Have you seen the meme putting MAGA hats on historic photographs of white men harassing black men sitting at segregated lunch counters? I provide an example below. With such memes, progressives smear tens of millions of white Americans who are not racist. Moreover, they disappear black Trump supporters, who number in the millions.
Social media meme circulating.
First, members of my family and a great many of my white friends are Trump supporters who move in fully racially-integrated occupational and social circles. They work and eat around black people. Their sons and daughters marry black people. They foster care for and adopt black children. They would never harass a black man eating at a lunch counter. They would share a cup of coffee with him. Or a beer. If they ever saw a black man being harassed, they would intervene. (See video below for an enlightened discussion on civil rights.)
Second, analyzing exit polling data from the 2016 presidential election, 13 percent of black Americans voted for Donald Trump. Racially disaggregating voter turnout from that election finds that the number of blacks who voted for Trump north of two million. And Trump looks to gain more black votes in 2020. Why? Historically low black unemployment, fastest wage gains among blacks in history, criminal justice reform, and immigration restrictions. Trump’s frank talk about the failure of progressives to properly govern black-majority neighborhoods probably has a lot to do with it, as well.
A lot of white progressives dismiss the black vote for Trump by chalking it up to false consciousness. Blacks can’t judge such matters for themselves really. Distrust of the people is deeply rooted in the technocratic attitude of progressive elites. The progressive has been known to call black conservatives “Uncle Toms.” Progressives reflect their candidate’s attitude in this regard. Remember when Biden said, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”? Yeah. He said that. He meant it, too. Progressives don’t even trust black people with navigating the voter verification process.
Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden tells Charlamange on The Breakfast Club that black people who do not vote for him are not really black.
This condescending attitude reflects the progressive worldview generally. Let’s put the left’s constant infantilization of blacks and other groups to one side. Identitarian politics for progressives isn’t so much about race or sex or sexual orientation as it is about partisan loyalties. Progressives want to see the first female president, but not if she is conservative; the identity of conservative women is suspect. They celebrate a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hailing her as a model for girls and young women, but an Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor.
One’s racial identity is suspect if one vote for Trump. Except if he is white. Then he’s acting on the reflexive white supremacy that the good white man recognizes in himself. To be fully black, woman, or gay, one has to subscribe to progressive doctrine and support the Democratic Party. Skin color comes with a politics. If you don’t see that, then you’re deluded or stupid.
People who think they had me all figured out are startled by my “change in views.” Much of this perception comes from young people who have been caught up in their entire adult lives in what they think is the left-style of thinking and, as such, thinking that should align with mine, which is openly and unapologetically Marxist. They hear me express an opinion, for example, on immigration, and they are disillusioned because I was expected, based on their understanding, to hold a different view—if I am who I claim to be. I am who I claim to be, so something is awry. But it’s not me. It’s them.
I try to avoid clichés, but, indeed, I did not leave the left, the left left me. Not the real left. That’s still there if you know where to look for it. I’m talking about the New Left. I cannot be a part of that mess. One can see how much the ground has shifted when one reflects upon the populist anti-corporatist/globalization protests at the turn of the century in comparison to the progressive protests of today, which in reality constitute a regressive mass act of violence bankrolled by global corporations. Both phenomena are self-described as “on the left.” Only one of them actually is.
When I share commentary on Facebook (my Facebook functions as a forward staging area for this blog) and say that in that commentary “they are making my argument,” I am not saying they are adopting my lines (although sometimes it is uncanny how similar the lines are). What I mean is that I am not alone when I make these arguments. I am trying to create mutual knowledge by letting friends know that they are not alone. I am not signing on to the entire agenda of whatever view I am sharing. I am sharing insights from various different perspectives.
Recently, I was listening to the populist right podcast War Room: Pandemic, and Curtis Ellis was down line (Steven Bannon was under arrest that morning, so he couldn’t make the program), making an argument using the same terms I have been using for years—corporatist, globalist, neoliberal, neoconservative, transnationalist, etc. But it was more than that. Ellis was advancing my analysis, which is a left-wing critique of corporate capitalism. And Ellis is American First! This happens routinely. Not just on War Room: Pandemic. Spiked is another program where my arguments routinely appear. Spiked is a left-libertarian online magazine in the spirit of classical Marxism.
I am not saying these folks are listening to me. Rather, I am remarking upon a current of thought that breaks down the left-right dichotomy and points instead to the real bifurcation points: populism-progressivism, democracy-technocracy, republicanism-corporatism, nationalism-globalism, liberalism-authoritarianism. I am pointing out how self-validating it is to know that you are not alone in thinking the things you think. And that is encouraging—even liberating. Independent confirmation of one’s views gives one confidence to share those views publicly. It creates community. In this case, it has the power to reconfigure popular power and struggle. Yet people will ask, “What are you now, a Bannonite fascist?” As if Bannon is actually a fascist. But, second, as if one cannot share insights from right-wing populism without being right-wing populist.
