I have published papers on lynching, so this subject is close to me. I also know how to work from a societal reaction perspective where regular events become defined differently based on the greater context in which they appear. Ideology and worldview can dramatically change the meaning of events.
I want to put in a word of caution concerning what I see as an emerging moral panic, which is perhaps understandable, but no less troubling. The risk is that public pressure could compel authorities to define things differently than they know them to be thus making the imagined appear real. Such acts of reifications will likely function to perpetuate a false narrative.
The memes circling around social media about five black men found hanging from trees has all the marks of a moral panic. Such memes conjure images of lynchings and, in the present context, are sure to heighten racial suspicions and animosities.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told Fox 26 Houston that she “believes there could be more to the story after an eerie pattern of recent suicides where black men were found hanging from trees.” What pattern? Calls to suicide hotlines skyrocketed during COVID-19. The hanging occurred in different cities. There’s security footage. No foul play is suspected. “People are on edge,” Jackson continued “They are nervous. This is a troubling, a challenging time for us. It is shocking in our community, and no death in that form should go uninvestigated. No death should go uninvestigated.
This is reckless rhetoric on Lee’s part. She is the one ramping up fear. First, the number is erroneous. Three black men, two found to have hanged themselves and another under investigation (no foul play suspected) is not five black men. Second, investigators see far more suicides than they see murders. How many more? Three times more. Investigators can tell the difference. Based on all the evidence we have at this point, the memes are inflammatory and irresponsible.
“We’re talking about multiple people hanging from trees across America in the middle of a race war that’s going,” said resident Anthony Scott, according to the station. “With everything that’s been transpiring, with all of the hangings that have been taking place within the last two weeks, why wouldn’t you automatically assume foul play?” Because there is no reason, too?
Suicide is common—even using the method of suicide we see in these cases. I’m not sure whether people know this, but more than 130 individuals kill themselves every day in America. Stop and reflect on that. In 2018, more than 48 thousand people killed themselves. In contrast, there were around 16 thousand homicides in 2018. Suicide by hanging is not unusual. In fact, hanging is the preferred method of suicide after firearms. Where people hang themselves depends. Some hang themselves in closets. Some in basements. Others from trees. Hanging oneself from a tree is rarer than other locations, but it happens. Whites are also found having hanged themselves from trees, too.
We are going through a period sociologist Émile Durkheim would describe as anomic, a period where rapid change upsets the normative structure. This leads to a profound confusion in which some individuals find death preferable to living. In fact, suicides have been rising over the last two decades.
The myth of a racist America shapes perception. We see this in the fact that a large proportion of Americans believe police officers murder black men as a higher rate than they murder white men. This isn’t true, but because of the myth, a false perception perpetuates itself on the basis of selected and misperceived facts. The false perception is even causing people to call for dismantling law enforcement, which will make their communities even more dangerous. It causes them to focus on the bigger threats to black lives. Indeed, suicide is a threat to black lives.
Finally, as a conceptual and historical manner, lynchings are public events. (See Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide, Journal of Black Studies; Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control, Crime, Law, & Social Change; see the blog entry Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.) Victims of lynchings can be of any race. Lynchings are not reducible to hangings. In lynchings, the victim or victims die surrounded by a mob. In the case of racist lynchings, the victims are typically beaten, tortured, and then killed, with body parts taken as souvenirs. If the victims in these cases were victims of lynching, there would likely be a lot of evidence for it.
I recognize the psychological need to deny that a loved one did not commit suicide. Suicide still comes with a stigma. It especially tempting to suspect foul play the victim showed no suicidal tendencies. But the truth is that a lot people who kill themselves do not show suicidal tendencies. Suicide is sometimes expected. Other times, it comes as a complete surprise. It may be that one or more of these was a racially-motivated killing. These do happen. But the moral panic is unwarranted.
Update (June 18, 2020):
More signs of moral panic grow. According to several news agencies, authorities in Oakland, California, are going forward with a hate crime investigation despite the fact that several alleged “nooses” found in a park turned out to be foot swings, according to the black man who says he put them there. Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wednesday that the intentions “don’t matter” in light of the current racial climate.
Exercise swings in a park in Oakland, California, bizarrely mistaken for “nooses.”
“We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” the mayor said during a press conference. “The intentions do not matter, because the harm is real. They will matter with regard to whether or not this is, in fact, charged as a hate crime, but they do not matter about whether or not we should tolerate symbols of hate and violence and torture in our public spaces.”
No, Mayor Schaaf, intentions do matter. They were for exercising. There is no harm—unless somebody hurts themselves using them while working out. If the mayor interpret everything that looks sort of noose-like as a racist system I would suggest psychological counseling. Because that is crazy.
But the comment, “We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” is emblematic of a moral panic. Makeshift hoops for exercising, plainly not hate crimes, are seen as hate crimes because mass hysteria causes people to see things not for what they are but for what they expect—or want—them to be.
Update (June 24, 2020):
Bubba Wallace, the only black driver racing full-time in NASCAR, was told that he the target of a hate crime when a noose was found hanging in his garage. There was a massive public display of support by other drivers and fans ahead of the Geico 500. “I’m enraged by the act of someone placing a noose in the garage stall of my race team,” Richard Petty said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place in our sport or our society for racism. This filthy act serves as a reminder of how far we still have to go to eradicate racial prejudice and it galvanizes my resolve to use the resources of Richard Petty Motorsports to create change.”
Today, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and the FBI said in a joint statement that the noose had been in Wallace’s garage stall since the October race at Talladega in 2019. It was a garage stall rope handle. (Remember Jussie Smollett? See Hate Crimes, Hoaxes, and Identity Politics.)
DiAngelo claims that racism is the status quo in the United States. Speaking for herself, she says that “it is comfortable for me, as a white person, to live in a racist society.” That’s why white people don’t see it, she contends. She wants to, in Shapiro’s words, “sustain the momentum of these protests” by making it (again, in Shapiro’s words), “uncomfortable for white people to continue to benefit from racist systems.”
Let her speak for herself. “We’ve got to start making it uncomfortable and figuring out what supports we’re going to put in place to help us continue to be uncomfortable,” DiAngelo says. “Because the forces of comfort are quite seductive.”
Exactly. The twenty-five million white Americans who live in poverty, and tens of millions more working class people at its margins struggling daily to make ends meet, are seduced by their comfort. It sounds like DiAngel’s comfortable existence is being mapped onto all whites, doesn’t it?
Who does she think she is? Not a nice white person, she will have you know. “Nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist,” DiAngelo says, “We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.”
Get that, white people? You are a monolithic group, all enjoying comfort, and guilty of racism. DiAngelo is racist, too, but at least she’s trying. What are you doing?
