freedom and reason

Must see update to a previous blog at the end of this blog entry.

Mass vaccination doesn’t work, as a comparison between two contrasting states indicates. Vermont is the most vaccinated state in the country, with more than 70 percent of the population fully vaccinated. Despite this, they are in the midst of a the worst COVID-19 surge in the nation. Indeed, COVID-19 cases are more numerous in Vermont than at any time during the entire pandemic for that state.

In contrast, Florida’s last COVID-19 surge peaked almost two months ago. Today, the average per capita new coronavirus cases in Florida are the lowest of any state in the nation. Florida has received extraordinary levels of negative media coverage concerning its rate of vaccination (still less than 60 percent, and only 50 percent when the surge peaked), as well as its reluctance to aggressively pursue masking and other draconian pandemic measures seen in other states. One might wish to pull more states into the comparison, but, frankly, on its face, the Vermont case proves that mass vaccination, aggressive masking, etc., don’t work. I will nonetheless provide Florida’s statistics for comparison.

Why don’t the pandemic measures work? I have explained this in several posts on Freedom and Reason. To recap, the mRNA technology is not a vaccine. It is gene therapy and it does not confer immunity. Those injected with the spike protein are able to contract and spread the virus. Because the mRNA injections may reduce the frequency of severe COVID-19, those who have had the shots and are infected may feel well enough to move about the community and spread the virus. This spread also has implications for pathogenesis and evolutionary paths of mutation (or variants). Moreover, despite reducing the risk of severe COVID-19, those who have been injected are still getting severe COVID-19, are hospitalized, and will die of the disease. Indeed, as the proportion of populations who are vaccinated increase, an increasing proportion of severe COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are those who will have received the recommended injections. Don’t fall for the spin about this. There is an attempt to use this fact to rationalize the failure of the vaccines to protect the population from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It is an indictment of mass vaccination.

As evidence makes clear, natural immunity provides more powerful protection in terms of levels of antibodies (as much as 27 times the early protection associated with the injections), and since natural infection exposes the body to the entire pathogen signature, greater diversity of antibodies. Furthermore, research on a number of therapeutics, for example ivermectin, have demonstrated significant efficacy in preventing the development of severe COVID-19 cases in those who are infected and as a prophylaxis in the general population.

Finally, as noted if the vaccines make it less likely for the infected to suffer symptoms that will keep them at home, they are more likely to be about the community spreading the virus. That’s the obvious reason why we are seeing these patterns The less obvious reason is that the vaccine changes the evolutionary trajectory of the pathogen. It allows more pathological variants to last longer in the population, which increases the likelihood of more deleterious mutations. This is why vaccinating in the teeth of a panic is a bad idea. Pathogens leverage population-wide attempts to defeat them by pursuing alternative selection paths. It’s evolutionary biology 101.

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Scott Hurley of Fox News (local Green Bay) authored a story yesterday with this shocking headline: “Unvaccinated 19x as likely to die of COVID compared to vaccinated in Wisconsin.” The headline is nearly identical to headlines rolled out across the country, the frame provided by the CDC (who you will see in the next section are keen on selectively focusing on data and interpretation). They are trying to scare more people into vaccination.

Read beyond the headline and do some math. Of every 100,000 people who were not fully vaccinated, Wisconsin Department of Health Services data shows that 24.5 died from COVID-19. That’s out of 2,351 positive cases, yielding a case fatality rate (CFR) of one percent. Multiply the CFR by five to determine the approximate infection fatality rate (IFR). This yields an IFR of 0.2 percent or two persons for every 1000 SARS-CoV-2 infections. Instead of putting the headline in those risk terms, the reporter ran with 19 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. Given that people drastically overestimate the number of people who die from COVID-19 (as I have shown on this blog), the headline is fear-mongering.

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The prevalence of type-2 diabetes in COVID-19 patients is as high as 36 percent—more than a third of cases. Insulin resistance is not the only consequence of obesity. These patterns are seen worldwide. So why was the pandemic so bad in the United States? Travelling around continental Europe will really bring this home to you. America’s obesity problem has caught up with us. We have to stop denying biological realities. Postmodernist epistemology is wrecking scientific literacy. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and COVID-19.

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Update on my blog from a month ago, September 15, 2021, Is the CDC Concealing Deaths from Influenza and Pneumonia? I showed that, according to the CDC’s own data, 47 percent of COVID-19 deaths 2020/2021 to date of data collection for chart production associated with influenza and pneumonia.

In my last blog Faking Genius for Power and Profit, I showed you that coronavirus was known by that name since the early 1960s. There has been no routine testing for coronavirus historically. It’s a cold virus, like adenovirus and rhinovirus. They don’t routinely test for those, either. Why? Because they aren’t a big deal.

The authors are telling us that influenza cases are the lowest in recorded history. If so, then how could influenza and pneumonia have contributed to the deaths of more than 300,000 COVID-19 patients? Is it not possible that we have been through one of the most lethal flu seasons but that, because of a test for coronavirus and the act of prioritizing the coronavirus over influenza to push a novel vaccine, mRNA technology developed on the basis of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, research funded by the same crowd (Fauci et al.) who push out the COVID-19 narrative, flu and pneumonia deaths are being portrayed as coronavirus deaths? We can’t say misidentified since the statistic is right there in the table.

We can’t believe masks prevented influenza but not coronavirus. It doesn’t work like that. Influenza didn’t go away. It’s not the lowest level of flu since we starting keeping records. It’s the way the data are represented to the public. The chart I am using is real. You can see it in the blog I cite above. I saved the document in case the CDC purges it. I was shocked to find it, frankly. I was even more shocked to find, when I checked yesterday to see if it was still there, that it is still there—only updated! Here’s the updated chart:

Look at the first line under the blue header bar. Influenza and pneumonia account for 339,190 of COVID-19 deaths as of October 10, 2021. Again, this is the same document as cited in my original blog. Why is the CDC openly publishing these data while simultaneously telling the public that influenza in the United States is at an all-time low?

Reuters headline last Friday: “Delta does not appear to make children sicker; Secondary immune response stronger after infection than after shot.” According to the story, comparing samples of hundreds of children, researchers from Great Britain found that the delta variant does not appear to cause more severe disease in children than earlier forms of the virus. Nor did the alpha variant compared to the “so-called wild, or original, form of the virus, first seen in China.” I quoted from the story to make note of the fact that Reuters uses the adjective “so-called.” Why that adjective? Because Reuters knows like the rest of the journalistic profession that SARS-CoV-2 is most likely the product of human selection and did not arise from the processes of natural selection (carried by a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, China).

Was there ever any indication that the delta variant was more dangerous to children? According to the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP), as of the end of September 2021, 0.1%-1.9% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization. That range covers across-state variation. For reporting states, 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death. The AAP examined 5,899,148 total child COVID-19 cases reported during this period and found that children represented 16.2 percent (5,899,148/36,501,46) of all cases. A conservative estimate would raise the number of cases by a factor of between four and five, in the process drastically lowering the infection fatality rate (IFR). By any measure, COVID-19 is not dangerous to children. And there is zero indication in these data that the delta variant represented a unique threat to children.

You don’t have to be an expert to see that there is no need to routinely vaccinate children (in fact, it might help if you’re not an expert—at least not one employed by a government agency or a pharmaceutical firm). Yet, you have no doubt heard by now, Pfizer has asked the FDA for emergency use authorization to jab children as young as five with its mRNA technology, which introduces into their bodies a genetic sequence associated with a long list of adverse consequences. What’s the emergency? Remember AAP’s review of the data: at worst, three-hundredths of all pediatric COVID-19 cases resulted in death—and the IFR is much smaller number than that. As I reported on Freedom and Reason, pediatric deaths from COVID-19 are almost invariable associated with comorbidities that make children particularly susceptible to severe disease, preexisting conditions that included diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Also on my blog, I citing CDC data showing that influenza is far deadlier for children than COVID-19 (see “COVID-19 is Worse than the Flu”—For Whom?),.

Since natural immunity greatly reduces one’s chance of reinfection compared to the vaccine, as well as decreases the likelihood of more pathological strains, which the evidence suggests the vaccine increases, vaccinating children is doubly irrational (see The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). It is irrational not only because it exposes children to danger for no reason; it’s also counterproductive given that the younger generation will be, as it has always been, a bulwark against future pandemics by establishing population immunity over the long-term.

Those in charge of this pandemic are screwing the pooch. We know at least a couple of reasons for this. The problem with natural immunity is there’s little money in it. Any rational observer who understands capitalism and the phenomenon of regulatory capture grasps that. Nor is there a lot of money to be made off a healthy population enjoying a robust immune response—at least not for the medical-industrial complex. So expect that the mass vaccination program will expand to include the little ones.

Mass vaccination of children is more probable if there is no mass resistance to the mandate. Mass vaccination is profoundly unethical (see Biden’s Biofascist Regime), however much legal precedent may be twisted to justify it. But even without a mandate, some parents will ask a doctor to jab their child. Tragically, there are parents who can’t wait to march their children down to the clinic for jabs and photo and video opportunities to be later or in real time shared with their social media accounts, the resulting cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome or Bell’s Palsy or some other potentially life-altering effect rationalized as mysterious or prideful instantiations of the communitarian ideal. The latter makes vaccine injury into a style of child sacrifice. (See Torches of Freedom, Vaccine Cards, and Our Civilian Lives.) The best we can do if we wish to keep the state from meddling in our own lives is criticize them; we cannot do what they do and demand the state intervene.

If children’s health (physical and mental) mattered, authorities would never have forced them to wear masks, which an industrial hygienist will tell you cannot work—hence the millions of children (and adults) who were infected (see Masks and COVID-19: Are You Really Protected?). With this in mind, we might reflect on the fact that more people have died from COVID-19 since the introduction of the vaccines (and habitual mask wearing) than in all of the period before the government granted manufacturers emergency use authorization. Blaming the increase in COVID-19 deaths (and Joe Biden’s poll numbers, as did White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently) on delta and the unvaccinated is dishonest.

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The pandemic began by authorities leaving the impression that coronavirus is novel and especially pathological across demography, alongside images and video of refrigerated semis and slit trenches to manage the piles of corpses. In fact, human coronaviruses date back to at least the early 1960s, when scientists positively identified the virus in humans. The microbe was classified as a common cold virus and designated B814. It took its place among other common cold viruses, the well-known adenovirus (1953) and the even more well-known rhinovirus (1956). In the 1960s, scientists began cultivating the coronavirus, labeling the grown strain as 229E. Exposing humans to both B814 and 229E produced common cold symptoms. By the mid-1960s, another strain had been identified, labeled OC43. By 2009, the species was known to have four main subspecies: alpha, beta, delta, and gamma. Yes, you read that right.

