freedom and reason

I realize a lot of people disagree with me on my rejection of the systemic racism thesis. My rejection of the thesis (which is based on evidence and logic) is not the main reason I oppose teaching critical race theory to children. My objection there is not that it is wrong but that it is taught as if it were the truth. It is wrong to lie to children. So while I teach critical theory in my law courses, I do not teach it as gospel. However, opposition among conservatives to the teaching of critical theory is formed on the basis of a correct understanding of race relations in contemporary United States. I suspect that one of the reasons so much energy is spent mocking and ridiculing conservatives is the need to poison the well on this issue.

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll is out indicating an association between support for critical race theory being taught in public school and belief in the notion of systemic racism, with conservative respondents skeptical of the existence of the phenomenon and therefore less likely to support the public instruction of critical race theory. (See Are Teachers Really all in on Critical Race Theory?) Critical race theory, boiled down, is an academic theory developed in law school rooted in the assumption that racism is embedded in the US legal system and American institutions. (See Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning. Also State Media Defends Critical Theory.)

One might look at American history and note that the system of de jure (that is legal) racism was dismantled more than half a century ago and wonder what the claim that racism is embedded in the legal system could mean. The response to incredulity is that racism is axiomatic and that, therefore, the absence of a race-conscious legal system and of race-conscious institutions and policies is the manifestation systemic racist. In other words, colorblindness, equal treatment, race-neutrality, etc., equals racism. The response is similar to the response I get when I ask a believer how he can believe in God when there is no evidence for God’s existence. The believer responds, “Just look around you. God is everywhere.” I have also been told that the greatest trick the Devil ever played is telling me that God is not real.

It’s a cute trick that I confess falling for at first. Not the God thing. The systemic racism thing. But the God thing compelled me to ask about evidence for the systemic racism thing. I have tried to live my life beyond faith-belief. It’s why I became a scientist. So I took a look and, to be sure, the facts indicate that blacks trail whites in every significant social category. Putting this in sociological terms, life chances for whites are on average better than they are for blacks. Whites as a group enjoy better health care outcomes and longer lives, higher levels of educational attainment, greater labor force participation rates, higher salaries and wages, nicer homes, less criminality and violence, and their children are more likely to live in two-parent homes. These and other group disparities are often cited in defending the claim that whites enjoy a racial privilege.

However, the distribution of situations and life chances internal to respective racial categories are more variable than average differences between groups on these factors and, moreover, whereas variability concerns individuals, statistical averages are abstractions. I can see, for example, that there are many more poor whites than blacks (three times more), whereas a greater percentage of blacks are poor relative to demographic proportion (see They Do You This Way). I agree that statistical aggregates are useful in predicting other statistical aggregates. But to draw assumptions about individuals based on abstractions commits both the ecological fallacy and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (or reification). Even at the level of statistical abstraction, group disparities do not explain those facts. Unexplained variance is just that.

Social facts accepted, the western system of jurisprudence developed in the context of adjudicating disputes between actually-existing individuals and formal groups. Put another way, the common law developed to deal with the matters of concrete fact not statistical abstraction. Moreover, the burden of proof rests with the accusers, while the accused is presumed innocent. The court does not accept prima facie an accusation as correct until proven otherwise. This gets the burden wrong. First impressions are often incorrect or inaccurate. A disparity is not proof of an injustice. Effects are not their causes. Any claim made about causal forces must identify and specify them and show empirically that the outcomes in question result from them while ruling out other causes. The foundation of the democratic republic is secular and supernatural claims are walled off for this reason. Yet the advocates of critical race theory ask us to substitute for the absence of evidence for systemic racism in law and institution results of unidentified or unspecified processes that lie beyond the law.

After overcoming the false belief of systemic racism, I wondered why conservatives are immune to the fallacious manner of thinking that propels the myth of systemic racism and white privilege even while they admit that personal prejudice and discrimination exist and are wrong. Here’s what I think is going on.

A thought-stopping mechanisms was put in me from a very young age wherein, if I were to blame individuals for their situation, I would find myself blaming the victim if the individuals in question were black and feel ashamed. Asians and Jews, two groups who have historically suffered remarkable levels of racism (or, in the case of Jews, at least something very much like it), overcame their situation in the United States through the ethic of hard work. Asians and Jews emphasize the importance of family, community, initiative, and responsibility. One can say this in the present of progressives without much controversy if certain comparisons are not made. One may not ask the same questions about the disparities between blacks and whites.

One may note the failures and pathologies of whites. Did they have babies too young and too often? Is the father involved? Does the parent surprise and discipline her child? Does she emphasize educational achievement? Does she drink and drug? To be sure, there are other reasons why there are poor white people. Corporations shipped the factories overseas. Politicians opened the border to mass immigration. But the point is that we’re allowed to include everything in the analysis. For sure, we may not claim that the situation of poor whites is the result of systemic racism. 

A conservative will tell you that everything I above identified played some role in creating and perpetuating white poverty. Globalization has made life difficult for the white working class. But members of that class have also often made life difficult for themselves. Not all poor white people were always or will always remain poor. That tells you a lot. Some change their lives for the better and they would take offense at the suggestion that they played no role in overcoming their circumstances. However, unlike the progressive, the conservative will also consider all these same possibilities with respect to the situation of a black person. He is open to explanations that rest on class and economics. But he is also open to cultural explanations. Too many children born out of wedlock? Fathers involved? Children supervised and disciplined?

The progressive cannot be open to cultural explanations with respect to blacks because he believes that to do so makes a man a racist. To be a good men, he must be the opposite of a racist. He must be the antithesis—the antiracist. The antiracist assumes group disparities, where those groups are differentiated by racial identity, are the result of injustices visited upon all members of the victim group. He has a priori excluded from all possible explanations the role of attitudes and behavior among those judged victims of circumstance. The progressive is still allowed to use the cultural explanation for groups not judged victims. He has no problem condemning the backward and ignorant whites who vote Republican and complain about critical race theory at meetings of their local school boards. In this instance, what a conservative believes is what explained his behavior. The white murderer chooses to pick up a gun and murder his victim. The black murderer kills because white supremacy put a gun in his hand.

Progressives believe in critical race theory being taught in public schools because they believe in a thing without evidence, indeed, a belief that flies in the face of the evidence, as well as defies logic because evidence and logic do not apply to faith-belief. Faith-belief is stood up on ideological ground. They also believe in teaching CRT to children because this makes them an antiracist and therefore a good person. In contrast, conservatives are immune from belief in systemic racism not because they are racist or bad people but because they neither reflexively nor selectively disallow cultural explanations for the outcomes progressives accept as prima facie evidence of systemic racism. Progressives want you to believe conservatives are backwards and ignorant. But, at least on this matter, they are thinking for themselves.

I am wondering if anybody can help me understand something. I am having trouble understanding why, if it is wrong to discipline or punish people for not adhering to religious beliefs others hold, for failing or refusing to take up a given religion’s doctrinal language, how can it be okay to discipline or punish people for not adhering to doctrinal language of critical race and gender theories? If I cannot be forced to believe in angels (or to not believe in angels), how can I be forced to believe that all whites enjoy racial privilege or that sex is not a biological reality or that 2+2=5 or that there are only four lights no matter how many lights they want me to see? Why is it not immediately grasped as the nightmare par excellence the act of forcing somebody to deny what they see before their eyes or know to be true or to believe something they neither see nor know? Or is the greater nightmare that some people find comfort and safety there?

When an employer requires an employee to attend a diversity workshop where he will be instructed to speak in a particular way and accept as true and good (or at least pretend that he has accepted some thing as true and good) things based on one theory among many about race or gender, why is that any different than requiring that employee to attend Bible studies and expect him to accept Jesus into his life? Doesn’t the Constitution protect individuals from having to accept the beliefs other people think are good and proper? Are we not as citizens of a constitutional republic based on Enlightenment principles of free thought and conscience with a bill of rights securing these protected from forced association and assembly and compelled speech around religion and political ideology? Critical race and gender theories are at least political (I argue they’re religious given references to impossible or at least supernatural things, but the status political is good enough).

A society that punishes people for words is a society that compels people to exist in bad faith. I am all for persuading people to take up or leave behind positions based on evidence and reason. I would be an unethical person if I were satisfied that others agreed with me because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings or because they were scared of what would happen to them if they didn’t. Imagine we live in a fascist society (we’re on our way). I am sure many of those reading this would be compelled by fear to participate in the indoctrination sessions necessary to bring the population around to the fascist point of view. Winston and Picard were stubborn men. Then again, they were fictional men. Can we regard those who live under fascism a free people? Can we regard any man who must believe and speak an ideology free? Wouldn’t an objective condition of freedom necessarily be that a man is never forced into the delusions of others?