According to DiAngelo, “Racism is what happens when you back one group’s racial bias with legal authority and institutional control.” Like the apartheid system in South Africa or Jim Crow in the United States South.
As I have reported on Freedom and Reason—what I thought was old news, but apparently not—the United States dismantled its system of apartheid more than half a century ago.
Undeterred by this fact, DiAngelo says, “When you back one group’s collective bias with that kind of power, it is transformed into a far-reaching system. It becomes the default. It’s automatic. It’s not dependent on your agreement or belief or approval.”
What collective bias? Backed by what power?
Plainly these claims are false. So why is DiAngelo so popular? Why is a person with a cracked theory of the United States being interviewed with such a degree of unconditional positive regard? It’s almost as if the bourgeoisie is distracting the working class by sowing racial division. Why would it want to do that?
DiAngelo says that black people have an understanding of racism that we, as white people, can never understand. Yet she presumes to speak for black people. And for white people.
There are lot of DiAngelos out there. Tim Wise hops in like an unwelcome toad in your potato salad. The white progressives on my Facebook newsfeed. The white progressives on corporate media. The white progressives in the administration and humanities and social science departments at our nation’s universities.
“Racism is the foundation of the society we are in,” DiAngelo says. “And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist.”
Let’s not mince words. The slogans DiAngelo and her ilk are rehearsing are more than bullshit. They’re racist. If you buy into this argument, then you are buying into racism.
This is what racism is apart from a pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority or institutional structures that systemically privilege some over others on the basis of race: supposing that certain attitudes and actions are intrinsic to all individuals abstractly grouped by skin color and holding all of them responsible for the actions of a few.
To say that all white people are complicit in racism—especially white people who do not subscribe to DiAngel’s cracked theory about white fragility—is a racist smear. It’s like saying that all blacks are violent criminals because some blacks are violent criminals. Its like saying that all blacks are complicit in violent crime even when they are not complicit in violent crime.
DiAngel’s claims are not true. America is not a racist society. America is a country that overcame racism. In a long Civil War, white people killed other white people to win freedom for black people. Americans amended their Constitution to forbid chattel slavery, a system of involuntary servitude based on race. Americans passed a historic law—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—to end segregation in public institutions and places of public accommodations. Americans instituted a comprehensive program of reparations in the wake of that law. Today, black people move in all spaces of American society. They are in academia, business, entertainment, government, and sports.
Robin DiAngelo is a purveyor of racism. She is the worst of the worst. Okay, maybe the loathsome Tim Wise is worse. But DiAngelo is the current hack cult leader. She is the Richard Spencer of the left (see What racists and anti-racists have in common, at Spiked).
That the media has taken up the line of race identitarianism announces an agenda at work. What is it? It’s simple, really. The cultural managers in academia and in mainstream media perpetuate the myth of racism to keep working people from thinking and talking about what really matters: CLASS. If it’s not intentional, it’s functional. It’s a tried-and-true strategy of divide and rule.
The ruling class has used racism to divide the people for centuries. Racism was invented to fracture the proletariat. It will always serve that purpose. Its new form exploits the narcissist desire of progressives to appear virtuous. The only way racism doesn’t fracture the working class is if we reject it. Therefore, we must reject race merchants like Robin DiAngelo, Al Sharpton, and Nancy Pelosi.
And we need to reject it now. When I wrote a moment ago that America is not a racist country, I meant that it is not right now a racist country. But if we allow DiAngelo and her crowd and their hysterical ideas to worm their way more deeply into our culture and society, it will be.
Want an concrete example of the agenda? The matter with which progressives are now most obsessed is demonstrably false—the claim that lethal officer-civilian encounters are systemically racist. The science shows that, not only are blacks not disproportionately killed by the police, but that, controlling for crime and context, it’s whites who are disproportionately killed by the police. But truth doesn’t matter in the postmodern multiverse.
#BlackLivesMatter rests on a false premise. The elite know it. They’re neither ignorant or stupid. They push the false narrative systemic racism—what Kwame Ture, aka Stokley Carmichael, notorious opponent of nonviolence and racial integration, called “institutional racism”—to confuse the people about the real situation facing them: global corporatism and the neoliberal reorganization of social life.
The establishment is dividing America by race to keep America from democracy. Don’t let them.
Troy L. Smith’s op-ed, Stop using ‘black-on-black’ crime to deflect away from police brutality, continues the irresponsible practice of rationalizing the problem of black-on-black crime. “If they cared, they’d be asking about crime within the African American community year-round,” Smith writes.
Houston officers pay their respects to George Floyd at a mural in his hometown
Right off the bat, I have to confess to, in part, making a version of Smith’s argument. In 2016, in the pages of TruthOut, I write, “Decrying Black-on-Black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.” In blogs entries since I have walked back those sentences (Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect, The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter, Death by Cop Redux). Why? Because the science and moral imperative compelled me to.
Now I talk about the high levels of crime and violence in black-majority neighborhoods year-around. A lot of people do. Not because we want blacks to look bad. Because we care. Moreover, I am a professional criminologist. It’s my job to care. I have an obligation to strive to be right about this (and every) issue. You know who doesn’t care? The media doesn’t care. Those who want to abolish the police don’t care. We must ask ourselves, Why do those folks only care about black bodies when the killer is a cop? It’s not entirely beside the point.
Smith writes, “When an opponent of Black Lives Matters talks about ‘blacks killing blacks’ it’s almost always to deflect attention away from police brutality.” What is the evidence for this claim? Back in 2016, I wrote that the problem of black-on-black crime was cliché. I never meant to downplay the problem. I was focused on critiquing Heather Mac Donald’s thesis, which I now recognize as not only correct, but the definitive position on the subject. Smith just said he expected that, if we cared, we’d be asking about year-around. Which is it? That’s the dilemma that moved me.
Smith’s essay is chockfull of hyperbolic claims. “When someone commits an act of terrorism against in the United States, which rightfully leads to anger and sadness,” he writes, “no one asks, ‘Well what about how many Americans kill other Americans each year?’” But I hear that all the time. When I write about Islamic terrorism (which has, for the time being at least, subsided), people are quick to scold me with numbers showing that death toll from terrorism is minuscule compared to those who are killed every year by homicide in America by Americans—especially if the perpetrators are white.
“But, by all means, let’s talk about ‘black on black crime,’” Smith continues. “You’ve probably heard a statistic like this before—The majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. That’s true, but also misleading. The overwhelming majority of white murder victims each year are killed by white assailants. So, when’s the last time you heard the term ‘white on white crime’?” Every time there is a serial killer on the loose. Every time there is a school shooting. Every time there is a mass murder. Then, even though whites are not proportionately more like to be the perpetrator in mass murder, the corporate media and social media is overflowing with op-eds and memes blaming white men for murder and wondering why we don’t call them terrorists (in fact, we do). (See Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong…and Racist.)