We can start the story even further back in time. Turns out that coronavirus was known to scientists back in 1930s when it went by a different name, infectious bronchitis virus (IBV). This known reality, certainly known to those who are in the know, is hidden in plain view by the legacy and social media. The point is that, before 2020, coronaviruses were always known as a common cold bug. Fast forward nearly a hundred years later and SARS-CoV-2 is a selectively pathological strain of IBV, likely the product of gain-of-function research conducted in a virology lab in Wuhan, China, in part funded by the United States (Anthony Fauci, an immunologist serving as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President playing a crucial role), with military applications.

The establishment could have avoided the derangement of mass hysteria by affirming what the public already knew, that most of them have likely had one or more coronavirus infections during their lives. Wives across the world have mocked husbands for thinking they were dying with a head cold probably caused by coronavirus. Rightly so. It was no big deal. It’s still no big deal for most people. Today, most of those testing positive for coronavirus report cold symptoms. Much of the rest are asymptomatic. Yes, as noted, people with certain comorbidities, especially obesity and its attendant maladies, as well as compromised immune systems, should avoid contracting SARS-CoV-2. But the majority of the population should have been allowed to go about their lives during this entire period. Why weren’t they? Why did the government obscure reality? Why is the Biden Administration mandating a vaccine most people don’t need?

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As we know, the pharmaceutical companies has been busy manufacturing vaccines alongside their other nostrums (I use that synonym intentionally). The SSRI craze (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), preying on the disequilibriums resulting from the processed food and iron cage that is life under corporate (ir)rationality, generated huge profits. But patents run out and science hits walls and, despite tactics attempting to engender fear using the scary strain names of influenza, the flu could not made quite scary enough to move product (that and the vaccine’s terrible record of efficacy) that planners believed was still a potential growth site of the industry. What to do in the face of shareholder concern? Innovate!

Since modern capitalism works by demand-creation, and fear is a well-known and a powerful pull factor in inducing desired behavior, the problem became one of how to manufacture mass hysteria over a common cold virus, with a vaccine waiting in the wings (you’re naïve if you don’t think Pfizer had the technology ready to go). First, find one about which the public is generally unfamiliar. Who’s heard of coronavirus? (There’s the neuralyzer for the few who have.) Next, modify it to make it especially dangerous for fat and old people and release it into the general population. Several obvious steps follow: obscure the source of its lethality (obesity and compromised or deteriorated immune response), causally reduce the resulting death rate to the virus alone (some sick and old people die from COVID, even those with stage-four cancer or victims of motorcycle accidents, not with COVID), manufacture panic in a scientifically illiterate population with its collective head trapped in a virtual space where the line between the real and the unreal is blurred, territory where even basic biological fact is denied, leverage routine testing to keep the panic going (see the Thomas theorem), quarantine healthy people and force everybody to hide their faces behind masks, then demand people get vaccinated or be routinely tested as presumptive disease carriers or forfeit basic freedoms that were always theirs to begin with.

What I have written above is a description of what has transpired. If I had written such a description of events in a science fiction novel you would have thought it far-fetched. This is like a far-fetched science fiction novel, only the novel if your life. You need not consider every step in the description to become suspicious about what has transpired. You can just ask yourself why the government would mandate a vaccine that does not in fact stop the spread of a virus in order to ostensibly stop the spread of a virus. Or you can ask yourself the related question of why you are not required to present an official immunity card for chicken pox, measles, mumps, polio, or small pox when attending a concert or dining out. Ask yourself why, if you did (and tens of millions did, so don’t feel too stupid), you fell for a big lie. After all, everything that was conspiracy theory yesterday is reality somewhere today and probably everywhere tomorrow.

Conspiracy theories in 2020:

– Covid passports.
– Medical apartheid.
– Banned from leaving countries.
– No work without covid passport.

Reality in 2021:

– Covid passports.
– Medical apartheid.
– Banned from leaving countries.
– No work in Italy without covid passport

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) October 9, 2021

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So, the government and the medical-industrial complex presented the coronavirus to the public as if it were novel. Yet, as I established above, they have known about coronavirus and its many variants for almost a century now and have been able to test for the virus for decades. They never bothered with routine testing because, well, it’s a cold virus. But that’s all changed. We can go down a rabbit hole and ponder all the reasons why it’s changed. Corporate profits may not be sufficient to explain circumstances. However, I want to get the reader thinking about an obvious feature of pandemic policies: the effect of a large-scale project to prevent virus acquisition and attendant resiliency of the immune system. For the likely result of what the public health experts have instructed us to do is immune system impoverishment for individuals at a crucial stage of physical development. Their directives came with the understanding that younger age cohorts with underdeveloped resistance to viruses and other microbes carry their weak systems into adulthood. They must know that these cohorts will be sickly ones over the life-course. It hard to imagine a more damning indictment of technocratic rule.

Think through the logic: Kids get half a dozen colds or more a year. Infection primes and develops the immune system at a time when most viruses have minimal pathological effects, thus safely preparing the little ones for adult life. (Safely does imply total risk elimination. Life is by definition risky, even deadly. In fact, eventually, always deadly.) One of the reasons most SARS-CoV-2 infections are asymptomatic or produce only mild cold symptoms in most adults is because of cross-immunity developed during a lifetime of exposure to coronaviruses, especially at an early age. Lockdowns may have fixed that problem by keeping children away from the pathogens they need for proper physical development, albeit the inefficacy of masks may have to some degree hobbled the solution by providing people with a false sense of security. Of course masks and other PPE helped sell the pandemic. It also helped sell masks and other PPE. Capitalism is remarkable in leaving no source of profit unexploited.

lockdowns and social distancing will likely produce a generation of adults whose bodies are less resistant to ordinary diseases. But the impoverishment will occur not only in the realm of physiology. Childhood is not just a critical phase in the physical development of humans, it’s also a critical phase in their emotional and psychological development. And it’s not just the lockdowns and social distancing and hiding of faces that are the damaging directives. It’s the constant drumbeat of fear over a virus that in several states has failed to kill a single child. “Doing our part” is a slogan in a line of ritual totems in a religious-like campaign of fear mongering and trauma-induction. The simulacra of death and disease create the illusion of ubiquitous danger—and they misdirect the populace about the real danger, namely corporate state tyranny. In fascism, the tyrant is portrayed as the savior. In the religion of scientism, in the cathedrals of the medical-industrial complex, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the word made flesh. The people become fanatics.

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If your kid has a deficient immune response, then it is not really safe to have the kid around other kids. Keep the kid at home. Work hard to make up for what the kid will miss from being around other kids. Ask the government for resources to manage your burden—a burden you do not wish to put on other parents and their children because you’re a decent human being who genuinely cares about the health and wellbeing of all children. That’s what the government is there for. No good person would by their actions wish to harm children for a bug that poses no real harm to them. Remind yourself as often as you can that influenza is deadlier to your children (and most of their teachers) than SARS-CoV-2 because it’s true. Truth is confidence-building. That will make you more courageous. And courage is contagious. It will remind you to ask what should be obvious questions: Why wasn’t influenza in our schools an issue before? Where were the lockdowns then? Where were the masks and vaccine mandates? (Expect them to put more cars on the gravy train, so don’t make too big a fuss of it in public—if you are allowed to make a public fuss over anything again. After all, we don’t want them to treat influenza the way they treat coronavirus.)

Here’s something else to consider, and I apologize if I offend some of you by writing this, but one of the significant comorbidity affecting the pathology of SARS-CoV-2 is obesity. Frankly, there are too many obese children in America. Obesity is associated with other conditions, such as juvenile diabetes. However, obesity is a disease process in itself (the only thing holds back that designation are insurance companies not wanting to pay for weight loss treatments). According to the CDC, an examination of children and adolescents from 2017-2018 finds that obesity prevalence among 2-5-year-olds is 13.4 percent. It increases with age cohort: 20.3 percent among 6-11-year-olds and 21.2 percent among 12-19-year-olds. Obesity is more common among certain populations, with prevalence at 25.6 percent among Hispanic children, 24.2 percent among non-Hispanic Black children, 16.1 percent among non-Hispanic White children, and 8.7 percent among non-Hispanic Asian children. Meta-analyses of epidemiological data finds a positive correlation between obesity in childhood and obesity in adulthood. Over all, the CDC finds that obesity prevalence was 42.4 percent in 2017-2018 (having increased substantially from 1999-2000). That study found that, 2017-2018, non-Hispanic Black adults (49.6%) had the highest age-adjusted prevalence of obesity, followed by Hispanic adults (44.8%), non-Hispanic White adults (42.2%) and non-Hispanic Asian adults (17.4%). Could this explain race and ethnic differences in death from COVID-19 that critical race theorists chalk up to systemic racism?

The good news is that obesity can be fixed in most cases through diet and exercise. We need parents to do a better job of helping their children live healthier lives. This is not a call for harassing parents who do a poor job of promoting a healthy lifestyle for their children, but we shouldn’t be hesitant to tell the truth about health in America. If public health matters, then surely poor diet and inadequate levels of physical activity matters. We must also be critical of this notion of body positivity, an Orwellian euphemism for fat acceptance. A fat kid is an unhealthy kid. A healthy kids is outside in the elements playing with other kids with their snotty noses and all the rest of it. Kids should be riding bicycles and skateboarding. Climbing on jungle gyms and in trees. And we might revisit the recommended number of jabs over the life-course—that notorious vaccine schedule. If we do the right things, if we are mindful of science, then there will be fewer kids with impoverished immune systems. There will also be fewer juvenile psychiatric disorders. And fewer fat and emotionally delicate adults.

Like all life on our planet, human beings are evolved creatures (Are We Forgetting Darwin?). Humans didn’t just appear a few thousand years ago. Nature had billions of years to develop resilient and marvelous biological machines can humans. Some humans have only recently figured out some of what makes those marvelous machines tick and, privilege and profit—and hubris—have encouraged some of them (the worst sort) to assume the role of Dr. Frankenstein. Some of them appear to think of themselves as kin to that Titan Prometheus. Gods or not, they work from theory. If the theory’s wrong, they can fall back on the provisional character of science. If the wrong theory finds its way into technology, not every result can be walked back. And medical professionals care little for science or ethics at all (Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds). But what scientists know for sure, before they do anything, is that, just as with cognitive, emotional, and moral development, people need to be around other each other to prime and develop their immune systems. One of the great evils of modern medical science is the propaganda campaign to convince you that without medical science you have suspect protection against the myriad of pathogens that surround you. Just as the manufacturers of acne medicine needed to make adolescents feel insecure about their complexion to move product, so the manufacturers of vaccines need to make the public doubt the genius of nature.

Like science, truth is mostly provisional. At least as a practical matter. But there are some things about which we are certain. One is our wondrous immune systems. Here’s another one: a corporation is not a person with a conscience. One more: Fauci and his ilk are minor intellects crouching in the shadow of the genius of nature. 

