I want public schools to reopen. There are real emotional and psychological costs to children stuck at home and in front of screens. Opportunities to acquire crucial knowledge and skill sets are being cut off—knowledge and skills that cannot be transmitted virtually. Social interactions necessary for normal cognitive and personal development are constrained, indeed deformed, by remote learning. We are told that a novel virus presents a challenge to reopening. Otherwise, it would be business-as-usual.
But business-as-usual is a problem in itself. Indeed, more concerning than the effects of COVID-19 is the degree of wokeness in progressive social programming and the expectation that children and young adults, as well as staff and teachers, will embrace social justice doctrines surrounding race and gender. Children and young adults are conditioned to be hyper-judgmental and hyper-sensitive. Others are ostracized for being born a certain way and on that account taught to self-loathe, to feel ashamed for things they could not possibly have done, to apologize for the wrongdoings of others, even including corpses.
Indoctrinating youth with the language of theoretical antagonisms developed by cloistered academics, limited by disciplinary matrices, moving in abstract conceptual worlds, and justified in their motivation by artificial entitlement and esteem, antagonisms pushed by an odious grievance industry grasping for unearned things, a sophisticated language painting some children and young adults as racist and sexist on the basis of color of their skin and their anatomy, while teaching others that they are the victims of oppression and trauma and deserving of special rights on account of these, all the while nourishing the worst personality disorders of narcissism and sociopathy, the fruits of which we are seeing playing out on the city streets of America and Europe today—the consequences of all this will in the long run prove far worse than any wrought by SARS-CoV-2.
I am sympathetic to those parents who are reluctant or who refuse to send their children into a totalizing environment that commands their attention for the better part of their waking hours five days a week and sometimes more. I oppose in principle vouchers for religious schools, but at the same time I can see that it is unfair to allow some parents with means to shield their children from progressive indoctrination while effectively compelling those with little ability to exercise choice to send their children back into this environment. I am sympathetic with taxpayers who wonder why their resources are being marshaled to fund programming that runs down the very culture that has allowed so many of them to have a good life.
For those of us who do continue to allow these institutions access to our children, we need to do a better job of arming students emotionally and intellectually to resist indoctrination and to challenge teachers on the things they say—and to not permit the exercise of disagreeable speech to be suppressed under the guise of discipline. Parents should periodically debrief their children to learn what it is that they’re “learning” and to address teachers and administrators directly with their concerns.
How did this happen? That is a long story beyond the scope of this essay. But the bottom line is that schools should not be teaching quasi-religious notions. It is not the place of administrators, staff, and teachers to disseminate social justice doctrine. As a parent, I would never tell the children of other parents how their children are supposed to think of themselves or think of others beyond treating persons as individuals and on the basis of behavior and character. To be sure, I have a problem with parents who fill their children’s heads with such hateful and divisive nonsense. Teaching children to judge people on the basis of race and gender under cover of such progressive rhetoric as “antiracism” is insidious. I would never presume to humiliate or shame a child or a young adult because of her or his phenotypic characteristics. But to have partisan interests reflected in public education in order to reinforce the obnoxious teachings of a segment of the population only doubles down on the problem.
I see the effects of the programming in the acquiescence of my colleagues in higher education to ideological struggle sessions cloaked in such Orwellian language as “diversity and equity training,” their equanimity prepared by their socialization in the institution of public education. As part of this structure, I feel a special burden to speak up about the direction it has taken. I am moreover, as a sociologist, acutely aware of the subtle forces that coerce education professionals to participate in reproducing that structure.
Public education is shot through with subversive political projects of this sort. Public schools should not, for example, insist that children and young adults tolerate exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines, such as those teachings imposing modesty dress on girls or condemning homosexuality, as merely “other cultural practices.” It is not the purpose of public education to validate any given ideology or deform a person’s ability to distinguish right from wrong by invalidating ordinary moral judgment as “ethnocentric.” In cultural terms, public schools have only to uphold the liberal values of autonomy, creativity, equality, free thought and expression, humanism, individualism, and secularism to do the right thing. For these are the values that allow persons the chance to manifest more fully the human right to self-actualization.
I expect some will find this essay insulting. Offense-taking does not negate facts and experiences. I remind the audience that I am the son of teachers and a teacher myself. I have children in public schools. My wife is a education professional. I study pedagogy and have reviewed the curricular materials of public schools and, more than once, spoken up about them. I confess, I should speak up more frequently and more vociferously than I have. So here we are. (Moreover, it is a shame that the best criticisms of the problem come not from the left but from the right. See There Is No Apolitical Classroom, The Silence of the School Reformers, and Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America’s High Schools.)
I recognize that many teachers disseminate propaganda handed down to them from on high. But here staff and teachers have an important role to play by challenging their administration over content or in practice avoiding transmitting the worst aspects of woke programming. Teachers should not wait for parents to probe their children for information in order to intervene. Teachers know better than anyone how reluctant parents can be to challenge authority. Teachers have a responsibility to not harm children with programming that can cause distress, engender guilt, or stigmatize.
The problem of indoctrination in education runs deep. The unraveling of the Enlightenment that woke ideology advances (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and all the rest of it) is part of a project reflecting decades of managed decline of Western civilization by corporate power and its functionaries in the culture industry and the administrative apparatus. These insidious notions are the result of a long march through our institutions by those who mean to undermine the values of personal and popular sovereignty that mark Western civilization as the pinnacle of world-historical development.
The goal of the project is obvious in its effects. And that’s why we have to confront the problem. And why we have to confront it now. We risk losing everything that has made our societies just and successful. Those who desire to fundamentally change Western society know how important it is to get at our children. It is our civic duty to protect them from it.
Early in the interview shared below, Coleman Hughes notes the huge wealth gap between Jews and Protestants and the fact that hardly anybody is interested in that matter. Indeed, if a person is interested in the wealth gap between Jews and Protestants he is viewed with suspicion. Is there not at least a whiff of antisemitism when a Protestant is interested in why Jews as a group do so much better than Protestants do as a group?
Coleman Hughes a fellow and contributing editor at City Journal.
We can push Hughes’ premise a bit more. If the person interested in the question argues that the reason there is such a gap is because the Jews have organized a system of institutions and organizations and occupy influential positions within this system that allows them as a group to amass privilege over time and accumulate a disproportionate share of the wealth, what social scientists call “cumulative advantages,” then the suggestion becomes an indication of antisemitism. Sounds conspiratorial, no? Does the explanation have the Jewish plan of control in hand? Are there laws on the books that protect and advance the ability of Jews to manipulate society in such a fashion? No? It’s just the way the system works? Jewish power is built into the DNA of society, is that the claim?
An imaginative Protestant seeking to blame Jews for his situation could certainly construct an elaborate theory about dynamics and structures in Western history that explain this disparity. Social science provides jargon for the construction of all manner of abstract things and “social facts” supposed to work forces on people. But I think we all know what that theory would be called in this case and what would happen to the person who advanced it.
It would remove all doubt about the question of antisemitism if the person pushing the theory of Jewish privilege and supremacy demands on the basis of his theory the reorganization of society to redistribute the wealth held by Jews to Protestants.
Yet it is not merely okay for blacks and their “allies” to blame whites for the wealth gap between their respective groups; it is expected. Those who object to antiracism are treated with the same scorn as a Protestant who wonders why Jews as a group are so much better off are than Protestants. Ibram X Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, whose theory of “antiracism” makes all whites who do not agree with him racist, tells us that it is racist to oppose reparations. Kendi is celebrated on the left and by the establishment media.
Ibram X Kendi, Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research
The antiracist standpoints normalizes anti-white racism. Whereas a Protestant runs the risk of being accused of antisemitism for asking why Jews are so well off as a group, the black person demanding reparations from white people for something their distant ancestors may or may not have done is bravely seeking the justice due him. This expression is given a lot of leeway. Some black nationalists even pull Jews into the scope of their theory of the black-white wealth gap and, unlike the white Protestant who would be crucified for doing such a thing, are able to maintain associations with groups like Black Lives Matter, darlings of the establishment, without much scrutiny. How dare white people tell black people which oracles to consult, right? As if criticizing rabid antisemites like Louis Farrakhan should be avoided because some black people wish to sidestep vile and potentially embarrassing and hypocritical associations.
