I know I told readers I would be blogging about voting rights, mass formation psychosis, and progressivism, but Twitter fascinates me. The whole social media thing fascinates me. I have to get something off my chest. After a decade of existing on the platform, I have almost no followers on Twitter—even while my tweets and responses to tweets get likes and retweets. It’s not that people don’t follow my account. It’s just that the vast majority don’t stay followers for long. If everybody who has followed my profile for a little while wound up staying, I’d have a lot of followers. As of right now, I only have eighty-six followers. Sad, I know. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
This is me possibly having an egocentric moment.
I have been looking at the profiles of followers to understand why this is happening (I am a sociologist, so I am so inclined) and I have developed a working hypothesis. Let me know what you think (mean comments will be be deleted). I’m supposing at the moment that identity and orthodoxy explain the pattern: folks like a tweet, follow, detect a left-winger (which I am), and unfollow; others assume I’m a left-winger because I’m a sociologist and a teacher (fair assumptions), follow, hate the tweets, which they perceive as right-wing (which they aren’t), and then unfollow. Right-wingers don’t like the man behind the tweets, while left-wingers can’t stomach the heresy. (Right-wingers appear much better at detecting left-wingers than so-called left-wingers are, an appearance I address indirectly below.)
I have long suspected that the worst species of heterodox thinker in the world to be—especially in today’s political-ideological environment—is the principled left-libertarian. If you ask me what I am, this is what I will tell you. What does that mean? It means that I resemble Christopher Hitchens’ self-description as a Marxist who rejects socialism, which is to say that Marx’s materialist conception of history and his dialectical method forms his analytical system, but those concrete systems claiming to follow from Marxian thought are authoritarian and soul-crushing and must be rejected. This is why both Hitchens and I like Orwell so much. (Perhaps if I were anywhere close to being as good a writer or orator as Hitchens things might be different. But clearly I am not.)
There’s a version of this dynamic in media requests for interviews. You may have noticed that the media has a definite progressive bias. The assumption is that a sociologist at a university can be counted upon provide woke counterpoint to some conservative or right-wing opinion on an issue. Not this sociologist. During the BLM riots, particularly on the question of police shootings, I would give an opinion that would completely throw the interviewer. What I am supposed to do? If a particular truth has a right-wing bias from the standpoint of woke progressivism it’s not my fault. Lately, there’s nothing to put on my vita about media requests. They’ve stopped calling. At least somebody’s paying attention.
My WordPress blog, Freedom and Reason, which you are now scanning, gets thousands of views and visitors annually. These aren’t incidental hits; the statistics tell me there is engagement. Visitors stay and read content. However, I suspect that as soon as the right-wing visitor sees a reference to Marx or some other leftwing critical theory type figure (and it won’t take long before he stumbles upon one of those), there’s no way in hell he’s going to say, “Hey, there’s this dude who blogs at Freedom and Reason who makes this point. Blah, blah, woof, woof.” Heaven forbid he should forward a link to the blog. My heterodoxy thus explains, I think, why my insights and arguments, sometimes almost verbatim, are rehearsed in populist circles without attribution because who in hell in those circles is going to cite a left-libertarian using Marxist methodology? So instead of directing people to my blog, right-wingers take the ideas as arrows for their quiver, developing out their system of conceptual and theoretical weaponry for battle.
Who can blame them? Not me. They know dropping the name of an environmentalist, feminist, pro-gay, atheist critic of capitalism who refuses to rationalize the planetary descent into corporate new-feudalism as a Marxist cabal will delegitimize what are otherwise good and useful arguments—irrespective of right and left. For the most part, this is fine with me. Ideas are way more important than me. And my ideas aren’t that original. My blog is a synthesis of ideas drawn from political sociology, social psychology, radical historiography, and moral philosophy—you know that because I cite the source of my ideas. At the same time, I want more people to be exposed to those ideas and I have this notion that directing people to the source of the ideas might help more people to them. Then again, one’s audience would then know the source of the ideas. It’s too much to expect, I know. I can live with that.
On the other side, woke progressive types read my blog and are horrified by what they think are right-wing ideas. That is this happening is not in doubt. I have disappointed a lot of people. Nothing on Freedom and Reason is useful to them because none of it is recognizably left-wing to them—nor am I anymore. I can make left-wing arguments about racism, immigration, religion, the pandemic, and so on, and the self-identified left-winger is so lost he can’t recognize them for what they are. This is not unexpected; neither wokeness nor progressivism is an actual left-wing position. Both are projections of corporate statism. Awareness that the left has turned and not me is a reality very few people are prepared to accept.
I often wonder about those academics who, having cited me in the academic literature (thanks to the norm of citing the literature, one’s name will appear in references, even if one’s work is unread), after learning that I am not a woke progressive, wince at not being able to remove that particular citation from their paper. The more woke academia becomes, surely the more wincing there will be, a situation I might find humorous but for the curse of excessive empathy.
I wasn’t the only one who saw masks for what they were back in the spring of 2020. In the above video, an interview with Lisa Brousseau, ScD, expert on infectious diseases, University of Illinois at Chicago, conducted by Infectious Control Today, was conducted in April 2020, Brousseau tells the interviewer, “The idea that cloth masks will protect anybody from contracting COVID-19 is magical thinking.” Surgical masks won’t help, either. You need respirators if you want any real level of protection.
Dr. Brousseau understands that SARS-CoV-2 is aerosolized and very small. How small? At less than 100 nanometers, it cannot be seen with a light microscope at the highest possible power. While masks do not stop the spread of the virus, they do spread a false sense of security. People confident that they are protected are more likely be out and about contracting and sharing the viruses. This is not a problem for most people, since the viruses is really only dangerous to specific groups in the population. But to those for whom the virus does pose a significant risk, confidence in masks can be dangerous.
If masks are not protective, then why did the CDC push them? Why did so many governments mandate them? Dr. Brousseau answers the question in a roundabout way. In her view, we should have all stayed home. I don’t agree with that since a large portion of the population catching the virus early on would have brought the pandemic to an end sooner. However, you can see how everybody staying home would paralyze the economy. The lockdowns and panic were already bad enough economically-speaking. So to get people to go to work—especially essential workers—authorities told us masks would protect us. They lied in order to keep those workers considered expendable from staying home.
Did you uncritically share this meme?How about this one?
If you shared the first meme without criticism, then you have zero understanding of science. You should be embarrassed to have shared such a bad analogy. Don’t even begin to think you have the intellect to challenge other opinions on this subject if you are sharing memes like this. But the second illustration is hardly more useful. What are these numbers based on? They can’t possibly be based on scientific research. So where did they come from? Frankly, from the rectum of an authoritarian-minded meme-maker.
From a World Health Organization report issued December 2020: “A large randomized community-based trial in which 4862 healthy participants were divided into a group wearing medical/surgical masks and a control group found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2.” More science: “A recent systematic review found nine trials (of which eight were cluster-randomized controlled trials in which clusters of people, versus individuals, were randomized) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness. Two trials were with healthcare workers and seven in the community.” Conclusion: “The review concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness.”
On my blog, I have shared the insights of industrial hygienists on the efficacy of masks (see my essay Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected?) Wear two masks. Wear three. It doesn’t matter. Wearing a mask is magical thinking. It may reduce your anxiety, which is the function of rituals anyway, but it does not protect you or others from SARS-CoV-2. Nor will social distancing. You might as well wear an amulet blessed by a shaman around your neck.
Ritual masks
Which brings us to vaccines. We know vaccines spread the virus. This became obvious early on. As with masks, those who are vaccinated and believe themselves safe to self and others go out into the world where they catch and spread the virus. And because the vaccines offer some protection from severe illness, the infected can walk around spreading more virulent mutants. Because of the magical belief that the vaccine protects them, they go to work and school sick or infected but not knowing they are sick.
I don’t mean to embarrass folks even more, or to sound ethnocentric (a nonsense term created by academic and cosmopolitan types), but this is the same reason the shaman is out on the beach doing his crazy dance moves and uttering incomprehensible incantations while the fishers are fishing near the reef in choppy waters. If the fishers believe the sea demons who disturb the sea are kept calm by the shaman’s spells and rituals, then they will get in the boat and risk their health and lives to procure food for the village. Great But are they objectively safer? No.
The point of magic and ritual, its latent function, as sociologist Robert Merton put it, is to reduce the anxiety of uncertainty in high-stakes and stressful circumstances where there is a high risk of choking or running away in fear. To put this in stark terms, the corporate state has been running a vast psychological operations project on the masses. They first scare the wits out of them by constructing a mythology and then instruct them on ritual practices to ward off the contagion. And while one would have hoped the people had evolved beyond primitive fishers who need superstition and magic to get through life, it is clear they haven’t. This also explains the Inquisition-like attack on doctors and scientist, i.e., heretics, who challenge the narrative, i.e., doctrine.
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Here’s another bit of irrational thinking. Cigarette smoking causes one of every five deaths in the United States each year. That’s roughly half a million deaths annually (eight million worldwide). That a far greater number of deaths than deaths associated with COVID-19. “But people choose to smoke.” Sure. And people choose not to be vaccinated or wear a mask or go to parties. Those are choices that endanger one’s own life. So let the people who choose not to be vaccinated, etc., risk their lives like those who choose to smoke cigarettes.
“What about me?” You’re vaccinated, right? “But you can still get COVID-19, if you are vaccinated.” Can you get it from another vaccinated person? “Yes.” Then what’s the point of vaccination? “A vaccinated person won’t get as sick.” Okay, so you changed the argument. Still, so? What does that have to do with the unvaccinated? “They take up hospital beds.” So do smokers. “But COVID-19 is driving up health care costs.” So are cigarettes. Why aren’t we banning smoking? Why aren’t we fining smokers? “We demand smokers not smoke around us.” But a vaccinated person with COVID-19 is blowing smoke in your face. Think about it, your workplace allows the vaccinated to be around you even though they may be sick and contagious. Infected people vaccinated or not shouldn’t be around other people.
The authoritarian argument makes no sense. If we punish people who don’t get vaccinated but not those who smoke cigarettes then the action is an arbitrary exercise of public and private power. Canada, Europe, Australia—all these countries are mandating vaccines. Some are locking people up. All these countries allow smoking. Why do they allow smoking? It’s deadlier than COVID-19—by millions. Smoking tobacco is a known risk factor for severe disease and death from many respiratory conditions and infections. Heart attack. Stroke. Do smokers have a better prognosis than nonsmokers if they contract COVID-19? Most people who have died from COVID-19 have comorbidities that, if not present, mean that the person likely would not have died. Many suffer from metabolic disorder caused by obesity. They are hypertensive, etc. Why aren’t we punishing people for what they eat and for not exercising? Why aren’t we regimenting ourselves in military fashion?
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A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows us how pandemic panic is changing attitudes with respect to democracy and freedom along partisan lines. The survey shows how fascistic Democrats as a group have become. “Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.” Such a measure is opposed by 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters. The poll also found that 78% of Democratic voters support the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate plan (only 22% of Republicans and 41% of unaffiliated voters support the vaccine mandate). “And many Democrats would support even harsher measures, including fines for Americans who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine and criminal punishment for vaccine critics.”
I spend a lot of time on Freedom and Reason worrying about the negation of the Enlightenment. However, I am aware that the Enlightenment never got hold of a lot of people. This is especially true of some of the most arrogant and smartest people in the room. Unfortunately, they happen also to be the most powerful. And they are overrepresented in academia, the administrative state, corporate media, and the culture industry. Bizarrely, a disproportionate number of these authoritarians identify as on the political left. That the corporate state enjoys supporters with Stalinist attitudes does not make this a socialist moment. The label that applies here is fascism.
Before getting to the substance of today’s blog entry, which concerns the depoliticization of tyranny in America today, I want to take the occasion of the holiday in his name to acknowledge the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and reiterate my opposition to post-civil rights conception of social justice that denies Kings’ vision of a colorblind society. Far from putting racism behind us, the post-civil rights deviation has spawned a new era of racial antagonism. This extremism grows from New Left perversions that pushed civil rights—and politics generally—from its roots in American conceptions of freedom and democracy towards a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values.
More than Stokely Carmichael’s belittling characterization of King as a “reformer who was good for the image of America,” the New Left eschewed the Old Left’s commitment to orthodox Marxian concepts and socialist politics, and took up instead the anti-American standpoint of such prominent Third World revolutionaries as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. These developments mingled with the nihilistic turn in French postmodernist philosophy to produce the truly vile synthesis that elites across the West exploit to undermine democratic-republicanism and the modern nation state. It’s this synthesis that forms the basis of contemporary antiracism and critical race theory.
Those of us who believe in justice and democracy must redouble our efforts to explain to those around us that Black Lives Matter and similar phenomena collectively represent a disjunctive break from the civil rights of MLK, Jr. The New Left, however much its rhetoric apes critical dialectics, because of its obsession with race, is incapable of grasping the West as a contradiction in need of a full becoming—the establishment of democratic socialism in the context of the Enlightenment. Thus the so-called critical turn in leftwing politics not only threatened bourgeois interests; it threatens proletarian interests.
