poor debate outing.

In invited commentary on infectious diseases in JAMA Network Open, published September 25, 2020, Rohan Khananchi, Charlesnika Evans, and Jasmine Marcelin make several claims about systemic racism’s role in an infectious disease in “Racism, Not Race, Drives Inequality Across the COVID-19 Continuum.” I do not find the article compelling. However it is illustrative of the problems with this type of research.

Demographic disparities are not automatically indicators of racism. If one argues that racism drives demographic differences, then one cannot at the same time a priori define demographic differences as racism. That move conflates the dependent variable (difference/inequality) with the theorized independent variable (racism). The argument becomes circular/self-confirmatory/self-sealing. The argument commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating abstractions in a concrete way, as well as the ecological fallacy (I explain below). That the paper sneaks a claim of lack of fairness or justice into the situation by using the term “inequity” gives away the political agenda. The assumptions made in this article are unscientific.

If the paper were to proceed on a rational basis, it would define racism in a way that allowed for its evaluation as a causal factor (conceptualize/operationalize). The claim that race explains differences in human populations and/or laws/policies based on purported racial differences defines racism. What is the evidence that any human beings supposed in the literature were motivated by racist beliefs? Where are the laws and policies based on this belief? If there were laws/policies in place that segregated medical care on the basis of race, or forced blacks to live in impoverished communities, then institutional/systemic racism might play a contributing role in the demographic inequalities identified. But these systems were dismantled more than fifty years ago in America. Today it is illegal to discriminate against blacks on the basis of race.

The article states that “fundamental causes of COVID-19 inequity include systemically racist policies, such as historic racial segregation and their inextricable downstream effects on the differential quality and distribution of housing, transportation, economic opportunity, education, food, air quality, health care, and beyond.” To be sure, historic racial segregation was based on systematically racist policies. But the operative word here is “historic.” Past policies are not present policies. And while history is not irrelevant to understandings of the present, history is also not the present. Keep in mind that “inextricable” means impossible to disentangle. The pairing of “inextricable” with “downstream effects” is obscurantism. The authors assume as given a foundation that they must demonstrate. This is strange alchemy. An exercise in mystification.

The article continues, “Each of these factors is associated with the risk of COVID-19 exposure and severity through direct (e.g., work conditions, crowded housing, carceral overrepresentation) and indirect (e.g., limited access to health information or insurance; increased prevalence of comorbidities; cumulative life-course exposure to discrimination, low socioeconomic status, and other health risk conditions) mechanisms.” However, since the racial and ethnic differences are not about race, according to the article, but about racism, then one would expect to find white people living in these conditions do not suffer the same fate. But the article commits the ecological fallacy by substituting for the situations of concrete individuals aggregate demographic differences.

Controlling for cultural factors (but perhaps not all, since we can draw too fine a distinction between racial groups in this regard), is it true that whites living under near-identical conditions are differentiated from blacks vis-à-vis COVID-19? Do we suppose that “low socioeconomic status” whites living in conditions of crowded housing, with limited access of health information or insurance and increased prevalence of comorbidities, etc., have better outcomes than blacks living in these conditions? (If so, that might suggests actual racial differences). What is the measure of “life-course exposure to discrimination”? Again, that’s an awfully big assumption.

These types of studies are part of a general approach in academic work that operates from an epistemological frame (critical race theory) that manufactures an ontology built upon arbitrary abstractions. At the core of this is the problem of reification in science. Such work proceeds on assumptions that are far too sure of themselves. There is nothing in this article that presents racism as conceptualized and operationalized as either belief in genetic differences in human populations and/or laws and policies based on such purported differences. The structural problems identified are class-based and explicable in terms of the processes of capitalist accumulation. The term “socioeconomic status,” which eschews class analysis, should alert readers to the probable race-centric bias of the research frame. There may be cultural/ethnic differences, as well (for example diet and obesity), but these are unexplored in the study.

There is a twin tragedy with this approach that works to perpetuate capitalist class oppression. First, by obsessing over race, social class as a casual factor is relegated to the outskirts of social consciousness. The real dynamic working behind the scenes to produce differential health outcomes is thus mystified. Second, by obscuring class effects with the rhetoric of systemic racism, poor white people are disappeared. The situation is made to appear as if black people are the primary victims of social oppression, moreover victimized by a system privileging white people. In this way, the woes of the working class are denied and those who exploit and live off their labor, who are both black and white, are absolved of their responsibility in disparate health and other outcomes. Critical race theory works to disrupt class consciousness and entrench the capitalist mode of production.

Yesterday I published an essay (Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism) on the comparable threats of violent extremism to the American republic, comparing two extremist groups who were subjects of the first presidential debate. Watching the establishment media’s take on the debate, I can now affirm what I have been telling people all along—the media positively sanctions left-wing chaos and violence by either denying or justifying it. The purpose of this is to return corporatist forces to power to continue the globalist project. Antifa is an element in a color revolution currently unfolding in the United States. I describe this in a recent essay: Authoritarianism, Supreme Court Hysteria, and the Corrupting Partisan Frame.

The Democratic Party and the corporate media push the narrative that, despite the facts of left-wing violence raging in the streets of America and the establishment by progressives of legal and propaganda apparatuses to dispute the 2020 presidential election, against the backdrop of a perpetual coup against the president (deep state spying, manufactured Russian collusion, an attempt to remove the president via impeachment), the public is supposed to believe that it’s the president who is shaking our faith in our democracy. One angle is to hang around Trump’s neck the albatross of far-right politics and white nationalist sentiment. To install this assumption in the public mind, they fail to demand of Democrats condemn left-wing violence while insisting that Trump condemns right-wing violence—as if the president, unlike Democrats, is using right-wing violence to disrupt the election. In other words, by flipping reality, they hide Biden’s failure to condemn Antifa by misleading the public with a false claim about Trump’s statements on the matter. The maneuver is an obvious attempt to gaslight the public. But because this is not obvious to everybody, it is usefully explained.

Roughly thirty minutes into the first presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Biden said, “Close your eyes, remember what those people look like coming out of the fields, carrying torches, their veins bulging, just spewing anti-Semitic bile and accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. A young woman got killed and they asked the president what he thought. He said, ‘There were very fine people on both sides.’ No president’s ever said anything like that.” Biden is referring to comments Trump made following the Unite the Right rally, held August 11-12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was organized around the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Lee Park. The protestors were met by counter-protestors and the event devolved into chaos and violence. Tragically, a young woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car through a crowd. Field’s action wounded numerous others, some critically. In a bipartisan action taken in September 2017, Congress unanimously approved a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups in the tragedy’s aftermath. Donald Trump signed the resolution.

All along Trump condemned bigotry, hatred, and violence on all sides. But pulled from his many comments on the subject was the opinion that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The media and left-wing groups accused Trump of implying a moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who opposed them. For instance, Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, writing for The New York Times, suggested Trump was “equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville.” The journalists then cited right-wing figures thanking Trump for clarifying the situation before wrapping Trump’s remark in the on-going narrative of Republican politicians making “muscular appeals to white voters, especially those in the South on broad cultural groups” going all the way back to the 1960s. However, while Reagan and Bush condemned white supremacy, the journalists contended, Trump wouldn’t. So racism in the Republican Party moves from dog whistle to bull horn. Biden thus felt emboldened to openly call Trump a racist in the debate.

Yet Trump accurately conveyed the facts on the ground in that notorious press conference. There were, among the right-wing contingent, those who were peacefully protesting the proposed removal of the statues, just as there were those among the counter-protesters who were engaged in violent action. I have many friends—and not just southerners—who oppose the taking down of statues. I am happy to vouch for them. They are very fine people. To be sure, there were white supremacists among the right-wing crowd. But there were also present members of Antifa, as well the armed militia group Redneck Revolt. Just as we see in America’s streets today, there were armed left-wing forces in Charlottesville. By armed, I do not mean just body armor, clubs, helmets, noxious agents, shields, and sticks (as if these aren’t bad enough), but semiautomatic firearms, as well. Many of the left-wingers were also armed with a violent ideology. It is an article of the Antifa faith that anybody it designates as fascist—which in their view cuts a broad swath across the political spectrum—has no right to speech and assembly, while Antifa reserves for itself the right to violently disrupt rightwing and conservative gatherings in the name of “defending the community” (see The Problem with Antifascism). If Antifa, Redneck Revolt, and other left-wing extremists had not showed up at Charlottesville, or had not violently confronted right-wing protestors, would the protests have devolved into chaos and violence? Is it not the goal of anti-fascists to violently confront those whom they designate as a threat to the community?