Even though the demand for reparations is made in a society that abolished slavery more than 150 years ago—even though the demand is made for blacks whose ancestors were never exploited and oppressed by the structures theorized to still disadvantage blacks after so many decades—even though some who will get reparations are descended from tribes who sold the ancestors of other black people into slavery—the characterization of all whites as privileged and collectively profiting from skin color and guilty of an intergenerational sin is viewed as a noble cause. White privilege rhetoric blames an entire race of people for the situation of blacks as a group. Blood guilt, rightly never tolerated in explanations of Jewish affluence and status, has become the prevailing theory of racial disparities and, moreover, the policy ground upon which racial equity is to be achieved.
To be sure, there was racial slavery in the United States. This is a historical fact. And that fact does have something to do with the development of post-slavery America. If you feel the need to point that out (which in my experience many people do), then you are missing Hughes’ point. Hughes need not ponder the substance of the Jewish question for a second for his point to work. One does not need to spend any time working out odious theories about Jewish affluence. It is for this reason that reparations is such an unhealthy obsession: it is driven by race prejudice. The hatred and loathing of white people has become so severe—paradoxically increasing in the wake of the elimination of actual structures privileging white people—that whites are now expected to self-hate and self-loathe in ritual confession. The truth is the opposite of what Kendi writes in his Atlantic article: it is advocacy for reparations that is racist. This should be obvious. But we are in an era where people are easily manipulated by feelings of guilt installed by antiracist programming. One cannot safely assume people see through the deception.
More than 150 medical experts, nurses, scientists, and teachers have signed a letter to political leaders urging them to shut down society and start over to contain the coronavirus pandemic. The letter was organized by PRIG, or the Public Interest Research Group, a network of non-profit organizations with the goal of politically change American in a progressive direction. Envisioned by that notorious scold Ralph Nader in 1971, PRIG recruits its activist army mostly from colleges and universities.
“Right now we are on a path to lose more than 200,000 American lives by November 1st,” the letter asserts, “Yet, in many states people can drink in bars, get a haircut, eat inside a restaurant, get a tattoo, get a massage, and do myriad other normal, pleasant, but non-essential activities.”
Of course, all the “normal” and “pleasant” activities people engage are essential for the survival of the bars, hair salons, restaurants, tattoo parlors, and all the other businesses that make our communities vibrant and prosperous and the dreams of entrepreneurs come true. The “normal” and the “pleasant” are also essential for health emotional and psychological states, access to which is rapidly dwindling for our children.
“Continuing on the path we’re on now will result in widespread suffering and death,” the letter warns on apocalyptic tones. “And for what?” For all those things that PRIG designates “nonessential.” And for more than that. To not sink the economy even deeper into depression and all the suffering that calamity entails. For the sake of the “normal” and the “pleasant.”
What the letter signers recommend is insanity. They demand enough daily testing to tag everyone with flu-like symptoms and an army of contact tracers to track all current cases. They demand the shuttering of all nonessential businesses. Restaurants should only provide take-out service. People should only leave their apartments and houses to obtain food and medicine or fresh air and exercise. Governments should mandate masks in all situations and ban interstate travel.
In other words, society should not longer be free and open and citizens should be forced into strict rules of obedience to demands articulated in a letter by medical experts, nurses, scientists, and teachers with the correct opinion.
The Authoritarian Revolution
* * *
Last night, I listened to a virtual debate about mandatory masks at the board of supervisors in the country where I live. It became obvious early on that the logic given to rationalize mandatory mask wearing to combat the coronavirus could be easily retooled to rationalize mandatory vaccination. “We do this not for our own protection, which is admittedly a personal choice,” the argument went, “but for the protection of others.” The same argument could also be marshaled for rationalizing the same mandates for combatting the spread of influenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and other coronaviruses, all of which are lethal and crippling.
But if we apply the logic of masks and vaccines and quarantine for SARS-CoV-2 to other things—and people should wonder why we don’t—then the good life will be increasingly difficult to come by. And that’s just fine in the opinion of an increasing number of our fellow countrymen.
What the scolds don’t tell you is that tens of thousands of people die every week from all sorts of causes. They die from heart attacks, strokes, chronic respiratory conditions, cancer, automobile accident, alcoholism, drug overdoses—it is a list too long to review here. Normal weekly deaths in the United States average around 60,000. That is a lot of death. And a lot of that death is preventable. If we shut down society, banned cars, forced people to eat only certain foods, banned a range of chemicals, strictly prohibited alcohol and drugs, etcetera, we could drastically reduce the rates of death and disease. Of course, we don’t do a lot that. We determined a long time ago that the good life comes with risks. But for how long?
We are on a dark path towards an authoritarian society. Our governments are normalizing germophobia—the pathological fear of microbes. Authorities and activists are pathologizing healthy people, teaching citizens that their fellow humans are by default diseased and dangerous. Creating fear and suspicious are important elements in establishing an authoritarian order. The panicked animal seeks the sheltering arms of the parens patriae. While this doctrine has its place—most obviously in the necessity of public safety—a new attitude seeks the totalitarian expansion of state power to curtail the “normal” and “pleasant” activities of healthy people.
* * *
The pandemic is occurring at the same time pundits and politicians are telling us that white people are racist and that their racism infects Western culture and law. Indeed, racism is in the Western DNA. Paradoxically, the free people of the West are told they have no right to except to be safe from criminals in their homes and their communities. Public safety is a racial privilege, a luxury white people do not deserve (black and brown people are collateral damage). Of course, the police will enforce the mask mandate—and the vaccine mandate when it’s finally handed down. Civilians throwing avocados at fellow shoppers without masks won’t get the job done. The contradiction is understood in light of a new ethic: criminal deviancy is allowed, even encouraged, while liberty is criminalized.
What explains this contradiction? Western culture is the source of democracy, humanism, individualism, liberalism, republicanism, and secularism. The ethics of civil liberties and human rights began there and spread throughout the world—where they are met with resistance from authoritarian forces. Now the West must resist its diminishment at the hands of a new authoritarian force: corporate power.
By reducing the West to white supremacy and rejecting it on this basis, under the cover of mass hysteria and for the sake of personal and exclusive opulence, a global power elite is dismantling the foundations of freedom, progress, and justice. They are removing the obstacles to total control of human life. The People’s Republic of China and the Islamic sharia are not condemned for their totalitarianisms, but held up as solutions to the problems of the free and open society. Democratic systems, with their respect for personal sovereignty and choice, are in decline everywhere. Manufactured crisis is a gun to put a wounded Enlightenment out of its misery.
What lies at the end of this dark authoritarian path is global neofeudalism. Western values emancipated large segments of humanity from the old feudalism, elevating individuals from the lowly status of serf, servant, slave, and subject to that of citizen. Freed from the oppressions of the tribe and traditional social arrangements, autonomous persons constituted a sovereign people granted control over their destinies and expected to take responsibility for their actions. Western man now find himself being retribalized and returned to serfdom—a new serfdom with a new king: the transnational corporation.
I am getting questions about the text beneath my name on my Facebook profile. It reads: “Teacher, musician, humanist, democrat, feminist, libertarian, republican, socialist, skeptic, infidel.” I cannot be all those things, people are telling me. I am even being told this by people who are not even my friends on Facebook (people are checking out my Facebook page).
I presume that teacher, musician, humanist, feminist, skeptic, and infidel is not what screws people up. By infidel I mean that I stand outside any religious system. I am an atheist. The rest is clear enough, I think. I will nonetheless discuss my understanding of these terms in a moment. It is the democrat, libertarian, republican, and socialist tags that gets people, so let’s begin with these
Democracy is a political system in which individuals enjoy collective power to determine the things that directly affect them. A democrat is a person who advocates for a substantial degree of political and social equality of people. In ancient Greece, the demos was constituted by the ordinary citizens in a city-state. My democracy advocates for the widest scope of popular sovereignty possible that does not interfere with personal sovereignty.
This is where my libertarianism comes in. A libertarian is a person who advances a political and moral philosophy emphasizing personal sovereignty. The focus is on freedom and autonomy. Libertarians are concerned with defending individualism, choice, and voluntarism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy articulating traditional liberal values: free thought and speech, freedom of association and assembly, and secularism or religious liberty (freedom of and freedom from religion). A libertarian is concerned with principled defense of civil liberties and individual rights. Defending liberty is an important piece of democratic republicanism wherein public and personal rights are balanced in a manner enlarging and deepening freedom and self-actualization. The US Bill of Rights is the paradigm of the libertarian conception of liberty.