If it was not clear in the moment, history has exposed Black Power as a reactionary politics. These are not King’s politics. Let’s rededicate ourself to King’s dream of a world in which individuals are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. This is a demand not for equity, but for each and every person to enjoy equal treatment—treatment blind to race. Let’s us say once and for all that we are to get no more or no less on account of our race. That’s justice. (See Colorblindness versus Colorfulness; A Note on Desegregation and the Cold War.)
Today we celebrate the victory we achieved more than half a century ago in ending institutional racism and recognize the need take the nation off the path to retribalization that progressives and the corporate state have put us on. Let’s honor Dr. King’s legacy and get back to living the dream.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci receives the Medal of Freedom Award from President George W. Bush
Last week the Supreme Court blocked Joe Biden’s attempt to federally impose a mandatory vaccine and testing regime on the nation’s large employers. “Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers,” the majority observed in an unsigned opinion, “it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly.” The opinion continues: “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category.”
This was the right decision. I was disappointed on the second decision regarding the mandate for health care workers. The paradox of medical personnel with natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 being fired for not submitting to a vaccine requirement while vaccinated personnel with a COVID-19 diagnosis are allowed to continue working in the heath care system is a contradiction that demands redressing. But as the arguments and questions unfolded, one could see the split decision emerging; blocking the employer mandate was the best one could hope for.
The Roberts Court, April 23, 2021. Seated from left to right: Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Standing from left to right: Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
In rationalizing their dissent, the progressive minority, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, those justices who had embarrassed themselves during arguments by disseminating misinformation, write, “When we are wise, we know not to displace the judgments of experts, acting within the sphere Congress marked out and under Presidential control, to deal with emergency conditions.” You knew that was coming based on their questions. What was perhaps unexpected is the degree to which they make explicit the technocratic attitude that works behind the decision-making process. Technocracy is the rule of unelected bureaucrats and selected experts managing the corporate state.
In a pending blog entry (not the next one, which will either be about mass formation psychosis or voting rights, but probably the one after those), I will delve deeply into the struggle to save the American republic from the totalizing tendency of corporate statism reflected in the minority’s opinion. It will suffice to say here that the Supreme Court’s decision on Biden’s attempt to weaponize OSHA against the proletariat is a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak historical moment; it will take a lot more than this decision to turn things around.
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Rand Paul grills Fauci on his anti-Great Barrington Declaration campaign: “In an email exchange with Dr Collins, you conspire…to create a ‘quick and devastating published takedown’ of three prominent epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford…to smear them as ‘fringe.’” pic.twitter.com/8c7p3kzqvz
I highly recommend to readers Paul Diesing’s How Does Social Science Work? In the chapter “Science Politics,” Diesing, who is a political scientist, distinguishes democratic science from technocratic science. A recent hearing in the Senate provides instantiations of Diesing’s categories. In the exchange recorded above, Senator Rand Paul articulates the principles of democratic science. Dr. Anthony Fauci is the paradigm of technocratic science personified. If you watched the hearings you could see Democrats pushing technocracy. Make no mistake about which of the two parties is the authoritarian part of the moment.
I want to dig into this problem a bit more by bringing in some other voices. In her essay, “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity’,” published in a special edition of Social Research, philosopher Sandra Harding discusses the matter by distinguishing between two kinds of politics and their relationship to knowledge production.
The first kind “is the older notion of politics as the overt actions and policies intended to advance the interests and agendas of ‘special interest groups,’” she writes. “This kind of politics ‘intrudes’ into ‘pure science’ through consciously chosen and often clearly articulated actions and programs that shape what science gets done, how the results of research are interpreted, and, therefore, scientific and popular images of nature and social relations.” This kind of politics politicizes science, a practice seen as corrupting in light of the idea of objectivity as neutrality.
This charge is usually leveled against Republicans. One often hears in progressive circles and the establishment media the lament, “How did the COVID-19 pandemic become so political?” The Washington Post tells us, “The pandemic didn’t have to be politicized,” adding, “one party is to blame for it.” Guess who? The Republicans. An article in the journal Science Communications blames “the high degree of politicization in initial COVID-19 coverage” for polarizing US COVID-19 attitudes. The Brookings Institute complains, “Politics is wrecking America’s pandemic response.” While CBS News wonders “Why did COVID-19 become partisan?” Vox tells us why in “How political polarization broke America’s vaccine campaign.” As if one could approach public health from an apolitical standpoint. As if we it wasn’t obvious to everybody that the virus was weaponized to advance the slow-motion coup against the Donald Trump presidency.
The accusation of politicization is a trick that depends on the false notion of objectivity as neutrality—a fig leaf, Immanuel Wallerstein calls it in his American Journal of Sociology essay “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society.” The pandemic response is political. That’s the truth that requires trickery. But the power elite is desperately seeking to dissimulate the politics driving policy while depicting resistance to those politics as the only politics in play. To see the trick, one needs to understand that there is an other type of politics, Harding writes, in which “power is exercised less visibly, less consciously, and not on but through the dominant institutional structures, priorities, practices, and languages of the sciences. Paradoxically, this kind of politics functions through the ‘depoliticization’ of science—through the creation of authoritarian science.”
Harding cites Robert Proctor, who, in his Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, reminds us of vital historical facts. “The Nazis depoliticized science by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy,” writes Proctor. “Authoritarian science based on the ‘Führer principle’ replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences.” (In light of present circumstances, we can update the Führer principle to the Fauci principle.) “The Nazis ‘depoliticized’ problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms.”
Are things clearer now? This is an old trick. It’s the way the classical political economists, such as Adam Smith with his “invisible hand” metaphor, removed economics from the political realm by establishing the logic Darwin later adapted as his theory of natural selection, a theory that would then inform eugenics and racial science. It’s the way neoliberalism works today; by treating public utilities as private business entities, and I am speaking here of the social media platforms controlled by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, censorship is no longer a government move but a consequence of market forces. You should see that the pandemic is a strategy to launder the grand project of transnational corporate power by denying the political ambitions of the policy makers.
The question at hand is not whether science is political. It is. It always has been. Denying that is political is part of the corrupting force. Depoliticization works by denying politics—by dissimulating and obscuring power. For the reason, Harding contends, we have to abandon the neutrality that hides power in order to become more strongly objective in our scientific and other endeavors. I agree with her.
One must stand somewhere. Indeed, how could there be science ethics without recognizing politics and power in scientific endeavor? The question before us—and this question must always be before us—is how power and politics are being hidden from view by the depoliticizing language of neutrality. Otherwise, Nuremberg becomes nothing more than a romantic bother that gets in Prometheus’ way. Humanism requires a critical standpoint, and this standpoint simultaneously rejects technocratic science and a demands democratic science—that is, science for the people.
(See also Robert Proctor’s Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge and Joseph Rouse’s Knowledge and Power: Towards a Political Philosophy of Science.)
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I want to show you what legacy media looked like before it became entirely subservient to the corporate state. The legacy media wasn’t perfect. But it was a hell of a lot better than what we have now. There once was a thing called “investigative journalism.” The networks covered the Church Committee hearings. They covered the Pentagon Papers. You would never see those stories covered today in the organs of the establishment.
In the video below, you will watch CBS News exposing the dangers of vaccines. In 1976, pharmaceutical corporations and governments around the world, including the US government, manufactured a swine flu epidemic. The government rolled out a massive vaccination program accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign involving print and television media. Millions of Americans were injected with the experimental swine flu vaccine. Scores of people suffered a range of vaccine injures. The story focuses on a sometimes lethal and almost always devastating paralytic condition called Guillain–Barré syndrome, or GBS. The government, shamefaced, had to cancel the program.
That disaster and mounting death and injuries from other vaccines led to the creation of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, or NCVIA, which required health care providers to report adverse events to vaccines. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, established in 1990 and jointly managed by the CDC and the FDA, grew out of the NCVIA. In the meantime, the US government granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers. United States Code states in part: “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine.” This law is associated with the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), popularly known as the “vaccine court,” administered by Health and Human Services (HHS), to compensate those injured by vaccines covered by VICP. VICP has to date paid out several billion dollars in compensation to those killed and injured by vaccines cover by the law.
Thus a regulatory apparatus was stood up to manage the fallout from mass vaccination programs—not to hold medical-industrial complex accountable but to act as a public relations operation to reassure the public that these products are beneficial, efficacious, necessary, and safe. In tandem with the establishment of this apparatus, the establishment media shifted its role from its traditional roles as the Fourth Estate criticizing government and corporate power to serving as the propaganda arm of the corporate state. Mainstream news organizations run interference for vaccine manufacturers by denying the link between the vaccines and GBS and a host of other deleterious side effects, while they demand that those who do criticize the industry are removed from social media platforms.
Over the years, I have posted this video twice on YouTube only to have it removed for violating “community standards.” Watch it while you can on YouTube if you are afraid to watch it on Rumble. If you do not fear Rumble (which you shouldn’t), you can can find my upload of a high definition video, “The Swine Flu Epidemic of 1976.” But the one currently on YouTube is a polished and contextualized presentation worth checking out.
CBS News exposes the 1876 swine flu fraud
This issue is personal. As many of you know, my son was injured by the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. (I discuss this in a recent blog: The World Has Been Played So Hard—But It’s Not Too Late to Resist.) I was injured by a flu vaccine in the late 1990s that produced an autoimmune disorder called Grave’s disease that nearly killed me. Fortunately, my Graves is in remission thanks to hormone treatment, an intervention that unfortunately resulted in obesity and metabolic disorder, which in turn caused my Barrett’s esophagus. All this is thanks to a flu vaccine. The mRNA vaccines are associated with Graves (and several other autoimmune disorders). Why didn’t I not subject myself to this shot? The answer to that should be obvious. (Over the last few years I have lost a lot of weight and my metabolic conditions is under control, but the quality of life lost, not to mention career advancement, is incalculable.)
The COVID-19 vaccine is associated with known dangers, which I have blogged about extensively. These vaccines (mRNA and viral vector technologies) may cause harms down the road. In the video below, Stephanie Seneff, a Senior Research Scientist at MIT with more than 170 peer-reviewed publications, whose research interests lie at the intersection of biology and computation, in which she studies Alzheimer, Parkinson, autism, and cardiovascular diseases, is warning of the potential for neurodegenerative diseases caused by the toxins the vaccine uses to produce an immune response to SARS-CoV-2 (or at least early variants of the virus).
Stephanie Seneff speaks up on the dangers of COVID-19 vaccines
Why is the establishment media not reporting on this story? Because the establishment does not want you to know about the dangers of vaccines. This is why there is so much censorship of information that challenges the official narrative by the social media platforms run by the Big Tech oligarchs. In place of democratic science, the model of science that dominates today is authoritarian science, what Diesing calls it technocratic science. I have called it scientism. Whatever we call it, it must be called out for what it is: corporate profiteering at the expense of human health and life. The Biden regime wanted to mandate this at the federal level. States are mandating the vaccine. Even for children.
I am often asked how it is possible that the United States government would allow dangerous and even lethal health care practices. Why would the medical-industrial complex list COVID-19 as the cause of death in cases where people died with not from COVID-19? That sounds like a conspiracy theory, I am told. Most people have no idea how deadly the policies and practices of medical-industrial complex can be, even when the evidence for this is publicly available. I want to close this essay with an example of publicly available evidence that ought to shock those who don’t already known about it and then make a point about our current relationship with the truth.
In 2016, in analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, researchers at Johns Hopkins calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year in the United States are homicide cases. The number of those killed by doctors and nurses and lab technicians surpasses the third leading cause of death in America (respiratory disease kills close to 150,000 people per year). How do the killers get away with this? John Hopkins documents that the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. Are you sure the CDC is correctly classifying COVID-19 deaths accurately?
The media is just now reporting that 40 percent of pediatric hospitalizations for COVID-19 are not COVID-19 cases. The kids were there for something else and incidentally tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. And they were asymptomatic. And that’s not the only recent admission that should cause us to reassess everything we have been told about the pandemic. The fact is that COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality statistics are vastly exaggerated (in morality statistics the error may exceed 90 percent), while statistics on cases remains underreported because most infected people aren’t tested. Also underreported are vaccine injuries and deaths (VAERS only captures some of the incidents).
Why would US doctors, medical corporations, and our government underreport vaccine injuries and deaths? For the same reason they underreport medical error. This is an industry and you’re an expendable. Corporate power means profits over people. You should be so naïve. Untie the ribbons and use them for something else.
These easily-produced antigen and PCR tests for coronavirus mean that, if such tests were made available to the public, one could also easily be tested for adenovirus and rhinovirus, two other viruses that cause the common cold. If the authorities did that, and if the majority of the population were unfamiliar with these viruses, the fear-mongers could make it appear as if these viruses also posed a constant threat of disease in human populations. I know you’re thinking “common cold,” but these viruses are a lot more serious than you think.
