A couple of days ago Sp¡ked published “How trans ideology hijacked the gay-rights movement.” It author, David Allen, was chair of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality (TORCH) from 1996 to 1999. An old warrior for the struggle for the right of gays and lesbians to stand equally before the law with straight men and women.
I will leave you to read the piece (it’s a terrific read). In this blog, I want to share something Allen’s piece moved me consider: the trouble an academic would seek for sharing this essay in a college classroom or suggesting to the director of a Pride center that perhaps the diverse needs of students are not met by a single office.
Why are there risks associated with such things? Because the ethic of free speech is not really a valued one in institutions of higher education. Don’t be misled by stories of universities hastily moving to take up the free speech question; this is occurring in the face of conservative and libertarian challenges to the culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), a system of woke progressive attitudes and theories that have taken root everywhere in America. That’s right, it’s not happening because faculty and administrators are worried about where woke has taken the institution. It’s public relations.
As I reported in April (Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses), the University of Wisconsin System delayed a free speech survey scheduled for the spring (2022), pushing out its administration at least until the fall semester (where it enjoyed no funding), because they did not want the public to know how intellectually closed our institutions of higher education have become. It now appears the survey will be supplanted by a year-long series of free speech events emphasizing civil discourse, often a euphemism for the rule of inclusion. I fully anticipate the exercise will be an attempt at a deft recoding of DEI indoctrination.
It won’t be my first rodeo. Given that free speech should be a core value of every public university in the country, one should expect periodic refreshers on the importance of upholding everybody’s right to think and speak freely in order to move civilization towards greater heights of justice and technological prowess. Indeed, a common defense of free speech concerns its function in promoting positive social change. And it’s true: all modern-day social movements have depended on the ability of activists to speak freely—and on those brave enough to speak up for justice even when facing consequences for doing so.
HR image that checks every visible box
However, what is often neglected in the defense of free speech on college campuses is the practice as intrinsic good, that is the recognition of the human right to cognitive liberty—the right belonging to every human to think and express his thoughts without consequence (which is what it means to say that speech is free).
To be sure, the functionality of speech to the dynamic of social change depends on cognitive freedom—which is precisely why authoritarian and illiberal types want to stifle speech! This is the imperative of blasphemy laws: to prevent heretics and even infidels from challenging the legitimacy of religious doctrine. This is also the imperative of rules compelling inclusive language: to exclude opinions that challenge the legitimacy of crackpot theories currently circulating through modern-day cultural and social institutions. When you are educated about “microaggressions” know that you are being subjected to the practical deployment of a crackpot theory.
When speech is rationalized on the grounds of functionality towards progressive ends, utterances determined to be dysfunctional for those ends are “justifiably” restricted. Thus “regressive” and “reactionary” ideas are disallowable under the speech regime envisioned by the progressives in charge of the institution or organization. This move presupposes what speech is for—and there are always people doing the presupposing (and it’s not hard to identify the commissar). But the free speech right is a neutral vehicle for the expression of human liberty that allows for any utterance to be emitted including (and, I would argue, especially) those utterances that offend the sensibilities of other people whatever their ideology, whatever their worldview—whatever their identity. That’s the human right: your entitlement to the universal freedom to offend others.
We must, therefore, in sussing out the essence of cognitive liberty, consider its obverse: thought control. Thought control is mind control. And if an entity can control a person’s mind, then that person is unfree. The rules of inclusion are thus in the service of mind control. Moreover, where undesirable opinions continue their lives in the privacy of skulls, insistence on inclusion encourages bad faith. The rules foster the development of clandestine groups where members, often suspicious of one another, try to feel free to let down their hair—just like Chinese Christians who meet in secret to pray (the house church). The rules create a culture that causes even comrades to lower their voices when sharing disallowed opinions. You know, like it was the former Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany. Most people don’t even bother to discuss effectively banned ideas anymore; they go along to get along.
"I enunciate 'nigger' in full, out loud w/ some purpose in mind. Usually the aim is to drive home to audiences the pervasiveness of anti-Black prejudice and, more specifically, the way in which this troublesome word has been an integral part of the soundtrack of American racism." pic.twitter.com/7CGkG7eA4r
What is often neglected in the defense of free speech, then, is the false claim that individuals or groups possess a right to be free from insult and offense. One often hears this false claim wrapped in the lofty defense of “human dignity.” Yes, the Muslim is man who believes in a religious doctrine, which is, in the final analysis, an ideology (as all religious doctrines are), and, yes, in theory, all ideologies are subject to criticism, but the man’s identity is at stake, and he has a right to that, so do not insult him for his deeply-felt religious convictions or offend his prophet. Well, to hell with his delusions and fuck his prophet. He has no right to tell me what to think or say. It’s not my religion.
We hear this same claptrap associated with rules punishing those who contradict gender ideology. Contradicting the claim that “transwomen are women” (on the grounds that women are adult human females and transwomen are males and thus cannot be women) are accused of an act approximating genocide. The criticism of gender ideology thus become a speech act erasing the existence of transpeople, an assumption that presumes as given what the critic is doubting (it is thus rendered undebatable) and, moreover, that a speech act is capable of such a thing. But if a man is permitted to doubt God, and surely he must be if he is a free man, then surely he is permitted to doubt the claim that there are “true selves” and “wrong bodies.”
This is why the rigorous defense of free speech is portrayed as “right wing”: it allows criticisms that challenge the legitimacy opinions uttered by those controlling the nation’s cultural and social institutions—while anti-white racism, anti-male sexism, and the remarkable denial that there are such things as men and women at all, are assumed as truth and uttered without consequence and even expecting affirmation. The free speech crowd is given its own identity and left to compete with the myriad other identities who, on the grounds of social justice, claim the right to silence speech they don’t like. Of course, folks are entitled to their crackpot theories. The Muslim enjoys his religious liberty. What they are not allowed to do, however, is establish rules that prevent others from challenging those theories. And that is precisely what the rules of inclusion aim to do—and are doing.
This therefore must be made plain: There is no right to dignity as such because, if there were, then those who claim to take offense at speech are given control over the cognitive liberty of others—and this is a human rights violation, rights to which we are all entitled. This is why those who claim to take offense seek to have the law or some rules at their backs: they desire to control others by punishing them for their opinions. And it should not have escaped your attention that those who complain about offensive speech are not those who might be offended but others who presume to speak for those people. How authoritarian is that? Very authoritarian.
Those who love freedom have allowed this to happen because the love of freedom is at once love for humanity. But this sentiment is misplaced humanitarianism, for it is in the end destructive to humanity.
Before I conclude, I want you to know that I hear your objections: “Fire in a crowded theater” (do I really need to debunk this one?) and “Libel and slander.” On the question of libel and slander, first it cannot apply to identity, as this is group-level abstraction and libel and slander, or defamation, applies to the action of damaging the good reputation of concrete individuals (I am skeptical even of this). Moreover, defamation can only be said to have occurred if a demonstrable lie had been told that causes a demonstrable consequence—all of this wrapped in malice. What demonstrable lie has been told when I openly doubt the claims of imams or gender theorists? Shall I be punished then for telling the truth?
“With bright knives he releases our souls.” —Pink Floyd, “Sheep”
When today we find conservatism to be the closest thing to classical liberalism in the West, the left made a wrong turn somewhere. Several wrong turns. A major one was abandoning the principle of individual liberty for tribalism.
With this illustration, Nate Kitch implies that free speech and national integrity are on the same political plane as identitarian moral panic. They are not.
A free man is under no obligation to accept or affirm the delusions, illusions, or lies of others. He is only obligated to tolerate these in those who are not harming others or depriving them of the liberties and rights to which we are each entitled. Toleration does not mean avoiding criticism or ridicule of their beliefs. The fool can stand babbling on the hill. And we can make fun of him.
The desire to compel an individual to accept or affirm delusions, illusions, or lies, or punish him for mocking people who hold or spread them, is an authoritarian desire. The force of law and policy behind such desire cancels the obligation to be tolerant.
The existence of Muslims does not depend on my faith in Islam. Muslims do not need my affirmation to exist. They only need to be convinced of the truth of their doctrine. I only need to tolerate them. Without faith there are no Muslims. But this is their problem, not mine.
To say a man is not exempt from a mandate or a requirement because he does not profess the relevant religious doctrine is to punish him for believing some irrelevant doctrine or no doctrine at all. This is discrimination.
Integration with western society does not require abandoning one’s faith commitments or other opinions. It does, however, require accepting as part of living in the West adherence to the ethics of secularism, rule of law, and diversity of opinion—the very things that permit those who choose to reside in our countries the right to keep or abandon their faith commitments and other opinions. You faith cannot give you any privileges in a free society.
Yet Americans are being told they have to accept and affirm delusions, illusions, and lies and that they will be subject to mandates for not holding approved belief.
Illiberalism is being normalized by the corporate state and its attendant technocracy. Our civil liberties and human rights are at stake. We must recommit ourselves to the Enlightenment. Insist that reason and secularism govern our institutions. Push this woke insanity to the hill where the fool stands babbling.
* * *
If you’re wondering why progressives are so gullible when it comes to accepting the pseudoscience of the state corporate apparatus, you have to grasp postmodernist corruption of the academy and our cultural institutions (A Judge Stands on His Head to Save Woke Progressive Indoctrination and “DeSantis is a Nazi” and the Hysterical Left’s Anti-Working Class Politics covers this issue and provides numerous links to past writings about this). Once academics, administrators, and cultural managers, and the progressives who came through their indoctrination programs, became convinced that science is just another ideology—and, worse, cisgendered, heterosexist, patriarchal, white supremacist ideology—it was only a matter of time before well-known and obvious truths were overthrown for pseudoscientific notions to be displayed on placards and profiles for the tribal purpose of signaling virtue.
One blatant giveaway that science has been rejected are these yardsigns telling us that “This house believes in science.” No it doesn’t. If it did, that sign wouldn’t be in the front yard. (See “In this House…” The Slogans of Woke Progressivism.)
Headline from this morning’s The Hill: “Judge blocks DeSantis’s ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ says Florida feels like a ‘First Amendment upside down’.” US District Court for the Northern District of Florida Chief Judge Mark Walker (the same judge who exploited the COVID pandemic to help engineer voting procedures that advantaged Democrats in 2020 and will again in the upcoming 2022 elections) issued a preliminary injunction blocking the private employer provisions in the law saying it violates free speech protections under the First Amendment and that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause for being impermissibly vague.
US District Court for the Northern District of Florida Chief Judge Mark Walker
“Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down,” the Obama appointee and activist judge wrote in the ruling (in which he compared the law to the fictional “upside down” in the Netflix series Stranger Things). “Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely,” Walker continued. “But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.” Here is the text of the Stop WOKE Act.
Walker’s understanding of burden is embarrassingly superficial but not unusual among progressive judges (and rightwing libertarians) who erroneously use the private status of corporations as justification for the regulation of speech. Burdening speech is not only suppressing certain utterances, which must be disallowed; lifting burdens must be concerned with protecting the cognitive liberty of individuals, which means prohibiting the practice of compelling political and religious speech, which is precisely what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity training conveys (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI).
The innovation of the Florida law lies in the act of extending the principle of free speech rights to state-regulated private sector entities, i.e., corporations, in the same way the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits private corporations from discriminating against individuals based on race, sex, etc. Speech is as much a civil right as one’s racial or sexual status—rights individuals do not lose upon entering private institutions. After all, these are places of public accommodations; they cannot discriminate for these reasons. Moreover, corporations exist because they chartered by and answerable to governments. DeSantis’s law should be the law of the land. It plainly follows from the First Amendment (as well as the Ninth).