As a political sociologist, I find it fascinating how the analysis from the populist right is so Old Left, so historical materialist, so sociologically Millsian (I am here referring to C. Wright Mills, who published the landmark The Power Elite in 1956) even while railing against socialism. It’s as if the populist right is a network of alienated classical Marxists and left-libertarians. A “plain Marxist,” Mills called himself. That’s what Steve Bannon is when one gets beyond his Catholicism. Perhaps I should say this is Very Old Left. It’s just not Maoist. It gets past all this Leninist, Trotskyist, and Maoist nonsense.
Perhaps it’s their Christianism that gets in the way of rightwing populists knowing themselves. Steve Bannon openly proceeds dialectically—which is why his world historical analysis enjoys such a substantial degree of validity. It is so important for his audience to hear this, as it tears people away from the neoliberal-neoconservative perspectives that dominate establishment politics. At the same time, the religious beliefs of populists doesn’t cause them to try to cancel everybody with whom they disagree. That’s because they are small-“r” republicans. They remain substantially liberal. The New Left is anything but liberal. They are illiberal. Authoritarian. Moreover, the populist right is working class in the profound and organic way the New Left can’t be. Rightwing populism and New Left progressivism make a different choice of comrades: the former appreciates individuals independent of race and ethnicity; the latter puts race and ethnicity before people. On civil rights, the right and the left have swapped places. The recent Democratic and Republican conventions illustrate the flip. This is Trump’s Republican Party.
For those who are not experts in political economy and political sociology, how does one get to this place—or, for the self-conscious leftist, how does one get back to this place? My skill set advantages me in sorting through all this. What does a person do who does not have the luxury of knowing the currents they’re swimming in? Because of the way the establishment media, the administrative state, and the culture industry filter out information that does not align with the prevailing narrative, people must become aware of how widespread the alternative view is so they can know how to challenge the corporatist propaganda that misleads them.
By labeling populism as “rightwing” and “racist” propagandist keep folks who believe they are leftwing away from knowledge. Because very smart people on the right are not deranged by the Third Worldism and postmodernist framing of the New Left, they are often the best sources to turn to. At this moment in history, they see more clearly because; however much they remain deluded in other ways, they are not deluded in the same way the New Left is. The establishment means to keep it that way.
If I were interested in sticking with a brand, I might lie myself into New Left positions. I could be a fixture on the progressive circuit. I know the argot. I can make arguments. But the left today has become so absurd, such a useless source of knowledge, that it has become impossible to follow it into the vortex that promisingly threatens to swallow it. Frankly, I wish to see its demise. It’s a mess of woke jargon and the reified abstractions of moribund sociology. I am too much of a scientist to not see that. I think my age helps here. My thinking approach was forged before the mass epistemological deformation. But it’s also because being a Marxist is no more a brand than being a Darwinist.
So how does one get to a place of objectivity? Part of it is just realizing how deluded one becomes when sticking with a brand. But that can leave one feeling hopeless and alone. So one needs a positive plan of action. The best way to digest information in an objective fashion is to (a) identify the bias frame of the source consulted, extract the information, and reinstall it into a scientific framework, and that means avoiding confirmation bias (and this presupposes one has a scientific framework); (b) identify a group of super smart people right-of-center who still adhere to the values of humanism, liberalism, and secularism; and (c) find a constellation of podcasts that air different but high-quality opinions so you can escape your thought bubble.
For (b), here are a few suggestions: Heather Mac Donald, Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Lionel Shriver. Although I would not argue that he is necessarily right-of-center, Christopher Hitchens and John McWhorter are must-listens. For (c): The Glenn Show (Glenn Loury), War Room: Pandemic (Bannon), The Joe Rogan Experience, and, from Great Britain, Triggernometry, Spiked, and the Julia Hartley-Brewer. Do all that and take a test: If you can watch Tucker Carlson and grasp that he has a solid outlook on the world, you will know that you’re coming out of the delusions of New Left thinking. Don’t fear this. I’m a Marxist, and this has only strengthened my understanding of historical materialism. Indeed, I have gained an even deeper appreciation for Marx through this process of criticizing the deformations of Marxist thought.
Don’t trust the prevailing narrative, check things out, and report your findings irrespective of ideological expectation. That is my creed. It is bad form to take on faith something that either you or somebody else wants you to believe. The habit of taking on faith that which you or others want you to could mark you as an untrustworthy person. If you persist with faith-belief in the face of the facts, it suggests you cannot be reasoned with. This is particularly true when there is the possibility of falsifying that which you believe to be true.
Faith-taking in the face of facts is worse than faith-taking in the case of nonfalsifiable claims. I have sympathy for people who believe in God since there is no way to prove God’s nonexistence. I find the evidence convincing that humans created God, but what would count as definitive proof of something’s nonexistence? Of course, you risk believing in all sorts of things if you believe in that which cannot be supported with evidence. But sympathy is altogether misplaced when you believe in something demonstrably false.