If you want to understand why it is so important to religious or, more broadly, ideological zealots that you believe as they do, you must grasp this—that many of the things the zealot believes (or pretends he believes) exist only because he believes they exist. If too many people stop believing in them, the phantoms of his beliefs lose light and power. Skeptics are trouble. Apostates, heretics, and infidels. If the phantoms dim or evaporate, then that means the zealot loses you. But he wants you to live in his world so he can control you. He wants this so bad that he feels he needs it. If he didn’t want to control you, if he didn’t need to control you, then he would leave you alone. However, if he commands societal power, then he can make you live in his world. What’s wrong with him?

Remember Tinker Bell from Peter Pan? Remember how when her light is going out Peter Pan turns to the audience and in a dramatic display of emotional blackmail exhorts them to chant, “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!” Millions of children have over the century been coerced by parents and peers to chant along with him, “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!” Doesn’t that give the away the game? Isn’t Pan telling us that Tinker Bell only exists because you believe in her? How horrible it would be to let her light go out. What’s wrong with you?

Pan (actually playwright J. M. Barrie) is telling us something essential. He is telling us that the fantasies of other people depend on our assisting them in upholding their voracity. When people tell us to affirm with them that some thing they believe is true, they are telling us that they aren’t sure it is, or that other people have doubted it, and they need us to help convince them and others that their delusions are not delusions, but that they are real. They need an “Amen.” Can I hear an “Amen”? The desire to compel other people to uphold one’s delusions is often unthinking, habitual, reflexive, sometimes even required. But sometimes it indicates a psychiatric disorder. And sometimes people who are mentally ill don’t want therapy. They want the rest of the world to join them in their madness.

In a revision to Barrie’s play, the invention of “fairy dust” was introduced. The fairy dust was necessary for the Wendy and her siblings to fly. Before, they could just fly without any special sauce. They could fly because they believed they could fly. But too many real-world children were jumping from beds and windows in an attempt to get to Neverland and its never-ending adventures. Some were badly injured. Without fairy dust, they were grounded. Sadly, it took a fiction to negate a fiction. Of course, they were children. What did they know?

I am 59 years old. I lived through the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the rest of it. I went to middle and high school in the 1970s (these schools were racially integrated, for the record). This was in the South, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, right down the road from the Stones River National Battlefield. In that environment, I learned all about the history of colonization, genocide, slavery, and racism. I also learned about how the United States abolished the slave trade, fought a war to end slavery, and then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended legal discrimination against black people in public facilities and businesses of accommodation. I learned about these things from my teachers and my textbooks and television shows. In 1977, the nation watched the miniseries based on Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots.

Radical historian Howard Zinn’s intervention in A People’s History of the United States was not written to correct the “lies my teachers told me” (to riff off the title of a similar book by sociologist James Loewen), but to pump ideology into a system of progressive indoctrination. This style of conveying history tells folks what most Americans have long known as if it’s news. It’s a method of orchestrated forgetting and manufactured discovery. It makes the myth-maker appear as truth-teller. Alongside revisionism (what Zinn calls the other side of history), the progressive teacher prepares her student to hear the good stuff—if they hear it at all—as an exercise in bad faith.

Students come into my college classroom fresh out of high school recounting the horrors of America. A minority of conservative students sit, most of them, quietly, either having learned the futility of protest or self-censored by the harassment they have endured. The hip kids seem to be unaware that all that bad stuff they talk about no longer exists and hasn’t for a very long time. There is no progress in the history they learned. The arc of history was never bent because it was waiting for them to bend it. They are a special generation with special insight and a purpose. They have this peculiar quasi-religious/racialist way of thinking where timeless evil passes through our genes and they are its chosen exorcist. Rare is the teacher who fails to take up the progressive scriptures that prompt the congregation to say their “Amens.” Cancel culture works primarily by chilling the environment.

Why are historians and sociologists trying to make the younger generations think that nobody talked about this stuff until progressives came along and spoke truth to power? Why are teachers, administrators, and pundits acting as if critical race theory is merely the “accurate and honest teaching” of American history? (Have you see these memes?) It is acting. They know it’s not true. That’s why the schools hid the curriculum from parents for all these years, a deceit waiting to be exposed by the lockdowns that forced children to work from home (an unintended consequence, I assure you). Teachers and administrators warned the staff to be careful what they said online in case a parent happened to be walking by or wanted to involve herself in her daughter’s education. Teachers are taught to organize their lectures according to an Orwellian newspeak, the jargon of critical theory. It’s code. The deep assumptions, that all cultures are equal and no cultures are bad except Western culture, which is the expression of white settler colonialism, are smuggled in such concepts as “cultural relativism,” “cultural pluralism,” and “white privilege.” Opposition to the racist indoctrination of our youth is portrayed as the work of backwards gun-totting mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers trying to keep people in the dark about American history.

But who’s trying to keep people in the dark really? I have a PhD in sociology and hold tenure at a woke public university teaching in a program called Democracy and Justice Studies. I have been teaching college for more than a quarter of a century and have been a student for much longer. I’m an insider, educated during the moment when postmodernist epistemology was pressed into the social science curriculum. The agenda of the progressive left, which is to advance the interests of transnational corporate power, depends on those coming up looking at America and the West with disgust. Graduate students are trained to teach your children a history of Western civilization that makes their history and culture appear as awful as possible. Teachers learn to accomplish this by pretending as if the “real history” was never told and that the academic is the courageous light-bearer. That makes them mighty special. But the real history has been told. The adults in the room all know it.

The deception is rather obvious if you step back a bit. By pretending as if “real history” is concealed, progressive educators mean to indicate the presence of rightwing conspiracy to falsely portray America and the West as something about which citizens should be proud and eager to preserve. Chauvinism, nationalism, patriotism, and populism are very bad things. This ruse makes progressives—those who seek to deconstruct the nation-state, democratic-republic sympathies, and liberal freedoms and rights in order to clear the way for the entrenchment of corporate bureaucratic command and control—appear as brave and honest. They are the good people. They mean well. They seek justice. The work to straighten a crooked universe.

Slavery is shocking, to be sure. But this truth is so well understood that I hardly need to tell you why. You know why. You learned about it in school. However, when one learns that it was America that ended the slave trade almost two hundred years ago, and that only a few decades later sacrificed more than three-quarters of a million men to abolish chattel slavery itself (a system that existed in only one part of the country), that’s not very useful for those who for economic and political-ideological purposes need Americans to believe America is an awful country and for white people to apologize for things for which they feel guilty but couldn’t possibly have done. By orchestrating a forgetting of history by manufacturing the illusion of a fixed and eternal past that shines the worst possible light on white people, especially men (since, after all, white men have done a lot of good stuff—and no only for themselves), the propagandist makes the horrors of the past feel present and acute, offer the audience a corrupted world and polluting people in need of purification and redemption. He constructs quasi-religious myths as “white privilege” and “intergenerational trauma” and then proffers progressive doctrine as salvation.

What is being foisted on children is not history. It’s ideology. A new religion backed by corporate power. Parents are objecting not because they are trying to stop the truth from being told. They are objecting because they know lies are being told. They sense that a cult is trying to get their children, disrupt their common sense, and turn them against their families. Corporations have not only captured regulatory agencies. They’ve captured the public education system—k-12, the technical and community colleges, and the universities. And they’ve put to work advancing the agenda and legitimizing woke public education the media and culture industry they already own and control. Antiracism is corporate propaganda. It’s divide-and-conquer masquerading as “social justice.”

Earlier I wrote that they know what they’re doing. That was a bit of hyperbole. There are some elites so bubblized they actually believe the propaganda. They appear sincere on account of it. But many of them believe that you’re so stupid that you won’t see what going on. You ought to hear the way they talk about you. Sometimes they say the quiet parts out loud. You’ve heard it. But it’s the atmosphere inside the bubble. When you’re not so stupid (which is very often and also sooner or later), they try to cow you by smearing you as “racist” and “xenophobe.” They’re trying to shut you up and shut down your protesting because they mean to transform this nation from something they loath and despise into something you can’t love or cherish. Recrimination is an effective strategy. It worked to some extent on me. That and the atmosphere. I required some deprogramming. We are, after all, the ones who should be the most deeply indoctrinated.