What this judge clearly fails to understand—or to take into account—is the fact (not the feeling) that DeSantis’ law is not burdening speech but instead preventing an institution or organization from compelling an individual to speak and think in ways he wishes not to. The law does not burden speech by prohibiting mandatory DEI training; on the contrary, it is mandatory DEI training that burdens speech. The law is correcting this problem by protecting individuals from the imposition of having political and religious speech forced down their throats in required struggle sessions at institutions where they are receiving an education or earning a living, activities in which they must engage to enjoy an acceptable quality of life. Forced into such training sessions, as such they are captive populations—who are moreover required to affirm the political and quasi-religious ideologies they are receiving. Judge Walker must be standing on his head to get the law so wrong.
* * *
DEI training and other instruction in critical theories where these are presented as the definitive explanations of the phenomenon people experience is an attempt by the administrative state and technocracy to indoctrinate employees and students with a moral philosophy derived from a illiberal ideology. I was therefore excited to hear the thoughts of Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian Carl Trueman speak to the comedians on Triggernometry about how technocracy cannot answer moral questions. However, I was struck by how quickly the guest made it impossible to actually take up the question posed as the title of the podcast.
Trueman argued that, without the absolute standard of religion, morality is merely an exercise in pragmatism. But there are plainly many religions and they differ drastically from each other. It follows that religion cannot be an absolute standard for anything. (You will recall that Feuerbach blew up Hegel over this point nearly two centuries ago. See A Humanist Take on Marx’s Irreligious Criticism.) This is why we have religious liberty. Religion, like critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and the other quasi-religious standpoints of the moment, fails to provide adequate moral rules, even while, unlike these critical theories, claiming there are such things.
Moreover, religion is notorious for undermining those moral rules that must necessarily lie beyond religion, for example, women’s rights. How are we otherwise able to objectively determine what is a just law or policy if there is no universal standard? There must be such a thing as an objective standard if we are to judge the adequacy of any given religious system to human thriving and well-being, which are objective criteria. The Jewish Bible positively sanctions slavery. Is slavery not wrong? On what basis is it wrong? Plainly not a biblical one (see Slavery and the Abrahamic Traditions).
Fortunately, there is such a standard: human rights as determinable by the approach secular humanism, i.e., a concern for and the science of our species: Homo sapiens. This is possible because human rights are inherent in our species-being, however much they are warped by such ideologies as Christianity, queer theory, etc. This is pragmatic if by that word we mean discovering the truth and putting it into practice (see Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). We find, then, that religion—or anything approximating it—is unnecessary. More than this, it is oppressive. Yet new religious are being forced upon employees and students across the West in the form of DEI training, new religious that contract human rights, indeed that deny the species being necessary for human rights to be possible.
* * *
Thinking about this morning as I was dropping my son off at work, I was reminded that I wanted to put down something I have said in discussions with family and friends—and in classroom instruction (via the arguments of Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks and Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)—that there are those who are desperate to deny the animality of man, to deny that the species is the product of natural history and that the ideas people express, rational and irrational, result from environmental contexts and social arrangements that either promote or corrupt development and justice.
Slogans that find their way into boardrooms and classrooms, such as “transwomen are women,” or the compelled use of pronouns, or statements recognizing the spiritual connection an American Indian tribe has to the land upon which the buildings of a university stand—these are political and quasi-religious activities that must deny reality in order to work. And to do this destructive work, the activists must shift the function of education from one of enlightenment and the ruthless search for the truth to one of indoctrination and ideological production. Replacing truth with doctrine requires indoctrination. It’s right there in the name. Such beliefs as individuals can change sex or American Indians are in possession of transcendent privilege require compelling since most free and rational person would rightly dismiss such irrational claims and therefore wouldn’t come to them naturally. The goal is to conscript all of us in the project to make falsehoods appear as the truth. This is the essence of all religion.
It should terrify all of us that, increasingly, an individual will be disciplined, ostracized, and punished for not only telling the truth but for failing to affirm a lie. DEI is part of the system seeking to supplant the ordinary understanding of humans, which is generally intuitive correct, and even knowledge of natural facts, with a political-ideological view of the world prepares employees and future employees for incorporation into an illiberal existence beneficial to corporate power and profit. This is an environment where the administrator, cultural manager, and employer can depends on the student and employee believing whatever those in authority tell them (this was a major objective of the COVID-19 mask and vaccine compliant strategies). DEI training, its basis in critical race theory, gender theory, etc., demands of those compelled those attending affirmation of the lie—and to go forth and spread this lie throughout the institution and the community.
* * *
Consider the appearance of the term “cisgender,” a transparent and cynical attempt to erase the notion of the abnormal by defining the ordinary as so problematical as to require a qualifying prefix. Such propaganda terms proliferate as the transgressive practice of postmodernist critical theory colonizes academic jargon. This is why Freedom and Reason does not critique gender ideology independent of the consequences of doing so—gender ideology is at once a system of claims about the world and an authoritarian politics that punishes people for skepticism regarding those claims. If I am hauled before a disciplinary committee for this blog, the truth of what I am saying will enjoy dramatic confirmation.
Consider the preachment found in the programming that heteronormativity and cisnormativity are at once oppressive ideologies (see the work of Christopher Rufo). These notions depend on the denial of necessary facts in human evolution and the perpetuation of the species across time and space. It is a religious notion even if expressed in a nominally secular fashion, one that sees man as not merely separate from nature but not really a natural being at all. Rhetoric about the “dominantly situated” and “negatively privileged” and “marginalized” groups, terms that populate the transgressive literature of critical gender studies and find their way into DEI training manuals—such rhetoric cannot obviate reality if we remain free from compelled speech.
Some will object that those forced into struggle sessions over these matters are not really compelled to accept the programming. They are still free to believe as they did. At best then, you will have forced everybody into bad faith. We all know that those who, for example, deny that males can be women will be attacked for “denying the existence” of transpeople. But what is denied is the claim that a transwoman is a woman on the grounds that a woman is an adult human female and, with the transwoman’s sex determined by such objective unchangeable things as chromosomes and gametes, the individual cannot actually meet the definition. I other words, those who refuse to affirm the slogan do so on definitional grounds that a woman must be a female which is rooted in scientific truth. For this, they are demoted, disciplined, expelled, ostracized, and smeared.
But rejecting transgenderism is no more discriminatory against transpeople as rejecting Islam is discriminatory against Muslims. The existence of Muslims does not depend on my faith in Islam. Muslims do not need my affirmation to exist. They only need to be convinced of the truth of the doctrine. And I only need to tolerate them. Without faith there are no Muslims. But this is their problem, not mine. Yet employees and students across the country are being compelled to undergo training in which affirming these ideas are a requirement for certification.
* * *
I risk being accused of transphobia for this blog (and for future ones dealing with this topic). However, readers should consider the history of using accusations of phobia to delegitimize criticisms of their views. Consider, for example, the propaganda term “Islamophobia.” Exploiting the construct “xenophobia” as inspiration, Islamists invented the term at the end of the 1970s to portray rational criticisms of Islam as a type of racism. But Islam is an ideology. It is the rational obligation of free people to criticize indeed resist ideology.
“Transphobia” is a propaganda term designed to accomplish the same thing. It’s designed to silence critics by making them out to be the equivalent of racists. You see this in the slogan “Transrights are human rights,” which Antifa chants while physically assaulting women demanding their rights. A male identifying as a woman has her human rights. There is no human right to be regarded by others as a woman when they perceive you as a male. This is for the obvious reason that an individual cannot force other people to live according to his perception of himself. A white may wish to be black, but those around her are under no obligation to recognize her as such. Indeed, it is violative of the human rights of others to insist they affirm the delusions of other persons.
Yet, while it would be outrageous to compel employees and students to undergo training sessions in Christianity, it is considered so obvious that they should be compelled to undergo training sessions in gender ideology that to pass a law forcing institutions to abide by the fundamental law of this country is somehow oppressive. (I considered using Islam as the example, but with Islamophilia so rampant among woke progressives, I cannot be sure they won’t attempt at some future point to have employees and students affirm the tenets of that totalitarian belief system).
In light of claims to the contrary, then, there is something therefore to be said about the emergence of novel religious standpoints as the old religious institutions fall away in the radical force of modernity. Indeed, the return of religion in new forms marks the postmodern condition. But this condition is not in the end the result of ideas, but the way the death throes of late capitalism manifest in the behavior of the corporate state and attendant technocratic arrangements expressed as ideas in universities corrupted by corporate state propaganda.
Trueman is right about this: technocracy cannot answer moral questions. However, extremists have infiltrated the technocracy and they’re making policy appealing to morality. They dress the appeal in the rhetoric of “social justice.” This must be resisted. We have to unwind all this. We have to bring western society back to reason and the principles of liberty and equality.
* * *
Alongside my libertarianism is a commitment to scientific truth and a concern for human rights, which I argue are universal and objectively determinable things. Because truth matters, while I may choose to lie or go along with a fiction to spare a vulnerable person’s feelings, I must not be made to lie for the sake of affirming the person’s imaginary world. No person should be forced to participate in the manufacture and perpetuation of untruths.
As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I am an atheist. Because I enjoy religious liberty, I cannot be made to repeat Islamic scripture. Also, Islamic belief is false and wrong. There is no God. Muhammad did not talk to an angel named Gabriel. There are no angels (no supernatural ones, anyway). Islam harms people subjected to it. I am not a bigot because I do not use the sacred language of Islam or refuse to affirm the claims made by that religion. More than this, I am free—or at least should be free—to criticize that religion; I am not subject in a secular society to that religion’s blasphemy rules because I am not a Muslim. If ever I am so compelled, then I am no longer a free man.
Today, woke gender ideology is very much a religious praxis. Gender ideology comes with a cosmology positing nonexistent entities, principally a concept of gender as something existing independent of bodies, the truth of which depends entirely on the testimony of the person who, like somebody claiming to have been abducted by aliens, presents an entirely subjective case, one that is, as with alien abduction, more likely to be delusional than anything approximating a true claim. Unlike in the case of Islam (or Christianity), those of us who do not subscribe to the woke religion are nonetheless expected to affirm its slogans. It is not just in the public education system that one is expected to rehearse the slogans of Wokism. Many of those working in corporate bureaucracies are also expected to repeat the preachments.
This slogan “transwomen are women” represents perhaps more than any other the special problem with gender and queer ideologies and the authoritarian desire to impose upon the world a crackpot theory of sex and gender. While I could not be expected to affirm the slogan “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger,” or, perhaps more certainly, “Jesus Christ is the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Him,” I am expected to affirm the slogan “transwomen are women.” That I fear or risk discipline or punishment for publicly refusing to affirm this slogan indicates that gender ideology has become a threat to liberty in America in a way that religion never has been.
Growing up in a Christian community, son to a minister with his own church, I was never expected to openly affirm Christian slogans. Admittedly, other children were not so fortunate. But, then, almost nobody ever had to think about it. They believed by virtue of early socialization (and perhaps genes that predisposed them to religiosity). Yet, several times over the last few years, I have been asked to affirm the slogan that transwomen are women. I have had individuals unfriend and unfollow me on social media not because I said anything critical of transgenderism but because I would not affirm the slogan. When I voice my support for gays and lesbians, which I often do, I am sometimes asked why I neglected transpeople in my advocacy. I ignore the question, which then becomes evidence itself that I am transphobic.