Read this op-ed in RealClearPolitics by Frank Miele: “Live Free or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters.” Share it. It’s fantastic. A taste: “George Orwell might just as well have never written Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Greatest Generation might as well have never defeated the Nazis. Ronald Reagan may as well have never defeated the Evil Empire of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. What’s the point if I have to surrender my dignity and willpower to the bureaucrats and technocrats and let them stick a needle in my arm to mark me just as a rancher would brand his cattle: owned.”

Readers of Freedom and Reason will hear my thoughts echoing throughout Miele’s op-ed. I have been blogging essays with similar content this since March 2020, albeit not written in quite this way. Content-wise, much of this essay reads as if it came from my blog, but the style is that of an accomplished newspaper editor. I am not making an accusation. I’m not the only person in this world who can see things for what they are and the slippery slope we are on. (Some would wish me to more humbly write that I am not the only person who sees things the way I do, but that is for other people to say about me.) So Miele’s essay comes as comfort. It’s why I ask you to share it (share this essay, as well). It will come as comfort to others, as well. We are not alone!

Without a course correction, we will soon live in a country we will no longer recognize—and that goes for a lot of the people around us. The capacity of the mind to convince itself that the undesirable is not a nascent actuality, to deny and accommodate changed circumstance, is a powerful force in human personality. Indeed, watching minds reshape to fit actions once understood as authoritarian is one of the scariest aspects of this moment we are in. If it were not for others who also see through the web of deceit, life for me would increasingly resemble the vibe of Roman Polanski’s horror film Rosemary’s Baby. 

Have you ever heard of Stockholm syndrome? Some say there’s no such thing, but that must be a rationalization, as we can easily see the syndrome at work throughout time and place. We see it big time today. The condition sometimes appears as equanimity, but when not strategically deceitful, equanimity is a sad attempt to dress inaction in virtue. What am I talking about? A mental illness wherein the hostage comes to identify with her captor.

Stockholm syndrome involves the same cognitive and emotional strategy victims pursue when confronted by rising tyranny in a formerly free and democratic society. Changing one’s cognitive and emotional standpoint is one way to deal with the unbearable stress of tyranny’s presence. The strategy is especially likely to occur when the victim feels that resistance to tyranny is not an option due to a belief that either those around her stand with tyrants or believe they cannot successfully do so. The circumstances function like gaslighting; organized circumstances cause her to doubt her ability to grasp the truth of reality and the soundness of principle. It’s a manifestation of auto-gaslighting. 

Underpinning Stockholm syndrome is what psychologist Leon Festinger identifies as cognitive dissonance. Festinger observes that human beings naturally seek consistency between attitude and belief, on the one hand, and behavior and actions, on the other. If people believe they cannot act in a manner that aligns with their beliefs, many will change their attitudes to fit their behavior. The simple way to say this is that slogan all of us have heard before. You know the one: “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” In this way, by identifying with the external threat, the victim can manage the stress situation and threat provokes. It’s a defense mechanism.

For those who find it impossible to adopt such a strategy, or who have found themselves of late determined to no longer acquiesce to tyranny, the burden of the stress is amplified by those who have acquiesced, especially those who have come to identify with the captor or tyrant and work to advance his agenda. Brainwashers discovered no more powerful moment in the transformation of a person’s consciousness than when the target discovers that his comrades identify with their common oppressor and find him odd for not doing likewise.

Frank Miele is an experienced editorial writer and I envy this style of writing. I am not saying he is a great writer. But when I read this style I realize how impoverished academic training leaves those in my profession. Different skill set. Miele clearly conveys his point. I write like a nineteenth century German moral philosopher. Since academic spaces have become unbearably woke (and super-exploitative) and I no longer write for them, I am going to keep working at it. 

Stay strong. Tyranny is on the rise everywhere. You are not imagining it. What was unthinkable a year ago is now happening. Much of it is already firmly in place. It will take forceful action to dislodge it. But first we have to stop the progression. Resist this. Resist it while you can.

I leave you with the prophetic scene from the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre:

Some readers may find this blog controversial. If so, I submit to you that this is only because we have for decades allowed extremists on both sides of the political-ideological spectrum to conflate culture and race. Culture and race are not the same things. Culture refers to a social system of beliefs, ideas, norms, and values. Race refers to supposed genetic or otherwise essential variation in our species claimed to be meaningfully organized into types that exhibit concomitant variability in behavioral proclivity, cognitive capacity, and moral integrity. Culture is a real thing. Race is not.

White nationalists, for the most part located on the political right, see culture through a racial lens, believing that the ideals and accomplishments of the West (which are profound and vast) reflect the superiority of the white race, into which they collapse selected ethnicities determined to be racially white. White supremacists are particularly committed to an extreme version of Christianity (Christian nationalism or Christianism) and slather other faiths, even Judaism—especially Judaism, for some of them—in loathsome sentiment. Thankfully, white nationalists are a rare and vanishing force in Western society.

More plentiful, and therefore more threatening, are the identitarians on the left, who, also collapsing culture, ethnicity, and religion into race, and defining race in essentialist terms that obscure its racist assumptions, portray Western culture as the expression of white supremacy, and use that portrayal to smear those moderate voices on the left and the right concerned with the integrity of the modern nation-state and the preservation and perpetuation of Western culture, with its democratic-republican commitments and stress on the Enlightenment values and practices of humanism, individualism, liberalism, science, and secularism. Left identitarians label themselves “antiracists,” but, in this system, antiracism is a species of racism.

This essay is a defense of individualism and democratic-republican values over against those extremists on the left and right who elevate group identity above liberty and civil and human rights thus compromising both. I will enter the discussion through the concept of whiteness, which antiracists falsely claim is the prevailing culture of the United States and the West. In fact, the West, especially the United States, is a multiracial space in which nonwhites enjoy the same rights as whites. The Enlightenment values inhering in Western culture—humanism, individualism, liberalism, secularism, etc.—have no color. They are for everybody and the greatest accomplishment of the West is realizing their universality.

* * *

In November of 1998, Jeff Hitchcock, director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, appeared before an audience at the 3rd National Conference on Whiteness at the University of Chicago and delivered a talk titled “Decentering Whiteness.” Hitchcock defines “whiteness” as a term meant “to describe such things as white racial identity, white culture and European Americans as a people.” He clarifies at the start that this is “different and broader from how other people may use the term.” That is perhaps a strange thing to say given that this is how most people who use that term define it. Of course, turf cutting is not uncommon in attempts to make one appear to have novel or superior insight on a subject.

By the time Hitchcock gave his speech, whiteness studies had become an established academic field, one that informs and is informed by antiracist activism. Although W.E.B. Dubois articulated the concept of whiteness in his observation of the race-based psychological wage many decades earlier, Theodore Allen initiated the project with his 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race in which he claimed that British colonists invented whiteness in the late-seventeenth-early-eighteenth century in the American colonies as an hegemonic strategy disorganizing the working class by manufacturing racial loyalties that disrupted class solidarity.

From there, Allen’s view was elaborated in a vast body of literature and numerous academic programs. Perhaps more than any other work, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991, establishes the academic foundation of whiteness studies. George Lipsitz gave the thesis a useful hook in his 1995 essay, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” published in the American Quarterly. The heart of the argument is that, at first, whiteness was narrowly construed to apply to white British workers. Over a period of time, the designation expanded to include other Europeans. Non-Europeans are excluded from the designation. These claims are untrue, it turns out. I debunk the narrative in my essay “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.” The Irish, Jews, and even Arabs have always been white. But ideologies are stubborn and whiteness studies refuses to die.

In this speech, Hitchcock advances a method he calls “decentering whiteness.” One hears such jargon alongside other constructions that echo in the halls of academe, activists workshops, and community organizing campaigns, constructions such as “white privilege” and “white fragility.” (See “Not All White People are Racist”). For those who use these words, as Hitchcock puts it, whiteness “forms the center of our society in the United States.” Because “no single racial or cultural group should control the center,” good people (antiracists) “need to take whiteness out of the center and replace the center with multiracial values.” (If you need help doing this, Hitchcock’s Center for the Study of White American Culture is a fee-based organization to help private and public organizations become antiracist. That’s right, he’s a race hustler.)

What does it mean to say that whites are at the center of our society? “When we talk about being in the center of society,” Hitchcock explains, “by that we mean having access to power, control of resources and having the ability to enforce one’s values.” He then specifies the extent of white racial power. “In the United States we have government, with the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court and these are overwhelmingly white, and for that matter, male, which is itself an element of whiteness.” But it’s not just the government that centers whiteness, i.e., finds the white majority also a majority in its dominant institutions. “We have Fortune 500 companies, which are overwhelmingly controlled by white people. We have white families in control of a disproportionately large measure of the wealth of the country. We have a majority of white people who believe living and working in circumstances that are overwhelmingly white is normal, okay, acceptable, and even worth seeking out.”

By “multiracial values,” Hitchcock means that “no single racial group should control the society’s resources, power and values, and every racial and cultural group should have access to these things.” I agree. And so do the vast majority of Americans. As I have explained numerous times on Freedom and Reason, and this was no less true in 1998, white Americans abolished the slave trade, emancipated black people from chattel slavery, affirmed the right of women to participate in politics, and dismantled the structures of Jim Crow segregation. (See “Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project”; “The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression”; “The FAR Podcast Episode # 21.”) There is neither a de jure or a de facto effort to center white people in America.

Hitchcock’s argument is an exercise of turning the expected and ordinary into the unusual and perverse. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the US population is white. One would expect, then, as a mere matter of course, a majority of people will live and work in environments that are overwhelmingly white. To suggest that this is neither normal nor acceptable implies that acceptable normality excludes a great many whites from life and work—or that maybe there should be far fewer whites. Presently, of the 330-plus millions Americans, approximately 275 million of them, or more than eighty percent, excluding nonwhite Hispanics, are white. Is it any surprise that white people are the majority in our institutions? Moreover, half of the United States population is male (patriarchy’s ubiquity in world history speaks for itself, so I won’t dwell on it albeit it is a problem). Black and other Americans will encounter a lot of white men over the course of their lives. A white majority does not obviate the fact of a multiracial society. The United States is self-evidently multiracial. However, following the progressive left style of thinking, there is an assumption in Hitchcock’s argument that whiteness is cultural and that therefore multiracialism must therefore be multicultural. In other words, culture must not be white because whiteness is racist. It has to decenter whiteness. But western societies are multiracial with a white majority. What’s the problem with a white majority?

There is a trick being played here. Whiteness studies is an expression of anti-white bigotry and white self-loathing that legitimizes such sentients by racializing Western culture and then taking up a righteous struggle against white supremacy. Whiteness studies aims to convince people that black inequality is found in the thought and actions of people—even black people—as a result of enculturation in a white supremacist culture. This is the source of such concepts as “implicit race bias” and “white guilt.” Racial inequality is wrong and therefore the culture that engenders it must go. The institutions of the West—the Enlightenment and rational jurisprudence—are expressions of white culture which in turn makes the West the racist projection of the white race which, according to Allen, is invented. But Western culture is not a proxy for anti-white bigotry. It is as much the case that anti-white bigotry is popularly engendered to struggle against Western culture. Who would want to dismantled Western culture? Transnational corporate power.

