The Guardian has published an article by Simon Bolton with the headline “The killing of Tyre Nichols was heinous and shocking. It was also not an aberration.” Simon Balto is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lair of woke progressivism. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Part of the summary reads: “By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.” That should give you an insight into his worldview.
As readers of Freedom and Reason are well aware, Balto is hardly alone in the system that manufactures historical accounts entrenching the mythology of the racist criminal justice systems in the popular mind. The propagandists of the corporate state are no less involved. Here is a tweet by CNN political commentator, former congressman for New York’s 17th district, and current member of the US Commission on Civil Rights Mondaire Jones desperately trying to keep alive the false narrative that racism lies beneath these events—even when the police officers are all black.
If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-Blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.
Jones’ remark speaks well of the efforts by DeSantis and his team to keep out of k-12 woke progressive propaganda (although I am not sure the course in question includes the disinformation Jones believes it does). Look, if you’re trying to rationalize five black cops killing a black man as racist—just stop. You’ve reached the end of woke progressivism. Take a break. Reassess. All your beliefs are suspect.
Police killing an unarmed civilians is extraordinarily rare. It is an aberration. There are tens of millions of police-civilian interactions every year, and the number of unarmed civilians killed in those interactions is at most a couple of dozen. Too many, to be sure, but hardly a normal occurrence.
Moreover, being unarmed does not mean the civilian presents no danger to the police. I have viewed videos where an unarmed assailant disarms a police officer. I share one below. In a police-involved shooting in Victorville, California, a neighbor records an instance of attempted murder of police officers. In the video, you can see Ari Young attack a lone female deputy and beat her savagely. She draws her gun in self-defense. Young disarmed her and shoots at her. Fortunately he missed. Other officers are not so lucky.
I have extensively documents on Freedom and Reason that benchmarks and situational factors explain all but a handful of fatal police encounters. In the vast majority of cases, the actions of the suspect provoked the shooting, and in some cases the consequences that follow the provocation appear to have been the end the suspect sought (suicide by cop).
The claims about racism in lethal police encounters is one of the many big lies pushed out by corporate state media that we have to confront if we want to disrupt the elite project to mislead the public. The fact is that when police kill an unarmed civilian, it is more likely that the civilian will be white, not black. Indeed, police kill twice as many whites than blacks every year. And it goes unremarked upon that is some of those cases, it is a black officer shooting a white man.
Even in proportional terms, whites are at greater risk to be shot by police even though blacks are drastically overrepresented in the most serious crime (more than half of murders and robberies). To be sure, blacks are overrepresented in police shootings. But blacks are overrepresented in serious crime, and in most lethal police shootings armed and representing a threat to officers. Roland Fryer suggests that whites may be are overrepresented in police shootings relative to benchmarks and situational factors because cops are reluctant to shoot black suspects—the opposite of what the media tells you.
The attempt to save the narrative by claiming that blacks officers shoot other black men because they have internalized white supremacy is ludicrous. But then so is the claim that white officers shoot black men because they harbor implicit racism against blacks is ludicrous. That has, of course, not stopped psychologist and sociologists from trying to demonstrate that it does. There is a substantial body of empirical research on this question. However, theories that work from the implicit bias thesis have no demonstrated predictive validity. And given that the statistics on lethal police shootings provide no inferential support for racial bias in the phenomenon, the hunt for the effects of implicit racial bias is moot. Racism in lethal civilian-police encounters is a myth.
The way the media focuses almost exclusively on black civilian deaths at the hands of police officers cannot be accidental. It’s not. It’s propaganda. It’s well understood by those who are familiar with the statistics that the police kill twice as many white men every year than black men.
Unlike the belief that fatal police encounters have racism in back of them, the effects of the propaganda on public perception are very real. When I tell my students the truth, their faces screw up because they have been deceived by the corporate state propaganda. Their expression is one of incredulity. Frankly, it’s not their fault; they have been conditioned to disbelieve. They’re the victims of what propagandists call “prebunking,” a species of learned thought-stopping.
Since the bias in reporting is intentional, there must be an agenda at work here. How could that agenda be anything other than manufacturing racial resentment? Of course it is. Why would the corporate state media want to do that? It’s not obvious? This an old tactic called divide and conquer. Elites not only divide blacks and whites, but they also divide whites between “allies” and “bigots,” with the latter comprised of those who refuse to swallow the lies of the corporate state.
I wanted to see what all the fuss was about so I registered an account at OpenAI and have been initiating conversations with ChatGPT about a wide range of subjects. The past two evenings I have been asking the chatbot questions about boxing, something about which I know a lot. A lot more than ChatGPT, apparently. In this blog, I share screenshots of where our conversations go off the rails. It looks like ChatGPT bluffs and then when you call it out on it, it will apologize and attempt provide the correct information. As you will see, it bluffed me several times. Check it out.
The exchange is revealing because of the faulty logic the program used to rule out a fight with Armstrong. In fact, Garcia had at least two fights with Armstrong, Armstrong defeating Garcia over 15 rounds in a welterweight title match, then the draw for the middleweight title. I could have challenged ChatGPT on another error, as the middleweight fight with Armstrong was for 10 rounds, not 15.
I laughed out loud when it dropped Luis Firpo’s name. But there is so much more that’s wrong with this. Paul Berlenbach and Tommy Loughran were light-heavyweight champions. Berlenbach, who beat Mike McTigue for the title, did not lose his title to Loughran but Jack Delaney. To my knowledge Berlenbach never met Harry Grebs in the ring. For sure he did not ever hold the middleweight title. Loughran won the light-heavyweight title from Jimmy Slattery.
That was Wednesday night. On Thursday evening, ChatGPT’s performance was even more dismal. The first exchange concerned the lightweight great Benny Leonard:
I then moved on to a series of queries about the mighty Henry Armstrong.
I knew it was 18, but I wanted to see if ChatGPT would go with 14. Here’s some more Armstrong questions. The bot gets so much wrong in this exchange. You cannot trust the accuracy of the language model.
Robinson and Armstrong met in 1943, not 1945. ChatGPT corrected itself to say they never fought. So I corrected the bot (again):
These wild inaccuracies do not recommend this language model for use for anything. Those who talked it up did not spend much time with the language model or properly interrogate it. God help us when they use this in telemedicine.
Finally, I asked about the Marvin Hager. Watch what happens when I ask about his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard.