On August 14, 2017, the president announced that the Justice Department had opened a civil rights investigation into Charlottesville. “I just met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack that killed one innocent American and wounded twenty others. To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.” The president described Heyer’s death and the wounding of several others as an “attack,” a characterization pushed back against the suggestion that this was in some fashion an accident. Trump characterized the violence as “racist” and promised to hold the perpetrators responsible. This framed the events in Charlottesville as an outcome of white nationalism. Moreover, it clarified that white nationalism is racist. The president urged the country to unite in condemning “hatred, bigotry, and violence.” He called racism “evil” and described those who carry out violence in its name “criminals and thugs.” He then called out hate groups by name: the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists.” He described them as “repugnant” and, in so many words, accused them of being disloyal to their country. He emphasized the importance of equality in our national creed, equality under the law and under our Constitution, while emphasizing the importance of the rule of law and the vital government function of ensuring a safe environment so that people can fulfill their destiny.

I quoted at length from Trump’s statement in my last blog so I won’t repeat those passages here. It is worth noting that, in that statement, Trump also said, “In times such as these America has always shown its true character, responding to hate with love, division with unity and violence with an unwavering resolve for justice. As a candidate, I promised to restore law and order to our country, and our federal law enforcement agencies are following through on that pledge. We will spare no resource in fighting so that every American child can grow up free from violence and fear. We will defend and protect the sacred rights of all Americans, and we will work together so that every citizen in this blessed land is free to follow their dreams in their hearts and to express the love and joy in their souls.”

It’s as if the president never said any of this, as if he never signed an unanimously approved resolution from Congress condemning white supremacy and racist violence. It doesn’t help the cause of enlisting the federal government in pursuit of justice to demand Trump say the right thing and then, when he does, cynically dismiss his words—then later disappear them. It’s especially crucial that his supporters hear these words and consider deeply where they stand with respect to white nationalism and racist violence. Not only is the media delegitimizing a president for political purposes, but they are working at cross-purposes with the anti-racist message they purport to proclaim. Yet the failure of the establishment to tell Trump’s alleged racist supporters that their president condemned their racist beliefs and actions did not result in rampant racist violence on the streets of America. Instead, it appears to have contributed to rampant anti-racist violence on the streets of America by making the president appear to support white nationalism.

A transcript of the press conference to which Biden was referring how antagonistic the press is to Trump and the way they have used his comments to portray him as a white nationalist. I close with some of the transcript of the spectacle and leave readers with the question: will Joe Biden and the Democrats condemn antifascist violence?

REPORTER: Do you think what you call the alt left is the same as neo-Nazis?

TRUMP: Those people—all of those people, excuse me—I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.

REPORTER: Well, white nationalists—

TRUMP: Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So—excuse me—and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

[In light of what transpired over the summer, Trump’s words are prophetic here.]

TRUMP: But, they were there to protest—excuse me—you take a look the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER: Does the statue of Robert E. Lee stay up?

TRUMP: I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.

REPORTER: Are you against the Confederacy?

REPORTER: On race relations in America, do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office with regard to race relationships?

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So, you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame—yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats—you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.

REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?

TRUMP: No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So, I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country. 

At the outset, I want to make clear that I condemn right-wing violence and have done so throughout my life. As a criminologist and political sociologist, I am quite familiar with right-wing extremism. I know how destructive it can be. I have shelves in my library and space on my computer devoted to books and reports on the topic. My goal here is not to downplay right-wing extremism, but to give my readers some perspective on the relative domestic threats facing the American republic. I focus in this essay on Antifa and the Proud Boys since their names were dropped in last night’s presidential debate (the first of three scheduled). Trump turned some heads when he said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” What he meant is not exactly clear. However, the Proud Boys took it as an endorsement. So did progressives and the media. “The president has denounced white supremacists repeatedly,” Peter Navarro countered in an interview on MSNBC. “You guys just aren’t hearing that.”

Moderator Chris Wallace took sides last night during the debate. At many points he seemed to be a debate participant himself rather than a moderator. And he was almost always directing himself as Trump’s second debate opponent. He asked the president, “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.” Surely Wallace knows that Trump has on more than one occasion condemned white supremacy, calling out racist organizations by name, including the Ku Klux Klan and neonazis. Yet Wallace’s question to Trump assumed the president hasn’t.

In 2017, Trump said of his administration that “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.” He continued: “And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.” He then condemned racism in the strongest possible terms and identified racist groups. “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” He reiterated the American creed: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.” Has Trump changed his views since 2017? Just this month, in introducing his plan to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into black communities, Trump proposed to prosecute the KKK. And last night he answered Wallace in the debate with, “Sure, I’m willing to do that.” He said, “I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.”

However, more startling than Wallace’s question was Biden claiming that FBI director Christopher Wray said Antifa is only “an idea.” Did Wray actually say that? No, he didn’t. “Antifa is a real thing,” Wray is on the record saying. “It is not a fiction.” He had to say this because progressives and the media keep insisting that leftwing extremism is a fiction. What is Antifa, then? “It’s a movement or an ideology,” according to Wray. Wray told Congress that the FBI has documented Antifa engaging in “organized tactical activity” at the local and regional level. “We don’t view how nationally organized something is as a proxy for how dangerous it is.” Wray has also said that the FBI is investigating Antifa’s “funding, their tactics, their logistics, their supply chains and we’re going to pursue all available charges.” “Organized tactical activity” and “supply chains” sound like a lot more than just “an idea.” So either Biden is misinformed or he is downplaying Antifa.

The Democrats and the media, which portray Antifa and Black Lives Matter as peaceful movements in the civil rights tradition, want the public to focus on the Proud Boys, a much smaller group than Antifa. To be sure, the Proud Boys are an obnoxious bunch. They are occasionally violent. I will condemn their violent actions without hesitation and so should Trump. But Biden downplaying Antifa, a violent extremist movement that has made a mess of American cities, is the buried lede coming out of the debate. The real threat to public safety today is not the Proud Boys. It’s Antifa. Antifa is destroying property and assaulting civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Proud Boys are small fry in comparison. This does not mean that law enforcement should ignore them. The more important question is why Democrats, progressives, and the establishment media put so much energy into denying the problem of left-wing extremism and violence. We must allow the Proud Boy’s antics to distract the public from the reality of what it happening in our country.

Part of the way the left confuses the public is by playing loosely with the term “militia,” reserving the term exclusively for the right. What is a militia? When we refer to a militia in terms of insurgent civilian movements, we mean an irregular paramilitary force engaged in insurrection, rebellion, and/or terrorist activities. This describes Antifa as much as it describes the several rightwing militias that we see around the country. Why the failure to accurately describe Antifa in the media? Why the double standard from the Democrats and the corporate media? Because, as I have shown in my blogs, Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the street-level forces of the corporate-led suppression of populism in America.

The Proud Boys have a paramilitary wing: the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, or FOAK. FOAK’s leader is Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman. At the same time, the Proud Boys in no way represent a mass movement on the right like we saw historically with the second KKK (formed in the same year as The Birth of Nation was released (1915), a movie screened in progressive Democratic president Woodrow Wilson’s White House). Indeed, organized white supremacy has been a vanishing problem for decades, exaggerated by alarmist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-defamation League to keep their audiences on edge. These groups publish reports about the proliferation of Proud Boy chapters in various counties, but they never report on the corporate-funded Black Lives Matter chapters proliferating across the West. Yet even these organizations are reluctant to identify the Proud Boys as white supremacist, describing them instead as “misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigration,” to quote the ADL Maybe that’s because the Proud Boys, who describe themselves as Western chauvinists, have black and brown members.

In considering domestic threats, one should look at the character of actual violence in society. Who is doing what? What is the scope of their actions? I have already documented widespread arson, looting, and interpersonal violence perpetrated by left-wing extremists. We should also consider in our assessment violence against law enforcement. In the context of his testimony regarding extremism, Wray has noted that that rate of violence against law enforcement “is up significantly this year from last year.” More police officers were killed in felonious acts so far this year than all unarmed civilians (black or white) killed in 2019. Are the perpetrators of these murders white supremacists? Not that I can tell.

