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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.

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 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.

People wake up.

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.

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.

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 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

Houstonians gathered Sunday in the Third Ward to pray for the family of George Floyd and beg forgiveness for racism. The prayer was followed up by black in attendance accepting the apology and joining them in prayer. The organization of bodies in physical space was telling: blacks stood on a platform, elevated over whites, while whites prostrated on the ground, weeping and moaning. The scene was captured on video:

White neighbours kneel down and beg their black neighbours for forgiveness on behalf of whites for years of racism. Such a beautiful moment.#GeorgeFloyd #ICantBreathe pic.twitter.com/2CJRZheSeN

— Preeti Nahar (@yaar_musafirr) June 1, 2020

It was only a matter of time before the religion of antiracism was taken up by those of another faith that strives to reduce its followers to sheep who always fall short of the glory of God. After all, both reference mythical things, find man broken, and command him to be well by shame. (See my previous essays on the problematic of white privilege/fragility. Against White Privilege: Clarifying the Critique of a Problematic Term. Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism. The Rhetoric of White Privilege: Progressivism’s Play for Political Paralysis. You are Broken. We Will Fix You. For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations. Not All White People Are Racist. The Psychological Wages of Antiracism.)

But unlike baptism making salvation available (even if you are always a sinner), always being white means always being broken with no chance of absolution. That’s because the individual is completely disappeared into race in antiracist thinking. Whites cannot remove the skin covering that heralds their eternal damnation. By virtue of their phenotypic surface, they are unfixable. Their children will inherit the sin and all whites should forever self-loathe and self-flagellate.

Antiracism is, in this sense, a superior religion. Being unfixable means always being subjected shame. It is also a superior religion in that it brings into the religious mode of thought and action those who aren’t particularly religious. It may be that those inclined to seek the transcendent in a secular society, but are reticent to adopt a theology, are drawn to antiracism for greater meaning and purpose. At any rate, religious-like tribalism is prone to zealotry.

The white privilege/white fragility rhetoric is hectoring and, ultimately, racist. Antiracists demands whites to self-loathe, gaslighting them, while obnoxiously pandering to blacks. The recorded scene is a pathological expression of extreme virtue signaling through self-flagellation—a type of masochism. It’s also a manifestation of narcissism in attention-seeking behavior. The white privilege/white fragility paradigm rejects equality and instead seeks the resurrection and inversion of a hierarchy long ago abolished. Men and women are not to be seen as individuals but as members of racialized groups that must exchange places in the hierarchy. The Old Civil Rights movement was about overcoming racism. The New Civil Rights movement is about entrenching racism, restoring the social logic of race relations at the center of political and social life. You are not allowed to be nonracist anymore. Logically, the white privilege/white fragility argument doesn’t work. It commits a fundamental error called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or reification—that is, treating an abstraction as a concrete thing. (See Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation. The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics. Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice. Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration. “This Goes On”: Did Arbery Die to Perpetuate a False Narrative About Contemporary American Society?) This conceptualization substitutes for flesh and blood individuals abstract demographic categories, categories with at best questionable validity, judging individuals in terms of identity not character. Operationalized and put in practice, the concept become malignant.

Antiracist practice must assume some objectivity about race as a mind-independent reality, which we know, from science anyway, is a false assumption. But the argument, moving as it does on the postmodern terrain of truth, doesn’t care about the science of all this. It insists, instead, on a different truth, one that epistemically privileges emotion and ideology over facts and reason, where, because I was designated white on my birth certificate (not my choice), I am racist and privileged. If I deny these allegations, then I am fragile and in denial—and doubly racist. I get get better if I don’t admit I am sick. But, then, I always will be sick. The obvious fact is that neither allegations are necessarily true. Some whites are racist. Some whites are privileged. At the same time, some blacks are racist. Some blacks are privileged. That should be obvious anyway.

* * *

Antiracism is a new religion with a very old message. It considers certain people on the basis of skin color fallen by virtue of a tribal stigma—skin color. A white person is a sick person who must confess his sins and beg to be healed. Alas, this is a sin from which he can never be absolved. This will always be the white man’s burden—to be an albatross around the society’s neck. He is the product of intergenerational guilt, an unfixable creature in need fixing, a broken machine that cannot be repaired. Racism is his nature.