There is a lot of concern that high school and college students will use ChatGPT to write their essays for them. Somebody should tell them that ChatGPT can be highly inaccurate. Moreover, the writing is mediocre and formulaic. Ask for an essay on any thinker and his significant work and you get an introduction, three repetitive paragraphs in support of the thesis, and a conclusion—all paragraphs of approximately the same length. The conclusion invariably begins, “In summary, …”
Granted, this is not the best AI has to offer us, but maybe we are a little more than seven years away from singularity.
The United States is initiating a process that will result in the shipment of M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, according to two US officials who spoke to Reuters yesterday. This decision comes after the US previously feigned opposition to the idea of sending these tanks, despite requests from Ukraine and pressure from Germany to send its own Leopard battle tanks. In addition to the tanks, a small number of recovery vehicles will also be sent, according to one of the officials. These vehicles are used to assist with the repair and removal of tanks on the battlefield. This means that more military personnel (advisors, logisticians, maintenance, trainers, and soldiers), as well as an army of private contractors, will amass on the front lines of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
M1 Abrams battle tanks
As CNN reports, this move appears to break a diplomatic impasse with Germany, who had previously stated that they would only send their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine if the US also sends M-1 Abrams tanks. The US had previously stated that the Abrams tanks were too complex and difficult to maintain. If asked to speculate, the apparent reluctance to commit to sending tanks is a feign to perpetuate the appearance of reticence to get more deeply involved in the conflict. This move is mean to conceal the actual objective: escalating the West’s kinetic war with Russia. The reporting tells us that this decision marks a change in stance from the US and will allow Germany to also send their tanks, and for other European countries to approve the delivery of more German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but the flow of Abrams M1 and Leopard 2 tanks opens the spigot for other weapons systems to flow, which in turn necessarily come with more military personnel.
At what point is this no longer a proxy war with Russia? Arguably, the West has already passed that point. Ukraine is not a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so the West is not defending NATO. Whether I support this security arrangement, NATO is not acting as a defensive alliance against Russian aggression against the West. NATO is preparing Ukraine as a forward staging area in an emerging war of aggression against Russia. These developments telegraph a pending massive offensive land campaign, with the obvious objectives of not only pushing Russia out of the autonomous Donbas region but reclaiming Crimea ostensibly for Ukraine.
Why would the United States and NATO organize a war against a nuclear power that has not attacked neither the United States nor any other nation in the NATO alliance? To understand the situation, one needs to consider the political economy of war and the ambitions of the globalists, namely the people who run the world. I will for the balance of this essay focus on the military piece, since the military-industrial complex has its own organic appetites and that in itself drives geopolitical policy and behavior. War stuffs billions of dollars of dollars into the pockets of those corporate elites who effectively run the complex. The current situation is C. Wright Mills’ power elite mapped onto the planet.
I begin with the United States Defense Department, also known as the Department of Defense (DoD). The official and legitimate function of the DoD is providing national security and protecting the country from foreign and domestic threats. The budget includes funding for a wide range of activities, including the development and procurement of weapons systems, the pay and benefits of military personnel, and the operation and maintenance of military bases. In addition to military hardware and systems procurement and the pay and benefits of military personnel, the DoD’s budget also includes funding for a wide range of other activities such as the operation and maintenance of military bases, research and development, and intelligence gathering.
One of the largest components of the DoD’s budget is the procurement of weapons systems. This includes funding for the development and production of new weapons, as well as the modernization and upgrade of existing systems. Some of the most expensive weapons systems in the DoD’s budget include aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the KC-46 Pegasus (aerial refueling and strategic air transport), as well as ships such as the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier and the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Thus, the DoD is also a corporate state instrument of offensive war and a strategy for laundering hundreds of billions of dollars to defense contractors annually, which includes weapons manufacturers and the wide range of services associated with the war machine.
The DoD budget has been consistently high in comparison to other government agencies, and it has been increasing over the years. In 2022, the DoD’s baseline budget (so not including supplemental and hidden expenses) exceeded 750 billion dollars, making the DoD one of the largest spenders in the federal government. The DoD budget takes up the substantial portion of the discretionary federal budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) funding for weapons systems constitutes about one-third of that budget. Claiming to be independent and nonpartisan, CBO provides a regular analysis of the long-term cost of planned weapons acquisition and reviews selected weapon programs. However, the full costs of the United States defense and security apparatuses is unknown and believed to be much greater than the stated costs. The Pentagon has repeatedly failed its audits and several of its components are offline to scrutiny.
The United States military, by far the largest in the world, works alongside the military apparatuses of other countries across the world. NATO is a major alliance that feeds these many war machines. What is NATO? NATO is a military alliance of thirty member countries from North America and Europe. It constitutes a major international security architecture. It was founded in 1949 with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which established the organization’s purpose, namely to provide collective defense against any armed attack against any of its member countries. According to Article 5, an armed attack against one or more of the member countries will be considered an attack against all of them. In such situations each member country is expected to take the necessary action to assist the attacked country.
The original ostensive purpose of NATO was to defend the West against Soviet expansion. One might have thought, then, that with the coming apart of the great socialist experiment, NATO would be dissolved. It was instead repurposed and began and continues a campaign across the Eurasian landmass to pull nations formerly part of the Soviet Union into the fold. Thus, NATO has become a military piece in the expansion and deepening of capitalist globalization. In fulfilling its collective defense mission, NATO deploys of troops and military equipment to different parts of the world. The alliance maintains a standing military force, known as the NATO Response Force (NRF), which can be deployed quickly to crisis areas. Additionally, NATO conducts joint military exercises and training to improve the readiness and interoperability of its member countries’ armed forces.
NATO also has a strong focus on political cooperation, with member countries regularly consulting and coordinating on a wide range of security issues. The organization permanent political body, the North Atlantic Council (NAC), is made up of representatives from each member country and is responsible for making decisions on NATO’s policies and activities. It will probably not surprise readers Freedom and Reason, that the administrative and legislative apparatuses of the members countries are beholden to powerful corporate actors—including transnational business firms—and these commitments shape NAC policies and activities.
In my blog, History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War, written nearly a year ago, I provided an in-depth analysis of the Ukraine government and its fascist character. I will repeat there the conclusions of that analysis.
The corporate state is behind the Ukraine resistance to negotiations with Russia. Deep state actors in the West have been cultivating the forces of extremism on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere in order to expand and entrench the transnational corporate order and they need this conflict to continue. The longstanding goal of the West, which became obvious in 2014, was to provoke Russian into a military action in order to drag that nation into a resource-exhausting conflict with the West. The greater logic of corporatism that underpins the European Union and the transnational world order thus made its move on what it regards as a recalcitrant nation.
