For those of you who regularly watch CNN, maybe you’re numb to it, but if you pay attention (wake up!) you can’t miss the messages constantly telling you that the programming is brought to you by Pfizer. CNN is Pfizer’s propaganda arm.
This is why you don’t know that SARS-CoV-2 does not produce severe illness in most of those who contract the virus. According to scientific polling, more than 40 percent of progressive Democrats believe half of those who are infected wind up on the hospital. It’s why you don’t know that natural immunity is far superior to that provided by the vaccine.
Do you ever wonder why they never told you that COVID mostly affects people who are overweight and very old and infirm? Why didn’t they tell you about zinc, vitamin D, and all the rest of it? Why didn’t you hear anything critical of the way the corporate state pushed panic and authoritarianism—the lockdowns, masks, vaccines?
You just went along with it as if there were no conflict of interest between Pfizer bankrolling the propaganda that claimed to be objective new programming. What happened to your critical thinking skills? The ideology of scientism trumped them. You also bought into the Russian collusion hoax. You bought into the Ukraine affair. You bought into the myth of racist police hunting down black men. You bought into the myth of systemic racism and all the rest of the nonsense peddled by the grievance industries.
There is no excuse for abandoning reason, for rejecting critical thinking. We all saw you swallow these big lies whole. You did it in a very public way. You adorned your Facebook profiles with slogans designed by corporate state propagandists. And you attacked and ridiculed those who kept their heads and demanded evidence and reason. We won’t forget this.
The worst offenders have been teachers. Of all people, teachers bear the greatest burden to make sure they aren’t misleading and harming their students. I’m embarrassed for my profession watching all the teachers and professors not merely failing to challenge the propaganda, but taking it up and disseminating it. I didn’t keep a list. But I have a good memory.
I had intended to publish this essay several days ago, but I have been consumed by the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (and other things) and so I had to push it back in the queue. It’s still timely since the popular movement that has put the Democrats on their back foot shows no sign of waning.
Former President Bill Clinton and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe during the latter successful 2013 campaign. McAuliffe was not successful in his 2021 bid for Virginia governor.
It didn’t go well for McAuliffe. He lost to the Republican contender, Glenn Youngkin. And not by a little considering the politics of the state (there are approximately a million more Democratic voters in Virginia than Republican voters). The party rode his coattails into defeat. Democrats had a lot riding on that election. They confess that 2022 depended on it. They understood how significant a loss in Virginia would be. Especially to a Trump-endorsed candidate.
There is a big lie being told about critical race theory. You’ve heard it. It goes like this: “Critical race theory is an esoteric legal theory only taught in elite law schools.” I’m an educator. I am surrounded by educators. I’m an also an expert on critical race theory (CRT). I have a PhD with a specialization in law and society. I was in graduate school in the 1990s when they rolled out the “theory.” I know what’s being taught and I grasp the contradictions (see, e.g., Committing the Crime it Condemns).
CRT sometimes goes under the name of “antiracism.” But this is code for racism. Race-neutrality—or colorblindness, as MLK, Jr.’s dream had it (which Nikole Hannah Jones is now denying)—is the only true antiracism. The antiracism CRT preaches is opposed to teaching children not to think in racial terms; the point of antiracist education from the CRT standpoint is to make sure children do (see Colorblindness versus Colorfulness: The Big Trick). It’s all about raising race consciousness and not at all about promoting colorblindness and individualism. In fact, antiracists believe colorblindness is racist. Think about that. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is racist. We mustn’t allow Nikole Hannah Jones to have her cake and eat it, too.
Critical race theory is a doctrine that programs young minds to believe that whites are as a class race oppressors who, however objectively deprived they are (remember, there are many more poor whites than poor blacks), enjoy unearned privilege and that blacks are oppressed and as a class kept underprivileged for the sake of systemic white advantage.
Not only is this false and hateful doctrine being taught to children, but it is also being deeply embedded in professional training across the country. Indeed, indoctrinating professionals is a crucial step in preparing educational and the other institutions that administer our lives for the practice of indoctrinating children not only in race consciousness, but in the preachment that the white race is the worst race to be. (See The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think).
Anti-racism is a “religion in all but name” that indoctrinates black people to believe they are “eternally victimized,” according John McWhorter in his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
Perhaps you have been following the protests at school board meetings and legislation passed or working its way through the process at states across the nation (Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standard). If you listened carefully, you heard the same people who deny that critical race theory is being taught to children decrying restrictions on its teaching on the grounds of the First Amendment.
It is amazing that such small thinkers as Ibram X Kendi, Nicole Hannah Jones, and Robin DiAngelo can have such big impacts on our society. But this is the way it is with religious ideology and its analogs. If it were science, they would operationalize their term and study the impact of the phenomenon they abstract according the demands of reason. Observers should declare policies racist because they are associated with racial disparities. That gets the causal order backwards. Racial disparities do not in themselves prove racism. Ask the question: what is racist about the policies? This must first be established, and that requires defining racism in a way that opens claims about it to falsification. Kendi won’t answer the question. What he says is not an answer. It is, as McWhorter has pointed out, a circular argument. This is where we are in our public discourse. This is the nonsense being taught to children in public schools. First they lie about teaching it (they’re still denying it), then they smear critics as racist.
This is the explicit design of CRT. Kendi, Jones, and DiAngelo are public-facing operatives. Instructional materials drawn from CRT directs teachers to indoctrinate students with the following notions: the permanence of racism, the endemic nature of white supremacy in American society, whiteness as property, interest convergence, and a critique of liberalism. Read my blog—deep dives abound there, but I discuss these ideas in this blog and provide additional insights given developments of late.
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The rhetoric of antiracism hides religion behind secular jargon to avoid the demands of the Separation Clause of the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to indoctrinate children in religious faith in public schools. So they insist that antiracist indoctrination is the teaching of history. Not only is antiracism religious thinking, but it’s also racist thinking. How did so many educators become brainwashed to believe that it is imperative to teach racist doctrine to children? Because not only are children brainwashed; their teachers are brainwashed, too. (See Are Teachers Really All In on Critical Race Theory?)
The deep method works through the transformed consciousness of the educator and the administrator. The language of antiracism hides racism by its very name and too few people have the critical thinking skills necessary for understanding what’s happening. That so few people have the necessarily critical thinking skills is a result of public education. The deeply indoctrinated don’t believe what they’re teaching is racist, even while it denigrates entire races of people, mainly white people, but also Asians (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite.), and blames them for the problems of another race, black people, who are in turn taught to blame their problems and situation on whites (and Asians). Replace “whites” with “Jews” and “blacks” with “Germans” and you will see it for what it is (see Reparations and Blood Guilt).
The deep method can also be found in the actions of those teachers who, suspecting or knowing CRT is racist, are pressured by administrators and colleagues to carry out the agenda nonetheless for the sake of keeping the job to which they’ve devoted their lives. This is social coercion, sometimes downplayed as peer pressure, a powerfully influential force in the lives of people whose existence is spent primarily in one institutional activity. Indeed, the ubiquity of CRT in the lives of educators amounts to life in what sociologists call a “total institution.” If you know teachers, k-12 and in higher education, even social life is largely spent around other teachers. It’s a lot like the experience of police officers and other occupations that tend to demand the near totality of the employee’s life. Social life thus revolves around occupational and professional identity.
The deep method involves dissimulating the central teaching (dissimulation is the process of hiding or masking the actual existence or purpose of some thing), which is the destruction of what CRT doctrine presents as “white culture” or “whiteness,” e.g., attacking those attributes that require no talent (admittedly difficult for some people for reasons that have nothing to do with race) but that increase the likelihood of success across the life course, attributes such as such as attitude, body language, energy, organization, passion, preparedness, receptive to and appreciative of feedback.
This is what diversity, equity, and inclusion training is designed to do: render problematic (a postmodernist move) those expectations that treat humans as persons (individualism) and judge them based on a common standard of conduct (equality). The assumption is that so-called “white” standards and values constitute a racist strategy that reproduces “white privilege” and holds down members of others races whose cultures do not value the traditional standards. The goal is to make the objective explanation for failures in life appear as a racist ideology and then use this deceit to explode the prevailing norms of success in order to bring the successful down to the level of the fruits of alleged systemic failure.
I just learned that my university is conducting a workshop on “white emotionality, a woke term defined as a “complex set of emotional responses to race-focused discussions,” a complex set of emotional responses “that maintain or support racial dominance.” The workshop will “consider the role of white emotionality in teaching and learning.” In these workshop, BIPOCs and their allies condescend to teach their white colleagues how to think and behave, their authority to do so deriving from “historical trauma” and “lived experience” that grant them privileged access to a truth. This is the “epistemic privilege of the marginalized and oppressed.” White people don’t have access to this truth because they see the world through the “perpetrator’s gaze.” White supremacy has blunted their sensibilities. The workshop is designed to interrupt whiteness to refocus the white lens, adjusting the gaze to reflect that of the victim.
The workshop is a struggle session that redefines resistance to the abstract claims social justice types make that center race in conversations about inequality in a manner that valorizes notions of white privilege and systemic racism as explanations for disparities as illegitimate expressions of white supremacy. This is what critical race theory looks like in action. If a BIPOC says white people are racist and a white person disagrees (which he should, since the vast majority of white people are not in fact racist), then the disagreement is not worthy of consideration but rather is an emotional reaction to his white fragility. White fragility is defined as white people’s inability to accept that they are racially privileged, that their achievements are due to the prevailing system of racial dominance, i.e., white supremacy, and that those achievements came at the expense of black and brown suffering.
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Critical race theory centers race in theorizing history and social relations. Race becomes the pivot upon which relevant history turns. The primacy of race is axiomatic. Social structures in the United States and during the period of British colonization of North America—really, throughout the world, since whites are the colonial masters (hence the affinity with Third-Worldism)—are constituted to manifest and perpetuate white rule and white privilege. Not were—are. In other words, the prevailing social system throughout the period of the European world-system to the present, whatever its appearance, operates intrinsically on the foundation of white supremacy—even if you can’t detect it! Denying it on empirical grounds is an indicator of its presence (that old psychological trick)!
Whiteness (i.e.. white identity) is a “possessive investment” (the thesis in a crude dialectic). White supremacy is in the interests of all white people, and those who define themselves as white or who whites allow to define themselves as such (except blacks who are the perpetual “other” as the negation of whiteness—see Fanon). Blacks can only rise if and only if their interests coincide with whites (“interest convergence”—see Bell) which is always limited and ultimately impossible to sustain because of possessive investment in whiteness, white subjectivity (race obsession projected onto whites), and the political economy of racialized bodies (see postcolonial thinking—Said, for instance).
Since race is centered and not social class, allowing for the jettisoning of historical materialism, all whites regardless of social class standing are privileged by the system. Likewise, all blacks, regardless of their social class standing, are oppressed. It may be that black capitalist exploit white workers, but the latter still enjoy the “wages of whiteness.” By the way, this puts the lie to the conservative argument that CRT is Marxist or neo-Marxist theory. In Marxism, racism, like religion, is an ideology functioning to maintain social class relations by obscuring the material foundation of the social order, found in the mode of production.
Change in social structure across time and space is conceptualized as mere system adjustments functioning to maintain racial hierarchies that systematically advantage whites. In other words, progress in race relations is only apparent, which is why 1619 is purported to be the founding date of relevant history. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” is the principle in operation. Any group that enjoys the same status or higher status as whites becomes “white adjacent” or “honorary white.” Nonwhite races that do not suffer systematic disadvantage—reckoned demographically—are rationalized so as to not contradict the premise of white supremacy. Any blacks and other “people of color” theorized to be systemically disadvantaged who also reject CRT are rationalized as “colonial collaborators,” i.e., “Uncle Toms” (or worse). All contrary evidence is negated by the axiom, a self-sealing fallacy.
Since all progress in race relations is only apparent, system reconfiguration occurs in such a way as to make the alleged source of racial hierarchy more difficult to detect, pushed ever further beneath the surface appearance, hence the need for “critical theory” (Freudian psychodynamics) to uncover it. Eventually, the cause of becomes so hidden that it need not be detected at all but assumed. This is why it is so crucial to get kids CRT early in their cognitive and character development—to build into their foundational worldview the (il)logic that the absence of racism proves the presence of racism. This is also understood by the Chambers of Commerce who build into young minds pro-capitalist assumptions, including even greenwashing, starting in the second grade by hijacking public school curriculum. Same with gender ideology. Racism is moved to an abstract plane to save the accusation from negation and children are taught that is the correct way to think critically about the world.
That whites and the collaborators would say this is all unscientific and illogical just reflect the ideology of white supremacy. But this is quite obviously indoctrination. And it serves the ruling class since it obscures the class relations that will govern the lives and life chances of most public school children in adulthood, destined to become members of the proletariat, if they’re lucky, serfs if things keep moving in the present direction. This is how CRT can appear as part of corporatist hegemony. If it were really radical it wouldn’t appear at all, just as exploitative capitalist relations and the problem of false class consciousness do not appear.
