Not everybody who disagrees with a Supreme Court justice tries to kill him. But when politicians and activists encourage people to go to his home and give them directions, then they enable those who do. This just happened. Around 1:50 am this morning, an armed man from California was arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home after making threats against the Supreme Court justice. The man was armed with at least one weapon and burglary tools. He told the police he was there to kill Kavanaugh over the leaked opinion in the pending ruling concerning the 1973 Roe v Wade precedent.
Understand that what we are witnessing is not the work of the left—at least not the left with which I have associated since I became political conscious. Rather, this is the work of the corporate state and transnationalist countermovement against democratic-republicanism and liberalism. Woke progressivism (and its European counterparts social democracy and corporatism) represent the political project of state capitalism. This praxis stands alongside neoliberalism and neoconservatism as ideologies of unfreedom. It looks favorable on the work of the January 6 Commission, currently holding hearings in Washington DC pursuing a theory of seditious conspiracy (see The Democratic Party is Not the Party of Liberal Politics for a discussion of the character of this intervention). It applauds DHS harassment of parents speaking up at school board meetings (see MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).
The appropriate response to this is inclusive nationalism and participatory populism. The establishment media characterizes these politics as dangerous to democracy (see The Atlantic’s recent essay about the “scheming” Steve Bannon “American Rasputin”). They are, however, an expression of the popular democratic spirit. And that is why they are dangerous. Inclusive nationalism and participatory populism are a threat not to democracy but to the corporate state and the transnationalist project that is destroying democracy and liberty everywhere.
In a letter addressed to J B Schweizer published in Der Social-Demokrat, February 1865, Karl Marx criticized Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous slogan (from What is Property?):“Property is theft!” Since theft as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, which Marx assumes is a category of law, then the anarchist’s slogan is self-refuting. How can the capitalist steal what is lawfully his? This criticism points to the importance of grasping what the criminal represents, namely, to lean on Richard Quinney’s first proposition in his social reality of crime thesis, “crime is a definition of human conduct created by authorized agents in a politically organized society.” In other words, without law there is no crime. And where there is no crime, there is no criminal.
From NRA Family
For many of you this is obvious. But for many others it is not. The gun debate has resurrected some old arguments and I once again feel called upon to suit up and slay them. One of those arguments is commonly sloganeered as such: “If guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns.” It’s an obvious tautology. Take “guns” off of the bumpersticker and stand any thing in its stead. Try “drugs.” See the problem? It’s clever wordplay perhaps, but not an argument. Another argument is that restricting guns will not stop criminals from breaking the law; therefore, restricting guns is a useless exercise. This argument is often joined by the slogan, the implication being that gun laws will only harm who would otherwise be law-abiding gun owners. The claim the argument is making is more than tautological, but is nonetheless wrong.
The argument that laws are useless because criminals break them forgets of what Marx is reminding Schweizer, namely that what makes criminals is criminal law. The existence of crime presupposes laws criminalizing behaviors and sometimes the identities or statuses. Moreover, the existence of a criminal presupposes an adjudicative process by which that definition becomes formally applied to a person accused of perpetrating the targeted behavior or being of some such thing or another. Again, if there were no laws, then there would be neither crime nor criminal. This is not to say that there are no things that should be criminalized (polluting rivers comes to mind). Rather, it’s to simply point out that until behaviors or identities are criminalized, those who act in those ways or who are this things cannot be criminals. This is true by definition.
Because there are people who break a law criminalizing murder, should we have no laws against unjustified killing? Remember, not all killing is unjustified. We may say that murder is “the unlawful taking of a life,” but what this means is that the killing was not justified or is not excused in light of the law. Do laws against those behaviors the law defines as criminal stop those behaviors? Not always. But sometimes. Deterring the behavior we criminalize is part of justification for doing so. Would I kill a person if it weren’t illegal? Only for the same reasons I would kill a person with the law the way it is presently (self-defense, defense of others who cannot defend themselves, overthrow of tyranny). But I’m confident that there are people who would see the absence of law against killing as a license to kill somebody whom they otherwise would not with a law in place.
Furthermore, we have laws not only because we want to reduce the wrongful behaviors the law defines as criminal but because we want to signal their wrongfulness. Here we confront the moral question. Not all law morality finds its way into law. And not all law is rooted in morality. Indeed, some laws transgress moral rules, such as those that segregate public facilities on the basis of race. It follows that we may oppose laws because we believe they are bad laws, not because they are ineffective. I am sure you have heard people argue that we should end drug prohibition because it doesn’t work or because it’s counterproductive (in generating other behavior defined as criminal by other laws and even more of the undesired behavior itself). We often hear this argument applied to the failures of alcohol prohibition (often not carried over to the case of other drugs). But that’s not the reason I oppose drug laws. I oppose drug laws because I don’t believe that it’s the government’s place to tell a person whether they can alter their conscious states or blunt their emotions.
I oppose laws against homosexuality for the same reason: it’s not the government’s place to tell people with whom they may have consensual sex. However, I can assure you that there were a lot of gay men who endured heterosexual appearance and relations because homosexuality was illegal. And, yes, laws against homosexuality drive homosexual behavior underground. But, again, that’s not why it was a bad law. It was bad law because it violates bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty. These are fundamental rights that lie beyond law. To be sure, we may need to prohibit state actors from passing laws that violate these rights. This is why our rights are recognized in bills of them—not because the state gives us our rights, but because we demand in writing assurance that the state recognizes them. Nobody gave women the right to vote; men in power stopped denying women an effective voice in politics via the ballot box. Etcetera.
It will not do as a counterargument against those advocating for stricter gun laws to say that laws are of no purpose because some people choose or are compelled to break them. Such defeatism applies to all law (and, remember, without law there can be no punishment). Moreover, strict gun laws would very likely reduce gun death and injury, just as taking cars off the streets would reduce traffic accidents. There is a deeper issue here: the matter of rights. A successful defense of the freedom to own firearms must proceed on the basis of showing that there is a right or rights gun possession secures, i.e., that gun possession affects rights already recognized in foundational law.
What are these foundational rights? Life and liberty. Like locks on doors and alarm systems, firearms are tools in the defense of these rights. How can I effect my right to life, for example, if access to the means to this end is prohibited or sharply constrained? If an intruder enters my home, I must be able to defend myself and my family from possible harm. What role should the government play in the type of firearm I use to effect that right? A firearm is, after all, a tool. I have no objection to registering weapons and showing authorities I know how to use them. But to deny me access to the tool I believe appropriate for the task must lie beyond the authority of the government of a free people. These rights must be reserved for the people. The Second Amendment was specific in guaranteeing the people the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of a free state because it was assumed that people had a natural right to possess arms for defense of person and home. This was assumed in English common law.
A common sight in high school parking lots int he 1970s and 80s.
The question, then, is whether it is wrong for the people to possess the means to successfully effect their rights. Only under tyrannical government is the defense of one’s rights wrong—and this is because tyranny is wrong. This question does not depend on whether the inhabitants of impoverished inner-city zones murder each other with guns on a daily basis. Nor does this question depend on whether a mentally-deranged teenager walks into a grocery store and shoots a dozen people. We don’t prohibit the possession of trucks because a black nationalist drives his through a Christmas parade in a small city in Wisconsin. We hold him accountable for his actions and inquire into what caused him to act in this way. The truck was only a means to an end. There were many people driving trucks in Waukesha that day (many of them gun owners). A truck did not murder Dancing Grannies. Darrell Brooks did. What happened in Salvador Ramos’ life that made him a mass murderer? Talk about that.