Adenovirus, as well as rhinovirus, may cause pneumonia that can result in hospitalization, even death or disability. They are associated with many other diseases. Common cold viruses are a particular threat to certain populations. Your kid might have a cold caused by an adenovirus or a rhinovirus (kids have several colds a year), visit his elderly grandmother, or his uncle whose immune system has been weakened by the chemotherapy used to treat his stage IV pancreatic cancer, transmit the virus to either of them, seeding the development of pneumonia, which could lead to their demise.
On March 29, 2020, in a blog entry When a Virus Goes Viral, I write, “Like influenza viruses and rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are associated with potentially severe respiratory infections.” I continue: “Like rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are a family of viruses. There are many more types and they are widespread in many animal species. They are usually associated with mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses, i.e., the common cold. However, like rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are also a lower respiratory tract pathogen.”
How many of you visited your grandparents with colds? How many parents spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with their parents and brought along their sick children confident it wasn’t COVID because of a negative antigen or PCR test? A lot of you. Admit it. It’s just a cold, right? Are there grandparents who died of pneumonia where the pathogen came from their children or grandchildren? Certainly. Have you ever stopped to wonder whether you were the one who gave your grandparents the virus that led to their death? Most of you haven’t, I’m guessing. Why not? Because you weren’t made to be afraid of the common cold. You are familiar with its constant presence in your life. “It’s just a cold, right?”
With adenovirus and rhinovirus, you aren’t rushing out to Walgreens to try to find an antigen test or to CVS to get a PCR test because the CDC and the NIH and the establishment media haven’t scared the daylights out of you to push products by pharmaceutical companies. Among those potential products could be adenovirus and rhinovirus vaccines, not just antigen and PCR tests. Did you think about that? Did you know that the Johnson & Johnson jab is in fact a viral vector platform based on an attenuated adenovirus? For my European readers, did you know that AstraZena uses an attenuated cold virus common in chimpanzees known as ChAdOx1?
So why didn’t the corporate state organize the panic they are using as cover to implement dystopian-level surveillance and control apparatuses around those other cold viruses that? Too many people know that the rhinovirus is a cause of the common cold and would immediately ask why the panic. Moreover, Fauci and crowd weren’t (to my knowledge) modifying adenoviruses and rhinoviruses in Chinese labs to produce strains with greater virulence. Since most people had never heard of coronavirus, it was the ideal virus for their purposes. Ignorance makes it easier to manufacture a fear campaign. It’s why I work so hard to enlighten you.
I wrote on March 29, 2020, “I am not denying that coronavirus is a burden. Influenza and rhinoviruses are also burdens. All of these pathogens kill people every year. Nobody wants anybody to die. So we need to deal with these burdens. What I am arguing is that shuttering an economy on account of coronavirus is novel will have serious consequences for jobs and livelihoods, not to mention emotional and psychological needs and human liberty, and, moreover, that wanting to get back to a normal life as soon as possible is not remotely the same as saying we want to kill old people. The societal reaction is following a pretty standard sociological explanation, except on steroids. It is proceeding on the basis of a novel definition of the situation more than a novel virus. The panic is viral.” Nothing that has occurred in the meantime has changed my assessment of our situation.
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From the Los Angeles Times: “In August, [Dr. Aaron] Kheriaty sued the University of California Board of Regents and Michael V. Drake, the system’s president, alleging he should be exempt from the university’s vaccine mandate because he has a ‘natural immunity’ to COVID-19 after being exposed to the virus.” Why is natural immunity in scare quotes? A writer or an editor at the LA Times did that. That’s no accident. The answer is to suggest that there is little or no natural immunity associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, a suggestion that not only flies in the fact of the evidence, but in the face of everything we know about immunity. There are many things for which I am not scheduled to be vaccinated because I have natural immunity by virtue of having acquired the disease. As I explain in my previous blog entry, COVID-19 is one of them.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the UC-Irvine medical school and director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health.
On December 17, the University of California system removed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty from his position as a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the medical school and director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health. “Two years ago I never could have imagined that the University would dismiss me and other doctors, nurses, faculty, staff, and students for this arbitrary and capricious reason,” he wrote on his blog. “Once I challenged one of their policies I immediately became a ‘threat to the health and safety of the community.’” This is the University of California Irvine’s medical school we’re talking about. Again, Dr. Kheriaty is an expert in medical ethics. See his essay in The Wall Street Journal “University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics.” The subtitle was “College students aren’t guinea pigs.” I think we might see the actual source of the university’s inflexibility on this issue.
To protect the university, the LA Times resorts to dishonest reporting, misrepresenting the science by asserting that research that shows that coronavirus immunity wanes over time. This can be said of all immunity. The extent to which charity might pull from claim some meaning, the research consistently shows that natural immunity is far superior to vaccination in every regard—more robust, more durable, and expressing cross-immunity to different variants. Exposure to the virus rather than just the spike protein provides to the system access to the full genomic profile. Moreover, at this point, as if this needs to be said anymore, the vaccine is worthless as a mechanism for producing immunity. Fully vaccinated and boosted people in large numbers are contracting and spreading the virus.
Irvine’s policy makes no sense from an objective standpoint. It not only expresses an ignorance of basic scientific understanding; by denying what it entirely expected and that which we know to be true, it represents an exercise in anti-science thinking. It is quite obviously irrational, a characteristic of authoritarian consciousness. It is, for the same reason, also anti-humanist—it sacrifices individual liberty for narrow corporate interests. Why is this happening? It’s not about the vaccine. It can’t be. University administrators are not stupid people. Adolf Eichmann’s spirit moves in them. This is about something else, something far darker, and it should deeply concern you.
“We got a Chinese virus. Now we risk getting a Chinese society.” —David Starkey
“It is a lot better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction.” —Ricard Feynman.
My goal was to get this article out before 2021 was over. That obviously didn’t happen. So here it is late on the first day of 2022. The delay gives me an extra day to gauge the spirit of the people. I saw everywhere on my social media newsfeeds on New Year’s Eve a reflection that went something like this: “We didn’t think 2021 could be worse than 2020. Boy, were we wrong.” This was followed by a wish that 2022 would be better. I share that wish, but I didn’t think 2021 would be better than 2020. As bad as Donald Trump was in handling the pandemic (lockdowns, not cleaning house at the CDC, FDA, and NIH, rushing the vaccine, allowing the suppression of therapeutics and censorship of contrary opinion), I knew Joe Biden would be a disaster. I warned the nation in Can the Republic Survive Biden? and other essays.
Progressive Democrats across our institutions have struck a most authoritarian pose. And they spread misinformation for its sake. CNN regular Peter Hotez tells the painfully shallow narcissist Jim Acosta that an 80-85 percent vaccination rate could have “staved off” COVID surge in the US (see video clip below—and follow Michael Senger on Twitter). Hotez wants the Department of Justice and Homeland Security to target vaccine skeptics for suppression. This would be wrong even if his claim were true. But nowhere in any country with that level of vaccination has the surge been “staved off.” Countries with 99 percent vaccination rates have COVID surges. Whatever else the vaccine is useful for (power, profits), it is useless as a public health measure.
CNN regular Peter Hotez says 80-85% vaccination rate could have “staved off” COVID surge in the US. Wants DOJ and Homeland Security to target vaccine skeptics.
No word on Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, etc. all seeing huge surges with 80%+ vaccination rates.pic.twitter.com/ePaIOCBS4W
What explains the insanity? “Vaxism” is a neologism defining an ideology wherein devotees fetishize vaccines and see those who don’t as unclean and subversive. “It’s like a cult,” podcaster Joe Rogan said. It’s more than that, Joe. It’s the new religion. Asking a person to get vaccinated for a virus that poses no realistic threat of serious illness is like asking a person to get baptized to save his soul. When one’s career and freedoms are at stake for refusing baptism, the presence of a theocracy is indicated. Cults tend to be suppressed, not embraced. This new religion is the ideology of the corporate state. As with every system of control, religion is a primary tool for legitimizing hegemony. As we have learned from our experience with wokeism (critical race theory and the rest of it), secularism affords little protection from the insanity of religious-like thinking.
And, as it is is with every religion, rational adjudication of fact is marginalized or forbidden. Elites have shifted the burden to prove vaccines are safe and effective to those who have the right to demand the government meet its burden. As all students of reason know, the burden rests with those who make the positive claim. Now, in an irrational world, it’s up to us to show that vaccines are neither safe nor effective. That’s not a difficult thing to do—except doing so risks censorship, deplatforming, social marginalization, and reputational injury. But if we take up the burden, then the opening paragraph of this Bloombergarticle will find more children exposed to a dangerous, leaky, and unnecessary shot: “Pediatric Covid-19 hospitalizations have risen to record levels as omicron races across the U.S., amplifying the urgency to get boosters and vaccines cleared for children.” So let’s get out the truth: vaccines don’t work. Everywhere this truth is obvious and is followed by a demand to “get vaccinated,” push back. Ask people if they can hear how crazy that sounds. Help them hear the crazy.
Facebook now tells me ahead of time to not post the thoughtcrime I’m about to post. Incorrigibility subjects users to limiting via algorithm. (And not just on Facebook. Twitter recently permanently suspended Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology.) Circulation is a journal of the American Heart Association. Facebook threatened to limit me for sharing a story about a scientific talk based on research published there (which readers can here) carried in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s The Defender. Was this the thoughtcrime? That The Defender picked up the story and brought it to a large audience—an audience of vaccine skeptics know pejoratively as “antivaxxers”? According to the establishment, Kennedy has fews peers when it comes to misinformation peddling. If Dr. Malone is banished from Twitter, Kennedy can’t be far behind.
We cannot abide by corporate state censorship of science. Nor can we participate in the perpetuation of lies. We cannot let Malone and Kennedy (and there are several noble others) go it alone. It’s a risk you have to take. Something is going on. Healthy people are dropping like flies. From The Defender (because Facebook doesn’t like it): “In an analysis presented during a meeting of the American Heart Association, Dr. Steven Gundry, a pioneer in infant heart transplant surgery, said mRNA COVID vaccines put many patients at higher risk of a new acute coronary syndrome, such as a heart attack.” Gundry tells his audience, “We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.” (See also this article.) At least allow your sassy inner contrarian to act up. The corporate state is trying to keep you from knowing, or at least appreciating, the volume of devastating injuries this vaccine may be causing. (See “’We do exist’: Some Americans suffer life-changing COVID vaccine injuries.”)
This hits close to home for me. My eldest son, who is twenty-six years old, just starting his professional life (he is an attorney) developed myocarditis within a few days of his first jab of the Pfizer mRNA technology (I would not be telling his story had he not already publicly told it, scolding those who pushed him to take it). He talked to me about the vaccine before he took it. I provided scientific articles documenting the risk he was taking. SARS-CoV-2 carries a very low risk of complications for healthy young people, I explained; the benefits do not outright the risks. But I am no match for my child’s peers. He did it to protect me. I will be sixty years old in a few months and I have comorbidities that put me at special risk for severe disease (I will spare you the details of my medical record). He had said this before the jab. I told him never do anything for me. (I have said this publicly, see Life is Risky. Freedom is Precious.) His cardiologist forbade him to take the second shot (after his primary care physician urged him to take it). Thankfully he didn’t. It appears that each shot sets up its victim for the deleterious effects of the next one.
I wound up getting COVID the week of Thanksgiving 2021 anyway. Aside from a steroid inhaler, which the nurse called in to the pharmacy, and the PCR test at CVS that confirmed I had the disease the day before, I had no contact with any medical professional. I can describe it as a prolonged sinus infection with some upper-respiratory concerns, symptoms resolved with fluticasone. I never developed a fever. My throat was never sore. I did develop COVID voice (inflammation of the vocal cords) for a few days. My wife, fully vaccinated (not because she wanted to be), was infected at the same time and developed disease at least as severe as mine. She lost her sense of smell for a few days. I am not going to tell you that this virus is a walk in the park. But now Mona and I have the best immunity there is.
Why did I say that last bit? Because it is exposure to the virus’ genome that protects you. Natural immunity is how we are going to get past this. Antibodies disrupt the process by which coronavirus gets into your cells, where it hijacks the host’s machinery to reproduce. The virus is constantly mutating its mechanism for entry (the spiked protein). Some mutations allow it to better evade antibodies that recognize it. Reproductive success means these mutations accumulate. Quantitative accumulation of mutations leads to the qualitative change we refer to as “variants.” This is why the mRNA technology works so poorly as a vaccine. Rather than expose the immune system to the full genome of a dead or attenuated virus, mRNA hijacks cellular machinery to produce the spike protein so antibodies (produced by our B-cells) recognize it. Before long, coronavirus mutates to evade that version of the spike and the vaccine becomes useless.
What is missing in the approach is the process of educating the killer T-cells. Because T-cells remember the genome of invading cells, they seek out and kill the viruses that evade the antibodies by targeting infected cells. The antibodies educated by the mRNA and viral vector vaccines (which basically work the same way) buy no extra time for the T-cells to learn the virus’ genome. Thus previous infections provide the immunity that establishes herd immunity, as well as cross immunity against new variants, which makes subsequent infections milder, which is why we want as many healthy bodies to be infected. Mass vaccination was a monumental error from the standpoint of public health. So were lockdowns and quarantining, which I pointed out in the spring of 2020 (see Future Containment of COVID-19: Have Authorities Done the Right Thing?; On the Pains of Testing and Contact Tracing. It’s Worse than Folly; The Wuhan Virus, the Chinese Communist Party, and its Menagerie of Useful Idiots).