When people refuse or fail to affirm the tenets of this quasi-religion, the gaze cast upon them condemns them of anti-science, as if the science confirms the truth of the ideology, assuming as given that which requires proving (another strange alchemy). Failing to provide proof (as I have shown in past blogs and will show in upcoming ones, all this is far more religious-like than scientific), why, then, is race or gender ideology different from Scientology or Mormonism? Of course, even if the science were there, one should still be free to reject its claims. The state would be no more justified in punishing a person for rejecting Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as it would punishing a person for rejecting L. Ron Hubbard’s theory of dianetics. (Where are the struggle sessions over Darwinism?) But race and gender ideology is so obviously religious in character how did we even get to the point where one has to risk one’s reputation and livelihood for refusing to accept doctrine? Because of the woke progressive assault on scientific truth. Why would it do that? Consider that science has to be delegitimized so that “other ways of knowing” can be used in medicine.
* * *
Here’s what has happened. Scientific truth, however tentative in its self-correcting character (there are things yet to be discovered and concepts still to be worked out), is the rational standard of knowledge, as it is based on verified belief and is universal, that is, it is true regardless of the cultural and historical context, what we may therefore properly call knowledge (over against belief). Scientific truth is challenged by a neo-idealism instantiated by a critical theory, as well as the postmodernist movement in French philosophy. (I am not talking about all critical theory, but specifically the 1960s deformation of critical theory and its offspring, e.g., critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, etc.) These other ways of knowing have found their way into our major institutions because they are functional to corporate governance and profit-making.
These developments have not merely warped ordinary understanding, but have found their way into law and public policy, which find popular support among rank-and-file progressives socialized in the woke church the academia has become. Critical theory in its postmodern turn represent a deviation from reason by defining science as ideology and then, in a move conflating ontology with a subjectivist epistemology expressing distrust of “grand narratives,” reducing scientific theory to “discourses,” thus denying the method for determining objective reality. The radical relativism expressed by these perspectives treat scientific truth and those things concerning reasonable minds as “problematic.” Law and policy proceeds not on the basis of fact and reason but on the basis of a politics corrupted by ideology. In a nation founded on separation of church and state, woke ideology has become the state religion. One only needs to look at the administrative state under President Joe Biden to confirm this.
We have arrived at a point where “indigenous knowledge systems” are elevated to the status of science—which only means that science has been demoted from its position as the rational standard of knowledge to lay alongside voodoo and witchcraft. Actually, as some would have it, we must go out of our way to value nonscientific ways of knowing. This is a core element of postcolonial consciousness. Critical theory and postmodernism come with a praxis of transgression that portrays normality as arbitrary, imperial, and oppressive, and therefore in obvious need of overthrowing. Science is a western notion, and the West is wicked. Science is white supremacist and cisgendered. The world is in need of purification from this corruption. This is at least the view of the rank-and-file science deniers of woke progressive praxis—despite those obnoxious yard signs that say “In this house…we believe science.” Social media profile pictures extolling the virtues of masks and gene therapies should make things obvious enough.
Because it rests on a neo-idealism that is derivative of Hegelian thought, which sees history as the manifestation of ideas rather than than the other way around (as the materialists do), the arguments are circular. For example, “cisnormativity,” a construct depicting the natural fact that the vast majority of the human population intuitively recognizes the sexual dimorphism inherent (and obvious) in the species as an oppressive expression of gendered power, finds the source of that power in cisnormativity itself, as if males and females who identify as men and women—oppressors the both of them—managed at a point long before modern humans emerged as a species to conspire to construct an oppressive ideology just in case their offspring ever decided to question their gender. (I have more to say about this, but this blog is getting long. Stay tuned.)
* * *
The theories that underpin DEI training are crackpot. They are so religious-like as to qualify as such. I spent some time with them here to give you an idea of the ideology that underpins the training many of you are forced to undergo. Children are being subjected to these ideas and the consequences are becoming apparent. Understanding what and why this is happening is key to understanding why DeSantis and a handful of other political visionaries are acting to stop it.
DEI training and other programs of indoctrination represents political and religious programming of the sort that is strictly prohibited by the First Amendment, these rights and liberties made available to all citizens via the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. This is the whole ball of wax: if these rights and liberties are negated we live in a totalitarian state in which the Party tells us was to think and say. The Orwellian nightmare world under construction is what Florida governor Ron DeSantis is trying to tear down. We need to help him. We need these laws in all of our states.
A few days ago, Fox News posted an article, “Parents push back on American colleges promoting DEI initiatives: ‘DEI is dangerous’,” by Elizabeth Economou and Nicole Pelletiere. They write, “Some universities across America are requiring compliance from faculty in the form of signed diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) statements, as conditions for tenure or promotion—arguing that DEI across college campuses is a top priority.” Their article then sounds an optimistic note: “However, there may be growing pushback in some areas from faculty as well as from parents—who claim that the DEI agenda actually challenges the diversity of viewpoints and opinions of students within the college environment. Some say it also promotes a culture of fear and intimidation.”
With little clamoring from the public, DEI is now everywhere.
The DEI agenda is indeed becoming ubiquitous these days and, while there is some pushback from faculty, parents, and students, it is not nearly enough. The lack of resistance, especially among faculty and students, is in part because of the culture of fear and intimidation that controls discourse and interaction on the modern university campus. I work at a university, and the fear and intimidation is palpable.
I have written about DEI programming on Freedom and Reason (e.g., The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think; Can I Get an “Amen” to That? No, But Here’s Some Fairy Dust). Many of us are required to attend DEI workshops or perform online trainings as a consequence of our necessary existence in helping, learning, and working spaces where DEI ideas and practices are the guiding objectives. The notice just went out at my institution that new staff and faculty are required to undergo DEI training. It is incorporated in the program of employee orientation. Given what universities are turning out, I am sure many of the new arrivals will be eager to express their wokism. For those who aren’t so enthusiastic, they will sit silently or forced into pronouncements of bad faith.
Achieving diversity at any institution, according to DEI doctrine, requires drawing employees, students, etc., from a myriad of identity groups based on gender, race, religion, etc. If, e.g., blacks are “underrepresented” at an organization, then administrators and managers will aggressively seek black applicants and prefer those applicants over white or East Asian applicants. The same is true for advancement and promotion. Managers are not looking for the most qualified individual, but instead looking for personifications of an abstract demographic category to build an institution that “looks like America,” or more ambitiously, since universities are international, that “looks like the world.” (As the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse society on the planet, America looks like the world.)
Management is also, it must be said, looking for personifications (it goes beyond tokenism) who agree with the progressive agenda of the institution. A black conservative or Republican is highly undesirable. (Is he even black?) It is important to recruit those who are also woke as they will promote the agenda and extend progressive hegemony in their “community.” This is functional, as Swedish Marxist and populist Malcom Kyeyune argues, as “progressive theories of race and gender” secure “influence, employment, and prestige for underemployed university graduates.” He characterizes wokism as the highest form of managerialism. (His participation in Oikos suggests he also understands wokism also as a denationalizing force destructive to individual liberty and civil rights.)
One of the objectives of DEI, whether explicit or not, is to achieve a reduction in the number of straight white men at an institution by replacing them with representatives of the various groups deemed significant and useful to the establishment justified by the problem of “underrepresentation.” East Asians are increasingly unwelcome to help fulfill the scheme, as well, as they tend to excel in various fields central to the work of the university. One finds justification for the diminishment of straight white men, hereafter SWMs, in institutional life in the claim, informed by postmodernism and critical theory (critical race, gender, and queer theories), as well as postcolonial ideology and third worldism, that SWMs reside at the intersection of oppressor categories. (The question of why oppressors are leading the way in disempowering themselves through the deployment of DEI rules left unexplained.)
Achieving equity, a euphemism for SWM depowerment, requires eliminating aggregate differences among individuals in bureaucratic life, a goal that often demands the elimination of any norm or standard that prevents individuals from achieving parity with SWMs, norms and standards said are erected by SWMs to achieve systemic privileges—cis privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, white privilege. However, since all modern institutions are structurally bureaucratic and thus necessarily order roles and statuses hierarchically, parity requires, independent of merit, deliberate promotion of those mired in the intersections of oppressed categories to stations with more power and prestige. In this fashion, members of minority groups possessing victim subjectivities are integrated into the structure of power where their loyalty to the goals of DEI becomes useful for tightening the hegemony of the command-and-control structure.
Inclusion means adopting interaction rituals that, on the surface, make members of various identity groups feel included (hence the inclusivity rhetoric—but we might also say “useful” and “welcome”) in a world unjustly run by SWMs, rules of engagement necessarily requiring that individuals accept the very ideology that, with required speech acts all members are expected to affirm, manufacture and sustain the identity groups based on the oppressor-oppression matrix. Thus by officially treating individuals as personifications of abstract groups, the system reifies the progressive ideology of identity. It is a desire to live in air castles that denies their lords.
This desire leads to am authoritarian end. Why, if employees and students are tolerating the behaviors (that do not physically harm or interfere with the liberty of others), identities, and opinions of others, is that not good enough? That is all that is required in a free society. Why must employees and students affirm behaviors, identities, and opinions with which they disagree? Perhaps the chief difference between the liberal and the authoritarian is that the liberal advocates toleration while insisting on cognitive liberty, while the authoritarian, intolerant of opinions with which he disagrees, desires to censor and compel the speech of others. This desire reveals a deep and pathological insecurity, no? Why is it so important to have others affirm one’s beliefs and behaviors? Is the authoritarian unsure of them? Are these delusions that require illusions to sustain? (Recall what S. Freud said about the difference there.) I think so.
What is the character of the modern bureaucratic institution? Is it liberal or authoritarian? A member of a modern organization shaped by DEI goals and objectives is compelled to adopt ideological, political, and subcultural ideas that he may in fact, and for good reason, oppose. These goals and objectives run contrary not only to the individual’s rational interests but to the principles upon which free and open societies are based. The demands of DEI force employees and participants to either change their way of thinking by affirming doctrine and rehearsing slogans drawn from it or to act in bad faith, thereby simulating adherence to doctrine.
Why would freedom of thought and opinion be constrained in the modern university? Isn’t free thought and debate the main purpose of the modern university—it’s raison d’etat? Did we not win the right to be free from compelled speech in centuries of struggle with authority and tradition? No, diversity in the DEI scheme does not mean diversity of ideas, or cognitive liberty, where individuals at an institution can refuse to affirm the ideology of the various groups represented in that space without discipline, ostracization, or punishment. Intellectual diversity is subordinated in this scheme, even negated by the principles of inclusion. If criticism of or non-adherence to an ideology, such as transgenderism, makes trans people feel excluded, then it follows from the goals of inclusivity that such criticism is to be excised from the common space, which may involve removing from that space the critic, redefined as a bigot. Criticism of ideology is replaced by affirmation of the ideology in question, which must be, without any attempt to achieve a consensus, accepted as truth.
Oftentimes, the ability of a critic of one ideology or another to make his criticisms is not only restricted on the grounds of specific form and content, but the meta-act of criticizing the system that disallows such criticisms (the sin I am committing in this blog) becomes itself the target of suppression. Individuals may be disciplined, ostracized, or punished for asking whether such a system that excludes a range of opinions or recruits, hires, and promotes people on the basis of their race, is fair and just. It is the same here as it is in strict religious systems where criticism of both the doctrine and the mindset and the ruleset that insist on adherence to doctrine is blasphemous and heretical.
That the practice of censoring heretics may not appear as rampant as the defenders of DEI demand it should be for it to be considered a real problem, self-censorship is rampant. What people talk about at social gatherings where they can let down their hair is a lot different than what people talk about at the office. They know—or at least believe—that if they were to express their real opinions publicly they would be risk desired committee and teaching assignments, positions and promotion, and their reputation.
For those of us who are genuinely on the left, it is crucial to understand that, in this way of thinking, equity does not mean achieving class or economic equality but rather obtaining arbitrary advancement in the bureaucratic hierarchy by virtue of membership in imagined communities, the relative aggregate inequalities of which are “explained” by the theorized matrix of group-level oppressions. If not designed to do this work (and I am convinced it is so designed), DEI programming functions to entrench corporate power by directing management to marginalize and make disreputable ordinary understanding and the majority standpoint.