The rhetoric puts people so stigmatized in an impossible situation. Whites are blameworthy merely on this basis: they had white parents. Whites prove the truth of the accusation by defending themselves against the charge. Whites wear their guilt as a “perpetrator” on their bodies. They’re wrapped in it. Whiteness heralds their condemnation, a condemnation they must own to approximate any sort of legitimacy in the realm of justice. Whites would be guilty until proven innocent, except that they will always be white. Every black person is a “victim” of white people even though individual whites could never meet most of the black people they’re accused of oppressing.

The white privilege/white fragility argument assumes things about people it cannot know and does so based on skin color. This practice has a name—it’s called racial stereotyping. This is what we are trying to rid our society of. The antiracist insists on keeping it and elevates it to a virtue. But the crimes of the father do not transfer to his children. My sons are as blameless with respect to racism as I am. They have never harmed a black person. Nor have I. And that claim is not simply the resistance of a privileged white person to taking responsibility for his whiteness. It is empirically true by every conceivable metric—eschewing ethereal ones. Neither my sons nor their father can be guilty of an offense simply by being, by merely existing. To suggest they are is to falsely accuse them, to bear false witness. In some circles, this is itself sinful. This is racism. And the rebuttal that racism depends on power is just one more fallacious manifestation of the postmodern attitude.

This is a deranged way of looking at the world. It’s false and wrong and it put lives at risk by giving people a reason to hate and ruin. People who never wronged a black person are being beaten and killed on the streets of America today because they are white. These are hate crimes. Meanwhile, the majority of victims of lethal police violence are forgotten because they are white. Most of the poor are forgotten because they are white—or because they possess privileges they obvious don’t. Because of this ideology, only some lives matter. It’s a profoundly racist way of looking at the world.

Once more, we find ourselves enduring symbolism over substance. This moment in Houston is emblematic of the problem. Rather than tackle the issue of police brutality in our communities, we see people perpetuating a false narrative about America. This false narrative is not benign. It distracts from the actual issue and undercuts the building of working class solidarity required to build a mass movement to reform policing, not just in America, but throughout the trans-Atlantic world.

* * *

I want to close with a few observations about our present and likely future and how antiracism keeps us from the task at hand. For there is a nice symmetry to open borders, globalists exporting jobs and importing foreign labor and building up China, and Mexican drug cartels importing fentanyl from China to distribute to disemployed and low wage American workers in despair, addicted or overdosing in neglected parks and dilapidated cars. These are the conditions that prepare the fire that the police slaying of black men ignites.

Here’s another symmetry, this one in part coincidental: everybody wearing masks just in time to anonymously loot stores and assault the people finally allowed to go back to their lives after an unpredicted lockdown. This is enabled by a racially divisive ideology that selects the targets of violence on the basis of race, and the politicians and journalists who conflate protests and anarchy and shame law enforcement from doing their job. This former is the result of decades of work to construct and entrench a mythology about the West, one designed to delegitimize Western civilization and prepare it for its integration into the global capitalist order. This connects this symmetry to the previous one noted.

“Lockdown” is a term used to describe the control of rioting prisoners. In this new world order we lock down the law abiding citizen and stand down law enforcement for those who break it. This new normal indicates something working class Americans need to pay attention to. There is an explanation for their despair. Western civilization is in decline because global capitalists and their functionaries are selling out their countries—and the people of the West are losing confidence in themselves. The saddest piece is the self-loathing and self-flagellation that indicates this. It’s like the dying bargaining with death. We are witnessing the managed decline of the American republic. If we lose the West, the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever.

This blog is about the death of Tony Timpa and what his example may tell us about police tactics. Also, what it tells us about racial politics in America. Tony died at the hands of officers of the Dallas Police Department. He was held down for 14 minutes. A cop put a knee in Tony’s back. It took three years for attorneys to drag out the DPD the officer’s body cam footage. The video is disturbing to watch. Tony begs the officers to stop holding him down. He struggles to breathe. Then he dies.