After reflecting on my illness from a few weeks ago, I am more sure than ever that I contracted SARS-CoV-2 mid-March of 2020. That infection produced a sore throat, fever, and a persistent cough. The cough lasted longer than coughs usually do with me. I was never tested and did not seek medical attention. Here’s what I did instead: aspirin, zinc, vitamins C and D, tonic water (which contains quinine), guaifenesin, and NyQuil to sleep. For my recent illness (associated with a positive PCR test) I added artemisinin, famotidine, Xlear (a xylitol-based nasal spray), and the aforementioned steroid inhaler. In both cases, I took 5-HTP for mood and melatonin to sleep. Either the complete regime made my November illness less severe than it might otherwise have been or, having already had an earlier variant (probably alpha), made the second go around milder. Either way, for the vast majority of people, the illness is manageable through self-care.
Perhaps the single greatest act of deception by the government and the media during the pandemic was leading the public to believe that the risks of SARS-CoV-2 was distributed equally across the population. For a brief while at the beginning they admitted that reality when they scolded the public for “killing grandma,” but then they soon settled into a narrative of indiscriminate death punctuated by rare cases of young people dying—the unusual against the backdrop of normality—to create the illusion that everybody was in danger from SARS-CoV-2. Children are not at risk for developing severe COVID-19. Now they do this with the “unvaccinated.” Most people are not at risk for developing severe COVID-19.
Yet we’re hearing reports that hospitals are overwhelmed with the emergence of the new variant, the omicron variant (see The Xi Variant to see the degree of deference of the medical-industrial complex to leader of the totalitarian People’s Republic of China), and that more children are showing up in emergency rooms. CBS News reports “More kids hospitalized with COVID-19 as Omicron spreads: ‘We need to get child vaccinations up.’” Here is that non sequitur again. The US is averaging 260 pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations a day (it is likely higher now). Reflect on this: there are more that 73 million children in America. At this rate, his many years before all them are hospitalized?
Omicron presents with typical cold symptoms
Omicron is a “strange virus,” the media reports. People have symptoms but are testing negative. That’s because omicron is associated cold symptoms—the same cold symptoms NyQuil claims it treats (which it does quite effectively). And that’s because coronavirus is a cold virus. You wouldn’t be able to tell whether it’s adenovirus, coronavirus, or rhinovirus unless you test for it—and then you’re just wasting time and money because it doesn’t really matter if it is omicron. In other words, it isn’t strange at all. Fortunately , the designation “hospitalization” means admission as an inpatient, so it’s a low bar. We need to talk instead of serious illness. Were is the surge in intensive care cases? CNN reports that Omicron is a game-changer for Covid-19 vaccines. If governments worked from a scientifically rational standpoint that would mean that it would bring about an end to mandates and passports. But we live by the rules of corporate bureaucracy.
Why is omicron so mild? For one thing, the evolutionary tendency in viruses is to become more contagious and less virulent over time (see Are We Forgetting Darwin?). Reproductive success depends on healthy hosts who can spread the virus to others. Since the vaccines are a bust, masks don’t work (Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected?), and people aren’t going to lock themselves in their homes (at least not enough people), it was inevitable that a mild variant would emerge. For another thing, tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and the killer T-cells are primed and ready to pick off the antibody-evading mutants. Again, that’s our path to herd immunity. It always has been. We always knew that. Pandemics are self-resolving. Life would not have survived very long otherwise.
Animal species has been subjected to coronaviruses since at least the 1930s, when this virus was first identified as infectious bronchitis virus (IBV). IBV was identified in humans in the 1960s and given its current name. Thus we have known about coronaviruses for decades. More than this, in 1965, scientists cultivated coronavirus and showed it to be one of the viruses responsible for cold-like illness by exposing test subjects to the virus and producing in them cold-like illness. Three coronavirus strains were identified before the decade was over. This discovery closely followed the discover of adenoviruses in 1953 and rhinoviruses in 1956. In the 1990s, the several variants of coronavirus were designated with letters of the Greek alphabet. That’s right, alpha, beta, gamma, etc. (See By Learning to Let Go of Mass Hysteria, We Can Bring an End to the Destructive COVID-19 Panic; also Faking Genius for Power and Profit.)
This is how we know that USA Today is misleading the public in their fact-checking article “Omicron coronavirus variant is not the common cold.” In fact, coronavirus is one of the viruses that causes the common cold. “The most frequently reported symptoms of omicron resemble symptoms of the common cold: a runny nose, congestion, cough and fatigue. But the two are not the same. COVID-19 is caused by a different virus.” The common cold is in fact caused by several different viruses, including the aforementioned adenovirus and rhinovirus. Coronavirus is one among the bunch. To be sure, SARS-CoV-2 (along with SARS and MERS) is different from the strains identified previously because it appears to be the result of a modified coronavirus that makes the virus more virulent so that it produces flu-like illness, especially more severe respiratory symptoms (and appears to have a mechanism that targets fat cells). (See Their Crumbling Ministry of Truth; On Herd Immunity, Establishment Disinformation, and Gain-of-Function; Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion.) However, the omicron variant is a reversion to the generally harmless coronavirus that you and I have experienced our entire lives.
It is the natural tendency of viruses to evolve towards less virulence to improve their R0 factor. SARS-CoV-2 is at least two years out from its release, and viruses evolve rapidly, so this was expected and probably would have happened earlier if mass vaccination programs had not been implemented, since the vaccine allows more virulent mutations to spread by reducing severe disease in hosts. (See Mass Vaccination Doesn’t Work; Will the Vaccinated Do the Right Thing and Mask Up or Stay Home?; The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart; By Learning to Let Go of Mass Hysteria, We Can Bring an End to the Destructive COVID-19 Panic.) Of course, it could be that USA Today is clueless about the history and nature of coronavirus and the common cold, which, like pneumonia, is not a virus but a condition or disease (“COVID is an acronym for coronavirus disease”). If this is true, then why is USA Today in the business of fact checking at all?
There is a rather large literature on coronaviruses that predates the pandemic. For example, in a 2015 journal article “Human Coronavirus-Associated Influenza-Like Illness in the Community Setting in Peru” (published in the American Journal or Tropical an Medicine and Hygiene), Hugo Razuri, et al., write, “We present findings describing the epidemiology of non-severe acute respiratory syndrome human coronavirus-associated influenza-like illness from a population-based active follow-up study in four different regions of Peru. In 2010, the prevalence of infections by human coronaviruses 229E, OC43, NL63, or HKU1 was 6.4% in participants with influenza-like illness who tested negative for influenza viruses. Ten of 11 human coronavirus infections were identified in the fall–winter season. Human coronaviruses are present in different regions of Peru and are relatively frequently associated with influenza-like illness in Peru.” As you might guess, I would produce numerous scientific articles like this one. But imagine it’s 2022 and this happens. What will they name the variants? Might we expect a push for mandates and boosters?
So if omicron is so mild, then what’s happening? Why are kids going to the hospital? As Robert Kennedy, Jr. tells us in the above clip, vaccine manufacturers hide behind emergency use authorization and children to avoid liability for products that kill and injure people (most of whom don’t need them). Omicron fear porn is a marketing strategy to herd people to physicians and pharmacies by manufacturing public health emergencies—and now the CDC says that we’re not over delta (they overestimated the prevalence of omicron). Scared witless parents rush their kids to CVS and Walgreens and emergency rooms for PCR tests on the basis of a positive home antigen test or in lieu of one (since stores are running out of them). Hence the “surge in pediatric caseloads in our nations hospitals.” Surely by now you have seen videos of long lines in major cities where people wait for hours to be swabbed by a worker under a tent. This is not rational behavior.
The establishment media appears incapable of reporting the facts. Now they are telling you that can’t lose your sense of smell from other respiratory viruses. This is totally untrue. Adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, and other viruses can also affect olfactory sensory neurons. Moreover, other respiratory viruses can cause severe headache and even fever. This is part of the project to create mass forgetting. The media functions like a giant neurolyzer. The power elite is desperate to keep the moral panic alive. And so parents are taking their kids to the emergency room for cold symptoms, where many of them test positive there—just as they would have if such rushes had occurred earlier in the pandemic. These become hospitalization cases. Those cold symptoms could be caused by an adenovirus, a rhinovirus, or an unidentified virus. The media tells us that you may think you have “just a cold” but it is very likely omicron (which is, as I just showed you, just a cold virus). Others have no symptoms at all, but parents just want to know—they have heard that many cases are asymptomatic. Since corporations and hospitals make money for every test administered, and since they have to protect other patients from COVID-19, everybody is tested. One also has to wonder how many kids visiting hospitals are there for vaccine injuries.
(For what it’s worth, my wife and I tried out one of these antigen tests and the instructions alone suggest that consumer error is big reason for approaching home testing with caution. The percentage of consumers who screw up the test can’t be small. The tests aren’t cheap, either, hence the long lines at CVS and Walgreens for PCR tests.)
Surprisingly, Dr. Fauci appeared on television only a few days ago emphasizing the difference between those who are in the hospital from COVID-19 and those who happen to test positive who were also in the hospital, a distinction that has always been in operation. Where was Fauci on this all along?
The run on hospitals has been exacerbated by loss of qualified personnel resulting from vaccine mandates. How many of those fired for not submitting to the demand that they be injected with experimental gene therapy with a concerning safety profile have acquired their immunity through natural acquisition, the only actual immunity one can obtain from this virus? We don’t know. They don’t bother to test them and see. So we have the most prepared health care professionals across the country sidelined because they refused to comply with the demands of the corporate state.
But it’s all the unvaccinated’s fault for not doing what they were told to do. Fear the unvaccinated or those who won’t show you their papers or who won’t test before visiting for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the vaccines don’t work. And they know it. If this were the general understanding I would be flogging a dead horse. But this myth won’t die. The Risk of Vaccinated COVID Transmission is Not Low, says Scientific America. “After my son got sick,” the author tells us, “I dived into the data, and it turns out vaccinated people can and do spread COVID” (see also this scientific article). Paradoxically, for many, this has become the argument for vaccination.
But elites aren’t stupid. They know people are wising up. Have you seen how eager they are to change the narrative? “The vaccines weren’t about immunity,” the historical revision goes. “They were about reducing severity.” But that’s not what they said about these vaccines (see the video above). They said the vaccines were to produce herd immunity and stop the virus. This is why we had to take them. This is why we had to have mandates and passports. This is why they tell you to fear the unvaccinated while talking out of the other side of your mouth (doublethink). If anything, fear the vaccinated; they can carry more virulent strains in public because, according to the vaccine pushers, a greater proportion of them don’t feel as sick. Hoist them on their own petard.
The Los Angeles Times reports that “Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, recently urged people to not go to the kinds of indoor parties attended by dozens of people whose vaccination status you don’t know. Fauci said it’s safer for people to gather in smaller-sized gatherings with family and friends in homes where everyone is known to be vaccinated and boosted, and even safer if people get rapid tests just before the event.” People are unsafe. They are unclean. At the same time, Fauci slashed isolation times in half because he doesn’t want to paralyze the economy (i.e., stifle corporate profits). Who is President of the United States? I believe it’s the man with the smaller federal pension, but I could be wrong.
The experts have been wrong about everything. Is there an agenda? Yes. Power and profit (see below video to learn about the depth of planning in Europe). But there is also ego. They’re too egoistical to admit they’ve been wrong. But they also know that they lose legitimacy if they tell the truth. Legitimacy is key to control because it lends authority to power. The clichéd question they dread: “What did they know and when did they know it?” The bottomline is that, if we were to take the vaccine because it would stop the virus, then the necessity of producing herd immunity might justify extraordinary government action. But if in fact that vaccines do not stop the virus, which in fact they don’t, then mandates and passports have no justification—not from the standpoint of democracy and liberty. The continued push for mandates and passports is thus nakedly pushing authoritarian control. Even in Sweden, where natural immunity to COVID was pioneered, authorities have rolled out passports. Swedes, made soft by a super-humanitarian social democracy, are getting chipped to make life convenient. (I discuss RFID technology in Biden’s Biofascist Regime. The technology has spread since then.)
None of this makes sense. If you’re vaccinated, why worry? Isn’t that what vaccines are for? That’s why we vaccinated our children for measles and other childhood disease. The vaccine is a miracle of science. Why does a person need to know whether people are vaccinated if it doesn’t matter whether they are? Because if you’re vaccinated it means you will be less likely to develop severe disease, is the response I typically get when I ask this question. But if you’re vaccinated you don’t have to worry about severe disease. Isn’t that what they tell us? Yes. Constantly. In phrases that clearly have in back of them talking point memos. But some people who are vaccinated develop severe disease after all. Why does it matter whether people are vaccinated if being vaccinated doesn’t protect people from severe disease?