Enlightenment and Western standards of ethics, individualism, justice, law, etc., are all but projections of the ideology of white supremacy, designed or functioning to perpetuate white privilege and rule under cover of normality. Being on time is a white supremacist value. Diligence in one’s work, award and promotion based on meritorious activities, peaceful conflict resolution, grammar, punctuation, spelling, style—all values of white supremacy. They advantage whites. The proof is racial disparity. The test discriminate because they are based on white standards. Even math is a white construct. Racism works this way—without any racist motive. Racism operates in the open as not-racism by acting normal.
You can play every ethic and principle this way. Here’s perhaps the biggest of them all: colorblindness. Colorblindness is not really about equality of persons before the law regardless of race, but an ideology under cover of which racism works undetected. You cannot treat everybody the same on racial grounds—that’s unjustly discriminatory. Justice requires privileging blacks to negate the unseen and undetectable force of white supremacy. The workings of the system of individualism perpetuate white privilege. CRT is an Orwellian mindfuck. Everything is its opposite.
Affirmative action, i.e., reparations, are clearly not enough. Racial disparity remains. And that must be a manifestation of white supremacy (you are blaming the victim if you say otherwise). Ultimately, Enlightenment and Western standards must be overthrown and replaced with an entirely different, non-Western social logic, one based on group-level justice, groups defined by race essentialism. In the new system, individuals will be treated not as individuals but as concrete personifications of abstract demographic categories—the fallacy of reification or misplaced concreteness. All whites regardless of merit are to be limited to make room for blacks who would otherwise be excluded on grounds of merit, any gaps explained by the master explanation of white supremacy. From cradle to grave.
Crucially, the hierarchy remains but flipped. Blacks can say whatever about whites. But can whites? No, that would be racist. Blacks can appropriate white culture. But whites? That’s cultural appropriation. Equality of opportunity not equality of outcomes. Racist. We must have equity not equality. We need not diversity of talents but diversity of skin color. We need to be inclusive by being exclusive. And so on. As Ibram X Kendi says, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Sounds eerily like George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Of course, my argument is hopelessly racist because it defends white power, at least from CRT standpoint. By definition, of course. Whites view the world through the lens of the “perpetrator’s perspective,” and this is the governing social logic, manifest in individual justice, legal innocence, burden of proof, rational adjudication of fact, presentation of evidence, etc. The liberal and rational system of individual justice is thus an instantiation—the instrument of racial oppression (which affirmative action rightly contradicts but doesn’t abolish). The correct standpoint of blacks (disagreement among blacks notwithstanding) is the “victim’s perspective,” manifest in group-level justice and intergenerational reckoning. This is the ancient religious doctrine of blood guilt and collective punishment. And blacks who advocate CRT are the clerics of a new religion that blacks who oppose it just don’t get.
Because abstracts groups replace concrete individuals on the plane of justice, justice is reckoned in group terms means using disparities between groups primarily based on race (allowing for intersectionality absent class—see Crenshaw). This means that any disparity between the races is not explained by racism but is racism-by-definition. The persistence of racial disparity is thus used to prove that white supremacy persists—and will persist as long as the prevailing social logic governing the status quo persists. Thus, liberalism is replaced by illiberalism, participatory democracy by the administrative management of things, and the America republic goes away. This is the antithesis of that crude dialectic sans any higher unity.
As John McWhorter recently noted, this is at best sociologically interesting, because we have a front row seat to witnessing a new religion being born. Of course, things won’t end well at the end of this path. And not just because of the racism of CRT. Mostly because our corporate masters will have a most excellent tool to keep the people—white, black, and everything else—the hell away from power.
Is all this what kids are taught directly? Do they read articles by Bell and Crenshaw? No. It’s more insidious than that. CRT informs curricula and orients teachers epistemologically. The kids get various crude versions appropriate to their stage of development. It’s the Junior Achievement version of CRT—which also shouldn’t be in schools. These items are not the same thing as teaching history and social studies. It’s ideological indoctrination. Aren’t teachers opposed to this? They flip it and claim that not teaching CRT is indoctrination—just as not taking into account somebody’s race, not reducing their personality to inherited phenotypic traits, etc., is now racism. Again, in a vulgar dialectic, everything is its opposite.
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Jones’ 1619 Project seeks to frame the nation’s history in terms of chattel slavery. Slavery was inherited by the United States. It was a ubiquitous practice across world-systems for thousands of years. It was already part of the nascent European world-system that emerged in the wake of the declining Islamic world-system that had established the global trade in African slaves. When the United States was established, nowhere in the founding documents does any mention of race or color appear. Moreover, the author of that document, James Madison, declared it wrong for men to own other men.
Nation-building after winning independence from a monarchy required compromise. To appease the former southern colonies, the Constitution had a clause stating that the slave trade may not be abolished prior to the year 1808. This kicked open the door to abolition. Within only a couple of years after that clause sunset the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished and no state was allowed to import slaves. Half a century after that, the domestic system of chattel slavery was abolished altogether and the society in which it had persisted reorganized. Before the 1960s where finished, race segregation had abolished and discrimination declared illegal across the nation. We now live in a society where blacks are found across the class and occupational structure, as well as at every level of political power.
CRT and 1619 deny that progress and preach a mythology about America, namely that all this earth-shaking change is merely the reorganization of racism in order to sustain an increasingly undetectable white supremacy. It is a religious move that casts whites as sinners in a doctrine of original sin who must repent the transgression of their ancestors and assume their position as allies. CRT and 1619 are not simply bad history; this is a racist ideology that demonizes whites and attacks the Enlightenment.
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A Facebook friend of mine vigorously defending critical race theory and testified to the everyday experience of racism. I explained that individual and overt acts of race prejudice should be beside the point for CRT because CRT contends that racism is systemic and invisible until revealed by CRT formulas. However, because CRT is not scientific but religious in character, “lived experience” is a frequent appeal, as we see with the testimonial in religious discourse. The reason why we hear about “personal struggles” with “everyday racism” is because the anecdotal stands in place of the actual when facts fail the argument.
This is especially ironic given that CRT claims that racism works through race neutrality or colorblindness. CRT will admit that social science finds little evidence of racism in society. So, they resort to abstractions that do not depend on empirical generalizations (it’s hard to say they are abstractions at all—more accurately they’re simulacra, idols representing ghosts of things long disappeared). At the same time, they define racial disparities as systemic racism itself (a false tautology). But the “lived experience” or “everyday experience” (personal subjectivity, impressions, assumptions) is always waiting in the pocket as the trump card, as if being black somehow makes one’s “personal truth” uniquely true. This is like the Christian who tells me that God is real because he knows it in his heart and experiences Jesus in his life.
Let’s steel man the thing by using CRT’s strongest argument: the criminal justice system. We hear the claim that systemic racism governs the criminal justice system. This is one of my areas of expertise. I have reviewed the scientific literature that has been accumulated over the decades. This is no longer an open question. The evidence exonerates the criminal justice system of the charge of racial bias. Racial disparities in crimes reported to the police, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing reflect the overrepresentation of blacks in serious and violent crime. Black men are six percent of the US population yet more than half of all homicides in the United States are perpetrated by black men (most of their victims are other black men). More than half of all robberies in the US are committed by black men. Taking all serious violent crime combined (aggravated assault, homicide, rape, and robbery) black men account for 36-38 percent of perpetrators. Half of those in US prisons are there for these offenses. Black men account for more than a third of burglaries. That’s half of those imprisoned for serious non-violence offenses, or one-quarter of prisoners.
Confronted with the evidence, CRT makes three moves: (1) It blames overrepresentation of black men in serious crime on white privilege. Structural inequality based on white supremacy is the cause. This argument fails immediately because there are three times more poor whites than blacks and whites are underrepresented in serious crime. Not only are they underrepresented proportionally, but despite being approximately 67-73 percent of the population, they commit fewer homicides and robberies than blacks.
(2) CRT moves to redefine the disparities as systemic racism itself and calls for depolicing and the abolition of prisons. The police are slave patrols. Prisons are plantations. And so on. Here we move straight into fake history in support of delusional policies that make black-majority neighborhoods more dangerous to black people.
(3) The final move is to testify to personal experience in dealing with the police, as if the police are somehow able to systematically harass a race of people while escaping empirical evidence of it. But we know, for example in traffic stops, that even when the police treat black and white civilians in a polite and race neutral fashion, a much larger percentage of black drivers will report feeling humiliated and subject to implicit race bias (implicit because there is no evidence for it). This is a perception. The ideology of systemic racism prepares blacks (not everybody falls for it) to perceive normal interactions to be discriminatory.
This is why this is so poisonous in public schools. It trains children to see what is not there. Just like religion does. We see this also in the experience of blacks walking down the street. To be sure, they are disproportionately subjected to Terry stops. But that’s because of neighborhood disorganization and the disproportionate location of blacks in disorganized neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are disorganized because of family breakdown, dropout, idleness, and high rates of crime—actual social facts. The most notorious claim is that of racial bias in lethal civilian-officer encounters. Science debunks this. It’s a myth.
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I have never denied the coexistence of class and race. I have published analyses and arguments about their interactions (see, e.g., Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste). The problem is the centering of race, which is an ideological move in light of the fact that class is the primary force shaping life and life chances for both the capitalist class and the proletariat (They Do You This Way; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment). Most people in the United States are working people, black and white. A handful of families, black and white, enjoy an actual privilege, economic and legal privilege, the privilege of private ownership in a form of property, namely capital.
There are other factors, to be sure (see Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach). Family disintegration, capitalist development, and public policy all play a role. For example, globalization, i.e., offshoring and mass immigration, and the overdevelopment of the welfare state in managing their effects (neighborhood disorganization, idleness, and so forth), have disadvantaged blacks (Know Your Anti-Worker Propaganda). But these policies were not and are not pursued on white supremacist grounds. On the contrary, these policies are deceitfully couched in language of “civil rights,” and progressives and the Democratic Party (and their counterparts in Europe, the social democrats, labor, and socialist parties) have long been the chief organizers of transnationalism and the managed decline of the nation-state and dismantling of democratic republicanism.
Here’s what happened in the United States (and we see this developing in Europe to some degree). When systemic racism was abolished where it persisted in the 1960s, with the civil rights and voting rights, the capitalist class lost one of its most effective forms of ideological control. An alternative system or race thinking was soon stood up, one that rejected the traditional civil rights politics rooted in the American Creed (most notably represented by MLK, Jr.) and pushed instead Black Power politics and critical theory (and postmodernism in time), with its rejection of liberal values, etc., perfected in CRT, picked up by the administrative state and pushed out by the culture industry and establishment media, and it is in the process of being installed everywhere.
McWhorter argues that the antiracism of today is not the antiracism of the 1950s-60s. There was a shift in the discourse of race relations over the 1970s-80s that yielded, to quote from the Publisher’s Weeklyreview of the book, “a militant ‘Third Wave’ that condemns white people whether they’re leaving Black neighborhoods (‘white flight’) or moving into them (’gentrification’), among other contradictions, and demands the ‘suspension of standards of achievement and conduct’ for Blacks.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion struggle sessions are now occurring across the private and public sectors. Children are being programmed in race thinking in CRT-shaped curricula. All this is backed by corporate power. It is imposed outside of the democratic systems by the corporate state technocracy.
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In a thread about CRT, another Facebook friend objected: “The so-called looming threat of CRT was used quite a bit in the Virginia Governor’s race even though it hasn’t been introduced in that state.” But isn’t the best time to stop racist teaching is before it starts? It may be the best way to prevent the appearance of a new fundamentalism to kill it in the crib.
However, as I noted at the outset, the claim that CRT is not in Virginia schools is false. One gets this impression from the establishment media. It’s a lie and they know it’s a lie. The Virginia Department of Education repeatedly and explicitly refers to CRT in its documents (see the work of Christopher Rufo). Moreover, there are news stories covering teacher training in CRT by the firms installing this ideology in public schools.
In 2015 the education department under then-governor McAuliffe instructed Virginia public schools to “embrace critical race theory” explicitly to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.” Under Northam (Governor Blackface but that’s okay because he’s a Democrat Northam, the superintendent of public instruction, a man ironically named James Law, sent a memo to the system endorsing “Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.” He called it an “important analytical tool.” Analytical is the wrong word of course. He meant “ideological.” Northam ties the deployment of CRT to the development of public education generally.
Let it be clear: they mean to reorganize public education in a system of reeducation camps. Keep in mind that the Democratic Party in Virginia represents corporate power in that state. These are Clinton’s “New Democrats.” In other words, neoliberals, corporatists. The worst sort of capitalist. Woke functionaries for woke corporate power. The people of Virginia became aware of what is going on and put a stop to it. At least they have begun to fight. Virginia is hopefully a significant moment in what may be the reclamation of liberalism and democratic-republicanism in America. Wokeness is on the ropes. Now we have find that killer instinct.