Erik Heipt, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in cases of in-custody deaths, said this about Tony’s case: “It’s just basic science: People can be essentially suffocated to death when they’re lying on their stomachs in a prone position and there’s weight on their backs compressing their chest and diaphragm.” Perhaps Timpa’s obesity put him as risk for positional asphyxia. While his death was ruled a homicide, medical examiners cannot even say for sure what killed him. But his death nonetheless sparked no riots.

Media coverage of police killings would leave you with the distinct impression that there are no Tony Timpas. The truth is there most victims of lethal police action are white men. Is that why there was so little public outcry about the Timpa killing? It’s not that the media didn’t cover it. The officers mocked Timpa as he died and that made it newsworthy. “Tony, we bought you new shoes for the first day of school,” one officer can be heard saying. There was talk of waffles as encouragement for him to wake up. The police later rationalized their talk as a “tactic.” But the media coverage soon died away.

I know we’re not supposed to think about this, let alone say it, but the problem of cops killing men is not a race thing. At least not usually. Almost never, really. While most men killed by the cops are white, controlling for the level of neighborhood crime and violence, white men are not proportionally more likely to be killed by the cops. The media agenda is to reinforce a myth that black men are disproportionately killed by cops and always for racist reasons. A white corpse is inconvenient to that narrative. But to say that some corpses weigh more on the scales of justice than others sacrifices morality on the altar of politics.

Riots are commonplace in American history. When we hear the word “riot” people of my generation and my parents’ generation reflexively think of the period 1960-1969—Watts, the “long hot summer” of 1967, MLK Jr.’s assassination in 1968. But the decade that followed was also quite riotous. There was a downside. Nixon used social disorder to win reelection in a landslide. The effective neutralization of the Black Panthers by the FBI’s COINTELPRO saw inner-city black communities regress back to criminal gangs. Disorder and criminal violence fueled a several decades-long war on crime and drugs. After a relatively quiet 1980s, the LA riots, in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of officers who beat a black motorist, stand out for Americans. A couple of years later, the federal government put the hammer down on crime, locking up hundreds of thousands of mostly young men, disproportionately black (the current Democratic nominee was an author of the law). To be sure, riots are not only an expression of black American rage. But, for living memory, that perception is not without warrant.

Like many other rhythms in the social animal, riots come and go. We need to do some thinking about the conditions from which riots emerge and the character of the events triggering them. The oft-heard metaphor is that a fire requires preparation and a spark for ignition. What or who prepares the fire? What or who ignites it? In sociology, we talk about structure and agency, with structure referring to persistent constellations of social relations, abstractly obtained through theoretical means, and agency, referring to concrete social action and, more subjectively, consciousness, at an individual or small group level.

If we stand back and look at the matter abstractly, riots, or what some prefer to call rebellions, do appear to grow out of the conditions. Criminologists often say this thing about crime being caused by privation: society prepares the crime and the criminal commits it. It’s something of a slogan. There does seem to be something to it. At the same time, most poor people don’t serious crime or riot. It’s a probability. Poverty may be a source of crime and riot, but it is not a cause of these phenomena (poverty is neither a cause nor a source of white collar offenses). If poverty did cause crime and riot, given the fact that poor people are mostly white, then we should see the overrepresentation of whites in these phenomena. But we don’t. (For the record, of the 38 million poor people in America, more than three-quarters of them are white.)

The difference, it may be suggested, is the unique situation black people encounter, an experience shaped by racism. It’s not just privation. It’s the compounding effect of economic and racial inequality. The problem, we are often told by those who suggest this, is “institutional racism.” Accepting institutional racism as a fact in black lives, we are to share a story of black male agency directed by institutional forces. These factors compels black males to steal and vandalize property and hurt people. You might ask whether every person has a moral responsibility to obey just laws and respect the lives of others. Don’t black males also have agency? Not really, it seems. Structure denies agency. But why some and not others? The denial of moral agency to one side, the explanation remains an unsatisfactory sociological account.