I should have awakened to this in the 1990s. During my training as a graduate student I showed students in introductory sociology the film Manufacturing Consent, a 1992 documentary based on the 1988 book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky of the same name. In the film, Chomsky, a linguist at MIT, is asked about the claim he and Herman make in the book that “it’s the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector.” “What are those interests?” asks the interviewer.

CHOMSKY: Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first place to look is who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society—decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on—are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They’re the ones who own the media and they’re the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. You know, what’s done in the society. Within the economic system, by law and in principle, they dominate. The control over resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and on the ideological system.

Chomsky is then asked, “When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?”

CHOMSKY: To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there’s two targets for propaganda. One is what’s sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life—either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They’re supposed to vote, they’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything — and they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.

For years, I didn’t internalize the truth of these observations—even though I knew as a student of Marx and Mills that they are true—until I left graduate school in 2000 and embarked on a journey of self-criticism. It dawned on me one day that Chomsky was talking about me. He was describing the world as apprehended by the methods of scientific materialism, only I forgot to put myself in that world and know myself in relation to it. I misheard my calling.

Think about these facts: The people of the United States abolished the slave trade, fought a war to end slavery, recognized the right of black people to participate in the political and cultural life of their country, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended legal discrimination against black people in public facilities and businesses of public accommodation. The people of the United States recognized the right of women to participate in political and cultural life, to control their bodies, and of gays and lesbians to marry. And even though progressives want to take these rights from you, this is a country where you can still speak your mind and peaceably assemble with others to collectively voice your common grievances.

This is not an oppressive society. But the left wants to turn it into one. Don’t be a spectator to a world on the tracks to totalitarianism. You are riding on that world. What is Howard Zinn’s clever turn of phrase? “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Indeed. Let’s turn that clever phrase back on radical historian’s project.

Violent crime is on the rise. The most recent upward trend started with the lockdown and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The FBI will soon be reporting numbers from 2020 in its Uniform Crime Report. I want to prepare readers for that report by presenting a trend line historical data on violent criminal offenses from the government’s Crime Data Explorer. The media reports that violent crime is rising after a several decades of decline. This is true. We don’t see it yet on the chart, but we can see the past. See the chart below. The long-term downward trend in violent crime is truly historic, falling from a peak exceeding 750 offenses per 100,000, to a low of nearly 360 per 100,000 by 2014. The way the CDE constructs the chart downplays the magnitude of the decline. Violent crime was cut by more than half between the early 1990s and 2014.

What changed in 2014? Ferguson, Missouri. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown in self-defense. Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was violently assaulting him. What we see after the shooting of Brown, pushed out in outrage by the fabrication of what is known as the “Hands Up” myth, has come to know known as the “Ferguson Effect.” Heather Mac Donald analyzes the Ferguson Effect in her book The War on Cops, published in 2016 (see Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect; The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter). Her work would be followed by a spate of peer-reviewed empirical studies confirming her claim that there is no systemic racism in police shootings (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters).

The nation enjoyed a return to the downward trend in violent crime during the Trump presidency, as the job market improved, especially for those minorities overrepresented in serious crime, and illegal immigration was sharply restricted. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the establishment leveraged the pandemic and racial unrest (which it had prepared) to advance its color revolution and drive the populist president from office. (See Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs; The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous. More on this in the second section of today’s entry.) See the chart below for the period covering the Obama and Trump’s presidencies.

What explains the decline in violent crime before “Hands Up” and BLM? It is explicable primarily by the vast expansion of the criminal justice apparatus during the 1990s—more cops, tougher courts, and longer prison sentences. I want to remind readers that I have for many years been highly critical of the approach the progressives took to dealing with criminal violence. (Folks bristle when I describe the New Democrats as “progressives,” but I remind them that the “third way” policies pursued by the Democratic Leadership Council were in fact developed by the Progressive Policy Institute.) The anti-crime measures that became law under Clinton, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, building upon the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s, represented the largest and most expansive crime bill in the nation’s history. (See The Neoliberal Approach to Criminal Justice and Trump’s First Step Act; Joseph Biden, Mass-Incarcerator-in-Chief and Other Accomplishments)

I would rather not see an expansion of the criminal justice apparatus and the shift to crime control because of its effects on working class people, especially black and brown civilians. However, I no longer make my criticisms on the grounds of systemic racism. As I have blogged about a lot lately, there is no evidence of that, and, without evidence, an objective person cannot continue claiming that the criminal justice apparatus, is in any significant degree, designed to be racially oppressive (see, for example, The Myth of the Racist Criminal Justice System). I have confessed that my early thesis of racial caste effects in this period, advanced in my graduate work, does not hold up. (Thankfully, I never published my dissertation, even though it was in line with academic consensus then. That said, here is the most workable version of my original argument stripped of its critical race theory elements: Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.)

My criticism of progressives opting for a criminal justice response in place of a populist national economic strategy that aggressively pursues public infrastructure investments, reshores manufacturing, and restricts immigration continues. But this critique must recognize that globalization is the established project and it forces us to choose between less-than-optimal options. Globalization will require a populist-nationalist revolt to turn things around. In the meantime, working people need protection from the criminogenic results of globalization of production (offshoring and mass immigration) and the progressive idling of black Americans in disorganized inner-city urban areas. The antiracist racist tactics of delegitimizing policing and depolicing crime-ridden neighborhoods explains the rise in crime in Obama’s second term and the current crime wave, because it takes the handcuffs off of the criminogenic conditions of late capitalism. In light of this, the best option is to resist weakening of the criminal justice apparatus.

* * *

According to the CDC, “COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. Older adults and people who have severe underlying medical conditions like heart or lung disease or diabetes seem to be at higher risk for developing more serious complications from COVID-19 illness.” For this, the elites and the experts wrecked the world (see A Moral Panic. A Year Later). At least they wrecked it for ordinary people. Silicon Valley was at the same time enriched and strengthened its grip on humanity. Just as they did in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, the corporate security state pulled a lot of things off the shelf and the state policing apparatus was pushed deep into the order of things, its social logic elaborated and entrenched. (I will be dropping soon a lengthy essay on the new fascism.)

When I suggest that the lockdown was, among other things, part of the strategy to get Trump out of office, I am told that the lockdowns were worldwide. But the inference there presumes that anti-Trump sentiment was a uniquely American affair, that there was no a global desire to get Trump out of office. The Chinese Communist Party certainly wanted Trump out of (and Biden into) office. The CCP wanted not only a trusted ally in Washington (“Dear Hitler…” or Joe Biden is the Neville Chamberlain of Our Time) but also to hide the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses, and we have just learned that researchers in Wuhan conspired with NIH officials to delete the record of the genetic sequencing of the virus early in the pandemic. Moreover, it was not only China who desired a change in the White House. Nor was Trump and the America First movement the only manifestation of populist-nationalism that needed suppressing. The European establishment have their own popular working class revolt to deal with.

On this high-tech wiping of fingerprints from the scene the crime (remember, the CCP also erased the wet market), US virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center discovered the information scrubbed from the NIH database and reconstructed it (34 sequences). In a scientific paper released Tuesday, Bloom details the contents of “a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive.” The data cast doubt on the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market. “There is no plausible scientific reason for the deletion,” writes Bloom. “It therefore seems likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.” You think? That this was a cover story was obvious from the git-go. How is it deniable now? (Yet the media is still trying.)

There is other evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic is a ruse to transform global economics and politics. A recent development gives us a compelling example. Recall that the FDA approved mRNA technology for emergency use. Crucial steps in vaccine development were suspended because of the emergency conditions. Now the Novavax vaccine is out and the early trials are impressive. It should get emergency use authorization, right? But we are told that it could be months before it appears on the market. Could it be that there is no emergency? (Take a look at the below chart and judge for yourself.) If so, then the emergency use authorizations should be terminated. Or could it be that Novavax is not mRNA technology?

Novavax data show similar efficacy against COVID-19 as mRNA (better—especially against variants) but with fewer and less severe side effects (both mRNA vaccines cause blood clotting and heart inflammation). The old technology works. It’s also a lot cheaper to make and less expensive to buy than the mRNA vaccine, which was developed from gene therapy technology. If nations switched from mRNA to Novavax, their governments would save money on vaccines, achieve better results, and spend less money compensating those injured and made sick by vaccines (which is a large and growing number). But that’s no good because Moderna and Pfizer, both market aggressive, secretive, and entangled with governmental elites, are making massive profits from the taxpayer subsidy and the consumer lure of “new and improved” technology. Big Pharma a long-term interest in replacing the old technology with the new and Moderna and Pfizer are at the forefront. As the stockbroker told us: “In devastation, there is opportunity.”