* * *
Bad cartoon
A quick empirical note regarding a bad cartoon. For most of the period of video games with simulated violence, gun homicides have sharply declined over the period before their appearance. This is also true for simulated violence in movies, which has, over the last several decades, become more extreme and graphic. Gun homicide has only very recently started rising again, and this is mostly in areas dominated by gangs where progressive depolicing policy has compromised public safety. Video games are not a cause of mass shootings, which remain a small proportion of homicide deaths. Some mass shooters also enjoy playing video games.
Frank discussion about the epidemiology of monkeypox is out there, but not enough. I’m talking specifically about demography here and who is most at risk. Monkeypox is disproportionately affecting a particular segment of western populations, namely gay men and men who have sex with men. There are two problems with failing to accurately report this fact.
Monkey pox
First, by failing to tell the truth about demography, gay men and men who have sex with men—and women who have sex with these men—may not fully appreciate the risks associated with certain activities. I understand why there’d be reluctance to talk about this for fear of stigmatizing homosexual relations. But blunt talk is necessary in the face of a disfiguring and potentially deadly disease. Political correctness can literally be lethal in this case.
Second, by not discussing the demography of disease transmission, the general population is left with the presumption that monkeypox is a free-range virus, if you will, one transmitted across the general population. We have suffered too greatly from the hysteria generated by COVID-19 fear porn to go through this again with monkeypox. Indeed, COVID-19 hysteria was fueled in major part by public health officials and establishment media not informing the public—and in some cases censoring information to this effect—that COVID-19 was only especially dangerous to the very old and those suffering from autoimmune and severe metabolic disorders.
I hear a lot of griping among elites that large swaths of the population no longer trust authorities—that our institutions are losing legitimacy. Whose fault is this? When authorities don’t level with the public there will be a significant number of people who will come to distrust the government’s claims and, moreover, wonder whether there is an ulterior motive behind what is at times effectively disinformation being pumped out by our major institutions. Time will tell. Maybe it is too soon to try again to bamboozle the masses.
At an event honoring those who died at the hands of a deranged gunman (Salvador Ramos) who entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Joe Biden said, “They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out—may be able to get it and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.” Who said? Doctors? Did they dig the .22 caliber bullet out of a living perpetrator who went on to do more harm? Or were they looking at the lung of a predator in the morgue who was stopped by a 9mm projectile before he could do any (more) harm?
Joe Biden: " the 9mm bullet blows the Lung out of the body "
At any rate, the man’s ignorance is astounding. Embarrassing. This is the President of the United States, the Command-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces. He appears to know nothing at all about firearms—while he gives away billions of dollars worth of them to countries he courts for the new world order he and comrades are building for the future state sought by their corporate masters. Yet he has no hesitation in talking about the subject—and always in the same uninformed way.
“So, the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.” He said this. For self-defense, stopping an attacker is paramount. The 9mm has stopping power at close range. If you know how to place shots, then its stopping power extends quite a bit farther. There is, therefore, a rational basis for possessing such a weapon; the 9mm it is ideal for self-protection. To be sure, it’s not particularly good for hunting, because of loss of energy at distance. But if you were face-to-face with a big animal, you could definitely bring it down with a 9mm. With what weapon would you rather face a bear? A .22 caliber or a 9mm handgun?
Silliness from The New York Times in 2013
“Remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute,” the President said. Somebody should tell this authoritarian hack that rights pretty much are absolute. It’s sort of the point of them. Rights are something you possess by virtue of your existence. Just a few days ago, Biden said that our rights come from God. He says he is a believer. That sounds pretty absolute. Now he presumes to speak for God. Limitations on rights depend only on the rights of others and then only in their real effects and depending on actual circumstance. Self-defense is a fundamental human right—however you think it comes to you.
Let me be clear: the right to self-defense depends on just exercise. This is no so much a limitation as it is an ethic. The efficacy of the means to accomplishing that end is a question for the person who seeks to exercise the right under just circumstances. Leaving a man with only a knife to defend his life and family undermines his right to effective self-defense. Drastically rising crime under Biden’s presidency indicates a need to protect the right and the means to effective self-defense. We have to survive in the world the progressives have made for us.
WATCH: Trudeau announces that he will put forward a BAN on the selling, transfer, or import of handguns in Canada.
— Roberto Wakerell-Cruz✝️ (@Robertopedia) May 30, 2022
However, this seems to be the purpose of compromising that right: to leave men effectively defenseless. Ask yourself: why does Biden wish to disarm the populace? He’s not the only (mis)leader seeking this end. The tyrant to our north—the smarmy Justin Trudeau of Canada—just announced an effective ban on all handguns. A “freeze,” he calls it. There are many other similarities between the moves Canada, the United States, and other western countries are making these days. The same people who seek one world government also seek to curtail to ability of their populations to possess firearms—except, of course, if those populations can be weaponized to threaten Russia.
“You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden said. Yes, you could. The Second Amendment allows for a cannon. Why wouldn’t it? There is nothing in the Second Amendment that says the people have the right to keep and bear arms except for cannons. Go read the amendment. But I can tell you now that it says nothing about prohibiting cannons. Indeed, the author of the amendment, James Madison, confirmed this when, as President, in numerous letters of Marque and Reprisal during the War of 1812 (more than 500), he clarified that the Second Amendment protects the right of private shipowners to acquire and arm their vessels with cannons—cannons purchased as private individuals from private manufacturers.
The 9mm round is the most popular handgun caliber in the United States. Depending on the year, nearly or over half of all handguns produced in the United States over the last several years have been 9mm. Biden wants to ban the most popular type of firearm. Why? Because of the vanishingly small risk of a mass casualty event at a public school? How, in light of the fact that civilian-use AR-15s use .223 Remington, not 9mm? More than this, rifles, the category that includes what activists and politicians refer to “assault weapons” were involved in just three percent of murders effected by firearm in 2020. (I no longer agree with the opinion expressed in this May 2018 blog, The Truth About the AR-15, but the facts are sounds and useful. Moreover, the contrast demonstrates how a rational person changes his mind in the face of facts. On the other hand, even as late as August 2019, I was still stubbornly resisting the opinion I now hold—and in dramatic moralistic tones. See A Truly Awful Commentary on Gun Control and the Value of Life.)
So Biden is stupid. We get that. (We cannot say his gun talk is the result of diminished capacity because he has always talked about guns in this way.) But his handlers allow him to be stupid because they believe Americans are too dumb to know that Biden is clueless on this subject. That’s not the entire reason; there’s also this: his handlers want the leader of the Democratic Party to repeat clichés and slogans because they know they’re effective among the cultural managers who manufacture attitudes useful to corporate power. But people who understand firearms know bullshit when they hear it. So the effect of his speech is further delegitimization of government in eyes of tens of millions of Americans. Arguably, that’s a good thing. But it is certainly no way to build consensus around gun regulation to talk in a way that tells millions of Americans that you don’t have the first clue about what you’re talking about.
The reality is that most gun death is suicide, with the plurality of those who take their lives being 75 years of age or older (and I think you can figure out why for yourself). Most gun homicides involve handguns, and many are perpetrated during robberies and gang violence, which are largely urban phenomena. Moreover, in these cities, guns are already banned or sharply restricted. We are not dealing with the real crisis at hand. Most homicide victims are black males—and black males are only around six percent of the population. Most perpetrators of homicide are black males. Most perpetrators of robbery are blacks males, as well, and guns are used in a large proportion of these crimes. And most of the the victims are black. (Black Lives Matters were useful for the 2020 color revolution. Not so much for saving black lives in our inner-city poverty areas.)