“White supremacists have attributed the fact that crime rates are higher among African Americans than whites to people of color being biologically more prone to violence. In reality, crime is directly linked more to poverty than race or any other factor.” This is a straw man. For sure, the biology thing is nonsense. Race is not a biological thing. It’s a social construct. But the poverty argument won’t work. There are three times more whites who live in poverty than there are blacks. Yet blacks are responsible for more than half of all homicides. What is more, blacks have been a lot poorer in the past—back when rates of black-on-black homicide were a lot lower.
Scroll back to the previous paragraph in Smith’s op-ed. Note that the character of intraracial crime is thrown out there without noting that less than 6 percent of the population is responsible for more than half of all murders in America. They are black men. That crime is intraracial in a de facto segregated society is not unexpected. That more than half of murders are committed by a small percentage of the population is. The homicide victimization rate for blacks is six times higher than for whites. Moreover, the intraracial character of the violence is greater than it is for whites.
Smith writes, “African Americans are two and half times more likely than whites to be killed by law enforcement.” This is true. But putting a statistic out there without explanation suggests a bad inference (I made this error in my 2016 TruthOut piece). Consider an analogy. Men are more likely to be killed by the police than women. Why? Because men are overrepresented in those serious criminal activities that are most likely to result in lethal officer-civilian interactions. Likewise, blacks are overrepresented in those serious criminal activities that are most likely to result in lethal officer-civilian interactions. Presenting this statistic without context lies at the heart of the false narrative that propels Black Lives Matter.
“When you step outside every day knowing you’re twice as likely to be killed by someone sworn to protect you just because of the color of your skin,” writes Smith, “you’re dealing with a different type of fear.” But that’s not how it goes down. You’re not very likely to be killed by the police by merely stepping outside your house. That almost never happens. Despite what the BLM rhetoric makes sound like, white police officers are not roaming the streets randomly targeting black men. However, one sharply increases his chances of being killed by the police (black or white) when he engages in serious criminal conduct. Especially if he’s armed. And if he threatens the police, his chances of being killed increase exponentially. A police officer, like every other person, has a right to defend himself from death or injury. And it’s not as if he is putting himself in harms way because he wants to. It’s his job to apprehend violent criminals. Society puts him in that position. Society needs him in that position.
The bottom line is, if Black Lives Matter wants to reduce the risk of black people being killed by police, beyond the common sense reforms that research and human decency suggest, then its leaders and members need to join with those seeking to reduce violence criminal offending in all our communities. Leftwing activists must stop apologizing for and rationalizing crime and violence and deal rationally with this issue. Smith’s op-ed doesn’t do that. On the contrary. It’s his op-ed that’s an exercise in diversion from the more serious problem of black-on-black homicide by reinforcing a false narrative about the racial disparity in police shootings.
If we care, we shouldn’t let another day go by without our leaders addressing the fact that black-majority neighborhoods are plagued by rampant crime and violence. Not only do black men murder more than any other race, black men are the victims of murder more than any other race. Don’t those victims matter? We should be talking about this year-around.
I understand why progressives want to distract others about this matter. The most dangerous places in America are our inner cities. They are mostly run by progressives Democrats. Progressive urban policy has failed city dwellers. I also understand why somebody would find the levels of crime and violence in these communities embarrassing. Nobody want’s their communities to look bad. I understand why it feels like victim blaming to talk about inner-city crime (in the long run, William Ryan’s 1976 Blaming the Victim probably did more harm than good). But we don’t save lives by denying and downplaying the significance of crime and violence. I refuse to do that anymore.
The article, “Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter,” published in The New York Times (June 10, 2020), written by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley, takes up the complaint that there is not enough diversity in the discipline of economics. The complaint here is part of a larger discourse on the importance of diversity in deepening knowledge.
The occasion that draws the attention of The New York Times to this subject is a tweet by the editor of The Journal of Political Economy, a top academic journal, University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig (a German national), in which he criticizes Black Lives Matters protesters as “flat earthers” for wanting to defund the police. Predictably, there are calls for Uhlig to resign his editorship.
Chicago economist Harald Uhlig under fire for criticizing the Defund the Police movement
The NYTimes article begins: “The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.”
The writers presume a cause they do not demonstrate—or at least fail to challenge. The constant assuming as given “systemic discrimination against black Americans,” or systemic racism (or institutional racism), lends the protests—even the riots—an undeserved legitimacy. The words “alleged,” “perceived,” or “supposed” would be very useful here.
On the specific matter of lethal officer-civilian interactions, which is the inspiration of this article, the evidence does not support the BLM claim. Relative to population, blacks are more likely to be killed by a cop than whites, but disparity does not necessarily indicate inequity. There could be reasons other than racism that explain the disparity. In fact, there are. Research of the claim finds that black overrepresentation in serious crime explains racial disparities in lethal office-civilian interactions.
The article ignores those studies and instead uses White House National Economic Council Larry Kudlow as an example of the problem the article presumes. Kudlow has told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the US.” For the reporters, Kudlow’s answer exposes a discipline that “remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues.” A full-scale shift, it seems, is what the writers desire. The suggestion is the Kudlow is racist by expressing a belief that accords with evidence. That this is an indirect dig at Trump should be obvious.
The reporters identify two problems: (1) the field is discriminatory towards blacks, and by this they mean that it is not racially diverse enough and doesn’t promote or publish enough black scholarship, and (2) many economists refuse to acknowledge discrimination in country at large. I understand this last problem to mean that there are economists who find no empirical support for the claim that systemic racism lies at the center of the difficulties some black people experience and that not going beyond the data to toe an ideological line is a problem. The way the matter is put suggests that a correct ideological conclusion is more desirable than findings reached with science.
“As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days,” Casselman and Tankersley write, “a conversation has erupted—often led by black economists—over how the lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas.”
The idea that having a diverse field in a discipline increases the power and scope of scientific endeavor is identitarian. It is the mark of postmodernist corruption of scientific epistemology. This is the notion of the “epistemic privilege” of identity, namely that a person of one race can produce greater truths than a person of another race because of the former can see things by virtue of his identity, presumed as monolithic, while the latter is unable to see things because of his.
We hear this in the form of the throat clearing exercise: “Speaking as a black woman….” Imagine if I, a white man, cleared my throat with, “Speaking as a white man….” Who besides a white supremacist would find that addition to the point I am about to make as anything more than asserting a racial (and sexual) privilege?