In an interview of MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term “critical race theory,” and who plays a key role in the development of “intersectionality,” explicitly informs America that critical race theory advocates simply want the law to do for freed black people what it did for the slavers. Here’s a link to the image below.

Let that sink in. What did the law do for the slavers? It allowed them to enslave black people. After that, the law allowed whites to enjoy racial privileges that denied blacks opportunities. But whites changed the law to free blacks from slavery (and died in the hundreds of thousands to achieve it—many more lost arms, eyes, and legs). And whites changed the law to end racial privileges more than half a century ago.

Crenshaw tells Reid that criticism of CRT (which the media is painting as entirely hailing from rightwing conservatives) is trying to stop the “racial reckoning.” Pay attention to language. What is a “reckoning”? According to the Oxford dictionary, it means “the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds.” That’s what your thought it meant. Crenshaw has always sought to impose a racial reckoning. This is why she formulated critical race theory those many years ago.

What have I been telling you for years now? Critical race theory is not about realizing the Enlightenment goal of radical individualism and self-government. How could it be? Antiracism not about dismantling racism. Antiracism is about flipping racism around so that whites become the subordinate caste, so that whites become a pariah. Whites are the reason blacks as a group don’t do as well as average of other minority groups. Whites control everything, and they fix things to keep blacks down. Antiracism is about the boomerang—and now the inventor of the perspective openly confesses it.

The goal of civil rights is to make the individuals of all skin colors sovereign and free from discrimination. Civil rights is about realizing fully the American Creed. The struggle against racism is about emancipating each of us from the confines of racial categories. Crenshaw says she only wants what Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted and what Frederick Douglas before King wanted. This is not true. CRT advocates believe discrimination in the past requires discrimination in the present. It seeks to replace negative discrimination with positive discrimination. It already has.

The past is history. It’s over and done. You can’t change it. My two boys aren’t responsible for what their ancestors may have done or failed to do. Whatever happened in the distant past cannot be justification for doing to people today what some did to others back then. It’s an irrational and primitive mode of justice. One might say, it’s biblical—Old Testament biblical. But reason tells us that if something is wrong one way around, it is just as wrong the other way around. Without the golden rule, there is no morality really. There is only the reckoning.

There is one truth uttered in this conversation: CRT is not Marxist. Not even close. CRT is a quasi-religious system. More than this, it is anti-working class. Long before this controversy broke, I was exposing all this on my blog Freedom and Reason. If you want to arm yourself, your friends, and your family against this insidious ideology, go back through my posts and find the arguments that reveal the darkness that lies at the core of this hateful standpoint. My goal in resurrecting Freedom and Reason was to create mutual knowledge and provide the words others may find useful in fighting against the authoritarian left.

In past blog posts about the problems with racial politics in the current moment, among other things, I have focused on the quasi religious character of demands for reparations. In “A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations” I write that “[r]eparations emanates from a mythological worldview, a religious cosmology, from fantastic precepts, where the primitive constructs of collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility dwell.” In “Reparations and Blood Guilt,” I riff on Coleman Hughes observation that the huge wealth gap between Jews and Protestants not only hardly seems to interest anybody, but if a person were to interested in the wealth gap between Jews and Protestants, then he would surely be viewed with suspicion. I ask, rhetorically of course, “Is there not at least a whiff of antisemitism when a Protestant is interested in why Jews as a group do so much better than Protestants do as a group?” Then I suggest the reader translate that the black-white problem. In “For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations,” I credit John McWhorter with the observation that antiracism rests on the construct of original sin and then criticize Ta-Nehisi Coates for pushing reparations.

In today’s blog entry I want to examine those arguments that appeal to legal principles of obligation and unjust enrichment as a justification for affirmative action and reparations, arguments that promote positive discrimination as a method for disrupting presumed patterns of white supremacy. The shorthand for these arguments is the word “equity.” The word is popping up everywhere and I wish to turn it against the antiracists. According to the Oxford Dictionary, equity is the quality of being fair and impartial. What is fair is the rub, of course. But the way equity is used by the progressive left would certainly not suggest impartiality. Quite the opposite. Advantaging or disadvantaging people on the basis of race is hardly an impartial practice. It is, indeed, discriminatory. The Cambridge Dictionary defines equity as the situation in which everyone is treated fairly and equally. But, according to progressives, treating everybody equally leads to disparate outcomes. As Hayek argued in his 1960 The Constitution of Liberty, individual freedom is a great source of inequality. So progressives want us to instead demand and equality of outcome, which of course requires partiality. So we are back there again. Merriam-Webster defines equity as freedom from bias or favoritism. Freedom from bias or favoritism suggests equal treatment. Yet progressives support affirmative action which institutionalizes the practice of racial bias.

What I will show is that, in Ptolemaic fashion, progressive legal scholars and policymakers construct a logic purporting to show that the failure to act in a biased manner is a form of systemic bias. This is the source of the claim that past discrimination justifies present discrimination lest we reproduce past discrimination into the future. It is rooted in an assumption that group disparities are the result of racial injustices and that groups are responsible to other groups for disparities. It’s not even inequalities between individuals (which comes with problems), but inequalities between groups that needs fixing. In this essay, I explore a rationalization in the service of obtaining unjust enrichment for those imagined to be unjustly impoverished.

* * *

Three major species of justice have been identified in the literature. I briefly take each in turn. Retributive justice concerns the application and administration of punishment. Distributive justice concerns appropriateness in the apportionment of burdens and benefits, addressing questions such as whether all people are entitled to the same protections under the law or whether a system of production is fair in its distribution of work and profit. Corrective justice concerns righting wrongs (not in the retributive sense) and repairing breaches caused by past, present, or future action. An example of corrective justice is reparations. Affirmative action is another example (affirmative action is really a part of a larger reparations package blacks have been receiving since the 1960s). For thorough treatment on these species of justice, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice.

In one sense, justice, according to University of Oklahoma philosophy professor Edward Sankowski, writing for The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “is identical with the ethics of who should receive benefits and burdens, good or bad things of many sorts, given that others might receive these things.” This is distributive justice. Its standard formulation in Western civilization is thus: “A liberal political conception of justice will ascribe to all citizens familiar individual rights and liberties, such as rights of free expression, liberty of conscience, and free choice of occupation.” This formulation, according to Sankowski, assumes “sufficient means to make use of their basic liberties,” to which, he notes, “excessive inequalities of wealth and power” stifle access. I agree, and, as I argued in the my last blog post, in “A Note on Desegregation and the Cold War,” the crisis of the moment is the disjunctive departure from the liberal civil rights model that finds the New Left, albeit appealing to the dialectic, utterly incapable on account of race obsession of seizing the opportunity to overcome the contradiction Sankowski identifies by establishing democratic socialism while retaining the liberal political conception of justice. For without this conception of justice, left politics becomes authoritarian and reactionary.

In Sankowski’s view, a broad conception of justice does not take questions of benefit and burden apart from the concrete relations that constitute them. Nor does a broad conception of justice limit itself to legal conceptions of justice. Many are therefore keen to adopt a broader sense of justice, what is called social justice, which questions whether social systems or aspects of them are fair and equitable, that is whether they are materially or substantively just. By these lights, social justice would involve the development of legal strategies and policy regimes that would enlarge the ability of everybody to enjoy the rights and liberties recognized in the law. This bridges the gap between distributive and corrective rights. I am a proponent of social justice defined in this fashion. However, the race identitarianism has something different in mind when he demands social justice.

The social justice argument generally is that public discussions of justice wrongly elevate formal justice principles over substantive justice concerns. This is as theoretically important as it is ethically meaningful to this standpoint. To compare, formal justice concerns equality and impartiality in the application of principles, such as rules or set criteria. One finds these concerns in procedural justice or standards discourse, such as discussions around due process. This form of justice does not require that the principle in question be just or fair, only that the principle or standard is equally applied. Substantive justice, on the other hand, concerns the fairness of the principle or standard. Here is the concern with equity, as well as the relationship between fairness and impartiality. The affirmative action problem rests on this dichotomy and the understanding of this relationship.

Consider two individuals, one black, one white, take an entrance exam to get into college. Formal justice principles obliges ignorance of their skin color in evaluating their applications. However, proponents of affirmative action contend, while it may be formally just to treat them equally in this regard, America’s legacy of racial separation makes it likely that equal treatment will advantage the white person, thus leading to an inequitable outcome. This would be an injustice. The practice of formal equality forgets history or ignores prevailing social structure by assuming a priori two approximately equal parties and then regarding differential treatment as “unfair.” Affirmative action is therefore justified as an intervention to achieve the goal of corrective justice.