I have to say, folks have been punked a bit with this Proud Boys distraction. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t bring up Gavin McInnes’ men club. Biden brought them up because he knows jack about white supremacist groups (which the Proud Boys aren’t). Except the Klan. Biden knows about the Klan because Robert Byrd, formerly Exalted Cyclops and then the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, was a dear friend of his (and the Clintons, as well). Trump either didn’t know who the Proud Boys were or knew that they’re a joke orchestrated by comedian Gavin McInnes. The media knows this, too. They are gaslighting the public who they know doesn’t know the ins and outs of right-wing extremism.

The much bigger issue here is why Biden and Harris not merely fail to condemn Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but why they promote their actions. Black Lives Matter is a racialist organization. By definition. How is that not completely obvious? The approach of Black Lives Matter is to reduce individuals to demographic categories and treat them on that basis. This is what critical race theory is all about: seeing race before people and making policy decisions based on grouped disparities. It is a cracked academic theory taken to the streets, where it burns buildings and cars, loots stores, and assaults civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Democrats find all this chaos useful.

I am sure readers are familiar with the claim that antifa simply means antifascism. First, this is insulting to the people who took on actual fascism. Fascism of the sort Antifa says it’s fighting is not an actual threat. So Antifa defines anybody who is on the right or conservative as a “fascist” and “white supremacist.” They’re like the witchfynders during the Inquisition. Hitler and fascists are the secular versions of Satan and his demons. Only the first were real and they are no longer with us. But since the modern left is not particularly religious, they can’t name check Satan, so they name check the Proud Boys. Second, Antifa is a highly organized anarchist-communist terroristic countermovement against republican government and liberal values. It is itself fascistic. It is authoritarian and sadistic. Just as antiracists are racists because they organize their politics not around individual freedom and democracy but racialist thinking and action, Antifa is fascistic because it uses the same street-level tactics that the Blackshirts and Brownshirts used during the European fascist period. Moreover, it is in the service of corporatists powers who share its goal of quashing the populist rising to neoliberal and technocratic oppression.

The Anti-Defamation League can’t say for sure, but, as is its habit, CNN can muddy the waters. Case in point: Enrique Tarrio, a member of the Proud Boys, is the leader of the Latinos for Trump movement. Tarrio is Cuban American. He is one of the many non-white members of the group. CNN and Democrats are freaking out because Trump is popular among Latinos. There are a lot of Cuban Americans in Florida. The Democrats must win Florida. That’s why Michael Bloomberg offered to personally pay off criminal fines so people could vote—a practice otherwise known as bribery. 

For some reason the position of Tarrio’s Latinos for Trump that “all guns laws are unconstitutional” has some bearing on the matter, as if opposition to gun restrictions was a white nationalist issue. (CNN should talk to all the black people buying guns and forming militias and see what they think about that.) CNN is also perplexed because, while Tarrio is brown and Proud Boys claims a diverse membership, its central tenets of closed borders and Western chauvinism seems to indicate something else. What exactly strict immigration controls and Western chauvinism has to do with anti-diversity is unclear. We do know that open borders are harmful to the economic interests of black and brown people. But somehow that isn’t anti-working class. The United States is and has been a very diverse country for a very long time, with people of all races and ethnicities distributed throughout the social structure. The same is true for the West generally. To confuse the public over matters of diversity, CNN conflates mass immigration with racial and ethnic diversity. 

Perhaps the most interesting piece of all this it was Biden not Trump who has made the Proud Boys a household name.

We should be terrified for our republic. We are seeing a color revolution unfolding before our very eyes. This time in the premier First World country. The strategy corporate elite fractions use in the Third World to construct governments conducive to their interests is being deployed in America thanks to neoconservatives, progressives, and the Democratic Party. With the debunking of the Russia hoax and the failed attempt by Democrats to remove Trump with impeachment (the Ukraine-Biden affair), the establishment has initiated a new and multi-pronged phase in the permanent coup against the President.

A color revolution is a type of coup in which powerful groups in opposition to a sitting government portray its leaders as authoritarian, corrupt, or otherwise illegitimate, organize mass protests in the streets, develop avenues for election fraud, use intimidation tactics during the electoral process, and dispute election results. The opposition in the current situation has in back of it the massive power of key capitalist forces—the Tech Giants and other corporations comprising the transnational capitalist fraction. The color revolution represents a revolution-from-above being waged by a power elite that represents global neoliberal forces. Those behind what Sheldon Wolin, in his landmark Democracy, Inc., called “inverted totalitarianism,” thwarted by the populist revolt that brought Trump to power, is fighting back with a vengeance.

Democratic operatives are pushing a narrative Bloomberg-funded Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn calls the “red mirage” that contends that, if Trump wins on election night (and 2016 told them that is possible outcome), he did not actually win. “We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Mendelsohn said. According to Hawkfish’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night. “When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said in published reports. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”

To confront this, there is a strategy already in place that one may characterize as “lawfare,” a type of warfare waged by leveraging the courts to dispute the votes cast for the undesirable candidate and find and count votes for the desirable one. To buy time in order to identify ballots for Biden, which we now know are being aggressively harvested via cash and intimidation, and work the courts after election night (Democratic lawyers are working the courts as I write this), the establishment and social media will hold off calling the election, even censoring voices that do. If they can’t find enough votes for Biden, or intimidate electors into switching sides, they will push the process into the House of Representation, where Nancy Pelosi as presiding officer will organize a contingent election in which states will vote for president. Democrats are in a frenzy over Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett because they know that the election chaos will wind up in that body. They want to keep the court at eight members and try to deadlock it.

Organizing the elite operations of the coup is a group called the Transition Integrity Project, or TIP, which presents itself as bipartisan, but is virulently anti-Trump. It is comprised of academics, current and past government officials, journalists, and pollsters in 2019. Members include Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, former chair of the DNC Donna Brazile, former chair of the RNC Michael Steele, and journalists Max Boot (Jean Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations), David Frum (Senior Editor at The Atlantic), and William Kristol (founder of The Weekly Standard), among others.

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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 Delaware Court of Chancery. The Delaware 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. 

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Some are wondering what Trump is talking about when he is asking for Biden to be drug tested before the debates. There are several drugs that can improve the cognitive performance of dementia patients. Cholinesterase inhibitors increase the amount of acetylcholine available to neurons. There are three drugs available that work along these lines: donepezil (Aricept), galantamine (Razadyne), and rivastigmine (Exelon). Memantine (Namenda) regulates the activity of glutamate. It helps learning and memory. Side effects include agitation, balance problems, and confusion (which is in evident with Biden). There’s a cocktail that combines donepezil and memantine (Namzaric).

These drugs are effective for mild to moderate dementia. They could get Biden through a debate with the media spinning the results and controlling the selection of soundbites. But drugs won’t keep him going for long. His dementia looks to be pretty far along. A lot of folks are in denial, but it’s obvious. He only does a couple of hours a day of campaigning when he can muster it. Most of his press conferences are fake. As the disease progresses the brain produces a vanishing amount of acetylcholine and the cholinesterase inhibitors will stop working. And most drug produce tolerances. Even with Namzaric, Biden’s dementia will sooner than later leave him disabled. The man is not fit to run for President. Perhaps that will become clearer tonight during the first presidential debate.

Those who fret over Trump not relinquishing power appear to be unaware of the plots to remove him from power (see The National Pulse for coverage)—not to mention dismissive of the strength of the republic to withstand the obstinance of a single man and his followers. I frankly don’t understand how anybody can be ignorant of either. I don’t think they are. Trump may not go quietly (is he ever quiet about anything?). But Trump will go. Maybe not this January. But the January four years from then.

I am fascinated but not surprised by how progressives feign unawareness that Democrats are blatant in their unwillingness to accept the 2020 election result if it doesn’t go their way. For those progressives who really are unaware, here’s Hillary Clinton on whether Joe Biden should concede the election if the Electoral College indicates his defeat.

Remember what Clinton said during the third presidential debate of 2016? Is she now running down our democracy and appalled at the words coming out of her mouth? Do we really believe she cares about the republic?