When you and I look at the world and see few white supremacists in it, the antiracist cannot scold us for not seeing the forest for the trees. There are indeed few trees. But he doesn’t let that stop him. This is because he works as the supernaturalists do, where a different style of truth prevails, the truth-style of positing forces that operate behind the seen/scene. In the antiracist worldview, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tells us, racism can and does exist without racists. Racism is “in the system.” It is the system. The language of “systemic racism” allows the antiracists to grow a forest without trees. No wonder you can’t see the forest. You were looking for trees!

Just as the antiracist forest does not require trees, the system of white supremacy needs no human agency to oppress. White supremacy works like the devil and his demons, making bad things happen in the world. This is a supernatural agency. Of course, for the sophisticated, demons are merely personifications of evil. So how do we see the evil? We need a specialized language. We need doctrine and scripture. We need a testament. We need clerics and institutions in which the clerics may preach and indoctrinate. We need missionaries to take to the streets and bring people to the faith. We need a rhetoric to shame and scold the infidel and punish the apostate. We need to stifle and marginalize the heretic. Either you are a believer (antiracist) or a disbeliever and therefore an enemy of the righteous (racist). Nobody is allowed to stand outside doctrine. As Brother Ibram X Kendi tells us, there is no such thing as a non-racist. Those who say otherwise are in league with the deceiver.

As I have noted several times on Freedom and Reason, people like Hitchcock have taken to living in a reified world constructed from concepts and theories that posit as real things imagined relations and structures falsified by obvious facts. Here’s one of those facts: Most poor people are white. They don’t control a disproportionately large measure of wealthy of the country. Even though there are twice as many poor whites than blacks, blacks nearly equal whites in welfare utilization. Here’s another fact: There are black families who own and control the means of production, employing and controlling workers to whom they extract value in the wage-labor system. More facts: There are blacks in positions of political power, in some cities a majority of those who make the policies that keep black neighborhoods in power and under-protected from the violence crime that plagues their lives. Blacks are prominent in entertainment, sports, and many other walks of life. Again, this was true in 1998 when Hitchcock gave his talk.

American society is already multiracial. It has always been multiracial. And the values associated with America is what guided white people to struggle against racism for the sake of their nonwhite brothers and sisters. It is this that makes the United States the number one target of destination for those seeking a better life for themselves and their families. But if Western civilization is racist, then opposition to developments that threaten Western civilization, such as cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism—those who oppose multiculturalism must also oppose multiracialism and therefore must be racist. Smearing opponents of cultural pluralism with racism is lazy. It’s also wrong. Many people do it out of habit and reflex. Decades of pairing racism with culture and ethnicity in an essentialist fashion has confused millions of people. People like Hitchcock work very hard to keep the confusion going.

* * *

In order to detangle the mess the antiracists have made of things, we need to clarify our terms. Racism is an ideology (and thus indeed a type of culture) that causes people to see selected inherited superficial physical characteristics, such as skin color or eye shape, as indicating different types of humans, and some institutionalize this typology to, or use it to justify, institutions that privilege members of their group while disadvantaging members of others. The manifestations of racism are seen historically in de jure segregation and presently in private and public programs that advance or thwart the aspirations of persons on the basis of ancestry and racial identity. But the subjects of racism, the individuals sorted into racial categories, are not abstractions.

The subjects of racist belief and practice are fundamentally different from the social systems of culture and ethnicity. Those are acquired through inculturation and socialization where, for example, one becomes an Arab or a Muslim. A person does not become this or that race through socialization. Like sex, race is ascribed at birth. Being black requires no special language or thought patterns. We see a black person as is. He may be an Arab or a Muslim. We won’t know until we ask him. Like sex, race, as understood in common sense terms, is an immutable characteristic, even if, unlike sex, it is not an actual biological reality but a social construction. As social systems, culture and ethnicity represent patterns of attitudes, beliefs, habits, norms, and values. A black people can be a constituent of any culture or ethnicity. And he may change cultures and even change his ethnicity. Very few people, including non-racists, believe a person can change his racial identity; however, nearly everybody who does not collapse culture into race, as is the reflex of right and left wing identitarians, believes an individual can adapt to a new culture, learn a new language, change his religion (or abandon religion all together). In the process of changing one’s culture, one can also abandon racial thinking.

I will use myself as an example. I am a white person. I did not choose to be nor do I wish to be white. Whiteness is of no value to me (see “About My “Whiteness’.”) However, if I tell people I am not white, they will think I am mad. I am not allowed to identify as another race or even to go raceless. I cannot change or deny my race as I might my religion or, these days, my gender. My ancestry is varied, but I know my ancestors were mostly Europeans and spoke many languages and practiced different religions (most were Christians, while others were Jewish and any number of religions practiced in Japan). They were mostly white even if the word white was not yet in use. (Names for things do not distinguish them; one will search in vain to find an ancient text that describes the sky as blue.) Upon arriving in the United States, my ancestors assimilated with American culture and became native Americans.

In a blog entry dated 2012, Let’s Recognize White American Culture, Hitchcock admits as much. “Some white Americans claim as their culture the original heritage of the European country or countries from whence their ancestors came. This makes sense for first or second generation white Americans, but the vast majority of white Americans have been here much longer. Often we’re a mix of many ancestral national origins. We can’t speak the original languages, and we have no meaningful relationships with those who remained in Europe. More likely we have gone through generations of assimilation in the United States, and the culture of the United States gives us our language, our customs, and our values.” But then Hitchcock intrudes upon sound history with his anti-whiteness. He declares that the future of the United States “it is not simply ‘American’ culture.” It is, as his blog title tells us, “white American culture.” “Our experience has been more constricted by race, and the historic process of cultural formation has taken place along racial lines,” he writes. It follows, then that there is a “black American culture.” Hitchcock sees multiple cultures in America, that differentiate “the music people listen to, the movies and TV programs they watch, and the foods they eat.” He recognizes that “individuals make individual choices and some people prefer the cultural experience of others. There is a fair amount of fusion and cross-over activity taking place.” “But the larger fact remains,” he contends, that “White Americans have a culture. We have a shared cultural experience. So why don’t we recognize that? And why is it important that we should?”

I am uncomfortable with insisting on a white culture. We might more properly in the domestic case talk about subcultures. It is not clear that there is a monolithic white subculture (I don’t think there is). One is on firmer grounds claiming the existence of a black subculture. But, for Hitchcock, there is a white culture that exists beyond those subcultures we might identify. “Let’s be real,” he writes. “White Americans, as a group, basically control what’s going on in the United States, and so our culture sets the norms.” So here we have it. There is a dominant culture, but it is one constructed and controlled by whites, and to maintain that control, whites set the norms to which all who live in the United States are expected to adhere.

I write about this on Freedom and Reason in the blog “The Myth of White Culture.” I was inspired to write the blog because Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, author of The Race Card: How bluffing about bias makes race relations worse,” told his audience in an op-ed for CNN, “There is no ‘White culture’.” I report on an exhibit at the Smithsonian (which was taken down due to protest) that identified several features common to “white culture.” What are these? Autonomy, common law, competition, delayed gratification, future-oriented, independence, promoting progress, self-reliance and the work ethic, time-oriented, the scientific method, the two-parent family. These are the norms and values Hitchcock wants to decenter. (See “The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs.”)  

While I am inescapably white (inescapable because others refuse to give up racial thinking), I am not any of those other cultures or ethnicities. One does not carry cultural or ethnical traits on their genes the way they do the traits for skin color or eye shape. My culture is American culture. I am ethnically America. I am a native of that culture and to the nation. This would be true if I were not white. I stand alongside black and brown people as a citizen of the United States—and as a representative of Western civilization. All those features of white American culture are really features of Western culture and belong to all people regardless of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.

There are white subcultures (plural), that is attitudes, beliefs, preferences, and tastes that have grown in the context of a segregated society. There are attitudes, beliefs, norms and values in my own culture to which I never subscribed. Growing up, everyone around me was a Christian and spoke with a regional accent. I am atheist and have deliberately spoken English in manner that doesn’t give away the location of my upbringing (although I am not ashamed of my upbringing). Growing up in the south, there were many people in my life who were racially prejudiced. I always resisted those attitudes. Yes, while originating among white people, Christianity is not exclusive to white culture (obviously). At the same time, I adhere to the attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values that founded my nation: humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism. I adhere to these because they are just and rational and universal. I expect others who wish to live in my country to do the same whatever the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.

* * *

America is a multiracial society. But it does not follow that it should be a multicultural one. Why, then, do so many people reflexively perceive criticism of and resistance to multiculturalism as a racist dog whistle? This reflex is a specular propaganda achievement in the service of a capitalist class fraction, the transnationalist fraction, that seeks to denationalize the global space and subjugate world labor to corporate governance and technocratic control. What stands in the way of globalist desire is national chauvinism or patriotism, founded upon a deep cultural understanding held in common across individuals regardless of racial designation. The pairing of race and culture and ethnicity is a political-ideological strategy designed to delegitimize those who believe in a common language and shared cultural values by smearing them as racist.

The force leveraging racism to fracture the proletariat is the multicultural progressive left. Leftwing elites portray those who believe in national integrity and support restrictions on immigration for reasons that have nothing to do with race as backwards, bigoted, and xenophobic. At the very least, the pairing functions this way. In any case, few people attempt to clarify the meaning of the terms at play for fear of being accused of what they are condemning. It is therefore vital for the future of the American nation and the Enlightenment project that the truth that culture is not race is reclaimed and widely circulated. Knowing that culture and race are not the same and that their false pairing is a deception that serves narrow economic and political interests is a game changer.

There is a peculiar thing about those who insist on the pairing. You will have noticed that who is smeared as a racist for defending cultural integrity depends on who is insisting on cultural integrity, whether this insistence will metamorphosize into the perception of a call for racial integrity and solidarity, or whether this latter quality will draw the smear of racism. Only some groups are permitted to demand a common language and culture without being so smeared, even when they collapse these thing into race essentialism. Put another way, permission to make demands is attached to and depends upon on those races qualified to do so, those qualifications built into the hegemonic system disrupting common sense understanding.