We see this in the Harvard College case currently before the Supreme Court. Seven years ago, Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard College alleging that the school’s consideration of race in undergraduate admissions was discriminatory against Asian-Americans. The evidence for discrimination is that Harvard consistently scores Asian-American applicants lower on factors such as “personality traits.” Some Asian-Americans have reporting feeling compelled to act in bad faith by attempting to appeal “less Asian” on their applications. In defending Harvard College affirmative action practices, progressives have argued that, whereas Asian-Americans are only around six percent of the US population, they represent more than one in five students at Harvard. The normalization of discrimination based on presumed group membership and a judgment about appropriate promotional representation of racial groups is the very problem I am tackling in this essay.

But let’s stay with the pro-affirmative action position for a bit longer because I want to steel man my position. The injustice of regarding approximate equality has two problems, according to proponents. First, as Stanley Fish puts it in Affirmative Action: Social Justice of Reverse Discrimination, “The word ‘unfair’ is hardly an adequate description of [the black] experience, and the belated gift of ‘fairness’ in the form of a resolution no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an adequate remedy for the deep disadvantages that the prior discrimination had produced.” Second, treating our hypothetical exam-takers equally will result in inequality because the advantages that the average white person enjoys—better schools, the appropriate cultural knowledge, and so forth—better equip whites as a group to perform well on college entrance exams. (Given the Harvard College case, one can substitute Asian-Americans for whites in the example. The point of limiting Asian-American enrollment in the school was to open space for black applicants.) Substantive justice therefore requires mechanisms that negate (systematic) white (or Asian-American) advantage. Race demagogues argue that, knowing this, insisting on the application of a formal equality principle reflects a desire to perpetuate white privilege. This is how opponents of affirmative action get the label of “racist.” Fear of being so labelled stifles criticism of the policy.

I will not argue in this essay that there is nothing to the problem of inequalities. Quite the contrary. The contradiction between formal and substantive justice is obvious in the political-economic machinery of capitalism and in the perpetuation of class differences. Because of the irreconcilable differences between political-legal equality and private property, the polity and the economy have been formally decoupled and are said to constitute independent spheres of activity. One finds this separation in the oft-articulated dichotomy of political versus civil society. It is a relatively easy task to demolish this political-legal construction on empirical and rational grounds by exposing the actual intrinsic relation between the two spheres and reducing the formal justice principle to its logical contradiction—that is that there is nothing unequal about inequality (this is Hayek’s point in The Constitution of Liberty). Indeed, strict adherence to formal justice requirement reproduces material injustice (for Hayek, this is proof of its goodness). Yet private property is enshrined in the US Bill of Rights alongside the other rights. The contradiction is skirted via the ideological and legal decoupling of the spheres. One of Marx’s main objectives in his work was to show how the political-legal and ideological superstructure produces a false consciousness about the exploitative character of the capitalist mode of production.

Such a decoupling is said to be manifest in the domain of race relations with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before the law, it was legal in parts of the United States to discriminate against individuals on the basis of race. Formal principles, such as equal and unhindered access to vote, the ability to bear witness in a criminal or civil trial, and access to educational institutions, even use of the same facilities, were all constrained or prohibited by the law. While passage of the law approximated formal racial equality, expressed in the liberal principle of “equality of opportunity,” the law had limited impact in reducing the level of material inequity in the United States. Centuries of racial economy had produced stubborn disparities between groups organized by race. Therefore, colorblind principles functioned to reproduce racial disparities in a (de facto) manner similar to the way equal treatment in class relations functions to reproduce economic disparities. Given that racial disparities include economic disparities, the argument can feign a degree of materiality.

Since US legal philosophy generally does not define racial discrimination in group terms (nor should it), the Civil Rights Act did not direct the dismantling of de facto racial segregation (and it is difficult to imagine how society would go about doing such a thing), only the abolition of laws requiring it (the de jure system of Jim Crow). In some of its features, the racial order entrenched. Richard Thompson Ford, in his excellent Harvard Law Review article, “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis,” provides one of the more lucid explanations for how racial inequality is reproduced in the absence of de jure segregation. And Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, in American Apartheid, show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation continues today, in some urban areas to a degree they describe as “hypersegregation.” For this reason, according to critical race thinking, the current body of race-neutral policy, cloaked in colorblind rhetoric and formal justice principles, is in fact a racist program, one that can be detected in institutional practices and government policies. All this is masked by colorblindness. Neil Gotanda, in his 1991 Stanford Law Review article “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind’,” writes that “the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of color-blind constitutionalism—a collection of legal themes functioning as a racial ideology — fosters white racial domination.” (See also Alan David Freeman’s 1978 “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” published in the Minnesota Law Review.)

Central to concerns of substantive justice is the legal concept of unjust enrichment, which is tied to the problem cumulative advantages and disadvantages along racial lines, one remedy for which is reparations. The principle of reparations, along with its sister restitution, grew out of a long standing principle in jurisprudence, part of the body of the law of obligation (see David Ibbetson, A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations). Several progressive scholars have explored this as it is expressed in a racist society and the obligations of those who have benefited from racism. (See, for example, Ian Ayers and Frederick E. Vars’ 1988 “When Does Private Discrimination Justice Public Affirmative Action?” Columbia Law Review, Theodore Cross’s 1984 The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the politics of Nonviolence, Richard Delgado 1996 The Coming Race War?, and Patricia Williams’ 1991 The Alchemy of Race and Rights. See also Dagan Hanokh’s 1997 Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values, István Vásárhelyi’s 1964 Restitution in International Law, Graham Virgo’s 1999 The Principles of the Law of Restitution, and Mari Matsuda’s “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” in Harvard Civil Liberties-Civil Rights Review).

While I understand the material contradiction that underpins class inequality, I have failed to show that racial categories exist on the same ontological plane (and this is not for lack of trying). Bourgeoisie and proletariat exist in objective relation to the means of production; their class categories root in material relations. Racial categories have no materiality in themselves. They are, as Barbara Fields keeps telling us, ideological. For this reason, (real) Marxists argue that the ideology and practice of racism harms all working people and that class unity depends on dismantling racism and abolishing its categories and liberating the individuals so defined by them from them (in much the same way that abolishing religion liberates individuals from religious categories). If white workers ever benefitted from racism it was only relatively and presently only in the realm of statistical abstraction. There are, after all, concretely more poor whites than poor blacks (about three times more, in fact). Yes, as a group, whites enjoy higher wages, nicer neighborhoods, better schools compared to blacks, but, again, these advantages are only as a group, i.e., in the abstract. It is not true for every white person. Not even close. (And the argument that skin color gives whites a psychological advantage over non-white groups has no bearing on the material circumstances, so we can dispense with that bit of rhetoric.)

The critical theory persuasion is keen on the problem of power. So am I. “Neutral principles are always an attempt to create a formal relationship that leaves out the power element in the real relationships,” argues critical legal scholar Morton J. Horwitz, in a 1997 interview with Kim Ann Savelson. “The Supreme Court established freedom of contract as the basis for interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment on the notion that to look at the actual economic power or coercive power of one or the other parties was not neutral. Neutrality required that you eliminate the power element and think of it only in terms of a formal relationship.” But what power? From where? There is certainly something to this in the realm of political economy, but Horwitz is claiming that colorblindness “has the same intellectual function that neutrality had in terms of economic power.” The analogy doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

“Color blindness wishes to eliminate the history of power relations between the races, and assess how we feel about any particular policy, as if today can be a starting point, without looking at how we got here today. As if we don’t talk about the inequalities of entitlements that are given to one or another race, because to do so would be noncolor blind,” Horwitz contends. “It seems to be quite the opposite, that unless you look at the history of how you got to the particular starting point today, you can’t begin to assess what is in truth a color-blind situation, a situation that eliminates the prior benefits, illicit benefits that people got on the basis of race.”

Horwitz is here referring to the problem of cumulative or inherited disadvantages. This is an explanation of grouped racial inequities. But the fact that other racial and ethnic groups that have suffered legal discrimination and institutional exclusion have nonetheless been able to overcome this past to become successful at the group level. The experience of Asian and Jewish Americans, to take the two obvious examples, suggests that this is not, even putting aside the problem of holding individuals accountable for group disparities, complete enough of an explanation to form a cogent basis for legal or policy formulations. To suggest Asian-Americans didn’t suffer terribly in United States history on account of racism is to ignore history. But they overcame all that as a group and are now so successful Harvard College has figured out a way to exclude them. And it is unclear whether the Supreme Court will stop them.