The answer must be because Pfizer wants money and to grease those wheels of capitalist accumulation the government and the media need to install irrational fear after fear. Fear porn is a lot like regular porn: it doesn’t matter if the premise is implausible; you’re there to see cash-transactional jabbing.
Big Pharma surrogates (most of whom are uncompensated and moonlight as friends and followers on social media platforms) are constantly comparing the need for COVID-19 vaccination with the need for measles vaccination. So let’s compare. Imagine people being vaccinated for measles and then getting measles. Not the rare measles outbreak, but large numbers of those vaccinated for measles infected and spreading the disease—to other vaccinated people. Before the vaccine, people would get the measles and acquire life-long immunity (I’m old enough to remember those days). Now they’re getting measles multiple times following vaccination. Not really; this is a “what-if?” But if this were to happen, wouldn’t this strike you as worrisome? Might you wonder what the measles vaccine was doing to the immune system? It’s as if the vaccine erased it. Instead of acquiring immunity, you now have to be repeatedly injected with the same vaccine that not only didn’t protect you, but prevented you from acquiring life-time immunity.
You can use polio and smallpox to illustrate the bizarre character of a popular argument. It’s as if folks have become confused or never learned the difference between positive and negative correlation. Not to condescend to my readers, but to clarify for them, a negative correlation is obtained when the Y variable decreases when the X variable increases. Let Y = COVID-19 and X = vaccination. If vaccination worked, then, as the rate of vaccination increases, cases of COVID-19 should decrease. If you conclude from the real world evidence that a more aggressive program of vaccination is the appropriate response to rising cases among the vaccinated, then either your thinking has become confused or you’re scientifically illiterate. It’s not an argument. It’s a rationalization.
But there is no sophisticated rationalization for these brute facts. “Breakthrough infection” is not a scientific concept; it’s a propaganda term designed to rationalize the reality, which we knew early on, that the vaccine does not effectively confer immunity. All those people not at risk from serious disease did nobody any favors getting vaccinated. All the injuries this vaccine has caused in young people had no public health purpose. Mandates and passports are irrational from a public health standpoint. Those in charge have been lying to you. They are now telling us that “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons.” Something about follow the science.
But the failure of vaccines doesn’t mean vaccines have failed. It just means the deployment of euphemisms to disguise that fact. “Safe and effective” is marketing for a product you weren’t asked to pay for but are paying for anyway, going to (and hurting) people who don’t need it. They tell you the vaccine is free. Guess who pays for all those millions of COVID-19 vaccines? It’s like telling you that the military-industrial complex is free. They have played us so hard.
And just like that CNN admits cloth masks do not stop COVID
It’s the same with masks. Why did anybody think these would work? But I still encounter such irrational comments as, “If I could do things over again, I would not have allowed my son to be around even vaccinated people indoors without masks.” The mother who wrote this then indicates that she will get him vaccinated when allowed. A little kid vaccinated for a cold virus. While she is waiting for that, she can feel somewhat assured that the FDA is expected to authorize the Pfizer vaccine for 12-15 years olds by early next week, according the Washington Post. And the use of the little ones in fear porn finds its counterpart in the use of the elderly ones for the same purpose. The Washington Post tells us about an elderly Iowa man who died from sepsis because all the hospital beds were full of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. It is only the unvaccinated who fill our hospitals. But that’s not true.
People are pushing back against this. One of my most popular political Facebook posts this week (and one of my more triggering) was my almost certainly unoriginal quipping, “Wearing a mask alone in your car is like masturbating in a condom.” People liked it because people don’t like the authoritarian attitude that masks signal (see What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire; What’s the Big Deal With Wearing a Mask? Lots; Mask or No Mask?) It’s a hopeful sign when people get mad and ridicule others. It means they’re paying attention.
A lot of that anger is being directed at Dr. Fauci. It’s well deserved. He should resign. Fauci has deaths on his conscience—deaths for profit . He is responsible for the pandemic, which resulted from gain-of-function experiments in the Wuhan Institute of Virology that he bankrolled behind the president’s back, and the botched response to it, denying the public therapeutics in order to falsely justify emergency use authorization for the experimental mRNA technology that has prolonged the pandemic. Finally we get a therapeutic—from Pfizer and Moderna. Here to mop up their mess. And the sticker shock. Will the government cover that bill? Maybe, if you’re vaccinated. To channel Chomsky, if the Nuremberg rules were properly applied Fauci would be in the dock being tried for crimes against humanity. That he is still in power confirms my characterization of the current regime in power in Washington DC.
“They completely disregard bioethics,” Dr. Robert Malone tells us. “They’ve broken all the rules that I know, that I’ve been trained on for years.” The flouting of the Nuremberg Code was the sign that confirmed my suspicion that we are rapidly spiralling into what I call the New Fascism (From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis; Fascism Becoming Under Cover of COVID-19 Hysteria; ). It’s like the old fascism except it doesn’t present with a dictator. Indeed, it’s a hell of a lot more effective without one—it denies what it is and people accept the deception. The other sign was how willing too many Americans were to give up their democracy and their freedom (and their children) and submit to corporate governance and administrative rule. Fascism always depends on a significant proportion of the masses to submit and follow (The Problem of the Weakly Principled). They even have a shiny new race theory, the New Fascists. Get ready to be tagged. Embed it in your hand to hide your shame.
Outstanding video. The best documentation yet of nearly every top official in charge of the response to COVID insisting the vaccine prevents infection and transmission—not just symptoms.pic.twitter.com/6PmlPApfrQ
People are tired of the lies. Biden recently said in a discussion about federal action with respect to COVID-19, “Look, there’s no federal solution.” That has always been true. But that’s not what he said when he was running for president. Check out this video of Biden repeatedly telling us, “I’m going to shut down this virus.” The fact is that the virus spread like a wildfire under his presidency. More people have died from this virus in the vaccine era under Biden than under Trump. Democrats ask, “What do you expect him to do?” That’s actually a useful question, the answer to which is nothing. Pandemics are self-resolving. There is nothing he or anybody else can do about this except let it happen as quickly as it can so we can develop herd immunity and move on—as I have been saying from the beginning of all this.
Smoking is analogous neither to a respiratory virus nor to not taking a vaccine. Moreover, the vaccine is associated with injuries. Should we deny treatment because the injured person made the choice that injured him? Isn’t that actually analogous to smoking? https://t.co/uDt5fFZVvL
A colleague of mine asked me where the ACLU was on this issue. I resigned from the ACLU a while ago, but I checked to find out. Here, I found the following: “Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of color hit hard by the disease.” The ACLU continues: “While the permissibility of requiring vaccines for particular diseases depends on several factors, when it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. The disease is highly transmissible, serious and often lethal; the vaccines are safe and effective; and crucially there is no equally effective alternative available to protect public health.” The disease is generally not serious, very rarely lethal, the vaccines are neither safe nor effective, and there are in fact superior alternatives to vaccines.
“While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19.” Even if we were to agree with this in principle, COVID-19 does not fall into the category of highly infectious and devastating diseases, a category that would include smallpox. “Vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity,” the ACLU asserts. “That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others.” This formulation gets the ethic backwards. Corporations do not have the right to inflict harm on others. Nor does the government. Corporations and governments have powers which must be limited by the civil liberties and human rights of individuals. That the ACLU would get this backwards in such an obvious way shows us that a grand institution has succumbed to the corrupting force of woke progressivism.
Vaxism is part of a larger religious movement known as “safetyism.” Safetyism is being normalized through a contrived process of institutionalization. There is neither democracy nor liberty on the other side of this contrivance. If our immune system doesn’t work, then the vaccines can’t work, since the mechanism of the vaccine depends on a functioning immune system to have an effect. It seems millions of people have forgotten this basic biological truth. If you have had this virus, and you have a healthy immune system, then you have developed an immunity to the virus. This immunity will be robust enough to provide a significant degree of protection from future variants, just as previous infections with any number of cold and flu viruses provide a degree of protection from variants of these. Even if we grant some efficacy to the original vaccines, they were narrowly specified for a protein associated with an earlier variant and therefore have no relevant. It’s as if you were to take last year’s flu shot for this year’s flu. Vaccination is entirely unnecessary to a person who had recovered from COVID-19 because (a) the vaccine is old and doesn’t work and (b) your immune system is there to catch you. Put your evolved brain to good use. Don’t give into the madness. Resist. Do not comply.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” —Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain
I want to make it clear that I am not making a pro-white argument in the essay. Far from it. I have been clear in my writings about my desire to see race go away. Race is a creation of racism and race thinking keeps the danger of racism alive. When we no longer see each another in racial terms, when we rid our thinking of racial categories, then racism can be relegated to the past. I oppose anti-white racism for the same reason I oppose anti-black racism: racism plays a crucial role in unjust enrichment and it can inspire violence. My argument is the opposite of a racialist argument. I am not arguing for the racial categories I am compelled to use here; these come with a social logic that is part of my society. I am responding to them. My argument would be the paradigm of antiracism if it were not for the corruption of that term by the woke racists who dominate our institutions and shape the prevailing narrative. From their standpoint, when properly understood, antiracism is racism. And so it is.
* * *
If the claim is that some races and ethnicities are disadvantaged as a group because of an oppressive system that systematically advantages some groups over others, that is, group disparities exist because of oppressive social relations, and this is systemic racism, and this claim is taken as fact, then a corollary is that Jewish Americans, who are highly successful as a group, are oppressors. Unless you can show me a law that privileges Jews, this is anti-Semitism. It also follows that the Chinese and Indians in America are oppressors. Here I will demand the same thing of you if you want to avoid being labeled anti-Asian: where is the law that privileges these Asian-American populations? There isn’t one.
Everywhere we turn these days we hear that whites enjoy a racial privilege which explains the alleged advantages enhancing their life chances. Every white person must admit their complicity in the system of white privilege. Peggy McIntosh, of the Wellesley Centers for Women, describes white racial advantage as an “invisible knapsack” of skin color privileges every white person carries on his back throughout his life (see Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism; You are Broken. We Will Fix You; Not All White People Are Racist; The Psychological Wages of Antiracism). The knapsack needs to be invisible for an obvious reason: where is the law that privileges white people? There isn’t one. But there is a desire that every white person wear privilege around his neck like an albatross.
The systemic racism thesis requires faith in unseen structures that undergird an abstract system disadvantaging blacks across societal institutions (see The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism). This system explains why blacks on average trail whites in almost every category of social life—academic achievement, career success, housing and health care, safety and well-being—with notable exceptions (entertainment, sports). These disparities are not to be explained by cultural differences between whites and blacks as groups. It is not, for example, the fact that three-quarters of black children are born to a household where the father is absent that explains why so many black children fail at school or join gangs. Academic failure and criminal conduct are explained by white power and privilege.
But claiming that all whites as a group are privileged oppressors, that it is their fault that blacks as group find themselves where they are, is the same as saying that Jewish-Americans as a group or that Chinese-Americans as a group are privileged oppressors—that they’re responsible for the suffering of others. In the absence of laws privileging whites, the claim is racist. If one objects with Patricia Bidol-Padva’s widely-assumed formula “racism equals prejudice plus institutional power,” then no argument will have been provided; as an empirical matter, whites as a group do not have such power. That formulation was wrong with respect to race relations when it was rolled out in 1970s. There is no law or institution that privileges white people as a group in this country. This is no less racist of a claim than the claim that Jews run our institutions.
This slogan we have heard for decades that “only whites can be racist” is a rationalization to preserve a complaint that was satisfied in a slew of court decisions and legislative actions in the Civil Rights Era. The corollary that blacks cannot be racist against whites is a Black Power slogan that assumes as given that which requires proving. The assumption is easily disproved: we do not live in an apartheid society. What is Black Power, then, if not “anti-white power,” as Roy Wilkins saw it, or “black supremacy,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. saw it? What is black nationalism or black self-determination if not black separatism? Are Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown the lights to guide us? Or is Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Is pro-white anti-black?
Blaming whites for the disadvantages of blacks and certain ethnic minorities is the same form of the ideology that taught the German worker to believe that Jews were the reason for his suffering because Jews were better off as a group than the German Christian. But Jews in Germany and in America today are better off because they have cultural values conducive to success. They have strong families and teach their children to value education, striving, and law-abidingness. For this, Jews are still loathed for it in some quarters. The same thing is true for Asian-Americans. But you’re not supposed to know this or recognize it unless it can be blamed on whites (see Are Cultural Explanations of Racial Disparities Always Racist? Only By Conflating Race and Culture).
The ideology of systemic racism is designed to obscure the power of culture, but it is also an ideology that disrupts class consciousness. The reason why there is material inequality is primarily economic. It has something to do with ethnicity insofar as not all cultures and subcultures are as good as others in meeting the basic human need for striving and succeeding. There is nothing racist about that fact. However, it has mostly to do with the fact that we live in a capitalist society where those who own capital are privileged by law. The dynamic that chiefly determines the fate of people is the class dynamic. (See What Explains—and Doesn’t Explain—Inequality; Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach; It’s Not a Racist System.)