Moreover, the thesis rests on a false narrative about American history. We might ask whether there is a difference between yesterday’s America, organized in part by institutional racism, manifest in the structure of Jim Crow segregation established in the wake of Reconstruction, which one would expect would prepare riots, and today’s America, in which, for more than fifty years now, institutional racism has been absent. Despite the rhetoric about “systemic racism,” the fact is that racial segregation was dismantled by the courts, legislatures, and executives in the post WWII- period. Today, there are no institutions accessible to whites that are not also accessible and on equal terms to blacks. This is a very different America from the one into which many of us were born. Tens of millions of Americans, black and white, those born after us, were and are born to a world without institutional racism. For every person in America today, there are no institutional or legal barriers preventing a person from getting an education, a job, a home, or any of the number of things that make life good. There is, of course, the inequality of social class—which is obscured by constant race-talk. But there is also a lot of personal failure. People waste their lives on their own accord. And there is language and culture. And the politics of division and resentment.

This is where agency becomes super relevant to the conversation. Appreciating our history as the story of a nation overcoming racism produces a very different set of assumptions, a fundamentally different frame for action, than embracing a narrative that sees no progress in American history. The United States was forged in a world where slavery and racism were commonplace. The United States freed itself from the British Empire and abolished the slave trade. The British Empire followed suit. Much of the world did not. In the 1860s, the United States fought a civil war to free people from bondage and preserve democratic-republicanism. Three-quarters of a million American men, the vast majority of them white, died so that black people could have rights. While men killed white men for the sake of human freedom. Following WWII, the civil rights movement saw black Americans come into those rights. This is a story of progress. America led the way for the world. However, if people are taught to believe that the United States is no different today than it was when Jim Crow prevailed, or worse, no better than the days when blacks were chattel, then the interpretation of selectively presented facts shaped by that framing comes out wrong and potentially destructive. Privation may lend this feeling energy, but it is the interpretation of American history that is malignant. Ideas matter.

If people in this situation do not know, for example, that most victims of lethal police action are white men, and that white men are not disproportionately killed by police relative to their population—that is, if the situation of lethal police action is falsely portrayed as cops targeting and killing black men exclusively or even disproportionately (and the sophistication to check the accuracy of this portrayal is lacking), then a portion of the population is prepared to be provoked into action with a particular character. The facts matter. Ronald G. Fryer, in “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2016, who, when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—found no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. Joseph Cesario and colleagues, in “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016,” published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, in 2018, found, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. They conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. In another study, “Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks,” published in the Journal of Crime and Justice in 2019, Richard K. Moule Jr. and Bryanna Fox found that, when focused on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, black citizens appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers. Charles E. Menifield and colleagues, in “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” published in Public Administration Review, in 2018, found that, although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. This is what science tells us. But what does the corporate media tell us? In other words, if enough people under similar circumstances see the world in a similar way, even if that worldview is the product of false consciousness, then the coil of collective violence is tightly winding. An event—a Michael Brown, a Trayvon Martin, a George Floyd—might release the spring. It doesn’t matter that everybody got the facts in the Brown and Martin case wrong. They couldn’t in the George Floyd case. All it took was seeing the first amateur shot video of a police beating to burn down south-central LA.

Thus a crucial principle to observe is that the decisions people make about how they will act under given circumstances is shaped by the way they think about the world around them. There is a pressing need to study the ideas that have colonized the lifeworlds of course citizens. Language, culture, and ideology are particularly important factors to consider. In light of this, I encourage people, particularly academics and journalists, those with the power to shape thought, to think about how they talk about America history and race relations. Stop proceeding on what you were told was truth and start working with the truth in mind. We have made immense progress since the 1960s, but if knowledge of that progress is unknown, denied, or suppressed, and especially if an alternative history is taught in our schools and on our streets, then the people’s lifeworld becomes shaped by ideology not reality. The paradigm of academic misdirection is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which came to dominate social studies curriculum (it is often the only history book our youth will ever read), a one-sided sledgehammer depicting American history as the story of oppression upon oppression, oppression in intersecting layers. It feels as times in this book that the sovereign people aren’t America at all, but rather are her slaves and subjects. But Zinn’s ideologically-driven history is part of the Maoist-inspired antiracist / postcolonialist project taken up by the New Left in the 1960s (by way of the French intellectual sweet on totalitarianism and Islam) that early on corrupted the civil rights movement, turning the struggle for equality, which promised class solidarity, to the tokenism of identity, with a new corporatist rhetoric of justice—diversity, equity, and inclusion—and white people as folk devils. And with it a drive the smash the democratic-republican machinery the working class need to peacefully transform society.