Horwitz’s argument only works logically if class relations and race relations exist on the same ontological plane. Whereas each worker stands in an objective relation to the means of production in such as way as to occupy a common social location with the same material interests, a situation that rests upon an exploitative relationship with members of the capitalist class, where value used by the latter is extracted from the former, individuals do not stand in relation to one another with respect to racial categories in this way. Imagine I can show that Protestants as a group earn higher wages than Catholics. You might ask whether Catholics are the victims of discrimination (or whether Protestants, with that ethic, are better workers), but you would have no basis for confusing religion with economics (and this is not to deny Weber’s thesis). Protestants and Catholics are categories of an ideological system we call religion. In the same way, whites and blacks are categories in an ideological system we call racism. Capitalism is not an ideological system. Like an ecosystem, Capitalism is a system comprised of objective relations that exist beyond consciousness. A man may be alienated from self and nature in a Feuerbachian manner, but he is not falsely consciousness of his religious doctrine. This he embraces, even if he doesn’t understand it. But that same man is very likely falsely conscious of the fact of his exploitation at the hands of the capitalist.

One way to detect the problem in all this is the flip the model of what cuts across what. There are black capitalists who exploit the labor of white workers. Millions of white workers toil in firms where black managers hire and promote them and organize their work. No white worker can challenge his black manager on the basis of race. No white solider can contradict or refuse the orders of the black soldier who outranks him. Race is simply not an authority relation in American institutions. Race gives whites no institutional power over blacks. That black capitalists and black managers derive their incomes from the work of white proletarians points to the absurdity of the claim of white privilege (many other things also point to the absurdity of this claim). Whites do not have a right to assert their race in social relations in the way capitalists have to assert their right to property. A black man may be kept out of the board room. He may not be kept out of the men’s bathroom. As I have pointed out on Freedom and Reason, property rights are an example of actual privilege (see “Systemic Classism: An Actual System of Privilege”). Racial privilege depend entirely on a law recognizing special rights. There is no such law privileging whites. White privilege is a myth.

To approach anything resembling class power, whites would have to organize around race in the way capitalists organize around property. Given that there is nothing intrinsically organic about race as a social grouping that would find it standing outside of intersubjective understanding (race is not physical, natural, nor material), power of this sort would require an legal infrastructure to maintain it. (Barbara Fields does a find job explaining this in a talk delivered March 2001.) And while there was such an infrastructure in the past, it was dismantled more than half century ago. Even with such a political and legal infrastructure in place, whites did not have common interests in their race in the way the capitalist does in his property. White privilege then was a bourgeois weapon to subdue white workers. A new weapon has long since been forged. The argument for reparations falls apart when one considers the absurdity of a white man owing a black man something merely on the basis of demographic identity. There is no material relation that makes this possible. I wonder whether the ethereal and therefore nonfalsifiable character of all this is what explains the persistence of this flawed type of thinking.

The flawed thinking I am describing here lies in treating as objective aggregates of individuals based on socially-selected characteristics and substituting the situation of the aggregate for the situation of the individual. There are two fallacies at work: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or reification, and the ecological fallacy. Race is not an actual thing like social class or biological sex. Race exists in the mind of racism. It does not stand apart from the ideology that invented it. To treat race as a real thing is to engage in reification. To be sure, acting on the basis of an idea as real can have real world consequences. In the case of race, it can involve discriminating against individuals based on their group identity. But we have all agreed this is wrong, at least in a certain direction. And that agreement is now the law of the land. However, against the principle of the law, affirmative action flips discrimination on its head, doubling down on the reification. The ecological fallacy is at work when supposing that every individual in an aggregate is identical to the statistical average, which is ever only an abstraction. The aforementioned fact of the great number of poor whites and a smaller but significant number of rich and powerful blacks tells us that we cannot substitute the abstraction for the concrete.

If an institution is designing practices that intentionally or purposively select individuals based on race or some other identity category, which necessarily excludes others on that same basis, rather than on their talents and accomplishments, then individuals are not being treated equally (or equitably, as it is defined) and discrimination is occurring. What progressives really mean by equity is positive discrimination, in this case discrimination based on race, and we have already determined that discrimination based on race is unjust. It’s one thing to accommodate an individual on the basis of a disability. Wheelchair ramps, for example, are about equal access. Or to recognize innate sex differences that put women at a disadvantage to men. Men cannot have babies and there is a certain liberty that comes with that. It’s another thing to decide that a qualified Asian-American is not fit for college because there are too many qualified Asian-Americans. The Asian-America is concretely an individual. Why is he being treated in terms of an abstraction? Why is racism acceptable in some instances and not in others? Shouldn’t it always be unacceptable?

* * *

I want to close with some remarks about standards. Affirmative action is a way to get around standards. But there is a movement afoot to change or do away with standards altogether. John McWhorter, writing for the Atlantic, argues in a recent Ideas column that “[b]y ending a requirement that classics majors learn Green or Latin, Princeton risks amplifying racism instead of curing it.” The title of the piece is instructive: “The Problem With Dropping Standards in the Name of Racial Equity.” I will have more to say about the rejection of standards in the face of failure (or, rationalized, for the sake of justice) in a later blog post, but I want to shorthand the problem here with a few notes about the problem of beauty.

The problem with beauty comes from a recognition that what a culture find attractive provides advantages for those who fit or come close to the beauty ideal. Those who do not fit the ideal are keenly aware of what affects some lives in a positive way negatively affects theirs. In other words, beauty, like intelligence and talent, is a type of hierarchy or inequality. One way of approaching a hierarchy is to work harder at trying to reach something approximating the cultural ideal. Culture provides many ways of accomplishing this. Another way to deal with falling short of the standard is to accept one’s lot in life. It’s not as if beauty ideals have been radically variable across time and space, so if one doesn’t want to work at it or can’t achieve it, he can always lower his expectations and suffer the pains of hierarchy. That’s the way it has been for much of human history. Yet another way is to demand culture change its ideals so that those who fall short of them don’t have to change anything about themselves or not have to feel bad about themselves. This is the pipe dream that everybody can be beautiful or that a society will come to an agreement that beauty should not matter.

The pipe dream is an uphill battle. But it is also not a very attractive one. It wears envy on its sleeve. And it’s unfair to others. A person who is beautiful, whether he comes by that naturally or through hard work, and it’s the same with intelligence and talent, doesn’t deserve to be diminished on account of it. Nor is the pipe dream impossible. Soviet-style brutalist architecture was not a society coming to an agreement that beauty shouldn’t matter but arrived there in any case. No pipe dream; it was a nightmare. A totalitarian situation in which the state decided what beauty was. And while corporations shape the standard in the West (albeit too thin), they have at least commodified some of the best cultural ideals (corporations remain destructive in other ways, however).

The critical theory version of equity lies behind the beauty resentment phenomenon—the smashing of standards. Resentment is a destructive force. Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron waits around the corner, just up ahead. We can choose a different path.

In her provocative 1988 Stanford Law Review article, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Mary Dudziak, a law professor at Emory, documents the concern among US elites that Soviet propaganda was having far reaching effects, not only on the freedom’s struggle with world communism, but on capitalist interests in the Third World. These concerns translated into a deliberate elite strategy. Dudziak argues that anticommunist ideology was so pervasive that it set the terms of the debate on all sides of the civil rights issue. Leaning on Dudziak but going a beyond her work, I briefly note a few things about this history in this blog as background for my September 2019 blog entry “The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left.” But, more broadly, I want to suggest here is that attempts to shape civil rights in a direction beneficial to global bourgeois interests, especially by progressive elites, played a role in radicalizing the black movement, producing in the end a situation that has undermined the proletarian struggle for genuine progress.

Cold War thinking as motivation for elites pushing civil rights was often explicit. The Truman Administration argued before the Supreme Court that recognizing the civil rights movement was vital to world peace and national security. In the aftermath of of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court that propelled the dismantling of apartheid, the Republican National Committee issued a statement claiming that the Court decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower Administration’s many-fronted attack on global Communism. Human equality at home is a weapon of freedom.” Following the decision, newspapers in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world celebrated Brown as a “blow to communism.”

There were other less explicit moments in the orchestration of desegregation. Elites were concerned that the civil rights movement could move too fast. Following Eisenhower, the Kennedy Administration took an active role in institutionalizing and, in effect, dampening the intensity of racial struggle. Hegemonic activity of the consensual sort Antonio Gramsci describes in his writings is evident in this process. For example, the Kennedy was successful in persuading the leaders of the 1963 march on Washington to eliminate from its speaker pool radicals critical of the United States political economic system. Several of the speakers were instructed to clean up their speeches and tone down their rhetoric.