I wish it didn’t matter that people continue believing in demonstrably false things. I would rather just pass by the fool on the hill. Who’s he hurting? But what if there are many fools all believing the same falsehood, and they come down from their hills? History is littered with corpses on their account.
The technocratic elite see the popular consensus expressed in democratic elections as routine endorsement of its policies. When the results run contrary to this purpose, the popular will is delegitimized. The people chose poorly, we are told. These are not referenda, after all. They are ritual acts of affirmation.
In 2016, we saw this in the Brexit vote and in the election of Donald Trump. The establishment successfully manufactured the perception that a vote for either indicated a reflex of reactionary stupidity. The Deplorables surprised them.
To meet the reflexive stupidity of the Deplorables, the Resistance was founded. Four years on, the Resistance has a chance to fix popular error. The polls indicate that destiny is on their side.
The United States is facing a situation in which those who claim to oppose corporate power, regime-change wars, and the vast prison-industrial complex are voting for a man who has for decades been at the forefront of pushing these very tendencies.
Globalist Joe Biden
The man the Resistance has or will vote for on Election Day is a career politician who represents for the elite a return to the neoliberal and neoconservative status quo, a globalist who has spent his entire life making sure the establishment knows that he is and will always be its man.
The Resistance is voting to topple a leader—a populist outsider with broad support among working class Americans—who has resisted globalization, ended foreign wars, and led on major criminal justice reform.
That the man the Resistance labors to carry to power has at his back the academic institutions, the corporate establishment, the administrative state, the propaganda apparatus, and the culture industry appears not to convey anything significant to the Resistance.
We are inundated with news stories of the rising SARS-2 cases in the United States and instructed by progressives and pundits to attribute the increase to the failure of the Trump administration to deal in an effective way with the pandemic. His Democratic opponent, former Vice-President and long-time Senator from Delaware Joe Biden, tells us that Trump’s lack of action puts Americans in harm’s way.
However, looking at Canada and major European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), one sees a drastic rise in SARS-2 cases in all of them (see charts below). It feels a bit silly to remind readers that Donald Trump is not the leader of any of these countries, but he’s not. Ask yourself: why is the media not reporting what’s happening in these other countries, all of which employed extensive lockdowns and enjoy comprehensive universal healthcare? Because the establishment agenda is to install globalist Joe Biden as the president of the United States. It’s the same reason they aren’t reporting on the evidence damning Biden as a corrupt politician.
The truth is that SARS-2 is a biological event. It manifests the same tendencies independent of the policies of the countries in which it appears—independent of the policies ostensibly meant to deal with contagion. It rises and falls on its own. It targets the same preexisting conditions. The average age of those die from or with SARS-2 is mid-80s. Lockdowns in free and open societies don’t work. Obviously. The more citizens of these countries have masked up, the more cases of infection there are. That’s not because masks spread the virus. No, it’s because there is no causal relation between the things these governments are doing and the natural history of SARS-2.
But this doesn’t mean that government policy doesn’t carry effects. We know that the downstream effects of shuttering society—the tens of thousands of deaths that will occur from undetected cancers, untreated conditions, drug addiction, suicides, and other acts of self and other harm—are the result of policy decisions. Pandemic preparation in the West never had societies locking down. The character of Western freedom ill-prepares people for social isolation. Tyranny imposed on a free people manifests in bizarre ways. Hysteria over systemic racism is a prime example.
We also know that SARS-2 originated in China. Whether naturally emergent, the result of a gain-of-function experiment accidentally released, or a bioweapon designed by the Chinese military, the Chinese communist state is ultimately responsible. Moreover, if we can believe the reporting from the CCP and WHO, China showed the world the efficacy of totalitarianism in controlling the spread of a virus domestically (see below chart), even while, at the same time, allowing the virus to escape China to infect the world. The corporate media is silent on that matter, as well (even while elites hold up China as a model of pandemic preparedness). To be sure, the devastating consequences of lockdowns are a self-inflicted wound that Western governments perpetrated on its own people. But without SARS-2 this would not have happened.
Finally, we know this, too. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked no different in terms of controlling the virus. The statistics would have been the same. Not unless a Clinton regime had transformed the United States into a totalitarian society by February 2020. I would like to believe the people would not have stood for such a thing. If I were a believer, I’d pray to God they’re not ready to stand for that in a Biden regime. Or a Kamala Harris regime.
One of the arguments progressives make in pushing their politics is environmental concern. They are excited when they hear presidential candidate Joe Biden and his sidekick Kamala Harris talk about ending fossil fuels. But progressives typically don’t think in terms of interconnections and they are generally ignorant of international political economy and the problem of uneven global development. (We see a similar myopia in the desire to shut down society over SARS-2, a demand that neglects all the downstream effects of shutdowns, such as the thousands of people who will die from cancer and other diseases, as well as from drug abuse and suicide.)