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Everything I say about this matter is not only understood but desired by those in positions of power. CRT itself claims that blacks are allowed things whites aren’t because racism = prejudice + power and blacks are powerless—a claim contradicted by the fact that the CRT agenda is everywhere. (I just published an essay Calling Their Bluff—Who Has the Power?) I am objecting to the formula, not inventing it. Indeed, much of what I do is simply describe what others are saying and doing. The agenda reaches all the way back to the 1960s. That’s the Black Power formula. It’s been operating in plain sight for decades.
There’s a greater agenda that dates all the way back to the early twentieth century. It’s been Democrats pretty much all the way. Democrats were the party of the slavocracy. Then the party of Jim Crow. And now the party of antiracism. At the core of this is the transnational corporate project to dismantle the Westphalian system (The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). From Wilson to Biden. It’s a largely unbroken and relatively undisturbed agenda: the managed decline of the American republic.
Trump was the biggest monkey wrench ever thrown into the machinery. This explains the hysteria, the impeachments, the color revolution (Antifa, BLM, etc.), the work to thwart election integrity, mass immigration, lockdowns, mandates, and all the rest of it. The elite are determined to get the project back on course. And CRT is a major element of the project.
Again, just describing history. It’s a history too complex for K-12 students. I wouldn’t teach them about the demographic profile of serious crime in America, either, for this very same reason. That’s another problem with CRT. Sure, teach it in college (I do). But K-12 is not the place for complex arguments like this. People feel shamed by such things. Even adults. But we mustn’t risk this with children.
We are talking about what CRT is and what it wants—what those who are using CRT want. To achieve it, and to keep expanding on what they have won (which is a whole lot), they are installing CRT in public school in the same way they installed other pro-capitalist propaganda in public schools. CRT is rapidly becoming hegemonic in public schools on the teaching of the subject of race.
The universities have trained up an army of cultural programmers, controlled by the administrative apparatus, to install on the wetware of our children’s brains an ideology that functions to advance the interests of the capitalist a professional-managerial classes, black and white, that manufactures racial grievances to disrupt proletarian consciousness. Whether it has had no effect or a huge effect, this agenda represents a deleterious mind virus (if we care about liberty and democracy) that should not be allowed to continue infecting our public and private institutions. Parents are waking up. People are waking up. Virginia is an inflection point. Hopefully 2022 will allow us to chart a path out of progressive ideology and technocratic control of our lives.
All this is in the service of progressive Democratic politics. It’s slick the way the Democratic Party keeps an ideology functional to capitalist hegemony going all these decades. First the party of the slavocracy, basing the practice on the myth of black inferiority, then the party of apartheid, draping segregation in the falsehood of “separate but equal,” forced to make this move by the Republicans who defeated the South in war and occupied southern states for years to reconstruct their institutions. Forced to reconstruct racial ideology in the face of the Civil Rights movement and legislation overwhelmingly supported by the Republican Party, the Democrats are today the party of antiracism, an Orwellian recoding of racism to preserve it.
I am writing today to plug you into the struggle in a big way. I hope you will listen. We are rapidly moving towards a totalitarian corporate state, part of a transnational corporatist project, and we need to raise the degree of mutual knowledge to mount a more effective resistance to approaching tyranny.
This is not a conspiracy. It operates in the open and with your tacit consent. You will detect the project in, among other things, the rollout of coercive biomedical regimes in law and policy across the world. Their common appearance and function are not accidental. Power elite are dismantling democratic republican governments across the globe and subjugating the peoples of the world. The citizen is being transformed into subject as the world moves from international capitalism to global corporate neofeudalism. We have seen a form of this game plan before.
The Financial Times asks “Orwell v Huxley: whose dystopia are we living in today?” The answer is both and more.
For some time now we have lived under what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism” (see his book Democracy, Inc.), a system critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, German Jewish philosophers who escaped the Holocaust, as well as American sociologist C. Wright Mills, warned us about in the 1940s and 1950s. These thinkers identified core elements of the corporate state, the marriage of corporate and state and military and national security power (the power elite), as well as the administrative apparatus, the culture industry, and the propaganda system. To understand how this have been accomplished, see Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony detailed in his Prison Notebooks. Because of the crisis of capitalism and the fall in the rate of profit, we are now moving rapidly towards totalitarianism in its naked form as elites seek to retain their power and privilege.
To see a historical example of this process, I highly recommend legal theorist Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published in 1942. Crucially, we are not facing Italian-style fascism, but a global corporate state too often confused with a type of transnational socialism. Indeed, this system appears as national socialism that has transcended its nationalist character. But Nazism was never a socialist system, Nazism was a corporate state organized by bankers and industrialists who used successive emergency laws and rulings to dismantle democratic republicanism (the same forces behind the European Union). Nazism was a manifestation of crisis capitalism that aimed to turn Europe (and eventually the world) into a regional corporatist state. If you have been paying attention and you are honest with yourself, you will find all this familiar.
One of the emergencies manufactured by the Nazis was a series of public health crisis, identifying groups associated with disease (including the virus of oppositional politics) and bringing the population under a regime of health passes. This was a major part of the Nazi strategy. The historic focus on the Nazi experience and the Holocaust has typically been on the Jews, but the Jews were one group among many. The power elite cynically use the Judeocide to shame those who appeal to history to show others what is happening by claiming that no comparison to the Holocaust can be made (while at the same time drawing comparisons to the Holocaust to justify their own designs). The central lesson of the Holocaust for the living is to use that experience to make this comparison. The Nazis were keenly focused on their political enemies, not just the Jews, especially those who raised consciousness about the Nazi tactic of rule by emergency decree, that is mandates and passports, and demonization of subpopulations.
If you have not yet been introduced to Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, an activist against harmful practices of the biomedical industry, especially focused on voluntary consent and other elements of the Nuremberg Code, which became the recognized standard in the wake of the horrors of the Nazi biofascist regime, and the protection of children, I am introducing you to her today by way of excerpts from a speech she recently delivered in New York City against mass vaccination. Marcia Angell, past editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and senior lecturer at the Harvard Medical School, said of Sharav, “I see her as someone the research establishment badly needs.” Indeed, democracy desperately needs voices like Sharav’s. Angell recognizes, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans in his prophetic farewell address to the nation in 1961, that the research establishment has been captured by corporate power.
Political scientist Paul Diesing has shown us that there are two types of science: (1) technocratic science and (2) democratic science. The former is under the command of the corporate state and its administrative apparatus. The regulatory apparatus is captured by corporate power both through staffing and funding. Corporate operatives staff the FDA and pharmaceutical and other medical corporations funds the CDC. In a phenomenon we called “regulatory capture,” these regulatory bodies have become industry fronts. The latter type of science is free science protected by the democratic republic for the good of the people. The mass vaccination program is not for the good of the people, but for generating profits for the medical-industrial complex and for the globalist project to dismantle democratic-republican nation-states. As serious as SARS-CoV-2 is, the purpose to which the pandemic is being put is far more serious.
The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican are the political fronts for the corporate state, constituting what some are calling the “uniparty.” An earlier phase in the movement towards totalitarianism was the deepening of the national security apparatus under the Bush/Cheney regimes in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Those attacks were used to implement several elements of surveillance and control, as well as justify US military projection globally (see the Project for a New American Century). The Bush/Cheney neoconservative tactics, combined with the neoliberalism of the Clinton regime, was carried forward by the Obama/Biden regime. The current Biden regime is the marionette of this same power elite.
The propaganda arm of the corporate state, legacy and social media, is not covering this honestly, but there is currently a revolt underway in the uniparty. The media is portraying this as a struggle being the sane and rational majority and the backwards reactionary deplorables. The deplorables are being portrayed as far right, fascistic, and racist. In truth, the revolt is being led by populists and nationalists on the left and the right. They liberals, libertarians, and conservatives (Goldwater and Eisenhower types) standing against the progressives and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) who are the popular face of the corporate state. It is this revolt that elites are desperately trying to suppress.
You need to push out this content to educate the people. We are standing at the threshold of totalitarianism. Once democracy is lost, it is highly unlikely we will get it back in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. The situation today, dressed in humanitarianism and progressivism, is more dire than it was at the brink of World War Two. Then, an interstate system largely composed of free nations opposed totalitarianism (even while it entrenched the corporate state). Today, the foundation of the interstate system is a global system governed by transnational corporations and world financial organizations linked together through ostensibly international governance. Don’t be fooled by the diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in China. The People’s Republic of China is part of the blueprint for global corporatist neofeudalism. The rattling of sabers against Russia in the Ukrainian situation is part of the manufacture of crises.
This will not be a struggle of nations against nations but states against people. In the United States, the Constitution is being subverted. Across the world international law is being flouted. Those in power who are advancing the corporate state must be thrown out of office. To my American comrades, find out who is running in your states and districts and vote for the candidates who oppose this. Don’t trust party names. Look at the politics. You may not agree with everything a candidate stands for, but don’t let that prevent you from voting for the politician who stands against the corporate state.
A headline from CNBC today: “Omicron significantly reduces Covid antibody protection in small study of Pfizer vaccine recipients.” This is what happens when you mass vaccinate into the teeth of a pandemic. It works like the mass-level use of antibiotics prophylactically. Pathogens evolve to get around immunity. Since the mRNA platform only instructs the body to manufacture a toxic spike (or S) protein (which is why there are so many injuries from the product—see Follow Only Approved Science) and doesn’t expose the body to the pathogen’s entire genome, only a few mutations are needed to effectively get around immunity. Only infection can generate a robust immune response (or perhaps a better vaccine, but that takes years and shareholders need bigger dividends).
Nurse Mary Ezzat administers a Pfizer COVID-19 booster shot to Jessica M. at UCI Medical Center in Orange, CA, on Thursday, August 19, 2021.
Omicron has more than 30 mutations in the spike alone, which explains why there is a more than forty-fold reduction in the efficacy in the Pfizer platform. Fortunately, Omicron appears to be milder than previous variants, which is also explained by evolution. To shorthand this, in order to increase their chance of spreading their genome, viruses want to infect their hosts without significantly reducing interactions among hosts. As a result, viruses mutate towards greater contagiousness and lesser severity. Still, they have the hardest time trying to evade natural immunity. In its research, Pfizer finds that those who have been infected enjoy greater protection from severe illness from Omicron. Again, this is because of the more robust immunity conferred by infection. Never to miss out on a chance to move product, however, Pfizer insists that your natural immunity will be even better with one of their boosters.
Guess who told you that the virus would mutate around a leaky vaccine? Me. I told you this several months ago (see links below). I don’t take credit for this. This was what Dr. Robert Malone warned us about from the start of the pandemic. Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA platform. He understood that the vaccine was leaky and not durable. What did Dr. Malone recommend instead of mass vaccination? Vaccinate those at special risk from the virus and use therapeutics to treat serious cases while allowing the rest of the population to contract the virus. We would already have been through this pandemic months ago if people had listened to Dr. Malone and hundreds of other doctors and scientists who told us essentially the same thing. But how could people know this (whether they listen is a different matter) when the media censored this information and deplatformed those who tried to tell us about it?
Alongside vaccines and boosters, perhaps there is no greater example of insanity that the wearing of surgical and cloth masks. In What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire, published back in May of 2020, I argued that, if masks work, we shouldn’t promote them generally since they would hamper the spread the of virus and thus interfere with the process of naturally-acquired herd immunity, which we know now (and really knew then) is what is required for moving from a pandemic life to a one where SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants are an endemic part of the human experience, just as it is with adenovirus, influenza, other coronaviruses, and rhinovirus, and all their variants. I also pointed out, as the title of the essay indicates, that the wearing of masks is a reflection of technocratic desire (this is the main function).
In the meantime, I have learned that masks don’t work. In Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected, penned back in September, I leaned on the experts who actually study this stuff, namely industrial hygienists. I have just run across yet another scientific article, Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery, published in 2015, that despite the ubiquitous use of surgical facemarks in surgical practice, used because they “have long been thought to confer protection to the patient from wound infection and contamination from the operating surgeon and other members of the surgical staff” and, moreover, because they are believed to provide “protection of the theatre staff from patient-derived blood/bodily fluid splashes,” that “overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination.” In other words, surgical masks are ritual not science.
Yet a lot of science is sketchy. According to ScienceNews, “A massive 8-year effort finds that much cancer research can’t be replicated.” So as it is in social science, so it is in medical science. Why is science even necessary? In his article, “The world has the tools to end the coronavirus pandemic. They’re not being used properly,” CNN’s Rob Picheta reports: “Pandemics fade out of view as a result of human efforts like vaccine development, contact tracing, genomic analysis, containment measures and international cooperation.” This has almost never been true. The vast majority of pandemics take care of themselves. This is the Promethean spirit of corporate state scientism speaking through its chief propaganda organ.
Meanwhile, in Germany….
A German police squad detains an old woman unable to show them her vaccine pass.pic.twitter.com/P0LM3AjnlZ
Jordan Peterson in error uses his middle name. Those of you who study the Holocaust will know him by Christopher Browning. Browning’s book is called Ordinary Men. (Read also Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. I have an essay on the subject in the Journal of Black Studies you may find useful. You can find a version of the essay on my blog titled “Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.” I try to make my academic work accessible to a general audience. Don’t ever buy a journal article of mine online. I will not receive a penny from it. Drop me a line and I will see if I can hook you up.)