If a young person is told that America is a deeply racist nation, that all whites are privileged and racist, that they are victims of oppression, intergenerationally traumatized, then a riot is being prepared. A riot is engineered with lies designed to engage people already frustrated by their life chances, the alternative paths out of frustration cut off by those who control their neighborhoods. Have you ever noticed that the poorest communities are led by the most progressive politicians? The likelihood that my interpretation is correct is quite high given the fact that the reasons given for the riots, while enjoying popular support in some political circles, enjoy little empirical support among objective ones. The claim that America is a country shaped by systemic racism cannot be rationally sustained. It is, however, a country where progressives, operating a vast culture industry, have brainwashed Americans into believing that the core values that define the West—enlightenment, humanism, liberalism, rationalism, secularism—are deeply problematic, and were very probably designed to benefit the white man at the expense of everybody else. At least, they claim, these values function this way, as one can plainly see in the racial disparities that distinguish America, thereby substituting for an explanation of inequality a definition: racism is racial inequality. With the certainty of this tautology at their backs, and the intrinsic evil of white people, America is subjected to a constant degradation of the history and the culture of European civilization—the culture that gave the world common law, human rights, civil liberties, and political freedom, not to mention the highest standard of living of any social formation in world history. Alas, these, too, are problematic in the same way. Paradoxically, for those who fetishize otherness (which is synonymous with constructing others), the things that prove its worth—liberty and democracy, civil and human rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, religious pluralism, scientific and technological advancements—are the things that condemn Western civilization.

Those who worry about the impression the mob leaves tell us that we should probably separate protesters from rioters. The rioters are a numerical minority. They are also not a monolithic bunch. Many are, if folks are honest, thugs who take advantage of the situation, under cover of chaos, to molest, steal, and vandalize. Again, since most poor people don’t do this, we can really only say that deprivation is a source of this behavior, not a cause of it. For sure we know that crime is more likely to occur when social control is loosened. It follows that depolicing communities, which progressives are advocating, will almost certainly worsen the crime problem. The crime problem is one that we should take seriously, since, while poor people are not destined to be criminals, they are more likely to be the victims of those who do. It is unjust to expose the vulnerable to disorder and predation. Harvard professor Randall Kennedy coined a useful term for this phenomenon—racially-selective underprotection. Others belong to the terrorist countermovement Antifa and its ilk, white youth who believe that anarchy by propaganda of the deed is an effective mode of societal transformation. Transformation into what? Nothing. They are nihilists. But, while most of the protestors are not either sort of rioter, they operate on the basis of the false consciousness we mistakenly attribute to the rioters. What moves the protestors is the belief that the police are targeting members of their community on the basis of race because America is a racist nation. Objectively, on the basis of this false narrative, they work against the community by demanding the police stand down. So, while protesting lethal police action is legitimate, the current protests are not.

This false narrative is not benign. The call for depolicing is a call to abandon the black community to criminal violence, to disorder and despair. It refuses to admit that half of all homicide victims in this country are black men and that their murders come mostly at the hands of other black men. This past weekend in Chicago, more than eighty people were shot and nineteen killed in the worst weekend of violence for 2020 so far. Black men are less than six percent of the population, yet they account for half of all the murderers in our society. There is a moral crisis in black America. Black children sleep in bathtubs to avoid the stray bullets whizzing through the walls of their homes. Walking to school—of which they have largely been spared by the lunacy of the COVID-19 hysteria—can be a terrifying experience. The situation is unacceptable to those who genuinely care about equality and justice. A truly righteous protestor doesn’t leave people to such a fate, especially on the basis of race. ACAB is a bullshit slogan.