There are host cultures or nations approved to assimilate new arrivals to the culture and language that supports the nation. Other cultures or nations are racist for insisting on assimilation. Indeed, for some, for some places, to suggest assimilation or integration with the culture that hosts new arrivals is considered a type of cleansing, as cultural genocide or ethnocide. Sometimes, those who racialize ethnicity criticize the term “ethnocide” as a synonym for cultural genocide for confusing culture with ethnicity. However, ethnicity is a cultural phenomenon. So, while not all culture is ethnic in character, all aspect of ethnicity are cultural in essence (at present, in contrast to phenotypic traits selected for constructions of race, there is no scientific evidence for any feature of ethnicity being carried on the genes). But more often the identitarian seeks to collapse cultural genocide and ethnocide into the definition of genocide generally. In considering these terms during the drafting of the 2007 “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” the United Nations eschewed any distinction and defined a wide array of modern nation building practices as “genocide.”

You will have noticed that those who equate assimilation with racism or genocide are either those for whom race is central to identity or adherents to a culture or ideology that is inconsistent with the norms and values of the host nation which is described in racial terms. For example, Islam is incompatible with the norms and values that have made Western societies the freest and most prosperous societies in the world. This ideology is a form of clerical fascism (a fact that seems to escape the left so-called antifascists who embrace Islam yet condemn Christianity and Judaism) that does not recognize the secular imperative, i.e., separation of church and state, indeed that believes that all law must come from God and brought under the control of clerics who interpret scripture. Assimilationists, respecting religious liberty, believe that Muslims are free to be Muslims, but that they should adopt the Western norm of secularism and subordinate their faith to it. Cultural pluralists counter that Muslims have a right to their culture and that Western legal systems should accommodate Islamic norms. When assimilationists insist on cultural integration, they are smeared as racist.

It should be obvious that religion and race are not the same things. Religious belief, a form of culture, is acquired through socialization. To be sure, once socialized, the Muslim is a culture-bearer, but he was not born a Muslim. While, in some cultures, a person may not be able to safely leave Islam, other cultures allow liberation from backwards cultural attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values. Those societies are the better ones. In contrast, race, constructed from phenotypic characteristics, is a physical stigmata. Again, it does not represent a distinct genotype in the way sex does, nonetheless it still marks the individual as physically different. Yet Muslims, despite being of many races, are increasingly perceived as a race (especially in Europe). What is more, Muslims are often portrayed as an oppressed race. The racialization of Muslims, which is associated with the dewhitening of Arabs (and increasingly Jews), something I have blogged about before and will blog about again in the near future, is part of a project to racialize all human conflict that does not fall under sex and gender (identity and orientation) thereby obscuring the material relations that should actually command proletarian attention, namely social class.

Beyond the agenda, racial thinking points out a very real problem in the West. Racial thinking will order our thoughts until we stop thinking racially. I cannot be an individual apart from my racial identity because of this damned irrational manner of thought. Because of widespread racial thinking, a type of thinking encouraged by our institutions and influential social movement leaders, indeed a type of thinking being taught to our children in government schools, the United States appears as a multiracial society. This is, of course, also true if you believe race is a meaningful biological category.

If American Indians demanded the expulsion of white people from North America, we would recognize the demand as racist and condemn it. The same would be true if blacks demanded a state free of whites and Asians. At least I hope we would recognize these demands as racist. But it would not be racist if an African state, even if the majority was black, insisted that Europeans assimilate to the culture of their state. It may be chauvinist. But chauvinism, defined as a belief in the strength and virtue of one’s own culture, is not a manifestation of racism. What woke progressive would consider a black African insisting on cultural integrity for his nation to be a racist? (I recognize the American Indian example is problematic given the rhetoric concerning stolen lands.)

What is it that drives the patriot to defend his homeland against threats foreign and domestic and to take pride in his country? Chauvinism. The right to a country and a nationality underpins the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So why are some nations entitled to national pride and integrity and others condemned for it? What lies behind the assumption that the countries of the West have no right to cultural and national integrity? It’s pitched as a moral matter, but, when not an expression of envy, it’s a globalist tactic. However, a black-majority African country barring whites from immigrating there, or segregating whites on the basis of racial designation, would be racist. How many woke progressives would agree?

While I advocate immigration restrictions, it has nothing to do with excluding people on the basis of race. Any judgment I make about who we should let in on the basis of culture or religion is for entirely non-racist reasons. I have always advocated policies of multiracialism because I am an individualist. My criteria for entrance to America has nothing to do with skin color but with what impact the immigrant will have on my country. We he adopt our values and submit to the rule of law? Or will he keep his foreign values and loyalties? If the latter, he should be allowed in. If we do not have an effective system of holding him to his word, he should be allowed in. If his presence means a native-born America will have a harder life, he should not be allowed it.

Multiracial societies have existed down through time. In some cases, there is significant racism associated with them. The United States past is one of those cases. In others, racism is minimal or virtually absent. Today, in the United States, racism is minimal—at least as it has been historically understood. However, there is no inherent reason why skin color or eye shape or hair texture should form the basis of group antagonisms. Multiracial situations are only conflictual when racist ideology is present. The United States has, at least for an extended moment, sharply minimized racism and made significant progress in transcending racial thinking to a substantial degree. Given that racial antagonism is preceded by an intensification of racial thinking, progress in struggle for equality is threatened by demands for differential treatment based on ancestry and the portrayal of whites as a pariah race.

But a multiracial society, however antagonistic it is in its internal relations, is very different from a multiethnic society. Superficial multiculturalism is not a problem. Cultural diversity in art, dress, food, music, even religious faith, enriches society. In a free society, the diversity of culture is the property of all. But deep multiculturalism is destructive. Often marked by profound racial thinking, it demands the national cultural bend to its norms and values and attempts to raise cultural and religious belief above the law and over the individual. When some individuals on the basis of race or religion are denied access to public spaces, prevented from appropriating cultural traits, or experience limits on speech and expression, then an oppressive situation is manifest. When Muslims demand that their religious practices, such as wearing the hijab in public schools, be recognized, while non-Muslims are denied hoodies and other head coverings, then multiculturalism threatens the secular basis of a free society.

Doesn’t multiracialism assume racially differentiating the population is meaningful? Yes, unfortunately. The legacy of racial thinking casts a long shadow. However, inclusive multiracialism, or colorblindness, is a step in deracializing thinking. You would think this would be the rallying cry of the left, namely transcending race and struggling on the basis of class. (They seem eager to transcend gender categories, after all.) Yet there are those, especially on the left, who not only resist deracialization, but insist on racial thinking and organizing society along color lines. These same leftists rarely talk about social class. They suppose, on the basis of race, that all whites are privileged and all blacks are victims.

* * *

I’m a sociologist. Maybe that why I can see straight away Hitchcock’s claims as confusing abstract demographic and statistical categories with concrete reality. But other sociologists and social scientists generally don’t always see this (and the proportion who don’t is ever increasing). Indeed, many sociologists have taken to living in a reified world constructed with concepts and theories that posit as real things imagined relations and structures that are falsified by obvious facts. Maybe it’s something else that enables me to see it. Atheism? Marxism?

If you believe thoughts make the world and that, therefore, others are obliged to live in the world you have thought for yourself or that others must think for you lest they deny your existence or your suffering, then you are delusional. Believe whatever you want to believe, of course, but don’t require others to believe it. Ultimately, you cannot be your delusions. As Jared Bauer, co-founder of Wisecrack, said on the podcast Unsafe Spaces a while back: selling your ancestors’ suffering is the least classy thing you can do. You are only a victim of your delusional thinking and those who taught you think like that in order to control you. However elegantly dressed in high-blown rhetoric, you’re a sucker.

As thoughts go, this notion of being on “the right side of history” is quintessentially Hegelian. To be sure, as Mills noted, even if we don’t control the history we make, history is still what we make it. History doesn’t preexist as right for people to declare standpoints for or against it. Ultimate right and wrong lie in the intrinsic and universal facts of the human species and its needs. That’s a Darwinian question. But it’s also a Marxian one. Stepping back and pondering, one will realize how absurd it is to describe the woke left as “Marxist.” Both the progressive left and the conservative right make this error.

Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, etc., are not, whatever they think of themselves, Marxist. They’re Hegelian. They do not see ideas as apprehending the world, but instead see the world as the projection of ideas—and the ideas they demand centering are alienated projections of their social situation shaped by class power. They want their politics to be about power, but they are ignorant of the actual character of power. If they could see, they would grasp that they are in fact not opponents, but agents of prevailing power, which is, again, class power.

It’s idealism that absorbs people into categories of thought and supposes these constructions are essential. Materialists know that the categories of thought are for grappling with the actual structures of reality. For idealists, group abstractions substitute for concrete individuals. It’s an irrational mode of thought. And a reactionary one. CRT believes that a man carries the guilt of his ancestors’ crimes. On the basis of his race, a man is guilty for what others do. That’s not materialism. That’s idealism. And it’s an idealism of the most primitive sort. It’s regression to ancient religious thinking. The woke world is a world of demons and witches. With a materialist turn, if one supposes a man carries on his genes the sins of the past, then the man just becomes another type of racist. Whatever sort of racist you are, calling yourself an “antiracist” won’t save you.

For the true believers, conflating culture and ethnicity with race at once mystifies culture and ethnicity and renders judgment on entire races of people. The attributes of Western civilization are expressions of white supremacy. They are bad because Europeans are white and white people are bad. White people constructed Western culture in the way they did in order to privilege themselves while subordinating nonwhites (never mind that certain groups of Asians outperform Europeans by Western standards).

But culture and ethnicity are not things that exist in the ethereal realm of abstract racial categories and essences. They are anthropological facts, and their attributes, the differential commitments to authoritarianism, egalitarianism, humanism, liberalism, secularism, that is the attitudes, beliefs, habits, norms, and values that differentiate cultures and ethnicities, are carried by concrete individuals who are, sadly, often taught that they must act this way or that or betray the abstract group with which they have been conditioned to identify. Coming out of race thinking is like coming out of religious things because, in the final analysis, they are both ideological systems.

Here’s some of those facts: Most poor people are white (see “They Do You This Way”). They don’t control the wealth or direct the power in their country. Even though poor blacks are less than four percent of the US population, they represent more than one quarter of food stamp recipients. How is black overrepresentation in a major government program servicing the poor systemic evidence of racism? (I can come up with a theory about that, but it won’t be a woke one.) Here’s another fact: There are black families who own and control the means of production, employing and controlling workers to whom they extract value in the wage-labor system. One more: There are blacks in positions of political power, in some cities they are among those who make the policies that keep black neighborhoods in poverty and underprotected from the violence crime that plagues those communities. This was true in 1998 when Hitchcock gave his speech.

American society is already multiracial. It always has been multiracial, in fact. Multiracialism doesn’t carry values but rather reflects a value we hold in America, namely the ethic of individualism. The question is whether the nation can survive multiculturalism, where groups are permitted to stand up separate norms and rules systems in the context of a nation-state. How is each citizen to stand equal before the law when his fate is determined by norms and rules at variance with it? How is the rule of law of a particular quality—humanist, liberal, rational, and secular—to enjoy the cultural integrity necessary for upholding that law if culture bearers with obstinate attitudes refuse to integrate with mainstream culture or if assimilation is equated with racism and neglected or forbidden?