The threat to the American republic is not Donald Trump. It never has been. The threat to the republic is an establishment beholden to corporate power that is daily turning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into dead letters. That threat is operationally embodied by the neoliberals and neoconservatives who command the Democratic Party. Their hyperbolic rhetoric over Trump betrays concern for the future of their project. It’s not Trump per se that gets them worked up (if is it, then they are exceedingly childish to fall prey to such trolling). It’s populist nationalism that terrifies them. It’s the potential reconstruction of the American ideal that keeps them frenzied.

I am a democratic-republican, but I do not operate in the Democratic-Republican frame. I belong to no church or party. My arguments are never partisan in this way. My choice of comrades are working class and creative entrepreneurial-minded Americans—the people who produce value in human affairs. My commitments are humanist, liberal, nationalist, populist, and secular (mind those small letters). I am a patriotic citizen of the United States and committed to the America ideal, which is very much on the ropes. I don’t worry about Trump. I worry about what happens when the establishment returns to full strength. I don’t know how long the republic can survive that.

I recently explained this in a popular post on Facebook. I wasn’t posting for likes. I was trying to help people understand my arguments, which they appear to have great difficulty doing. That’s because they operate in the Democrat-Republican partisan frame. There’s an election coming up and experience has taught me to prepare people for my arguments, to remind them of my approach to such matters, to try and save them from the freak-out. It’s obvious that they want to understand me as one thing or another. If I am not a Democrat, then I must be a Republican. The dumbest question I ever get goes something like this: “You’re not voting for Obama? So you’re voting for Romney?”

It often seems a futile exercise, I will confess. When people say to me, “Trump is your boy,” or to others, “Andy’s become a Republican,” they are telegraphing the message that they don’t get me. They suggest they don’t care to. That’s okay. I have people who care to get me. More importantly, they show me they cannot think outside of the frame they have been given. This disappoints me because I expect better of them. I care. Of course, they expect things of me, as well. But my politics are obvious in everything I say: I do not subscribe to the “big man” theory of history (Trump is a result not an oracle); I cannot switch parties I have never belonged to; I cannot leave a church of which I have never been a congregant; I cannot leave a faith I have never subscribed to; I don’t use words deceitfully; I strive never to use terms ignorantly or stupidly (if I screw up I admit it); I loathe ideology; I have made my choice of comrades; I am not a contrarian; I have a center of gravity; I don’t imbibe in moral panic.

The partisan frame has made its appearance in spades with the decision of Republicans to go ahead with the confirmation of Donald Trump’s pending supreme court pick in the wake of the death of liberal jurist and feminist hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg from a long battle with pancreatic cancer. That her death was approaching could be understood by anyone who understand the challenge this type of cancer presents. So could the consequences of her reluctance to not step down from the Court during the Obama presidency. Immediately upon her death, Democrats preemptively charged hypocrisy—while immediately accusing Republicans of not allowing Ginsburg to rest in any peace—over Mitch McConnell’s certain decision to proceed with a constitutional-prescribed process. They pretended as if what McConnell did as majority leader of the Senate when Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland came to that body—McConnell did not move the nomination forward—gives the minority party justification for upending the principles of a republican form of government. As if McConnell is their leader. No political party legitimately owns the American republic. McConnell’s maneuvering as leader in accord with his constitutional authority doesn’t obligate any sympathy for the fanaticism of Chuck Schumer and his ilk. Sorry, not sorry, I cannot even appreciate that point of view. The ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg carries no hereditary status beyond her imagined community. Dead justices don’t reserve seats on the Supreme Court. Those seats belong to the people.

Asked in 2016 if the Senate had an obligation to assess Garland’s qualifications, Ginsburg’s answer was very clear: “That’s their job. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” Ginsburg was a consistent and principled jurist. She put the Constitution before politics. As I have said elsewhere, I will have to hear a recording of her contradicting herself before I will believe she was a hypocrite. Ginsburg’s legacy aside, if the roles were reversed, Democrats would fill that seat in a heartbeat—or the party wouldn’t be worth supporting. Does anybody seriously believe Scalia’s dying request would or should be revered? Elections have consequences and Trump was elected in part, if the opportunity arose, to replace one or more Supreme Court justices. And a Republican majority in the Senate would be expected to do the same. The president is president all four years (if the other party fails to removed him from office or he dies or is assassinated or otherwise leaves). The president has the power under the Constitution to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The majority party in the Senate has the authority to bring that nominee before its body in its capacity to advise and consent. That’s what matters. That and this: the Supreme Court needs an odd number to break ties. We can anticipate some tie-breakers coming down the pike before Trump’s term is up.

The fact is that Democrats don’t want another conservative on the Court and they seem too sure of the outcome of the 2020 election. Especially if they can deadlock the Court. They believe, because they have said so, that another conservative on the court is the end of everything good in the world. Don’t progressives tell us to hold our noses and “vote Blue no matter who” at the very least for the sake of the Court? Of course, “Blue no matter who” is more than a strategy. It’s a religious attitude.

There’s the problem with partisan thinking organized around political party: it leaves the subject without the critical independence needed to evaluate objectively the facts before him. He becomes an object, a pawn, not an agent. If one operates with a clear set of interests and from principle, and a party that he has supported betrays those interests or abandons principal, or if it becomes apparent that the party has not operated with those interests in mind or from principle, or that it cannot operate with those interests in mind or from principle, and the partisan follows that party where it takes him, then he abandons interests and principal, sacrificing his agency and autonomy to interests and principle that are not his own. In so doing, he betrays himself and his comrades. In that scenario, the function of the party is as shepherd leading sheep to an undesirable end. The party whose agenda does not align with the interests of a class or classes of people is not for the sovereign person and his comrades a mechanism with which to realize interest and principal in action. Following the crowd often finds a person surrendering to his enemies, doing very bad things in the name of solidarity, or walking over the edge of a cliff.

The partisan frame in the United States corrupts everything. Even science. Matthew MacWilliams, a visiting research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and alleged expert on authoritarianism, illustrates this in an article published yesterday in Politico, “Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of American,” in which he leverages alleged scientific research on authoritarianism to declare millions of Americans essentially fascists. The author’s claim to fame, according to his publisher (St. Martin’s Griffin) is that MacWilliams “was the first researcher to use survey research to establish a link between Trump’s core supporters and authoritarianism.” The blurb continues: “Early in the Republican nominating contest for president, he warned that Trump’s activation of American authoritarians would make his candidacy virtually unstoppable.” MacWilliams conceptual framework, one with pretensions to social psychology, appears to be inspired Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

MacWilliams writes in his Politico article that authoritarians “are more likely to . . . agree that the media is the enemy of the people rather than a valuable independent institution.” In what sense is the media independent? The media is a projection of corporate power. Its product is quite often propaganda in the service of this power. As the purveyor of the corporate life-way, the media represent the class enemy of the proletariat. The institution is elitist in character and its operatives routinely dismissive of the intellect and values of the ordinary citizens. MacWilliams, whose scholarly training is left in a publisher’s blurb at “award-winning practitioner of American politics” and “recognized expert” is insulting to those Americans Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.” Joe Biden calls them “bad people.” MacWilliams cannot simply allow Trump to stand in place of the people he loathes.

These authoritarians, MacWilliams writes, “are also more likely to think . . . that those who disagree with them are a threat to our country.” But this is a sentiment frequently expressed by progressives, the alleged defenders of democracy. Indeed, this article is an instantiation of authoritarian sentiment. Are not progressives constantly decrying conservatives and especially Trump an existential threats to America—a country progressives often condemn as irredeemably racist? Its undemocratic character reason to proceed undemocratically? After all, it’s progressives who, when not promoting riots, rationalize them—even lie about them. MacWilliams himself characterizes violent insurrection, still ongoing, as “peaceful protest.” Just last night in Seattle peaceful protestors beat a police officer about the head with a baseball bat. In Louisville, Kentucky, Larynzo D. Johnson, shot two police officers attempting to disperse a mob at Brook Street and Broadway who had set fires and damaged property. I could generate a very long list of this sort of violence going back for months. Moreover, MacWilliams ignores that fact that it’s the progressives who are pushing corporatism, globalism, and technocracy. Perhaps that’s because he cannot see it. The walls of his frame are blocking his view.