There is an odd disconnect. The AR-15 is rarely the instrument of death in gang violence. The Glock 9mm is popular here. The Swedish semi-automatic TEC-9 and its permutations has also been popular historically. It’s also 9mm. The call for comprehensive gun reform leverages the mass shootings perpetrated by most young white males using the AR-15. Yet Biden is talking about the 9mm. Are gun control advocates planning to limit gang violence without talking about gangs violence? One can see the politics necessity a stealth strategy. But is this the way to go about reducing crime in our inner cities? It looks more like a plan to ban everything, from 9mm handguns to AR-15s. If feels like we are being positioned for disarmament, especially with all the talk about “domestic terrorism” and the mobilization of the Department of Homeland Security against American citizens of a particular political persuasion (MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).
To be sure, there is a violent crime problem in America. As I reported in Bias Coverage of Gun Homicide Distorts Statistical Reality at the Expense of Young Americans, the 45,222 total gun deaths in 2020 were by far the most on record, representing an increase of 14 percent over the year before, a twenty-five percent increase from five years prior and a forty-three percent increase from a decade ago. More than half of those were suicides. However, the growth in gun deaths is largely explained by homicide. The nearly 20,000 gun murders in 2020 were the most since at least 1968 (exceeding the previous peak of 18,253 in 1993). When we look at the homicide statistics, the rise in gun deaths is startling. The 2020 total represented a thirty-four percent increase over the previous year, a nearly fifty percent increase over five years and a seventy-five percent increase over 10 years. (See this recent analysis by Pew Research Center.)
While it is true that the gun death rate in the United States is higher than in many other countries, it is still far below the rates in several Latin American countries (according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington), countries to which the Biden Administration address his invitation to come to the United States. (See my blogs The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence and The Interstate System and the Experience of Safe, Orderly Immigration.) But restricting immigration isn’t the only strategy for reducing violent crime in America. We also need more cops on the street. And while we must demand officers obey the Bill of Rights, we need to make sure that public safety is the number one priority in the list of the job duties.
Guns have always been popular in the United States. They are an enduring piece of Americana. I grew up around guns and have no fear of them. Even when I advocated banning certain types of weapons, I did not do so out of fear (but rather out of a misguided understanding of public health). The desire to disarm Americans will likely fail, but not before whipping up more anger and resentment. That in itself can have political benefit by further polarizing—and paralyzing—the proletariat. Guns have become a major ideological element in class warfare, pitting the professional-managerial strata against the working class. But violence is not caused by guns per se. Yes, gun violence does involve the availability of guns; but guns have always been available. The real cause of gun violence is societal disorganization and an uneven commitment to public safety. Fixing those problems requires solidarity, a substance gun hysteria makes elusive. This is not accidental.
“A researcher’s avatar was sexually assaulted on a metaverse platform owned by Meta, making her the latest victim of sexual abuse on Meta’s platforms, watchdog says.” That’s the headline from a Business Insider article. “A researcher entered the metaverse wanting to study users’ behavior on Meta’s social-networking platform Horizon World,” reports Weilun Soon. “But within an hour after she donned her Oculus virtual-reality headset, she says, her avatar was raped in the virtual space.” This is not an isolated case. In November, a beta tester reported that her avatar had been groped in Horizon Worlds.
But the researcher was not raped. The beta tester was not groped. These things could not possibly have happened. The virtual space is not real. You are not your avatar. You are your body—and your body remains on the plane of the actual world.
A Metaverse meme
Soon finds the researcher’s tale in a report by SumOfUs, “Metaverse: another cesspool of toxic content.” The report links to a video that purportedly shows what happened to the researcher’s avatar from her perspective. “In the video, a male avatar is seen getting very close to her, while another male avatar stands nearby, watching. A bottle of what appears to be alcohol is then passed between the two avatars, per the 28-second video. Two male voices are heard making lewd comments in the video.”
The bottle of alcohol is not real, either. It can only appear to be alcohol. And lewd comments are words. It’s bizarre that Weilun Soon treats these occurrences as if they are actually happening. The bottle does not appear to be alcohol because it really isn’t. In Soon’s account, appear is used here as if there may be alcohol in the bottle. You know, the way a cop presumes there is alcohol in the bottle on your dash right before he asks you to step out of the vehicle. But we are here talking about a bottle that doesn’t exist. There is no alcohol.
In discussing this story on Facebook earlier today, a friend said, “Do people know what make believe is anymore? There were safety measures the players turned off themselves. But it is disturbing that some people wanna gang rape others avatars. What kind of sick people want to do this in this imaginary land?! It is imaginary but disturbing.” I responded, “No more disturbing than shooting people in virtual worlds.”
She liked my comment so I did not elaborate my point. But I will here. Why is it weird to pretend to rape avatars in virtual space but unremarkable to shoot them? If a mother were to walk into her teenage son’s room and witness the boy “raping” an avatar, she would likely be very troubled. Yet mothers watch their teenage sons “killing” other players in hyper-realistic first-person shooter games and pay no mind. Isn’t killing as wrong as rape? But nobody is being killed or raped. Nothing wrong is happening. The only potential crimes here are thought-crimes—and only if we allow thoughts to enter into the realm of punishment. Sure, people think these are wrong thoughts. But that’s an opinion.
Another friend noted that Meta’s latest Quest 2 is highly immersive. The game “has multiple forward facing cameras to capture the environment you are in, augment it, and use it to create the experience. You put that headset on and it immediately starts to recorded and utilize what you would be looking at. Having Darth Vader ’stare’ you directly in your eyes (adjusted for height) can give you chills. Rollercoaster experiences can cause physical reactions.” I am reminded of the movie Brainstorm, where a research team, led by Christopher Walken, constructs a system that directly records and replays the sensory experiences, emotional feelings, and physiological reactions of a subject. Predictably, the military-industrial complex seeks control of the technology for military ends. One researcher, played by Louise Fletcher, records her own death from a heart attack. When the recording is played back, it produces a heart attack in the user.
“Obviously, you can take the headset off but I still have papers from when I was an undergraduate making the argument the Facebook would eventually generate an abundance of poor quality social capital that it would have an impact on ’disconnected’ life whether you wanted it to or not,” writes my Facebook friend. “And, well, here we are.” He continues, “The argument I made was that although discourse would increase, corroded networks of associations and the algorithms that utilize would make that distinction of online or offline irrelevant. Does this lend credence to that concept or something similar? Does there need to be a clear distinction similar to computer facilitated assault?”
These are useful observations and important questions. In my initial Facebook comments (which were only these: “It isn’t real. No one was sexually assaulted”), I wasn’t talking about the socially corrosive effects of virtual reality. I was talking about the absurdity of supposing virtual spaces and occurrences are actual. To be sure, people can become absorbed in a false world where they believe the things that are happening to them are actually happening to them.
We see this problem in religion. A religious man may believe he is possessed by a demon. But he is not really. His experience is that of a false consciousness. This is why it is important to help him understand that the entities supposed by by faith are not actual things. They are real to him because he believes they are real (the Thomas Theorem). We help him by telling him that his experiences are not real. We do not help him by joining him in his delusion. We also don’t regulate religious content or put warning labels on religious experience.
There are mentally ill people who believe the things happening in their head are really happening to them, or that they really are the thing they think they are, such as the embodiment of this or that spirit animal. Consider body dysmorphic disorder, in which a person perceives something about his body that cannot be seen by others. To expect others believe his claims is an attempt to break down the distinction between the real and the imaginary. That is the problem. It leads to horrors such as those I cover in my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds. For instance (true story), a person wants to have a smooth genital areas like the ones he imagines space aliens have, and opportunistic surgeons, rather than refer the deluded man to a psychiatrist (one who isn’t woke), they mutilate his genitalia. Now he has only a hole where his genitals used to be. This is not described as mutilation, but “affirmation.” Affirmative is also expected from those the man encounters who are expected to participate in his delusion.