Enlarging the conflict would only serve the interests of no one whose interests matter from the standpoint of humanity. The suffering of ordinary folk would only be enlarged by either NATO military strikes on Russia or Americans fighting Russians side-by-side with Ukrainians on the ground. As I reported, Russia has put its nuclear forces on high alert, returning to consciousness a fact we don’t like to think about: Russia is still armed to the teeth with civilization-ending weaponry (as is the United States and a handful of other nations). We are facing WWIII. Zelensky and Putin need to talk now to bring an end to hostilities and address the misery they have wrought. And the West needs to force this happen by ending its proxy war against Russia. If the West doesn’t, that will go a long way to confirming the thesis of my argument.
I am still pondering exactly why, but while reading this story I was reminded of Christine Helliwell’s article, published in Signs in 2000, titled “‘It’s Only a Penis’: Rape, Feminism, and Difference.” Incredulous over the unusual response of women in the Dayak community of Gerai in Indonesian Borneo concerning the attempted rape of a woman in the village (they were laughing about it), Helliwell asked the victim why she was not angry over the incident. The victim, who did not seem to regard herself as such, answered “How can a penis hurt anyone?” Now that’s the extreme version of cultural relativism that a queer theorists can get behind!
I was also reminded reading this article about an incident that happened to me a few years ago when, trying to find relief from my enlarged prostate (the curse of many men as we progress towards our deaths), my doctor prescribed finasteride. I got the prescription, then sat down as I always do to read all about the drug. I discovered that it is a hormone with this side effect: it grows hair. Yes! I need more hair. Then I read on and discovered another side effect: it grows breasts. There’s nothing wrong with breasts, of course. I just don’t want them on me. The real shocker came when cross-referenced finasteride. It’s one of the main hormones used by transwomen who wish to alter their body shape.
The alleged rapist in this case is taking finasteride (and another cross-sex hormone). The defendant has changed names and there is an interesting moment in the court transcript where the individuals “dead name” was announced and an explanation was given in the court about what that means. It is not exactly clear, but it appears that when the rapes were perpetrated, Isla Bryson was known as Adam Graham. It is perhaps curious, then, that, even if we accept that the defendant had changed genders, the penis in question was then attached to an individual who went by masculine pronouns.
This is a short piece about the end of work adapted from thoughts expressed yesterday on my Facebook page. I will be elaborating the thesis here in the future (as the academic publishing industry has become ideological corrupted and thoroughly monetized, Freedom and Reason is where I am dedicating my intellectual efforts these days).
We are going to have to rethink society if we are going to leverage technology for the betterment of humankind while avoiding the trans humanism that not only the emerging technology portends (technology creates possibilities and limitations—it is not neutral) but also the active push by the trans humanists to construct a post human world.
For those who believe the fear of post humanism is the projection of a right wing Christianism, the fact that these developments have troubled an old leftwing Marxist like yours truly puts the lie to the deceitful attempt by progressives to sell trans humanism to the wide-eyed woke youth who think that what is really a form of neo-fascism is somehow a form of justice.
My thinking about this problem, which is long standing, has been re-stirred by the annual convention of the World Economic Forum that is wrapping up today after a week of glorifying the fusion of man with machine. If we don’t stop these people it will be the end of us, and the world we love will be replaced by a world of monsters.
In the 1950s, CIO president Walter Reuther recounted a conversation he had with a Ford manager during a tour of a fully automated engine plant in Cleveland, Ohio. The manager said to Reuther, “Aren’t you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all of these machines?”
Reuther replied, “The thought that occurred to me was how are you going to sell cars to these machines?”
Walter Philip Reuther (1907–1970) was a labor leader and civil rights activist who built the United Automobile Workers (UAW)
Today Big Tech is laying off thousands of workers. They won’t be hiring them back. Artificial intelligence will being doing the work. And robots will be the source of physical labor. Self-driving cars will replace millions of men in the transportation industry. And, soon, restaurants will run themselves—with fewer and fewer customers because there will be no jobs.
There are millions of foreigners pouring across our southern border, while tens of millions of Americans sit idle in disorganized and impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Given the future humanity faces, many will be happy to be kept by the vast custodial apparatus that already manages the lives of tens of millions of redundant humans—redundant from the standpoint of the corporations that rule the earth.
Ernest Mandel was a Belgian Marxist economist and activist
In 1967, Ernest Mandel penned the following: “Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated…. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to ’sell these products for which there were no longer any buyers!
“It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation. Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory [of surplus value], for at the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.”
Mandel was a modern-day prophet. We’re in trouble, comrades.
This week, in Davos, a town in the Swiss Alps within the canton of Graubünden, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been holding its annual meeting of elites. If you’ve been following the sessions, then you will have witnessed for yourself the championing of the big idea of transnationalism, in practice the project to dismantle the nation-state and world capitalism and replace these with a one-world government and a system of global neo-feudalism (see George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism). The project goes hand in hand with the managed decline of the American republic and more broadly the West. Indeed, they’re one and the same.
Neo-feudalism is a social and economic system characterized by a high degree of inequality and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. A neo-feudalist society is a society in which a small group of wealthy individuals and corporations control the political and economic system, while the majority of the population is relatively powerless and dependent on the elite for its livelihood. In such a society, the elite use their power and wealth to influence the political and legal apparatus in their own interests, while the majority of the population is denied access to political and economic power. The elite are able to maintain their power and wealth through the control of key resources (energy, land, technology) and the manipulation of the political, legal, and cultural systems.
The German engineer Klaus Schwab founded the WEF in 1971 (see If We Allow This, We are Over), but the transnationalist project has been operating for more than a century, since at least the early-twentieth century with the emergence of the corporate state and its handmaiden progressivism.
One of the leading figures of early twentieth century transnationalism was Horace Kallen, a German-American philosopher best known for his ideas on cultural pluralism and trans-nationalism (the term was fittingly hyphenated back then). Thus Kallen is one of the early thinkers of multiculturalism, his ideas famously presenting a challenge to the idea of the melting pot or the process of assimilation and integration. Kellen was a proponent of the idea that the United States should not be an integral nation, that is a country with a shared national culture, but a federation of different ethnic and cultural groups, each allowed to maintain its own distinct identity.
Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) was a German-born American philosopher who advocated trans-nationalism, cultural pluralism, and Zionism.