There is an elitism at work here, one that see black people as not being able to help themselves. As if they are savages with no agency, no capacity for moral responsibility. It is an anti-humanist ideology. The fact that the media only focuses on black victims of police violence devalues the lives of other victims and perpetuates a false narrative about policing and about America. What is more, among the majority of Americans, there will be many who will not see police violence as a problem since it does not affect their community. But if we are going to do something about it, then we need to see to it that they do. There is strength in numbers. Antagonizing white people by telling them that they’re racist for not buying into a false narrative that degrades them and the country of which they are also a part only alienates them. Is this stupidity or by design?

The BLM approach is counterproductive if the goal is reducing police violence. But, frankly, the goal does not appear to seek to raise awareness about police violence. Folks would not attack those who ask America to look at the other victims of crime and police violence if it were otherwise. What about Tony Timpa and all the white victims of lethal police action? Watch it or you will be accused of being an ALM racist, because apparently not all lives matter (that’s why the other victims of police violence escape our attention or soon slide down the memory hole for lack of it). No, the goal appears to be about creating and perpetuating resentment and prejudice towards the white people of a nation that dismantled institutional racism more than fifty years ago and widely instituted reparations shortly afterwards. The BLM approach, embraced by the corporate media, denies and distorts history and delegitimizes the institutions of our republic. It is functional for the few and politically paralyzing for the many. And these effects appear to be by design. This is a political project decades in the making. The riot does not organically emergent from the conditions of black America. It is prepared by the elites in the service of corporate power.

Those of us who study social phenomena must reckon the power of ideology. Don’t let people don’t tell you that language and culture don’t matter. They don’t believe that themselves. Beliefs organize action. Power organizes belief. The power of the culture industry is demonstrated by the ubiquity of a false narrative that has set ablaze the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters. My city of Nashville is on fire because progressives run down America constantly. They preach racial division and resentment. Stripped of its academic pretense, “white privilege” is a variation on “kill the white man.” It’s that old “white devil” rhetoric. It’s hateful and racist. If you don’t believe me, listen to the rhetoric on the streets of America right now. You will hear recycled slogans culled from old news reels. They should stay there. Progressives wring their hands over hate speech and incitement to racial violence. They need to look in the mirror. They own this. At the level of electoral politics, the Democrats own this.

I want to make my position crystal clear because I expect people will want to make it less so. When I am criticizing mob violence in our cities today I am not saying that there is no problem with police violence or the people have no reason to protest. I have been a critic of police violence and an advocate for civil liberties for my entire life. It’s what I do. There is a problem with police violence and the people have the right to protest it and they should protest it. What I have a problem with is the character of the protests. They have been racialized. The problem with racializing the problem is this: if progressives are correct that whites don’t care about police violence because they don’t think black lives matter, then it is counterproductive to insist that not all lives matter in the same way. Since more whites are killed by police than blacks—a lot more—then it behooves those who oppose police violence to make whites aware that members of their community die in greater numbers at the hands of the police than do blacks. You won’t do that by telling white people that they’re all racist or that the best they can be is an ally. I’m not racist (I don’t know many white people who are) and the demand that I be an ally is to demand that I stand peripheral to a cause that is part of my life. I will not stand with any movement that subordinates me to any other person. I hear white people being told to shut up and listen. If somebody ever talks to you in that tone of voice, you tell them to fuck off.

Why haven’t the leaders and participants in this movement figured this out yet? I am continually astonished by the attempt to create a mass movement against police violence that at the same time strives to blind the public to the greatest number of victims of police violence while smearing white people as racist. Given how smart these folks are, does this not suggests that BLM is not actually a civil rights movement devoted to ending police violence but a grievance industry to heighten and entrench racial antagonisms? Looks like it to me. It doesn’t seek popular unity and class solidarity. It seeks racial division. Would Marx advocate such a thing? No, he would ask you to ask yourself, whose interests does this serve? Not the interests of black Americans. Except, of course, the handful of the black misleadership strata. Not the interests of the proletariat. this benefits the capitalist class. They are playing you.