How do phenotypic characteristics produce “ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas”? How does being a member of a particular race help a person, as Howard Spriggs, an economist at Howard University, suggests, “to reflect and rethink how we study disparities”? Are white economist lacking a gene for reflecting and rethinking?
Spriggs, an accomplished black man, also served in the Obama Administration. I raise the matter of Spriggs’ race because systemic racism doesn’t seem to have hindered him. Just like it doesn’t seem to have hindered Glenn Lowry, economics professor at Brown, also a black man, who sharply disagrees with the identitarianism expressed by academics like Spriggs. (Why wasn’t Lowry interviewed for this story?)
Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard, who found no anti-black bias in police shootings, did not come to that conclusion in spite of his blackness. (Why wasn’t Fryer interviewed for this story?) Perhaps not incidentally, Fryer’s paper on racial disparities in police-civilian interactions was published in The Journal of Political Economy.
Spriggs tells Casselman and Tankersley, “We find ourselves, as so often happens in these ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are exactly that—discrimination.” But, as a professional economist, one whom I presume is interested in the pursuit of truth, does Spriggs really want other economists to not expect that he would have to prove his claims? I can’t imagine black scholars like Lowry and Fryer agreeing with that.
The reporters relay anecdotes told to them by Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economist, of students asking her “where does this racially hostile environment come from?” They ask, “Why does this racial discrimination exist in the pinnacle of the social sciences?” Again, the premise is assumed without demonstration. To buttress her claims, Casselman and Tankersley locate an article from 1962 where Nobel Prize winning economist George Stigler contends that blacks do poorly in the workforce because they are less educated and not as ambition as white workers.
The language Stigler uses certainly looks bad in the light of almost 60 years of progress. The reporters themselves admit, “Few scholars today would use such language.” “But the ideas persist,” they continue. “Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.”
As readers of my blog will know, I am highly critical of research using IQ. I do not regard IQ as a valid or reliable measure of intelligence. However, research emphasizing education and upbringing is hardly indicative of the assumptions supposed to be lying behind Stigler’s 1962 article. I am a sociologist, and education and upbringing are important factors to account for in explaining the life chances of individuals. So are factors of discrimination and structure barriers. But these are factors to be demonstrated and measured, not merely asserted.
Economics is a science. The racial identity of economists brings no more to economics than it does to physics or biology. The assumption is that a white economist will shape analysis to fit with a bias, which is hardly transparent way of saying that white economists produce scholarship advancing their racial interests. What goes along with this is the idea of “unconscious implicit bias,” a phantom of the social sciences.
Validating the notion that one’s race gives them special powers of perception lies at the core of this story. The pervasiveness of postmodernist epistemology is something that those who do science—and those who depend on science in a technologically advance society—must confront. It is inherently corrupting to the enterprise of knowledge production. It weaves into the fabric of apparent scientific conclusions systemic bias, namely that of ideological standpoint. It accuses science of a race bias on the grounds that the majority of scientists are white (in a white majority society) and seeks to rectify this alleged bias with the introduction of race-conscious politics. If that sounds paradoxical, that’s because it is.
Unfortunately, many scientists are reluctant to ask whether race actually has the power to deepen scientific knowledge because for decades the cultural ground of the academy has been worked in a way that to ask such a question leaves one open to accusations of racism. Racism has become not the intentional actions of person, but the failure of persons to admit the presence of phenomena they are to take on faith. The exercise is anti-science. Under pressure from university administrators, whose interests do not always lie with facilitating the production of objective knowledge, to diversify their departments on the basis of racial identity, the injection of racial politics into science is becoming normal.
In the 1960s, liberal Democrats slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations and opened the borders to the free flow of capital and labor both ways. Income and wealth inequality soared. So did crime. Labor unions were decimated. So, to distract workers, liberals leaned on New Left thought and rolled out an ideology: antiracism.
Image by Steve Cutts
The system of de jure race-based segregation benefitting whites also having been dismantled in the 1960s, the conversation about economic and social inequality strangely moved from the problem of social class to the problem of race.
In hindsight, this wasn’t strange but necessary since, having removed the legal framework that privileged whites, progress on the racial front risked the legal framework that sustained economic and social inequality coming into plain view in a way it hadn’t since the Great Depression. The capitalist class had gotten off easy with the New Deal. It didn’t need a class consciousness working class.
What grew from this soil was the doctrine of white privilege, which today finds white people begging black people to absolve them of their sin of whiteness and the elevation of a man convicted of multiple felonies, including armed robbery, to the status of a saint, while characterizing all police officers as racists and calling for the abolition of law enforcement.
George Floyd did not deserve to die. The man who killed him is a murderer. But Floyd’s death is not representative of race relations in America.
Who benefits from all this white self-loathing? Such an absurdity does not occur to people en masse without a regime of hegemonic production. That is to say, this is not an organic development. It was manufactured. By who?
The notion of a pervasive white privilege coming to dominate the politics of a country that had more than half a century earlier eliminated white privilege provides clues about those behind the new religion. Actually, it tells us straight away who’s responsible: the ruling class and its functionaries, an army of cultural managers preaching a gospel of “diversity, equality, and inclusiveness.”
What explains the proletarian rejection of class politics and equality and the embrace of antiracist rhetoric? Could it be that affluent white liberals don’t know many poor white people? Maybe they came from humble beginnings and have forgotten where they came from? I suppose it’s easy to say one has privilege when one enjoys a high status and can afford nice things. Starting from humble beginnings, one can pat oneself on the back for a job well done.
But if white privilege is so pervasive, how can black people have high statuses and buy nice things, too?
For sure, if you’re a progressive, you want to avoid talking about how some blacks overcame adversity to become successful (there are millions of them, so one has to do a lot of obscuring). For then you’re saying something about those who didn’t. You don’t want to be called out by your woke comrades for suggesting that there are those in the black community who don’t strive. You don’t want to be seen talking about culture and personal responsibility in reference to black people. Antiracism tells you that is “racist.” That sort of talk is only reserved for white people and the culture they embrace.
This is the problem with internalizing racecraft. One is taught to substitute race for class. But from an objective standpoint the world doesn’t make sense that way. Self-evidently, there are a lot of well-off black people. There are black capitalists, administrators, professors, entertainers, athletes, politicians, etc. White privilege can’t explain them. They didn’t all get there on handouts. They are not all the product of tokenism. Would you want them to be?
Moreover, there are three times more poor whites than there are poor blacks. White privilege can’t explain them either. Why are there so many poor white people if their skin color systemically privileges them?
Until you put social class at the center of your thinking about the problem of poverty, you will always be groping about for a rationalization for why people are poor regardless of race.