For example, Chris Rufo has documented that, at San Diego Unified School District (and he has found this elsewhere), teachers and students are being taught that heteronormativity, the fact of natural history that heterosexual relations are normative, simply meaning standard and ordinary (not arbitrary), a necessary truth found throughout the animal kingdom of which human beings are a part (necessary for perpetuation of the various species), is “straight privilege.” This notion is especially absurd in light of the fact that same-sex activity is documented among thousands of other animal species. But the goal, or at least the function, of DEI ideology is depicting ordinary understanding as bigoted and hateful in order to marginalize the majority and fracture the proletariat. As a general rule, DEI program exaggerates, manufactures, and promotes inter-group antagonisms and ressentiment and then provides the means to act on those psychological feelings of envy and hatred.
SCOOP: San Diego Unified School District claims that heterosexuality is “a system of oppression,” promotes the idea that girls can have penises, and encourages children to adopt synthetic sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “genderqueer,” and “two-spirit.”
Here's the story.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 3, 2022
DEI is authoritarian and oppressive because it orders it program with a narrow range of theories selected by elites from a plethora of theories explaining various societal inequities—and the theories selected are the worst of the plethora from an objective and scientific standpoint. However, they are selected not because they are rationally valid or enjoy empirical soundness, but because they advance the interests of the corporate state or some interest group, which for the former functions in much the same way as a king in securing popular legitimacy for his rule by tapping members of the various tribes to sit on his court.
Have readers ever considered this function of DEI before? When you start going through the program with the ethic of individualism in mind and determined to rationally adjudicate its logic, it becomes very obvious very quickly what the program is about: DEI is a corporate state strategy of control that integrates into the command structure individuals drawn from a myriad of groups each of which is created and sustained by the strategy itself. It works by reducing individuals to personifications of imagined communities and, on the basis of a “theory,” determines their “rightful” place in the order of things. It moreover requires all individuals accept the overarching ideology that rationalizes all this. In other words, it is a racist and sexist project governed by a racist and sexist ideology. And, like racism and sexism historically, it functions to divide the working class and advance the interests of elites.
The assumption that inequality in demographic representation is de facto racism has smuggled into recruitment a new racism where concrete individuals are regarded as personifications of abstract categories and discriminated against on this basis. This should be illegal (and the Supreme Court will take up the matter soon). But affirmative action is only one of the more explicit ways the corporate state transgresses the principles of liberalism. There are more subtle maneuvers.
Consider the lie that critical race theory is not being taught in our nation’s public schools. There is a slight-of-hand at work in this claim. Finding few lesson plans specifically identifying CRT as the learning objective, we are supposed to believe that CRT is not present in the curriculum. But CRT doesn’t need to be explicitly taught to be present in the curriculum. What is required is that CRT is part of the operating system of the school system. The curriculum is then developed consistent with the “normative” framework of the institution. And so it is (see The Ethic of Transparency in Public Education—and the Problem of Indoctrination; Banning CRT in Public Instruction). We see the same thing with normalization of gender and queer theory in public education (see If QAnon is Not a Deep State Construct, It Certainly Functions that Way; The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida). I raise the issue of CRT and other ideologies because these are in back of DEI training.
DEI is antithetical to the struggle for free and open societies based on the ethic of individualism and equality. DEI and its guiding ideologies are anti-Enlightenment and illiberal. They are anti-democratic and anti-republican. That DEI is a major component of the prevailing corporate operating system, which also marks the university (which pioneered it) indicates that the institutions of the West have been hijacked by a powerful force the goals of which are contrary to the principles establishing and sustaining western nation-states, especially the United States. These forces are not mysterious. It is the work of transnational corporate power.
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“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.” —Douglas Murray
Have you ever wonder how society became confused about the role of words in our lives? The errors that disagreement is oppression, argument is assault, and words are violence are, in part, the result of a theory derived from literary thinking wherein words do the work of actions in the minds of readers who have difficulty living in the real world. It may be said that words do violence to one thing or another, but words don’t do actual violence. The figurative is not real. However, those who live in fictional worlds find the things in it real.
It is very much the same with religious doctrine. This is why challenging the speech of the (quasi)religiously-minded produces such a profound reaction—up to and including actual violence. Short of that, excommunication, ostracization, and disciplinary action.
“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.” —Douglas Murray
Here with some Sunday thoughts. There is so much that can be thunk. First up are some of the things I am not going to talk about.
The Biden Administration has quietly resumed building the wall at the southern border. Biden’s press secretary characterized it as cleaning up the mess Biden’s predecessor left.
The mayor of Washington DC has called out the National Guard to deal with the problem of illegal aliens who have been arriving in large numbers to her city on busses. Other cities are also experience large influxes of illegal aliens.
The economy is in recession, but the Biden Administration changed the definition of that term (and so did Wikipedia for a short time), so it’s okay.
Speaking of changing definitions, Merriam-Webster has changed the definition of “girl.” A girl is now “a person whose gender identity is female.” While they were at it, they changed the definition of “female,” too. A female is now a person “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”
And speaking of gender identity, more sports associations are banning transwomen in female sports.
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I have been involved in a long twitter thread started by Laurence Fox:
The point of contention in the thread is free speech. I defended free speech as a human right. Humans rights, the counter ran, are invented by law, so their restriction is tautological.
“If rights are invented,” I pointed out, “then they can be anything—even their opposite.” I them demonstrated how one can know that rights are a priori: “There is no reason to deny women the franchise, therefore they must be allowed equal access to the ballot box. Women, therefore, a priori, possess the right to vote. The law denies—not gives—them that right.”
There was a lot more to back-and-forth, but I will summarize my argument and move one: Humans come with rights. See Maslow’s hierarchy. Human nature. Natural history. Law does not create rights. Rights are not given by men. Rights are discovered and recognized. Or denied. Rights were not established by the United Nations in 1948 or the United States in 1789. They are progressively found and articulated in law and defended by government—if law and government are just.
The notion that rights are invented is a dangerous subjectivist game with very real consequences. As I note in a recent blog, The Behemoth Returns: The Nazis Racialized Everything, it is a characteristic of National Socialism to see the law as politically constructed, unmoored to any universal ethical or moral system. This makes human rights merely a tool of social control.
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Some on the left appeal to populism and progressivism in the same breath. They used to do it a lot more. Awareness that populism comes along with nationalism has causes a general distaste for the term. However, progressivism was invented to supplant populism. And, so far, progressivism has been winning.
Want to know why the left today pushes the agenda of the corporate state? Progressivism. The problem with the left is not, as the conservative believes, creeping socialism or communism. The problem is that progressivism cannot lift up working people because it was evolved to do the opposite.
I have a blog pending on this topic, but it may be a while before I post it, so this earlier blog will have to tie you over: Why I am not a Progressive.
* * *
I am Dr. Ian Malcolm.
The “explanation” for the marked increase in “unexplained” (non-COVID-19) deaths (heart attacks and strokes) among 18-49 year olds now appears to be “cold showers. These deaths have nothing to do with being injected with the spike protein associated with cardiovascular trauma. Right. Textbook instantiation of “blame the victim.” Nobody forces you to take a “cold shower.”
Okay, so tell your loved ones in this age cohort—especially if they’re young men—to avoid “cold showers.” Make sure you to enlighten them about euphemism while you’re at it. Buried lede: At least the corporate media and sellout physicians and scientists are admitting that it’s not just selective attention that’s causing all these young healthy people to drop dead.
(With all the synthetic estrogens in the environment, why do young people even need cold showers?)
It will be damn hard for many more than the tens of millions who have expressed regret at taking the shots and repeating the corporate state narrative to admit regret after they fell for the deception hook, line, and sinker. Admitting regret reveals gullibility. Gullibility indicates a larger judgment problem. Moreover, they’d have to admit that the Dr. Ian Malcolms of the world were right after all. Good Lord, we can’t give those insufferable skeptics any encouragement.
I knew from the beginning the medical-industrial complex and the administrative state were lying and that they will keep on lying. It has been fascinating to watch people around me buy into obvious lies and then scold those who told the truth. Of course people can’t admit they were wrong. Their gullibility goes to judgment.
I applaud Republicans for exposing the persistent FBI strategy of manufacturing the threat of “white supremacy” by entrapping dumb and confused Americans in plots to commit domestic terrorism hatched and bankrolled by the FBI themselves. Remember how outraged progressives were when the FBI did this to Islamists? They don’t care at all if the targets of FBI machinations are Christians conservatives.
What we need to know (and there is evidence indicating this) is whether and to the extent January 6, 2021 was at least in part an DHS/FBI operation. But how can we in the context of a hearing that does not follow the basis rules of rationally adjudicating facts?
The establishment, including many Republicans (Liz Cheney, most prominently), does not care about the truth. The establishment only cares about thwarting the populist-nationalist movement, because the movement threatens the corporate state and its ambitions.
Remember Casey Kasem? The voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo? Those sweet tones lulled you to sleep as a kid—not the cartoon character, but American Top 40. You always knew Kasem was white. His full name was Kemal Amin Kasem. He was Lebanese Druze. Does his Middle Eastern origin make him nonwhite? Of course not. Remember Jamie Farr? Maxwell Q. Klinger, the crossdressing corporal from M.A.S.H.? Farr was Lebanese, too. But you also always saw him as white. To be sure, Farr was thought by many to be “ethnic.” But, then, most Americans are in some sense ethnic. Italian. Jewish. Greek. Polish. German. If assimilation works right, those differences go away over time. But all the people remain racially white.
Casey Kasem was the original host American Top 40.
As I explained in a recent blog, Almost Everybody in the Bible is White, I agree with the late Harvard professor Richard Lewontin that race is not really about types but about ancestry. Offspring look like their parents and, given thousands of years of relative geographical and sociocultural independence, albeit fuzzy around the margins thanks to admixture, inherited traits cluster. However, they do so in a manner that corresponds with long-standing intuitive understandings of racial groups operationalized by physical anthropologists in the twentieth century: Amerindian, Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid—with the last three groups comprising most of the world’s population. So the matter is not as straightforward as the “race is a social construction” line would have it.
I have argued in the past that, if racial is a social construction, then we should stop socially constructing it. However I think about the matter today, I still don’t care personally whether Kasem and Farr are white in some essential way. I never thought about it growing up. In fact, by the 1970s, most people didn’t think much about race at all. But it appears that people today are obsessed by race, so much so that they feel the need to center it and engage in a project to reracialize the world’s population. That there is a project underway to disrupt common-sense understanding that Arabs, Indians, Jews, and Hispanics are for the most part white is undeniable. You don’t have to be obsessed with essentialist notions of race to wonder what’s up with that.
In this blog, which is a followup to Almost Everybody in the Bible is White, I argue that the reracialization of selected world populations, in particular the majorities of peoples of West Eurasia and Central and South America, functions as a gaslighting project with two ulterior motives: (1) redefinition of Western resistance to foreign culture as not merely nativist but racist (of course the negative connotations nativism has assumed does much of this work itself); (2) the reflexive portrayal of Western civilization as intrinsically white supremacist and the spread and entrenchment of its ideals, values, and norms as representing the imperialist expansion of white-racial power.
Using this frame, the rational humanism that conceptualizes humans as individuals equal in moral worth is supplanted by romantic schemes depicting humans as personifications of abstract demographic and racial categories arrayed in a hierarchy of oppressed and oppressor. Moreover, race and culture are conflated. Even science is under attack, with the postmodernist offering up “indigenous” and “marginalized” “ways of knowing” as alternatives to fact and reason, which the disaffected zealously put central to a leftwing identitarian ideology.