A republican is a person who advocates for the establishment and preservation of a republic, that is a representative form of government comprised of citizens (as opposed to absolutism over the subject). The republicanism I advance is democratic and libertarian one: a government founded on a constitution with a bill of rights shaped by the pragmatism of common law. I embrace popular sovereignty for citizens with constitutional protections extended to all persons residing within the juridical boundaries of the republic. A republican rejects inherited authority, such as an hereditary monarch.
I identify as a democratic republican. A democratic republican is a person who believes in popular sovereignty with limited government with respect to individual liberty and protection of civil rights. That I am a humanist follows from this. I am also on this account a liberal and a secularist. I am a feminist because I believe in the equality of individuals.
Please note that the tag is small “d” democrat. It does not refer to Democrat, as in the Democratic Party. If I had meant to indicate that I would have capitalized the word. Same with republican. I am not referring to political parties but to political philosophies. I support neither of the two major parties currently running the United States. The political parties who go by these names do a very poor job of reflecting the political philosophies from which their names are derived. They have become organs of corporatist and globalist forces. They undermine popular sovereignty and work technocratically not democratically. Our democratic-republican system is in danger of being canceled by bureaucratic-corporate power.
I do realize that the socialism part is confusing. This is because of the pervasive character of bourgeois ideology in capitalist societies. Socialism refers to a type of economic system wherein workers and communities have substantial control over and collectively benefit from the means of production. Those who produce goods and services own and control the means of their production for the good of themselves and their families and ultimately their communities. Socialism does not negate democracy (it may in fact enlarge it), republicanism (republic governments can exist with socialist economics), or libertarianism (there is no inherent reason why collective ownership and benefit limit individual freedom—these may actually expand opportunities to be freer).
Of course, socialism can appear with association with a variety of types of government arrangements. It can exist in an authoritarian political and legal framework in which the state controls the means of production. Or it can appear in a democratic-republic wherein the workers enjoy a substantial degree of control over the means of production. Because I am a democrat, my socialism is democratic socialism operating within the framework of a secular republic wherein citizens are empowered to make these determinations. Because I am a humanist, economic decisions citizens make are informed by reason and science. Because I am a libertarian, individuals are free to determine what they will do with their share of the social product with due consideration for the rights of others.
Okay. I said I would define the other terms.
I mentioned this several times. Humanism is a scientific and ethical worldview emphasizing human agency and human rights. Humanism is an epistemological stance eschewing dogma and superstition for evidence and critical thinking. I am also a Marxist and some assert that the mature Marx was an anti-humanist. It is beyond the purpose of this blog to get into this (I address this elsewhere), but I do not agree Marx was anti-humanist. Indeed, Marx’s advocacy for the full emancipation via social revolution of humanity from the alienating conditions of segmented social arrangements is quintessentially humanist in substance; alienation is unfreedom, and therefore a distortion of species being.
Feminism is politics advocating sexual equality and opposing patriarchal organization of communities. A feminist affirms the right of girls and women to exist as autonomous individuals and not subordinates to men or the norms of masculinity. A feminist holds special regard for the unique character of women and for this reason staunchly defends personal sovereignty, bodily integrity, and reproductive freedom.
An infidel is a person who does not believe in religion or who holds a religious view different from the one his accuser holds. I am the first sort, usually defined, given the intensity of my infidelity, as antitheism. An antitheist is more than an atheist—either the type of atheist who has insufficient reason to believe religious claims or the type of atheist who knows the claims of religion are false on reasonable grounds—but rather a person who finds religion objectionable. I tolerate religious belief because I am a libertarian. For the same reason, I oppose the imposition of religion.
Skepticism is a rational attitude towards truth claims, the default position of which is doubting the truth of any significant claim without compelling evidence or reason. Knowledge is verified belief or information. This does not mean that knowledge is fixed and eternal. It means that knowledge is based on facts gathered and studied via rigorous methodology with a readiness to consider contrary evidence (disconfirmation). Skepticism means that discovery and the dialectic informs consciousness; if one encounters facts or argument that cast doubt on what he believes, and if he can no longer sustain his belief using reason (not ideology), then he modifies or abandon that belief. A key aspect of skepticism is charity in argument, that is working through contrary claims with an open mind.
Nothing in my tag line contradicts anything else in my tag line. The confusion represents an inadequate understanding of political theory and, really, a lack of creativity in thinking about political possibility. My mind changes on matters of substance. But the principles identified in my tag line have been my guiding principles for decades.
This is not a civil right movement. This is a violent countermovement against freedom and progress (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). The federal government has to step in and stop this. Enough is enough. All the so-called leftist who support this? People, please. You made the wrong choice of comrades. Wake up. You let something confuse you and you don’t have your head on straight. Shake yourself out of the fog you’re in.
“Wall of Moms” between law enforcement and rioters in Portland
The question is not whether federal troops ought to intervene in situations occurring in the states. If this were true, the only place the federal government could appear is in the District of Columbia (and progressives have a problem even with that—because Trump is president). It is bizarre, frankly, to see progressives make the “states rights” argument. What do they think about President Eisenhower’s intervention in Little Rock, Arkansas when Orval Faubus used military force to stifle the right of black people to attend school with whites? We are first and foremost citizens of the United States of America. Arkansas blacks were right to expect that the federal government would defend their rights because their rights applied to all people regardless of the color of their skin. (See Fake News, Executive Power, and the Anti-Working Class Character of Street Crime.)
I am reading progressives on the matter of Portland and they sound like the far-right wing-nuts who, during the 1990s, characterized the ATF, the FBI, and other federal officers as “jackbooted thugs.” Remember that? These reactionaries claimed that the federal government was a fascistic entity depriving them of their rights. Their concerns of course fell on the deaf ears of progressives. But Waco wasn’t wrong because the feds intervened. Waco was wrong because the feds acted stupidly and recklessly. Same thing in Portland.
What we are seeing from the left is not judgment based on principle and the rule of law in a democratic republic, but panicked knee-jerking when the rule of law is applied a particular group with whom they agree. For progressives, smashing right-wingers is a beautiful thing—even when the protests are peaceful. Just the presence of conservatives and right-wingers is violence in the progressive’s eyes. They abhor the “deplorables,” white they adore Antifa for punching them in the face. When the cause they support involves arson, looting, and physical violence, then law enforcement is supposed to stand down because that mob is justified. It is an utterly contemptible double standard.
“Protestors” on the run in Portland
These progressive voices like to think of themselves as on the left, but as a lifelong left-winger, the double standard just isn’t working for me. As Marx explains, “laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual.” He writes, “A statute book is a people’s bible of freedom.”
Marx was not an anarchist (neither am I).
For Marx, reason—the natural law, which for Marx is human rights, found in the objective potential of species-being—is realized in positive laws that establish the conditions for freedom (positive and negative), which has at its base security. Marx was an advocate of socialism because he wanted to improve the life chances for people. People cannot be free under conditions of anarchy because under conditions of anarchy there is no rule of law.
When E.P. Thompson embraced the rule of law in Whigs and Hunters, he was attacked by many on the left for deviating from Marxism. They did not grasp Thompson’s point that leaders disregarding the rule of law—which Ted Wheeler, Mayor of Portland, is guilty of—are a menace to freedom. Thompson meant to contrast the lawless leader from leaders constrained by the rule of law. Thompson understood that in any complex social system, the law is a necessary institution. Wheeler is not above the law. The mob he is advocating for is not above the law.
Progressives do not represent working people. They mean to disorganize the left with identity politics and postmodern thinking. They seek group rights not human rights, which are necessarily individual rights. Whatever Trump’s thinking is for intervening, the effect of his actions is pro-working class.
The just-minded don’t break laws unless they absolutely have to and this requires a legitimate cause. The mob in our streets is illegitimate. Their claims are objectively wrong. This is not a civil rights movement. It is a countermovement against progress. It is reactionary.
Civil disobedience to one side, there is no justification for destruction, plunder, and violence. Citizens have the right to expect that the government will intervene to protect them (see The States Rights Fallacy; Portland and the Rule of Law). If Wheeler fails to do that, then the federal government has to step it.