The answer to these question is that it can’t. And that’s why it’s so important to differentiate between, on the one hand, multiracialism, where every person is equal before the law regardless of race, i.e., colorblindness, and, on the other hand, multiculturalism, where the fate of the individual is determined by the cultural system in which she is born and compelled to endure. Multiculturalism is modern-day tribalism. The point of the Enlightenment was emancipation from such tribal arrangements.

Did you know that half a trillion dollars is transferred every year from the native working class in this country to the capitalist class because of cheap foreign labor? This cartoon is corporate propaganda. It’s a paradigm, so pay attention to what I am going to tell you. This is 100 percent truth.

Here is the cartoon’s angle: the artist maligns the worker (here stereotypically reduced to the hard hat construction white worker) by making it appear as if the worker falsely believes cheap foreign labor (depicted here stereotypically as a dark-skinned person to cast the white work as a racist) wants his cookie. But as you can see by the statistics I cited above, a significant part of the explanation for why the capitalist’s plate is so full of cookies is because he deploys cheap foreign labor not just to super-exploit the foreigner (who gets cookie crumbs), but to drive down the wages of the native worker and confuse his consciousness and disorganize his politics. The capitalist does this not only by importing cheap foreign labor to America, but by off-shoring factories to exploit-processing zones where cheap foreign labor awaits.

The irony is that those most harmed by immigration and off-shoring are black and brown Americans, who are idled in disorganized urban neighborhoods burdened by high rates of poverty and crime. Black Americans are especially affected. Want to guess who maintains the custodial arrangements that idle blacks in America’s inner cities (and warehouse them in its jails and prisons)? The same people who share this cartoon: progressives.

Corporate power wins again and again because people don’t take the time to understand basic political economy and the capitalist mode of production. There is probably no greater action one can take to tell an audience who knows better that you do not know better than sharing this cartoon. I see this cartoon all the time. It makes me furious every time because it reminds me how many people don’t know better.

This is the function of race identitarianism: to substitute a false consciousness about the true nature of capitalist relations. So when you see this cartoon, feel free to use my argument. We have to shut down this fake leftwing reflex and educate people about the true nature of corporate state power. If you actually care about black and brown people, you will call out cartoons like this for what they are: anti-worker propaganda.

Among the religiously-conscious, a type of consciousness especially pronounced these days among those who adhere to the ideology of woke progressivism, perceptions are shaped much as they were in the past, most notably in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, a time when Christians attacked individuals with perceived similar characteristics, proclivities, and traits. Homosexuals, Jews, and single women were suspect because of who they were, not what they did, and any one of them or all of them could stand in for something one of them did or might do. If a Jew did something bad, any Jew could take his place on the pyre. All Jews were subject to control and retribution because of who they were. This is the same attitude woke progressivism brings to questions of justice from its standpoint (what it calls “social justice”).

A heinous act is committed by a man against a woman and the narrative on the left is that what happened to the woman was motivated by misogyny, a type of prejudice attributed to all men, a hatred and loathing that ranges from the male gaze to rape and murder. Therefore, all men are responsible for the actions of the perpetrator and thus all men where they can be wrangled (universities, the workplace) require reeducation and reform. Men are naturally sexually attracted to women, see women as objects in their environment, as they do everything else, and this puts women at risk. In this way, members of an abstract demographic category are blamed and shamed for actions they did not perpetrate (and objectification is turned into something untoward).

We see the same thing with race. A white man commits a crime against a black man and the act is construed as motivated by race prejudice. One need not know anything about the crime other than the respective race of perpetrator and victim. The narrative on the left is that racism is systemic, something possessed to some degree by all whites; therefore, all whites are ultimately implicated in, or at least to some degree responsible for that act and all whites have to be reeducated about race so it won’t happen again (which, of course, it will). Even when there is no instance of wrongdoing, the ideology that might result in wrongdoing is always lurking implicit in everything, and therefore reeducation is necessary. Identity is proof of motivation. Phenotypic features are sufficient condition for suspicion. In another manifestation of this thought pattern, each black man can speak for all black men except when he can’t, but no white man can speak for black men.

This is a entirely irrational way of thinking. It takes an anecdote and represents it as if it were a scientific conclusion in the way that a falling rock is an indication of gravitation. It assumes that racism and sexism are aggregate and regular phenomena and that explains actions supposed to result from them. Demographic disparities are by definition racism and sexism. The anecdote becomes proof that heterosexism, racism, sexism, and all the rest of it are systemic without any scientific work. To be sure, persons act on the basis of the beliefs they have about things, but where is the evidence that the beliefs motivating concrete heinous acts are held by all members of a group who happen to be defined as white or who have male gonads (and who identify as such) or who are attracted to members of the opposite sex? A straight white man is not analogous to a Nazi or a Muslim—or progressives. Nazism, Islam, and progressivism are ideologies. White, straight, and male are passive demographic categories. The woke mix qualitatively different things. Moreover, even in the case of ideology, the connection must be made between collectively-held ideas and the concrete action those ideas are supposed to have motivated.

As a straight white man, I am no more responsible for what other straight white men do than I am responsible for what gay black women do. I may be burdened by abstract categories when they move others to discriminate against me, but I am not really a category. I am a concrete individual. I am responsible for my actions. My actions are not intrinsically motivated by the demographic characteristics attributed to me. There are neither empirical nor rational means by which anybody can put me in the realm of culpability for actions taken by another straight white man. There are only irrational means, the same means by which a black man is made to stand in for another black man or all black men and mistreated (or rewarded, for that matter) on that basis. To assume on grounds of race and sexual orientation that I possess a flawed character is race and sex prejudice. To treat me differently on that basis is discrimination based on race and sex.

It is this irrational cognitive style that makes it difficult for progressives to accept that, for example, there is no systemic bias in lethal civilian-police interactions. Newspapers report the death of a black unarmed man at the hands of a white police officer and the manner of death, extraordinarily rare as it is, is portrayed as evidence of a systemic problem demanding reeducation and reform. But the science finds no racism in lethal civilian-police interactions—and scientific findings only matter to those with intense religious commitments when they support the doctrine. When it comes to claims about white privilege, for example, progressives are eager to appeal to statistical averages around abstract aggregates, but for COVID-19 risk assessment it’s all about that suffocating MAGA hat wearer who rejected the vaccine confessing his stupidity from his hospital gurney. This is a special sort of hypocrisy because the soundness of the respective cases actually requires a flip in the level of abstraction (hint: because one is a reification). This is why more than forty percent of progressives think half of those infected by COVID-19 wind up in the hospital. While they sit around laughing at the much smaller proportion of the population that thinks the earth is flat.

* * *

Even when I was sympathetic to elements of critical race theory, I never taught it uncritically in a classroom, let alone supported its imposition in diversity training. I now recognize critical race theory as a toxic ideology, but even when I didn’t, my belief that higher education is no place for demanding conformity to a particular line of political thought always guided my classroom ethics. Nor should critical race theory be represented as a definitive or settled view in training sessions in corporation and government agencies. Not only is critical race theory toxic, but the practice of compelling speech from administrators, students, teachers, and workers is tyrannical. This is what Randall Kennedy misses in his answer to questions about anti-CRT legislation. If it were just a matter of assessing the merits of CRT claims that’d be one thing. But that is not what what’s happening. CRT is being taught as truth and assessment of it is treated as racism. What is more, how can the elementary school environment be an ideal speech situation (see Jurgen Habermas)? It can’t. Perhaps high school could be. But it’s not.

Suppose you are a biology professor at a university who believes in creationism. That could bias the way you treat the subject matter, how you grade students, how you treat your Darwinian colleagues, how your work reflects on the reputation and integrity of the institution. Your colleagues find your beliefs offensive. That are quite disturbed by creationists. They seek uniformity of thought. But you have a right to your beliefs. Second, how does what you believe affect your coworkers if you don’t act on those beliefs? It is already against the law to discriminate on the basis of race. This is about thought control. If the action is illegal, why do you need to brainwash the employee? Why this? If you are going to brainwash employees on race, then why not everything? Why should a person’s right to their own beliefs matter at all? Mix the suppression of ideas with the conflation of concrete individuals with abstract categories and democratic freedoms are sliding into the abyss.

You may have noticed in the righthand side bar of your social media account(s) news items informing you that President Biden’s vaccine mandate enjoys legal precedent. There is a US Supreme Court decision upholding a state law for compulsory vaccination for small pox, a disease that kills a third of those it infects and is even deadlier for children. The Supreme Court case is Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). I write about it here: The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.

What is left out of the story is what that precedent has since justified, most notoriously Buck v. Bell (1927), a decision that upheld the power of states to forcibly sterilize United States citizens for all manner of “ills.” Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized without their consent. But that’s not the only decision that used Jacobson to justify oppressive state action. In Vernonia School District v. Acton (1995), the court used Jacobson to justify the random drug testing of students. More recently, the Jacobson precedent has been cited as a precedent in rulings concerning face masks and home confinement orders. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a court extended Jacobson to cover matters of reproductive liberty. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit leaned on Jacobson to uphold a Texas ban on non-essential medical services and surgeries that included abortions.

Remember that racial segregation in the United States rested on precedent. The personhood enjoyed by corporations rests on precedent. Citing precedent and then moving on, as if law is ever finally settled or uniform in character, is lazy thinking. It’s a way to avoid mounting an argument to justify policy—in this case a policy that strikes at the very core of liberty. What matters is not bad court decisions but fundamental human rights, and none are more central to freedom than personal autonomy, embodied in the right to refuse to take a pharmaceutical agent or undergo surgery. It’s your body. You can refuse medical treatment. It’s your decision in a free society.

Vaccination does not treat disease. The COVID-19 vaccines don’t even confer immunity (see The Official Vaccine Narrative Completely Falls Apart). SARS-CoV-2 is not an unusually pathological disease. Coronavirus is not small pox. Sterilization programs were also not for the treatment for disease. As do vaccine advocates, sterilization advocates claimed the practice prevented diseases, social diseases such as alcoholism, criminality, mental retardation, and physical deformity. These interventions—sterilization and vaccines—are not for the sake of the persons targets by the mandate. Sterilization and vaccines are part of the logic of extreme social engineering. It’s not about public health. It’s about power and control. And, in the case of vaccines, it’s about profits.

Jacobson is the legal precedent for both. Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.

Following up on my last blog post Rationalizing the Border Crisis with Hysteria, Lies, and Smears, The Guardian is trying to give the attack on Tucker Carlson legs (see also The “Great Replacement” as Antiracist Propaganda). Martin Pengelly writes, “Claiming the Biden administration was trying ‘to change the racial mix of the country,’ Carlson said: ‘In political terms, this policy is called “the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” Carlson is speaking frankly about the progressive project. “They brag about it all the time,” he says, “but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.” It’s true. They do brag about it all the time.

ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, who is calling for Carlson to be fired, accuses Carlson of engaged in antisemitic and xenophobic speech. “For Tucker Carlson to spread the toxic, antisemitic and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.” But concern over the pace and purpose of mass immigration is not xenophobic. Nor is recognizing the problem of multiculturalism xenophobic. Not all cultures are adequate for maximal human development. Moreover, what makes criticisms of mss immigration “antisemitic”? This is an attempt to attribute to Carlson a paranoid belief held by a small minority of people that Jews are orchestrating multiculturalism. What evidence is there that Carlson is to be counted among this minority?

Carlson’s response is on-point. “The ADL?” Carlson said. “Fuck them.” The ADL, he said, “was a noble organization that had a very specific goal, which was to fight antisemitism, and that’s a virtuous goal. They were pretty successful over the years. Now it’s operated by a guy who’s just an apparatchik of the Democratic party.” He continued: “It’s very corrosive for someone to take the residual moral weight of an organization that he inherited and use it for party.” Carlson is refusing to accept that the progressive worldview about immigration is coextensive with the correct moral position on immigration. He rightly points out that “the great replacement theory is, in fact, not a theory. It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president.” That the point that the progressive establishment is desperate to obscure. The President of the United States himself is celebrating the fact that, if the pace of immigration continues, white people will be an “absolute minority” in the United States. The question for Biden and progressives is why are they so giddy about this? What explains the loathing of the white majority?

In the clip Carlson plays, which I emphasized in my previous post, then vice-president Biden says: “An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who were Caucasian, of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50 percent of the people in America from then and on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s as a source of our strength.” This has not come to pass, but clearly Biden was anticipating it with a joy he could hardly contain. Carlson wondered in his monologue, “An unrelenting stream of immigration. But why? Well, Joe Biden just said it, to change the racial mix of the country[, to] dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.” Carlson noted, “This is the language of eugenics.”

Who pushed eugenics to begin with? The history here is not ambiguous. Eugenics and demographic steering are the offspring of the progressive movement (see Biden’s Biofascist Regime for background). It took a massive populist movement to stop mass immigration the first time, a proletarian movement that establishment historians have ever since tried to portrayed a nativist and racist (see Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class). “[I]n one sentence,” Carlson says, “it’s this: ‘Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that. We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us.’ So there isn’t actually inherently a racial component to it, and it’s nothing to do with antisemitism.”

As I have shown on this blog, for more than a century, progressives have aggressively pushed immigration policy to change the demography and culture of America. The goal was clear back then, as I have documented in several posts on Freedom and Reason (here are three posts laying out the argument and the facts: The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism; The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate; Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility).

Because of the profound shallowness of political understanding on the left, I have to state what should be the obvious: my argument is not a rightwing argument. It’s pro-working class. Carlson is indeed a conservative. But I’m a socialist (see Marxian Nationalism and the Globalist Threat). Despite our distinct political world-views, we both get what’s going on because we have a populist outlook. In contrast, progressivism is corporate state ideology. Multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, as they used to call it, is an ideological component in denationalization politics (see The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate). This all part of the transnational project to incorporate the proletariat of the West into a global socioeconomic order. Mass immigration since the 1960s is part of the managed decline of the American republic and, more broadly, the West (The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism). The power elite don’t want people talking about this, so they try to cancel them.

As I am sure readers are aware by now, there’s a crisis at the border. When immigrants stormed the border under Trump, the chaos was blamed entirely on Trump. He was responsible for any excesses, whether it was actions of Border Patrol or citizen intervention (see Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps. Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum; Law Enforcement and Family Separation. The Rhetorical Function of Family Separation and Family Reunification; Ocasio-Cortez and the Powers of Expectation and Identity). Border patrol under Biden confronts immigrants storming the border, some of the officers on horseback, and the media misrepresents their actions, even falsely accusing them of using whips against Haitian immigrants, while trying to distance Biden from the consequences of his invitation to immigrants to come to America (see Joe Biden and the Ultimate Source of Our Strength: “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop”). Biden is now promising disciplinary action against the officers defending the border. Border Patrol are no longer Trump’s “brownshirts,” but racist officers off the chain. The Biden regime has now put officers as a disadvantage by denying them the use of horses.

Border patrol pics were 'misconstrued' as whipping, photographer says https://t.co/SPg4nyK4Xn pic.twitter.com/Vvuj7Itsb6

— New York Post (@nypost) September 24, 2021

Desperate to stop awareness of the problem of illegal immigration, the power elite continue the moral panic about white supremacy, an nearly nonexistent phenomenon in modern democratic societies. One voice of reason with whom they are particularly obsessed is popular Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. The Daily Beast is reporting that the Anti-Defamation League is once again calling for Carlson’s firing for going “all-in” on the “racist” “Great Replacement” theory. I blogged about this back in April when the ADL was calling for Carlson’s head (see The “Great Replacement” as Antiracist Propaganda). In that post I told readers about the underlying premise underpinning smears of racism and white nationalism: “Those who promote mass immigration and multiculturalism make culture about race in order to marginalize and silence those who favor rational immigration policies, as well as assimilation and integration.”

Elites keep trying, but this dog ain’t hunting. People are waking up to the fact that culture and race are not the same thing (see why here: Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Criticism of Culture is Not Racism; Racisms: Terminological Inflation for Ideological Ends). Ironically, it’s the people who insist they are who are helping unwind the conflation. Folks are also starting to see that the constant attack on nationalism is part of the globalist strategy to undermine democratic republics and their liberal freedoms (see The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism).

The problem with immigration, besides the fact that it a business strategy to super-exploit cheap foreign labor and drive down wages for the rest of the working class, as well as increase the size of the industrial reserve (see Bernie Sanders, Immigration, and Progressivism; The Koch Brothers and the Building of a Grassroots Coalition to Advance Open Borders; Quoting Reagan on Immigration; on and Economics), is that human beings are culture bearers (Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration). It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with norms, values, and socialization. Drawing immigrants from maximally different places has political advantages, not least of which is to fracture the working class by disorganizing the national culture.

Carlson doesn’t care what color people are. This isn’t a white nationalist argument. Tucker is concerned about the racist motive behind the push for mass immigration, which is to reduce the number of those of European ancestry. Tucker is not inferring goal from policy. It’s not an interpretation. In the video I shared, you will hear Biden himself say it. Biden is celebrating the prospect of “Caucasians”—this is the racist term Biden uses—becoming an “absolute minority” in the United States. Biden is saying that fewer white people is a good thing. That would be like leaders in Japan inviting in large numbers of people from the Third World because there are too many Japanese in Japan. What’s wrong with the Japanese? What’s wrong with Americans? Imagine saying that there are too many “Negroes” in the United States so we need more European migrants. Sounds racist. The so-called antiracists are advancing a racist project, and if those who are the target of the project complain, then they are the racists. Whites are supposed to agree that they’re the problem and participate in the project to shrink their proportion United States. Carlson isn’t wrong—this is eugenics.

Tucker is concerned about assimilation. As many people are. As am I (see The Need for Limits; The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate; Observations from Sweden). The United States cannot properly assimilate newcomers at this pace. And we should be selective in who we allow into the country. The media wants to smear Carlson to shut him up and in doing so smear everybody who agrees with him (Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class). Understand what this tactics is all about. It’s about canceling and silencing those who oppose denationalization and the managed decline of democratic republics and all the liberties and rights that come with them (see The Attempt to Gaslight America Over Open Borders; Physical Capital, Human Capital, Technology, and Productive Work—These Drive the Real Economy).

As many readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have been a college teacher for more than a quarter of a century. I teach critical race theory in my law and society classes. CRT is one of the major perspectives in legal studies. I agree that it is important students learn about it—in college. Mostly so they can crush it in debate. It is a deeply flawed standpoint. For this reason, CRT should not be taught in k-12 (Are Teachers Really all in on Critical Race Theory? Maegan Vazquez Defends Racially Divisive Curriculum). Immature minds (and a lot of mature minds, as well) have trouble telling the difference between fantasy and reality. As rebellious as some children are, many more of them will believe what their teachers tell them.

In this post, I will explain what critical race theory is and identify its outstanding errors. I will show that it is fraught with major logical problems, manufactures false abstractions, presents with a quasi-religious character, and ultimately constitutes a racist standpoint. Critical race theory is ideology. Its goal is to keep alive race antagonism in post-racist society. If CRT has its way with America much longer, we won’t live in a post-racist society anymore. The corporate class and technocratic apparatus have embraced the standpoint because it is functional to these ends: the imperative of reproducing the political and ideological division necessary for disorganizing the proletariat and perpetuating bourgeois hegemony.

* * *

On May 4, 2019, in Committing the Crime it Condemns, I penned the following:

“When I was in graduate school, I was seduced by Critical Race Theory, or CRT. CRT incorporates into its analysis of law critical theory, a set of ideas drawn from the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, and the humanities, in particular art and literary criticism. Critical theory is a product of the cultural turn in Marxist thought by [German] scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. However, critical theory was warped by the [French] postmodern turn in the academy, that is the social constructionism of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking devolving to a radical relativism denying the existence of a single reality. Postmodernism functions as a carnival mirror, warping Marxist insight by reducing ontology to the supposed collective consciousness or should-be consciousness of social position (actually the multiplicity of social positions intersecting in a person), thus rejecting the premise of a universal reality and fracturing the truth with the blunt ideology of epistemic relativism. At the same time, postmodernism asserts that knowledge exists in a matrix of power that allows some knowledge forms to dominate others. Thus the claim to a universal method of interpretation, i.e. science, is a reflection of the power asymmetries. Science [in this view] is dominant ideology. Truth claims can therefore have no real external verification for there is no common method with which to evaluate them—except the claim that all knowledge and thus our lives represent a projection of position and power.”

The outlines of what would become critical race theory could be detected in the mid-1970s in the writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of intersectional feminism, as well as those by Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, and other, mostly Afrocentric, legal scholars. The original goal was to identify structures that might explain why black Americans as-a-group continue to trail white Americans as-a-group in every significant social category of life chances. The explanation avoids attributing these problems to black folk (apart from the collaborators among them), placing the burden of racial inequality squarely on the shoulders of all white Americans, even the children, despite the fact that most whites do not control the forces that generate inequality generally (i.e., the capitalist economy) and no living American had a thing to do with slavery.

A major influence on this early work was critical legal studies (CLS), a leftwing legal movement emerging from legal realism, a tradition that criticized legal formalism and leaned on social science for argument and evidence. CLS was given voice by such legal scholars as Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, and Roberto Unger. Kennedy and Klare write in a 1984 Yale Law Journal article that critical legal studies is “concerned with the relationship of legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society.” It has been claimed, for example by Alan Hunt, writing in the pages of the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, that CLS is “the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective.” This is not true, however, as German exiles Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer had developed a Marxist critique of the law decades earlier, an important fact to note since CRT adapts CLS to generate an approach that is distinctly contrary to Marxian thought, contradicting assertions made by both conservatives and progressives that CRT is neo-Marxist. (For a good review of CLS, see Jonathan Turley’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to CLS, Unger, and Deep Thought,” published in a 1987 issue of the Northwestern University Law Review.)