White privilege is a religious-like mode of thinking. Antiracism provides a mythic explanation for the social problems our communities fact, the problems of crime and poverty. The doctrine of antiracism authors a false narrative. It tells a tale of “perpetrators” and “victims,” with personified color-coded abstractions. It asks us to put on polarized lens that see good and bad in racial terms. It paints a world without progress by denying the arc of our history by dwelling on and even attempting to resurrect the obstacles we overcame.
Is there race prejudice? Yes, of course there is. And we should condemn it when we find it (which is becoming increasingly difficult to do). But confronting race prejudice does not require a mythology of pervasive white privilege that supposes a race prejudice that is intrinsic and exclusive to a group of people. White privilege is a new satan thrown in the path of progress.
Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack is not invisible. It’s empty. Her claims are those of an affluent white woman imagining for the sake of her own esteem the experience of blacks who are presupposed not as individuals with diverse experiences but as a monolithic group.In her world, blacks are singularly defined by their skin color. She wishes upon blacks a world wherein every waking moment is consumed by racial thinking.
There must be blacks out there wondering upon hearing the racecraft of Peggy McIntosh, Robin DiAngelo, and Tim Wise whether they are living an authentic black experience. Do these white progressives know something they don’t?
Antiracism commits the ecological fallacy: it presumes that facts about monolithic abstract categories can reasonably stand in place of concrete individuals. In an objective and rational world, antiracism should die on that fallacy—except that, through the magic of white self-loathing, it haunts us as the living dead.
This is the ghost of Jim Crow, aroused in middle-class séances administrators call “diversity, equity, and inclusivity training sessions.” The Maoists called them “struggle sessions.” China lost a decade on account of them.
Antiracism is not something we should desire to embrace. As Adolphe Reed, Jr., tells us in his 2016 essay “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence” (which seems so apropos given the insanity in today’s streets): “antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.” (See also Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption.”)
Reed warns us that, “although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.”
Antiracism is a corporatist neoliberal doctrine that rationalizes capitalism, in particular its globalist corporatist form. It is not an element in the democratic struggle for a more just society. White privilege hides the denationalization project of the transnational fraction of the capitalist class. Contemporary leftwing thought constitutes a zombie politics.
I am not big on the whole “cultural appropriation” theory, but to use African aesthetics to pander to black people for is a truly pathetic display of virtue signaling.
Democrats scolded for wearing Kente scarf while genuflecting the Church of Political Correctness
Democrats are making a play for blacks because the globalists are deeply concerned that Donald Trump will be reelected (they were shocked when he won the first time). A roaring economy (that appears to be roaring back), the failed attempts to hang around Trump’s neck Russia, the border crisis, Ukraine, and coronavirus, has aroused them to the politics of racial division. They know they cannot win middle America. So they are making a play in ramping up enthusiasm in urban America. Black lives suddenly matter.
Here Democrats are kneeling in a gesture to signal the false narrative of systemic racism, of the presence of white guilt and the need of whites to collectively atone for sins never committed (the racial system was abolished more than half a century ago), and, in a repulsive display of tokenism, they’re using African symbolism and black people as props to advance the regressive identitarian project to smear the white majority as racists. The Democrats lead the way with demonstrations of white contrition.
Meanwhile, our progressives cities consistently have the greatest levels of poverty and the highest rates of crime in the United States. With few exceptions, especially compared to those of other advanced democracies, these cities do poorly when compared to cities around the world. Progressives have a dismal record of improving the lives of black lives. Their record makes donning the Kente scarfs not merely cynical pandering but morally reprehensible.
The Democratic Party has been for decades at the forefront of policies that cause this despair, inducing corporations to take operations offshore and import foreign labor into the United States to disemploy and displace millions of native-born workers, while transferring trillions of dollars of value from the American working class to the corporations who pay them to serve as their functionaries. Black and brown people suffer the worst of it.
It was the Democratic Party, under Kennedy and Johnson, that slashed taxes for the wealthy and corporations in the 1960s and opened up the country to mass immigration to begin the devastation of neoliberalism. When they started, the foreign-born proportion of the population was less than 4 percent and union density was around one-third of the workforce. Today, the proportion of foreign-born is at early 1900 levels (around 13-14 percent) and private sector union density has fallen well below 10 percent of the workforce. The Democratic Party cratered Southeast Asia, squandering billions of dollars on a war that killed tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Southeast Asians. Johnson declared “war on crime”—a war against his own people. the FBI carried out a clandestine counterinsurgency program against minorities.
Nixon continue the Democrat’s globalist agenda and the war on labor and the left. And later, in the 1970s, Trilateral Commission stooges insinuated themselves into the White House under Carter and destabilized Afghanistan (the origins of the present quagmire), while preaching a gloomy message of American decline.
Under Clinton, Democrats pushed through NAFTA, which further devastated American labor, pushed through a massive crime bill that locked up scores of poor and minority citizens (Joe Biden was the author) whom they described as “super predators,” oversaw the establishment the WTO, dismantled AFDC (the cash support program for poor children), bombed Serbia, and repealed Glass-Steagall, preparing America for a massive transfer of wealth into the hands of the minority of the opulent. With Hilary Clinton leading the charge, the Democrats gave a blank check to globalist G.W. Bush to invade Iraq, who dutifully switched his loyalty to the Democrats. Of course he did: neoconservatism is a liberal Democratic doctrine (see Scoop Jackson).
The Democrats under Obama funneled trillions to Wall Street during a housing collapse that threw scores of families out of their homes. They bombed Libya into the slave trade, devastated Syria, pushed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and sent Biden to 25 hours of private dinners with the Chinese president Xi Jinping in order to help orchestrate China’s Belt and Road initiative that means to turn the United States in a tributary state or the Chinese Communist Party.
The Democratic Party lies at the core of the managed decline of the American republic. They are preparing the United States for incorporation into a global corporatist system—a neofeudalist order—by dismantling the Westphalian system, the system of nation-states that comprised the order of a free and open community of nations. And they are using race to pull to their side those who are most harmed by their machinations.
I want to make this perfectly clear: I will never prostrate myself before anybody. I will never beg forgiveness for something I did not do. If you believe you are a sinner, then be my guest, take a knee. People are free to make spectacles of themselves. But be sure you know that you aren’t taking a knee for me. I’m not going to accept the irrationalism of cosmic nonsense like collective guilt, collective responsibility, and collective punishment. I owe reparations to nobody. I owe apologies to no one. I cannot be counted among the guilty and to say that I a call for injustice.
What really are the Democrats guilty of? Of selling out the working class to transnational corporations and bankers. The Democratic Party is toxic.
Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a man who has in the past argued for blowing up the regulatory process surrounding bringing new drugs to market, announced that a COVID-19 vaccine will be available before its effectiveness is confirmed. The first human trial for a potential coronavirus vaccine, which is being conducted in Washington State, began back in March.