I want to close this essay with a confession. I misjudged Peterson because I was too embedded in academic culture. At times I criticized him in an ignorant way. But not nearly as ignorant of those around me. Academic culture is corporate state ideology for the professional-managerial strata whose function it is to administer the technocratic order (see Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning). A man like Peterson blows up the narrative they promulgate. They loathe him for this reason.
The further I get away from that damned culture the clearer my mind becomes. I am at the point that I can see that what I was inside appears to be the domain of cluster B personality types who became stuck in the mentality of the high school snob clique. (I have written about this here: Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me and here: Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds and here: The Cynical Appeal to Expertise.) It was not always this way. The deformation of the university is a product of the last fifty years. As we can see, this deformation comes with dangerous potential.
This morning, I received a letter in my email inbox from an organization from which I recently resigned, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), alerting me to the hopeful possibility (from their standpoint) that reparations could make it to the House floor in the form of House Resolution 40. This is important, writes Jennifer Bellamy, Senior Legislative Counsel, because “justice, equity, and basic human dignity have been denied across civil life and civil liberties for centuries” in the United States of America.
Bellamy writes, “Police brutality cuts hundreds of Black lives short every year. Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the mass incarceration system. And Black communities continue to be hit hardest by the impact of the pandemic. If we are ever to address the racial injustices that continue to prevail in this country, then we must confront chattel slavery and its impact—and make strides toward achieving reparatory justice.” She continues, “H.R. 40 is the path forward to achieve this. This bill would establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, its legacy, and make recommendations to Congress for reparations. And right now, we have momentum: H.R. 40 was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee and now has 195 cosponsors.”
As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, statements suggesting that racist police brutality disproportionately takes the lives of black people or that the criminal justice system locks up black people in numbers disproportionate to their involvement in serious crime are contradicted by the evidence. In absolute numbers police kill twice as many white men in civilian-officer encounters every year in America than they do black men, and the disproportionality cited is explained by overrepresentation of black men in serious crimes, which makes black men more likely relative to population size to come in contact with police officers. Moreover, prison demographics reflect crime demographics. Black men perpetrate around 36-38 percent of serious crime in America and comprise around 36-38 percent of prisoners.
As I have reported on Freedom and Reason, black men, who comprise only six percent of the United States population, account for more than half of all murders and more than half of all robberies in the country. Do not mistake the point I’m making here. Most black men in America are law abiding citizens. At the same time, most murderers and robbers in America are black men. Moreover, when it comes to interracial crime and violence (most violence is intraracial), black men kill and rob more whites than whites kill or rob blacks (see my essay Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?).
While the ACLU continually distorts the character of crime and criminal justice in the United States, the establishment makes it hard for prominent individuals to push back against the distortion by pursing a politics of personal and professional destruction. A few days before receiving this email from the ACLU, progressives were beside themselves because Candace Owens repeated facts well known to (if not usually admitted by) professional criminologists. The power elite is furious with Owens because she is blowing up the narrative on violence in America. They are especially angry with her because she is a conservative black woman. Her racial identity is supposed to align her politics with progressives and the cultural and political narrative that whites are the more oppressive and violent race in America.
Here’s an attack on Owens by The Young Turks typical of the way progressives handle truth claims made by black Americans:
Progressives Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian attempt to obscure the probable motive in Waukesha massacre.
The corporate state media and bourgeois hacks like the The Young Turks want the public to believe the greatest threat of crime and violence in the United States comes from white supremacists in order to marginalize the heartland, the majority of American elites wish to associate with bigotry and racism. That isn’t close to being true. There are white supremacists, but they are few in number (however much attention legacy and social media give their occasional small marches). Compare the crime and violence perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter to that perpetrated by white supremacy groups and you can see the problem. Respective criminal wrongdoing isn’t comparable judged by any metric one might use—assault, arson, looting, vandalism, killing.
Because their claims are demonstrably false, and because all whites are lumped together, the lie that white men represent the greatest threat of crime and violence in America defames an entire racial group. This is why the ACLU and House Democrats push reparations. They want to establish a high-profile commission to facilitate a continual discussion that will hold living whites collectively responsible for an ex post facto crime that occurred 156 years ago as of December 18. They wish to decree in law what they cannot establish in fact, namely that whites constitute a criminal class. Anti-white racism is rampant today’s America and it puts lives in danger. (The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?)
There are two things to understand about this libel as a political strategy. First, the corporate state deceives the public into believing that white men represent the greatest threat to public safety, as well as the primary source of human suffering in America in a campaign to turn the nonwhites against the majority of value-producing labor in the nation (white men and white people generally) to disrupt working class consciousness. It would be one thing if any of the claims elites made were true (the truth is never racist). But their claims are false. Second, by constantly blaming white men and white people generally for the problems of blacks (which has nothing to do with most white people), the elite make white people suitable targets for violence, as they become objects of loathing (including self-loathing) and resentment. This is not an accident. It is designed to sow chaos. Weakening public safety aims at amplifying that chaos. Owens is observing the effects of anti-white prejudice.
This is not a new observation—even if the character of criminal predation are somewhat changed. More than a century and a half ago, in various writings, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both recognized and condemned what they called “primitive rebellion.” In an 1844 letter to Marx from Paris, Engels sees in “the rapid increase in crime” among the proletariat, “robbery and murder” as “their way of protesting against” the conditions of their existence, conditions established by class dynamics (this has not changed). Engels describes, hopefully, “At night the streets are very unsafe, the bourgeoisie [the middle class] is beaten, stabbed and robbed; and, if the [lumpen]proletarians here develop according to the same laws as in England, they will soon realize that this way of protesting as individuals and with violence against the social order is useless, and they will protest, through communism, in their general capacity as human beings. If only one could show these fellows the way!”
I need not review the body of writings by these two on this subject (I have surveyed that elsewhere). Engels sums up the spirit in those few sentences. Marx and Engels hoped to see primitive rebellion transformed into communist rebellion. (They were pessimistic about the possibilities, however, failure on which the rule of the capitalist class depended.) What has somewhat changed? The historic character of the United States and anti-white prejudice means that the lumpenproletariat’s targeting carries a racialized character. However, at the core of this is the demoralization of the working class, the roots of which lie in the social condition, antagonized by ideologies dividing the working class. (In addition to Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide, see also Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; Marxist Theories of Criminal Justice and Criminogenesis.)
Candace Owens
This is why elites obscure the truth about the Waukesha massacre. Russell Brookes Jr., a black nationalist, drove his car through that Christmas parade to murder white people (Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed). It was an act of anti-white terrorism that the establishment means to communicate through inaction. There’s a reason Waukesha police chief Daniel Thompson said in a press conference, “There is no evidence that this is a terrorist incident,” emphasizing moments later: “This is not a terrorist event.” The narrative provides the mechanism by which the obvious is reflexively denied while meaningfully transmitted. Meanwhile, a school shooting resulting from what appears rather obviously to be a case of irresistible impulse (perpetrated by Ethan Crumbley, 15, at Oxford High School in Oakland County Michigan) has been designated an act of terrorism (apparently because it was a terrifying experience), announced by prosecutor Karen McDonald. Charges of manslaughter have been leveled at the parents have been charged and the charges may include school officials. The perpetrator in this case is a white male.
There’s a reason why interracial patterns of perpetrator and victim run in the direction they do—it’s because of the way progressives talk about race. The same narrative to deny the obvious is the same narrative that provides the motive. Using racist dog whistles such as “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” progressives have mainstreamed the 1960s black extremist talk about white devils to such an extent that it becomes part of a population’s background assumptions. They have turned one part of the population against the other in such a way that Owens merely stating facts carries a shocking effect. Inspired by an analogy offer by Coleman Hughes, I discuss the problem of scapegoating a racial or ethnic group this way in my essay Reparations and Blood Guilt (see also Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment).
Tragically, it is black people who suffer the worst of mass neglect of the truth of crime and violence in America, as most homicide victims in the United States are black, their perpetrators overwhelmingly other black men. Glenn Loury has been pleading with the public to recognize this fact on his program The Glenn Show. Owens is an easy target because she’s not a distinguished professor at a major university with Loury’s heft. But Owens and Loury are making the same point: by blaming white people generally for the problems of black people, the real reasons for black suffering are obscured and no concerted effort is made to address the reasons (see It’s Not a Racist System). Here’s the most recent example of Loury’s powerful sentiments on this matter. (It you aren’t regularly watching the Glenn Show you’re understanding of race relations in America is impoverished.)
It’s not that there aren’t white people to blame for the problems black people confront. Most murders perpetrated by blacks occur in progressive-run cities dominated by white officials and professional blacks (see “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities). It’s that the failure to recognize that progressive Democrats, white and black, use black people for political ends while perpetuating conditions harmful to black Americans (for example custodial management and mass immigration). This is the truth the power elite cannot allow to enter mainstream consciousness.
Ibram X Kendi and his ilk are trying to make criticizing anti-white prejudice a form of white supremacy. You know how they tell you that whites can’t be victims of racism because of the power formula. It’s nonsense. The old antiracism we knew as the civil rights movement—that’s the struggle for equality before the law—won the fight. De jure segregation has been abolished and discrimination in businesses of public accommodation and in applications and admissions to colleges and universities and in employment—at least for nonwhite minorities (with the exception of those of Asian descent deemed “white adjacent”)—has been illegal since the 1960s. In contrast, the new antiracism, what Kendi is pushing, what inspired Darrell Brooks. Jr. to drive his SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, is an expression of anti-white prejudice.` It racist.
Kendi presses his case in “The Mantra of White Supremacy,” published in The Atlantic, carrying the subtitle: “The idea that anti-racist is a code word for ‘anti-white’ is the claim of avowed extremists.” I invite you to read his piece. But the essay you are about to read by me concerns the old antiracism and how we let public policy warp that achievement almost as soon as the ink on President Johnson’s signature had dried. The crazy moves quick with this Kendi fellow and stories about him can get away from you. I want to take up the thing he did prior to this, when, if you remember, he quickly deleted his tweet sharing a news story about whites applying as minority students to gain advantage in the university application process. He did that because he knew he had fucked up by sharing that story. He didn’t merely jeopardize his own “antiracism” project with it; his tweet exposed the race hucksterism that has for decades produced hucksters like him who guilt and shame whites into supporting positive discrimination. Here’s a screenshot of the tweet:
So successful is the hustle that it moves white parents to support a system that disadvantages their children in the name of “racial justice,” an ideology that treats individuals not as such but as personifications of abstract demographic categories. This ideology represents such a barrier to self-actualization that white youth are moved to lie on their college applications to skirt the associated injustice. So we can make it about Kendi. Kendi makes it easy to make it about him. But let’s not bury the lede: affirmative action discriminates against white people by granting black people racial privilege (see Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment). Whites are not privileged in America. That hasn’t been true for decades.
The argument for affirmative action is not that it grants an artificial privilege for minorities but that it checks the natural privilege enjoyed by whites. Affirmative action is pitched as a moderate policy that strengthens equality of opportunity. It’s no imposition really. Affirmative action is rationalized as a remedial attempt to equalize the playing field in a society marked by social inequality rooted in racism. It’s the least we can do, we’re told to fix an historical wrong. That formulation assumes an awful lot while claiming to do very little. But in reality it does an awful lot or else white kids wouldn’t lie and say they are nonwhite to avoid the disadvantage affirmative actions imposes on them. To be sure, there are racial disparities. But disparities don’t explain themselves (see What Explains—and Doesn’t Explain—Inequality). And explanations given provide no remedy if justice matters; you can’t hold individuals accountable without establishing their responsibility. To hold persons accountable for the supposed actions of others, part of present, is contrary to the ethic of individualism. When it’s based on race, then it’s racism. The new antiracism isn’t just about prejudice. It’s also about discrimination.
The counterargument is that racism is structural, that it’s woven into the fabric of America; the natural workings of our institutions are governed by a master social logic guided by white supremacy. But a system privileging nonwhites over whites blows up the premise of white supremacy. How could a system be racist in a manner that systemically advantages whites while systematically disadvantaging them to the extent that they feel compelled lie on college application forms to get ahead? Why would a white establishment establish rules that are contrary to dominant group interests? Why would the institutions of a white supremacist society design policy that limited the ambitions of white people? To put the matter simply, given the depth of racism in America, how can something like affirmative action even happen? Clearly the problem has been misspecified.
Affirmative action is strategic culturally and politically. The goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion comprise an ideology that cosmetically covers economic inequality, integrating minorities into capitalist hegemony, while perpetuating the ideology of racial ordering. By making everything about “racial justice,” racial ideology obscures the real inequality: the system of social class (It’s Not a Racist System). This is why proportional representation is demanded in those areas of life where it does not obtain—but only in a certain direction. This is why a person’s skin color or some other identity marker is treated as if it is itself an accomplishment. “She is the first this.” “He is the first that.” “They lie at the intersection of firsts.” The establishment can point to the diverse appearance of its institutions and claim to have achieved equity while keeping the structures that produce inequality firmly in place. This is a different kind of racism. It’s racism that brands itself “antiracism.”