This is not to say there is no institutional racism in America. Law and policy permits whites to be treated as second-class citizens in admissions to colleges and in applications for work. This matter of law and policy is hailed as a good thing. You risk being accused of racism if your disagree. Taking race into account in college admissions and in hiring is described as a necessary program of positive discrimination, necessary because the institutional and structural power of whites requires negating via some principle contrary to the principle of colorblind treatment, i.e., equal treatment regardless of racial identity. Positive discrimination is recognized as unlawful, so in the United States it is rationalized as “affirmative action” (in the the United Kingdom it’s rationalized as “positive action”). (See The Freudian Slip that Invites Us to Ask the Question: Is it Time to End Race Privilege?)
In the absence of some mechanism that privileges blacks, the argument goes, the intrinsic nature of American institutions and the momentum of history privileges whites; each white person is justifiably told to get in back of the line because of the greater success of whites on average, a statistical abstraction that includes Jews (who are mostly racially white) and increasingly the Chinese (defined as “white adjacent”). Thus, while systems formally privileging whites have been abolished, explicit systems based on abstract race privilege have been developed that thwart the aspirations of concrete white persons for the sake of repairing historic inequities that the white person played no role in creating. This is in the face of whites constituting the largest proportion of disadvantaged persons in America (see They Do You This Way). The bias against group success is increasingly applied to other groups, as well; anti-white privilege is being extended.
Anti-white prejudice is not just a danger to the culture of striving and success. It represents a physical danger to those considered white, as well to the Chinese and Jews (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite; Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?Policy Presuming “White Privilege” Violates Equal Protection Under the Law). In light of violence against whites, Jews, and Asians, it’s surprising that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) would publish an essay without critical reflection claiming that the observation that anti-racism in its current form is code for anti-white. That a white supremacist may utter truthful statements is the fallacy the ADL, along with the SPLC, like the most (a type of association fallacy in spirit of reductio ad Hitlerum). But in my essay “The Myth of White Culture,” I show that this is indeed the case: Western civilization is pitched as racist, and Western civilization is depicted as the work of white people, therefore white people are racist. It follows from this that to be anti-racist in the modern sense means to be anti-white. This is what Roy Wilkins was talking about.
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1963 and executive director from 1964 to 1977
To see the danger of the formulation, recall once more the time of Nazi Germany and the way in which widespread antisemitism exposed Jewish shops and Jews themselves to acts of crime and violence by ordinary Germans who believed Jews were privileged oppressors. Germans were socialized to envy Jewish success, to loathe Jewish standards of excellence, to believe that the reason the Jews had it so good—thus rendering invisible millions of poor Jews, as if all Jews were privileged—was the reason the life of the ordinary German was so impoverished and miserable.
We know—at least those of us who approach the subject from a historical materialist standpoint know—that the real reason ordinary German life was so impoverished was because of the structure of capitalist society in this period. That structure prevailed because the bourgeoise was desperate to increase the pace of wealth accumulation, to raise the rate of profit. It was the German bourgeoisie who actually enjoyed unearned power and privilege—protected by law. They were the oppressors. They were the exploiters. They were the ones who organized anti-Semitism and used it as an ideological weapon to confuse the German proletariat. In this way, the corporate state and the culture industry it controlled prepared the German citizen to serve as a weapon in its project to smash working class organizations and scatter popular consciousness and entrench the power of the German banker and industrialist by portraying the Jew as unjustly privileged and responsible for the suffering of the poor and working class German.
This is a tactic called “scapegoating.” It’s deployed to mystify the real cause of a people’s misery by identifying an imaginary one. Jews were scapegoated to distract the ordinary German worker from the real struggle: the class struggle. Jewish group success was used to replace the actual oppressor with a contrived one. Racism and fascism took the place of classism in Nazi Germany, redirecting the anger of those exploited and impoverished by the economic system that favored the banker and the industrialist. The worker was told with whom to be angry by the trusted institutions of their society. The worker was indoctrinated by powerful forces to target the wrong antagonist. I don’t have to tell you what was the result of weaponized anti-Semitism. It’s why we say “Never again.”
Among my several academic publications, two concerned lynching. The first appeared in the Journal of Black Studies in 2004, a comparative piece on lynching and the Holocaust. The second, in Crime, Law, and Social Change, published in 2006, theorizes that the progressive humanization of black people by raising them to the status of equal citizens explains the disappearance of lynching. The common argument underpinning both articles is essentially this: anti-black prejudice explained racial violence that took the form of lynching. Racial violence occurred frequently because anti-black racism had been institutionalized in the major social institutions of America and in its culture and language. It had over years been normalized, even expected. It was easily mobilized for political purposes. The civil rights movement, driven by a desire to more fully realize the American creed of equality before the law, demanded from American’s intolerance of racist ideology and speech. Anti-black racism was pushed out of our institutions and largely out of our language. By deinstitutionalizing anti-black racism, by banishing anti-black racism to the margins of American culture, a form of violence lost its motive and reason. Thus racial violence against blacks has been almost entirely eliminated by putting anti-black racism behind us.
As with anti-black racism, anti-white racism fuels racial violence against whites. A black man driving a car through a Christmas parade is explained by widespread anti-white sentiment that makes racial violence against whites appear warranted and justifiable (Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). Anti-white racism moved Darrell Brooks Jr. to drive his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, swerving side to side targeting people, injuring at least 50 people, killing five elderly people and a child. The authorities describe his actions as intentional. In my essay Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide? (see also Establishment Myths About Race and Violence), I show that, year after year, whites are more likely to be homicide victims at the hands of black perpetrators than blacks are to be homicide victims at the hands of white perpetrators. The same pattern holds for robbery. The disparity is even more striking when one reflects on the fact that most perpetrators of homicide are male and black males constitute around sex or seven percent of the population.
Not only do the statistics on violent crime shows this, but the failure of government officials to identify violent action as such, and the systematic neglect by the media to report the story in the same way they report fake accounts of racism (in Kenosha, Washington DC, Chicago, and so on). And when faked anti-black episodes are exposed, the media and politicians go silent. They leave it to Black Lives Matter to declare, “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.” When convenient, the Democratic Party and the establishment media amplify hoaxed cases of anti-black racism, expressions of the very anti-white racism that causes whites to be the target of black nationalist terrorism and disproportionately the victims of interracial crime and violence, from the looting of their stores, burglarizing of their homes, to robbery on the streets. Widespread anti-white racism is a license to target whites for crime and violence.
We are told “Never again” after widespread antisemitism saw Jewish stores and Jews themselves targeted for acts of crime and violence by Germans prepared to commit these acts by being told that Jews were their oppressors, that they must envy Jewish success, that the reason the Jews had it so good (and so the millions of poor Jews were rendered invisible) was because Christian Germans had it so bad. The same wrong is committed when white and Asian owned stores and whites and Asians are targeted for acts of crime and violence justified because of a belief that blacks are disproportionately poor because they are an oppressed people (see Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect). To be sure, people have a free speech right to defame whites and Asians. Our libel laws work at the individual level. But violent action is moved by ideology. If dominant social institutions consistently and for years blame whites for the problems of blacks, the consequences are predictable.
Minneapolis May 29, 2020
In a three-month period over the summer of 2020, according the US Crisis Monitor, the Black Lives Matter movement was linked to more than nine in ten riots in forty-nine states across the country. The United States experienced 637 riots between May 26 and September 12. Ninety-one percent of those riots were linked to the BLM movement. The riots incurred more property damage in 2020 dollars than any other riots in American history. The nearly two billion dollars in property damage were accompanied by more than two dozens deaths and countless injuries. Black Lives Matter was heavily financed by transnational corporate power and encouraged by the establishment media which, at the same time, downplayed the violence BLM, often while documenting arson and looting in their videos. (See What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; On Riots and the Postmodern Corruption of the Culture of Protest.)
Whether history repeats or rhymes, among other things, we record history to learn from it. We are on a very dangerous path in the West, especially in America. We are ignoring one of the most important lessons history has to offer—that organizing around the categories of racial thinking carries with it the risk of ginning up racial antagonisms, and these can go sidewise very quickly and in horrific ways.
Many black Americans resist this weaponization. But just as ordinary Germans who opposed the radicalization and oppression of Jews under Nazism were shamed and otherwise socially coerced into supporting the agenda, blacks who resist anti-white prejudice are also being shamed and coerced into the supporting the corporate state agenda. Side with the class interests of the ordinary American worker and risk being called “Uncle Tom” and “Negro.” Even white progressives like to get in on that action.(See Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism; Democrats Pander While Managing America’s Decline.)
* * *
In closing, I need to repeat my long-standing demand that we refuse to conflate white supremacy with Western culture. White supremacy is a type of racism. Western culture is not a product of a race, but of a place in time. It is the source of autonomy, democracy, humanism, individualism, liberty, republicanism, rights, and secularism—in a word, Enlightenment. The conflation of white supremacy with Western civilization is really an attempt to defame the latter as a delegitimizing step in dismantling the modern nation-state, subvert rational jurisprudence, to replace the individual member of the species with racial genres, and to overthrow the Westphalian system to bring about a transnational corporate state.
So here’s a discussion between Glenn Loury and Amy Wax about the perils of anti-white racism as well as pro-white sentiment.
This afternoon, at East High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the school my son attends, a student let another student in through an unsecured door. The principal, Lori Frerk, in conjunction with the Green Bay Police Department (GBPD), locked down the school. An investigation turned up a gun in one of the student’s locker. After further investigation, Green Bay Public Area Schools (GBPAS) and GBPD determined that there was no intent to harm students or staff.
I wrote the principal seeking follow up. I told her that I am a criminologist and that my son attends East High. She responded with a cut-and-paste from the GBAPS statement I shared in my email to her. I responded asking why the kid had a gun in his locker. I mean, a kid has a gun in his locker, shows up to school, another kid lets him in through an unsecured door, and there is no intent to harm anybody. Nothing to see here. Move on. No. Let’s not move on.
In the meantime… I receive an email from GBAPS that we’re going to virtual learning—again. They can’t keep our public spaces safe, so we go to virtual learning.
The principal’s response: FERPA and confidentiality. FERPA stands for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 USC § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99). But I wasn’t asking about the student’s personal information. I understand FERPA. I was asking why there was a gun on campus. This question is the equivalent of a statement that it was determined that there was no intent to harm others. GBAPS is already speaking publicly about intent. The GBAPS statement even describes the circumstances. If my question violates FERPA, then so does GBAPS’ statement.
That was the substance of what I wrote back. So parents can’t know why there was a gun at the school their children attend. They’re supposed to be satisfied with “further investigation determined the student did not intent to harm students or staff.” Given the scenario, that determination is hard to swallow. That’s why I asked for follow up. It’s my business. I’m not satisfied.
This is the technocracy in action. Elites are running the show and the proles are only supposed to know what the technocrats want them to know. I’m a criminologist with a vested interest in this situation and I’m treated as if I don’t understand the law and I have no right to obtain crucial information about what’s going on at the school my child attends.
According to the Green Bay Press Gazette—”Handgun found in student’s locker at East High School; Green Bay schools grades 6-12 to have online instruction rest of the week—Police are recommending prosecutors charge two students in connection to bringing a weapon into a school. The students were placed in secure detention with the juvenile authority. But they were not planning to use the gun, GBPD said. Well, that’s a little bit more information. But it doesn’t tell me why there was a gun in a jacket in a locker at my son’s high school. I am not feeling very reassured.
This incident follows three social media threats made last week toward another Green Bay High School, Preble. I joked on Facebook that social media threats of violence were becoming the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm to get out of a test. This incident today has put me in a more serious mood. Across the district, twice as many students were absent last week than in a regular week, this, according to district superintendent Stephen Murley, the result of parent and student concern about school safety. They’re right to be concerned. I apologize for my quip.
As some of you know, I have written opinion pieces and testified before the school board in opposition to the trend in physical security in our schools. On June 8, 2018. I published a piece in the Green Bay Press Gazette (picked up and carried by USA Today), titled “Police in schools does not make them safer.” On June 14, I published more radical piece in TruthOut’s Buzzfeed “How Garrisoning Schools With Armed Resource Officers Normalizes Authoritarianism.” In that piece I write, “Instead of controlling guns like every other rational democratic country, communities are asked to model their schools after the garrison, generating profit for weapons and security firms.” Campus Reform and Accuracy in Academia criticized my views.
I formed that opinion in the midst of sharply declining crime rates due to general strengthening of public safety. I am a libertarian, and the less control we have over the individual the better. I am still committed to libertarian principle. And I am still committed to keeping guns out of our schools (while supporting gun ownership for hunting and personal protection, a view I have more strongly gravitated towards given what’s going on in the country).
However, governments have since abandoned, or at least relaxed, commitment to public safety. This is thanks to antiracism and the woke progressive insanity infecting our urban spaces. All this talk of de-policing and prison abolition and the rhetoric of social justice, i.e., the preaching of ethnic and racial resentment and false attribution of personal failure, is undermining the legitimacy of our social institutions. The predictable consequence of this is social disorganization and demoralization and rising crime and violence.