Radical historian Howard Zinn contends that the government pursued compromise so they could subvert the movement from within, thus containing civil rights within parameters beneficial to capital. Zinn’s contention is somewhat cynical and incomplete, but it is nonetheless the case that these efforts helped drive radical elements of black struggle underground. However, it did not purge movement politics of them. Black radicals regrouped and retooled their thinking and their tactics. In response, the 1960s saw the shift in the black critique from attacking the legacy of segregation by appealing to the American Creed to a focus on the fundamental structure of political and economic power in what was conceptualized as a racist state capitalism. See “The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left” for details.

But Cold War-inspired compromise was only part of the elite strategy. As Gramsci tells us, hegemony is not only maintained by engineering consent, but also through coercion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a counterintelligence program, better known by its acronym COINTELPRO, comprised of five large-scale programs aimed at neutralizing what the agency perceived as threats to the internal security of the United States. The program was based on the counterinsurgency tactics the national security state (NSA and CIA) was using abroad. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and information made public during federal government oversight hearings conducted by United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, have revealed a particular interest in what the FBI called “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups.” Several groups fell under this label, but the Black Panthers preoccupied the COINTELPRO mind during the years between 1967 and 1971. FBI tactics included disseminating misinformation, deploying agent provocateurs, assisting local police in conducting raids on Panther headquarters, and framing members of the Black Panther Party for unsolved crimes. These actions, while ultimately successfully in crushing the Party, also resulted in the glorification of Black Power. As Medgar Evers put it, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”

The radicalization of the black movement deeply troubled elites. For one thing, it was beyond the limits they had set for racial justice, which was to be kept within the framework of the abolition of de jure segregation and individual discrimination. But particularly disturbing was the connection black radicals were making to imperialism’s victims in the Third World. In the globalization of radical black consciousness, revolutionary forces were developing a critique about the capitalist world system foreign to the traditions of the West, a critique that peddled the rhetoric of the colonial subject, the racialized subaltern. This not only threatened imperialist fortunes everywhere in the world (a good thing) but the legitimacy of the modern nation-state with its values in humanism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism (a bad thing). As these values were the imperialistic values of “white supremacy,” they were in need of overthrowing, as well. Indeed, the cultural theory of the New Left lifted from Gramsci required subverting these values in order to advance the overthrow of western civilization.

Far from putting the legacy of racism behind it, elite machinations fed a dynamic of radicalization that would spawn a new era of racial antagonism. Radicalization occurred in the context of New Left perversions, which pushed civil rights—and politics generally—from its roots in American conceptions of freedom and democracy towards a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values. More than Stokely Carmichael’ belittling characterization of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a “reformer who was good for the image of America,” the New Left eschewed the Old Left’s commitment to orthodox Marxian concepts and politics, and took up instead the anti-American standpoint of such prominent Second and Third World revolutionaries as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. These developments mingled with the nihilistic turn in French philosophy to threaten civilization itself. Given its deeply illiberal character, it is not inaccurate to describe this as a post-civil right politics . It is this character that lies at the foundation of contemporary antiracism and critical race theory. Black Lives Matter is a disjunctive break from the civil rights of Martin Luther King, Jr. The New Left, however much it appeals to the dialectic, because of its obsession with race, is incapable of grasping the West as a contradiction in need of a full becoming—the establishment of democratic socialism in the context of the Enlightenment. Therefore, the critical turn in leftwing politics not only threatened bourgeois interests; it threatened proletarian interests, as well. If it was not clear in the moment, history has revealed Black Power was hardly a revolutionary politics, but a reactionary one.

To return to the premise of this blog to make its conclusion as clear as possible, and to add an additional and crucial point, the same Cold War imperatives that influenced the establishment to join with the civil rights movement and its leader to overcome the systemic racism that had long plagued the United States brought the Cold War home to the US and played a role in turning many black and white Americans against their own country and the West more generally. The great catastrophe in these developments is that they have only helped strengthen the transnational corporate power structure that stands over the world and against a working class made up of the majority of all races. Woke corporations and the technocratic elite have explicitly taken up the language of Black Power and wield it against the proletariat.

On the importance of cognitive liberty and the paralysis of cerebral hygiene. Big Tech and progressives want you to turn off your brain. But true empowerment comes from acquiring a scientific mind.

Here’s how childish anti-Trumpers are. Trump suggested the pandemic was the result of a lab leak (which is almost certain now), but because it was Trump who suggested it, progressives were primed to believe the establishment claim that COVID-19 originated in a wet market in China. Trump derangement syndrome dispossessed folks of their capacity to reason. Remember when Democrats said they wouldn’t take the vaccine if it came out under Trump? There are reasons not to take these vaccines, but Trump being president is not one of them. I cannot imagine making up my mind on the basis of things Trump said. How sad that would be.

Last week an argument appeared on my Facebook newsfeed. It concerned the things in our lives that might make us worry, things we feel powerless to do anything about. By putting those concerns in God’s hands, and following God’s word and direction, we have less to worry about, the person argued. Faith in God translates to contentment and happiness. Those messages that contradict God can be dismissed out of hand. Indeed, why even have to hear them or thinking about them? After all, they may be the work of the Great Deceiver. Faith-belief in scientism performs the same function for progressives that faith-belief performs in the lives of the religious.

There are concerns in a progressive’s life that he feels powerless to change. COVID-19, for example, is a very scary thing—especially when you don’t or can’t understand it. By putting COVID-19 concerns in the hands of the CDC and the FDA, by following their word and direction about what to believe and what to do, and what not to believe and what not to do, the progressives has less to worry about. Messages that contradict the CDC and FDA can then be dismissed out of hand. Big Tech is to be thanked for limiting the proliferation of false preachments on the Internet, for protecting the innocent from the tricks of the evildoers. Trump is the Great Deceiver. Whatever he says alerts the progressives to the location of the truth, because the truth must lie in the opposite direction.

The regulatory agencies, legacy and social media, the culture industry—these represent something like a network of religious institutions. They tell the progressive what the truth is and pt him on the good and righteous path. They are also busy keeping track of the evildoers and keeping them at the margin of the good and righteous society by fact-checking their lies.

Long ago, the American pragmatist William James differentiated between the “once born” and the “twice born.” He described the once born as having a childlike faith in their opinions. Not just faith in the religious sphere. Adherence to any worldview without reason. We must add to this class those apologists who use their intellect to keep themselves from doubting. Once born practice is, in essence, thinking out of reflex or an act of rationalization. Once born persons enjoy a simple, uncomplicated worldview, one that does not cause them much anxiety. Indeed, their certainty in the convictions cushions the pains of the actual world—a world of uncertainty.

The twice born, on the other hand, may believe exactly what they would have believed had they not been born again, but they do so only after rationally examining their convictions, finding rational justification for them, and obtaining a fuller understanding of them. At the same time, the critical examination of belief causes them to give up many of their convictions, and this can be a great source of angst and anxiety. Twice born people are more likely to be unhappy and dissatisfied. They have to live with ambiguity. But they are also less likely to be zealots and bigots.

The twice born allows himself to consider the possibility that COVID-19 was the result of gain-of-function research that leaked from a lab. It’s the mark of the once born mentality to uncritically accept the claim from authority that COVID-19 occurred in nature. The twice born reads the research showing that hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and other interventions are effective in preventing and treating COVID-19. The once born rejects that research out of hand because the authorities told him to. He does what others tell him to do. He doesn’t think for himself.

I could continue with many other examples, but I trust you get the point. Look, I understand the need to not worry. Worry is a terrible thing. I don’t accept the desire to fill that need by practicing the cerebral hygiene of faith-based thinking. You know what is truly empowering? The scientific mind.

Teacher Caleb Wells’ TikTok video has become unavailable. Wells had said in that video that it is racist to oppose critical race theory in the classroom. “When you don’t want to teach about how these systems were designed to oppress people,” he said, “you’re taking the side of the oppressor and being racist.”

Nonsense. To the extent that the system is designed to oppress people, it’s not designed to oppress black people; it’s designed to oppress working class people. Even when there were systems designed to manage populations on the basis of race in a manner that relatively privileged whites—e.g. Jim Crow, which was dismantled more than fifty years ago—those systems were so designed to maintain class power by dividing the proletariat.