Here are several examples of propaganda from MacWilliams’ article: “[Trump] has sent paramilitary forces from the Department of Homeland Security to quell nonviolent protests, looked the other way when a foreign power interferes in American elections, . . . spent an election year casting doubt on the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system, rather than working to protect it—all without eroding his main base of support.” Trump sent law enforcement officers to protect federal personnel and property from violent insurrectionists. MacWilliams uses the term “paramilitary” to conjure fascist imagery. This is shameful. Russiagate was a hoax, perpetrated by that “valuable and independent institution” in cahoots with the Democratic Party and the deep state. Why did they push Russiagate? To undermine a democratically-elected president. Readers should reflect on the fact that it’s progressives who are casting doubt on our electoral system. They recognize that Democrats have so frightened the people with doom and gloom over COVID-19 (its authoritarian lockdowns and all the rest of it) that the people are scared to go to the polls to vote. Democrats are pushing to forego the secret ballot. And they’re winning. They intend to contest the election all the way to end, hoping Nancy Pelosi can fix it. (Again, see The National Pulse.)

MacWilliams and the progressive rank-and-file live in a partisan dreamworld. “American authoritarians fear diversity,” the expert on authoritarianism writes. “They are more fearful of people of other races, and agree with the statement that ‘sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.’” We hear this type of thinking from progressives all the time, do we not? We are told: White peoples are oppressors. Blacks can’t step outside without fearing white violence. White people should “stay in their lane.” Men should stay in their lane, too. Recall Mazie Hirono, Democrat from Hawaii, telling men to “shut up” and watch the Democrats besmirch the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh. Hirono said, “I just want to say to the men of this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.” Men do not do the right thing, according to Hirono. Not this or that man. Men. And then a perfect illustration of faith-based thinking: “Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed. They need to be believed.” Rarely should you not beware when a person tells you, “You need to believe me.” Cancel culture, censorship, deplatforming—progressives have little tolerance for diversity of opinion. The culture that prevails in our institutions is such that the heterodox are terrified to say what they think. They fear being smeared with the progressive slime of political correctness.

How can anybody be ignorant of the obvious that it’s progressives who routinely express support for the suppression of speech across social media? Those who argue for suppression of speech they don’t like on the grounds that “speech is violence”? Who attempt to compel speech by claiming “silence is violence”? Progressives portray peaceful marches organized by conservatives (which rarely happen) as fascist rallies, then applaud disruption of them and even terrorist violence perpetrated in “defense of the community.” Progressives complain bitterly that not enough attention is paid to the handful of actual white supremacists who cause mischief from time to time while denying the mass leftwing uprising on America’s streets with comical news items that recall a hilarious scene from Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun. Administrators put employees and students through struggle sessions in organizations private and public to change their attitudes—self-appointed thought reformers. I look at the tasks others obligate me to and only see their origins in progressive politics and policy. I would say that even our employee unions are more interested in carrying out the progressive agenda than in representing the labor interests of their members, except that I can now see that as a feature not a bug. I am, after all, a part of the technocratic corps.

Progressives are profoundly illiberal. They are reflexively and deeply intolerant of other opinions. Imagine if right-wingers mobbed Democratic politicians, marched on their homes, occupied neighborhoods, beat people in the streets, burned down and looted businesses. It would of course only be more hysteria by degree; imaginary fascism is enough to work up progressives. But what I just imagined on the political right describes the actual behavior of the political left in protests MacWilliams characterizes as “peaceful.” Today’s left is authoritarian and regressive. Denying that suggests a mental disorder. Indeed, MacWilliams article is a master class in projection. But Doublethink is not crazy in any clinical sense. It’s what can happen with partisan faming.

I wouldn’t want to be guilty of MacWilliam’s offense. The research presented in the article is absurd and I know what it is up to. The studies cited are designed as self-sealing exercises that assume as given that those who support Trump are more likely to be authoritarian. It is argument by definition. It pushes out a perception. The concepts are operationalized in an ideological direction. This is scientism, fake science the object of which is to disguise partisan propaganda as objective knowledge. The work attempts to depoliticize opinion by portraying it as the fruit of scientific labors. These labors work to pathologize conservative values, to locate them “objectively” outside the bounds of normal discourse via a “neutral” and “rational” framework. This type of work is representative of the technocratic impulse. It’s the social logic of the administrative state. Those who do not conform are not merely disagreeable; they are in need of an intervention.

One might think that over the last several decades we have seen a major shift in the interest matrix the major political parties of the United States represent. We certainly see a very different Republican Party today that we saw under the Bush/Cheney administration (effectively continued under Obama/Biden). However, to the extent that the Democrats ever represented working people (for me, that they have never done so became apparent during reconsideration of fact patterns), they are now fully agents of transnational corporate power. Whatever one believed the Democratic Party was before, it is perfectly obvious that it no longer represents the interests of my choice of comrades (see above) or the principles of my country. It follows from this that, beyond my general commitment to objectivity of thought in light of interests and principle (which allowed me to reach these conclusions), I would be a sheep to be shepherded if I framed my thinking in terms of contemporary partisan politics. 

(That I should not say this because some will find it offensive is a desire that I should govern my speech according to the offensive sentiments of others. What was it that Christopher Hitchens said about the shepherd and his flock? The shepherd is not really sheep’s friend whatever his kind words and tender loving care. He is kind to sheep because his intent is to feast on, fleece, or fuck them.)

I will close with a montage of Democratic hypocrisy put together by the GOP. I have to share Republican Party propaganda because the establishment media is only interested in exploiting Republican action in 2016 to leave the Supreme Court understaffed, when, to reiterate, their status as majority party justifies their control of the agenda then and now. But the hypocrisy on the center-left is blatant and massive. In 2016, Democrats cited the Constitution and said the process must go forward. At the time it looked like they were defending the traditions of the republic. Their rhetoric was bold and patriotic. Now we see that they have no interest in that. They’re going back on everything they said and cynically citing Republicans as their authority. If Democrats have any authority, can we rely on it? Check it out:

Scrubbed from its webpage, the Black Lives Matters organization had previously stated in its “About” section: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” This statement cannot be understood independently of the Third Worldist/neo-Maoist ideology that informs BLM’s portrayal of Western civilization as not only a white supremacist project but also a patriarchal one (see “Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics”). The statement dovetails with the also scrubbed Smithsonian exhibit “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States” (see my podcast and blog on The Myth of White Culture—and be sure to check out my previous blog).

Along with the attack on the nuclear family structure, BLM seeks to disrupt traditional and modern gender categories. Much of that language has been scrubbed from the page, as well. Yet the Black Lives Matter slogan is almost always in the streets paired with the Trans Lives Matter slogan. At least among the hard core of the countermovement. It is not enough for BLM to advance the liberal value of seeking equality before the law with special rights for none, the feminist cause of abolishing patrilineal and patriarchal rule, and the libertarian ethic of persons freely choosing their gender identity, all of which I advocate unreservedly, the organization has to attack the two-parent household and sex-based gender roles, human relations one finds cross-culturally that predate modernity and that provide a social-stabilizing function.

The characterization of BLM presented here comes with a reflexive rebuttal: The quote about disrupting the nuclear family is missing eclipses. The quotation is taken out of context. BLM only wants extended families. They want to see the community take up the role of the family. It takes a village. As if idealized primitive social orderings are appropriate to modern life of liberty. It is enough to share the heart of the ideology confronting America. (Do eclipses even matter in the wake of the statement’s official disappearance?)

From where does this idea of disrupting the nuclear family come? Having declared themselves “trained Marxist,” Black Lives Matters leaders do claim a revolutionary politics. “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors told Jared Ball of Real News Network in 2015. “Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”

Given that the founders are self-described Marxists, BLM’s position on the nuclear family might be read in the spirit of views expressed in the Communist Manifesto, appearing mid-nineteenth century, where the principle leaders of the European communist movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, acknowledge popular trepidation at hearing that Communists want to abolish the family, describing the abolition of these relations as their “infamous proposal.”

To be sure, Marx and Engels own it. But there is some nuance here. The communists argue that the present prevailing family form in the West, the nuclear family, is based on the bourgeois family. They then identify its complement—“the practical absence of the family among the proletarians”—and make a prediction: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

In the communist worldview, the abolition of the family as it is presently known is bound up with the abolition of capitalism. What is more, Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously writes, “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.” This formulation, which has always struck me as self-evident, precludes any significant jettisoning or even skirting of the reality of biological sex differences. After all, Marx and Engels believed in natural history. They were fans of Darwin.