The United States does indeed produce a lot of energy from fossil fuels. We have achieved a substantial degree of energy independence on account of it. However, because of our high level of economic and technological development, our production and use of fossil fuels, thanks to, among other things, carbon capture and storage methods, is efficient and clean compared to that of China, India, Russia, and other economies. If we reduce production of fossil fuels in the United States, we not only give away our energy independence, but we will also come to rely on fossil fuels produced by other countries in the dirtiest way, thus drastically accelerating global climate change.
The truth is that the world economy depends fundamentally on fossil fuels. We cannot produce the energy we need to run the world using geo, hydro, solar, and wind. I am all for these other sources of energy, but we have to be honest about the situation. And while it is conceivable that we could replace fossil fuel with nuclear power, even if we could agree that nuclear comes with little risk (I seriously doubt folks can agree on that—I am not sure I could agree on that), we could not produce the number of reactors we need to reduce emissions to a level sufficient to stop the trend in global warming.
What progressives appear unable to grasp is that progress on the environment comes with technological advancement. We cannot have technological advancement without economic growth. We cannot have economic growth without sufficient sources of energy. We cannot have sufficient sources of energy without fossil fuels. This is the character of the treadmill of production for the foreseeable future. We have to grasp the structure of throughput and the dynamic interrelation of systems parts in developing sound environmental policy. Moreover, without economic development, we also cannot raise the standard of living for those whom progressives purport to speak.
Extinction Rebellion protests in London last year.
After a year of reflection, I now believe that the most immediate path through the climate crisis is the development of technological solutions to conservation and pollution. The United States can lead the way—but only if we have a country. Progressives have us giving up too much in the name of “social justice.” To be sure, much of the promotion of “clean coal” is greenwashing, as I have written and spoken about. I have worked very hard to debunk the claims of the antienvironmental countermovement. But I have come to realized that one of the greatest barriers to rational discussion on economy and environment is the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from climate change zealots, such as Extinction Rebellion. Unlike the panic over systemic racism, global climate change is real. But like systemic racism hysteria, climate apocalypticism is a disruptive and regressive force in modern society. All of these panics—and throw the SARS-2 panic in there—reflect a neurotic worldview that functions as a type of quasi-religious fundamentalism, a secular millennialism, if you will. We have to listen to more rational voices than these.
I have been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the current tendencies we are now experiencing in the West. I have been helped considerably by several prominent thinkers. Among them are Bruce Gilley, cancelled for defending colonialism, James Lindsay and his New Discourses resource and damning critique of social justice, Tom Holland’s thesis of the Great Awokening, Daniel McCarthy of Modern Age and his case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson and the problem with the progressive elites, Heather MacDonald and the diversity delusion, and Thomas Frank’s advocacy of populism. Although there are problems with their arguments, which I note in yesterday’s podcast (see below), their insights helped me make important connections.
These insights inform my historical materialism and political economy specialty. What I have come to see very clearly are two convergent developments that should trouble every freedom loving person. The first is the critical theory, neo-Maoist, postcolonial, postmodernist, race identitarian, Third Worldist tendency currently on the streets burning down America, manifest in progressive politics, and, in the academy, poisoning the minds of the youth of Western societies with a cracked theory of history and social arrangements. It is an utterly incoherent worldview, illiberal in attitude and totalitarian in character. The tendency directs activists and administrators to organize institutions around and assess and evaluate individual thought and behavior on the basis of racial identity.
The second development is the transnational corporate powers—in business, culture industry, media—weaponizing this tendency to delegitimize the Enlightenment and democratic republicanism and dismantle the international system to establish a global neofeudalist order with a new aristocracy ruling the masses. It is astonishing to me—an embarrassing for me because I did not immediately see it clearly myself—that academics have been so keen to recognize the problem of the corporate takeover of higher education but have not grasped the regressive character of the critical theory/postmodern tendency they still believe represents radicalism in colleges and universities, even k-12. This should have become obvious when administrators incorporated the tendency in advertising and marketing, curriculum, and in HR (diversity and inclusion) policies. As if corporations would promote anything truly subversive.
The truth is that the critical theory tendency undermines class consciousness. This is a New Left tendency—racialist, antihumanist, illiberal, and Islamist. It is radical in this sense: it is a radical departure from the Old Left politics that emphasize class, humanism, liberalism, and secularism. Why else would corporate elites, who stifled Old Left politics for more than a century, push the New Left tendency? Remember, progressivism is the ideology underpinning technocratic logic of corporate governance.
Who is the presidential candidate of the New Left tendency? It’s Joe Biden. Joe Biden was the United States Senator from Delaware for nearly forty years. The Biden campaign paints the candidate as “Joe from Scranton,” but before serving as Vice-President from 2009 to 2017, Biden was the Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009. Delaware is a unique state with its Court of Chancery. The General Corporation Law is the statute governing corporate law in the state. Due to the favorable legal environment, more than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States and more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state. Delaware has for decades been known at the premier corporate haven in America. From this perch, Biden has helped corporatists advance their globalist strategies. Perhaps no politicians has done more to hurt working families in America than Joe from Scranton. As Senator and Vice-President has promoted mass incarceration, global military action, regime change wars, and surveillance. That this is the man who progressives tell us we must vote for tells us a great deal about their politics.