Violence is the wrong word to describe virtual experiences
We cannot say this enough. What you imagine is happening to you may not be happening to you. If it is the virtual space created by a computer program, then it is not happening to you—at least not physically. And if you can’t be in a virtual space where rape and murder can only be imaginary without experiencing trauma, then how can you stand to watch horror movies, pornography, or read a graphic novel? A “rape” in the metaverse is not a crime because nobody is actually raped. Nor are you actually who you pretend to be online or in real life, even if your pretending is not intentional. You are lying or delusional. You need either to be called out or helped.
Is it the fault of the computer program that you are confused? If you are inclined to answer in the negative, that is not what Meta representative, Kristina Milian, told MIT Technology Review. She told them that users should have “a positive experience with safety tools that are easy to find—and it’s never a user’s fault if they don’t use all the features we offer.” She continued: “We will continue to improve our UI (user interface) and to better understand how people use our tools so that users are able to report things easily and reliably. Our goal is to make Horizon Worlds safe, and we are committed to doing that work.”
Deploying the word “safe” here evokes the woke notion of “safe spaces” on college campuses. These are not spaces safe from outside interference that would limit discourse, but the opposite: rules limiting discourse to keep people “safe” from ideas that might offend them. In both cases, the motive and effect is infantilization.
Moreover, trying to manipulate the public into believing these are spaces where actual things happen is part of the rot of trans-humanism. It functions to prepare populations for changing self and spaces—real selves and spaces—to align with the avatars we create (or are created for us) and the virtual spaces they inhabit. This is the real danger of this discourse—if it ever finds itself way into law and policy.
The researcher is not her avatar. No one was raped here. No one is actually killed in a virtual world. Ever. That people believe that they are raped or killed in virtual spaces—that’s a problem. We need to help people who have become confused about what is real and what is not. The Business Insider article is to helpful. It is an exercise in reification. The bigger problem is expecting us to agree with the deluded that they are what they think they are and that what they think they are experiencing—which cannot be real—is actually real. We mustn’t join them in their delusions. The majority needs to keep its collective head in actual space and time.
Today’s New York Post headline, “Guns now leading cause of death for American children, CDC says,” comes against the backdrop of two nearly back-to-back shootings by young white males, both eighteen years old, the first shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the second at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Between them, the shootings left thirty-one people dead, mostly children. These are the latest in high profile mass shootings occurring over the last several decades. But mass shootings seem to be ramping up.
The NYP story summarizes an analysis published by the New England Journal of Medicine on May 19, “Current Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States,” which, based on data recently released from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reports that firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children. More than five deaths per 100,000 Americans between the ages of one and nineteen were due to guns in 2020, the most recent year for which the CDC has data, a figure that represents a nearly 30 percent increase in firearms deaths among children over 2019. That’s more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population.
The CDC data shows 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 (2021 will likely show an even great number). The NEJM reports that this is a new peak. “Although previous analyses have shown increases in firearm-related mortality in recent years (2015 to 2019), as compared with the relatively stable rates from earlier years (1999 to 2014),these new data show a sharp 13.5% increase in the crude rate of firearm-related death from 2019 to 2020.” Significant, the increase is not driven by suicide, which remains however the largest proportion of gun-related fatalities. “This change was driven largely by firearm homicides, which saw a 33.4% increase in the crude rate from 2019 to 2020, whereas the crude rate of firearm suicides increased by 1.1%.”
“The increase was seen across most demographic characteristics and types of firearm-related death,” note the authors of the analysis (professors at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). The authors provide a link to Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix if readers wished to follow up. I followed up because I had a suspicion about where this increase was occurring; politically hot subjects are often conspicuous in their absence. Scientific norms push scientists to be honest (not that they always are), but those norms don’t usually compel them to make finding all the relevant information easy. You usually have to do that work yourself (the COVID-19 pandemic made that abundantly clear).
I provide a screenshot of significant parts of Fig. S1 below (what is left out is the overall increase, which is reported above, and sex differences, which finds that the vast majority of most homicide victims are male, as expected). One crucial piece included in the screenshot left out of both the NYP story and the NEJM analysis is race and ethnic differences, which is substantial. Take a look:
Significant parts of Fig. S1
You will note that, after Asian/Pacific Islander, which shows a decrease in gun homicide over the period, Non-Hispanic White shows the lowest overall rate of gun fatalities and the lowest increase during the period for all racial and ethnic categories. In contrast, Black or African American shows the largest number of gun fatalities and the largest increase, followed by American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic White. Also included in the screenshot is the higher rate of homicide relative to suicide among those one-to-nineteen years of age, which is reversed in those over the age of nineteen. I do not have access to the relative race/ethnic distinctions among victims of homicide over against suicide. It is entirely possible that the increase of homicide victims is even greater for one or more groups.
I am highlighting the demographic profile of the evidence because the almost exclusive media attention given to shootings perpetrated by white males (Salvador Ramos is Hispanic but racially white) can lead to a false perception of the cause of the rise in gun homicides is a young white male problem. In fact, as I have reported here on Freedom and Reason many times (most recently on April 18, The Continuing Media Campaign of Disinformation about Race and Violence, which contains links to other past blogs), most homicide victims in America are black men and their deaths come at the hands of other black men. Moreover, most mass shootings occur in black and brown neighborhoods and their victims are mostly black and brown people. However, the dominant MSM narrative, amplified by Democratic Party members, is that mass shootings are the result of white male pathology.
Putting aside for now the question of why the MSM and Democrats portrays white males as the source of violence in American society (it’s part of why Douglas Murray calls his latest book The War on The West), we must ask why black and brown victims of gun violence are ignored by the MSM (except when their deaths are at the hands of white perpetrators, a statistically uncommon occurrence)? This is an important question; if we wish to understand gun violence we need to understand its dynamics, and a narrow focus on the unusual case of the young white male mass shooter, which typically involves significant psychiatric illness, leaves the dynamics of most gun violence lying in darkness, where it continues to wreak the most havoc.
The fact is that most gun violence is perpetrated by young black men without fathers in their lives socialized in a subculture that diminishes the capacity for empathy and conditions individuals to see others as means to ends. Most gun deaths in America are associated with robbery, gang warfare, and other crimes of disorganized neighborhoods where generations of black and brown families have been idled by progressive policy (see Michael Shellenberger’s 2021 San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities).
Progressives have for decades installed a mechanism in popular consciousness to deflect from their failure to make American cities thriving centers of personal success. By treating subculture as an authentic expression of racial type, those who draw attention to criminogenic pathologies in the majority-black neighborhoods in our cities are branded racist. This political move comes at the expense of the thousands of young black men victims by young black male perpetrators.
We also have to ask why the United States government is prepared to mobilize the Department of Homeland Security to address the relatively rare phenomenon of white nationalist terrorism but are silent on the remarkably high rate of gun violence occurrence in America’s inner cities. The question is largely rhetorical. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here: progressives are portraying white working families as the real problem of America in the longstanding project to dismantle the American republic.
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 26, 2022
We know what AOC means by “radicalized.”
The NEJM analysis reports that “drug overdose and poisoning increased by 83.6% from 2019 to 2020 among children and adolescents, becoming the third leading cause of death in that age group.” This is significant for the reason the NEJM analysis notes: “The rates for other leading causes of death have remained relatively stable since the previous analysis, which suggests that changes in mortality trends among children and adolescents during the early Covid-19 pandemic were specific to firearm-related injuries and drug poisoning; Covid-19 itself resulted in 0.2 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2020.”
Leading Causes of Death among Children and Adolescents in the United States, 1999 through 2020. Note: Children and adolescents are defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age.
However, pandemics are largely manmade phenomena. Those in power lock down societies, not pathogens, whether naturally occurring or lab enhanced. To be sure, alienation from isolation and social distancing explain some of the increase. This piece is acute. The persistent conditions of America’s cities that produce globally extraordinarily high rates of gun violence and death are the result of a much more profound situation of isolation and social distancing. These are the consequence of decades of progressive policy.