I am posting to my blog an annotated script to my recent podcast/vlog on the myth of anti-black bias in police shootings. I provide references to all the sources I reference in that blog.
I also report a casualty in the moral panic over police shootings, the “voluntary” retraction of one of the many pieces of research I cited (which was announced after I recorded my podcast). The authors did something wonderful in their retraction letter: they cited even more research that supports my thesis—research going back to 1977. That extends the body of research back in time another decade. We now have 43 years of research countering the Black Lives Matter narrative. Amid the pressure to retract their findings (the reasons for which are absurd) the researchers did so with Galilean defiance. My guess is that it was better to voluntarily retract and draw attention to the letter than have the journal retract. I have not talked to the authors, so I cannot say for sure.
I do worry that the attacks on scholars will be expanded to include others. But here’s the deal: the research is out there, and no amount of official sanctioning will diminish the power of the facts and the analysis. These findings are as certain as anything can be in the social sciences. The question is really: who do you believe? Black Lives Matter, Democrats, and the corporate media? Or the social scientists and public health researchers who have actually examined the evidence using the most sophisticated methods to date? I know who I believe.
Jeremy Peters’ July 14, 2020 The New York Times story “Asked About Black Americans Killed by Police, Trump Says, ‘So Are White People’,” is an example of the scientific impoverishment of the mainstream media, many of which carried similar stories. Peter’s claim that, in his answer, “The president rejected the fact that Black people suffer disproportionately from police brutality.” This characterization misrepresents the president’s comment.
Peters did get the scoop. The question was put to Trump by Catherine Herridge of CBS News: “Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” It is a very poor question. Why is the question not about everybody who dies at the hands of law enforcement? If police brutality is a problem, then should we not be concerns about all the victims? Why would Trump reinforce the attempt to portray the victims of lethal police-civilian encounters as all or mostly black? The question disappears the white victims of lethal police violence. Moreover, the questioner doesn’t seem to recognize that she can easily answer her own question: because police confront violent offenders who are often armed and engaged in violence or are resisting in a manner that threatens the safety of the officer or others, it follows that black males are more likely on a proportional basis to fit that description.
“What a terrible question to ask,” Trump responded. Indeed. “So are white people,” he added. “More white people, by the way.” The public is not supposed to know this or think about this. The media scrambled to confuse Trump’s point.
Peters writes: “Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.”
So, right off the bat, we have to note that Peters confirms Trump is right: “more white Americans are killed by police”; “a majority of victims are white.” What did Trump say? In as many words, just that. That’s the buried lede: Trump is right: police kill many more whites than blacks every year. But this would mean that Black Lives Matter operates on a false premise and that does not advance the agenda of delegitimizing the police function in America.
Let’s look at the last three complete years. I am using data from Statista. The data conflate race with ethnicity. White and black are racial categories. Hispanic designates an ethnicity. Most Hispanics are racially white. According to the 2010 census, 53% of Hispanics identified as white, whereas, in 2013, only 2.5% of Hispanics identified as black. However, I will not adjust the numbers in light of this since I do not know how the Hispanics in these numbers identified. There are also quite a few victims for whom either race or ethnicity is unknown, so we will have to put those aside.
Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race
For 2017, leaving out those of unknown race or ethnicity, 903 persons were shot by the police. Of those, nearly a quarter were black. Whites were just over half of all those shot by police. Let’s stop and reflect on that: more than twice as many whites were shot and killed by the police than were blacks. There is a pattern. Check it out. In 2018, just over a quarter percent of those shot by the police were black. Whites, again, were just more than half of all those shot by police. In 2019, around 30 percent of those shot by the police were black. Whites were nearly half of all those shot by the police.
Over the three-year period 1,226 whites were killed by the police in contrast to 667 blacks killed by the police. Overall, blacks were just over a quarter of those killed during this period, whereas whites were almost half of those killed by the police at 49 percent. Trump is correct. More white people than black people are shot and killed by the police. Trump is not right by a little. He is right by a lot. I realize this information is mind blowing for those who have not studied the facts, but it is documented in every study of lethal police-civilian encounters. The police kill many more whites every year than they do blacks.
One objection to these facts is that, plainly, there are more whites in America than there are blacks. The objection means to drag the argument only to the ground of proportionalities. Peters points out that “people of color” are killed at higher rates. Crucially, he notes, the victims are disproportionately black. This means that, relative to population, blacks are more likely to be shot by the police.
The overrepresentation of blacks in police shootings becomes a racial disparity that is assumed to be explained by systemic racism. Disparities are prima facia evidence of discrimination. An inequality presumes an inequity. We hear this argument all the time. However, the inference is faulty, and I want to illustrate why before blowing it up with facts and the large literature showing that patterns of lethal police-civilian encounters cannot be explained by systemic racism.
We know that 96 percent of those killed by the police are men (I calculated this from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report). We do not infer from this that lethal police-civilian encounters result from systemic misandry (dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men). Why not? The reason men are overrepresented among shooting victims is obvious: men are overrepresented among those whom police confront as violent offenders, often armed and engaged in violence or resisting in a manner that threatens the safety of the officer or others. This is so obvious that nobody cares to even look at the data showing men are overrepresented in violent or otherwise serious criminal offending.
The police do not go out looking for civilians to murder. They respond to crime. That’s their job. If a person puts himself in confrontation with a police officer, and he is a serious offender, armed and representing a threat to officers, then he is at greater risk of being shot by the police.
It follows that, if black males are more likely that white males to put themselves in this position, then it follows that they are greater risk of being shot by the police compared to whites. As I said earlier, we could infer from the facts than blacks are shot and killed disproportionately that they are overrepresented in those criminal activities that put them at higher risk of being killed. Why would one automatically assume the disparity is explained by racist cops?
The facts bear all this out—and any serious journalist who is prepared to ask the question should study the facts. Black males are responsible for more than half of all homicides and half of all robberies in the United States, two of the most serious violent crimes recorded by the FBI. Black males are responsible for 30 percent of robberies and 30 percent of aggravated assaults. Blacks males are only six percent of the population. (Uniform Crime Report, FBI)
In other words, a small proportion of the US population is responsible for a large proportion of the most serious violent offenses in America. It should be obvious from the facts of black overrepresentation in serious and violent crime that police are more likely to interact with blacks with a greater proportional likelihood of a lethal outcome than police are whites.
It is striking, though, that even with this stark overrepresentation in serious crime, the police still kill more than twice as many whites as blacks every year.
What Peters is doing in misrepresenting the president’s point is plug another data point in the alleged continuum of Trump’s racism. The objective is not only to mischaracterize the president’s comments. It is also to confuse the public over the reality of lethal police-civilian encounters, the very reality Trump is alerting the public to.
My analysis is backed up by scientific research looking specifically at the role context and crime rates play in lethal police-civilian encounters. The evidence is clear. There is no systemic racism in lethal police-civilian encounters. In fact, there isn’t much evidence for it in the criminal justice system at large.
We have known this for more than thirty years. William Wilbanks, in The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, published way back in 1987, produced a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers. Among the specific areas considered in his analysis are provisions of counsel, police deployment, use of deadly force, bail decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing patterns, and inmate classification and discipline. Wilbanks finds that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system. Wilbanks summarizes: “At every point, from arrest to parole, there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect.”
Robert Sampson and Janet L. Lauritsen, in a comprehensive review of studies of the criminal justice system, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States,”published in the pages of Crime and Justice in 1997, find “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias.”
Heather Mac Donald’s 2016 book The War on Cops, yet another comprehensive review of the evidence, finds no evidence of racially biased policing.
Roland Fryer, in “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2018, but available in 2016, finds no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force, i.e. officer-involved shootings.
Joseph Cesario and colleagues, reported in 2018, in “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016,” published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, that, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. The authors conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, that exposure to police, given crime rate differences, accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks.
Charles Menifield and colleagues find, in “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” published in Public Administration Review in 2019, that white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. The pushback here is the argument that it is the racism endemic in policing that turns black cops into racist killers. In other words, black cops are racists against other blacks.
In “Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks,” published in Journal of Crime and Justice, in 2019, Brandon Tregle and colleagues, when focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, find that blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.