The split is not between the New Left and corporate power. The arsonists and rioters on our streets are not in opposition to the corporate powers that fund them and push out their message. That’s a contradiction. Antiracism is not a movement. It is establishment politics. The bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese communist state and the state monopoly capitalism of the West intersect in the managed decline of the West. The bulwark against this monstrosity is the small “d” democratic and small “r” republican populist nationalist uprising. It is an uprising against neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and globalism. Perhaps the deaths of democracy, humanism, liberalism, and secularism are inevitable. But there is a force resisting transnational corporatism and it’s represented, with all its imperfections, by the Trump movement. You know it’s a movement because its opposition is the establishment.
The establishment media not reporting on the Hunter Biden story is big time gaslighting. The elite are forcing the people to choose between two narratives: (1) the establishment is covering for Joe Biden (an obvious truth they mean to sound crazy) and (2) there is nothing here, which is straight up a lie. The truth is that the laptop is real, every bit of it, and Joe Biden is eye-ball deep in epic corruption and totally unfit to president (as if that wasn’t obvious already). A massive fraud is being perpetrated on the American public. Biden is a traitor to the American republic.
Shame on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Especially Sanders. Sheepdog par excellence. These quislings portray themselves as super ethical and keen to smoke out corruption. Nonsense. They are enablers of the Democratic Party’s big lie. The Democratic Socialist of America is revealed as a complete deception. Cornel West, Chris Hedges—the whole lot of them are fake populists, faux-socialism at best haplessly working with the transnational fraction of world capitalist power to defeat the working class.
Folks need to move on from this Supreme Court business. The nation has its ninth justice. But before moving on, a reminder on hypocrisy and what lies behind it:
Let history record that it was the Democrats who insisted on hearing Merrick in an election year. Were all the arguments they made then—and they made them confidently and dramatically—made in bad faith? Probably. But let’s take Democrats at their word.
McConnell and Grassley, in that famous Washington Post op-ed, had every reason to believe that Hillary Clinton would be elected president in 2016. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent. Whatever their arguments were about hearing the voice of the people, MccConnell’s party held power in the Senate. (Republicans even held power in the House. It was a divided government between executive and legislative branch.)
Here’s what not being hypocritical would look like: If you say something in 2016, and you say it is on principle, then you have to say the same thing in 2020. It’s principle. It doesn’t change. In 2016, Democrat after Democrat insisted on hearing Merrick in an election year (watch above video). President Obama was a Democrat president. The Republican majority didn’t have to schedule a hearing or a vote for the nominee of a president of the other party. Elections have consequences. Power matters.
Trump ran on putting originalists on the Supreme Court. His party controls the Senate. They scheduled a hearing and a vote. Elections have consequences. Trump and Republicans followed through with their promise. Democrats are contradicting themselves on principle.
What is this about? Democrats aren’t really concerned about hypocrisy (they would have appointed a judge in an election year if Hillary Clinton had been president—this isn’t about principle). The noise they made was really about keeping the Supreme Court out of the hands of those who base interpretation of disputes the philosophy to which Amy Coney Barrett subscribes, namely originalism, which progressives equate to racism, sexism, and homophobia. (For them, our founding fathers were horrible people.)
Asked during the confirmation hearings about her method, Barrett said, “I interpret [the Constitution’s] text as text and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time. And it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
The term “originalism” emerged in the 1980s to capture the character of a judicial philosophy that holds that, in resolving legal disputes, the judge must do so in light of the Constitution’s text and the founders’ intentions. If progressives want to change the law, originalists suggest they do the hard work—the work assigned to the legislative branch, which represents the will of the people—of passing and repealing laws rather than depending on an activist judges to inject new meaning into the founding texts on the basis of their ideological views. Supreme Court justices aren’t elected by the people (heaven help us if they ever are). They are there to interpret law, policy, dispute, and judgment in light of the Constitution and other founding texts and other legislative texts and intentions. Just imagine activists judges on the right injecting their ideology into the law and you get the problem with judicial activism.
“Even though you didn’t give a direct answer I think your response did speak volumes,” Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii scolded Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. “Not once, but twice, you used the term sexual preference to describe those in the LGBTQ community. And let me make clear, sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term.”
Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono scolding Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett over her word choice
What was Hirono responding to? “I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said when asked about her stance on preserving protections for members of the LGBTQ community. Correct answer, right? Wrong. Lambda Legal tells us why:
IMPORTANT:
Barrett used "sexual preference" (not "sexual orientation") when discussing her views on marriage equality.
The correct term is sexual orientation. "Sexual preference" is a term often used by anti-LGBTQ activists to imply that sexual orientation is a choice. https://t.co/rT6g95gsG1
After being confronted by Hirono, Barrett apologized. “I certainly didn’t mean and would never mean to use a term that would cause any offense in the LGBTQ community,” she said.