Ibram X. Kendi, Professor in the Department of History in the College of Arts & Sciences and founder/director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.
We need to be clear about this question of unearned wealth and status and cumulative disadvantage. The new antiracist rhetoric makes it sound like black people built this country all by themselves. To be sure, this country was built with black people’s labor. But it was also built with white people’s labor. In fact, most of the labor that built this country was white. Centering race obscures social class. It conceals poverty in America. There are two to three times more poor whites as poor blacks in this country (They Do You This Way). You would never know that listening to the culture industry. The prevailing narrative tells a tale of stolen Indian land and exploited black labor, as if all white people are members of the colonizing, slave-owning bourgeoisie. The truth is that most white people are working class men and women who own very little except mountains of debt. Today, most working class people are white men and women. So as long as we’re focusing on race (I’d rather not but the race hustlers are making me), we have to acknowledge the first-rate magicians in the house. They made hundreds of millions of people vanish in thin air. But we know how the trick works. It’s time to end privilege based on race.
The World Health Organization (WHO), led by the Maoist Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, of Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a wing of the ruling communist Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, is in charge of naming SARS-CoV-2 variants. The name next in line was Nu, to be followed by Xi.
Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chairman of th Central Military Commission, and President of the People’s Republic of China since 2013.
In naming the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron, the WHO skipped over Nu and Xi at once to avoid obviously skipping over Xi when WHO got to it, which it inevitably would since viruses mutate. Xi is the name of the Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping and repeatedly referring to the Xi variant would keep in mind the questions we should be asking: from where and under what circumstances did this virus originate and spread? Tedros didn’t want to make it look obvious when The Who avoided the communist dictator’s name Xi in naming the virus.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization
The highly probable answers are the questions we should be asking are not unknown. SARS-CoV-2 is very likely the result of gain-of-function research organized by Dr. Anthony Fauci, decades-long director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and the People’s Liberation Army in a bioweapons facility in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus either escaped or was released, resulting in the infection of thousands of people who were then put on planes and flown to major cities around the world.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Frankly, Xi should have been the virus’s inaugural name. This is the CCP virus. And the man who played a central role in creating it tells you that it’s too soon to know whether you will be locked in your house and forced to receive mRNA jabs.
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Remember, it was Tedros who tapped EcoHealth’s Alliance Peter Daszak, an associate of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who runs the money laundering operation behind the gain-of-function research, to not coverup the Wuhan lab leak, but also to obscure the fact that Fauci restarted gain-of-function research, which President Obama had halted, without notifying President Trump.
The EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology looking for pathogens in bats in China.
The fetish for expertise in narrow disciplinary scientific divisioning, a fragmented knowledge system that appears totalistic, reflects a desire for a priesthood (The Cynical Appeal to Expertise). For this is a chief marker of scientism. Scientism is not be confused with science. I write in my previous blog (Biden’s Biofascist Regime), “Science is comprised of rigorous methods of producing knowledge that proceeds objectively in the context of free and open inquiry. Scientism, in contrast, is an ideology that pulls about itself scientific jargon to conceal its quasi-religious spirit.” Scientism does not tolerate criticism of its “findings.” It relies on state power and corporate governance to establish its conclusions as official truth. I further write, “We see this in the manufacture of COVID-19 policy and the cult of personality surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci. We see it in social media platforms censoring and deplatforming those skeptical of corporate power and product. We also see it in the elevation of critical race theory.” The priesthood tells you that you can’t understand the things it purports to know. You’re supposed to proclaim your ignorance and practice cerebral hygiene. Keep your thoughts clean of apparent contradiction (to miss the real ones). Practice ritual gullibility.
Elites use this attitude to sanction technocratic control over the masses. It’s a fundamentally anti-democratic doctrine, profoundly destructive to liberty, especially cognitive liberty. People stop thinking for themselves. Not thinking for oneself invites tyranny. The corporate state’s response to COVID-19, to take a pressing case, is not a rational response to SARS-CoV-2, but rather a strategy for building in totalitarian control of society. Control depends on a mass subjectivity for legitimation, for transforming corporate power into authority, and that subjectivity is the attitude of scientism. It’s a faith-based doctrine. A new religion. Moreover, it’s fascistic.
Circumstances have handed me an illustration. Every year, typical of universities across the nation, the institution where I teach adopts a common theme and organizes classes, curricula, and events around it. This year, the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, or CAHSS (cleverly pronounced “cause”), is rolling out its annual “Common CAHSS” with the theme “Truth: Information, Misinformation, and Democracy.” As you will see, Common CAHSS 2021-22 reeks of progressive angst over the rise of the popular voice and the concomitant decline in the faith in the academic priesthood.
Here is the theme description:
The public’s ability to distinguish truth from falsehood seems to have deteriorated significantly in recent years. There is a widespread deficit in the ability to recognize subject expertise, critically evaluate sources, and synthesize ideas. The very notion that facts exist has been called into question through phrases like “alternative facts.” This deficit has proven catastrophic during the Covid-19 health crisis, where conspiracy theories and YouTube health “experts” have carried more weight for some than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, unproven and debunked claims about widespread election fraud threaten to undermine our democracy. While these problems can be explained in part by technologies that allow for the rapid spread of information regardless of quality, intentional efforts to misinform the public have resulted in frequent questioning of the existence of scientific truths like climate change, racial and sexual discrimination, and the health benefits of masks and vaccinations. Common CAHSS 21-22 will explore the role of the modern university in supporting the “continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone truth can be found,” which has been part of the University of Wisconsin identity for over a century. In an era where information—both true and false–can be readily accessed from our phones, the function of higher educational institutions must include not only generating and sharing high-quality information but also teaching the critical information literacy skills required to navigate a complex terrain. Such skills are essential to democracy and to making progress on the key issues of our time, including human rights, racial justice, and sustainability.
It concerns me that the persons organizing the theme this year, while almost assuredly the same persons who make a fetish of demographic diversity (what often becomes, to lean on Musa al-Gharbi concept of “curated diversity,” an exercise of white progressives fixing the standpoints of the other groups for whom they claim to make room and give voice), do not appear to be committed to the viewpoint diversity that is an essential element in any valid system of knowledge production. Posing the problem of knowledge in terms of how to immunize consensus or official claims against challenges presumed to be illegitimate gives away the game. In the mind of the authors of the theme description, the problem is not the crisis of science brought on by technocratic government and the corporate imperative of shareholder profits, but by the dissent of conservatives, socialists, and others from corporate state control that threatens the legitimacy corporate governance and thus imperils the status upon which academics depend for reputational promotion and occupational climbing. Insecurity lies at the heart of condescension.
Christopher Freeman, philosophy professor at William and Mary College, opines in his Inside Higher Education article “In Defense of Viewpoint Diversity,” “we have good reason to think that the teaching and research missions of higher educational institutions are better served when those institutions welcome dissenting opinions.” That good reason should be obvious, but it’s not, and it’s that blindness that speaks to the crisis of higher education. “Truth is a process, not just an end-state,” writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt identifies “obstacles to that process, such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and the worship of sacred values.” These are manifest in demands (identified in “The Coddling of the American Mind Haidt published in The Atlantic) for “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and administrative mechanisms for disciplining “microaggressions.” The fact that microaggressions (an Orwellian euphemism for the faux pas) are so real to the academic that administrators will assign mandatory training on the matter shows just how deeply tribalism has corrupted the endeavor. Such training is required at my institution and almost certainly the authors of the text in question are in full support of such mandatory training. Just as they are for mask and vaccine mandates.
While I am reluctant to deconstruct the work of colleagues whom I regard as friends, the theme description shared above is a paradigm of the problem we are facing in higher education. The Common CAHSS 2021-22 theme description is a clinic not only in these obstacles, but in the way academics expertly couch the obstacles in a rhetoric that presumes to bear the truth. In the case of Common CAHSS 2021-22, that rhetoric is drawn from corporate media propaganda. In this blog, in what will appear as something like Karl Marx’s 1875 critique of the program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (Critique of the Gotha Program), I focus on the text and its relationship to ideology and power. Methodologically, I deconstruct the description’s rhetoric in light of critical media and propaganda studies, as well as the logic of institutional analysis, relevant fields of study of which—given the parroting of corporate media characterizations throughout description, and the absence of any mention of the problem of corporate governance, power, and profit—its authors appear unaware.
Media studies has its roots in the work of American pragmatists, such as George Herbert Mead, the founder of symbolic interactionism (a term coined by his student Herbert Blumer), who argued that democratic society requires forms of communication that allow individuals not merely to be exposed to, but to appreciate the opinions of others, especially from those unlike themselves, as well as develop empathy towards others with whom they disagree. In agreement with his friend and fellow pragmatist John Dewey, Mead saw open and deliberative communicative forms as essential to arriving at genuine consensus and authentic community. Media and propaganda studies formally appears at the New School in New York in the early twentieth century and becomes a central focus of the Frankfurt School, where critical theory is applied to mass communications and propaganda. A contemporary instantiation of work in this area is the work Mickey Huff and his colleagues carry out over at Project Censored.
If one is interested in accessible examples of how to pursue critical institutional analysis, I recommend two documentaries, both by Zeitgeist Films: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan’s The Corporation, the latter based on Bakan’s book by the same name. I show these documentaries in two courses I teach: Freedom and Social Control and Power and Change in America. In Freedom and Social Control, the semester project involves students producing an institutional analysis of a student-selected for-profit corporation or industry. Pharmaceutical corporations and related areas of the medical-industrial complex are always popular topics. Is it the opinion of authors of the theme description that I should criticize students whose findings contradict the edicts of the CDC and FDA?
As will become apparent, the description of Common CAHSS 2021-22 theme is an expression of the same technocratic desire that animates Silicon Valley’s Big Tech oligarchs, a desire captured well by the great propaganda and public relations men of early twentieth century United States, principally Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, and the concept of “engineering consent” or “manufacturing consent.” From this standpoint, the goal of apparent intellectual activity is not to interrogate claims but to indoctrinate the public, including deploying strategies to exclude arguments that increasingly resemble what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four described as a “thoughtcrime,” aimed at controlling politically unorthodox thoughts that contradict the dominant ideology. Orwell detailed a list of terms associated with the official language of his dystopian world Oceania called “Newspeak,” among them “crimethink,” which refers to politically-wrong thoughts and actions.
In the 1920s, Harold Lasswell, a student of the work of Mead and Dewey’s, as well as Freud, defined propaganda “in the broadest sense is the technique of influencing human action by the manipulation of representations. These representations may take spoken, written, pictorial or musical form.” The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942), a think tank founded by a group of historians, journalists, and social scientists, announced its purpose this way: “To teach people how to think rather than what to think.” I am sure many of your have heard that before. That is what should be occurring at the university—not telling people to accept the claims that the 2020 election was the most secure election in the nation’s history, that masks and vaccines are the best way to deal with a pandemic, that blacks are the victims of systemic racism, or that global climate change is caused by human action. The IPA defined propaganda as “expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinion or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends.” Almost everything about the theme description speaks to the desire to seek predetermined ends without facts and reason. Only one of the four claims listed in this paragraph highlighted by the theme description enjoys empirical support sufficient to warrant belief, and that is the problem of global climate change.
The concept of manufactured consent appears also in the work of Italian Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, so named because the notes were written from a prison cell where fascist dictator Benito Mussolini threw Gramsci for crimethink, where it is referred to as ideological hegemony. Gramsci argues that the ruling class governs in two ways: control over the means of violence (the iron fist) and control over the means of ideological production (the velvet glove). Governing a people requires suppressing opposition and leading a majority of the rest. In other words, rule is established through coercion and consensus. Gramsci’s theory is concerned with identifying those institutions that function to bring the masses under hegemonic control, primarily by constructing a consensus reality that conceals or distorts objective reality and dissimulates power. Gramsci understands that economic (or structural) coercion and culture provide an essential context for the work of violence and manipulation. Elites establish a social logic in which its interests are presented as common sense. Thus citizens are conditioned to accept elite interests as their own interests, to accept elite opinion as correct opinion. Those so conditioned not only do not require discipline and punishment, but they often serve as social controllers for the elite on their own volition. Sometimes, they take up the duty with zeal. Oftentimes, in fact.
Antonio Gramsci, author of the Prison Notebooks
The consensus Gramsci describes is not finding common understanding in the manner pragmatists propose. Rather it is a manufactured consensus in the sense that enough people are swayed by versions of reality constructed by societal institutions under the control of the ruling class. The significant institutions in modern society are the corporation, the state and its administrative officers and regulatory agencies, the organized media (owned by the corporations), including book and journals, established educational institutions, and major religious organizations. The latter two have often been marked historically as institutions where traditional intellectuals work to some degree outside hegemonic power. This changed over the course of the twentieth century. Gramsci could see that early on.