The war on the West is prosecuted with an arsenal of lies and half-truths—and that’s why I care about this issue. Race could disappear tomorrow for the right reasons, namely colorblindness and individualism, and I would be ecstatic. But when race is used as a weapon to advance racism in another form, I can’t standby. And racism in another form is, as I have documented in numerous blogs on my Freedom and Reason, is what antiracism represents. As somebody who has opposed racism his entire life, I have to be concerned about this. Indeed, I would describe my ethic as “antiracism,” except that today’s antiracism is a euphemism for anti-white. (See Is There Systemic Anti-White Racism? and The Metaphysics of the Antiracist Inquisition.)
We see growing awareness of the racism against whites. Douglas Murray tells Lex Fridman in a recent interview concerning his book, The War on the West, “that today in America the only group you’re actually allowed to be consistently vilely racist against are white people. If you say disgusting things about black people in America in 2022 you will be over. You will be over. If you decide to talk about people’s white tears, their white female tears, their white guilt, their white privilege, their white rage, and all these other pseudo-pathologizing terms, you’ll be just fine. You could be the Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff. You could lecture at Yale University. Absolutely fine. And the white people are going to have to suck that up as if that’s fine because there was racism in another direction in the past.” (I have been on to this for some time. See Reparations and Blood Guilt; For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations; A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations.)
To be sure, races may be redefined over lengthy periods of time; however, when race is redefined over a relatively short period of time by elite and popular forces hailing from a particular political-ideological framework, it is reasonable to assume an agenda. Moreover, while concepts may make non-things appear real, they do not in the final analysis create reality; whatever a people may call something does not change what it is. A man remains an adult human male regardless of whether the Merriam-Webster dictionary redefines “male” as a person who identifies as such. Being a male, whatever word one wishes to use, is ultimately defined by natural history. Unless, of course, one is a postmodernist, in which case he is useless as a source of knowledge.
Gaslighting is when a person or persons attempts to disrupt common sense understandings by disordering perceived reality. When all your life you have understood some thing or situation in a certain way and would continue to understand that thing or situation that way but for efforts to disrupt your understandings, then either you’re being enlightened or you’re being gaslit. The difference depends on whether there is a rational or empirical reason for disrupting common sense understandings, such as in educating a person with knowledge, i.e. validated or verified belief, serving greater benevolent interests, or whether the disruption is motivated by some ideological or ulterior purpose, such as to deceive or manipulate for destructive or selfish reasons. (I have written quite a bit on this. See, e.g., Intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black and The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism.)
Race, however much the prevailing typology is supported by evidence, is neither a matter of genotype nor indicates essence. The claim that the races ascertained through common sense represent distinct genotypes of the human species (apart from rare anomalies, there are only two genotypes in our species, namely female and and male), has been debunked by the scientific fields of genetics and physical anthropology. There are indeed clusters of phenotypic constellations, but the differences are small. This does not, however, necessary mean the differences are insignificant (we want to avoid the Lewontin fallacy), but it does mean that the differences do not amount to distinct genotypes. Race, if we wish to keep the term, refers to factors revealed by statistical analysis of genetic traits (factor analysis).
The claim that race is the manifestation of an essence of one sort or another is a mystification that comes with a catalog of irrationalisms, such as the fallacy of cultural appropriation. Again, what we call race is the product of a long historical practice of categorizations organized around selected phenotypic characteristics acquired through inheritance of allele pairs across geographical areas. We are beneath the skin and hair and behind the color of our eyes the same with the same basic needs of happiness, liberty, life, and love. It follows that culture is neither produced by nor belongs to any particular race. Our outward appearances may not be pleasing to all who scan us, but we are not more or less on account of them. Moreover, the averages differences and overlapping distribution between racial groups are abstractions. Concrete individuals may be anything and each has his own intrinsic worth.
What we have in a common-sense fashion referred to as race all these years is thus actually reference to ancestry (see Richard Lewontin’s “Confusion About Human Races”). Those with white or light skin, anomalies aside, are descended from those who had white or light skin in the past. Of course, different races may have light skin. Or dark skin. There are individuals on the Indian subcontinent who are dark. A team of geneticists led by Sarah Tishkoff has documented a remarkable amount of variation of skin color within Africa, ranging from skin as light as some Asians to the darkest skin found in the world (see The varying skin colors of Africa: light, dark, and all in between). There are light-skinned people in the West and in the East who are said to be of different races. However, majorities in North Africa, Western Asia (ethnic Arabs), Central Asia, and much of South Asia, Europe, and North, Central, and South America (descendants of ethnically Europeans) with light skin have historically been classified as white. Light-skinned East Asians have not been, but are often treated as such either analogically in hierarchies or similarly in Western societies.
Factor analysis finds that phenotypic traits cluster consistent with historically intuitive conceptions of race
There is a conversation that can be had about the history of race as a concept in the development of science and the current notion of clines as described by scientists that I will leave to one side except to express concern that such a standard might become in the hands of the new racialists a tool to further Balkanize populations. I discuss these matters in other entries on Freedom and Reason, but it should suffice to reiterate that we know from large-scale populations genetics studies, archeology, and physical anthropology that our common sense notions of race align with the geographical distribution of phenotypic features. It is not likely that, despite common sense understandings existing on a different plane from scientific ones, populations around the world, operating from varied worldviews, would arrive at a simultaneously false yet uniformly common understanding of race. The evidence would have to be radically different from what we know or what we expect to undermine those common-sense understandings.
As noted earlier, the inspiration for this blog entry is a meme claiming that nobody in the Bible was white. As if this “truth” is common knowledge among those who are not made stupid by white supremacy, something that the wise meme-maker already in the know already know, the meme obnoxiously condescends: “Take all the time you need.”
Popular meme on Facebook.
I encounter this argument quite frequently. Here is a recent example from the Mission Resource Network (MRN): “Why There are No White People in the Bible.” The article gives itself away in the opening paragraphs. “Did you know there are no white people in the Bible? Does that surprise you? It’s true, I assure you. Not Adam, Abraham, Moses, Deborah, David, Elijah, Jezebel, Daniel, Jesus, Peter, Paul, or even Lydia or the church in Rome were white. Most of the people in the Bible were Jews of middle eastern origin. The few people in the Bible from the region we now call Europe may have had light-colored skin and would be considered white today, but they were not white in their day.”
The author of that MRN essay, Dan Bouchelle, the president of the organization, offers this as his reason for making the claim: “How can I say this? Because the concept of whiteness didn’t exist yet.” Whether he knows it or not, Bouchelle is making a postmodernist move, one that means to deny the existence of some thing or situation by noting that it was not known as then by the name it goes by now, as if something exists only because language creates it—and, moreover, that language is but the oppressive expression of power asymmetry. If people of today were able to time travel, would they not find that the people living in “the region we now call Europe” were white? Or, by some yet unidentified process underpinning an unobserved phenomenon, would their minds be caused to forget the common racial terms we use to describe people? This is a bizarre conclusion, but one nonetheless following from the claims made in the essay.
The reality is that reality is not called into existence by words. That is the work of religious mentality. If you were to time travel to the Levant of biblical times and see people you would recognize as white, then those are white people. Of course. They don’t suddenly become not white because somebody told you that these people did not define themselves as white. Moreover, the color “white” is a shorthand for the constellation of phenotypic traits identified as caucasian, which, as I have documented, covers West Eurasia (as far east as the Indian subcontinent) and North Africa. The “There are No White People in the Bible” thesis could not be more incorrect from a scientific standpoint—or a common sense one.
Ashkenazi Jews were white Europeans, many of whom were blonder than the Nazis who exterminated them. This did not make the Nazis less white.
This rhetorical move does not save Bouchelle (it couldn’t anyway) from the claims he made in the essay regarding middle eastern Jews and light-skinned Europeans. As I explain in Almost Everybody in the Bible is White, the natural history of skin color runs in the other direction. It is a common error to assume that light-skin originates in Europe. Light skin among those understood to be white (however they may have been understood in the past) are the result of mutation and natural selection, migration patterns, and large-scale changes in food production in the Fertile Crescent, an area that extends from Northeast Africa through Mesopotamia in Southwestern Asia. This history means that white skin first appears in the geographical area from which the myths taken up by the ancient Hebrews lived and spread to Europe from there.
If white skin originated in the Levant, which all archeological and anthropological evidence demonstrates, confirmed by population genetics studies, then the Hebrews, the focal tribe of the Bible, and the tribes around them, were white people, differentiated in their day from those who were not—those in East Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa (they could not have known about the Amerindian). The white farmers of the Levant migrated to Europe, spreading the genes for white skin and other phenotypic traits there. The original inhabitants of Europe, those who had not developed large-scale agriculture, were dark-skinned (it is likely that those who built Stonehenge, for example, where dark-skinned). Over time, through assimilation, conquest, and interbreeding, dark-skinned Europeans were replaced by light-skinned people. The fact is that, while Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and, yes, even Jesus, may be (and very likely are) mythical figures, they would have been, were their historicity actual (which is doubtful), white.
Those of us who have always known that the leading characters in the biblical stories we read or heard as children were white are not wrong. There is no rational or empirical reason to suggest we were. So why the gaslighting? Our common-sense understandings are not being disrupted to enlighten us. Except for the attempt to purge scientific language of terms disliked by woke progressives, the science hasn’t changed. If anything, advancements in genetics and biomedicine are strengthening claims about human variation (which is why I do not as easily as I did in the past reduce race to social construction). Those who make and spread these memes and write and promote these essays do not have privileged knowledge. Their condescension is not justified. Either they are ignorant themselves or they are gaslighting those they mean to manipulate. Manipulate to what end? We’re coming to that now.
Bouchelle’s motive is ostensibly a religious one: “Jesus wasn’t white. Seventy percent of Christians globally are not white. And all people matter equally to our creator.” In fact, of the approximately 2.2 million Christians in the world, more than 60 percent of them are white. I doubt those who make these arguments or most of those who share them are ignorant of this fact. They have reasons, and Bouchelle’s reasons does not exhaust the catalog. At the very least, the reracialization of selected human populations has functions and consequences. Bouchelle’s argument is therefore essentially political. There are two reasons that emerge from this effort to gaslight the world that strongly suggest that reracialization is not being pursued for the sake of enlightenment (in which case it would still be wrong).
First, it is not the case that the West became the most highly developed civilization in world history because the people there are white. As documented, Europe became white with the westward migration of near eastern farmers from the Fertile Crescent. It is thus the case that modern Europeans are white, as are the peoples of North Africa and Southwest Asia, etc., because they descended from those with white skin. The West developed for many reasons, including norms and values associated with European culture. Only white supremacists claim it is the result of racial superiority, and white supremacists are a vanishing segment of western populations.
Sumerians, the first civilized people, were white. But they were not civilized because of their skin color.
But critics of the West, on the basis of the skin color of Europeans, claim that Western civilization and its values represent white supremacy. The spread of Western ideals around the world are interpreted not as the great civilizing force in world history that developed humanity, abolishing slavery, liberating women, freeing people from grinding poverty and autocratic rule, etcetera, but instead as racist colonialism—even an instantiation of metaphysical evil. It is true what Murray says: anti-white racism is deep and dangerous. Yet this is the standard history now being taught in the Western university; it is no accident that this interpretation is widespread. And this interpretation has been pushed down into public education. Our children are being taught race hatred and the white kids in particular self-loathing.
What is the function of all this? Is it no obvious? To delegitimize the civilization that gave the world the modern nation-state with its democratic-republican form of government, and its liberal values of humanism and secularism, by claiming that it is the work of the white race which carries in its heart great evil. Why would such a thing be desired? In order to advance the globalization project of denationalizing the West while transnationalizing corporate power. Thus nationalism, that great detribalizing force that liberated humanity from ancient institutions, becomes redefined as a racist and oppressive force that itself warrants dismantling.