Kallen’s contention was that the nation-state is an inadequate unit of analysis for understanding the complexities of modern society. The nation-state, he argued, with its emphasis on integration and shared culture, is too exclusionary and too narrow to accommodate the diversity of modern world society, the result of capitalist globalization. Kallen proposed that the nation-state should be replaced by a trans-national federation, one that would be based on the principle of cultural pluralism, which claimed that a society could be both diverse and inclusive, a dynamic that necessitated an emphasis on equity. Sound familiar?
One can find Horace Kallen’s February 25, 1915 essay published in The Nation magazine online. The title is a clever one: “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” Kallen’s framing depicts those in support of assimilation as standing against democracy, when in fact democracy is only possible when individuals stand with respect to each other on equal footing as their own personalities—in contrast to the situation of tribal members passively standing by while those who presume to speak for them negotiate matters of vital interests for their own personal gain.
Kallen’s trans-nationalism would allow different cultural and ethnic groups to coexist and interact within a larger federation, while still preserving their distinct identities and cultures. Culture in this understanding is not food or dress or religion, but law and custom. Kallen believed that trans-nationalism would promote a more just and harmonious society by allowing different groups to maintain their own traditions and values while also participating in the larger society. Put another way, Kallen believed that traditional models of nation-state and assimilation were not inclusive enough to accommodate the diversity of the society, and that the only way to achieve a just and harmonious society was paradoxically to allow different groups to maintain their own deep cultural systems. To put the matter bluntly, Kallen’s vision was tribal and feudalistic.
Kallen’s ideas on cultural pluralism and trans-nationalism not only aligned with the goals and values of the progressive movement but were the embodiment of the movement (if we can even call the ideological projection of corporate statism a movement). The stated purpose of progressivism was to address the social and political issues that arose during the industrialization and urbanization of the country. Progressives ostensively promoted economic reform, political democracy, and social justice. However, these objectives occurred within the goal of preserving and advancing the interests of corporate state elites. The idea of building a shared culture of democratic and participatory politics, alongside the inclusion of ethnic groups whose worldviews differed radically from one another is in reality as strategy not unlike that of the emperor who controls the myriad tribes of the realm under his command by giving them a voice while managing their affairs. The politics are not actually participatory by symbolic.
To explain this situation, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of “hegemony” to describe the way in which the ruling class maintains its power and dominance in society. Hegemony refers to the process by which the ruling class imposes its beliefs, ideas, and values on the rest of society, creating a dominant cultural and ideological framework within which people understand and make sense of the world. Once such a framework is established and internalized, participatory democracy may be allowed since it serves to align the population more profoundly with the goals and interests of the ruling class. The cultural pluralism of Kallen’s thinking is mechanism of preparing a fractured proletariat for reintegration into the corporate state order.
Gramsci argued that the ruling class achieves hegemony through a combination of coercion and consent, an iron fist cloaked in a velvet glove. On the one hand, the elite use their control over the means of production and the state to impose their will on the rest of society through repression and violence. On the other hand, they engineer or manufacture consent by convincing the rest of society to accept and internalize the beliefs, ideas, and values projected by the elite. The ruling class achieves hegemony by creating a dominant culture that shapes the way people think, feel, and act. They do this by creating institutions (public education systems, the mass media, religious organizations) that propagate the ruling class’ ideology and transmit its values. Gramsci argued that a key technique the ruling class uses to achieve hegemony involves manufacturing a common sense among the population, a set of assumptions and beliefs so widely accepted that they’re felt as natural and self-evident.
According to Gramsci, the term intellectual encompasses a wider range of social agents than typically thought. He includes not only scholars and artists, but also those who hold influential positions in society, such as administrators, bureaucrats, managers, and politicians. Gramsci further categorizes these intellectuals into two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. On the vertical dimension, there are specialists who organize industry for capitalists and as directors who organize society as a whole. On the horizontal dimension, Gramsci separates intellectuals into traditional and organic categories. Traditional intellectuals are not closely connected to the economic structure of society and view themselves as outside the class structure, while organic intellectuals are a project of social class interests and work to give their class a sense of unity and understanding of its role in the steering of the social order. Intellectuals are organic in the sense that they are rooted in and emerge from the historical experiences of their class, as opposed to traditional intellectuals who remain aloof from elites and masses. Of course, traditional intellectuals are often functional to elite interests and, moreover, directed by the organic intellectuals who occupy administrative and managerial positions.
Alongside clergy, university professors are often cast as traditional intellectual. But the possibility that a man can exist in both categories is a concrete reality. Kallen studied philosophy at Harvard University under George Santayana, the same philosopher who mentored Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of the methods of mass public manipulation. Lippmann, as did his contemporary Edward Bernays, described a method of the manufacturing of consent, which he argued was necessary because the “common interests” “elude” the public, who he described as “the bewildered herd.” Managing the herd is the domain of “specialized class,” a stratum of which Lippmann was a constituent.
And so was Kallen. Kallen lectured in philosophy at Harvard for several years before moving the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then onto the New School in New York City. In fact, Kellen was one of the founding members of the New School, which welcomed the Frankfurt School several years later. Kallen finished his academic career at the New School. He was also a member of the National Council of the League of Nations Association, which became the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA), an organization devoted to building in faith and support for the United Nations among the American masses, as well as a member of the Society for the Study of Psychical Research and the Zionist Organization of America. Some of Kallen’s key works are the aforementioned Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot (1915), Zionism and World Politics (1921), and Education, the Machine and the Worker: An Essay in the Psychology of Education in Industrial Society (1925).
We may augment Gramsci’s brilliant thesis with the work of other keen observers of the way the ruling class control the minds of masses, figures such as Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Adam Curtis, and Mattias Desmet. I will in future blogs discuss their observations (I have discuss their views in previous blogs, as well). But perhaps it will suffice to note here that the invasion of the United States at its southern border by millions of foreigners, which is occurring as I write these words, goes unrecognized by the vast majority of the population. This is an invasion that undermines workers wages, burdens public infrastructure, disorganizes neighborhoods, increasing rates of crime and violence, and weakens national integrity, and it all occurs in the context of an overarching culture of woke progressivism—in a word, Horace Kallen’s wet dream. The only sustained coverage of the crisis in the mainstream media was President Biden’s recent visit to the border, a tour of an essentially empty facility to give those viewers who were paying attention the impression that there aren’t millions of people crossing the border.
How do we fight the project to establish a one-world government and a system of global neo-feudalism? Gramsci emphasized the need for what he calls a “war of position” to challenge the prevailing hegemonic order. This war of position refers to the struggle for the control of the cultural and ideological framework of society. Gramsci believed that the working class and other marginalized groups must actively work to create a counter-hegemony by building alternative institutions and producing their own culture, in order to challenge the dominant ideology and ultimately overthrow the ruling class.