(For those interested in research deploying Gramscian insights, I use a Gramscian framework in my analysis of anti-environmentalism in my award-winning article “Advancing Accumulation and Managing its Discontents.” published in 2002 in the Sociological Spectrum. This work is relevant to the subject of the present blog. In that paper, I apply Gramsci to the study of corporate-funded climate research largely lying outside the university framework. Crucially, hegemonic production proceeds both inside and outside the university. Maybe some day I will blog about what happened to me when I critiqued anti-environmentalism inside my university.)
I emphasize that my argument is not that there is no objective method for determining the validity and soundness of truth claims. Quite the contrary. Not all arguments that examine the intersection of knowledge and power are postmodernist in character. My argument is that scientific practice, which has a normative basis that I detail below, one that derives from the materialist standpoint, is corrupted by money-power. For this reason, I do not argue for the neutrality of science. Crucially, as philosopher of science professor Sandra Harding noted, objectivity and neutrality are not synonymous. The desire to weed out corrupting influences degrading objectivity in science cannot be a neutral endeavor since it requires identifying forces that bias the scientist.
In his 1942 essay “The Normative Structure of Science,” sociologist Robert Merton, a founder of the sociology of science, developed what has been called “The Merton Thesis,” captured in the acronym CUDOS, composed of four principles of normative science: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. I will detail each of these in the next three paragraphs, where it will become obvious to many of you why the problem posted by Common CAHSS is misspecified. Communism here does not refer to the social system envisioned by Karl Marx, but is rather used, according to Merton, “in the nontechnical and extended sense of common ownership of goods,” specifically scientific goods, to represent an ethic wherein discoveries become the common property of the scientific community and society at large. Proprietary control over scientific method and results by corporations corrupts the ethic of communalism in science. Science is the property of humankind.
Universalism means that truth claims are evaluated not on the basis of abstract demographic or ideological categories (class, gender, nationality, race, religion) but on transcultural and transhistorical grounds, that is on the basis of objective and universally accessible methods. Identitarian and postmodernist epistemology corrupts the ethic of universalism. The ethic of disinterestedness follows from the ethics of communism and universalism: the researcher’s work should neither be one of self-interestedness nor one constrained by the narrow group interests that may direct his work. Like corporate power, tribalism corrupts disinterestedness.
Finally, organized skepticism means ideas must be subject to community or popular scrutiny. When the claims elites and intellectuals make are met with doubt and skepticism, when the people lose faith in their institutions, and academics find this unwelcome, and corporations censor and deplatform speech and speakers, indeed when intellectuals and elites smear the skeptical community as “backwards,” “racist,” and so on, we have clear indication that the institution of science has been captured by a subjectivity generated by money-power that dictates practices (for the most part without direct orders) working at odds with the ethos of science.
Robert K. Merton, who wrote about the sociology of science
Merton provides a powerful example of the contradiction between the ethos and practice of science in his observation that a handful of scientists receive a lion’s shared of awards, coveted positions, and grants. This has at least as much to do with the strategic distribution of the means to achieve these than it does with talent. Merton saw the problem early on as a student in the 1930s in his study of the influence of the military on scientific research In his studies of character and social structure with Hans Gerth, and on his own, in such works and White Collar and, especially, The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills documents the effects of bureaucratic organization on shaping human action and attitude in line with Merton’s concerns (see also see Paul Diesing’s 1992 How Does Social Science Work?). (For those of you who know a bit about sociology, you will already have detected that this work is as much animated by Max Weber’s ghost as it is by Marx’s.)
There was a time when these concerns reached the highest office in the land. In his Farewell Address in 1960, in addition to his trepidations regarding the “military-industrial complex,” President Dwight Eisenhower expresses concern that, because of the control over scientific research by the corporate state, “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” He worries aloud that “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research,” wherein corporate state funding, and the direction that comes with it, “becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Eisenhower feared the “prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars,” of elite control over “project allocations” by the ever-present “power of money.” These problems, he warned, are to be “gravely regarded.” The present conditions fulfill the prediction Eisenhower’s trepidations imply. The neoliberal university is captured by corporate power. Indeed, that the very descriptor “neoliberal” is a common one tells us that the corruption of higher education is well understood. We can say, in Gramscian terms, that the status of intellectual is no longer a traditional but an organic one.
A point of clarification: when I say “deconstruction,” I do not mean in the Derridian sense that language is indeterminable or irreducibly complex. I mean in the critical media and propaganda sense of connecting language to institutional and moneyed power. Again, this is not an exercise in postmodernism, but rather one of historical materialism, where it is recognized that those who control the material means of production (a fact objectively determinable) also control the means of ideological production. As Marx and Engels famously put the matter, in its simplest formulation, “The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.”
Finally, before turning to the task of deconstructing the target, I want to say that, no, I don’t think the theme was organized with me in mind (although I know my colleagues read my work and, because my arguments fall on the opposite side on almost every item specified in the description, are troubled by me). Rather, I confidently believe the theme was organized with people like me in mind. I am not alone in my criticism of technocracy and corporate propaganda; my criticism is shared by tens of millions of people across the nation (and judging by the private messages I receive, some of my colleagues are reluctant to speak up precisely because of the attitude expressed in the description—they fear ridicule and marginalization). As my writings on Freedom and Reason make clear, I resemble the problem facing the modern university from the standpoint of Common CAHSS 2021-22, namely the problem of popular refusal to accept the progressive doctrine pitched as truth that has corrupted science. Based on missives and rumors, I have apparently become a right-winger on account of this refusal. I hate to disappoint (not really), but I remain a man of the left. Frankly, if people actually understood politics, then I wouldn’t need to say that. But they don’t. So I do.
* * *
Turning directly now to Common CAHSS 2021-22 theme description, the text opens with, “The public’s ability to distinguish truth from falsehood seems to have deteriorated significantly in recent years. There is a widespread deficit in the ability to recognize subject expertise, critically evaluate sources, and synthesize ideas.”
Bracketing “truth” and “falsehood,” the fact that, today, according to scientific polling, more than eight out of every ten Americans believes in human evolution suggest that the public’s ability to distinguish fact from faith has not significantly deteriorated. What has actually happened over the last several years, thanks in major part to the anarchy of the Internet (the unintended consequence of making public a system designed for military purposes), is that alternative sources of information have emerged that function to weaken the hegemony of the corporate owned and controlled legacy media and challenge the legitimacy of the corporate-captured regulatory apparatus and the administrative state. Major social media platforms have been unable to effectively suppress the popular voice and new social media platforms are proliferating in the wake of their attempts. This is a good thing. It challenges power. Which is why from another standpoint it is a bad thing.
Increasing numbers of people are no longer accepting as truth the propaganda of the state corporate apparatus, which includes not only regulatory bodies and the media, but also academia and the culture industry. Contrary to the theme description’s claim, the popular voice hasn’t lost its ability to distinguish truth from falsehood (to be sure, this is a strategic mischaracterization—and a rather obnoxious one). Instead, the people have lost their faith. In some cases, they are immune from the infectious and pathological character of propaganda. The people no longer accept as given that their interpretations of the world are false in the face of prevailing ideological claims of truth. They are thinking for themselves. Again, from another standpoint, this is a dangerous development.
In the 1970s, German sociologist Jürgen Habermas described this problem as a “legitimation crisis,” wherein corporate state actors lose or suffer diminishment of the steering capacity to shape outcomes conducive to realizing their fractional interests. The anxiety academics and cultural managers are experiencing stems from the sense of loss of control over their ability to determine the truth of such matters. The angst is sublimated as an agenda. Social coercion around masks and vaccines represent an attempt to prop up the authority of the medical-industrial complex and its representatives. Organic intellectuals, in the service of corporate governance and profits, shame those who, in the face of considerable evidence have good reason to doubt the efficacy of these measures, dissent from the agenda. The parade of dissenters at school board meetings across the country demanding critical race theory, which has as much valid science in it as intelligent design, be removed from the curriculum is another indication of the crisis of legitimacy.
What is popularly known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or TDS, is a manifestation of this elite anxiety. Progressive elites were horrified by the revolt of the working class Trump’s election signaled. Progressives revile populism in part because it challenges the legitimacy of technocracy and thus their authority. They fear displacement by the popular voice, by the bewildered herd. How dare the deplorables think they can know more that the experts. Progressives regard any attempt to challenge their authority with contempt. I have on occasion had students tell me that, despite their teachers’ assurances that they would be allowed to freely voice their opinions, doing so resulted in ridicule and shaming and, sometimes, ejection from class.
In the minds of most academics, it is not in the realm of possibility that they could be wrong. When they see a fellow academic change his mind, it is not an opportunity to celebrate the way the process of truth is supposed to go, but a reason to think a man has lost his way—maybe his mind. In any case, how can we now trust his judgment? He admits he is wrong! It follows that those who question the opinions of those who are certainly right must be backwards, deluded, stupid, or dangerous. Think of the universities distributed throughout the country as colonies of the elite snobs who dominate the coasts of our nation and you will have a pretty good understanding of what students face when they come to campus. Given how focused the academy is on marginalizing white men, could this be why so many young white men are not bothering to attend college? (For the the record, the Department of Education is not interested in explaining the phenomenon.)
“The very notion that facts exist has been called into question through phrases like ‘alternative facts,’” bemoan the authors, as if there can be only one set of “true facts” or that facts speak for themselves. Facts can be manufactured and presented in a manipulative manner to achieve a desired end—including those facts that face alternatives. I always tell my students, “Facts do not speak for themselves. People purport to speak facts. The default position with respect to such utterances is skepticism.” Demonstrating the importance of skepticism, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a clinic in manipulated fact and interpretation. This is why it is imperative to recognize that the science of propaganda is a technology for manufacturing consent around managed sets of alleged facts to further the interests of cultural, economic, and political elites.
If the complaint here is a lament over the loss of the traditional intellectual who works through some process like that identified by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolution, where disciplinary matrices come together scientifically and establish themselves as knowledge (valid and verified information) to be overthrown by new discoveries and theoretically-organized (re)interpretations of extant knowledge, then the author(s) of description might ask why so many academic have become organic intellectual for corporate state power big and small professing to speak the truth while actually serving as functionaries for money-power and narrow political interests. How can it be that one theory among many about race relations, and, frankly, the least valid and sound among the myriad, can become the foundation for required training in diversity, equity, and inclusivity? This betrays a religious sensibility.
“This deficit [sic] has proven catastrophic during the Covid-19 health crisis, where conspiracy theories and YouTube health ‘experts’ have carried more weight for some than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.” This bit is so cribbed from legacy media propaganda as to be embarrassing. I will come to “conspiracy theories” in a moment, but “YouTube health ‘experts’”? Like an inventor of the mRNA platform Dr. Robert Malone who warns about leaky vaccines and antibody-dependent enhancement driving mutations and disease? Or perhaps Yale’s Dr. Harvey Risch who demonstrated long ago the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in saving lives? I understand such experts to be all the experts who are not Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID or WHO director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and those others whom they anoint with the authority to speak on the matter (although Tedros’s days as an authority are limited if he continues to express skepticism over mRNA boosters).
The use of the construct “conspiracy theory” to characterize other interpretations of the facts, interpretations organized from positions critical of governmental and corporate power (what you might think would be encouraged at our institutions of higher education), is a classic propaganda tactic to manipulate people into dismissing undesirable interpretations out of hand. One cannot defend a conspiracy theory without become a conspiracist. The term “conspiracy theory” functions as a thought-stopping device preventing the recipient of propaganda from considering that there are conspiracies (which is why the legal category exists) and that one can have theories about them. Of course, what they mean by the term is any theory that disrupts the authorized or official narrative; but the charge is effective is marginalizing other viewpoints. (See Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion.)
The author(s) appear to suffer some ignorance about the history of the CDC, an organization, along with the FDA and the USDA, long ago captured by corporate power. It explains the naïveté with respect to power.Is regulatory capture a conspiracy theory? Given history, how could anybody think such a thing? It’s not a difficult thing to know. The web site Investopedia has a solid definition of the phenomenon: “Regulatory capture is an economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest. The result is that the agency instead acts in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be regulating.” (For those interested in the evidence and history of regulatory capture, there are several talk available on the Internet of Richard Grossman, director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, covering the matter in-depth: “Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore.”)
“Meanwhile, unproven and debunked claims about widespread election fraud threaten to undermine our democracy.” Another bit of redirection cribbed from legacy media propaganda. The phrase “unproven and debunked claims” assumes what requires investigation to know, such as a forensic audit of the elections, if not in all the states, at least in key states: Arizona (where one is underway), Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The claim that claims about widespread election fraud are “debunked” amounts to disinformation (which would have been nice to have included in the theme’s title). If truth matters, then the claim that some claim has been debunked when it hasn’t is revealing—especially when it is repeated ad nauseam. There is overwhelming evidence of election irregularities that point to a rigged election (see Peter Navarro’s three-part report). If what went down in November 2020 had gone down in a Third World country with a regime the US wished to see stay in power, you’d hear all about it.
The claim that accusations of widespread election fraud undermine democracy is an opinion that feels wrong in light of the importance of ensuring election integrity in building public confidence in the electoral process. This is why we audit elections, something that, before Joseph Biden’s election (or installation) in the White House, progressives were adamant about. Of course, progressives are right to challenge election results that smell funny. That’s what democracy looks like. Except when conservatives do it. Then they’re undermining our democracy.