One of Wells’ example was the prison-industrial complex. He claimed that mass incarceration is “used to oppress people groups.” Since this was said in the context of a rant about racism, he means black people. As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, more than half of all homicides and robberies, and a third of aggravated assaults and burglaries, are committed by black males. Taking all violent crimes combined, around 36-38 percent of it is committed by black males. Blacks males are only around six percent of the US population. So when we look at prisons, which exist to control crime by removing dangerous offenders from our streets (which mostly benefits working class people, and especially black and brown working class people), and we see that 36-38 percent of the population there is black male, we shouldn’t see a system designed to racially oppress black.

Moreover, looking at the matter historically, it is simply not true that prisons were created to oppress black people. Prisons largely developed outside of the US South and were used to control the white lumpenproletariat. Prisons were a northern phenomenon. Prisons came to the South well after the end of slavery (which this racist country is now celebrating as a national holiday—that’s right, Juneteenth has become official recognized) and became disproportionately black when blacks became overrepresented in serious crime and violence. (see The Line from Slave Patrols to Modern Policing and Other Myths.)

Wells’ other example was the military-industrial complex. This is a truly absurd example. The military apparatus is among the most racially-integrated systems in world history. The hierarchy in operation in the military is achieved rank. A black officer outranks those below him by the same degree as a white officer of the same rank.

I am sure these facts were not what caused Caleb Wells to take down his video.

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Are white progressives racist? After all, they do admit they are. Have you heard them? But there’s an angle. Robin DiAngelo confesses her racism and then soothes her guilt by arguing that all white people are racist like her. When another white person says, “No, Robin, I’m not,” she accuses them of “white fragility” (apparently she coined that term), which becomes proof that they are, like DiAngelo, really racist.

Do people not see the psychology at work here? White progressives suspect that black people are not up to the task of life and so they blame whites for the situation of blacks. Progressives cannot bring themselves to ask why, if Asians and Latinos have overcome historic oppression and disadvantage to become successful minority groups in America, blacks as a group still struggle?

One reason they cannot ask this is because they have a suspicion that this situation may be because of progressive social policies—the ones they used to dress themselves as saviors—that idled the black proletariat, generated urban crime and other pathologies, and disintegrated the black family. The correlation of progressive politics and bad outcomes for black people is rather noticeable (see Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors). Another reason is that critiquing the subculture associated with impoverished black-majority areas has been used to attack conservatives who ask frank questions about it. Progressives can’t take up that line. Instead, they embrace degrading and destructive elements of subculture, pushing these out as popular culture.

To sooth their guilt over viewing blacks as inferior and over their role in (re)producing the conditions in which black suffer, progressives look at other white people and say, “All of you are racist.” No, sorry, we’re not. You’re going to have to handle this one on your own.

* * *

When you and I look at the world and see few white supremacists in it, the antiracist can’t scold us for not seeing the forest for the trees. There are 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 Brother 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 we can’t see it. We are 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 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.

Rigid religion works this way: 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 one with the deceiver.

* * *

We are told by Liz Wheeler in Newsweek that “Critical race theory is repacked Marxism.” Wrong. It’s Hegelian, not Marxist. If it were Marxist it would be about class and capitalism. If it were really Marxist, it would not be promoted and funded by corporations. No authentic Marxist struggle would reject scientific truth or put racism central to its politics.

Critical theory types are calling this Marxism (or neo-Marxism) to trick the left into advancing the corporate takeover of society. Republicans are calling this Marxism because (a) they don’t understand what Marxism actually looks like or (b) they know that the truth—that CRT is the manifestation of transnational corporate power—is too destabilizing to capitalism. They cannot thread that needle. It’s too late for that. What everybody needs to recognize is that democratic-republicanism and the modern nation-state and the interstate system are being dismantled and replaced by global corporate government.

* * *

There’s is massive difference between teaching history honestly (which includes accomplishment and progress) and telling white children they’re racially privileged and black children they’re all victims of racism and that their white classmates are the perpetrators. It’s the difference between social studies and propaganda, between education and indoctrination, between seeking truth and spreading mythology for political-ideological purposes. Progressive educators know what they’re doing. Stop doing it and stop lying about it. (See Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards.)

* * *

The corporate media line in response to evidence that the FBI had infiltrated groups associated with the January 6 riots is to charge investigative journalists at National Pulse, Revolver News, and other outlets with “conspiracism.” But if you know the history of the FBI, it would be far more unusual if the FBI had not infiltrated these groups.

Indeed, if you know the FBI’s history, it’s not far-fetched to consider whether there was a covert operation at the Capitol that day. For sure the riot ensured a Biden victory and pushed the reckoning over election fraud and irregularities into the future where correcting the error becomes ever more unlikely.

A false flag only sounds far fetched if you are ignorant of the long history of FBI operations against working class Americans, for example, COINTELPRO, or of the findings of the Church Committee Hearings. You should get up to speed on the depths and lengths to which the FBI will go to shape outcomes favorable to the power elite.

You should also invest some time in developing the critical cognitive capacity necessary to analyze the character of the power elite at a given point of time. As the power elite change, so do the targets and tactics of the FBI. The NSA and the CIA are are also part of the permanent administrative apparatus.

There really is a deep state, Virginia. Patriots are not the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. Patriots are the greatest threat to transnational corporate power.

* * *

Democratic Senators and activist groups promoting a false, conclusively disproven narrative about the Pulse shootings for their own benefits. Anti-LGBT animus was not part of that massacre. It dishonors the memory of the victims – & the LGBT cause – to lie about what happened. https://t.co/bhjpeaVSS5

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 12, 2021

In light of Glenn Greenwald’s recent tweet, I can’t go without pointing out that I called out progressives on June 22, 2016 for their reluctance to name the evil behind the Pulse nightclub shooting. I wrote then, “Please tell me about the time a Christian man walked into a gay bar in the United States and killed 49 people while shouting ‘God is great!’”?

The race hustlers are very clever in the way they abuse sociological categories in order to deceive the public with statistics.

For example, in statistics on the intersection of race and poverty, you will be given rates among demographics that show a larger number for blacks than whites. What this conceals is that there are nearly 18 million poor whites in the United States compared to around 9 million poor blacks. That means that there are roughly twice as many poor whites than there are poor blacks in America.

You didn’t have that impression, though, did you? The way the numbers are presented disappear poor whites. In doing so, it hides class effects behind racial categories. Don’t think there is a strategy there?

There is another deception happening in these statistics. When you see tables of the intersection of race and poverty, say by the Kaiser Family Foundation (which I am using here, but I could use any batch), the tables mix race and ethnicity. They list “white,” “black,” and “Hispanic.” But Hispanic isn’t a race. It’s an ethnicity. Most Hispanics are white. In fact, more than 65 percent of Hispanics are white (why are they reracializing whites?).

So in calculating the number of poor whites you have to add 38-plus million Hispanics, a massive number of individuals Kaiser excludes from “white” column. When you add them back in, you find that now nearly 30 million whites are poor. Even if you assume the remaining Hispanics are racially black, that means there are roughly three times more poor white people than poor blacks.

What’s this bullshit about “white privilege”? Do you see how they are dividing us? The reality is that poverty is the result of economic inequality and that is mostly a class issue. If we eliminated poverty for everybody, guess what happens? There are no more poor blacks. But you aren’t supposed to think about that. You’re supposed to get mad at me for “denying black poverty” (which I obviously haven’t done).

These diversity, equity, and inclusivity seminars, tasks forces, workshops—have you noticed they are about everything except social class? Critical race theory and all the other critical theories they’re laying on the children in our schools—are they teaching the kids about class and corporate power? Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, don’t let them do you like this!

* * *

Bonus lie from the powers-that-be: Remember when NPR reported on June 1, 2020, “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op”? Trump was accused of brutalizing protestors in Lafayette Park for a photo op at a Saint John’s Church. That’s the church BLM protestors burned the night before. Turns out, Trump had nothing to do with it.

The Park Police cleared the park hours earlier in order to erect unscalable fencing in order to protect buildings from Antifa and BLM rioters who were on a rampage burning cars and structures and assaulting police officers. The media not only lied about the situation, but they came on talking about how Trump used teargas to soothe his bruised ego after cowering in the White House underground bunker during a night of “peaceful protests.” Funny way of spinning the fact that the President and his family had to be rushed to a bunker because BLM protestors had surrounded the White House and were threatening to break in and assume power. If only we had a name for that sort of thing…

The Inspector General report is out about this and, predictably, it finds this: “The evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install antiscale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31. Moreover, the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day.”

What is NPR (and CNN) doing now that the lie has been exposed? They’re lying more, of course, saying the report doesn’t clear the President. But it does. Read it for yourself. Corporate media is telling you that what you see and hear and read is not really what you see and hear and read. They will tell you what to think. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, don’t let them do you like this!