David Johnson and colleagues, in “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” in the pages of the 2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, find that it is the rate of violent crime, not the race of the officer, that determines the race dynamic of police shootings. What Johnson is speaking to, as was Cesario, is the “exposure hypothesis,” serious criminal activity increases the likelihood of officer-civilian interaction and this influences the frequency of policing shootings. As do Tregle and colleagues, Johnson and associates find that, taking crime rates into account, the bias in shootings appears to be against whites.
After producing my podcast, Johnson and Colleagues voluntarily retracted their article. Here part of what they said in their retraction explanation: “Although our data and statistical approach were valid to estimate the question we actually tested (the race of civilians fatally shot by police), given continued misuse of the article (e.g., MacDonald, 2020) we felt the right decision was to retract the article rather than publish further corrections.”
In the era of cancel culture, we should approach the voluntary character of the retraction with caution. The researchers were assailed not for the actual research, which concerned officer characteristics related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, but for the impression critics claimed the paper conveyed that it said something about racial disparities in the probability of being shot. In other words, the conclusion was politically incorrect. The authors had issues a clarification about the matter. Apparently a clarification wasn’t good enough. They were to suffer the humiliation of a retraction.
You will note the MaDonald 2019 and 2020 references in the retraction. Indeed, they are front and center. These are references to Heather MacDonald’s essay “False testimony,” for the City Journal (Manhattan Institute), and op-ed “The myth of systemic police racism,” published in The Wall Street Journal. That the authors highlighted these particular “misuses” of their article by the much maligned author of The War on Cops suggests the character of the pressure that was put on the researchers to retract their article. MacDonald is the scourge of the Black Lives Matter countermovement against public safety. Her open defense of law enforcement and criticism of race identiarianism has made her the witch at the center of the moral panic.
That the retraction was forced by politics is furthermore suggested by this passage in the retraction statement: “Relative to the proportion of Black civilians in the U.S., Black Americans are shot more than we would expect. However, relative to various proxies for the propor- tion of Black civilians who commit violent crime, Black Americans are not shot more than we would expect. This has been consistently shown for the majority of fatal shootings (90-95%) where the citizen shot is an immediate threat to an officer or other citizen (Cesario et al., 2019; Fyfe, 1980; Goff et al., 2016; Inn et al., 1977; Tregle et al., 2019; Worrall et al., 2020), though some evidence has been presented that racial bias may be present in the remaining types of shootings (Ross et al., in press). The lack of racial disparities once violent crime rates are taken into account has also been shown in papers using more complex analytic approaches than proportion comparisons (Fryer, 2016; Mentch, 2020).”
In this passage, the authors are essentially telling readers that, while their article was being used in ways their critics did not like, the inference that systemic racism is not found in research controlling for relevant factors is nonetheless correct. All the more shameful that they claim that clarification was insufficient, in my view. However, at the same time, the passage alerts readers to research dating back to 1977 that supports the inference they were alleged to have conveyed. This list is quite helpful to readers, but only if they note it and follow up. Here are the full references to the research they cite: Andres Inn and associates’ 1977 “The effects of suspect race and situation hazard on police officer shooting behavior,” in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology; James Fyfe’s 1980 “Geographic correlates of police shooting: A microanalysis,” in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency; Phillip Goff and associates’ 2016 “The science of justice: Race, arrests, and police use of force,” Center for Policing Equity; Lucas Mentch’s 2020 “On racial disparities in recent fatal police shootings,” Statistics and Public Policy; John Worrall and associates’ 2020 “The effect of suspect race on police officers’ decisions to draw their weapons,” Justice Quarterly. These references only strengthen the thesis of my podcast, so I appreciate the care the researchers took in their retraction letter.
Katelyn Jetelina and associates, in “Dissecting the Complexities of the Relationship Between Police Officer–Civilian Race/Ethnicity Dyads and Less-Than-Lethal Use of Force,” published in the American Journal of Public Healthin 2017, find that, when controlling for other factors, the observed significant relationships between race/ethnicity dyads and use of force dissipated.
We have to be honest here. The cause of Black Lives Matter is not informed by science. The media and fellow travelers either do not know the evidence or they carry on in the face of the evidence.
Ex-cop Reddit Hudson said in a Vox article in 2016, “Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life.”
The first sentence is an evil metaphor. It’s like saying racism is in our DNA. If racism is woven into the fabric of the nation or in our DNA the only option is to throw away the fabric or kill the organism—i.e. dismantle or destroy the country. The second sentence is false. There is a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. Nothing could be more obvious that that. It is also obvious that there are people who hate America and want to dismantle or destroy it.
Finally, when Joseph Cesario says “not being involved in criminal activity is far and away the best way to not be shot by the police,” many will have a knee-jerk response. They will hear this as “blaming the victim.” As I have written about in my blog, “blaming the victim” is a terrible way to characterize the perpetrators of criminal violence who strike terror in the residents of our most vulnerable communities. This is the pathology of left-idealism, an ideology that heroizes the criminal as the pitiable monster of unjust social structures.
More fear mongering on the left. I am referring to the chaos in Portland, Oregon. The “rebellion” is in its seventh week of chaos. The federal government has moved to quell the mob while the corporate media amplifies the hysteria. We see the establishment media on the side of those attempting to overturn our republic. Progressives are describing the intervention as “authoritarian” and “fascist.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called the officers “stormtroopers” and accused them of “kidnapping protestors.” The Washington Post documented a single person who was arrested, briefly detained, and released. The officers followed procedures, drove him to the federal courthouse and then released him.
Federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Oregon
When we see leftist mob violence in Portland or other cities it is useful to ask what we would expect of the federal government if the authorities of a southern city or state stood by while white supremacist mobs rioted and perpetrated acts of violence on citizens. Would we expect the federal government to step in and do the job local law enforcements are failing or unwilling to do? Or would we condemn the federal government for intervening? No doubt progressives would howl if the government failed to bring the hammer down on white supremacists. In fact they do (U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism).
If I consistently adhere to principle the answer to the question is yes—whatever the ideological persuasion. I called for federal intervention in Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots back in May (The Riotous Left is on the Wrong Side of Democracy and Justice) and followed up with an blog about in June (Fake News, Executive Power, and the Anti-Working Class Character of Street Crime). I also called for federal intervention in the Cliven Bundy case, calling that situation an insurrection (see The Cliven Bundy Case and State Power; see also The States Rights Fallacy). My problem with the tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas was not not that the federal government intervened. It was how the intervention was conducted. I do not have a problem with DHS or the National Guard stepping in when local law enforcement cannot do its job. And, in the present case of Portland, federal officers are protecting federal buildings and officers.
The riots in Portland, Oregon have devastated the city
Something needs to be done. Riots, vandalism, arson—these are not legitimate acts of protest. Just because you may agree with the protestors and don’t like Trump or the police is no reason to disregard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Unlawful acts of violence and property destruction are not protected speech or expression by the First Amendment. The First Amendment guarantees citizens’ right to peaceably assemble. It does not give people permission to engage in insurrection, terrorism, or criminal violence.
Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end. pic.twitter.com/PE4YfZ9Vqd
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) July 16, 2020
The Constitution makes clear that the federal government—the supreme law of the land—has the authority to execute the laws of the Union, repel invasion, and suppress insurrection. It doesn’t matter whether you and I agree over what the insurrection is about or who the insurrectionists are. The government does not take a side against the people. It’s obligation is to uphold the rule of law. The Constitution guarantees a republican government to all citizens. It must step in in the face of failure or unwillingness to uphold the rule of law—especially when the republic is threatened.
Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf said in a statement a couple of days ago, “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.” The statement continues, “Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community. This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.” The statement then goes on to detail a list of violent actions by the mob since May 29. The list of criminal actions is extensive. Portland has a problem. The city leaders either don’t know how to control criminal violence or choose not to. Under these circumstances, the federal government is obliged to step in.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler
I want to make this clear: I am a defender of the Constitution and the US Republic. I don’t care whether it’s antifascists or fascists or whatever. If people are perpetrating criminal violence, they need to be dealt with. If the federal government is interfering with lawful and peaceful protests, then I will of course condemn those actions. If the federal government is upholding the right of citizens to be free from violence and property destruction, and if proper criminal procedures are following in doing so, I will refrain from criticizing them. If there are cases where they do not correctly follow procedure, this does not necessarily condemn the overall action.