Here’s a fact we might acknowledge if the people matter: a large proportion of the population believes something went wrong with our elections in 2020 and they want to know why. One third of all voters and fifty-six percent of Republican voters in a June survey expressed their belief that Biden won the White House because of voter fraud. One might argue that this shows that Republicans live in a bubble operating on “alternative facts.” But most of the more than eight of ten Democrats who believe Biden won the election legitimately do not bother to base their opinion on evidence. I have yet to have a conversation with a progressive who will even look at the evidence. That’s anecdotal, of course, but don’t forget that more than four of every ten Democrats believe that half of all those who contract SARS-CoV-2 wind up in the hospital.
Leaving doubters in doubt surely undermines democracy more than investigating claims of election fraud—which not investigating exacerbates. If this were the other way around, does anybody really believe that those who wrote this description would not be demanding an investigation into the election in the spirit of “continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found”? I am confident that the authors believe the Russian collusion and Ukrainian phone call controversies where valid bases on which to overturn a democratic election. The Steele dossier was treated as the Gospel truth in my suite.
The propaganda here means to impress people with the “truth” of a disputed claim, that the 2020 election was the most secure election in our nation’s history. On the face of it, the claim is unbecoming of a university that states the pursuit of truth as its raison d’être. That the theme description treats the matter as a foregone conclusion betrays its pretense to objective inquiry.
“While these problems can be explained in part by technologies that allow for the rapid spread of information regardless of quality, intentional efforts to misinform the public have resulted in frequent questioning of the existence of scientific truths like climate change, racial and sexual discrimination, and the health benefits of masks and vaccinations.” This is a lament over the rapid spread of information with which the authors disagree. What is more, in keeping with the rest of the description of the theme, this sentence assumes as scientific truth that which has not been demonstrated as such.
Is climate change “scientific truth”? To be sure, climate change is a consensus position among those with expertise in this area. It happens to be a consensus of which I am a part (having published papers and given talks on the matter, I am convinced climate change is a problem), but is it “truth”? If by truth one means a fact or belief that is accepted as true, then, yes, it is true for a majority of those trained in this area. Should we listen to those who challenge that consensus? I do. I have learned a lot from those who call into question the certainty—and self-righteousness—with which those who make arguments concerning the causes and effects of climate change express their position. Assuming the fact of climate change, the matters or theory and policy are still very much contested terrain.
What about racial discrimination? Is this a scientific truth? Take the claim of systemic racism in the US criminal justice system. There is arguably no better example of debunking that the large scientific literature demolishing the claims of systemic racism. Every major scientific study produced over the last several decades has failed to find evidence of systemic racism in, for example, lethal civilian-police encounters. Recall that the description bemoans the disregard of subject expertise. Well, I am an expert on the subject of the criminal justice system and I can testify to the fact that my expertise has been entirely disregarded in the formulation of every position and action taken on the question of systemic racism at my university, action that has put the debunked claims regard systemic racism in lethal civilian-police encounters at the center of consternation. Why? Clearly not because of any concern for the truth. If people understand that the claim that lies at the core of the Black Lives Matter movement is utterly false, then the progressive agenda will receive a shattering blow. I have the wrong opinion, however expert and informed it is.
I have already touched on this matter of claims about the health benefits of masks and vaccinations. These have always been subject to dispute. And for good reason. There is little science behind the efficacy of masks. The discipline of industrial hygiene tells us that attempting to stop a virus with a mask is analogous to trying to keep mosquitos out of one’s yard by installing a chainlink fence. State corporate propaganda regarding vaccination has imploded in light of the real world facts concerning its efficacy and safety. Public policy around COVID-19 has been a total shit show. I need not say any more about this.
“Common CAHSS 21-22 will explore the role of the modern university in supporting the ‘continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found,’ which has been part of the University of Wisconsin identity for over a century.” This is the “Wisconsin Idea,” which I fought to keep in the System’s mission statements. I hedge on possibility of finally knowing the truth, but I do not hesitate to pursue it. Given the things assumed as true in the description about which there is no established truth, how could Common CAHSS 21-22 be an exploration of the role of the modern university in this task? Again, what lies behind the description is not really an expression of scientific desire, but an expression of scientism, an ideology gathering about itself scientific pretense. A scientist searches for the truth. He does not assert it. A science welcomes challenges. He does not reject them out of hand. Science is not religion.
“In an era where information—both true and false—can be readily accessed from our phones, the function of higher educational institutions must include not only generating and sharing high-quality information but also teaching the critical information literacy skills required to navigate a complex terrain.” In context, “critical information literacy” sounds like an Orwellian euphemism befitting the Ministry of Truth my colleagues want the university to be. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, its origins are found in the society of radical librarians. The Association of College and Research Libraries defines information literacy as “the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.” The critical side of information literacy demands that practice make explicit the role of power in shaping the production of knowledge.
However much critical information literacy may sound like the approach I am using to critique the theme description, critical information literacy is really a cover for the type of woke approach Haidt, Merton, and others correctly see as corrupting reason and science. One detects this in the work American University recommends for the practice: “In Pursuit of Antiracist Social Justice: Denaturalizing Whiteness in the Academic Library” (Library Trends, 2015), “Neutrality is Polite Oppression” (keynote presentation at Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium, University of Arizona 2018), and “That Which Cannot be Named: The Absence of Race in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (The Journal of Radical Librarianship, 2019). These titles are dripping with what Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury calls “identitarian epistemology.”
The description concludes with: “Such skills are essential to democracy and to making progress on the key issues of our time, including human rights, racial justice, and sustainability.” Yes, albeit not as defined by and administered as policy by progressives. If we really wanted to make progress on these issues (racial justice is in the bank, but the others are in play), then we would open up the discourse to everybody, not just confine it to those who claim expertise in repeating propaganda lines. However, the framing of Common CAHSS 2021-22 suggests another cause, to (a) marginalize those students and faculty who do not accept as truth the assumptions of the description (each of which could be couched in neutral language), assumed (probably correctly) to be the consensus of most faculty and administrators on campus, and (b) strategize better methods of presenting as true state corporate propaganda. In sum, the task at hand is to assert a priori knowledge of the truth and then figure out ways to stop people from challenging it.
* * *
I want to conclude by returning to the matter of expertise. I am a criminologist. I am the only criminologist at the campus where I teach. I have a special responsibility to present the range of criminological perspectives. Are all criminologists in lockstep theoretically? Are there no disputes in that discipline? Hell no. Criminology is one of the most theoretically-diverse fields in the social sciences. Suppose the criminologists we believed were the ones the corporate state told us to believe and, furthermore, that you could not know any different because you were not one. That’s what’s happening. That and this: the university does not proceed in an interdisciplinary fashion (it used to, see here: Notes on Problem-Focused Interdisciplinary Education.) Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy write about this in their 1967 Monopoly Capital (you can read the introduction here). Mills writes about this in his 1959 Sociological Imagination. Noam Chomsky makes similar arguments. What these authors share is a broad understanding of scientific production beyond their expertise. Chomsky is a linguist. He denies there is a relationship between linguistics and his analysis of power. I think there is, but should we ignore Chomsky’s analysis of power because that’s not his area of expertise?
When my labor union passed a resolution condemning systemic racism in lethal civilian-police encounters, not a single member contacted me to find out if the premise were true. It was as if my institution had no criminologist in its employ. The result was a public position taken based on a demonstrably false premise. Would it have mattered if I had intervened? No. It would only have confirmed something had happened to me. If one disagrees with Black Lives Matter it’s not because BLM and its supporters are wrong; it’s because the dissenter’s politics are right in a partisan sense. The resolution was never concerned with accuracy or facts. Its purpose was virtue signaling to a particular audience. Experiences like this testify to the power of ideology. If objections to my arguments were for some other reason than ideological, then productive conversations might ensue. But they’re not.
If I told you that you must believe what I say about criminology or political economy because you do not have a PhD in sociology and I do, then I hope that you would call me on my arrogance. Many don’t—at least not when they don’t need my expertise to legitimize their own arguments. You have probably noticed that, for most people, what they believe is what their side believes, and they appeal to expertise only on that side, telling others to listen to the experts. Their experts. As if they could know by the lights of their own arguments. It’s like this slogan “follow the science.” What they really mean is that you should follow the scientists who agree with them. And they are frustrated when you don’t. You will get called names for it.
Here’s an idea: How about we practice science? The university, like the other institutions of Western society, have been captured by corporate power. The ideas expressed in the theme description are the ruling ideas. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, and I will reproduce the quote once more, “The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.” The ruling ideas appear everywhere. If “Black Lives Matter” appears as a corporate decal or a city street’s name, then you know that it is not a revolutionary slogan. In Gramscian terms, with respect to university faculty, part of the white collar strata, the new middle classes, the traditional intellectual has become the organic intellectual. He no longer represents the general interests. He instead represents the corporate class—even if he thinks he represents the marginal and oppressed.
Noam Chomsky famously observed (see the documentary Manufacturing Consent) that at the level of first approximation there are two targets of propaganda. There is the eighty percent of the population who must be made to be disinterested in how the world works. Then there is the twenty percent of the population who must be deeply indoctrinated, for it is their role to define reality for the other eighty percent. He calls the twenty percent “cultural managers,” and among them he finds the academic to be especially influential in misdirecting and misleading the public.
One can agree or disagree with the goals of OSFs and its benefactor. But progressives want to scuttle disagreement by blocking discussion of the sources of funding for their causes. The tactic they use is a rather crude one, one you’d think would be obvious to everyone. Yet it is effective, especially among the simple-minded. It involves appealing to Soros’ ethnicity in order to manufacture accusations of anti-Semitism. “Why do people loath George Soros?” The answer: “Because he’s a Jew.”Are there people who believe Soros lies at the heart of a Jewish cabal to rule the world? Yes, for sure. There are people who believe the world is run by lizards. What does that have to with the fact that Soros is effectively installing DAs around the country who are “reforming” the criminal justice system in a manner that puts vulnerable communities at risk? We deal in facts here on Freedom and Reason. And we don’t flinch.
In the summer of 2016, the rightwing anti-Semitic publication Politico published an article by Scott Bland carrying the scandalous title, “George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system.” In his article, Bland doesn’t just make it appear as if the billionaire financier, George Soros, who is Jewish, is behind the cabal to change the way the United States criminal justice system operates. He comes right out and says it: “Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.”
Bland is relentless in pursuing this thread. “While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals—reshaping the American justice system.” That was the year Donald Trump won the White House and the big freak out began.
Fast-forward to November 24, 2001, in the aftermath of a massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin, I tweet this:
Politico’s foray into anti-Semitism went unnoticed. At least the story has not been retracted. But when Newt Gingrich came on Fox News in September 2020 talking about Soros’ activities, he immediately drew the ire of the hosts of a Fox News television show. The topic was, as Gingrich put it, “Verboten.” (Watch the clip. The ladies are horrified. If they didn’t know how to react, you can be certain there were commands barking in their in-ear monitors. Soros is off limits. Why?) Gingrich anticipated this in a tweet posted several days before his appearance (The Times of Israel in covering the story noted that “Soros has funded progressive candidates for district attorney across the country”):
Why are some in the left so afraid of our mentioning George Soros’ name that they scream anti-semitic? It IS his name. He IS funding pro-criminal,anti police district attorneys. Why is the left afraid of the facts?
Both Politico, a center-left publication, and Gingrich, a conservative pundit and former Republican congressman, were over the target (the opening paragraph to this essay was sarcasm; I don’t believe Politico is anti-Semitic, nor do I believe Newt Gingrich is). Soros’ project is real and it has yielded tangible results. It was Soros-funded Wisconsin district attorney John Chisholm who eliminated cash bail in the county, a change that granted Darrell Brooks, Jr. the liberty to drive his SUV through a Christmas Parade in Waukesha, killing six people (so far) and injuring dozens of others. Brooks, a man with a decades-long criminal record, had been released just two days earlier. Posted bail was only $500. (See Rittenhouse’s Real Crime and Corporate State Promotion of Extremism; Waukesha is Scheduled to be Memory Holed.)
Chisholm is not a one-off. Another Soros acolyte, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall election next year over the rise in San Francisco crime rates. “It’s my perception that Chesa lacks a desire to actually and effectively prosecute crime, in any fashion,” Brooke Jenkins, a homicide prosecutor, told the New York Times in June 2021. “While he ran on a platform of being progressive and reform-focused, his methodology to achieving that is simply to release individuals early or to offer very lenient plea deals.”
Chisholm and Boudin are just two of many DAs Soros has backed. Soros is getting his money’s worth. We’re in the middle of the greatest increase in violent crime in two decades. Last year’s violent crime rate grew by 30 percent over the previous year, the largest single-year percentage growth in criminal violence in American history.