In contrast, those ancient institutions supplanted by western norms and values become exoticized, heroized, and romanticized, and its backwards-kept populations portrayed as the racialized victims owed the wealth of the West “stolen” by the “white oppressor.” The notion that the wealth and progress produced by the ingenuity not of white people but of Europeans is portrayed as an expression of eurocentrism, of racist chauvinism. To avoid implicating all Eurasian populations, non-European whites are redefined as non-white. What are they? Nobody can answer that question. They have become either raceless or their geographic location or ethnic and religious identities are substituted.
But race is not culture. Race is not ethnicity. European culture is superior to other cultures not because most of its population is white, but because it does a better job of realizing, among other things, human rights. If this culture were the product of whiteness, then why is the Middle East so underdeveloped? (The Third Worldist has a quick answer, and it is not entirely wrong, but I assure you that it will fail to account for the atavistic force of Islam. Such is ideology.)
In light of all this, since the antiracists are representing not only nonwhites, but also whites in much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, there is a need to redefine these white populations as nonwhite in order to divide the world in a clean way: Europe, with its nation-states modeling and serving prominent role in the interstate system, recast as the source and sole expression of white supremacy, over against the rest of the world, over against the oppressed masses, so oppressed because they are not white, having been redefined as such.
We are thus witnessing to the emergence of a false ideology that serves the transnationalization project. It should not escape anyone’s attention that you are to pay attention to all this and not the fact of world economic forces who establish the class systems that finds the vast majority of us, whatever our racial identity, as exploited labor or labor made redundant by technological development—a development not made available to the masses to end their suffering, but to stuff the coffers of those who run the system. And those who run the system are the very ones who are gaslighting the masses.
The strategy to change the dynamic is to feed resentment, to provoke reracialized populations to demand racial reparations for colonialism, for Europe and the United States open their borders to the world, for example, in the European case, Arab populations that are overwhelmingly Muslim. The end goal is to transfer the wealth of the West to the transnational administrative state. European elites, convinced of antiracist revisionism, have opened their borders, much to the suffering of Europeans. When elites and masses seek to restrict the flows because of the chaos it brings even to their doorstep, they are accused of racism. Why? Because they are closing the borders to nonwhites? No. They’re closing the borders to culture-bearers who refuse to assimilate to western norms and values who will do the work they used to do. But reracialization permits the recasting of resistance to incompatible culture and to economic displacement as racism.
Thus we see the hypocritical demand that the world observe the right of nonwhites to cultural integrity, whether in their own nations or as minorities in western nations, while at the same time depictions of the demand for the same right to cultural integrity of whites as racist and chauvinist. Europeans have no right to their culture because they’re white. This is racism. This racism incentivizes groups external and internal to the West to redefine their populations as nonwhite in order to portray themselves of victims of racist colonialism (external and internal) and justifying their demand that Europe given them the things they want, especially access to the wealth produced by other people. The project is expressed in the West as postcolonialism, third-worldism, critical race theory, etc., all of this underpinned by cultural and moral relativism relativism, cultural pluralism, postmodernism, and New Left critical theory.
This portrayal of race and history obscures deep truths about the world. The first is the role of Western culture in the development across economic, legal, moral, and political domains throughout the world. The modern nation-state and human rights are but a couple of these developments. Reaching the zenith of historical and social development testifies to the superiority of western norms and values. The second deep truth is the role of capitalism, a class system organized on the basis of the private ownership and control of the means of production for purposes of profit generation and capitalist accumulation, in the development and expansion of western culture, the good and the bad of it. Capitalism is an economic force that is at once founded upon the exploitation of human labor while raising the living standards of the majority of people incorporated in the system.
This is the real struggle: the struggle of the peoples of the world against transnational corporate capitalism. The real struggle, if it is just, requires democratization of the means of production in the context of responsive nation-states in an international liberal order that preserves the values and practices of civic nationalism, equality before the law, humanism, individualism, liberalism, republicanism, and secularism. The reracialization project functions to derail the development of the shared proletarian consciousness and politics that threatens the power of corporate elites.
By disrupting common-sense understandings and manufacturing and promoting antagonisms based on racial animosity, corporate elites rule via a divide-and-conquer strategy. Because the most developed regions of the world are majority white, shrinking the numbers of those understood as such, turning white people into a pariah, incentivizing populations to escape association with such a pariah, the transnational powers-that-be seek to denationalize the trans-Atlantic system and appropriate its technology and wealth.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the prevailing (and I still believe correct) explanation for global inequality and the dynamic of development and underdevelopment identified the capitalist mode of production and its attendant class system as the primary causal forces. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, the history of the racialization of human populations was theorized as false consciousness justifying exploitative economic relations.
I became interested in the possibility of a synthesis of historical materialism and critical race theory in which the latter would be articulated in language indicating the ontological status of the former. I was drawn to this synthesis because, as I was preparing the proposal for my dissertation, I became increasingly frustrated with description of racism as largely ideological (see the work of Barbara Fields, whom I now believe to have been correct) and endeavored instead to conceptualize racism as a material relation in the manner of social class. I used the model in my dissertation, which I successfully defended in the summer of 2000, a two-volume 800-plus page study of America’s history of class, race, and criminal justice.
However, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that this synthesis confused categories of things and, moreover, lacked empirical support, especially with respect to criminal justice. Whereas economic modes of production and social class relations are material, objective, oppressive, and protected in law, oppression on the basis of race had been abolished in law and the explanation for inequality along lines of race as the work of race oppression was not compelling; too many other factors (breakdown of family structure, culture of idleness and violence, neighborhood disorganization, progressive politics) were in play.
The core problem in theorizing inequality today is the centering of race in the explanation, a centering that works to obscure the actual source of exploitative and oppressive social relations: the system of social class. I write about this in my essay The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones. This problem is why I write so much about the problem of racism.
“The crisis of education in the United States presents not only a danger to American democracy, but also the ideological and structural foundations for the emergence of a fascist state.” —Henry Giroux
“If history weren’t so important, people wouldn’t get so upset by it.” —Howard Zinn
A few days ago, Henry Giroux published an essay, “The Nazification of American Education,” in Counterpunch that strongly implies that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a Nazi. Giroux, a leading proponent of critical pedagogy and critical theory (the 1960s deviation), the intersection at which academics and administrators intensely and incessantly toil to infuse educational practices with anti-Western sentiment and ressentiment, finds in DeSantis a personification of the emerging fascist state. The tone of Giroux’s essay is hysterical—as in confused and delusional; the argument is at every point absurd and hyperbolic.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
To begin with the obvious, if teaching students about the ideals and deeds of the United States amounts to the “nazification of public education,” then one must presuppose that the historic character of the United States is in some substantial fashion National Socialist. Of course, in creed and accomplishment, the United States has not historically been a National Socialist endeavor—at least not before the rise of the corporate state. America was founded by liberals as a secular republic with an emphasis on individual rights and liberties. How can teaching students to appreciate American values and celebrate its successes—abolishing absolutism, ending slavery, empowering women, defeating National Socialism on the world stage, to name but a few—in any way represent “nazification of public education”? It just doesn’t follow.
What a nasty assumption at work in Giroux’s essay. It’s an assumption that runs throughout his popular writing.
Despite having the evidence directly in front of him, and (not meaning to patronize), being a smart man, Giroux nonetheless manages to mentally invert the situation. “Nazi education was designed to mold children rather than educate them,” he writes. “The Nazi educational system was deeply anti-intellectual and created modes of pedagogy that undermined the ability of students to think for themselves.” Moreover, Giroux recognizes that the Nazis used the educational system to weaponize identitarian division in order to advance hate and resentment of certain racial and ethnic groups. All true.
It really isn’t that hard to stand back just a bit and see that it’s the agenda of woke progressivism that moves with the spirit of National Socialism. Yet Giroux thinks it’s the other way around. He can’t take that step back to gain perspective. He doesn’t even understand his source material, which is here critical theory. Giroux believes that families, mostly proletarian, and legislatures opposing the indoctrination of their children in critical race and gender theory—the goal of which is to transgress the norms and values of western civilization and the liberal ordering of social life—is fascistic and not the corporate state takeover of public education because he is invested in promulgating the ideology that legitimizes these arrangements. Giroux is a functionary for the technocratic apparatus, a tool of the administrative state. It is with considerable irony, then, that Giroux, well known for his concern for public education in the face of neoliberalism, works against his explicit standpoint by characterizing the populist movement against neoliberalism as fascistic.
His error occurs in part because of misunderstandings of National Socialism and the theory of it offered in the writings of leading Frankfurt School scholars before the New Left and postmodernist deviations. It’s almost as if he’s running a misdirection play for the establishment, distracting the masses from the administrative and technocratic systems commanding their time and minds. Perhaps he is. In a recent interview with Lex Fridman discussing his latest book, The War on the West, Douglas Murray responds to Fridman musing about identiarianism working from some ulterior motive by suggesting that indeed it is. It is, after all, a characteristic of what Franz Neumann describes in Behemoth as “totalitarian monopoly capitalism” to fracture the proletariat through division. (See The Behemoth Returns: The Nazis Racialized Everything. So Do CRTs; Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.)
In 1959, in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Theodor Adorno writes, “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.” Although Adorno is fascinated by the authoritarian personality found among conservative thinkers and concerned about the implications (see The Authoritarian Personality), the body of his work, succinctly wrapped in this quote, indicates that he wasn’t as worried about the antidemocratic forces at the margins of society (which doesn’t in any case accurately characterize the ever-growing populist-nationalist movement that threatens to derail the new world order transnationalists are establishing) as he was about the antidemocratic and illiberal corporate state tendencies animating what Adorno referred to as the “administered world,” an intrinsically authoritarian situation emerging from technocratic rationality antithetical to egalitarianism and individual liberty.
Adorno understood, as did C. Wright Mills (see The Power Elite and The Causes of World War Three) and others, that the real fascistic threat in the post-war period emerges from the guts of corporate bureaucratic arrangements, with its social logic pressed into the prevailing cultural and educational institutions, not from the handful of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who show up with street corners with “shirts, stickers, and flags” adorned with images of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (an instantiation of the fascist threat Giroux, following Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Counterpunch, offers in his essay).
It is, therefore, with some bemusement that one finds Giroux using Adorno to frame his argument. Indeed, the deployment of an Adorno quote in diametric opposition to the claims Giroux’s makes reveals a profound misreading of Adorno’s position, which differs from the critical theory Giroux apes, i.e., Herbert Marcuse and his ilk, a deviation that, with the help of postmodernism, finds its way into the transgressive methods of CRT, queer theory, and the like, which in turn find their way into the heads of children.
Perhaps some time spent with Adorno’s correspondence with Marcuse might help clarify matters for Giroux. The exchange of letters concerned student harassment of Adorno not unlike Brett Weinstein’s experience as Evergreen State College, a situation about which I can easily imagine Giroux taking the wrong side. Adorno was (as was Jürgen Habermas) highly critical of the New Left tendency, seen in the student movement of the latter 1960s, detecting in it the potential for leftwing fascism. Marcuse, who became a New Left guru during that period, while admitting to Adorno the irrationalism of those politics, was nonetheless swept up in that tendency, even advocating the repression of the speech of those with whom he disagreed (see The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse; see also Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics and my Project Censored piece Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square).