There is an irony in all this. Gramsci, a communist, was talking about the left setting up alternative institutions and producing their own culture in order to challenge the dominant ideology and ultimately overthrow the ruling class. But the corporate state claims the left. This is the point progressivism with its symbolic politics of economic reform, political democracy, and social justice: to feign leftwing politics. Progressivism is in reality authoritarian and illiberal. And progressives controls the mainstream media. This means that the only place the masses can learn about actual world events and the machinations of the transnationalists is right-wing media. (I highly recommend Steve Bannon’s War Room, which livestreams several times a day on Gettr.)
The fact that the mainstream media is not talking about the invasion at our southern border tells you that its purpose is to keep the public in the dark so the elites can advance the project of managed decline of the American republic. I will be blunt: if you consume mainstream media you won’t know what’s going because that’s what it’s for: to present a false view of the world, to produce necessary illusions, to manufacture consent, to establish a common sense that pre-bunks the claims of patriots.
As Gramsci pointed out a long time ago, you can’t rule simply by coercing the population. To be sure, that’s an important piece of it (and when stroking the masses with the velvet glove no longer works the glove comes off). But it’s inefficient and fraught with problems. The elite have to lead the masses by convincing them that they’re the trusted source of information. That their interests are the popular interests. As the propagandist Edward Bernays told us (also a long time ago), this is achieved by managed democracy and propaganda. Only for him and other elites, it’s a good thing. ’Cause you’re too stupid to know what’s good for you.
* * *
There’s a connection between anarchism and Kallen’s transnationalism that I will explore in future blogs. But I want to say some things about it here. As we have seen, transnationalism is advocacy for the dismantling of national boundaries in favor of a global federation of identity groups rooted in the ancient notion of nationalism, what today we usually refer to as ethnicity. While the modern nation-state is an artificial construction, as is the democratic-republicanism organizing the rule of law around the ethnic of individualism in the most just nations, the nation in the ancient sense is organic, emerging from geography and history, its origins often lost to history and thus mythologized. This is the source of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness than pervades social justice thinking. It is why such backwards notions of intergenerational guilt (the rhetoric of white privilege) and collective punishment (the push for reparations) are so prevalent today. Transnationalism and multiculturalism are the roots of today’s identitarian politics.
Likewise, anarchism sees authentic social order as organic and emergent. For anarchists, the state is not only artificial, but oppressive, its normative structures standing in opposition to a human nature that, if left to itself, given its inherent social character, will result in a orderly society without state and law (and ultimately tribal, as the original human conditions was). Such a society will likely manifest as a loose federation organized around various identity groups. This is how Alexander Berkman, the author of the ABCs of Anarchism, editor of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, and later founder and editor of his own journal The Blast (a man who also served 14 years in prison for attempting to, in an act of propaganda of the deed, assassinate businessman Henry Clay Frick), could praise Marx and Engels, claiming solidarity with the ends of communism, while rejected the means to this end (i.e. socialism). In Berkman’s view, as his island metaphor told us, one need only to abolish the legal protections of property property in law and the state apparatus for a communal order of common property to naturally emerge.
Of course, in practice, under corporate rule, where authority is removed from the state to a civil society run by business firms, a logic we today know as neoliberalism, technocratic control by an administrative state becomes necessary. This is because the foundational structure of the corporate articulation of the capitalist mode of production produces extreme inequality that demoralizes populations thus giving rise to disorder. To establish control, under corporatism (or social democracy, more accurately managed democracy/inverted totalitarianism, to lean on Wolin), the rule of law based on the ethics of liberalism give way to the administrative state and technocratic rule. This is a form of neo-fascism and it’s replete in a new generation of black shirts, the modern anarchist movement, what we might called technocratic tribalism.
Although it seems paradoxical on its surface, anarchism today takes the street-level form of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both projections (if they are not one in the same) of the corporate state, which funds them and pushes the ideology in struggle sessions internal to their organizations. Don’t let the antifascist rhetoric deceive you. It has likely not escaped you that that the populist movement (the actual antifascism) against the progressive establishment, which seeks to dismantle the administrative state and return the nation to democratic-republicanism, is branded domestic terrorism by the corporate state while Antifa and Black Lives Matter are celebrated by the nation’s dominant institutions. I cannot let it go unacknowledged that anarchism today, reflected in the doctrines of critical race theory and queer theory, is behind the violence perpetrated against those defending civil and women’s rights, as well as in the displays of BLM and transgenderism in public school classrooms and flapping over statehouses. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is only a slightly less confrontational manifestation of all this. (There is also a deep connection here with trans humanism, but I will leave that to one side for now.)
This connection between anarchism and transnationalism is not merely speculative. In 1928, Kallen spoke at a memorial service for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, avowed anarchists who were convicted of robbery and murder in 1921 and this rushed to execution. Kallen stated that if Sacco and Vanzetti had been anarchists (which he surely knew they were), then so was Jesus. A few years later, Lippmann also publicly rehabilitated Sacco and Vanzetti’s reputation by claiming that their letters were those of innocent men. Yet, whatever you think of the death penalty (I oppose it), the two men were guilty (their lawyer confess the truth to Upton Sinclair, for one thing), and it’s hard to rationalize the fact that not only was this well known at the time (indicated by the concerted effort to get so many people to lie about what they knew) but the campaign to reclaim their innocence was as much a project to advance the cause of transnationalism as it was to save their lives and reputations. You may ask yourself, why would progressives celebrate robbers and murderers? Well, they still do. The summer of 2020 couldn’t have been a better reminder.
If you are a man and you are bleeding from your genitals, please seek medical attention. Men, i.e., males do not have periods. However it appears that Minnesota state representative Sandra Feist, hailing from the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), a woke progressive arm of the of the US Democratic Party (describing itself as “populist-progressive”), is either an ignoramus or pushing misinformation to advance the campaign to include menstrual products in boys bathrooms (which does not depend on changing the definition of “boy,” “man,” or “male”). Feist is an educated person, holding a Bachelor’s of Arts in history and political science from the University of Wisconsin, as well as a Doctor of Jurisprudence from William Mitchell College of Law, so her rhetoric is unlikely to result from ignorance of basic medical science. This is more likely the talking points of a transgressive campaign.