Did you know that when I choose who sees my posts or when I unfriend somebody on Facebook or block somebody on Twitter this does no violence to my expansive position on free speech? Do you realize that I when I use the word “violence” in the rhetorical question I just posed it is purely as a figure of speech and that speech is not actually violence? Did you know that silence is also not actually violence? On the other hand, violence can be a form of speech. Do you understand how that works?
An elementary school library
Did you know that censoring content for adults is not the same thing as censoring content for children? That’s because the body of science in child development finds that, because of variation in imagination, sense of self, and degree of maturity in the capacity for abstraction and reason, not everything from the adult world is age-appropriate and that the regulation of childhood experience is important for normal development of children into adulthood.
In figuring out the world and their place in it, their role in the system of roles and statuses, children often pretend to be things they encounter in their environment. Children may obsess over certain thoughts. Children are easily influenced and manipulated.
Did you know that hate speech and offensive speech and other forms of objectionable speech shared in spaces containing consenting adults are covered under the doctrine of free speech? The merits of these forms of speech are a subjective matter and a commissar who determines what speech in a public space is permissible and what is not for consenting adults necessarily depends on subjective judgment backed by illegitimate force. However, there are time and place restrictions to speech, a matter that I next take up.
Suppose a progressive is giving a talk at a university and conservatives in the audience bring noisemakers and make noise sufficient to disrupt the ability of the speaker to make her points and the audience to receive them under conditions that permit maximal consideration. The disruptive conservatives in the audience are violating the free speech rights of the speaker and and the audience. Since the government is obliged to defend the free speech rights of citizens, it is entirely legitimate, and in fact a dereliction of duty to fail to do so, for the police to forcibly remove the disruptive students from the hall and arrest them for violating the civil rights of the speaker and the audience.
Here is another example. It does not violate the speech rights of a kindergarten teacher to discipline her for talking to her students about gender identity, since elementary school is not an appropriate time and place for such talk. Why is this? It is not age-appropriate; children this young are not developmentally ready for this subject matter. They are minors and cannot freely consent to receiving this information. They are a captive audience; they cannot reasonably leave if they object to this speech. There are reasons for subjecting children to speech to which they cannot consent, such as language arts, math and science, American history etc. But the teacher’s religious or other deeply-held beliefs are not germane to the classroom. Nor are sexually intimate facts about her life.
I conclude by noting that many of those who criticize restrictions on what teachers can expose children to in elementary school are the same people who object to books currently sitting on shelves in high school libraries and who, using the rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, seek to remove curriculum using historical and scientific facts they find objectionable in light of their political-ideological beliefs. as a general rule, no books should be censored. However, in the case of children, material designed to sexualize them, censorship is appropriate.
Here’s the trick that the transnationalists have played on you. They have for decades conflated culture and race to facilitate the spread of an ideology, namely cultural pluralism, what today we more commonly call multiculturalism. Cultural pluralism is an ideology useful to the normalization of transnationalism, an elite program that aims to disintegrate national cultures, dissolve the nation-state model, and dismantle the international rules-based order, the Westphalian system via the means of globalization, e.g., off-shoring and mass immigration. This end is sought to impose a global corporate state system governing world populations via technocratic methods. The program is managed by transnational corporate power and the network of governmental, nongovernmental, and quasigovernmental institutions and organizations serving its interests.
When liberals and modern conservatives push back against cultural pluralism, progressives, the professional-managerial stratum managing the technocracy, as well as representing most ideational managers across the dominant culture and educational industries, accuse critics of multiculturalism of opposition to multiracialism, an accusation that comes with the smear of racist (see Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism). Moreover, the trick permits the progressive claim that western civilization is “white culture”—that is that western civilization was raised up by the white race to secure its interests at the expense of the interests of the nonwhite races who comprise most of the world’s population (see The Myth of White Culture). Those who oppose multiculturalism for its effect on western civilization, are portrayed as white supremacist fearful of losing racial power.
It’s a brilliant trick. At least it has worked brilliantly over the last several decades. However, the trick falls apart when one simply recognizes that culture and race are not the same things (see Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Casual Conflation of Categories). Culture is an emergent ideational and action system composed of beliefs, customs, norms, practices, traditions, and values. Race is the construct of an ideological system called racialism or racism. The attributes of racial categories are generated from socially selected geographically and historically variable heritable phenotypic characteristics. which are falsely claimed to predict attitude, behavioral proclivity, cognitive ability, and moral aptitude. Essentially, what we call race is not more than the result of ancestry. Offspring tend to look like their parents and parents tend to select mates who look like them in part because of convenience; one would expect that mates are selected from those in one’s environment.
Culture is spatially and temporally variable—that is, there is geographical and historical variation. Some systems are better for humans than other systems (See Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility). One can judge the adequacy of cultural systems using objective standards. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which incorporates universal human rights, which are scientifically determinable, with science representing a transcultural and transhistorical method, is a valid and useful model. The model makes clear that racism, which constrains individual liberty, transgresses human rights, and therefore the idea should be discouraged and practices and systems operating on this idea should be dismantled and outlawed. Indeed, racism is an example of a harmful cultural system.
Crucially, racism holds that culture is a projection of race. Why are the people of one culture worse off than another culture? The racist’s answer is that this is because those worse off are racially inferior. But this is not what liberals think. Liberals are proponents and defenders of the Enlightenment, an ethical and philosophical view advancing the humanist notion of liberating individuals from the premodern institutions and tendencies that limit them. Liberals oppose backwards cultures not because they are racist but because they believe in human thriving. Liberals are critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming because these undermine cognitive liberty, equality, and the just and open society.
Since human beings are culture bearers, liberals and conservatives recognize open borders as a strategy for replacing native workers with foreign workers, thereby fracturing proletarian consciousness, undermining organized labor, lowering the price of labor, and superexploiting economic migrants, as well as organizing an army of new voters who owe a debt to the transnationalists who gave them a better life to vote for their policies. Of course, some liberals and conservatives support open borders for this reason and stand alongside progressives in fighting to keep open borders (see The Koch Brothers and the Building of a Grassroots Coalition to Advance Open Borders; Bernie Sanders Gets it on Open Borders Rhetoric—At Least He Did in 2015; Words and Pictures: What is a “liberal” and Who is Responsible for Migrant Deaths?). But progressives are the ones using the fallacy of conflating culture and race to claim that opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism are racist.
* * *
Speaking of culture and race, there is a story out to today about a Michigan teacher who used an assignment in class showing a photo of Barack Obama alongside several other animals asking which of the animals was a primate. She is now on leave and the school has posted guards around the school after receiving death threats. The assignment concerned evolution and asked, “Which of the following are primates?” As a factual matter, if students checked the box with Obama’s picture, they would be correct. Human beings are primates. However, the historic association of monkeys with black people made the exercise problematic.
Before readers have a fit about me appearing to problematize the controversy over this, know that I am a sociologist who teaches the history of racialism and show in class instances of racist illustrations from the nineteenth century to make students aware of how ideology can corrupt science, specially instances when images and diagrams were used deceitfully to convey assumptions and theories about racial hierarchies and inferiority. Please don’t lecture me as if I don’t understand why some observers would find such a classroom exercise offensive. I get it. But I am an optimist that one day we might transcend this association. And I want to make the point that I do not believe this is what this teacher intended.
Carolyn Lett, the director of diversity for the Roeper School where this incident occurred explained, “She [the teacher] had her biology hat on, but didn’t realize the awareness that she should have had culturally.” It is central to the teaching of evolution to confirm that Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with the other apes. We are in fact a species of the great apes and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of science over ideology than having young Americans understand that they are primates. Using the popular president is sure to make the exercise memorable, especially for those who positively identify with the president. Perhaps this is what she was thinking. So this was a misfire.