Giroux writes, “Education under the Third Reich offers significant insights into how repressive forms of pedagogy become central to shaping the identities, values, and worldviews of young people.” Indeed. As an active university teacher, I see everyday the effects of woke progressive indoctrination of our nation’s youth. The disregard for cognitive liberty, rejection of reason, loathing of Western culture, and the depth of identitarian thinking does not bode well for the future of liberal society—and how the institutions won’t even assess itself to determine the extent of the problem (see Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses see also Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning). “Nazi educational policies,” writes Giroux, has “made visible how in the final analysis education is always political in that it is a struggle over agency, ideology, knowledge, power, and the future.” He then raises the specter of Hitler. “For Hitler, matters of indoctrination, education, and the shaping of the collective consciousness of young people was an integral element of Nazi rule and politics.” Giroux quotes Mein Kampf: “Whoever has the youth has the future.”
Giroux might have pulled from George Orwell, who writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.”(You will recall that O’Brien invites Winston to rehearse the sloan.) That way Giroux could have referenced another proponent of critical pedagogy, the evangelist of “New History” Howard Zinn, who interpreted Orwell to be saying “that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.” However, Giroux would write such words without awareness that he is describing the prevailing social logic of American public education, a social logic, as I have said, in the service of corporate state governance.
Giroux has a woefully impoverished understanding of cognitive liberty and the point of government in a free society. He believes that good government is one that protects the power of administrators and teachers in public schools to indoctrinate children with the preachments of Wokism. In his writings, which are filled with glittering generalities, he goes about “democracy” and whatnot. But good government obtains when the state establishes and maintains the conditions that enable self-government. By self-government, we mean the power of individuals to govern their personal destinies and the collective endeavor represented by the republic to make certain the availability of such power for that purpose. The function of the state in a free society is not to mold citizens, to shape them towards ends that are not their own, to tell them what to think, but to protect their rights and liberties from others and from the state and otherwise get out of their way as they travel the path to self-actualization. Good government empowers citizens, not tosses obstacles before human development. This is the substance of any democracy worth practicing.
Yet they undergird public school curriculum as if they are the final truth, parading as enlightened insights into the fundamental human condition, which is either fixed or fluid depending on which advances the agenda. This is what Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, as “enlightenment as mass deception.” Teachers are today part of the technocratic apparatus that serves the corporate state agenda. Woke progressivism is the ideology that lubricates the machinery of what is essentially totalitarian monopoly capitalism. It is a false enlightenment that dominates the culture industry, mass media, public schools, and the university in contemporary corporate America.
As I earlier alluded to, the nation has already fallen well away from the republican principles upon which it was founded, the teaching of which Giroux thinks are fascist. But it is the illiberalism of Giroux’s worldview that’s in line with the fascist threat he decries. Progressives have, by systematically misrepresenting history, cleverly argued that liberalism was fascist along (after all, the founders owned people, subjugated women, and colonized the world) and that the new fascism, i.e., “social justice,” will correct all that. It’s how they use the term “anti-racism” to continue racism in an inverted fashion, rationalized by a rhetoric of asymmetrical power. Not even a year ago, in a move symbolic of wrenching historical figures from cultural contexts, Thomas Jefferson’s statue was removed from city hall in New York because the founder and third president enslaved people. The man who stated in the most eloquent terms imaginable the fundamental principles of human freedom delegitimized because he lived with the legacy of slavery, a world-wide and millennia-old economic practice. There are countless instantiations of this move.
It was the Enlightenment principles of humanism and liberalism that eventually ended the practice of slavery, but Giroux and progressives like him, rejecting liberalism, appear as romantics, mired in a worldview that sees the public not as agents but as objects to control; not as citizens of a republic, but as subjects in a bureaucratic collective; not as individuals, but as personifications of abstract demographic and cultural categories. Like a clergy, progressive educators see education not as a system of empowerment but as a system of indoctrination. This is because the children given over to what administrators and teachers see as their institution will likely bear the wrong and regressive thoughts of their families and communities. Teachers see other people’s children as their own children. They are the new parents who know better than the real parents. They even keep from the parents secrets with the children. Progressives enjoy hours of control over the minds of children—more than half the conscious day of the little ones—and they mean to use that time to condition a generation to think in their terms. The progressive seeks to push out of the heads of America’s youth those ideas that are contrary to their own—ideas they characterize as “racist,” “sexist,” “transphobic,” etc.—and replace them with allegiance to the corporate state and its operating system, i.e., the identitarian divisioning of human populations.
No doubt this image triggers progressives who see fascism and racism in everything
I don’t mean to be dramatic, but the notion that Governor Ron DeSantis is in any fashion a Nazi or a fascist or anything remotely approaching that ideology is so absurd as to raise questions about the Giroux judgment overall—even if one did not already know this from acquaintance with his recent work.* Giroux is wrong because he works from a standpoint that is wrong. In thought and in deed, Governor DeSantis is pro-individual, pro-family, pro-American, and pro-West. To be sure, in the eyes of those who see the world in abstractions and endeavor to cancel individualism and dismantle the family, America, and the West, these are terrible things to be. But this is what passes for much of the left today: a pathological loathing of patriotic Americans. As a leftist, I am embarrassed to read the nonsense produced by other leftists. But, then, my leftism is liberal and republican, not bureaucratic collectivist. Like many other things, leftism is not monolithic. Nor is the New Left tendency in any fashion communist (there are misunderstandings left and right).
I want to close with a few remarks about Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to help readers understand how to read critical theory. Adorno and Horkheimer are neo-Marxist, and the Marxist method of historical materialism is what we might describe as a moving critique. Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis is therefore useful for what it might tell us about the present-day situation, and for this one needs to understand the underpinning logic of critique in order to adapt the argument, not slap it on top of the contemporary. The passages I am critiquing focus on the way language is used to direct behavior in an administered fashion that serves the interests of corporate power. It is this use of language that marks present-day public instruction, which has become in the period between Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing and today fully integrated into the administered society.
The social logic of totalitarian monopoly capitalism has colonized public education. The divisioning of human populations into identity groups is entirely consistent with the phenomenon of branding in consumer culture. One is encouraged, even compelled to adopt an identity as one adopts a style, with attire, banners, flags, placards, and standards—and an imperialist attitude—in tow. Adorno and Horkheimer identify this as the work of the “culture industry.” We see it in what George Orwell termed “Newspeak” in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eight-Four penned only a few years after Dialectic of Enlightenment. The language is changed on the premise that language creates reality. It’s a theological notion, the Christian notion of logos, that in the beginning there was the word. Those who control words thus control reality and the people in it. They determine who is in the circle of respectability and who is not. They determine what passwords access institutional privilege. They write the code.
“The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword,” write Adorno and Horkheimer. “The layer of experience which created the words for their speakers has been removed; in this swift appropriation language acquires the coldness which until now it had only on billboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes.” We can see here that the authors have detected the colonization of the popular lifeworld of tactics that secure corporate governance; by the mid-1940s, consumerism had already entrenched in the depths of mass consciousness. Over the next several decades, the repetition of words with special designations would come to dominate public instruction. They were very clear that this is a fascist development.
We often hear from the political right that the cultural Marxists, on the command of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, have accomplished a long march through the institutions of Western society, and that such methods as social and emotional learning are marks of a communist sensibility translated to a rhetoric about an intersecting array of identity groups. But the long march though the institutions was really the colonization of republic society by corporate ideology. Enlightenment as mass deception replaced Enlightened democratic practice (republicanism). What is kept from consciousness by the teaching of critical gender and race theory are the material interests of the working family. What is missing in the theory of intersecting oppressions is class analysis. So the correct historical account is obscured. (See The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones.)
Why would one expect anything else? Are we really to suppose that corporations actively deploy (not merely tolerate) critical theory and critical pedagogy because they want to subvert corporate power? Or do we suppose the dominant institutions are woke because they function to perpetuate and entrench corporate power? What benefit do working class families derive from having public schools teach children to despise their race or question their gender? Who bankrolled Black Lives Matter? (See Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter.)
What is happening here should be obvious. Corporate power is unhappy with DeSantis because he is their enemy. Corporate power is unhappy with Donald Trump because he is their enemy. Corporate power is unhappy with the populist-nationalist movement to reassert republican, liberal, and enlightened democratic values and practices. Enlightenment principles—humanism, individualism, self-government, and all the rest of it—are antithetical to the social logic of corporatocracy. A return to the principles of the Enlightenment threaten to derail the transnationalist project to establish a world government that would oversee the final destruction of capitalism and stand up its replacement: a global neofeudalist order secured by the Balkanization of everything. With its insistence on cultural pluralism and moral relativism and its program of managed decline of the modern nation-state, the goal of progressivism has never been about dismantling the intersecting oppressions against which they rail, but rather it has been about establishing and entrenching a consciousness that sees division everywhere except where it truly matters. The Enlightenment led to the emancipation of slaves and women. In time, it will lead to the emancipation of the individual from collectivist structures. So it obviously must be delegitimized.
The social logic of bureaucratic corporate arrangements has infected everything. Adorno and Horkheimer saw it coming. Giroux misses it. “The minister for mass education talks incomprehendingly of ‘dynamic forces,’” write Adorno and Horkheimer; “and the hit songs unceasingly celebrate ‘reverie’ and ‘rhapsody.’” Adorno and Horkheimer find that “the culture industry has taken over the civilizing inheritance of the entrepreneurial and frontier democracy—whose appreciation of intellectual deviations was [admittedly] never very finely attuned. All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralization of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology—since ideology always reflects economic coercion—everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same.” How does Giroux leverage Frankfurt-style critical theory and not grasp what it is telling him?
Adorno and Horkheimer conclude that “the choice of words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to man’s attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture industry.” Public instruction has become fused with culture industry method and the intended result is youth making itself a proficient apparatus for corporate needs, which are essentially totalitarian in character. Perhaps Giroux doesn’t know this, but his arguments serve the interests of the establishment, not the interests of those with whom he claims to stand. And the establishment is the present-day manifestation of National Socialism, which the idea of nation is replaced by every conceivable imaginary community. In the final analysis, Giroux’s essay is an exercise in anti-working class politics.
* * *
* In “The Ugly Terror of a Fascist Abyss Lurks in the Background of This Pandemic,” published in TruthOut during the burning of American cities by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, Giroux writes the following: “There are lessons to be learned regarding how history is reproduced in the present. First, there is the Trump administration’s caging of children on the southern border. Second, there is Trump’s threat to use ‘dominating force’ and unleash the National Guard and police upon demonstrators peacefully resisting police violence against people of color. Third, there is Trump’s relentless language of violence designed both to embolden second amendment gun rights activists toward committing violence and to dehumanize certain populations while attempting [he quotes Jason Stanley] ‘to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central themes of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle.’”
Everything about this paragraph is demonstrably wrong. Giroux has more than enough time to know that the images of children in cages at the US border were from the Obama era, a presidency he describes elsewhere as “an unprecedented moment in the fight against the legacy of racism while at the same time offering new possibilities for addressing how racism works in a post-Bush period.” Giroux also writes that the Obama presidency “puts the brakes on many authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies operating both domestically and abroad, while offering a foothold not only for a fresh critique of neoliberal and neoconservative policies, but also an opportunity to reclaim and energize the language of the social contract and social democracy.” How on earth anybody thought these thoughts astonishes me. I knew and blogged before Obama was president that he was a corporate state tactic. Moreover, his politically-motivated pivot on the matter religion revealed his duplicity. (For the religious pivot, see Barack Obama: Doing the Lord’s Work; Mixing Church and State: Is Obama Un-American?Obama’s Religious Speech. See also Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps; Ocasio-Cortez and the Powers of Expectation and Identity; Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum.) )
Are any of you sharing this pic? Don’t. It’s 100 percent factually incorrect.
This popular image is entirely wrong.