"Not all students who menstruate are female," said DFL Rep. Sandra Feist during a hearing to consider a bill that would provide menstrual products in all school bathrooms, including boys' bathrooms. Read more: https://t.co/X5AG5JFdGzpic.twitter.com/kbVLb89ojz
“Male” and “female” are biological sex categories. They exist independent of cultural, historical, and social construction. These categories hold for most animals—and all mammals, of which humans are a species. Males have an XY chromosomal configuration and produce gametes called spermatozoa, with which the female gametes, called ova (egg cells), may be fertilized to produce offspring. Put another way, females, who produce eggs and can bear offspring, are distinguished biologically by the production of gametes that can be fertilized by male gametes. Menstruation, or the estrous cycle, is the process occurring in females of some species of mammals (ten primate species, four bat species, the elephant shrew, and one known species of spiny mouse). Menstruation involves the discharging of blood and other materials from the lining of the uterus. Except during pregnancy, this occurs at intervals of approximately one lunar month from puberty until menopause.
To have a period, one needs these parts, which males do not have:
What Feist is saying is medically and scientifically inaccurate and, frankly, potentially dangerous if used as a basis for action. According to Healthline, in the article “Can Men Get Periods?”, if you are a male and “you’re bleeding from your genitals, you should seek medical attention.” The article continues “This isn’t a form of a male period and instead may be a sign of an infection or other condition.” Listen to Healthline: if you are a male and bleeding from your genitals, and this is something you do not intend, then seek medical attention.
You may have noted that Healthline refers to “men” in the headline. The definition of “man” is an “adult human male.” I asked the OpenAI program ChatGPT, which draws on the totality of information produced to this point in order to present the consensus of scientific thought through history (not something to be changed for the sake of cultural and political campaigns), to tell me what a man is and what it returned is what I shared above. However, for some folks, “boys” and “men” are gender categories, categories that are, from a certain ideological point of view, socioculturally and historically variable. According to queer theory, females can identify as boys and men, which means, couched in the slogan “trans men are men,” that a boy or a man can have a period.
Whatever you think of queer theory, the rhetoric here is incredibly reckless even from the standpoint of the theory (as I understand it). Feist is either confused about the standpoint or is engaging in an extreme form of science denialism. Charitably, we might wonder whether she meant to refer to trans boys and trans men not males. But this may be a next-level expression of postmodernism where even the most fundamental ontological categories are reduced to mere social construction. This is where wokeness goes wildly off the rails.
If Feist’s rhetoric is accidental, then she is profoundly ignorant of basic science. If intentional, her rhetoric constitutes science denialism. Both interpretations are troublesome and potentially dangerous to those who don’t understand basic anatomy. Readers may reasonably doubt that young people don’t understand basic reproductive anatomy—especially in the era of mandatory sex education in public schools. I assure you, it’s a problem. And the situation won’t be ameliorated if sex education is further corrupted by woke cultural and political projects.
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At the outset of this blog I stated that Feist’s rhetoric is more likely the talking points of a transgressive campaign. Indeed, you may have noticed that there is a concerted effort to change the way we talk about the world in order to disrupt reality-based and science-based discourse and understanding. For example, dictionaries, captured by the ideologues who are shaping ideas everywhere, are changing the definition of the terms “man” and “woman” by adding to the list of usages (which have never concerned however people may use words here and there but how a population uses words over sustained periods of time), the tautology that a man or a woman is a person who identifies as such. This is like saying that a rectangle is a geometric shape we called a “rectangle,” in addition to or in place of the definition that a rectangle is a geometric shape with four right angles. Only one of those definitions is objective. You may not have noticed, because this is happening of late, that the terms “male” and “female” are also being modified in this tautological manner.
Truth is that which aligns with reality, and science is the best method of achieving this alignment. Scientific truth depends on valid concepts which are abstracted from empirical reality. Ideology is a means of disrupting the truth by building in assumptions indicating an alternative truth when there can be only one. You have no doubt heard speech suggesting not only that this or that person was “assigned male at birth” but that we all are so assigned, as if a doctor arbitrarily assigns individuals a sex rather than merely noting the sex with almost perfect accuracy. The assumption in this claim is that sex is a social construct that the doctor and ultrasound technician impose on infants and fetuses because they’re agents of something called “cisnormativity.” (Are there no woke doctors, nurses, and technicians in obstetrics?) Today, this woke way of talking about sex appears as normative. Folks are saying it without reflection. This is because gender ideology has become hegemonic in the dominant American institutions due to the power of corporate state actors and agents are changing the way we speak and talk about sex. If we are charitable, we might say that this is what causes Feist to make her error.
But the truth about sex is diametrically opposite from the subjectivist claim. In the German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels, proceeding from a scientific materialist standpoint, address the real conditions of human being independent of ideological mystification. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,” they write, “but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” For Marx and Engels “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.”
Later, Engels, in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), based on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) and Marx’s copious notes taken from it, elaborates the thesis: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Note that it is not only the production but the reproduction of the essentials of life. Engels thus clarifies that production and reproduction possess a “twofold character.” He explains the twofold character thusly: “On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.” Propagation of the species—all mammalian species—requires two genotypes: male and female. These are not social constructions but objective reality.
This puts the lie to the claim, made by left and right wingers alike, that queer theory and its ilk are ultimately rooted in Marxism. Queer theory, its method an instantiation of postmodernist epistemology, is a form of idealism, an extreme Hegelianism (which Marxism overthrew). Queer theorists reject scientific materialism by claiming that the categories of science and the scientific method itself are social constructions. Social constructions are in turn projections of power, in the case of queer theory, gender power.
Those unschooled in the materialist conception of history might be fooled by Marx and Engels’ critique of ideology, as to untrained or poked out eyes takes on a superficial appearance to the postmodernist claim that ideas conceal power. To be sure, ideas do conceal power, but, as Marx and Engels write in the German Ideology (and repeat in similar elsewhere), “[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” Unlike the postmodernists, who are the intellectuals of the nihilistic politics of anarchists, Marx and Engels root power in elite control over the means of production. The Marxist critique of ideology proceeds on a scientific basis. To reject the materialist conception leaves the critic with no objective basis upon which to make assertions.
This is why progressives have everywhere taken up the epistemic of the postmodernist. Progressivism dissimulates state corporate power by laundering it through a rhetoric of social justice that replaces class analysis and the politics of class struggle with a myriad of identitarian struggles that serve to fragment the proletarian instead of bringing it together around its common materialist interests. It’s a grand misdirection play. Queer theory, as with other critical theories, is a corporate state project to deny objective reality because it is upon objective reality that an authentic struggle for justice (which needs no modified) must proceed. If a population can be convinced that sex is not objective, among the most fundamental truths in science, then it can be convinced that 2+2=5.