“We would start manufacturing vaccines before we know that it even works or not,” Fauci said. Fauci told the Journal of the American Medical Association that a third trial phase will involve 30,000 subjects. “I would not be surprised if we have more than one season of (coronavirus), with the likelihood that the second season will be much milder than the first,” Fauci told Newsweek. “Particularly if we have a vaccine.” I understand that more than 100 potential COVID-19 vaccines are working their way through the system.
The danger of rushing vaccines to market must not be downplayed. I remember the swine flu pandemic and swine flu vaccine scandals, as I am sure many of my older friends do, as well. It was rediscovering the video I share below during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that got me interested in influenza pandemics and vaccine efficacy, benefit, and safety.
The 1976 Swine Flu Pandemic Hoax
In reviewing meta-analyses of industry versus independent research, one finds that the efficacy of flu vaccines is variable from year to year. In many years it is quite poor. This information is hidden in plain sight on the CDC web page. You have time to dig around in there. But it’s worth the effort. Also of note is that vaccine companies are given immunity from prosecution and billions of dollars has been received by the scores of people injured by vaccines through a vaccine compensation fund paid for by a tax on vaccines.
Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), which is discussed in the video, is, at least symptomatically, highly similar to consequences of a tiny minority (0.1–0.5%) of polio infections, what’s called paralytic poliomyelitis. GBS is a serious condition that continues to affect people. The 1976 swine flu scare is Exhibit A in why a rational person is skeptical of claims made by governments, public health services, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies. If you trust the medical-industrial complex, you’re naive.
In my experience, there are two types of advocates of science. We might call these standpoints. There are those who treat science like a new religion and scientists like new priesthood—i.e., who have the faith-based attitude that scientific reasoning is meant to circumvent. And there are those who look at and weigh the evidence in light of reason and interest—i.e., those who treat science and scientists for what and who they are, namely tentative attempts to grasp the world and men and women who are subject to all the same pressures as any other professional but who are not always cautious or objective, and who often cloak their ideology in the rhetoric of neutrality.
The first standpoint is scientism. It’s a faith-based exercise. The second one is science. It is the standpoint of the skeptic.
I wanted to call this essay “Why I am not Antifascist,” but I thought about how the uncharitable would conclude, “You mean you aren’t opposed to fascism?” It should be clear from my blogs that I am opposed to fascism. I find it hard to believe anybody wouldn’t be opposed to fascism. History has shown us the horrors fascist practice brings. It is profoundly illiberal and antidemocratic practice ( a proper treatment of its form and content requires at minimum a dedicated essay, so I will have to put that to one side for now).
At any rate, given my opposition to fascism, I am being told in memes and commentary on social media that I should self-identify as an “antifascist.” After all, the commentary goes, antifascism is the antithesis of profascism (an odd construction given that a fascism is by definition profascist). But antifascism is not the antithesis of fascism. Antifascism is a dangerous worldview and political practice. It is like fascism. I want to explain why in this blog entry.
Former antifa organizer Scott Crow once told an interviewer, speaking about fascists, “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.”
Crow’s statement of antifascist principle should terrify those of us who believe in liberty and democracy and basic human decency. In practice, Antifa cast a very large net, one that catches run-of-the-mill conservatives and then punches them in the nose. When I hear somebody telling me that hate speech is not free speech, I wonder who the omniscient wise guy is (the “Oracle”), what central office he occupies (the “Ministry of Truth”), determining which speech is hateful and which speech is not—as if this can be separated from ideology. Who can I trust to tell me what speech is hateful? How about myself? I’m sure you have seen Antifa members—do you trust them to tell you what to think and say? They’re clowns.
Clowns
When Antifa and those who glamorize them worry about the consequences of ideas, do they include the actions antifascist ideas incite? Why would the rights of a single person be conditioned upon the judgment of an organization that spouts nonsense and beats people up? The Taliban use this tone of voice (and spout nonsense). When Crow says Antifa “go to cause conflict,” why doesn’t he just come right out and say that this means vandalizing property and assaulting people?
Why shouldn’t fascists enjoy the same rights of expression that Antifa claims for itself? After all, there isn’t much difference between the two of them except the sides upon which they claim to stand. In case you aren’t up on the principles of civil libertarianism and the history of authoritarian repression and violence, what Crow is saying and what Antifa do in practice is perfectly in line with fascist thinking and action about free association, assembly, and speech and expression. Antifascism is the authoritarian attitude in its paradigmatic form. Antifa is illiberal and antidemocratic, bent on violating fundamental human rights. It’s a toxic ideology. Just like fascism.
Progressives want to portray fascism and antifascism as thesis and antithesis. They want us to think in crude binary language. But they are in fact alternatives on one side of the political dynamic, comrades in authoritarian thinking, with antifascism lying at the far left of the authoritarian end of the authoritarian v. libertarian spectrum. Antifa claims the left. So what? The left isn’t monolithic. The left includes liberty and and democracy minded folks, on the one hand, and authoritarian and totalitarian minded folks, on the other. Antifa claims to anarchism, communism, and socialism, political economy is hardly important (or apparent, frankly) for a group that fetishizes street violence—you know, like neonazis do (who also claim to be socialist).
Antifascism is the perfect way to describe this attitude because it is the mirror image of fascism, which is to say it is a reflection of itself. Like antimatter is to matter in physics. If they only annihilated each other, then that’d be fine. To the vacuum with the lot of them, as far as I’m concerned—as long as it is by their own hands. But annihilation in social life generates energy that affects its surroundings. And even without its identical matter to confront, the antimatter in this case is on the prowl for something to annihilate. Since there are so few fascists left in the world today, and these few hardly leave their parents basements anymore (not because of Antifa), Antifa is left exploiting black anguish for attention and attacking police officers, those who are duty-bound to defend people and property from violence and destruction.
So what is the alternative to the fascism-antifascism binary? Small “d” democratic and libertarian-minded ethics, those principles—civl rights, feminism, humanism, liberalism, secularism, and scientific-rationalism—that have produced the most just and most technologically-advanced and prosperous civilization in the history of humanity. Antifascists want to tear all that down because a just world is a world without them, especially since justice doesn’t need them. More than this, justice is difficult to achieve with them around. Their idea of utopia is a punk concert forever. And while punk music is great, a society based on its image would vanish faster than the punk movement did. Unlike punk, anarchism would leave civilization in ruins.