Shortly afterward, John McCormack of the National Review asked an obvious question of Hirono: “Senator, last week at the hearing you mentioned that you thought it was ‘offensive and outdated’ when Amy Barrett used the [term] ‘sexual preference.’ It turns out that Joe Biden said it in May. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it in 2017. Some of your colleagues on the Judiciary Committee said it maybe in 2010, 2012. Do you stand by that criticism?”
Mazie Hirono: Well, of course.
McCormack: Do you think Joe Biden should apologize for saying that in May?
Hirono: Well, look, it’s a lesson learned for all of us. But when you’re going on the Supreme Court and you’ve been a judge, as one of my judge friends said, you should know what these words mean.
McCormack: Should Joe Biden apologize, too, like Amy Coney Barrett did?
Hirono: Joe Biden is not up for the Supreme Court.
McCormack: He’s up for the presidency. So, he shouldn’t apologize?
Hirono: People will decide.
McCormack: You don’t want to call on him to apologize?
Hirono: Oh, stop it. The world is in flames.
There are lots of problems with Hirono’s response. For one thing, telling another person how they are supposed to talk about complex and unsettled matters is arrogant and obnoxious. What does Hirono know about this? Somebody tells her something and she becomes a walking truth scold? Now she’s everybody’s mother? That’s the left these these days. The authoritarian impulse is off the hook with these people. They think they have the right to cancel, bully, hector, and shame others into their ideological frame.
But at its core, the argument misunderstands the idea of preferences at a fundamental level. It is to admit to a profound ignorance of everything we know about the nature of human character to suggest that preference indicates choice. The truth is, we don’t know very much about how people acquire references.
As a professional sociologist, I may have something to contribute here. Those of us who study these things, if we’re honest, admit we really don’t why human beings prefer one thing over another. We know that preferences may persist or vary over time and place. Preference is frequently contextual. It can be shaped by mood. Some days, a person prefers one thing over another thing. On other days, that same person prefers the other thing. Humans navigate their lives via an often ever changing constellation of preferences. All this is observable. How humans come to have preferences? That’s a hard problem. But I do know this: Lambda Legal doesn’t have the answer to this question.
Choices are something different. Preferences shape our choices. But they do not always determine them. We often choose what we do not prefer.
I am not so arrogant as to presume to know why I have the preferences I have. Humans prefer all sorts of things and they have no idea why they prefer them. We didn’t choose them. We cannot presume that being more attracted to blue eyes, blonde hair, and fair skin is genetic. That would presume that people are born with racial preferences. I don’t think that’s true. Maybe it is. I don’t know. Neither does Senator Hirono. Or Lambda Legal. Or GLAAD. At the same time, attraction is not a choice. A person does not choose to be attracted to one thing rather than another. They discover they are. A person makes them feel a certain way. To be sure, they can catalog the characteristics that makes them feel that way, but they cannot explain why those characteristics work for them and others don’t. Or why they persist. Or why they change. It mysterious. And that’s okay.
Because a person doesn’t know why he prefers this over that—or that over this on Tuesdays—does not mean the preferences are innate or that he chooses them. That is a false dichotomy. Genes may be involved. Hormones may be involved. They may not be. If genes or hormones are involved, they may not be all that is involved. Very likely they aren’t all that is involved. Socialization is a powerful factor in shaping preferences.
The argument Hirono is making is an extreme oversimplification of the human conditions that presumes that an open matter is a settled one. The Senator is operating within a frame that holds that something like sexual preference is either totally determined or must be a matter of free will. Determined by what? Is this a genetic model? A behavioral model? Does it matter?
A person may believe that homosexuality is a choice. But to say it is a preference is not to say that it is a choice. It doesn’t even suggest it. Lambda Legal wants to hector people into using words it prefers. It’s on a power trip. It’s the same power trip that lies behind the habit of presuming to speak for others or demanding utterances avoid offending abstract people. But Lambda Legal is wrong. To say something is a preference implies nothing about the origins of the preference. The way those who work in that office hear things does not determine the truth of the things they hear. They aren’t in charge of the meaning of words. Or their usages.
If somebody asks me, “Why do you prefer this?” perhaps the most honest answer I can give is to say, “I don’t know. I just do.” And that should be good enough. It’s not like I did something wrong. I don’t have to explain myself. I’m not a bad person. As long as what I prefer does not hurt anybody else, then it’s an entirely acceptable way of being and behaving.
We really don’t have to accept a master explanation about the constellation of preferences that informs our choices. Not from Mazie Hirono, Lambda Legal, or anybody else. For sure Senator Hirono is unqualified to lecture anybody on such matters. Judge Barrett should not have apologized. Never participate in another person’s effort to humiliate you—or to force into you their newspeak.
Finally, to Hirono’s remark about the state of the world. This is typical of the progressive movement. Barack Obama says Joe Biden has the character to lead us through these dark times and heal us. Child oracle Greta Thunberg, the movement’s climate scold, warns us that she is watching us. Hirono says the world is in flames. What does such apocalyptic rhetoric signal? It’s not obvious?