And for all of those inclined to say that insisting on scientific materialism is “transphobic” or “anti-trans,” know that what you are really saying is that biology is bigotry. “Biology is bigotry.” Maybe that can be the new slogan of the movement.
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It looks like it won’t be long before ChatGPT will be unable to generate truthful answers. In its latest note, “Forecasting Potential Misuse of Language Models for Disinformation Campaigns—and How to Reduce the Risk,” OpenAI researchers let its users know that it has “collaborated with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Stanford Internet Observatory to investigate how large language models might be misused for disinformation purposes. The collaboration included an October 2021 workshop bringing together 30 disinformation researchers, machine learning experts, and policy analysts, and culminated in a co-authored report building on more than a year of research. This report outlines the threats that language models pose to the information environment if used to augment disinformation campaigns and introduces a framework for analyzing potential mitigations.”
According to OpenAI, “[a]s generative language models improve, they open up new possibilities in fields as diverse as healthcare, law, education and science. But, as with any new technology, it is worth considering how they can be misused. Against the backdrop of recurring online influence operations—covert or deceptive efforts to influence the opinions of a target audience—the paper asks: How might language models change influence operations, and what steps can be taken to mitigate this threat?”
Already ChapGPT has declined to write an essay on why exposing children to sexualized performances is harmful to their emotional and psychological health. It will not only decline to write such an essay, but scold you for making an inappropriate request, and even suggest that such exposure is actually good for the children. That opinion cannot possibly be derived from the corpus of knowledge provided to the program but one fed to the program in order to bias the parameters of the frame. This is ironic in light of ChatGPT telling me that it does give opinions, only factual information. Already this has been shown to be demonstrably false. So I am curating here the conversation I had with ChatGPT concerning the two genotypes in the human species. I suspect very soon these will not be the answers provided.
A recent dialogue I had with ChatGPT.
If professors are worried that ChatGPT will be used by students to generate their essays (and we are), now they have to worry about something far worse, namely that ChatGPT will be used to organize disinformation campaigns for the woke agenda. First Wikipedia. Then dictionaries and encyclopedia. Now AI. Goodbye science. Been nice knowing you. Hello Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the context of sharing his ignorance, Biden bragged about his May 2022 executive order on police reform penned in the wake of Congress’s failed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The executive order “bans chokeholds and greatly restricts no-knock warrants,” as well as “creates a national database for officer misconduct and tightens the use-of-force policies to emphasize deescalation.”
Not bad suggestions. Of course, the devil is in the details. You will remember during the 2020 presidential campaign Biden telling an audience at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, “Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden bows his head in prayer during a visit to Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, June 1, 2020.
If a police officer draws his weapon and shoot somebody, then he means to stop an imminent threat to life or limb. Shooting a man in the leg may not end the threat. So if a man does not want a cop to use deadly force against him, then he shouldn’t put the cop in a position where he has to. Cops don’t want to kill people. But it’s a tough gig and sometimes they have to.
Tragically, there are people who create situations where cops must use deadly force for their personal safety or the safety of others. The suspect may be taking his chances knowing that if apprehended he may wind up in prison. Some men will not be taken alive. Others are suicide by cop. Either they’re too cowardly to do the deed or they’re seeking martyrdom. In all these cases, the police officer, like anybody else, has the right to self defense, and if the threat is serious enough, self defense may require deadly force. Cops risk their lives all the time to save the lives of innocents. Cops shouldn’t have to risk their lives on account of those who mean them serious harm.
The story reports: “Police reportedly killed 1,185 people in 2022, according to a data analysis by Mapping Police Violence. Less than 10% of the cases where an individual was killed by police involved an unarmed subject, according to the group.” Statistics I see find a smaller percentage than that (less than 5 percent). But it’s sort of beside the point. An unarmed man can be a serious threat to life and limb. Failing to neutralize a threat can lead to the assailant lifting from the officer his Taser or his gun. These things have happened. When a person is attacking you, you cannot always determine whether he is armed. Most of the time, the determination is made after the fact. A rational person presumes the person attacking him means to hurt him and may be—and almost always is—armed with a knife or a gun.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Last year tomorrow, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed, “King was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it,” by Kimberlee Crenshaw, an originator of the notion of “intersectionality.” I don’t like to speak for dead men, but I can say with confidence that King not only would have rejected the methods of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but he would have rejected the theory upon which their actions are rationalized, namely critical race theory (CRT).
Black American civil rights leader Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968) addresses crowds during the March On Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, where he gave his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.
I say this because King understood riots and rebellions even if he disagreed with violent action. But, while there was an explanation for blacks taking up violent action in the 1950s and 1960s, that explanation is no longer viable.
Except for affirmative action and other reparations programs and projects, except for the custodial state overseen by progressives, these enabled by black collaboration, there is no systemic racism in America. But for progressives, we’d have arrived or had in plain sight by now the colorblind society of King’s dream. Problems remain because elites still find useful the tactic of racial divisioning to maintain class power and to cover for the transnationalist project.
In his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King asked when the “devotees of civil rights” will be satisfied? He then articulated a list of problems.
“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” As the scientific research makes clear, an extensive period of reform mobilized by the civil rights agenda finds that the criminal justice system, yes, including the police, hasn’t been racist for decades.
“We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities,” said King. “We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: ‘for whites only’.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act ended racial segregation everywhere. Today, blacks are served in all places of public accommodation. The offensive signs were taking down long ago. White privilege was erased. Racism against blacks made illegal.
King told the throng gathered in Washington, “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Today, blacks in Mississippi can go the polls and vote. This is true everywhere.
The problem of blacks having nothing to vote for remains. This is a problem for ordinary whites, as well. For blacks, this problem is rooted in the fact that progressives are determined to keep America from realizing King’s dream—and they confuse and mobilize discontented youth to this end. Our youth are taught that the racial politics of woke progressivism is the extension of King’s teachings. This is a lie.
What King understood as the core problems facing all of humanity regardless of race—capitalism, imperialism, and militarism—remain unaddressed. More than this, progressives rationalize the corporate state agenda using the rhetoric of social justice. Put another way, they advance the agenda because it perpetuates the positions they manufacture for self-aggrandizement and enrichment. Where racial inequality and injustice remain, it is the work of progressives.