If your opinions don’t change in the face of evidence, then you have failed the rationality test. Our nation is in the middle of an explosion in criminal violence in the United States. Green Bay, Wisconsin is experiencing a sharp uptick in criminal violence. We can’t move on. We have to get back to what works. End the woke nonsense and return to responsible limited government focused on public safety and values of personal accountability. Those are basic and sound republican commitments. I would have written those editorials a bit differently if I had them to do over again.
I sound like a liberal mugged by reality. Remember that old line? Well, I’m still a liberal. Still mugged by reality, though.
Folks are private messaging me to explain critical race theory to them, so I thought readers of Freedom and Reason would find a blog entry useful. I have blogged about CRT quite a bit here. However, my critique works from a Marxist dialectical position and it’s perhaps not immediately accessible to those not well-versed in Marxist thought (like with Einstein, most people who think they know Marx’s ideas don’t really). Therefore, in this blog entry, I conscript an anti-Marxist/anti-CRT activist to assist me in conveying an understanding of CRT that is more easily digestible. At the same time, I critique the thinking of that activist and his comrades to show why those interested in actual leftwing praxis should reject CRT.
The anti-Marxist/anti-CRT activist who I will use for these purposes is Christopher Rufo. He has authored numerous articles on critical race theory, many of which can be read at City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute. For the present essay, I will use a piece he published at USA Today: “What I discovered about critical race theory in public schools and why it shouldn’t be taught.” He gets a lot right in his work, but he gets one piece wrong and it’s a doozy. He portrays CRT as neo-Marxist. This is somewhat understandable given that CRT claims to be leftwing and appeals to Karl Marx, while Rufo is a right-wing populist at war with progressivism. But CRT is not Marxist but instead a betrayal of leftwing praxis—it’s a deception developed and advanced by cultural managers subservient to corporate state ambitions.
Christopher Rufo, writer for Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Here’s what Rufo gets right: “Critical race theory is an academic discipline that claims that the United States was founded on racism, oppression and white supremacy—and that these forces are still at the root of our society. Some supporters of critical race theory claim it is merely a ‘lens,’ arguing that ‘race is a social construct’ and that racism is ‘system’ not individual.” Rufo argues that “this is a strategic retreat that fails to grapple with some of the theory’s more controversial concepts.” What are these? Here’s where Rufo’s explanation goes wrong: “Critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dialectic of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and Black [sic]. But the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.” “In simple terms,” Rufo continues, “critical race theory can be seen as a form of ‘race-based Marxism’; they share a common conceptual framework. Critical race theory was derived from ‘critical theory,’ a 20th century ideology sometimes called ‘Neo-Marxism.’”
So, while Rufo is correct about the way the logic of the class struggle is appropriated by CRT with race categories substituted (and then reduced in a vulgar manner to black and white racial terms), he is wrong to call CRT “race-based Marxism.” It is also incorrect to call CRT “neo-Marxist,” which is the way many CRT advocates describe themselves, if not simply “Marxist.”
Moreover, critical theory is not a monolithic system. At first approximation, there are two types. The first is that formulated by such Frankfurt School luminaries as Theodor Adorno, Marx Horkheimer, and Franz Neumann, a synthesis mainly composed of the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud. That type constitutes a powerful critique of the corporate state and its administrative apparatus.
The second is Herbert Marcuse’s brand of critical theory, which was developed synthesizing with the first type the reactionary phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of the Nazi regime in Germany during that totalitarian moment. Marcuse, author of Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, dresses up the gloomy and joyless style of Heideggerian thought in language he finds in Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts.
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), guru of the New Left
It is onto Marcuse’s corruption of critical theory that CRT proponents latch. One can see this plainly in the adoption of Marcuse’s concept of “repressive tolerance,” in which the liberal value of free speech is jettisoned for the sake of ideological warfare, censorship moving on the wings of power. Marcuse is thus not properly a neo-Marxist, but a neo-Hegelian thinker (see my essays The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse and Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory?). I will explain what I mean by neo-Hegelian in a moment. It will suffice at this point to identify it as a totalitarian philosophy.
I would also like to note the work of two critics of Marcuse for those who wish to follow up on this. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre accuses Marcuse of right Hegelianism, calling him a “pre-Marxist” thinker.” Leszek Kołakowski, a critic of Marxism who, in my view is unconvincing in his argument that Stalinism represented not a deformation of Marxism but its logical outcome (it is beyond the scope of this essay to take up that argument), was nonetheless perceptive in describing Marcuse as anti-Marxist, jettisoning the man’s critique of the Hegelian dialectic (which I take up in the next section) and substituting for the politics of class struggle Freudian notions of love and happiness (there is a very good four-part documentary on this by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self). In the third volume of his Main Currents of Marxism, Kolakowski argues that Marcuse envisions a world “ruled despotically by an enlightened group … realiz[ing] in themselves the unity ofLogos and Eros, and throw[ing] off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences.” Sound familiar?
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For Marx, race is ideology, like religion and other forms of alienation. Marx’s treatment of alienation is important to grasp in order to understand the corpus of Marx’s output. For Marx, human beings are distinct individuals who possess a species-being (or species-essence, both of which are translated from the German word Gattungswesen) by dent of sharing the same genome (a biological reality unknown at the time that, like Darwin, Marx anticipated). With the emergence of property and the state, human beings, who had heretofore existed in a state of “primitive communism,” the original form of society confirmed by archeologists and anthropologists as gatherer and hunter arrangements, became segmented into social classes out of which ideologies, such as religion, race, and gender, emerged, to justify unjust social arrangements rooted in exploitative economic structures. History is understood as a succession of such modes of production (ancient, feudalist, and so on), with capitalism (at the time of Marx’s life) being the latest. Race is thus part of the superstructure that facilitates capitalist hegemony. This is why Marx was so exuberant in his letter to Abraham Lincoln upon the occasion of Lincoln’s reelection to the presidency of the United States; Marx saw potential in the resolution of the Civil War: the elimination of racism and the subsequent unification of the world class.
As such, Karl Marx’s thought is the diametric opposite of that which we find in the work of such CRT advocates as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Columbia Law School professor most often credited with establishing the discipline. In contrast to Crenshaw and her ilk, who think in race essentialist terms, Marx is an egalitarian who endeavors in his work to persuade the working class to organize to dismantle the superstructure of race and other ideologies. As I have stressed numerous times in my writings, Marx would be the last person to advocate for organizing political and cultural struggle around race. He would immediately see through the deception of replacing equality, which concerns individuals, with “equity,” which concerns identity groups. Marx was an individualist and a humanist. His work establishes the material foundation for universal human rights. CRT is collectivist and authoritarian. Its work transmits totalitarian sensibilities to those vulnerable to crude feelings of resentment.
What makes Marx’s thought difficult for folks like Rufo to understand is that Marx proceeds by the dialectical method, a convoluted method (not in his hands, of course) developed by a group of German idealist philosophers in the late eighteenth century, its principle advocates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It is Hegel’s approach to the dialectic in particular that Marx takes up. But he does not leave it as he finds it. Inspired by Hegel’s rebellious student Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx transforms the dialectic and draws from it the opposite conclusion. In doing so, Marx establishes the foundation of social science. His great discoveries flow from this method, discoveries that, as Engels declares them, put Marx alongside Newton and Darwin in the pantheon of revolutionary thinkers.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of critical race theory
In the preface to the first volume of Capital, his magisterial critique of political economy, Marx writes, “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos [a Platonic construction of a mystical artisan fashioning and maintaining the physical universe] of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
Marx says it is not nothing else than, but it’s more complicated than this. Marx writes, “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” He explains: “In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things [emphasis mine]. In its rational form [the form Marx would make it take] it is a scandal and an abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors [represented to today by the woke progressive], because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Before a reader objects that CRT wants to radically transform the United States, he must check his assumptions. I will take this up in my next blog entry, but quickly here, CRT is designed to prevent radical transformation of the West in the direction sought by Marx, that is, towards democratic socialism and the emancipation of the individual from capitalist control, to instead continue the fundamental societal transformation that began after the Civil War with the emergence of the corporate state and the transnationalist project to establish a new world order founded upon the logic of bureaucratic collectivism upon which will sit the new aristocracy. As I will explain in that pending essay, it was in the defeat of populism and the institutionalization of progressivism that the original struggle between left and right (and the meaning of those words) is negated. It is only now that the populists, however problematic the character of their consciousness, have remerged and are raising consciousness about the pending finalization of the corporatist neo-feudalist global order.
It is crucial to understand this point. Indeed, if you do not understand this you can neither understand Marx nor Hegel and only partially understand the present inflection point. (One of the problems I am attempting to address in my work is how that populism, however welcome it is in light of the alternative, lacks a Marxist character.) In a word, this difference is the linchpin. Hegel writes, “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. The state is the actuality of concrete freedom [i.e. totalitarianism]. The strength of the state is lies in the unity of its universal end with the particular interest of individual [the individual subsumed into the nation in ethnic terms].” Elsewhere, Hegel writes, “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” My commentary in brackets is to make sure you understand what Hegel mystifies. It is progressives who glorify the total state and the destruction of liberalism and republicanism. Their desire marks the terminal point of individual autonomy and liberty.
Marx is telling the reader that Hegel has matters upside-down. Marx is an atheist. He sees, as did Feuerbach, that Hegel’s appeal to God is an expression of alienation. Crucially, Hegel confuses the predicate and the subject. The world is not an expression of God, i.e., ideology, but rather God, i.e., ideology, is an expression of the world. Ideology is a mystification of the world because the world is corrupted by its division into social classes, a condition marked by exploitative relations. The solution to man’s woes is therefore not in religious perfection in a state with such a character (heavens no!), but the overthrow of existing material conditions, which evaporates ideology. As such, man’s consciousness becomes isometric with reality. In other words, the obstacles that mystify knowledge are removed and the lies at once exposed.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831), a key founder of German idealism
Marx explains in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Had Hegel started with the real subjects as the bases of the state it would not have been necessary for him to let the state become subjectified in a mystical way. ‘However, the truth of subjectivity,’ says Hegel, ‘is attained only in a subject, and the truth of personality only in a person.’ This too is a mystification. Subjectivity is a characteristic of subjects and personality a characteristic of the person. Instead of considering them to be predicates of their subjects, Hegel makes the predicates independent and then lets them be subsequently and mysteriously converted into their subjects.”
Here, Marx brilliantly identifies the problem with idealism: reification, or the problem of misplaced concreteness, a fallacious move that turns abstractions into apparent concrete reality. You can see this explicit in CRT’s race essentialism, which treats individuals as mere personifications of abstract racial categories which are treated as concrete actors. Hence a disparity in a group-level statistical outcome is treated as if it were an individual act of racial discrimination, and, on this basis, a reason for appropriating the wealth produced by individuals seen only in terms of their racial categories—in a word “reparations.” CRT moves as a religion, replete with notions of collective guilt, collective punishment, and original sin.
Marx explains our present-day troubles one hundred and seventy-eight years before the moment: “The existence of the predicate is the subject; thus the subject is the existence of subjectivity, etc. Hegel makes the predicates, the object independent, but independent as separated from their real independence, their subject. Subsequently, and because of this, the real subject appears to be the result; whereas one has to start from the real subject and examine its objectification. The mystical substance becomes the real subject and the real subject appears to be something else, namely a moment of the mystical substance. Precisely because Hegel starts from the predicates of universal determination instead of from the real Ens (hypokimenou, subject), and because there must be a bearer of this determination, the mystical idea becomes this bearer. This is the dualism: Hegel does not consider the universal to be the actual essence of the actual, finite thing, i.e. of the existing determinate thing, nor the real Ens to be the true subject of the infinite.” Marx continues, concretely: “Accordingly, sovereignty, the essence of the state, is here first conceived to be an independent being; it is objectified. Then, of course, this object must again become subject. However the subject then appears to be a self-incarnation of sovereignty, which is nothing but the objectified spirit of the state’s subjects.”
As an ideology of the corporate state, critical race theory stands with Hegel and against Marx. CRT, helped by the corruption of Marcuse (whose most notorious student is Angela Davis, a CRT icon), is a regression to Hegel. CRT subsumes the individual into abstract categories organized around a racial ideology that perpetuate alienation. CRT is not a liberation ideology, as it claims, but a thought suppression system. CRT is a specific doctrine in the religion of racism, but it no less racist.
CRT hides its anti-Marxism behind the appeal to neo-Marxism and critical theory (which has fooled Rufo and his comrades), the particular brand of which rose in prominence because the ruling class understood its function in mystifying corporate power and bankrolled it, insinuating it into colleges and universities, embracing it in corporate board rooms, and now forcing it into our public schools. It is being installed in public education in order to raise up a generation subservient to the technocracy, which is what the first type of critical theory, with all its defects, endeavored to warn us about. The power elite seek a generation who will be incapable of knowing there was a time before totalitarian corporate governance by making present and future totalitarianism appear as the air we breathe.