Marx and Engels also argue in that section that, under communism, society replaces home education—“the most hallowed of relations”—with social education. To be sure, there is under bourgeois rule a form of social education. But prevailing curricula, Marx and Engels contend, is designed to deepen false consciousness. “The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education,” Marx and Engels say of their solution; “they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

Given the current state of public education with its social justice curricula (critical race theory, the 1619 Project, etc.), it appears that Marx and Engels did not have to wait for the establishment of communism for education to work against the bourgeoisie family (and that likely would have made them suspicious). However, the BLM interpretation of historical materialism is comically juvenile. The founders of the countermovement are hardly super-versed in Marxism. Rather, their ideology is an approximation to neo-Marxism with some postmodernism and nihilism thrown in. Its racism exposes its anti-humanist orientation. As I said, it is neo-Maoist in character. It means to effect a cultural revolution.

Whatever one thinks of the Black Lives Matter/neo-Marxist take on the family and education, the ambition expressed raises an empirical question: Is disrupting the nuclear family and sex roles and establishing public school curricula that means to invalidate bourgeois values good for children and society? If not, who or what is it good for? There is an historical record we can look at.

For at least eighty years following the abolition of slavery, the nuclear family was the bedrock of black and white majority communities. More than three-quarters of black families were two-parent families and black-majority communities were stable and supportive. Workforce participation among blacks was similar to those of white majority communities. That changed with the full implementation of progressive policy organized as the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. Accompanying the vast expansion of the welfare state during this period, the United States opened its borders to mass immigration in 1965, while promoting globalization, displacing millions of native workers and undermining private sector union density, a trend that coincided with the expansion of public sector unionization, protecting the technocrats of the administrative apparatus. The consequences of these and related policy developments proved devastating for many black people.

Twenty-five years after Johnson, 68 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers. If not for the legalization of abortion, that percentage would likely have been much higher. Today, three-quarters of black families are single-parent families, the vast majority headed by women. Female-headed households are associated with higher levels of poverty. Black unemployment climbed to two and three times that of whites, as businesses relied on foreign labor and left for more dependable environments elsewhere. Rates of crime and violence exploded in black-majority urban neighborhoods. Today, despite being less than six percent of the US population, black males are responsible for more than half of all murders and robberies and around a third of assaults and burglaries. Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods, with rising fatherlessness and joblessness and rampant criminal violence, operated as open-air custodial facilities, conditions secured and perpetuated by progressive regimes that entrenched in city governments across the country, the same progressive regimes that are enabling, even promoting open insurrection in America’s cities.

Responding to the crime and violence explosion caused by the disintegration of the black nuclear family, governments expanded the law enforcement apparatus with considerable effect—and the shame of mass incarceration. Their efforts notwithstanding, in part due to racially-selective underprotection of their residents, levels of crime in these neighborhoods, along with family disintegration, poverty, and unemployment, continue to degrade the quality of life for black people. Paradoxically, Black Lives Matter and its allies push for disrupting public safety, calling on governments to stand down the police. BLM inspired rebellion and government rollback of law enforcement have resulted in markedly higher crime rates, erasing decades of progress. Black people are those most harmed by these developments.

Observers are shocked—some are thrilled—when they hear of BLM’s goal of disrupting the nuclear family. But BLM’s goal is not novel. We don’t have to go way back to nineteenth century European-style communism to find its inspiration. BLM’s political position is inspired by the function, if not the intent, of progressive politics and policy in twentieth century North America. BLM has internalized the social logic of global corporatism, a logic that has no need for families or nations. Progressivism is the technocratic arm of corporate governance, its politics and policies designed to manage populations affected by the inequalities globalization systemically generates in the pursuit of corporate profit.

Ask yourself why it is that when progressives hear criticism of the single-parent household in black-majority neighborhoods they hear an attack on moms and not condemnation of the dads who abandon their children? Why is advocacy for the nuclear family considered reactionary among progressives? One might think progressives are feminists. They say they are. So why aren’t they talking about a man’s responsibility to his children and how wrong it is to leave child-rearing solely to the woman carried financially by the state? Why do they hear as racist discussion of the facts that the police who shot Jacob Blake were there to protect a woman from assault and to serve a warrant for Blake’s arrest for felony sexual assault? Put another way, why does Black Lives Matter negate #MeToo? Why is Black Lives Matter pushing an ideology insisting that men have a right to define what a woman is? Why are women who assert their being as a real and a priori ontological category smeared as “transphobic”? Why is BLM dissimulating its politics by cleansing its web page of objectionable rhetoric? They still believe these things. Why, if Black Lives Matter founders are trained Marxists, do they avoid class analysis and criticism?

BLM and Smithsonian are not the only organizations scrubbing web pages. Remember these words crafted by Nikole Hannah-Jones? “The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative”? The statement now reads: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Hannah-Jones is denying that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with 1619. And she is fully aware of how her denial sounds. In a now-deleted tweet she writes, “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.” She did not mean to draw attention to her act of dissimulation.

Black Lives Matter, the Smithsonian exhibit on whiteness, the 1619 Project—these campaigns are elements of antidemocratic and illiberal propaganda, of the word and of the deed, aiming to delegitimize the American republic and Western civilization with falsehood and violence, namely that the West is intrinsically racist and its institutions and values exist to perpetuate white privilege and are therefore justifiably scheduled for annihilation. History and science are being problematized into ideological battering rams to smash objective knowledge.

Our institutions and values are being delegitimized because transnational corporate power means to denationalize the West to extract its wealth and assimilate the proletarians of these countries into a global neofeudalist order. The modern nation-state as the dynamic unit of world affairs and the family as the fundamental unit of human relations are obstacles to globalist ambition because the social logic of republican political and legal machinery is democratic, humanist, and liberal (and potentially socialist) and the family is the fulcrum of community stability. “Global citizenship” and “it takes a village” share another name: serfdom.

The California Department of Education announced new anti-racism lessons and teacher training for school districts (Education to End Hate initiative). This comes just days after President Donald Trump announced the 1776 Commission to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 project has been adapted into a curriculum guide for schools. The The 1619 Project Curriculum, promoted by the Pulitzer Center, obsesses over the history of slavery, portraying it as the root of alleged systemic racism in the United States. The project, which is fraught with errors, has gained momentum with the media-hyped moral panic over the debunked claim of racial disparities in lethal officer-civilian encounters (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters).

Facts appear to be unimportant to those pushing the narrative that portrayed the United States as a racially oppressive society. “We have continued to watch unspeakable acts of racism play out on our television screens, whether it be police brutality or those who want to hold on to symbols that represent hate against African Americans that go back to slavery,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a news conference announcing the lessons and trainings. “Sometimes I’m not sure what to do,” he continued. “But in those moments, I’m reminded education continues to be one of our most powerful tools to countering hate.” Translation: The institution of public education is a powerful instrument of indoctrination.

During his September 17 remarks at the White House Conference on American History, President Trump said that the 1619 project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” Decrying the project, he said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”

The president identified critical race theory as informing antiracist curriculum in our schools and workplace trainings. I have critiqued critical race theory in several essays on Freedom and Reason (see, for example, “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” “The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression,” and “Race and Democracy”) as well as discussed its role in racial diversity training programs. “A perfect example of critical race theory was recently published by the Smithsonian Institution,” Trump told his audience. “This document alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were instead aspects of ‘whiteness.’ This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity, and it is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.” (I discuss the document at length in “The Myth of White Culture.”)

As with most of his speeches, the president’s remarks White House Conference on American History were at moments inelegant, but in substance correct. Antiracism “education” socializes children to (1) see and treat people not as concrete individuals but as personifications of racialized categories; (2) assume all blacks are victims of white supremacy; (3) assume all whites are responsible for black despair, immiseration, and suffering; and (4) believe the American Republic was designed to secure and perpetuate the privileges of white power.