By the end of the 1980s, after a decade of stewing in a pot of critical legal studies, postmodernism, and other ingredients, CRT coalesced into a movement that teaches that the system of justice that grew out of European-style jurisprudence—civil rights, due process, individual responsibility, legal innocence, rational adjudication of facts, the state’s burden—amounts to a “perpetrator’s perspective.” The perpetrator’s perspective reflects the ideology of white supremacy, an oppressive force disguised by a rhetoric of neutrality, or “colorblindness.” For this standpoint, the ethic of equal treatment is a stealth method for reproducing social inequality and perpetuating the racial status quo. Liberal notions of the law are racist because liberalism is a European ideology and thus a reflection of white culture, which is racist (for a counterpoint, see The Myth of White Culture). Justice rooted in racism is no justice at all; a system designed to secure a racist order is incapable of rooting out racism. So critical race theorists advocate displacing the perpetrator’s perspective with the “victim’s perspective,” an “antiracist” standpoint that represents racial disparities as prima facia evidence of systemic racism, that is a truth that need no adjudication. The system is responsible, and since this is true, any apparent progress within its parameters is merely a reconfiguring of things to preserve and deepen the system. This assumes that, objectively, all blacks have the same interests. They either identify with the struggle or they are traitors to it—or, charitably, they need to be made aware. Thus, those who speak for the black community do so by presumptive virtue of possessing awareness and the correct interpretation of things.

You might, as I do (see, e.g., Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It), object that the United States abolished the slave trade, fought a war to end slavery, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that ended legal discrimination against black people in public facilities and businesses of accommodation. You might furthermore point out that it was from the West that sentiments of equality, liberty, and rights spread across the world. The Enlightenment liberated humans from slavery the world over. From the CRT standpoint, none of that history matters in the final analysis. If over time there appears to be no evidence of white supremacy, it is only an appearance; in reality, white elites, aided by black collaborators, have plowed racism more deeply into social order. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Recenter history on the black experience, mark the start from 1619, and the “truth” follows: American history is a story about the oppression of blacks for the benefit of the white race. The system is racist sui generis. It follows that antiracism requires dismantling the system.

From the standpoint of science, the claim that racism is the cause of racial disparities requires evidence in support of the thesis. Antiracists remind us that modern methods of fact analysis are problematic on account of their origins in European civilization. Science is white supremacist. But antiracists still nonetheless feel the need to skirt empirical tests by redefining racial disparities, or more precisely inequities, as racism per se, misusing demographic differences to establish an apparent fact, the effect of which raises all blacks to the status of victims in need of restoration—and all whites as those party responsible for this state of affairs. This is the essence of social justice. CRT has other, more crude tricks. For example, if one argues that racial disparities have other causes, then that person is working from the perpetrator’s perspective and is, by definition, a racist. However vulgar, this trick has cowed a lot of people. But, as we can see in school board meetings and in state legislatures across the country, people (not a few of whom are black) have grown tired of being bullied.

Antiracist politics ask the public to disbelieve what it sees. Apologists for CRT say that it is an academic theory only taught in some law programs around the United States; it has nothing to do with what those parents are objecting to at their school board meetings (State Media Defends Critical Theory). The dishonesty of this argument is part of the character of the new racism that seeks to establish an entirely new subjectivity about race relations. The reality is that antiracism curriculum in public schools, diversity, equity, and inclusion training, workshops on microaggressions, and the like are based on the logic of CRT (see, e.g., The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs). When CRT apologists tell you that what really lies behind the critique of CRT is a racist desire to prevent the teaching of “real history,” they are asking you to forget that our public schools have been teaching “real history” for decades. I’m 59 years old, grew up in the US South, and my history classes in the 1970s were frank accounts of history (see Lies Your Teachers Tell You). Nothing that was known was hidden from us. And what students didn’t learn in school they learned almost every day on TV, which, if not exactly an accurate accounting of history, was nonetheless a history that pushed what would become the CRT line. It’s as if 1977 ABC television miniseries Roots, a celebrated miniseries that won nine Emmy awards, as well as Golden Globe and Peabody awards, its finale remaining the second-most watched in US television history, never happened.

I call the phenomenon of strategic forgetting the “Zinn effect,” after radical historian Howard Zinn. It works like this: Write a book claiming to tell the real history and, if enough authorities get behind it, it becomes possible to make a proportion of the population, especially those who work from perceived grievances, believe they were denied the truth of the past. Alex Haley worked in this tradition, even taking time to reconstruct a genealogy to distort history (his first book The Autobiography of Malcolm X was likewise a confabulation). As for Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, widely used in high school social studies curriculum, Stanford University School of Education Professor Sam Wineburg, one of the world’s premier researchers in the field of history education, puts it succinctly when he observes that Zinn’s crusade was built on “secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.” Zinn’s reclamation of our history is something akin to Charles Dawson’s Piltdown Man. Thus, one of the ways propaganda works is by making people forget what they already knew (see Orwell) or treat historical events and trends of which they are personally ignorant as something nobody knows. The propagandists tell them that a manufactured history is full of things elites don’t want them to know. The objective is to make the target of the propaganda feel historically and socially significant by being in the know and by serving justice as a change agent. The young person searching for meaning and purpose in life gets to have her civil rights moment. The strategy works all the better thanks to the rampant narcism that characterizes late capitalism (see Curtis Adam’s 2002 BBC series The Century of the Self).

Princeton’s Sean Wilentz succinctly captures the problem in a new critique of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jake Silverstein’s 1619 Project with The New York Times Magazine. “By the time I had finished the entire thing,” he writes of of the 1619 Project initial offering, “the shape and purport of the project as shaped by its editors were clear. (If every essay did not espouse the same framework, all could be assimilated to it.) Instead of trying to instruct the public about the significance of the year 1619, and hence of the foundational importance of slavery and racism to American history, the project promoted a narrow, highly ideological view of the American past, according to which white supremacy has been the nation’s core principle and chief mission ever since its founding. Everything, supposedly, that has happened since to make the United States a distinctive country is rooted in slavery and the subsequent debasement of Blacks. America has not really struggled over the meaning of its egalitarian founding principles: those principles were false from the start, hollow sentiments meant to cloak the nation’s reliance on and commitment to the subjugation of Black people – principles claimed and vindicated, to the extent they have been, by Black Americans struggling pretty much on their own. And now, thanks to The 1619 Project, that suppressed history would at last, for the first time, come to light, with the esteemed imprimatur of the New York Times.” Elsewhere he describes the writing as “historical gibberish.” “The 1619 Project’s claims were based not on historical sources,” Wilentz writes, “but on imputation and inventive mindreading.” 

There are several flaws with CRT that should have fated it to obscurity long ago. And it would have if not for corporate state power exploiting the widespread problem of irrationalism in American society, a society unique in its degree of religiosity. One such flaw is the self-sealing character of the system. Antiracism cannot be wrong because it assumes as evidence the conclusion it asserts. One is either inside the charmed circle (and knows the formulas and slogans) or one is an apostate, heretic, of infidel, depending on whether he escaped the loop, denies the loop, or was never in the loop. It is a tribal philosophy. A related flaw is its Manichaeism, or black and white thinking. As Ibram X Kendi tells it, either you’re a racist or you’re an antiracist. Also, he tells us that past discrimination warrants present discrimination. Kendi argues that determining an individual’s fate on the basis of skin color is just and right because determining an individual’s fate on the basis of skin color is unjust and wrong. That’s what reparations is all about. It rests on the premise of blood guilt, that children of today, though they did nothing wrong, must pay for what their ancestors did (see For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations).

CRT’s idealism leads advocates to falsely attribute to all white people a racial privilege. A privilege is ordinarily defined as an exclusive or special right or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. If, as a white man, it can be guaranteed to me a public restaurant free of the presence of black people, then I enjoy an exclusive right. Special rights on the grounds of race were abolished more than a century ago, but CRT needs a problem in order to pursue its “solution,” which is seeking unjust reward on a racial basis, so its advocate redefine terms to manufacture the appearance of a cause that rationalizes the goal. This is how the rhetoric moved from that of “institutional racism” to “systemic racism” after the United States dismantled racist institutions more than half a century ago (an act carried out by white people). It’s a move not unlike shifting the God concept from an entity who walks upon the earth to one that moves in mysterious ways. It is the act of forever perfecting the nonfalsifiable proposition. This move makes critical race theory akin to religious ideology. This quasi-religious character is covered by a veneer of science (which is an admission of sorts) rooted in common fallacies. CRT treats individuals, materially concrete entities, flesh-and-blood human beings, members of the same species, as personifications of racial categories, as projections of ideas, an act of reification, i.e., making an idea out to be a real thing, while treating group-level disparities, i.e., statistical abstractions, as the actual circumstances of concrete persons. CRT thus commits two fallacies: (1) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, i.e., treating abstractions as if they are real things, and (2) the ecological fallacy, i.e., drawing conclusions about individuals from group-level statistics. (See The Problem of Critical Race Theory in Epidemiology: An Illustration.)

But critical race theory is something else, too. The logic of racism operates in the same way. For the white supremacist, all black individuals are personifications of the black race. For example, since blacks are much more likely to be involved in violent criminal offending (and not because police are more likely to enforce the law with respect to black offenders), it must be in the nature of blacks to be violent criminal offenders. The white supremacist thus judges each and every black person based on a perception he has about blacks as a group. Stereotyping is the common word for something approximating the ecological fallacy. The fact is that most blacks don’t engage in violent criminal actions, so the attribution of crime to black individuals is an error. Moreover, most whites don’t engage in oppressive action directed against black people. Nor are they engaged in exploiting black labor for personal gain. Most whites are, therefore, not racist. But, like white supremacy, critical race theory is.

Conservatives tell us that critical race theory is a neo-Marxist standpoint, that it was invented to keep the Marxist project going under a different guise. Why did Marxists do this? Because the class argument failed to take hold popularly, the proletarian revolution never occurred, and so race and other identities have been substituted. A lot of progressives believe this, too. The dispute becomes ideological on the popular partisan political terrain. But both sides are wrong. CRT is not Marxist. It is Hegelian (for reference, see Historical Materialism and the Struggle For Freedom; A Humanist Take on Marx’s Irreligious Criticism; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; Preaching What You Practice: Doing the Race Hustle in the Name of Marx). CRT is thus a form of idealism, treating abstractions as real things and concrete things as mere personifications of abstractions. The standpoint is profoundly unscientific. CRT presents its conceptual architecture as as a reality that subsumes under the power of its logic everything. Like Hegel, it gets things upside down.