However, as a general problem, we might ask why the teaching of human evolution should be limited by cultural, ideological, or political hats at all. What if the teacher had used a photo of Trump instead, a man who has been compared to an orangutan? I can imagine some MAGA parents would be offended and raise objections. One wouldn’t want to put an illustration of a generic human in a worksheet with photos of other animals. Whose photo should appear? And what race should the person be? One could replace all the photos with illustrations. I wouldn’t mind if a person with phenotypic features associated with the white race were used in either case. A realistic looking computer-generated image of a generic white person perhaps. Science books have long used these phenotypic features in illustrations. As long as children learn that human beings are primates, mission accomplished.
However offended some people where, the teacher should not be punished, disciplined, retrained, or made to apologize. She is almost certain to never do this again. What evidence is there that the exercise was designed to push a racist view or advance a racist agenda? Doesn’t sound like there is any. Indeed, it is conceivable that to her mind using Barack Obama as the exemplary human being in such an exercise conveys the opposite. Perhaps the teacher should have been wearing her culture hat. She should have at least been aware given the current climate of how some would receive the exercise. But spare her cancellation.
This story reminds me a bit of the woman who was attacked for calling children swinging in a tree monkeys. Some of the children were black. If I had a nickel for every time an adult called me a monkey. Every playground I have ever played on has had monkey bars to swing on. I presume they are called this on the playgrounds in majority black neighborhoods. Whenever I watch video of a monkey the first thought that pops in my head is that I am watching a close relative.
Again, I get the sensitivity around the comparison. However, I look forward to the day when we can recognize all humans as a genus of primates without having an image provoke in our brains offensive and ideological displays from the nineteenth century racism. I also look forward to the day when calling human beings animals is understood as simply a true statement and not an attempt to degrade humans. We are, after all, animals. We are the result of natural history. There is no shame in that. Racism is so poisonous.
Update May 24: Glenn Loury published a note on his substack, “An Argument for Border Control,” that originated on his show, The Glenn Show. I direct you there for more info. But for your convenience, here’s the relevant clip:
From The Glenn Show, May 24, 2022.
* * *
Remarks condemning white supremacy are easy and obvious. Any president, governor, or mayor can be counted on to condemn white supremacy. Trump did it all the time (he was constantly asked to do so in a strategy to manufacture the perception that he is a racist). Actions and systems rooted that ideology are wrong and should be punished and dismantled. Indeed, the United States has done both. Almost sixty years ago the United States abolished systems of racial segregation wherever they existed and outlawed discrimination based on race. What emerged from that experience is the near universal recognition that violence rooted in racial antipathy is contrary to the humanist values that have always resided in the heart of the American spirit.
President Biden delivers remarks in Buffalo on the problem of white supremacy
So where was President Biden when a black nationalist ran over white people at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin? Darrell Brooks, Jr., a black man, intentionally targeted participants based on his racist beliefs. Unlike Payton Gendron’s actions, which were immediately acknowledged as domestic terrorism (Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced that Gendron’s actions are being investigated “as a hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism”), authorities just as quickly denied that Brooks’ actions were and the media stopped reporting the story (see Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed).
On November 22, 2021, in brief comments before discussing other matters, Biden referred to Brooks’ actions as a “horrific act of violence,” but there was nothing in his remarks about black nationalism, racism, or domestic terrorism, even though the facts known to him then clearly indicated that these were all features of the attack that had left five people dead (another person, a child, died later). In a press briefing a week later, Press Secretary Jen Psaki effectively skirted a question by Peter Doocy of Fox News asking about whether Biden was going to Waukesha, steering the conversation back to the government’s campaign to foment panic over the new wave of COVID-19 infections.
However, President Biden, the First Lady at his side, traveled to Buffalo, New York, yesterday afternoon to meet the families of the victims of Saturday’s mass shooting. In his speech, Biden described Gendron, “who massacred innocent people in the name of hateful and perverse ideology rooted in fear and racism,” “a hate-filled individual who had driven 200 miles from Binghamton, in that range, to carry out a murderous, racist rampage,” as the embodiment of “evil.” “What happened here is simple and straightforward,” Biden said. “Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that, through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated and lost individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by the other. By people who don’t look like them.”
As the speech unfolded it became clear that Biden’s visit to Buffalo was an opportunity to tie the populist-nationalist movement upending the Washington establishment to the actions of a handful of extremists (yesterday’s blog, Payton Gendron, the Black Sun, and the Great Replacement Smear, anticipated this tack). Biden essentially told his audience in Buffalo before checking himself (or perhaps somebody flashed him the sign to move on) that his motivation to run for president was to hang Charlottesville 2017 like an albatross around the neck of the populist-nationalist movement. “We heard the chants—’you will not replace us’— in Charlottesville, Virginia. I wasn’t going to run, as the senator knows, again for president. When I saw those people coming out of the woods of the fields in Virginia, in Charlottesville, carrying torches, shouting, you will not replace us, accompanied by white supremacists and carrying Nazi banners, that’s when I said, ‘No, no.’ And I, honest to God, those who know me—Chuck, you know, I wasn’t going to run for certain. But I was going to be darned if I was going to let—, Anyway. I’ll get going.”
“White supremacy is a poison,” Biden told the families in Buffalo as the nation listened in. “And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes.” He implored Americans “to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.” He then picked up and ran with a slogan from the social justice movement, clearing his throat with an Obama tick: “Look, failure to saying that is going to be complicity. Silence is complicity. It’s complicity. We cannot remain silent.” Biden continued: “I call on all Americans to reject the lie, and I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit.”
In case my words at the start of this blog didn’t reach you, we must condemn white supremacy. In one sense, Biden had no choice but to go to Buffalo and make this speech. The problem is that he chose not to go to Waukesha and make this speech. The problem is that, while Biden marked the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder with a private Oval Office meeting with members of Floyd’s family (as congressional negotiators sought a deal on a bill named after Floyd aimed at reforming policing practices across the nation), we all know that Biden would never have invited the family of Tony Timpa, a white man who died in the same manner as Floyd, suffocated with a Dallas police officer’s knee on his neck, while other officers held him down, all of whom returned to active duty after seeing the criminal charges against them dropped. We all know that Democrats would never take a knee for Timpa.
It’s too easy to replace words in Biden’s speech to highlight what ought to be immediately understood as a double standard. Black nationalism is a poison, one that has been allowed to fester and grow. The ideology of black nationalism has no place in America. Yet progressives promote the ideology. By the lights of social justice, failure to condemn black nationalism is complicity in it. Black nationalism is based on a lie, the lie of systemic racism, a lie told for power, political gain, and profit. Democrats peddle the lie. They give oxygen to it. An so on. That I have to rehearse what should be obvious to everybody but isn’t speaks volumes about the moment.
Democrats wearing Kente scarfs while genuflecting to Black Lives Matter
It should also be obvious what lurks behind the double standard. Biden links criticism and opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism (this is what he means by attributing to his political opponents “fear”) to the actions of a white supremacist who shares the same hateful ideology as the soldiers the United States is arming in Ukraine—the same hateful ideology the United States has been weaponizing since the end of WWII when the CIA and the NSA recruited Nazis in the struggle against world communism. Yesterday, knowing full well the answer to the question, the establishment media wondered out loud, “What is Ukraine’s Azov Regiment?” This is a tactic in the strategy of organizing ignorance. Biden goes about how terrible are weapons of war serving as chief salesman of the military industry worldwide.
Bannon explains to his audience who is being replaced.