These are false teachings. Race is a social construction produced and sustained by racial thinking. There are millions of black Americans in positions of power and privilege. There are millions of white Americans suffering from poverty and in distress. No white person alive today is responsible for anything her or his ancestors did. Any white person who engages in discrimination is potentially subject to consequences under the law. Testifying to the power of its creed, the American Republic abolished the slave trade, chattel slavery, and de jure segregation, while instituting affirmative action. Attempting to deny this history, antiracist teachers sow the seeds of racial antagonisms and resentments in the nation’s children. The harvest of their toil is more social conflict in the future, conflict that harms the interests of all members of the working class. White children are made to feel guilty for things they have not done, while black children are taught that, no matter what they do, they will always face systemic racism. Unless, of course, the “structures of oppression” are dismantled, i.e., the principles of the American Republic are abolished or dead letters.

We won’t get rid of racism by telling little white kids that they’re responsible for the situation of the little black kids sitting next to them (as if their situations are monolithic). That story is a variation on the blue eyed/brown eyed experiment that shows how easy it is to create in-group/out-group conflict. It is unethical. But, also, the function, if not the purpose, of antiracist education is to sow racial division and perpetuate race-based antagonism. We won’t make progress on race relations by teaching our kids—in the face of a grand history of progress—that the republic is incapable of realizing its creed. We will get rid of racism when we teach our children that they are individuals who have a right to expect that they will each be treated equally before the law and that the story of their nation has been one of overcoming racism.

What public instruction should do is teach children the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world, make them aware that they live in a constitutional republic with a bill of rights where every individual is equal before the law, and inspire them to chart a path towards self-actualization and the realizations of their aspirations. To be sure, not every person can rise to the highest stations of their communities (not everybody aspires to reach for these heights), but adults do not help children make the most of themselves by teaching them that they are victims, that all those with their phenotypic features suffer the same fate and at the hands of those who don’t look like them, and that their situation is hopeless until the country they live in is no longer recognizable.

“[I]f you think there’s some biological fact of the matter about what race people actually belong to utterly independent of what race they think they belong to, you’re committed to a view of racial difference as biologically definitive in a way that’s even deeper than sexual difference.”—Adolph Reed, Jr. “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” Common Dreams, June 2015.

In his dissent in Plessy, 163 U.S. 557, John Marshall Harlan writes, “Every one knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white people from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.” He continues: “The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.”

In 1892, in Louisiana, Homer Plessy, a man who passed as white, took a seat on a whites only car. He was told to take a seat on the black car because he was not legally white. To put this another way, he was compelled to remain in and be judged by a state-imposed racial category. He refused and was arrested. The case wound up in the Supreme Court where the justices (save Harlan) used it to establish legal justification for Jim Crow segregation. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) thus lent constitutional authority to the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

In back of segregation is an ideology constructing race as an actual thing such that a person who does not look black could be classified as black on the basis of his ancestry, a test that requires in its policing not only a profound invasion of privacy but also a profound restriction on the right to self-determination. Some entity not only wants to know what persons are—as if there really are races—but insists that people be this thing. It is not that Homer Plessy wanted to be white. He was, like Rosa Parks decades later in challenging segregated buses, a participant in a contrived test case to challenge the 1890 Separate Car Act. But had Plessy wanted to be white, as his skin suggested he was, he could not be. It was this imposed identity that determined which train car he could ride in. In this day and age, would progressives allow Plessy to be white?

One might think that if racial categories are used to discriminate against people, in light of the fact that race is a construct of racism, an ideology that holds that the human species can meaningful be divided into varieties with different aptitudes and sensibilities and ranked accordingly, the abolition of race would be at the heart of the movement for equal rights. Yet despite having abolished de jure segregation more than half a century ago, many, if not most insist on keeping race as a classification system, one that must be imposed even on those who may wish to be a race other than the one identified on her or his birth certificate or entirely raceless. If race isn’t real, why does anybody have to be a race at all? But at the very least, why can they not identify as the race they wish?

“Please understand me. I’m not a white woman with black skin and African hair. I’m a black woman with heart and soul. Getting more and more the body of a black woman is so a wonderful and liberating feeling for me. I don’t want to offend anyone! But I’m not only outwardly a black woman, I’m also with heart and soul a black woman, I swear that by God!” Those are the words of Martina Adam, a German woman whom who transitioned from white to black.

If there is no such thing as biological race, if a black person can be born and raised in Germany, and if a German person can transform herself into the gender she believes she should be, then why can she not also transform herself into the race she believes she should be? I know, asking this question risks an accusation of transphobia. But I have heard the question but I have not heard an answer. To be sure, people think they have provided an answer. Understand, my point here is not the problematize transgenderism. It’s to problematize transracialism.

Based on her words, Martina might be diagnosed with a form of body dysmorphic disorder. Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, “outed” as white, describes the same anxiety. Both believe they are black. They are changing the way they look to belong to the group with which they identify. They want their outsides to match their insides. Is it discrimination when that group doesn’t accept them for who they really are?

Are transwomen women, as the slogan says? Perhaps this is not perfectly analogous because gender has a clear biological basis, whereas race does not. While human populations may not be divisible into races, they are into sexes. Anomalies aside, the species is composed of two distinct genotypes, XX and XY. Chromosomes are not arbitrarily selected.

However, it is one thing to not accept transwomen as women, on the hand, and to destroy a transwoman’s career and life because she used to identify—or be identified—as a man. To be free means to determine for oneself which imaginary community with which one wish to identify. The headlines told us that Dolezal “pretended” to be black, deciding for her with which race she is allowed to identity. Can you imagine the uproar if the headlines told us to think in a similar way about Caitlin Jenner?

Three more women have been outed or have come forward to reveal themselves as white. George Washington University recently suspended professor Jessica Krug after a blog post was published claiming she has, in the words of the news stories surrounding the case “pretended to be Black.” She also went by the name Jess La Bombalera, an activist persona in the Bronx. Krug grew up Jewish but, in her words, “assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She claims to have “gaslighted those whom I love.”

Krug’s outing is triggering a string of what the media is calling “race fakers.” A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student, CV Vitolo-Haddad, who identifies as non-binary and goes by the pronouns “they” and “them,” resigned from from teaching role after admitting to lying about being black. She admitted to being Southern Italian and Sicilian. Then community activist Satchuel Cole admitted to posing as a black person for years in Indianapolis. She was a member of the Indy10 Blacks Lives Matter organization. In 2017, she was spokesperson for the family of Aaron Bailey, shot and killed by police in a traffic stop.

There are many other examples if, falling short of claiming to be black, have acquired a black appearance via surgery, deep tans, and makeup. Critics even identify artificial and textured hair as part of the ruse. The term used to describe such practices is “blackfishing.”

Our society does not give people the choice of picking their race. It popularly, and in some cases legally, insists on maintaining a caste system. So, while you can leave the working class for the capitalist, and you can leave the identity of a man for that of a woman, you cannot leave the white caste for the black caste without being declared a fraud or mentally ill.

This is made all the more interesting given the spectrum of human variation along lines of color and other relevant phenotypic features leads to misidentifying the race of people. Podcaster Dan Bongino, who is Italian, is asked if he is black or has black ancestry. While Bongino does not appear to see advantage or esteem in being perceived as black (it angers him to be mistaken for black), Krug obviously did. She wanted to sit on that car. But because she is not a person of color, she has no right to the advantage and esteem she sought in a different identity. She was riding on the wrong car. I wonder about blacks who “pass” for whites and whether their outing would feel the same way. Were they seen in the Jim Crow days as fraudulently accessing the advantage and esteem of the white car?

Which identities may be taken up and which are forbidden? Who makes these rules? Who polices them? For what purpose? Race is a social construction, yet there are those who work very hard to police it. This suggests that there must be benefits that accrue to it.

There is a politics at work here. Leftwing identitarians exposing individuals passing redefine selected white ethnicities—Arabs and Jews—as nonwhite. The present case is particularly interesting given that Krug is of European Jewish ethnic ancestry. For some purpose here, she is white. Leftwing identitarians will even define a religion as a race when it’s convenient to do so. Christians aren’t a race. Muslims are.

All this progressives have in common with rightwing race identitarians. And we know how that goes. Elizabeth Warren is a “fake Indian.” People are upset when Trump says this. But we didn’t see a lot of people defending Ward Churchill when folks were saying he was a “fake Indian.”

But what is real in any of these things? Should we follow the blood quantum rules (the rules that the folks who saw to it that the University of Colorado fire Churchill denied existed)? Or is it enough that Dolezal’s parents are white to wreck her identity? If we are going to assert race is a real thing, then how shall we determine its presence? Since race is not a biological thing, DNA testing will only tell you a person’s ancestry, not her race.

