freedom and reason

Have you seen this story from NewsOne? (Nice touch with the air freshener.) If you search “truck,” “61,” “Minnesota” on Google, this is the first result returned. (I put “61” in there because I heard that was the age of the suspect.) The article, written by Bruce Wright, carries the headline “White Anti-Mask Driver Flees, Hits Minnesota Cop ‘Hanging’ From Truck With Hammer, And Isn’t Shot.” Is NewsOne suggesting the man should he have been shot? For those who are unfamiliar with this site, NewsOne is an explicitly black news channel with the tag line: “Latest news from a Black perspective with stories and opinions you won’t read anywhere else (but should).”

The opening paragraph sets the tone for the article: “In yet the latest evidence of police responses being predicated on the race of a suspect, a white driver who was shown on video fleeing from police, trapping an officer in his truck’s window and hitting the cop with a hammer was able to avoid being shot during his encounter with law enforcement in Minnesota on Wednesday.” Is this evidence for a claim of systemic racism? For objective observers, this is an anecdote. Anecdote for anecdote, show me a case of a police officer killing a black man in a particular way and I can show you a case of a police officer killing a white man in the same way. See Tony Timpa Can’t Breathe for example. Before you challenge me to provide more examples, here’s John McWhorter saving me time:

Can we be scientists? What does the totality of the evidence show? A wealth of empirical studies come to the same conclusion: there is no racial bias in police-civilian interactions when controlling for proportional criminal involvement and context. See my The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters. (Here’s the FAR Podcast version with notes.) When I tell people this they either can’t hear it (most people and all progressives) or they are shocked (frequently shocked that I would even say such a thing). I have yet to meet anybody who knows this or who has tried to know it.

I have more shockers. First, there are many more white men shot by the police than black men.* In 2020, cops shot 457 white people. That same year, cops shot 241 black people. That’s almost twice as many whites shot than blacks. Did the media tell you that? No, I had to. That must be an unusual year, you say? COVID-19 had something to do with it? In 2017, 457 white people were shot by the police. Same year, 223 black people shot by the police. That’s more than twice the number of whites than blacks shot by the cops. It’s like this every year. So far this year? 50 whites shot by cops, 30 blacks. Where are the stories of whites dying at the hands of cops? Think race-hustling propaganda sites like NewsOne are going to share these facts? Not even the mainstream media will.

What about proportionality? I answered that in the previous paragraph (see blog and podcast). But to summarize here, a wealth of studies finds that racial disparity in police shootings is explained by involvement in crime and contextual factors. Blacks are proportionally more likely to have interactions with the police because they are proportionally more likely to be involved in serious crime compared to whites. Still, as you can see in the statistics, around twice as many whites are killed by the police than are blacks. Studies finding any potential bias at all find that it actually works in the opposite direction (at least the scientists cannot explain overrepresentation of whites in police shootings based on their involvement in crime and contextual factors.) I know it seems counterintuitive that, controlling for relevant factors, police would be more likely to shoot white men. But that’s what empirical studies show.

While you’re scratching your head or thinking about an angry response, here’s a second shocker: the vast majority of police-civilian interactions, including dangerous ones, do not result in the police shooting or killing suspects. This is true for black and white suspects. There are approximately 200,000 police-civilian interactions annually. The vast majority of people walk away unscathed. Do you have any thoughts about why that’s true? Because most people follow the commands of officers and do not resist. Consider this: There are 42 million blacks in America. In 2020, 0.00057% of blacks died at the hands of police officers. A tiny amount of those were unarmed black men. Should they have died? Perhaps not in every instance. Does this prove America is a racist country? Not in the slightest.

The man in the truck in the NewsOne story was not shot because he was white. He was not shot because the circumstances did not allow or call for shooting him. It’s that simple. He was not shot like most black men are not shot. Disinformation about police shootings is used to fuel a moral panic about race. Manufacturing a moral panic is a tactic: the rational use of irrationality. It’s part of an organized propaganda campaign to create the illusion of white supremacy.

* * *

* Many Hispanics self-classify as white. Around one-quarter of Hispanics identify as black. In 2020, 169 Hispanics were shot by the police. The statistics do not assign these individuals to racial categories. But it’s possible that the gap between white and black victims of police shootings is even greater.

It’s time again to make sure people know the rules for dealing with the police. I know you may feel humiliated during the encounter (you can take a shower later), but you want to stay safe and you want to avoid being arrested and charged with a crime. People love you and entering the criminal justice process is time-consuming, expensive, and harmful to your reputation. It is not an act of pride burial to cooperate with the police within the parameters of the Bill of Rights. You may feel like being defiant. The thing you should resist in this situation is the urge to be defiant. That and the urge to run your mouth. Don’t run your mouth.