For the record, I do not agree with the motives of the insurrectionists. We are in the midsts of a campaign to delegitimize law enforcement and, more broadly, our republic. Violent anarchists or other rebels are subverting law and order. This is a regressive countermovement. To be sure, anarchists and others have the right to peaceably assemble and protest. But when their actions cross over into insurrection, terrorism, and criminal violence, I see no alternative but for a government sworn to uphold the Constitution to intervene in a lawful fashion. How the cops are dressed or what sorts of the vehicles they drive around in is irrelevant.
I will continue to closely follow these developments. But the federal government moving to suppress this insurrection is part of what I meant when I made the slogan “enough is enough” my Facebook cover. Federal intervention is long overdue.
Officer Jackson talks about being a black police officer working at the demonstrations in Portland, Oregon. pic.twitter.com/ZtIjQ7AMaO
In the summer of 1969, I was seven years old and watching Apollo 11 blastoff into space. This event put in me going forward an outlook of optimism about human possibility. I did not know that all around me 100,000 people (out of 200 million people or .05% of the population) had died from influenza strain H3N2 during the 1968-1969 flu season. The death toll likely would have been much higher but for the herd immunity acquired a decade earlier when the same strain swept the world—with a much greater proportional death toll (116,000 out of 175 million people or .066% of the population). All I knew is that we were going to put men on the moon.
Had physicians, pundits, and politicians framed H3N2 like they are framing COVID-19, which may in the end produce a proportionally comparable death toll (currently 140,000 out of 330 million or .042% of the population), albeit with a much lower lethality potential for children and adults under 50 years of age, my outlook going forward would have very likely been very different. It almost certainly would have been worse had I been younger while experiencing this trauma. Unable to have much of an abstract grasp of the risk, I would no doubt have been terrified. Like many children, the terror would manifest in ways that may not be immediately apparent to those around me. But I would nonetheless be a different person inside than I otherwise would or should have been.
Most of the brain development in our species occurs after birth, during the first five years of life. It is during this time that our nervous system potential is activated and elaborated. Depending on how the child experiences the world, this system can develop along normal and healthy or abnormal and pathological trajectories. We will discover in time—many parents already see it in their children—that the societal reaction to this virus has traumatized a generation of children and young adults. Trauma and crisis change the organism. In this case, it will be for the worst.
I confess, there is a selfishness expressed in the world today that angers me. Adam Curtis puts it well when he describes this as the result of a “century of the self.” Part of this is due to the sociopathy mass consumer culture has produced, a dehumanizing social logic engineered by corporate power for the sake of profit. But it is also the result of those whose nervous systems developed in the grip of trauma.
When I see people hellbent on deepening trauma by doubling down on hysteria, I do understand and sympathize at a certain level. I see the fear of the wounded and frightened animal in their eyes, peering over the mask. They want to keep the pandemic panic going because they’re scared. Characteristic of moral panics, it’s the paranoids and phobics acting in often unconscious ways to generalize their specific traumas to the rest of the population who become the most aggressive advocates for hysteria. They soothe themselves with the fear of others. It makes them feel not quite so alone. Their empathy deadened, they think of their own emotional and psychological needs first, and that manifests in shaming, scolding, and, if possible, coercing others into their regime of pathological anxiety and fear. The stress response becomes a political and moral cause that sweeps everybody into their pathology. This explains the remarkable degree of intolerance for the choices others make in their lives.
Salem witch hysteria—the classic case of moral panic
As a consequence of all this, a great many of our children will grow up to see other people and social situations as disease vectors, especially those who do not give into the fear that the victims of panic have become convinced is warranted. Moral panics—witch hunts, red scares, pandemics—breed suspicion of others. Mass hysteria trains people to perceive invisible enemies in need of identifying and stigmatizing for the purposes of making uncertainty manageable. It is a world of pariahs and scapegoats. Those who do not fear the invisible enemy in the way they are expected to—in the way they should—are not merely wrong but evil and dangerous. These are signs that trauma victims are imposing their victimization on others.
Many of our children will carry the anxiety and fear that others have put in them into their interactions with others. They will project their victimization in this same way. They will spread a different kind of virus, a virus of fear and loathing. Pathological fear and loathing, i.e. phobias, generates avoidance behavior. Pathological fear causes people to avoid the wellspring of common humanity—the intimate social relations that forge the well-developed and potentially self-actualized personalities that keep alive the desire for the free and open society that sustains these necessary positive interactions.
We have entered a period of rapidly-successive mass hysterias (this in itself indicating a deep disturbance in the moral order). We are experiencing a vicious downward spiral into mass pathology. In this context, all of the core values of our civilization—free speech, autonomy, privacy, personal sovereignty—are threatened. Indeed, we see a new culture emerging bearing all the signs of an authoritarian order. And that is something to panic about.
We are, like all mammals, evolved beings. Natural history has made us specially social; engaged and non-stressed interaction with other persons roots deeply in our nervous system. As Gabor Maté tells us, children require attentive and emotionally-available caregivers. Co-presence is insufficient to properly activate our nervous systems. We cannot accomplish this through screens. Children require intimate and physical interaction to develop out more fully their brains, emotions, and minds. The unfolding of the human personality is dialectical; we come with wetware that requires activation and stimulation and programming (socialization). Humans depend on sufficient dopamine production for proper levels of motivation. They need ample oxytocin for love and solidarity. Serotonin for happiness and wellbeing. And all the rest of it. It is engaged and non-stressed social interaction in childhood that builds the normal and healthy adult. Children can feel the stress their parents bring to their interactions. If parents behave as if a terrible monster waits around the corner—even more frighteningly, as if other human beings carry this terrible monster within them—the children will internalize this stress and it will damage them.
I realize that this virus is not harmless. I have said this in many essays. But the fact that we do not respond this way to the annual flu, which kills tens of thousands every year in the United States alone, tells us that the response this virus is irrational. I have written about why the response is different this time, so I won’t repeat those points here. But the rational way to have responded to the appearance of the virus would have been to focus on the vulnerable populations the authorities ignored. More than half of all those who died perished in our long-term care facilities. Only around five percent of the population live in those facilities. Making sure the vulnerable were protected, while the healthy went on with their lives, would have been the rational approach. We could shift to this approach immediately—if cooler heads prevailed. Alas, I fear they won’t.
By conditioning people to perceive disease and death in human relations and intimate interaction, the societal response to this virus is deadening people. Stress produces cortisol, a hormone that affects every system in the body. If the production of this hormone is constant, it compromises every system in the body, producing a damaged person. Like a wolf or a bear in a cage. It’s not the virus that is doing this to us. It’s the societal reaction to the virus that is doing this to us. In light of the actual risks from this disease, objectively, there is no justification for the intensity and duration of the stress response. It is tragic that only some people can see that this is the wrong thing to do in the throes of a pandemic. Maybe one day most people will see it. They usually do. But by then it will be too late. In many ways it’s already is too late. All we can do now is try to mitigate the harm the fearful and the selfish and irrational fear have inflicted upon our nation.
For all those who will take umbrage at what I have written here, know that I have been watching the way you treat other people. Your mocking and hatefulness, your belittling of others with whom you disagree, are signs of the very pathology I am writing about. The offense you take, the anger you feel, are personal reflections on the condition that you have imposed on others in a dynamic of othering. The reflex of projecting lack of empathy exposed you a long time ago. I owe you no apology. Quite the other way around. Start treating people as the human beings they are.
Continuing to push back against weaponized historical revisionism. The prevailing world-historical narrative over slavery and the West is an ideological exercise. This blog does not deny slavery was practiced in the West. Nor does it deny that racism exist or remains a problem. My previous blog Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It attacks the idea that one can diminish Western civilization and the American republic on grounds that white Europeans made them. I argue that such an assessment of culture and ideas on account of race is a profoundly racist claim in itself. The claim is rooted in the fallacy that culture roots in race. We see the fallacy in the rhetoric of “cultural appropriation.” Leftwing identiarianism is founded upon an untenable essentialism about race (when convenient, it does the same thing with gender). As I will explain in this blog, this error results in part from the shift from class to race in New Left thought, largely the product of a Mao Zedong Third Worldist corruption. The public has no idea how much our culture and politics have been shaped by Mao Zedong thought. You cannot understand what Black Lives Matter is really about until you grasp this history.