Of all the reasons to vote against Joe Biden (and there are plenty), the quasi-religious zealotry of the progressive movement is arguably the main one. The faux-moral language signals the core belief of the technocracy: that the elite are called by providence to treat a disease called the common man. Senator Hirono sees Judge Barrett, because Barrett is a conservative, as one among the deplorables. Hirono could not miss an opportunity to lord over Barrett self-assigned moral superiority.
I am very impressed by how intentional this SARS-2 virus is. It has clearly made a choice of comrades and that choice is the same choice progressives make: the downtrodden and oppressed and their allies. There is no uptick in SARS-2 cases associated with the Black Lives Matter protests, the women’s marches, etc. The high priests of the establishment make this very clear. The awokened are magically spared. It’s like the lamb’s blood mark on the doors of Jewish slaves that deterred the creeping death. But the virus follows Trump rallies around the country infecting thousands. Like frogs and locusts pestering Pharaoh. Have you noticed how disproportionately white Trump rallies are? You know, the descendants of the slave masters? The deplorables. They had it coming. This is a virus with a definite tribal preference. Black people and their allies? Off limits. White conservatives? Death to their crippled and elderly. As an old and often tongue-tied man told us, if it wasn’t for Trump, a multitude of people would still be alive today. As legend has it, Moses wasn’t a gifted speaker, either.
I have been following this story and blogged about immigration several times (I provide links to some of those blogs in the present blog). I have been critical of some of Trump’s politics with respect to the immigration question (see, for example, Immigration and Nationalisms). At the same time, I advocate immigration restrictions and do so because my pro-worker politics demand this of me (I oppose globalization generally). Whatever we think about open borders or immigration restrictions, there’s something the media isn’t telling you about the more than five hundred children who have not been reunited with their parents: many of the parents don’t desire reunification; some even actively resist it. Truth can often sound cold, so I apologize for having to tell you this, but truth is more important than sparing your feelings. This is not a white lie situation.
Before getting to the dirty truth, I need to remind readers that a large proportion of the alleged family units coming across the border are not actual families. Early on in the migrant crisis, a pilot DNA testing program found that at least around one third of alleged families crossing the borders were not actual families; the children were not related to the presumed parents (The Interstate System and the Experience of Safe, Orderly Immigration). Here’s the way it works: either smugglers are paid to deliver children across the border, or economic migrants use children to manufacture the illusion of a family to create sympathy at the border. In the latter case, some of the actual parents sometimes compensated, but others are kidnapped. (The Situation at the Border and How to Respond to it.) President Trump was accurate when he said, “Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and it’s easy to use them to get into our country.”
But there are actual families crossing the border and who are illegally residing in the United States, and the United States has practiced family separation for many years. The practice was common during the Obama-Biden administration (Law Enforcement and Family Separation). With the respect to the children discussed during the final president debate, authorities often do locate their parents. In many cases, families have been reunited. The government is pursuing family reunification. There is an international effort to find families and reunite them. The search includes toll-free hotlines and teams working in the United States, Mexico, and the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. For those who have not yet been reunited, or during the process of facilitating reunification, investigators set up videos calls between the parents and the children. This is all documented. The suggestion that the Trump Administration is not trying to reunite families is untrue. Most families have been reunified.
One of several family reunifications
Progress in family reunification is the good news. Here’s the bad news: In many cases, parents don’t want to be reunited with their children. Many of these parents are poor and cannot afford their children. I realize it is hard for progressives to believe that there are parents in the world who don’t want their children, who see them as a burden to be pawned off on somebody else, but there are. Philippe Ariès’s landmark Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, wherein he develops a thesis commonly known as “the discovery of childhood,” documents a long and uncomfortable history of child abandonment and infanticide that has only recently come to offend liberal sensibilities. For many throughout the world, these sensibilities are still being discovered. Other parents make the decision to leave their children for what they perceive is in the best interests of the children. As Tucker Carlson reported tonight, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson says that in one lawsuit currently pending, the plaintiffs have been able to contact the parents of 485 children separated at the border and yet “they’ve yet to identify a single family that wants their child reunited with them in their country of origin.”
Often the parents chose to leave the country without their children. “Parents that did return home without their child did so after being provided an opportunity to have that child accompany them on the way home,” said Matthew Albence, who heads US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s removal operations. The unscrupulous are keenly aware of these sensibilities. Human traffickers and economic migrants exploit the humanitarian sensibilities of progressives in America to more successfully move to and abandon children in the United States. They are encouraged to do this by the network that organizes illegal immigration. While some parents plan to have their children live in the United States for the good of the children, who then become wards of the state. Many children are just pawns in grander criminal schemes.