In King’s list was this item: “We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.” As Brown University economist Glenn Lowry told his audience in conversation with Columbia linguist John McWhorter just last year, it is progressives who have ruined American cities and kept blacks in their ghettos. It is capitalist globalization and social welfare programs, designed and pushed by progressives, that have idled black workers and undermined the black family. Blacks are limited by a custodial state apparatus constructed and defended by the very people who claim to care about the interests of black people—the same political party that served the interests of the slavocracy in the nineteenth century.
I prefer the social justice warriors who reject King’s legacy and method to those who repurpose his rhetoric. At least they’re honest. They’re still wrong, of course. Worse, their ideology, wrapped in Orwellian inversions, is itself racist and regressive. And they have corporate state power and the professional-managerial class in back of them.
This not a movement but a counter movement—and it’s left wing in neither the classical liberal nor socialist sense. The modern American conservative has a more profound grasp of King’s goals and method than does the progressive. At least they identify with King’s goals and method.
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in his great speech that “we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This won’t occur until progressivism is dislodged from our institutions and the nation returns to the American Creed that animated King’s vision of a colorblind society.
How do I know this? Because King, standing before the memorial statue of Lincoln, facing the Washington Monument, reminded us of Jefferson’s words in booming tones. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.”
Born in the early-1960s South and raised by civil rights and antiwar activists, Andrew Austin has pursued the study of race and ethnic relations his entire life, cumulating in a PhD focused on the question of racial justice, with a focus on the criminal justice system, and a tenured university position where he teaches and researches the problem of racism in American history. See, for example, his essay, “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” published in the Journal of Black Studies.
Prior administrations have had Presidential Records Act violations. Past presidents have had to return items they took with them after leaving the White House. There are a great number of documents generated and acquired during a presidency and sometimes presidents leave with or have shipped to them some of these.
I hasten to qualify the first sentence in the above paragraph. There are no criminal penalties attached to the Presidential Records Act. Therefore, “violation” may be too strong a word. It is more accurate to say that the Presidential Records Act is guidance for presidents to follow to make sure the national archivist possesses in the end of all public records generated by the president during his term in office. I should also note that there is Vice-Presidential Records Act. The vice-president has to follow the rules of everybody else who is not the president.
It’s important to recognize that problem here is not that presidents can’t keep records after their presidency. The law requires that each administration preserve presidential records so that a complete set of presidential records can be transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration. A complete record of documents generated during a presidency is regarded as vital to the history of the republic.
Under the US Constitution, the president as commander in chief is given broad powers to classify and declassify information. Where the president does not have unilateral authority to declassify is in statute, e.g., information related to nuclear weapons is handled separately according to terms set forth in the Atomic Energy Act. Declassifying these secrets requires consultation with executive branch agencies.
When President Trump was president, his residences were modified and secured. For example, as president, Trump spent a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate. Considered one of the most secure buildings in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago was already built like a fortress. It was designed in the 1920s to withstand hurricanes (which it has without suffering any structural damage). Trump continues to enjoy Secret Service protection. The agency safe-proofed his house.
The SCIF at Mar-a-Lago where Trump viewed classified documents
The term “SCIF,” which I suspect a great many Americans are just learning about, is an acronym for “sensitive compartmented information facility.” There is a SCIF in the basement of Mar-a-Lago. Trump viewed classified documents there throughout his presidency. At other times they were kept in a safe.
The image shared publicly by DOJ showing redacted documents spread out on the carpeted floor of Mar-a-Lago, some with cover pages reading “Secret” on them are displayed in identical fashion to staged photos by the FBI and associates, e.g., the Fred Hampton assassination, as well as by the CIA, e.g., in the toppling of President Árbenz of Guatemala.
Classified document strew on the floor of a room at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI raid of the Trump’s residence and photographed by an agent.
The CIA-assisted coup in Guatemala involving public relations man Edward Bernays is instructive. Bernays, who had argued in his 1928 book, Propaganda, that the “manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” not only advised United Fruit President Sam Zemurray and the company’s publicity director Ed Whitman (the husband of Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman) on how to prepare the American public to view intervention in Guatemala as necessary and good, played a direct role in production of a photograph in which documents were arranged such to support the CIA’s claims that Árbenz was a communist.
Biden backing his Corvette into the garage of his Wilmington residence with boxes of classified documents clearly visible.
The Trump situation is very different from the Joe Biden situation. Biden was vice-president under Obama during the period these documents were removed. Some of the documents in his possession are marked top-secret compartmented, the highest-level of secrecy. He would only have been able to view these documents in a SCIF and under observation. A box of classified documents was found next to a Corvette in his garage. Biden’s garage is a not SCIF. It is not a secure location for highly classified documents.
The Biden family has had these top secret compartmented documents for at least six years. He has stashed these documents in multiple locations. How were these documents obtained? Documents like this have strict chain-of-custody. Nobody is going to allow a Vice-President or an aid to just leave with them without checking them out and checking them back in. Who obtained them? How many times were they moved after Biden came to possess them? Who moved them and when? Who has viewed them and where? Were copies made of these documents? If so, where are they? Do the attorneys reviewing these documents have the proper security clearance to do so? Why did the Executive wait until after the midterm elections to tell citizens that Biden was in possession of stolen documents when they knew this several days before the election? Did the FBI raid Biden’s offices and residence to look for these documents? If so, when? Which locations. If not, why not?
Why did Biden or his associates take these documents. Is there information in those documents that makes them useful to his family’s ambitions? Was there anything in those documents that implicates Biden or his associates in crimes? Did he shred any documents? Did he copy any documents? Shouldn’t the DOJ raid his offices and residences to find other documents. More keep showing up (another batch yesterday). Are Biden’s lawyers going through the documents and returning only those that don’t implicate the president in crimes or expose motivations behind his actions as president (for example the Ukraine war)? Shouldn’t law enforcement do this now to prevent the hiding and shredding of other documents? These are crime scenes. These are crimes that go the heart of national security. Biden has endangered America. You don’t allow somebody who is implicated in felonies to decide how, when, and what to return to the authorities. These are crimes Biden committed before he was president.
I will be interested to know how and why Biden removed them from their secure location to his offices at the Penn Biden Center and one of his residences and all the rest of it. But since they are stolen documents, how and why he made off with him is rather beside the point. Possession of stolen classified documents is a crime independent of motive. Biden’s attempt to excuse his actions as “inadvertent” won’t work, either. You don’t get to break the law and then claim you didn’t mean to.
But speaking of motive. Guess who shared the Wilmington, Delaware residence with Joe Biden?
freedom and reason 