Billionaire and backer of progressive causes, financier George Soros
For those who don’t know who George Soros is, he is a multibillionaire and philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations (formerly the Open Society Institute). He has funded the OSFs to the tune of billion of dollars. The OSFs is in turn a major funder of the racial justice movement, as well as pro-immigration causes. In other words, Soros financially backs black nationalism and open borders, causes lying at the heart of the social disorganization in American cities that fuels criminogenic conditions.
“It is inspiring and powerful to experience this transformational moment in the racial justice movement,” said OSFs president Patrick Gaspard in July 2020 of the organization’s support for Black Lives Matter. “We are honored to be able to carry on the vital work of fighting for rights, dignity, and equity for oppressed people the world over started by our founder and chair, George Soros.”
One can agree or disagree with the goals of OSFs and its benefactor. But progressives want to scuttle disagreement by blocking discussion of the sources of funding for their causes. The tactic they use is a rather crude one, one you’d think would be obvious to everyone. Yet it is effective, especially among the simple-minded. It involves appealing to Soros’ ethnicity in order to manufacture accusations of anti-Semitism. “Why do people loath George Soros?” The answer: “Because he’s a Jew.”
To gain some perspective, compare the characterization of criticisms of Soros with progressive complaints about the Koch brothers, Charles and the late David Koch, two billionaires who fund conservative political causes. Their father, Fred Koch, was the son of a Dutch immigrant. You might ask what that has to do with anything. Good question. What does George Soros’ ethnicity have to do with anything? George Soros is no more the personification of world Jewry than Fred Koch was the leader of a Dutch cabal to change American attitudes towards the fossil fuel industry. Moreover, if you know anything about Jewish politics and opinion, you’d know that Soros doesn’t speak for world Jewry. Indeed, a great many Jews do not like George Soros.
Are there people who believe Soros lies at the heart of a Jewish cabal to rule the world? Yes, for sure. There are people who believe the world is run by lizard people. What does that have to with the fact that Soros is effectively installing DAs around the country who are “reforming” the criminal justice system in a manner that puts vulnerable communities at risk? We deal in facts here on Freedom and Reason.
Progressive Democrats cynically leverage Soros’ ethnicity to marginalize and silence those who draw attention to the billions of dollars that are being invested in a political movement orchestrating the managed decline of the American republic and, more broadly, the enlightened West. For example, when Soros backed opponents of Brexit, and proponents of the movement to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union criticized him for it, the way for the power elite to draw attention away from the money-power behind the transnationalist effort to erase national borders was to accuse critics of anti-Semitism.
The tactic is effective not only in stifling those who speak up, but carries a chilling effect on those who might. Being called an “anti-Semite” when you criticize Open Society Foundations has the same effect of being called a “racist” when you criticize Black Lives Matter. People don’t like to be called names and name calling can shut them up. This tactic is especially effective today since progressives, who administer the academy, culture industry, and media corporations, reject liberal values of free speech, debate, and dialogue.
This is the tactic being used to draw attention away from the money-power behind efforts to undermine the American criminal justice system, portrayed as “reform,” as if black nationalism and open borders could represent reform working in tandem with the interests of the American working class. Most Americans are unaware of Soros’ effort to transform American criminal justice despite Politico and others reporting on it years ago. Criminal justice “reform” is just one facet of what Soros and his fellow globalists seek.
Nicolas Guilhot, Professor at New York University
In 2007, Nicolas Guilhot, senior research associate of French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in his article, “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences,” published in Critical Sociology (no rightwing journal, I assure you), argues that OSFs serve to the same function as the Rockefeller Foundation: moving from the standpoint of globalism and modernization, these progressive organizations enlist intellectuals to legitimize the entrenchment of corporate and financial control over the world economy. One of the ways Soros has achieved this is by controlling the social sciences, whose depoliticized findings are pushed out by media firms and political groups.
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels write in The German Ideology (1845): “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” Sitting in Mussolini’s prison, Marxist Antonio Gramsci worked out the machinery of intellectual control in his theory of ideological hegemony.
Guilhot writes, “Philanthropic practices allow the dominant classes to generate knowledge about society and regulatory prescriptions, in particular by promoting the development of the social sciences. The 19th century industrialists had often invested their resources in the definition and treatment of relevant social issues, in order to institutionalize the new form of capitalism they represented. In the late 20th century, the new transnationalized social strata representing the hegemony of financial capital, whose power depends on their capacity to perpetuate the new socioeconomic order, used similar strategies. Philanthropy offers a privileged strategy for generating new forms of ‘policy knowledge’ convergent with the interests of their promoters.”
Focusing on the Central European University founded by Soros, Guilhot argues that “far from seeking to curb the excesses of economic globalization, such efforts are actually institutionalizing it by laying the foundations of its own regulatory order.”
Years earlier, in 1999, in noting another facet of Soros’ power, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman criticized Soros’s effect on financial markets.
[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is “Soroi”.
The accidental theorist: and other dispatches from the dismal science. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 160.
Are these quotes from a nest of anti-Semites? Of course not. The charge of anti-Semitism is an attempt to keep people away from the truth.
Beyond a cheap thought-stopping trick by progressives Democrats to poison the well of their opponents, there is a genuine failure to understand transnationalization and the power actors transforming the global economy and with it the Westphalian system of nation-states and international law, with the long-range goal of fixing the problem of late capitalism (fall of the rate of profit, overshoot and collapse, and all the rest of it) by replacing it with a global system of corporate state neofeudalism—this in order to protect their power and privilege. Such aims are detrimental to the interests of the working classes of the West. Liberal values and republican virtue will be smothered by the New Fascism of the corporate state. Democracy will be replaced by technocracy. So the educator must be educated.
Diane Stone writes about this ignorance of globalization in her article “Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy,” published in 2008 in The Policy Studies Journal. “Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization,” Stone writes, “public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.” These observations are echoed in the William Carrol and Jean Philippe Sapinski’s 2015 article, “Transnational Alternative Policy Groups in Global Civil Society: Enablers of Post-Capitalist Alternatives or Carriers of NGOization,” published in Critical Sociology.
Perhaps it is true that public policy scholars had yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration in 2008. But radical international political economists had well before that. For example, William I. Robinson, in his Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony, published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press, deploys a Gramscian analytical frame to lay bare the policy machinery that lie at the heart of the transformation of democracy and international affairs amid the dynamic of globalization, a transformation led by the transnational corporation (TNC). See also David Korten’s 1995 When Corporations Rule. (I studied under Robinson at the University of Tennessee.)
Joel Kotkin, Urban Studies Fellow, Chapman University in Orange, California.
When one steps back from Soros, what one sees is a network of capitalist elites who are transforming the world economy in the way I have described on the pages of Freedom and Reason. A key word in my essays is neo-feudalism. One increasingly encounters this word. It is Joel Kotkin’s The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism, who warns the world of this development in a manner resonate with a classical Marxist interpretation, who moved me to adopt it in my arguments. Kotkin’s earlier book, The New Class Conflict sees the rise of an oligarchy founded upon the high technological revolution, supported by the corporate state, academia, and media, a force I describe, following critical theory conventions, as the administrative state and the culture industry. In The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism, Kotkin identifies three estates in the new world order.
The First Estate is comprised of the oligarchs who have amassed great fortunes, celebrated as “disrupters,” pioneers of a new and glorious future. They are like the robber barons of the Gilded Age who built the great factories and the transnational railroads. The Second Estate are the bureaucrats, consultants, public intellectuals, scientists, teachers, and other members of the professional-managerial strata—the administrators and cultural managers who support the First Estate. They’re the ones who preach multiculturalism and progressivism, who frame the political and societal narratives. Kotkin writes, “Many of the people in these growing sectors are well positioned to exert a disproportionate influence on public attitudes, and on policy as well—that is, to act as cultural legitimizers.”
The Second Estate are the folks who promulgate the rhetoric of “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” not to help those the rhetoric claims suffer on account of racism, but to orchestrate hegemonic devotion to the machinations of the First Estate, thus allowing the First Estate to get richer and more power, which, in turn, finances the lifestyles or the Second Estate functionaries. The university system is the mechanism that prepares functionaries for this role.
As Marxist Adolph Reed, Jr, has noted, identity politics and antiracism are central elements in the corporatist neoliberal project. Reed tells us in his article “Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left” that “antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.”
Antiracism is corporatist neoliberal doctrine rationalizing capitalism. He writes that “although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.”
Kotkin describes the Third Estate as comprised of those who believe in the liberal values of modernity. That’s us—the working class and the populist resistance. Thus we have the progressive attitude, accepting the legitimacy of corporate governance (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves”; “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”), standing in stark contrast to the populist nationalist movement defending Western civilization, the defenders of modernity. It is this resistance that Soros and his ilk mean to break. A true working class movement is opposed to what the globalists desire.
Make no mistake, Kotkin’s Second Estate is a powerful force in the West. The practice of organizing individuals into groups based on skin color and then promoting or punishing people on the basis of identity is the more insidious manifestation of neoliberalism. This thinking has invaded our institutions, public and private, and is now treated as the ground upon which other assumptions are founded.
Embracing the neo-Maoist Black Lives Matter agenda, universities across the country are rolling out reeducation camps for staff and students under the banned of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Intellectuals are being conscripted into the globalist corporatist project to prepare America for completely incorporation into it. On the ground, people claiming to express leftwing politics eschew the capacity for rational judgment. They just want to burn shit down.
The next time you hear deflection of criticisms of George Soros by appealing to his ethnicity and accusing critics of anti-Semitism, understand that what motivates this cynical move is a effort to keep from popular consciousness the work of global elites in transforming the interactional system of nation-states into a global neo-feudalist order. It has nothing to do with a Jewish cabal or anti-Semitism. Those are thought-stopping devices. This is about power and privilege—and those need neither ethnic nor racial inputs. This is about class struggle.
In a recent essay, If We Allow This, We are Over, I discuss the case of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF is the hub of world planning by the transnational elite and its functionaries. To make the problem about George Soros one Klaus Schwab risks distracting readers from the reality that this is a network of elites who use their immense wealth and privilege to fund and influence global policymaking. This is why I have written so little about Klaus Schwab and never before (until now) George Soros.
History-making is more complex than personalty. At the same time, we are talking about individuals with immense money-power and global reach. Human agency matters. The debate between instrumentalism and structuralism, most famously carried out by Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas on the pages of New Left Review in the late-60s and early-70s, finds its resolution in work published decades easier, in C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956) and, before that, in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in the earl twentieth century. This is the analytical ground on which I pursue these questions.
Moreover, the assumption that there are no conservatives or right wingers to be found among world Jewry betrays a profound ignorance of the political and ideological diversity among those sharing this identity (see, e.g., the essay “The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab” published in The Jewish Voice). Read my essay. Read David Solway’s essay. Understand what’s at stake. Push out this content. Do not be afraid of smears. Those wielding false smears operate in bad faith.
One tragic aspect of the atonement discourse is the indoctrination of young people to experience trauma over past events they could not possibly have experienced themselves. They would find it difficult or impossible to know anybody who did experience the trauma they are asked to share in.
When people talk about intergenerational trauma they are describing the same problem as memory implantation. The same cognitive process that underpins memory implantation lies at the heart of intergenerational trauma. In memory implantation experiments, researchers have been been able to make people believe that they remember an event that actually never happened. A concern is that, in therapy, what is thought to be repressed or recovered memories, are actually false memories that are implanted in the client’s mind by the therapist. If this implantation occurs early enough, the person will remember something that never happened for the rest of his life and be affected by it.
This is a big problem with antiracism teachings and trainings. The indoctrinators take otherwise emotionally and psychologically well-adjusted children and adults and socialize them to believe they are victims of wrongdoings that occurred decades and even centuries before they were born and then point the finger at other children and adults and mark them as the perpetrators of the wrongdoings that they could not possibly have perpetrated. Manufacturing trauma around past events is a technique of control that furthers political ends. This is a rampant practice in public schools that works under cover of social and emotional learning, or SEL. It will not have escaped you whose political agenda is at work here in these teachings.
A dramatic illustration of the practice of guilting the living
The establishment media is busy today trying to establish a National Day of Mourning (CNN, NPR). They’re telling about the “real story of Thanksgiving” (NBC). This is a day of “truth-seeking” and “accountability-building” (Anchorage Daily News). Thanksgiving is not about bringing relatives around a table to strengthen the family bond, but a ceremonial marking another year of surviving colonialism. Robert Jensen’s suggestion that Thanksgiving should be a National Day of Atonement marked by self-reflective collective fasting is just more woke virtue signaling.
Atonement means to make reparations for a wrong or injury. In its religious sense it means confession of a sin. Those who will be asked to atone will be asked to atone for things done by other people a long time ago. In other words, it will be a ritual exercise for the woke religion. They ask us to atone for an original sin, namely the founding of the United States of America. As such, a National Day of Atonement would be a gesture to supernatural thinking that has no place in a rational and secular society.
Thanksgiving is about the living. It’s not about corpses—except for the recently departed we remember together. Thanksgiving is about joining with family and friends and observing the value of those associations and relations that live in our lives. Those who want everybody to dwell in a narrative of collective guilt have way too much influence in today’s world. We need to be more forceful in our insistence that they sit the fuck down.
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