There are persons around with characterological traits that suggest an appreciation for fascist attitudes and rituals. Fortunately, these days, such persons are rare animals. To be sure, if the traits and attitudes are organized into a cohesive worldview, and if there is a compelling force that steers that worldview, that directs political and moral action, then fascism can threaten society once more. But there is no mass-based fascist movement threatening society. There is, of course, a great deal of hype about fascism, just as there is hype about the devil in Christianity. But we must leave hyperbole to the religious fanatic.
The threat is not from old school fascism. There is a much greater threat facing us. Antifa is not in back of a regressive countermovement threatening our republic. Antifa is a blatant manifestation of the threat to civilization. The danger is far greater than those defacing and toppling statues, beating people in the streets, the lawless occupation of neighborhoods, the smashing of stained glass and the burning of churches. The Democratic Party, and even some Republicans, are encouraging this because racial division benefits those they represent: the corporations that rule the earth. Why do we see the convergence of the bureaucratic collectivism of the East and the corporate bureaucratic statism of the West? Both express a profoundly antidemocratic and illiberal logic that reduces citizens to subjects. Those of us who believe in freedom and dignity are staring authoritarianism in the face. People must grasp this moment. It’s been building for decades. It is finally realizing itself on the streets.
I am trying to keep my blog entries to at most one a day. The pressing need to correct misperceptions has triaged this essay, which I wrote shortly after the story came out, to the back of the cue. It remains relevant, so I am publishing it now, with some updates thanks to the unfolding of insanity. The blog has first to do with this NPR headline: Trump Says He’ll Deploy Military To States If They Don’t Stop Violent Protests. That wasn’t the original headline. Here was the original one, curated on my Facebook page: “Trump Calls Protests Against Police Killings ‘Acts of Domestic Terror’.” That headline is a bald-faced lie. It’s that headline I take up here. Trump said nothing of the sort.
(The New York Post had a useful editorial on this on June 2 by Eddie Scarry, “The lying about Donald Trump is now completely out of control.” Frankly, I have never seen anything like this in my life. The lying is so extreme it’s almost comical. At times it is. What’s tragic, though, are all the people on my Facebook newsfeed who are perpetually suckered by it. I want to think my progressive friends are smart. I truly do. But they seem determined to prove me wrong. Confirmation bias is at its worst when it comes to the bad orange man in the White House.)
I watched Trump’s speech twice. The president said clearly and deliberately that he was “an ally of all peaceful protesters.” He continued, “we cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protestors to be drown out by an angry mob. The biggest victims of the rioting are peace loving citizens in our poorest communities and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe.” What Trump said next was that criminal violence is not legitimate protest. And he’s right, it’s not. Criminal violence for political purposes is domestic terrorism, he said. Right again. That’s exactly what it is. All this comes straight from my lectures in my upper-division criminology course. Textbook stuff. Those committing violence are not rebelling against an unjust order. They’re molesting the order of a democratic republic.
Right before your eyes, NPR assumes, and wants you to assume with them, that crimes against persons and property is a form of protest, that criminal violence is a First Amendment activity. Reread the headline. NPR is trying to change your brain. NPR has become the propaganda arm of the insurgency. But I hesitate here a little. Collective violence may feel like a revolt or uprising, but calling the riots an insurgency is perhaps a bit much (to be clear Trump didn’t use the term). If it is an insurgency, the goal isn’t exactly isn’t clear. It’s members are not a monolithic bunch.
The mobs of black people smashing white businesses and beating white people in the streets are collective acts of vicious hate crimes. It is shocking, given the history of lynching in the United States, to see members of the race targeted by mobs in the period following Reconstruction target people in the same way and for the same reason—racial hatred fueled by myths about a group of people. There is no justification for what we are seeing.
Antifa, overwhelmingly white in character, is an international terrorist organization shamelessly using the protest to pursue its own agenda of destabilizing democracy and civil liberties (Antifa reserves the right to determine what speech is acceptable and what speech warrants kicking in somebody’s face or burning down their house). Legitimate protests across the planet are being tarnished and undermined by Antifa’s actions. Using black lives on the streets of America is an easy tactic for a group of narcissists who feel strong by sowing chaos. Antifa thrives on disorder and violence for the sake of selfish needs of dysfunctional people. The group means to draw police action with criminality in order to manufacture the perception that the government is repressive in order to amplify the anarchy that feeds their egos. Antifa is a pathological manifestation of extreme egoism. The police aren’t neonazi street thugs.
The postmodern left’s progressive vision for America
The black mobs and the white anarchists say they pursue a political cause, so we have to operate with their subjectivity in mind. Take them at their word. They’re terrorists. As for the peaceful protestors, they believe they have a political reason, too, but as I have shown with facts in recent blogs and will show again on Freedom and Reason tomorrow, they don’t. This is not to say that the protests should be stifled. I am with Trump, “an ally of all peaceful protesters.” I don’t police the content of protests. But while I support the First Amendment to the hilt, I cannot ally with the substance of protests as they are based on false premises. The United States does not suffer persist systemic racism. Whites are not a privileged class that oppresses blacks. Blacks are not disproportionately victims of lethal police force. Blacks are not disproportionately arrested or imprisoned independent of the amount of criminal activity in which they are involved. The United States eliminated institutional racism more than half a century ago and, moreover, instituted in the decade following and going forwards an expansive reparations program for blacks. I confess, I fell for these myths too. But several years of checking my own beliefs showed me that I had fallen prey to an orchestrated campaign of disinformation by the globalist wing of the capitalist class.
NPR lied about something else, too. Riot police pushed back rioters near the White House not because President Trump was visiting St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been set on ablaze by vandals the night before, but because rioters were attacking police officers. “Park Police Tear Gas Peaceful Protesters To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op,” read a NPR headline. “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church,” the New York Times reported. But tear gas was not used. Had they coordinated with the White House and had they used tear gas, the president could not have walked to the church. Can people do logic anymore? This is a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Progressives are such funny people. They get so mad they can’t see straight when citizens with the wrong politics protest the quarantining of health individuals, even calling for the police to enforce arbitrary “shelter-in-place” orders, but when criminals are burning down churches and assaulting their fellow citizens and the president calls on governors to protect and defend the rule of law against violent criminals, progressives lose their shit. They think defending a democratic republic from street thugs is fascism. (By the way, where is that panic over COVID-19 now that people are out in the streets delegitimizing the government that progressives previously demanded lock up people in their homes? COVID-19 is so yesterday for trend mongers on the hunt for new virtue signaling memes. Well, at least new and improved.)
What about the president’s authority to use the military to suppress insurrection? (See my “The Riotous Left is on the Wrong Side of Democracy and Justice”). Remember Little Rock in 1957, when Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to stop African Americans from attending Little Rock Central High School as part of federally ordered racial desegregation? He essentially dared President Eisenhower to make him integrate his schools. Well, on September 5, 1957, Eisenhower sent Faubus a telegram that went like this: “The only assurance I can give you is that the Federal Constitution will be upheld by me by every legal means at my command.” Then he federalized the Guard and used them to protect African Americans in Little Rock Central High School.