White skin comes from a expression of a handful of genes making their appearance in the Middle East and Caucuses as long ago as twenty-eight thousand years from present. Fair or light skin is thus a characteristic of the people of the Fertile Crescent, and that includes the Levant and civilizations in the Tigris-Euphrates River Vally, the Indus River Valley, and even the Nile. A subgroup of white skinned people migrated westward from these places into Europe and replaced darker skin populations that had lived there for thousands of years previous. White-skinned people in Anatolia who, some ten thousand years ago, sparked the Neolithic Revolution, which formed the economic and technological foundation of civilization.
Several thousand years later, in the Levant, white people collected stories about mostly white people and produced what we know today as the Bible. Noah, Abraham, Moses, and all the rest of them were white. Noah, whose legend the ancient Jews derived from Sumerian myth, the oldest involving the hero Ziusudra whose exploits are nearly identical to those attributed to Noah, would have been, if an actual person, among the earliest white people mentioned in the written records. Of course, there is no record of these folks having ever existed outside of the Bible, but given where their adventures took place and the time frame, they would have been white.
It may interest the reader to know that the earliest hominids were very likely white. The great apes are white under their fur and we are, after all, a great ape. A great naked ape. Chimps are mostly white if you shave them. Black skin is an adaptation emerging with the progressive loss of fur in the various genera associated with our species (Australopithecus, Homo, Paranthropus). White skin reemerged later on as a dominant trait (or possibly due to mutations, as it may not necessarily be the useful recovery of atavistic traits) among West Asians, North Africans, and Europeans as an adoption to large-scale agriculture and the receding of the ice sheets opening up land to the north for habitation where there is less sunlight.
One might ask themselves whether Spaniards are white. You might be inclined to say so, but not a few people are confused about this. A few years ago I noted that, at an academic institution, a professor from Spain, who is clearly white, won the annual Woman of Color award. That her white colleagues nominated her for the award is revealing of the profound ignorance about race, geography, and history shared among progressives. Why no colleagues of color spoke up is a curious thing.
What about Greeks and Italians? For the most party, they’re white. Arabs? Yes, white, for the most part. Yet here, people treat Muslims from that part of the world as non-white (see Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?). Jews? The largest subpopulation of Jews, the Ashkenazi, are Germanic European. The Sephardim are Hispanic (North Africa, Portugal, and Spain), the Mizrahim (Levantines) are Arabic—all white.
These are of course nations and ethnicities, but nonetheless nations and ethnicities who majorities are historically white. That the skin tone of many of these populations is darker than a Swede’s makes no difference. Whites are no more all of one shade of color than are blacks.
Sumerians
Somebody shared the image of the woman with the sign on Twitter and judging from the upvotes, it was quite popular among the Twitter folk, especially those with Ukrainian flag emojis. I wondered aloud in the thread, if the Biblical characters aren’t white, then what are they? Somebody said “Middle Eastern.” That’s a region, I responded. Try again. Every answer I was provided revealed a profound ignorance of history, hominid evolution, and anthropological classification. (I have been thinking that it might be more useful to teach these subjects in our public schools than social and emotional learning and critical race and gender theory.) I find the notion of race problematic. I don’t believe it’s an intrinsic thing.
Following Richard Lewontin and other (see Lewontin’s “Confusion About Human Races”), I argue that what we understand as race is ancestry. Since offspring look like their parents, both parents and offspring are subject to the force of natural history, and human populations tend to mate with those who look like them and live in the same geographical area, a scheme can be devised to identify different subpopulations based on constellations of phenotypic traits. As history would have it, no scheme needed devising, as humans rather uniformly came to see the world in these terms, which, we later found out, enjoy empirical support. Nonetheless, since racial groups are primitive concepts that fray at the edges when confronted with more in-depth genetic analysis, the ideal would be to shift our language.
However, if people are going to make claims about race, such as that Arabs and Jews are not white, which necessarily presumes that there are people who are in fact white (and racial groups cannot define themselves since there are no elected leaders to define them nor can they demand others change their perceptions), then they should work from the prevailing framework, which divides most of the global human population into three primary racial groups: Caucasoid (white-skinned people living in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia), Mongoloid (yellow-skinned people living in East Asia), and Negroid (black-skinned people living in most of Africa).
You have heard that race is a social construction. You might have heard it for me. I have certainly said it enough times. My students are probably sick of hearing me say it. But it’s interesting that the genetic evidence is consistent with the popular understanding of racial groupings. Geographically speaking, the world breaks up into (1) most of Africa, (2) Australia; (3) East Eurasia (except for North Africa), (4) West Eurasia, and (5) North and South America (before colonization of the new world by Eurasians). Note that the genetic distances indicate evolutionary time. American Indians are the most recent human population genetically-speaking. Black Africans are the oldest.
The neighbor-joining method allows scientists to calculate when different species, or variations within a species, diverged by analyzing differences on a molecular level. This illustration maps the relationships between 18 human populations, using the method to create an evolutionary tree built on genetic data. (Credit: Alison Mackey/Discover after Jason Spatola/Wikimedia Commons)
I have in-depth writings about this in Freedom and Reason, so I am directing readers to the following blogs rather that repeat those points here: Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation and Casual Conflation of Categories. But I want to emphasis the color scheme appearing in the parentheticals does not refer to the actual neutrals and the color yellow. I am fully aware that “yellow” is offensive to many of East Asian descent, just as “red” is offensive to many American Indians, and my intent is not to offend. I don’t like this scheme. Nobody is actually black, yellow, or white (or red). The color schemes is shorthand for the constellation of superficial traits. I don’t believe in race. But clearly the woman holding the sign believes in it, since she is presuming the characters of the Bible belong to one or many—none of which are white.
All of this is well-established. But scroll up and look at the woman holding the sign again. Do you think she cares about facts? She’s woke. What else would possess a person to hold such a sign? She didn’t for a second wonder whether this claim was true or false. Facts don’t matter to her. Ideology does. So confident is she of the truth of the claim that she adds an snark at bottom suggesting that you may be too dumb to get it. What do you think? A BLM rally? I’m guessing so. The intent of the sign at an anti-racist is to express white self-loathing manifest in a desire to deny even the Judeo-Christian religion to white people, as if it were their race that produced those myths—or civilization itself. The deep error of the intent is that race and culture have nothing to do with one another and it is the racist who think they do. (See Culture and Race—Not the Same Thing; Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism; The Myth of White Culture; Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism.)
I want racial thinking to go away. But it appears some people care. A lot. And they’re trying to disrupt our common-sense understanding and traditional classification of most Arabs, as well as most Hispanics, etc., as white. You don’t have to be obsessed with essentialist notions of race to wonder what that’s all about. So I will follow up in the coming weeks with analysis of why the left is reracializing selected human populations.
For the record, if he were an actual person (he may have been), Jesus would almost surely have been white. Maybe not blue eyes and blonde hair (although it’s possible), but white. Most whites don’t look like Hitler’s wet dream. But there is an effort to make it appear this way.
The President of the United States has contracted a coronavirus. Like most people who contract this virus, the President is experiencing mild systems. But he is old and frail, so there is reason for concern. Cold and flu viruses present some risk to the elderly and the infirm. One worry here is that Kamala Harris could be president. Of course she won’t actually be in charge (neither is Biden). It just means that America will be represented by an airhead.
Just days ago, too frail to genuflect, US President Joe Biden fist bumps Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Saudi Royal Palace.
Speaking of COVID, when are we going to have our reckoning with the public health madness that first threw billions into unfreedom and then the world economy into calamity? Some have suggested that we moved on from COVID too quickly. Have they not seen this New York Post headline: “Unvaccinated Americans up to 9 times more likely to die from COVID-19: CDC”? The fear porn has not gone away. But neither has our access to information. The buried lede tells us where to find the data that reveals the scam.
Getting past the drama of the headline, which doesn’t really convey risk despite appearing to, one finds that, of those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and a booster dose, only 0.23 per 100,000 cases led to a COVID fatality between September and May. However, the risk of COVID fatality was only 1.60 per 100,000 among those who did not receive the vaccine. The per 100,000 calculation for the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA products is presumably similar, but those numbers don’t change the numbers of those who did not receive the vaccine, the so-called “unvaccinated” (a construction not unlike “uncircumcised,” which functions to normalize circumcision, an unnecessary medical procedure).
Working out the risk for the unvaccinated in percentages produces a fatality rate of just 0.00106 percent. The difference between the groups may be nine times, but the difference is very, very tiny. This difference is likely explained by confounding variables, such as the likelihood of those at greater risk of dying from COVID to escape vaccination, i.e., black, brown, and poor people, the later factor (i.e., poverty) associated with an increased risk of metabolic disorders, which are the conditions most associated with COVID fatalities. Since black and brown people more likely to be poor, the associations are obvious.
Returning to the case of Joe Biden, his positive test and his advanced age remind us the risk of death from COVID is not equally distributed across the population. For those fifty years and younger, the risk of death from a coronavirus is vanishingly small. The vast majority of those who died from this virus were over the age of 65 and mostly unwell. The median age of death was in the mid-80s. I have discussed this extensively on Freedom and Reason so I will refer you to my past blogs.
Moreover, all the deaths from blot clots, strokes, heart attacks, etc., from the vaccine are left out of the tolls. The Health and Human Services Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicates that, through June 2022, tens of thousands of deaths occurred within hours of injection with a COVID-19 vaccine or mRNA product. According to CDC data, there have been more than 1.3 million adverse events following COVID vaccines reported to VAERS, including 29,273 deaths and 241,910 serious injuries between December 14, 2020, and July 1, 2022 (see this article for details).
The upshot is that the COVID hysteria was irrational and the lockdowns, vaccines, etc., harmful to human populations. There was never a need for healthy adults or children to get vaccinated. Despite claiming that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission, the authorities knew they did neither. This ordeal will stand as the worst public health disaster in history, not because of a (lab-enhanced) virus, but because the actions of a public health system that has been entirely captured and corrupted by the corporate state.
I called bullshit from the beginning. Remember that. I was mocked. But I was right. I followed science.
The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1, plainly states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Pay attention to this part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….” By denying the franchise of marriage to same-sex couples, states were abridging the privileges of US citizens. Marriage is a civil right. Civil rights are not a matter for majority rule. As James Madison understood, applying the principle of majority rule to civil rights constitutes tyranny of the majority. Madison designed the Bill of Rights to prevent such a thing. (He had early sought to explicitly articulate this federal power in the Constitution itself. See The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities.)
The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Read that again. You may be unfamiliar with the Ninth Amendment. It is rarely referenced. Just because same-sex marriage—or marriage in any form—goes unmentioned in the Constitution does not mean marriage is not a right retained by the people. The Ninth Amendment very clearly states the principle here. Read it once more: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Why do conservatives rarely if ever talk about the Ninth Amendment? Now you know why: it’s the linchpin of the liberal order established by our nation’s founders. The American Republic, as Glenn Loury put it so well in 2020, is an instantiation of Enlightenment principles of individual liberty and civil rights. That’s right, the founders were liberals.
Conservatives love the Tenth Amendment, of course: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is a statement concerning our federal system.
However, conservatives mislead their public by referring to the amendment as recognizing “states rights.” States don’t have rights. People do. States have power (and so do people). The amendment is not talking about rights. Read it again. It’s talking about powers. Marriage is a civil right. States officially recognize marriage to give it the force of law, but states do not have the power to deny civil rights to American citizens (at least states do not have the authority, i.e., legitimate power, to do so, which is the form of power manifest in law in a just civil order). You and I are first and foremost citizens of the nation, whether we are gay or straight or black or white.
Richard and Mildred Loving, whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law, found justice at the Supreme Court, further realizing the American Creed for everybody.
Think about it. If Cruz were correct, then the Loving v Virginia ruling, which recognizes the right of interracial couples to marry, is bad law and should be overturned. Does anybody believe that governments should be allowed to decide whether a black woman marries a white man? Are you a racist?
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