Biden accuses the Americans he falsely associates with racism and terrorism of not understanding America, as if understanding American means agreeing with his transnationalist ideology—or being associated with neo-Nazis. As I noted in yesterday’s blog, the establishment means to make it impossible for you to criticize mass immigration. The political function of selective condemnation of hateful ideology is strategic. We have to call it out.
Note: 10:44 am blog updated to include a recent tweet on the surrender of Azov Battalion to Russian forces in Mariupol, Ukraine.
As you might imagine, or maybe you saw for yourself, Twitter yesterday was a total shit storm. I’m sure we will see more of the same today. Progressives aren’t going to let a mass shooting go to waste—at least not a shooting useful to the narrative that white people are the reason we can’t have the good society (as progressives define it, anyway). The elite know that popular ignorance about the demographics of mass killing, a false consciousness the establishment media has spent decades cultivating, allows for a particular albeit fallacious narrative to be reinforced with each new mass shooting, which, in America, can be counted on occurring with frightening frequency.
The Buffalo massacre is yet another installment in what I called in a recent blog entry The Continuing Media Campaign of Disinformation about Race and Violence. The pattern is entirely predictable: mass murder committed by white men is used by progressives as an opportunity to push talking points about alleged racist police killings of black people, the smearing of Muslims as terrorists, and the problem of civilian gun ownership; whereas mass murder committed by blacks and Muslims is either censored or rationalized. To punctuate the narrative, Twitter is awash in images of the Buffalo shooter juxtaposed with images of Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15 or US Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky with his family (all seven of them) armed with their AR-15s or US Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado with her four sons with their AR-15s. That both the Massie and Boebert family photos were snapped in front of Christmas trees makes the campaign to bring into disrepute western civilization even more potent.
The Continuing Media Campaign of Disinformation about Race and Violence contains links to some of my many other blogs on this topic. In those blogs, I debunk the prevailing narrative in its various permutations. I show that it’s not true that most mass killing is perpetrated by white men. Indeed, over all, and this is true both proportionally and absolutely, white men are underrepresented in murder, mass or otherwise. Moreover, I show that police kill many more whites every year than members of other racial groups; the selective images of cops taking living whites perpetrators into custody instead of summarily executing them, as the cops are alleged to do in the case of black perpetrators, distort perception. But I don’t want to rehash all of that here (read the blogs). I want to focus instead on the usefulness of the Buffalo massacre in the establishment campaign to weaken nationalist sentiment as the country approaches the mid-term elections. Populist enthusiasm signals real trouble for the globalist agenda. However, the incident is most useful to these ends if a particular element of it is obscured, namely the establishment’s own support for right-wing extremism.
Payton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter.
This is Payton Gendron. Commit this picture to memory. I will recall one of the details in a moment. Gendron shot and killed ten people at a Buffalo supermarket (Tops Friendly Market grocery) in a majority-black neighborhood. Gendron is a white supremacist. It appears from screenshots of his gun that Gendron wrote the names of Waukesha, Wisconsin parade massacre victims on the barrel (he wrote other things on the gun, as well). Waukesha was the site of a black nationalist terrorist attack last year. If you remember, Darrell Brooks, Jr., aka MathBoi Fly, drove his truck through a Christmas parade, intentionally running over participants, killing several of them, mostly old white Christians. Unlike Gendron’s actions, which were immediately acknowledged as domestic terrorism, authorities denied that Brooks’ actions were and the media stopped reporting the story (see Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). I understand the President will travel to Buffalo. He avoided Waukesha.
Among the items written on Gendron’s gun was an anti-black slur.
Like some other white supremacists who have recently perpetrated massacres, Gendron posted a manifesto. The Gendron manifesto rehearses themes similar to these in the other manifestos. Sunday morning, The New York Times made note of it, running the headline A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.The Times reports that the suspect in the Buffalo massacre was a proponent of “replacement theory.” The theory, according to The Times, is associated with the 2018 shooting inside a Pittsburgh synagogue (Tree of Life), in which “a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant ‘invaders’ into the United States.” The white man was Robert Gregory Bowers, who had posted to the social network Gab, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
The Times continues: “The next year, another white man, angry over what he called ‘the Hispanic invasion of Texas,’ opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling police he had sought to kill Mexicans.” That white man, Patrick Crusius, drove eleven hours to commit the slayings. Like Crusius, Gendron, also white, drove several hours from his home to perpetrate his mass murder. Police attribute to Crusius a manifesto that had ant-immigrant and white nationalist themes posted on the message board 8chan. Gab and 8chan are part of the alt-right communication network. Crusius’s manifesto cites the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand as inspiration. The Christchurch shootings, which left 51 people dead, was perpetrated by Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a white supremacist. Prior to the attack, Tarrant had also published an online manifesto. Like Gendron, Tarrant live streamed the massacre.
Having established a pattern, The Times’ article endeavors to link that pattern to populist nationalism. “By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as ’replacers’ of white Americans,” writes The Times. “Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party—spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.” Despite what sounds like a rather large crowd of conservatives, only a few are mentioned in the article. One of them is Tucker Carlson, whom I will discuss in a moment. (The Guardian casts a wider net in “Scrutiny of Republicans who embrace ‘great replacement theory’ after Buffalo massacre.”)
But before I turn to Carlson, note the framing. The problem is not an extreme and racialized version of arguments made by the critics and opponents of mass immigration who would never advocate racism let alone mass violence (or at least never have). Instead, criticism and opposition to mass immigration are framed as sanitized and stealthy expressions of white supremacy. This inversion makes it impossible to be a critic of mass immigration without also being a racist. By portraying criticism and opposition to mass immigration as “anti-immigrant” sentiment rooted in “white nationalist” ideology, the establishment in back of the policy of mass immigration stifles criticism and opposition to that policy. The tactic is analogous to an argument claiming that those who criticize the practice of abortion are responsible for abortion clinic bombings. There is no intrinsic connection between criticisms of mass immigration and multiculturalism and racist violence—or even racism.
Carlson joyfully pushing back against the establishment campaign to delegitimize him by smearing him as a white nationalist.
In the blog, The “Great Replacement” as Antiracist Propaganda, I attempt to explain this separation between ideas, on the one hand, and violence, on the other. I write about the campaign against Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, the most popular voice in media presently. Carlson has become a target because of his popularity. I discuss an April 2021 dialog with Mark Steyn wherein Carlson notes that, by promoting immigration from developing countries and pushing policies of multiculturalism over assimilation, the immigration policies of the Democratic Party favor that party’s electoral hegemony over against Republican fortunes. For this rather straightforward observation, the Anti-Defamation League demanded Carlson’s firing. They didn’t get it. (I have written extensively about immigration. See Rationalizing the Border Crisis with Hysteria, Lies, and Smears.)
I note in the blog that Carlson anticipated the accusation that he was advancing a “white supremacist theory,” an argument originally developed as an analysis of state policies that holds that, by recruiting Arab and Muslim populations from Africa and the Middle East, elites sought to change European societies culturally and demographically to undermine organized labor and weaken nationalist sentiment, both steps in regionalizing corporate control over the masses and entrenching capitalist exploitation. In Strange Fruit, Kenan Malik uses the example of capitalist elites in France in the 1970s using Islam as a “stabilizing force” to keep “the faithful” away from “unions or revolutionary parties” (these are the words of Paul Dijoud, Minister for Immigrant Workers). Among the various tactics, the government encouraged employers to build prayer rooms to divert Muslims from militant activity (see Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility). Keeping newcomers away from native-born workers proved an effective strategy to disorganize the national proletariat. This is the function of diversity. In the 1950s, roughly one-third of French workers belonged to a trade union. Today, less than one in ten. This mirrors the decline in organized labor in the United States during the same period. The decline in labor density in the US follows the opening of the national borders in 1965. (See Joe Biden and the Ultimate Source of Our Strength: “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop”; also The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate.)