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The logic of the dialectic Marx employs is Hegel’s but with Hegel stood on his feet. This is a metaphor for rationally and empirically accessing the real world to explain illusions, rather than trying to grasp the real world by making its surface appearances the starting point. Critical race theory reverses this move, standing Hegel back on his head. In doing so, CRT turns Marxism upside-down, which is no Marxism at all. CRT cannot be Marxist whatever it says of itself. It must be neo-Hegelian. That’s its logic—as Marx himself showed.
Christopher Rufo and other populists cannot understand this because they do not bother to study Marxism, an endeavor to which I have devoted a lifetime. Of course, it’s not as if Rufo, James Lindsey, Jordan Peterson, and the rest would change their rhetoric if they did know this. So perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe they do know it, but mystify it to protect their turf—which today takes the form of dopamine hits on social media.
This confusing leftwing praxis with progressivism is the great error of populists and progressives alike. For those progressives who fancy themselves Marxists, the neo-Hegelianism they think is Marxism is a feature of their false consciousness. It prepares them for assumption into the corporate state. Believing CRT is stealth Marxism betrays their ignorance of Marxism, but it also exposes their ignorance of the history and purpose of progressivism. Their ignorance of both explains their faith in progressivism as leftwing praxis. I’m trying mightily to educate them, but they are remarkably resistant (it’s the same quality of resistance we see in their belittling of the pandemic truth movement). I’m up against the most basic of obstacles: the desire to not have to admit that what one believes in with all his might is a big lie.
Despite this error on the right, Rufo and his ilk correctly identify the concrete character of CRT—it is racist. Rufo does not believe this because he is right wing. Progressives would like for you to believe this because they desperately want to believe this. Accusing a person of being a witch is also self-serving; it keeps the accuser of question his religion. Rather Rufo believes this because he is not so deluded by progressivism that he can’t see it. Once you get your head out of wokeness, you cannot help not seeing it.
Because they operate from a right-librarian standpoint, populists intuitively understand that the emergence of the corporate state threatens not only individual liberty, but capitalism as we knew it. They can see that CRT is backed by corporate power—and that means something is terribly askew. A defect becomes a virtue. Perhaps no ideology comes without some insight.
To be sure, it sounds rather goofy to suppose a cabal of cultural Marxists is behind critical race theory. But the goofiness is fixed by admitting that CRT and the rest of the woke progressive clown show isn’t Marxists at all. It’s a right Hegelian movement that is ignorant of its origins and reactionary character. Because if CRT were actually Marxist (which it cannot possibly be), then you would likely know nothing about it because it would be nowhere.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. —the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
As Democrats have done in several past elections over the decades, Republicans disputed the November 3, 2020 election that resulted in a loss for Donald Trump. There is a constitutional process by which such disputes can be resolved. Congress was in the midst of that process when proceedings were disrupted by citizens entering the Capitol building. In the end, the disruption prevented the process from proceeding and Biden was determined to have won enough electors to assume the Office of President.
Prior to that disruption, the President spoke at a rally that occurred entirely within the parameters of the First Amendment. I am not defending the violent actions of the handful who broke the law on January 6, 2021. I do, of course, wish to see their civil liberties and rights protected. However, this essay is a defense of the right of the President of the United States and his supporters to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Conflating the peaceful rally with the riot at the Capitol is an attempt to delegitimize the exercise of First Amendment by those the establishment considers its enemies.
A massive crowd turned out for the “Save America” rally, held on January 6, 2021.
This is protected speech: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” This is not incitement to violence, even if these words were not in association: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” However, certainly those words make obvious the meaning of “fight” in this context: this was (and is) an argument, a conflict, a confrontation, a contest, a disagreement, a dispute, a quarrel, a struggle. We all know this is what the President meant when he uttered these words at the January 6, 2021 rally in the nation’s capitol.
By conflating the massive January 6 rally, a paradigm of activities protected by the First Amendment, with the much smaller crowd that entered the Capitol building, some of whom engaged in activities not covered by the Constitution (most peacefully ambled about the premises), many of them languishing in Washington DC jails denied their right to habeas corpus, the Democrats and the Republicans who have joined them are effectively declaring that the applicability of the First Amendment depends upon who is exercising those rights.
With the Washington Monument in the background, people attend a rally in support of President Donald Trump near the White House on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.
The conflation is embodied in the impeachment brief authored by Democrats, which claimed that Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.” In light of the violent mob action in Washington DC, June 2020, repeatedly portrayed as “peaceful protest” by corporate state media and the Democratic Party, the message was clear: if you are progressive, then you are allowed to exercise your First Amendment right in a myriad of ways not covered by the First Amendment.
Black Lives Matters rioters gather around the White House, June 2020.
If you are a progressive, you are even allowed to occupy buildings. Don’t believe me? What about Madison, Wisconsin 2011? Did you forget that thousands of progressives occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol building for several days. (Did you miss my January 10th, 2021 essay on that? See The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings.) But, if you’re a conservative or a populist, then you are by definition a mob and the First Amendment doesn’t apply. You’re peaceful protests will be conflated with the violent actions of a handful of people who may or may not have been associated with your rally—who may or may not have been part of an “insurrection.”
February 15, 2011, Protestors occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol building.
This is not how rights works. A right is not available to some and not others. Exercising one’s rights to assembly and speech do not dependent upon the political or religious character of their contents. A right is universal and inalienable. The First Amendment concerns such rights. Each and every individual is entitled to them. The January 6 Commission is a project to deny the “deplorables,” that is those who support Donald Trump those rights established by the United States Constitution. This project dovetails with the greater countermovement by progressives to suppress the populist-nationalist movement, see, for example, is the systematic weakening of electoral integrity.
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By the way, if you didn’t see in the text messages from January 6, 2021 that Liz Cheney publicly released in bad faith, that those around Trump, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, were surprised by the behavior of some of those in Washington DC that day, then you missed the most important thing about those text messages.
Our species has been subjected to coronaviruses since at least the 1930s, when this virus was first identified. It likely existed long before it was discovered; it’s not as if humans suddenly started catching cold in the twentieth century! It was shown in the 1960s that the coronavirus is responsible for cold-like illness when test subjects are exposed to the virus. Three strains were named in that decade and, in the 1990s, several variants of coronavirus were named using letters of the Greek alphabet. (I review this history here: Faking Genius for Power and Profit.)
NBC News is reporting today that the “CDC finds first handful of U.S. omicron cases have been mostly mild.” Omicron is a variant indicating evolution of the SARS coronavirus (likely lab-enhanced) towards the typical coronaviruses that you and I have been exposed to our entire lives. It’s also likely that omicron is mild because it’s infecting people previously infected with coronavirus. Previous infection by coronavirus, as with other cold viruses, such as adenovirus and rhinovirus, provides antibodies that are protective against many variants of a virus. As doctors and parents know, children normally get several colds every year and coronavirus is standard among those.
I am telling you this because, while it is true that coronavirus is here to stay and that we will have to live with it, this claim is misleading since the coronavirus has always been with us. We were subjected to an especially virulent form of a virus that we have almost certainly encountered before, which we experienced as a cold, if we experienced any symptoms at all. Even with SARS-CoV-2, the experience of most people is cold-like or asymptomatic. The severity of the disease never warranted the panic with which it has become associated. (I have discussed the reasons for this in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason.)
One difference between previous coronavirus infections and the present situation is that the invention of the PCR test that allows detection of a virus in people with mild symptoms and no symptoms. Testing thus allows a cold virus to be redefined as a serious infection that potentially causes death, even though the risk of death for a healthy individual is near zero. People who experienced no symptoms were told they had a dangerous disease on the basis of a test they would never have otherwise taken if it were not for the COVID-19 panic. Parents are told they must vaccinate children with novel mRNA technology to protect them from a virus that presents no threat to them. And many parents dutifully stood their children in line for jabs.
Vector pop art illustration paradoxically used by the College Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Penn State to sell COVID-19 panic. See Use of conservative and social media linked with COVID-19 misinformation. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay aped Penn State in its most recent Common CAHSS.
The combination of the PCR test and general ignorance of coronavirus, along with constant hyping of dire but rare outcomes, allowed authorities and experts to portray the ordinary as extraordinary and generate global panic. If we don’t acknowledge this fact and admit to ourselves that coronaviruses, like adenoviruses and rhinoviruses, are standard cold viruses in our environment, and that they are not only no big deal but necessary for proper development of our immune systems, we will continue to behave in ways that are detrimental to public health. This is especially true for children, who need to be exposed to pathogens to develop normally physiologically and for whom the risk of injury from the vaccine is far greater than risk from the disease itself.
The notion that vaccines are the solution to the problems of diseases is an extreme position that we must resist. We don’t need to vaccinate for viruses generally, as most viruses are mild and we have evolved over millions of years an immune system to deal with them. We do not vaccinate for other cold viruses, such as adenoviruses and rhinoviruses (although I am concerned that Big Pharma will roll out vaccines for those, as well, and a large proportion of parents will line their children up for the jabs). The elderly (those over sixty) and those with certain preexisting conditions could benefit from the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. But most people won’t. And just as people did not need the vaccine for coronaviruses over the last almost one hundred years that we have known about coronaviruses, there will be no need to vaccinate against coronaviruses going forward.
The government agencies, medical-industrial complex, and the corporate media treating coronaviruses as novel and dangerous pathogens in our environment does not stand in place of the science and reason and history that tells us that coronaviruses have been endemic to human populations for almost a century as a known pathogen in our environment and that they are generally harmless (if not annoying). It is irrational to think the authorities of a monopoly capitalist society could stand in place of science and reason. However, it is precisely this irrationality that provides a ready source with which to manufacture modern-day moral panics.
Understanding Moral Panic
One of the most important activities of sociological work is the identification of moral panics and situations of mass hysteria, a problem we call social contagion, where a changed definition of a normal thing or activity in our environment causes a significant proportion of the population prone to irrational thoughts and behavior to panic and think and behave even more irrationally. However, irrationality can serve as means to rational ends. Moral panics are often useful towards certain goals, such as financial gain and obedience to authority.
Moral panics may be generated around almost anything. You may remember the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s, especially remarkable given that they occurs in modern secular societies. The Satanic panic remains one of the most notorious manifestations of mass hysteria in American history. Pushers of the panic asserted without evidence the existence of a terrifying phenomenon they described as “Satanic ritual abuse.” They said it was occurring in daycare centers across North America and even in Europe. Scores of people suffered on the account of the satanic scare, not from ritual abuse, of course, but from the hysteria surrounding it.
There were complex cultural and societal reasons for the satanic ritual scare, but the salient point to make here is that cultural and societal factors, generally inaccessible to ordinary people without social scientific training or curiosity, were interpreted as the presence of transcendent evil by those in authority. In this case, the interpretation was provided by moral entrepreneurs using faith-belief in religion to translate anxiety and trepidation into a meaningful public response. Likewise, there are complex cultural and societal reasons for the present moral panic surrounding COVID-19. These are being translated by moral entrepreneurs, as well, this time by those in business firms and governmental agencies. They generate panic by exploiting popular faith-belief in scientism, a religious-like attitude or ideology among the science-illiterate that leverages scientific-sounding jargon to manufacture gravity around claims that are beneficial to those manufacturing panic.
I called this a moral panic in March of 2020, and nothing has occurred to cause me to change that assessment (see When a Virus Goes Viral). Indeed, just today, reported in the Israel newspaper Haaretz, we hear news that, in an attempt to encourage the children’s vaccination drive, Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, warned his cabinet that two British schoolboys died of omicron. In fact, these boys had died of the virus well before the new variant was reported. Moreover, as statistics across Europe and North America make clear, influenza is far deadlier to children than the most virulent variants of SARS-CoV-2 yet there is no vaccine mandate for the flu vaccine, which despite having a superior safety profile compared to the COVID-19 vaccine, is just as leaky and unreliable. Also today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reported one case of an individual who died with the omicron variant, and then asked the public to put aside reports of mild infection and receive a booster shot of a vaccine that has proven to cover little to no immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
The imposition of external demands and rules has given the present moral panic a hard shell that is difficult to crack. The satanic ritual scare relied upon inner compulsion born of religious faith commitment. But it never gripped a majority of the population, despite lasting years across a fourth of the planet’s geography. The COVID-19 hysteria is not only an expression of an inner compulsion to cower in the face of a virus, but it is global and externally imposed by authorities in both the public and the private sector. The satanic ritual scare is rather insignificant compared to the COVID-19 panic. The actions of governments have greatly magnified the harm caused by the virus, actions that have objectively caused far greater harm across societal institutions—the economy, the family, individual and human rights—that the reaction to fantasized satanic rituals ever could.
But we don’t have to hang onto mass hysteria. To be sure, it feels overwhelming for both those who continue to support the lockdowns, the mandates, and passports, and those who oppose the authoritarianism these impositions signal. But we can learn to let go of the panic, and begin pushing back against it, by understanding that it is just that, a panic, and that those who seek and find in mass hysteria financial gain and obedience to authority do not represent our best interests. We need to reclaim our autonomy and dignity and overthrow the regime of fear. Knowledge is power. But only potentially. You have to act on that knowledge to change the situation.
freedom and reason 