Classical Marxists value the Enlightenment and modernity because they understand that these forces have historically detribalized people and reincorporated them as citizens and individuals in national communities based on liberal and secular values. Put another way, modernity liberates people from backwards and traditional structures. (See The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism;Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism; Capitalist Globalization and the Promise of Democratic-Republicanism.) As a consequence, working people have opportunities to grasp more clearly the primary determinant of their life-chances: social class. They come to recognize themselves as a class-in-itself and make possible thinking as a class-for-itself. This points to the bourgeois necessity of confusing the proletariat with ideology and propaganda.
Classical Marxists do not reduce the Enlightenment to capitalism. Indeed, communism and socialism are themselves products of the Enlightenment. Such liberal values as free speech are not the problem for Marxists. The problem is that the bourgeoisie possesses power and property to such a degree that the possibility of realizing these values in action are unequally distributed and thus constrained for the majority.
The Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society
More than clearing the ground for class consciousness and opening the possibility for socialism and the expansion and deepening of democracy, the ethics of liberalism and modernity articulate the reasons for abolishing slavery. By recognizing common humanity and emancipating the person from the tribe so as to make the individual, the Enlightenment puts the black man on the same moral plane as the white man. “Am I not a man and a brother?” asked the man in chains in Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 medallion designed for the British antislavery campaign. This sentiment is made possible by the recognition of species-being. The injustice of involuntary servitude becomes an inescapable fact in the light of modernity; rationalizations of it could only work at times and in places and only for so long. The institution of slavery is marginal in the world because the West spread this sentiment across the planet.
The Enlightenment did not invent colonialism or race prejudice. It pointed a way beyond them. It was revolutionary and universalist. By transcending capitalism, the classical Marxist argues, liberal values can be more fully realized, since the contradiction that restricts access to them would be removed. Until then, the target of resistance is globalism. Karl Marx did not stand against Enlightenment but was a product of it. He did not want to overthrow modernity but universalize it.
It was Mao Zedong thought and the New Left who reframed the political problem in racial terms, shifting the dynamic from class antagonisms and struggle to white Western oppression of nonwhites. Whereas Marx exposed the strategy as “bourgeois nationalism,” Moa embraced it. The “North-South” divide in international political economy, obscuring class antagonisms in the national context, is a product of the reframing. This is Third Worldism. This Worldism is not a class-analytical standpoint, but a race-ideological one, dressed in Marxist jargon. With its rhetoric of “oppressed nations,” Maoism pits workers of some nations against workers of other nations on the basis of race. It sinks this divisiveness down into the national context, antagonizing social relations with the rhetoric of “internal colonialism,” thus making racialized minorities appear as aliens in their own countries. In this way, minorities are alienated from their comrades in the majority. This ideology makes enemies among the people. Divide and rule. The 1983 Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, in arguing that white proletarians lack working class consciousness, and that therefore nonwhite minorities are the organic vanguard of socialist revolution, is a case in point.
The crowd in the street is not a movement for equality and justice. Such a movement would be a multiracial (transracial, really) class-based mass movement against corporate power. An authentic democratic movement would not manifest as a race-identitarian reaction canceling republican institutions and liberal principles. That is an obvious contradiction. A genuine emancipatory movement would extol democratic-republican values of individual rights and responsibilities, for these are the liberating forces that abolished slavery and marginalized racism. Such a movement would not merely eschew the regressive and racist ideology of blood guilt, but would condemn it as authoritarian and retrograde. An authentic movement for equality and justice would not strive to make our most violent neighborhoods less secure by diminishing the institutions of public safety. It would demand that the national government step in to protect citizens where state and local governments fail them. A movement representing working people would focus its rhetoric on the continuing problem of class exploitation and economic inequality. The movement’s character would be populist not progressive. It would be left-realist.
Capitalists have long used race to divide the working people. They’re at it again. What we are seeing is not a democratic movement for equality but an elite-financed elite-organized countermovement to entrench corporate governance and spread neoliberal programming. It’s astroturf.
What makes today’s race project so successful is that many on the political left have adopted the transnationalization agenda of the globalist fraction of bourgeoisie: the managed decline of the West and its institutions. The left has been duped by a deformation of critical thinking that leverages against the people the alienation caused by conditions of which they remain unconscious. As they sit in their high school and college classes listening to their teachers and professors trashing the institutions of the West, they do not hear about the most important determinant of their life-chances: the capitalist mode of production. Instead, they are in training to become functionaries of the very productive modality that exploits their labor.
The progressive deceit turns out popular forces to wage war on comrades not capitalists. The mob thinks it’s working for justice. But it’s working against itself. At least it is working against the proletariat. It’s working for corporate power. The effort is not making a more just society, but undermining the striving to manifest in law and policy the values extolled by rational and fair-minded people, and with these the aspirations, interests, and security of the American working class, including the black and brown Americans for whom the riot does not and cannot speak.
“We wouldn’t have to have Black Lives Matter if we didn’t have 300 years of black lives don’t matter.” —Antiracist Jane Elliott
Slavery has been a fact of human societies across the world dating back to antiquity. Its terms are covered in the Code of Hammurabi and the Jewish Bible. The Greeks and Romans owned slaves. Slavery was widespread under Islam. The practice is not unique in world-historical terms. What is unique about the transAtlantic experience with respect to slavery is this: the West abolished the practice. The United States was a leader in slavery’s abolition from the country’s inception through the modern period, from banning the slave trade to globalizing the effort to abolish slavery everywhere. America remains vigilant (for example, in 2017, the US State Department established the Program to End Modern Slavery).
Arab slave traders under Islamic hegemony
The United States did not establish slavery in North America. Slavery existed long before the United States was a country. Within a decade after establishing the republic in 1787 (the year the Constitution was ratified), Americans outlawed the slave trade. It was a promise kept. When, in 1860, some southern states elected to secede from the Union and put slavery at the center of a new nation, the Union took up arms and put down the insurrection, abolished chattel slavery, and reunited the country under one flag. The struggle saw the sacrifice of three-quarters of a million Americans, mostly white, for the sake of the freedom of black people. Overall, more than a million Americans perished in the conflict. The Confederate flag flies only in the imagination of a recalcitrant few.
The United States government made the former slaves and their descendants citizens and, in time, guaranteed all Americans equal rights—civil, political, and social—regardless of race. When the barrier of de jure segregation was erected in the aftermath of Reconstruction, a racism hardly dissimulated by the fiction of “separate but equal,” the United States government abolished that, too. Discrimination against black people has been illegal throughout the nation for more than half a century. Black people in America now ascend to high positions in the civil and political sectors of American society. Systemic racism has been abolished. Institutional racism is a thing in the past. And very few white people carry racist beliefs in their heads anymore.
The emancipation of humanity from the scourge of slavery was a product of the Enlightenment and of Western civilization. The Enlightenment is a European philosophical and moral movement emphasizing democracy, humanism, individual liberty, liberalism, republicanism, science, and secularism. The Enlightenment is the source of the doctrine of universal human rights, which recognizes the common humanity of our species. These are radical ideas. I do not write this to ennoble white people. At the same time, we should not tear down these ideas because white people authored them. The race of a people does not determine the validity of their ideas.
The founders of the United States reflected this way of thinking. Their Declaration of Independence expresses in inspired tones the humanist principles of inalienable rights and self-governance: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the American creed. Their Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, embodies Enlightenment ideals and principles. It was in this light that the institution of slavery and the ideology of racism was overthrow. And it is in this light that the fight against slavery and racism continues.
The Libyan slave trade thrived in the wake of the Obama-Biden bombing campaign.
Yet, despite the devotion and success of the United States in shepherding these ideals through to practice, we are hearing, articulated by so-called radicals, the wholesale condemnation of the very civilization that gave rise to abolitionism and the granting of full citizenship to black Americans. Our people are being taught that the United States is a problematic construct because it was founded in a world where slavery was ubiquitous. Our children are being trained to gloss over such monumental facts as these: American revolutionaries overthrew a monarchy and established a secular democratic-republic and freed black people from bondage. The project seeks to move the date from our founding in 1776 to the year 1619 when Dutch slave traders brought twenty or so Africans to the Jamestown settlement in the British colony of Virginia. They mean to recenter world history on the black struggle in order to tell a tale of 400 years of uninterrupted oppression at the hands of white supremacists. This is a delegitimation project.