I would be out there protesting police violence myself, but I cannot as long as the protests proceed on a basis of racial exclusivity/subordination or the glorification of anarchy and mob violence. I refuse to participate in racially divisive political action. I will not stand with protesters who erase the victims of police violence. I will protest when the protests expand to address the actual problem: police violence against the people. Moreover, I will not stand with those who advocate abolishing the police or depolicing communities. Crime is a serious problem and black Americans are disproportionately subjected to the fallout. I oppose the practice of racially selective underprotection of populations. We need to reform policing, not abolish it. Finally, I cannot stand with any movement that fails to condemn antifascism. Antifascism is the mirror image of fascism not its negation. Antifa is a terroristic countermovement rooted in nihilistic derangement. They are the extreme expression of postmodernism. Everything well short of that extreme is bad enough. So you won’t see me out on the streets.

This MSNBC segment “Early Facebook investor: Zuckerberg has ‘lost the plot’” is surreal. Not because of a needlessly masked journalist (it’s Ali Velshi in there) editorializing in front of the burned out remains of a city block in Minneapolis. To be sure, that scene is absurd. Pestilence and rampage in the same shot. What is more disturbing is how the normality of contempt for democracy and liberty in a free and open society is just assumed as given. The segment is organized around anti-human sentiment, corporatist propaganda of the highest order, perfectly illustrating the shift to the corporate state from the republican government established by our forefathers, without any dissimulation of power. That is surreal.

Have you watched the clip yet? Here are three ideologues complaining about the United States president going around the corporate media and using social media to speak directly to the public. Imagine complaining about radio stations bringing FDR’s Fireside Chats to millions of Americans in a time of crisis. The social media, the audience is told, must censor and label the president’s speech. What took them so long? How dare the one government official elected by all the people speak directly to the people about matters of urgent concern. Corporations should interpret for the people what their president says, not the people themselves. Corporate elites and their functionaries have decided that this president has no legitimacy—nor do those who support him—and for the good of the order of things the people must have no inherent right to hear their president unfiltered or unframed. Rights are conditional in the postmodern view of the world, distributed on the basis of institutional power and political correctness. Donald Trump is politically incorrect. And it’s not just the president who needs censoring. Everything progressives disagree with—what they characterize as “hate speech,” “disinformation,” and “conspiracy theory”—needs censoring and labeling.

Roosevelt’s use of the radio to directly reach the US population is instructive. Radio emerged in the 1920s and there was a debate about whether it should be a public utility or commercially owned. The compromise was national control over bandwidth, reserving the 88–92 megahertz band for non-profit and educational programming, formally without advertising (although corporations sponsor and thus control content), and licensing the rest to commercial enterprises. Television broadcasting followed this scheme. And there is public access television narrowcast through cable. There are rules and regulations, but these are developed and administered by government. In the case of the Internet, which is also regulated by government, the danger is the enclosure of the commons established at its inception. Thus the Internet faces the same challenges as radio and television but in the era of near total corporate governance. See my article “Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square.”

The call being made in this MSNBC segment, for corporations to establish networks of commissars and gatekeepers, to develop and position propagandists, real and robotic, charged and programmed with and for political education and organization, with the express purpose to control and shape what people think and say, is an expression of totalitarian desire. By omitting the fact of government regulation, the piece leaves the impression that corporations have an inherent right to censor and label. Beyond the assumption of right, corporate elites and functionaries aren’t hiding the agenda anymore. They are up in our grill with it, openly advocating the end of democracy and describing as progress and justice its replacement with systems analogous to those operated by the Chinese Communist Party.  This is the Orwellian nightmare world depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four made concrete, albeit technological elevated and dressed in more fashionable Huxleyan garments. It’s Debord’s Spectacular Society. I talk about this as if it is coming, but these systems already exists and we are now seeing powerful corporations going to war with our republic. And because they control the airwaves, the corporations are reporting the war from their side of the battlefield. Their enemy is the sovereign people and their republic. They are using Trump to legitimize their claim to virtue.

It’s not the institutions of republic government that needs smashing. Workers need that machinery for advancing the struggle to control their destiny. It’s corporate power that needs its collective head dashed upon the rocks. The corporation is our enemy. When they win, what I am writing at this moment will vanish into the ether, assuming I am even allowed to have a WordPress account.