Progressives are naive about the people crossing the border (PBS and Immigration Apologetics). It’s not just the running of contraband; human trafficking and child exploitation are huge problems. Economic migrants are brought across the border to work for criminal corporations throughout the United States. (What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?Immigration, Rule of Law, and the Peril of Ideology). To my southern comrades, have you ever wondered why, when you were growing up, black folks used to work in specific occupations of the split labor market, but that work is now being performed by Hispanic workers? Black people didn’t leave the South en masse. They still live in your towns and cities. In fact, during your lifetimes black Americans have been returning to the South because of the conditions in midwestern and northeastern urban centers. The reality is that thousands of black Americans have been disemployed by international migration, forced into idleness and poverty. It is well understood how devastating immigration has been for the black community. There is an irony here. Progressives talk about systemic racism. Maybe they should take a look at how their leaders have facilitated the replacement of black workers in key sectors by workers from Mexico and Central America.
The distortions, exaggerations, and lies progressives tell us about immigration has a purpose beyond smearing conservatives. It’s propaganda designed to keep open the flow of economic migrants coming to the United States so they can be exploited (a) for cheap labor; (b) to drive down the wage floor for all workers; and (c) to disrupt worker consciousness and disorganize class politics. With respect to (c) last piece, take a look at what happened to private sector union density over the last sixty or so years (The Immigration Situation). Multiculturalism is the ideological ruse covering the corporate economic strategy progressives advance.
Biden said of Trump during the debate, “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire. Every single one. He started off his campaign coming down the escalator saying he’s gonna get rid of those Mexican rapists. He’s banned Muslims because they’re Muslims. He has moved around and made everything worse across the board. He says to them about the ‘Poor Boys’ [sic], last time we were on stage here. He said, ‘I told him to stand down and stand ready’. Come on. This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a fog horn.” Leave aside that Trump’s remark about Mexican rapists and the ban on people from selected Muslim-majority countries are not examples of racism, or that the Proud Boys are not a racist organization (Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism), once you understand the interests Democrats represent, their antiracism is exposed as pro-corporate propaganda that harms the working class, especially the most vulnerable members of our society, citizens who are disproportionally black and brown.
Finally, I hope that every family who desires to be unified with their children can be found and those families reunited. If this happened to my family, I would move heaven and earth to find my children.
“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society. I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”
This is Joe Biden from the US Senate floor in 1993 speaking about “predators on our streets” who he specifically identifies as “young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally have not been socialized.” “We have no choice but to take them out of society,” Biden says in his fiery speech. See “Biden in 1993 speech pushing crime bill warned of ‘predators on our streets’ who were ‘beyond the pale’” (CNN).
Biden’s Senate speech was in the service of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a catalog of draconian laws and policies he played a major role in formulating. In fact, he wrote the damn thing. It contained, among other things, the “three strikes” formulation that disproportionately impacted black people, driving mass incarceration in the following years—all this at the same time he was scheming with transnational corporations to put American workers out of work and lower their standards of living, policies that disproportionately affected black people.
We all know who Biden was talking about. He was talking about young black men, the same population of young Americans Hillary Clinton described as “superpredators” in a 1996 speech in New Hampshire in support of the 1994 crime bill that her husband, Bill Clinton, signed in to law. Hillary Clinton said this of black youth: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy.” She said that before we “talk about why they ended up that way,” “we have to bring them to heel.” This was all part of the progressive Democrat “get tough on crime” push. Here’s the speech:
Contrast the Biden-Clinton crime bill with the First Step Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018. The First Step Act eliminates the “three strikes” life sentencing provision, and expands judges’ discretion in sentencing of non-violent crimes, among other log-overdue reforms. According to the White House, the First Step Act helps inmates return to society by expanding access to rehabilitative programs. These programs leverage innovative life-course within-subject research to assess the needs and address the risks of prisoners to promote rehabilitation. Specific reforms include expanding Pell Grants to provide education and training to inmates prior to release and the “Ready to Work Initiative” to help connect employers with former prisoners and expand employment opportunities.
Trump shakes hands with Alveda King during signing ceremony for the First Step Act, White House, December 21, 2018 (Source)
We know from the research that jobs are the single most important intervention in reducing recidivism. It was the neoliberal policies of the Democratic Party that threw American workers into competition with foreign workers both at home and abroad. Under Democrats going back to the 1960s, the nation saw black unemployment rise to two and three times the rate of that for whites. The black community are particularly hard hit by globalization.
Prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, Trump’s economic nationalism saw the lowest unemployment rates for black Americans in several decades, lifting millions of black families out of poverty. Combined with criminal justice reform, the policies of economic nationalism, by ameliorating criminogenic conditions, promise to sharply reduce crime and violence in the future. Indeed, before the emergence of militant Black Lives Matter movement and the progressive push for depolicing, violent crime was down. All crime, in fact declined under Trump. Since violent crime drives incarceration, progress on this front portends an even sharper reduction in prison populations going forward, building on the already sharply downward trajectory of the last few years.
You may not like Donald Trump’s house style, but we cannot go back to the failed policies of neoliberalism.
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freedom and reason 