Today, thanks to a retelling of our common history from the standpoint of oppression, there are crowds in our street burning down government buildings, desecrating monuments and toppling statues, and physically assaulting their fellow citizens. Skirting the reality that it was white men who abolished slavery and ended Jim Crow (white men also guaranteed women the right to vote), the crowds insist that they’re overthrowing systemic racism and a regime of white supremacy. The white majority is portrayed not as a people who strived to form a more perfect union, but as habitually standing in the way of justice for minorities.
There is a fundamental error committed here—a grand ad hominem fallacy. This is the argument: Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention, nearly half owned slaves. The nation was stamped from the beginning as a wicked thing because of the identity of its authors. All of them were white men. This is the essentialism of identity politics. But if a ubiquitous white male supremacy constituted government and made laws to preserve particular racial and gendered interests over against the interests of nonwhites and women, then why was it white men who secured equality and freedom for blacks and women? It was not a slave revolt that won freedom for blacks. It was white men advancing the ideals of a nation who freed blacks and made sure they became citizens. Likewise, it was white men who pushed the Nineteenth Amendment through Congress and saw its ratification as part of the ever expanding Bill of Rights. It was moral conscience and patriotism guided by the America creed that moved white men to fight for equality and justice. American history is proof of the righteousness of its institutions, not an indictment of them. The American republic is irreducible to the race and gender of the men who founded it. Identitarianism is a false proposition. Yet it is the prevailing form of racism in the West today.
Of course the enlightenment was not the product of white male thought (whatever that might mean outside of racialist claims) but the product of Western civilization and culture. Civilization and culture are not racial things. Only racists believe this. The Enlightenment was not an ideology constructed to secure the interests of white males over nonwhite people. It is a error of epic proportions to think that the radical ideas of the Enlightenment spring from racial type. Race is not an actual thing. How many times do we have to speak this truth before it sinks in? If one says that we must reject European values because they’re the values of people who are judged to be on account of race a problematic people, then that person is making the same sort of racist argument that white supremacists make when they reject good and beneficial ideas from Africa or Asia on the grounds that those who hail from these continents are problematic. It so happens that the Enlightenment emerged in a region of the world that was majority white. Racists make something of that. But we shouldn’t.
In Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi conflates race and culture in the same way racists do when he argues that, after biological racism was discredited as a scientific theory of racial separation and inequality, appeal to African American attitudes and culture as the explanation for disparities became the new racism. I cite his book because of all the attention it has generated, but Kendi is hardly alone in making this error. It is endemic on the left. For analyses of the problem, see my recent essays The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics, Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism, and Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation. (In The New Racism, which I wrote in 2008, you can see the beginning of my questioning of the new racism concept that many of us were taught from childhood. As an academic, this fallacy was reinforced in my training.) The fallacy has become more widespread over time and is now the popular understanding. It is at least the understanding that shapes discourse in popular culture. We see it, for example, in the essentialist rhetoric of “cultural appropriation,” which must assume that culture is rooted in race (see Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice for a critique).
Kendi’s formulation is wrong. Culture and ideas do not belong to any race. They are the products of the brains of a single species: Homo sapiens. It therefore cannot be true that criticizing or praising culture and ideas is racist. For example, analyzing and criticizing the culture of violence and dependency associated black-majority neighborhoods is not a racist endeavor. There are many reasons for the relative degree of poverty that exists in the United States and the racial disparities associated with it, but it is not racist to reject the claim that systemic racism explains these inequalities. Nor can Western civilization be discredited on account of the fact that white people founded it. Western civilization is not a culture of white supremacy. It is the culture responsible for the ideas of democracy, humanism, individual liberty, liberalism, republicanism, science, and secularism that have resulted in the most advance and just societies in history—indeed, the culture in which abolitionism appeared. Defending these ideas does not require any appeal to white racial superiority. The preservation of Western civilization is not a racist project. The claim that it is a project that seeks to cancel Western civilization. Those who take up this project believe they can inoculate themselves from criticism by crying racism. We shouldn’t let them.
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I quoted antiracist Jane Elliott at the start of the essay not because I admire her; on the contrary, her presence in the struggle for justice and equality is toxic. She says on the one hand that there is no such thing as race, then proceeds to frame everything in those terms. The quote—“We wouldn’t have to have Black Lives Matter if we didn’t have 300 years of black lives don’t matter”—is the subject of memes shared across social media. I shared it yesterday on facebook so I could say this snarky thing: “Because abolition of the slave trade, civil war, Emancipation, the Fourteenth Amendment, Reconstruction, Brown v Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and Barack Obama never happened.” Frankly, I am not sure she actually said this. It’s a meme. But it is something she would say. Race merchants like Elliott say things like this all the time to diminish our accomplishments as a people. The New York Times 1619 Project is an project to deny progress. Kendi’s thesis that racial ideas are constructed to legitimize white supremacist policy and structure rationalizes every advance in race relations as a tactic to keep in place a system that materially benefits white men. “Not-racist” is therefore a manifestation of racism.
According to Robin DiAngelo, denial of white fragility is proof of white fragility. If our legal system worked this way, nobody accused of a crime would ever be acquitted. https://t.co/tgBe9ndlIQ
The New Left racialist project is a massive exercise in gas-lighting. If a white person denies their white privilege that proves they enjoy white privilege (a white person has it anyway by virtue of being born that way). If a white person says he not racist that means he is racist. Kendi tells us that one can either be a racist or an antiracist. There is no between. If you oppose reparations, then you are racist because “the middle ground is racist ground.” Ironic that the offspring of poststructuralism are so eager to establish binaries (when it’s convenient, of course). You are one or the other and essentially so.
“Are you doing something about your racism?” is a variation on “When did you last beat your wife?” Somebody says you are sexist. You deny you are one. That is proof that you are one. You’re in denial. The trick is meant to undermine confidence in your self-judgment by people supremely confident in their own. Those who deny woke doctrine are in particular need of the therapies amateur pop psychologists peddle. The deniers are in need of healing. Or at least in need of acquiring the skills to live with their incurable disease (whites are categorically racist, after all). Racists Anonymous. Is that a thing? “Hi, I’m Bobby Charles and I’m a racist.” It is hard to believe anybody takes this nonsense seriously. But they do. And, no matter how much it’s dressed up in jargon and confused with bad argument and statistical manipulation, it is nonsense. It’s manipulative and arrogant. Woke scolds are insufferable.
Nobody I know claims that history is free of oppression and struggle. Peasants, workers, women, children, gays and lesbians—the story of human freedom is the overcoming of barriers and injustices to ascend to new heights of dignity and liberty. Justice isn’t like flipping on a light-switch. It’s realized in steps and slowed by missteps and resistance. But the claim that black lives didn’t matter for 300 or 400 years—at least in the West—is utterly false. Elliott, along with DiAngelo, Hannah-Jones, Kendi, and the other practitioners of racecraft, erase the history of progress in order to delegitimize the American project. As Glenn Loury put it (I am paraphrasing), the historical revisionists mean to relegate civil war, abolition, and civil rights to footnotes in order to construct a grand narrative of 400 years of white supremacy and racial oppression that depicts the black victim as the pivot of historical turning. From this standpoint, nothing short of dismantling the republic can redeem such a world.
Things have changed. In the past, one could point to the oppression of the day. Today, the cries of oppression have little to justify them. We are a substantively just society in every area of social class. The panic over “microaggressions” tells us that. We have reached this stage in our development because of the Western ideals that guided the struggle of people. We reached these heights not by rejecting our values, but demanding that they be realized in practice. We’re here because our creed is righteous and our devotion to it adamant. We need to put the matter of race behind us and get to the real task at hand: poverty and class inequality.
In the following videos, Glenn Loury, economist as Brown University, and John McWhorter, linguist at Columbia University, show us how to think and talk about our history. They discuss the 1619 Project after receiving numerous emails from viewers of Loury’s vlog at Blogging Heads asking them to address the problem of its regressive and racialist narrative. I want to close with their wisdom.
freedom and reason 