Comrades, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. The president is well within his legal authority to deploy the militia of this country to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections, and repel Invasions. Indeed, the commander-in-chief is as much obligated to protect and defend the republic from insurrection as he is to defend the republic from invasion. These words I am using come straight from the Constitution of the United States. The founders of America invested in the office elected by all Americans the power to protect and defend the Constitution by military means if necessary. And presidents in the past have on numerous occasions done just this. But when Trump does it, he’s a fascist.
The first right of every man and woman in a democratic society is security in their persons and effects. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s right there in our Declaration of Independence. It’s why we overthrew a monarch and established a strong national government and a powerful executive elected by all the people. Do people really think we have sacrificed so much for democracy and liberty over these many centuries to give up now? Fuck them. Without security, freedom and development have no foundation. A state that fails to protect its people is a failed state. We know a failed state is what the globalists want. They are engineering them everywhere. The insurrection we have been experiencing slots in nicely with the Chinamerica project (see Gordon G. Chang, “China is Stoking Racial Tension in America,” Newsweek.) The Party of Davos is grinning ear-to-ear at the site of chaos by the puppets they animate. That Antifa presents with a Maoist character completes the circle. (I will have more to say about this in future blogs.)
It is one thing to protest under the First Amendment. Assemble, petition, write, raise your voices, bear your placards—these are your rights. I’m a huge First Amendment guy. I have assembled, petitioned, written, raised my voice, and bore placards many times in my life. It is another thing altogether to loot, rob, and assault. Every police chief, every mayor, every governor fails in their primary obligation if they fail to uphold the rule of law. Trump called them out. Good on him. Unlike Democrats and progressives, Trump is not failing to stand up for the republic.
Here is a terrifying example is why citizens are right to fear what is happening in their communities and to expect the government to intervene and project them. In a recent press conference, Richmond Police Chief Will Smith explained told a story about how rioters set fire to an occupied multi-family residence with a child inside, then repeatedly blocked firefighters’ access to the scene. “Protesters intercepted that fire apparatus several blocks away with vehicles and blocked that fire department’s access to the structure fire,” Smith said. “Inside that home was a child.” “Officers were able to –,” Smith attempted to continue, though he was overcome with emotion, “help those people out of the house.” “We were able to get the fire department there safely,” the emotional police chief said. This is horrifying. This is what I mean when I say this is out of control. (Rioters Set Fire To Home With Child Inside, Then Block Firefighters’ Access; Emotional Police Chief Details Incident.)
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is representative of the rot of progressive ecumenicalism that embraced Islam but mocks conservative Christianity. “The President just used a Bible and one of the churches of my diocese as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for,” she writes in a tweet promoted by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and the corporate media. “To do so, he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers in riot gear to clear the church yard,” she claimed. She said, “The President did not pray when he came to St. John’s; nor did he acknowledge the agony and sacred worth of people of color in our nation who rightfully demand an end to 400 years of systemic racism and white supremacy in our country.” There is no requirement to pray in a secular society, Bishop Budde. That’s a shameful remark. And we ended systemic racism half a century ago and implemented an expansive program of reparations. There are few white supremacist left in the entire world. Budde, like so many progressives, lives in a fantasy world. Budde continued, “In no way do we support the President’s incendiary response to a wounded, grieving nation. In faithfulness to our Savior who lived a life of non-violence and sacrificial love, we align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others through the sacred act of peaceful protest.” She presumes to speak for a lot of people. A “wounded, grieving nation”? Wounded by whom?
The “we” is an ever growing collection of characters. The worst of the worst. Waiting on publishing this blog has given me two more instances of the lunacy. First was Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, former Secretary of Defense. CNN carried the headline, “Mattis tears into Trump: ‘We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership’.” My Facebook newsfeed was swamped with shares of the articles gleefully reported by the corporate media. Progressives fawn over Mad Dog as if he’s a great moral figure. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Mattis support the Saudi military campaign against Yemen? He asked Trump to lift restrictions on US military aid to Saudi Arabia, right? Never forget, Mattis resigned his post because Trump pulled America out of Syria mess Obama got us into. Trump fast tracked Mattis’ resignation by moving it up to New Years Day, essentially firing him. Savage. By the way, Mattis doesn’t like the nickname “Mad Dog.” He prefers “Chaos.” I’m not being sarcastic.
And speaking of Obama, the former president has reappeared to egg on the protesters (NPR, “Obama Urges Young People To Keep Up Their Protests To Bring Change”). Like he cares about justice. Remember the Harvard Square incident (“What Motivated Sergeant Crowley?”)? Or when he bombed an prosperous African country into the Slave Trade? How about the way he disowned Wright and Trinity Unity (“Disloyal Obama’s Duplicity”)? The dude even threw his grandmother under the bus. His hypocrisy is feel almost tactical it’s so deliberate. After running as an antiwar populist, Obama was at the forefront of indefinite detention, summary execution, and the widespread deployment of aerial drones in warfare. Against the people, he worked hand-in-hand with local law enforcements to suppress legitimate political dissent. Remember, in Obama’s America, Occupy Wall Street protesters are cleared out in multiple cities overnight by armed government thugs. The man only wants to get a globalist back in office so the team can continue the managed decline of the American republic. I lay this mess at the feet of progressives and the Democratic Party who have for decades been teaching our young people a story of America’s history designed to breed fear and loathing of Western order and values. They prepared the ground for the uprising.
Those who rationalize riots are lying, as well. The claim that nonviolent action and peaceful protest have not advanced the cause of social change and justice is dishonest. When folks say that, they’re erasing the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. They erasing more than King. Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation in public schools, was not won through violence. It was won by argument and persuasion. Sitting at segregated lunch counters, in segregated bus seats, these actions may have been met with violence, but their impact was not obtained by those seeking justice acting violently. The violence came from those who opposed justice. You cannot justify your violent actions or your call for others to act violently on the obvious lie that nonviolence doesn’t work. To be sure, violence has its place, but it is out of place in today’s America except to defend our way of life. We were finally getting things back on track. For progressives, that was the problem.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the foremost advocates for the interests of the proletariat, characterize those prone to criminality as “social scum,” pursuing “primitive rebellion,” victimizing the working class, activities that prepared them more for serving as the “bribed tools” of “reactionary intrigue” than any purposes suitable to forward-leaning social transformation. That’s what real socialism looks like in the face of thugs and anarchists. #maketheleftgreatagain
freedom and reason 