What does it mean to condemn interracial adoption because white parents can’t teach the children their heritage? I get it that there is asymmetry in group power, but just imagine white people arguing that black people adopting white children is problematic because, “Who will teach the white child his heritage?” For white people, heritage is racism. Maybe we should ask the cops. They seem to know for sure who is who.

There is a strange essentialism at work in identity politics. It draws a hard line at race. The Washington Post pitches in by making sure their readers know Dolezal is a “white woman who posed as black.” She is not a transracial person. That’s not even a thing. (Actually it is.) Consider if she were also transgender. What would the headline be then? Are there white brains and black brains? There’s no want of people asserting it or trying to find it. She fails the blood quantum test? Or is Dolezal white because the social and cultural rules demand white stay in their lane? Are we permitted to make this claim about other identities with reputation intact?

One of the reason Dolezal is so hated is because she moved among black and white populations without anybody knowing. They believe they know race when they see it. But not a single person had a clue. It took her hateful mother to rat her out. She was upset because Dolezal was a race traitor. Dolezal is the one wrecked and gaslighted.

Bottom line, if Dolezal passed, what’s the big deal? Who would have known? Why does it matter? What we are witnessing is selective suspension of belief on the terrain of social construction. The problem is one of reification. It matters to a particular system of imagination. It’s racecraft.

Here’s an idea: stop caring about how people identify and turn your attention to the problem of economic inequality and social class. That’s where you will transverse the terrain of the real.

In a recent blog (The Establishment Media Running Down the US Pandemic Performance) I noted that four counties—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—had death rates comparable to those of the United States. I used the similarities to push back against the establishment media claim that the United States is an outlier in COVID-19 deaths, a claim used to attack the president.

The World Health Organization is expressing concern that COVID-19 cases are rising in Europe (The new Covid-19 case surge in Europe, explained). They have declared it a “very serious situation.” The four countries I used in my comparison are among the affected nations. I present the change over time in four graphs below, obtained by searching “COVID-19 cases [country name].”

We see that COVID-19 cases are on the rise in all four countries, most drastically in France and Spain, where the current number of cases is higher that the previous peak, which occurred months earlier. For these countries, the rise in cases started back in July. For Italy and the United Kingdom, increasing frequencies becomes clear by early August.

With the warning lights going off, we need to step back and ask the most important question: are the increases in cases associated with increasing deaths? After all, if we tested for any virus and found a growing number of cases we would need to have some reason for this to cause alarm other than the mere presence of a virus. Most viruses are not particularly lethal or even consequential. For example, rhinoviruses are common in human societies yet we don’t test for them nor do we panic when we perceive colds are appearing with greater frequency. The next four charts document the frequency of death in these four European countries.

In only one country (Spain) does it appear that deaths are on the rise in any significant number, and this is the country with the greatest number of new cases. To be sure, if deaths follow, a lag in frequency is expected. Yet, in France, where a dramatic rise in cases began in mid-July, we see only a slight uptick on in the second week of September. Moreover, both Italy and the United Kingdom show very little increase in deaths despite a steady rise in cases. Perhaps this will change over time, but at present it does not appear they rise in cases is associated with increasing death.

Let’s take a look at the United States, where frequency of cases has been much greater since June. As you can see, this is associated with a rise in the frequency of deaths, but the visual comparison is striking in how the number of cases of death was much greater during the period with fewer cases of infection than in the period with more cases of infection.

What are we to make of this? Why was there so much greater death in the earlier periods than in the later periods? One reason for this is likely aggressive testing. The more testing authorities do the more cases we uncover, which in turn increases case frequencies. In may be that, in the early months of the pandemic, many more people had the virus that we thought but, with testing constrained, few cases were uncovered, thus producing a much higher case fatality rate, which created the exaggerated perception of the virus’ lethality. As testing ramped up, we began to develop a better understanding of the virus’ true lethality, which was not nearly as great as we initially thought.

This is, of course, assuming the virus has a stable rate of death. Natural history suggests that this is a bad assumption. In nature, the proliferation of virus depends on its successful replication. If, in the replication process, a virus sickens its host to the point where the host cannot effectively spread the virus, then this particular variation cannot spread as effectively as those variations that do less damage to the host. A virus is not trying to sicken or kill its host. It is simply trying to exploit the host’s cellular machinery. With the proliferation of less lethal varieties of SARS-CoV-2, death rates fall while infection rates rise.

It is likely that all of these are simultaneously occurring. There were early on certainly more cases than were detected by testing. The initial case fatality rates were thus based on underreporting of cases. I knew this at the time and reported on it my blog. But the viruses has under evolutionary pressures attenuated over time. It is less lethal than it was before. A rise in cases accompanied by a drastic decline in cate fatality rates should be cause to celebrate, but the establishment media and medical-industrial complex are spinning the statistics in a manner that at least functions to frighten the public. They have switched from death counts to case counts. They are hiding the good news for political purposes.

It may be that the lethality of the virus was magnified by those who were most likely to die from it, namely the old and the infirm. Of the 182,095 deaths recorded by the CDC to date, 104,661, or 57.5 percent, were over age of 74. Including those in the 65-74 age range raises the number to 143,790, increasing the percentage to 79 percent. Including those 55-64 accounts for more than 90 percent of fatalities. Approximately half of all those who died were in long-term care facilities, so it was not just age but health condition. For the other four-fifths of the population, 14,871 died from COVID-related causes. That is two percent of all causes for those age groups. For schools aged children, from daycare through undergraduate, COVID-19 related deaths account for just 1 percent of all deaths for those age groups. (All these stats are from the most recent CDC provisional death reports.)

In late August, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested that only 6 percent of people who died of COVID-19 actually have COVID-19 as the sole diagnosis on their death certificate. This isn’t just an issue when COVID-19 is a factor. Underlying diabetes, coronary artery disease, etc., are common diseases that contribute to mortality, They are triggered by influenza, pneumonia, or some other infectious process. When doctors talk about “triggers,” they mean the proximate cause of death. Unfortunately, the media is not educating the public about proximate and ultimate causes.

If you are healthy, a cold virus won’t kill you. Indeed, getting cold viruses as you mature will protect you against cold viruses throughout your life. This improves your quality of life. But if you are very old, with late-stage cancer, have health problems associated with obesity, etc., with an immune system in decline or depleted, then you might not be able to fight off the cold virus. The cold virus is the proximate cause of your death. But the ultimate cause is something on that list I just enumerated. Eventually, sooner than later, all those with underlying conditions will die and their death will likely be the ultimate cause of their death (if they aren’t hit by a bus, struck by lightning, slip in the bathtub, murdered, etc.). The virus—the trigger— could be a rhinovirus, a coronavirus, or some other virus. The point is that the virus is not the ultimate cause of death because it rarely kills anybody by itself. If it does kill somebody by itself, then a deeper investigation is warranted. The doctors missed something. Or foul play is suspected.

Consider a man who has been shot in the chest. He survives, but the injury exposed him to an antibiotic resistant bacteria that invaded his lungs. Should we absolve the man who shot him of murder because the proximate cause of death is a bacterial infection? No, because the ultimate cause of his death is the gunshot wound to his chest. The man who shot him is responsible for this death. His ultimate passing was triggered by the bacterial infection.

The establishment is using a COVID-19 diagnosis in counting deaths to leave the impression that each of us share the same risk of death if we contract SARS-CoV-2. In fact, most of us who are infected won’t even present with symptoms. Half of us probably already have an immunity to the virus because of a lifetime of exposure to coronaviruses (T-cells exhibit cross-immunity). Indeed, the perception conveyed by the media is so false that any expert who does not make sure the public understands this is lying to them. Virtually everybody the media puts in front of you is lying to you. And they’ve been actively censoring those contradicting the official science on this matter. The good news is that you don’t need to be a virologist to understand the logic of science. You just need to be a scientist or think like a scientist.

Finally, a comparative point. Sweden pursued a different strategy in handling COVID-19. They sought to build herd immunity while mitigating the worst effects of the disease and thus soften its impact. As you can see by the numbers, this was a sound choice. They are not seeing the rise in cases that the other European countries cited are seeing. There almost no deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden, a diverse country of ten million people.