Why is white supremacist theory in quotes in the above paragraph? Because Arab is an ethnicity and Muslim is a religious category (see Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were? See also See Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism). The so-called replacement theory is not intrinsically a racist theory. People, as Malik points out, are culture-bearers, vessels who carry norms and values often incompatible with the culture of the region to which they are traveling (see Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration). Without vetting the new arrivals and without a comprehensive program of assimilation into culture of the host country, the country will be changed. This is why progressives portray assimilation as racist—it disrupts the work of diversity in disintegrating national identity. To be sure, some nationalists in the United States adapted the theory to explain America’s situation, which for progressives means, by way of the fallacious reasoning, that anybody who suggests elements of the theory enjoy even face validity is a white supremacist or, at the very least, white supremacist adjacent.
I asked readers in that blog to suspend reflex for a moment and think about the elite framing and our current situation rationally: “According to progressives, conservatives worry that changing the demographics of the United States in a direction indicated by past, present, and future patterns of immigration harms the electoral prospects of Republicans.” I continued to write, “Progressives put it like this: The nation will be less white and, since Republicans are the party of white people (black and brown Republicans notwithstanding), and since a white majority signals white supremacy (which is a good reason for getting rid of the white majority), the concern is by definition racist.” I then pointed out the obvious: as a factual matter, mass immigration did change and is changing Europe and the United States.
For progressives, they will say the change is for the better, which sounds like a claim that requires supporting evidence—and an invitation to disagree. But, if you disagree, then you are racist. Given progressive hegemony over the nation’s institutions, disagreeing with pro-immigration propaganda makes the disagreer appear in public as a bad person. I asked in that blog that readers to consider this: “Why are progressives always talking about the value of diversity and eagerly anticipating the time when whites are no longer the majority in America?” Fewer white people is a thing to be celebrated. Personally, I don’t care if whites are a minority (they have always been globally). In fact, I have argued many times that I would prefer we abandon the notion of whiteness—and every other racial category—altogether. But progressives can’t stop talking about race. It is everything to them. They demand we center race to yield a master theory of our circumstances. It’s the wedge they use to divide the proletariat. Therefore, in their worldview, any argument that suggests the status quo of a white majority in the West must be a racist argument. And in a world guided by antiracism, those seeking “racial justice” must actively work to transgress that status quo.
What’s clear in all this is that, to get the public to ignore the elephant in the bedroom, progressives smear conservatives as racists for expressing concern with open borders and multiculturalism by tying that concern to a white supremacist theory, the “replacement theory.” Social democrats do the same thing in Europe. I write in that blog, “The organized response to the effects mass immigration has wrought, namely the populist and nationalist movements seeking national sovereignty and cultural integrity, have been so frequently paired with so many awful labels ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist,’ ‘fascist,’ ‘Islamophobe,’ ‘nativist,’ ‘xenophobe,’ even ‘Nazi’—that now simply announcing ‘populist’ and ‘nationalist’ will do to make most audiences recoil in disgust and horror.” This smearing of populists and nationalists is dressed as “antiracism” and put at the center of the “struggle for social justice.” Antiracism is the new racism. (For a depth discussion of antiracism, see The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics.)
With the Buffalo massacre, the corporate state finds an opportunity to ramp up anti-racist propaganda in a campaign to blunt the surge of support for the populist-nationalist element of the Republican Party in the approaching midterms. The Times ends its article with the words of Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that pursued the successful civil suit against organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Repeating the inverted frame, Spitalnick argues that the broader promotion of replacement rhetoric normalizes hate and emboldens violent extremists. “This is the inevitable result of the normalization of white supremacist Replacement Theory in all its forms,” Spitalnick said, giving the slander the oomph of a proper noun. “Tucker Carlson may lead that charge—but he’s backed by Republican elected officials and other leaders eager to amplify this deadly conspiracy.” The establishment media means to hang Gendron around the populist-nationalist neck like an albatross. This is a big lie.
Knowing full well the answer to the question, the establishment media wonders out loud, "What is Ukraine's Azov Regiment?” This is a tactic in the strategy of organizing ignorance. https://t.co/ABm0nQPBW3
Organized frenzy is very often subterfuge. Could this frame be concealing something more than the managed decline of the West? Are there other forces at work here that “normalize hate” and “embolden violent extremists”? Go back and look at the symbol on his Gendron’s vest. It’s a type of sunwheel (sonnenrad in German) called the Black Sun (Schwarze Sonne). It’s a Nazis symbol popular among Eastern European neo-Nazi groups. It was used, for example, as the insignia of the Banderists, fascists who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Below is a photo of a Ukrainian soldier wearing the symbol. The photo, which I have shared before, is war propaganda tweeted by NATO leveraging International Women’s Day to promote the righteousness of the Ukrainian military. The popular Ukrainian president Zelensky’s slogan “Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes” is the same slogan as that of the wartime fascists in Ukraine. The current government has adopted the slogan as the country’s national motto. (See The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales.)
NATO War Propaganda
The Black Sun lurks behind the insignia of Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi unit of the National Guard of Ukraine based in Mariupol (the coastal region of the Sea of Azov). I blogged about this back in February when Russia invaded Ukraine. In addition to providing context missing in the globalist push for war, I wanted to raise consciousness about the persistent problem of fascism in Eastern Europe, which I have been talking about since the 1990s after Russ Bellant exposed the link between fascist and Nazis sympathizers and the Republican establishment behind George H. W. Bush and his associates (the neoconservatives who came to power under Bush’s son in the 2000s). The history of these links are pursued by Christopher Simpson back to the formation of the national security apparatus and regionalization of Europe and the larger project of transnationalizing capitalism under the Truman Administration. In that blog (History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War), I document that, in addition to the problem of Ukrainian Nazis terrorizing ethnic Russians residing in parts of the country, NATO expansion has put the military might of the United States behind European Nazism, which now stands at Russia’s doorstep.
If we reflect on history, the threat Nazism poses to the internal security of Russia is recognized and Russia’s actions makes sense (which is not to say that the invasion was morally correct). Indeed, in light of that history, why the US and the West are backing Ukraine becomes a pressing question. This is all connected to the expansion of NATO in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. NATO’s raison d’état was mutual defense of Europe from the threat of world communism—and fascist and Nazis sympathizers were weaponized in that struggle. With the end of the Soviet Union, and the integration of China into the global capitalist economy, NATO should have been dismantled, its reason for existing having evaporated. Why it was not became clear when NATO bombed Serbia: NATO was a means for establishing a global military net over the whole of the Eurasian landmass. Part of the grand plan is the marginalization and eventual incorporation of the Russian people into the global system. And, of course, to secure trillions of dollars for the military-industrial complex.
The expansion of NATO. Soon Finland and Sweden may be blue.
Has anybody bothered to look at the map of the EU lately? Does it look familiar? Not exactly, but in the main? What country lies at its center? (Find the map before Brexit if you want to feel that the working class somewhere has made a bit of progress in pushing back against the neo-feudalist designs of the world capitalists.)
The European UnionEurope at the Height of German Expansion
This is the white supremacy you are not supposed to consider, even though one of its representatives, wearing its insignia, murdered ten people in Buffalo, New York last Saturday. You’re supposed to consider the white supremacy that allegedly lies behind opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism (see Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism). The Buffalo massacre should not have you thinking about Western capitalist powers enlarging corporate state power across the globe. It should instead cause you to ignore the purposes and consequences of inviting hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the world to pour across the southern border of the United States. Either pretend the invitation has no purpose or isn’t consequential or, on the positive side, is a thing to celebrate. Or you’re a racist.
freedom and reason 