The first overarching rule is that you have rights (thank those dead white guys you’ve been taught to loathe for that). Do not give up your rights. Here are the specifics:

• A police officer can pat you down for his own safety, but, beyond that, you have the right to refuse searches (Fourth Amendment). Politely demand a warrant for any and all searches. Do not invite officers into your house without a warrant. You don’t know what’s in there that could be used to charge and convict you. Don’t let them see inside your house. Do not let them search your car for the same reason. Etc. If the officer proceeds to search your home, vehicle, or person without a warrant, do not resist. You can address illegal searches later in court.
• You may be required by law to show an ID if you are operating a motor vehicle, and, in some states, you may be required to identify yourself by name, but, beyond that, you have the right to remain silent (Fifth Amendment). – Politely ask if you are being detained or if you are free to go. If you are not free to go, you are being detained. Don’t talk to the cops beyond this except to ask for a lawyer if you are placed under arrest. You have a right to a lawyer (Sixth Amendment).
• If you are placed under arrest, you may hear a Miranda warning. This protects you from being interrogated. It reminds you of your right to be silent. Politely tell the officer you intend to remain silent and that you want to see a lawyer. Don’t talk to the cops beyond this. Anything you say, even if the truth, can be used to charge and convict you.
• If you talk, don’t lie. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t talk. Also, don’t talk. Is that clear? Shut the fuck up. Don’t cry. Don’t whine. Don’t beg. Cops are used to that shit. Just sit quietly. Don’t be an asshole.

The second overarching rule concerns some of that I have said about about comportment. Don’t be an asshole and don’t resist.

• Be calm. Dealing with cops can be anxiety provoking, but try your best to avoid looking nervous and being fidgety. Officers are trained to detect suspicious behavior. Rightly or wrongly, nervousness behavior raise suspicions. Don’t be an asshole. Cops save lives. They put their lives on the line for you and your community. They have families. Be nice.
• Follow the lawful commands of a police officer. However, even if the commands are unlawful, as in violative of your Fourth Amendment rights, resistance is unwise. Police officers confront danger in their work. They have reason not to trust you.
• The police have a duty to take criminals suspect into custody. They are permitted in reaching this end to meet resistance with force. Force carries with it the potential for injury—as does resistance. If you are resisting lawful arrest, then the injury suffered may very well be your fault. Resisting is not the police officer’s fault. Don’t be an asshole.
• If you are pulled over, turn off your car, crack your window, and turn on your inside car light. Make sure your hands are always visible. Do not put them in your pocket. Do not put them down your pants. Do not wave them around. If the police ask you to take off your seatbelt and step out of the car, make sure that you can use your hands. I know that sounds goofy, but get permission and let the officer watch you through the window. Same with registration and insurance in the glovebox. But here’s an idea: keep these in a sleeve on the dash or on the visor.
• Keep your hands to yourself. Never touch a police officer. Try not to even accidentally touch a police officer.
• If you believe that what a cop is doing constitutes misconduct, file a complaint, but do not tell the officer that you are going to do this. Be wary of who you file the complaint with, as well. Study up on this a bit. But, first, as soon as you can, record everything you remember, including the officer’s name and badge number, the number of the patrol cars (if available), the name of the agency, and any information from any witnesses if you can. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures.

The third rule is about not having to deal with the cops at all.

• Make sure your car is in good working order and that you have valid, visible and up-to-date license plate or plates, if required. No tail lights out, etc. Make sure that it’s your car or that you have permission to use somebody else’s car.
• You have First Amendment right to have bump-stickers that say things like “ACAB” and “Fuck the Police,” but you might wonder whether that’s something you want to have on your car. Not just because it draws attention to you but because these are stupid slogans. What are you Antifa? Asshole.
• More broadly, don’t commit crime. Criminal are generally not heroes but assholes. Of course nonviolent civil disobedience is morally permissible. But if you break the law you may suffer the consequences, so just be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Cops aren’t part of your protest where acts of civil disobedience are occurring. Cooperate with your arrest.

Violence is only morally permissible under certain conditions. There are essentially three reasons where violence may be just.

• Self-defense. If somebody is violently aggressing on you without just cause, you have a right to defend yourself with proportional force (police officers have the same right). If the violence is used against you is just, then self-defense becomes criminal violence. Arresting you involves coercion, but it is not criminal because it is a legitimate use of power. Authority is what separates the meaning of action.
• Defense of innocents or those who cannot defend themselves. For example, if a man with a gun is shooting people in a mall and you have a gun, then you can shoot the man. You should shoot the man. It will save lives. He chose to die when he started killing people.
• The third is the overthrow of oppression. The United States was founded in rebellion against Great Britain. This involved violence. Slave rebellions involved violence. These examples are, of course, potentially criminal violence. If you lose your rebellion, you will likely be adjudicated a criminal. It’s crucial therefore that your rebellion is just. The riots we see in America today are not just because they based on a myths and lies. If they were just, they would be rebellion. The state is acting properly when it violently suppresses riots.

It seems that some folks think that (when the suspect is of a certain race) no force should be used in affecting an arrest, as if, when a suspect resists, the arresting officer is suppose to say, “Oh, you don’t want to be arrested. My bad. Be on your merry way.” The police have a duty to take a criminal suspect into custody. They are permitted in reaching this end to meet resistance with force. Force carries with it the potential for injury—as does resistance. If you are resisting lawful arrest, then the injury suffered may very well be your fault. Resisting is not the police officer’s fault. She’s doing her job.

If we are going to make policy that police officers can’t use force, we might as well give up and let criminals do what they want. What will we do with those who commit hate crimes against racial and sexual minorities? What about those who harm their spouse and children? Those who rape children? I don’t think some folks have fully thought this through.

Long overdue. Why ever fly a flag representing any part of a defeated nation, a nation that put central to its civilizational claims racialized chattel slavery? In a letter to the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx put it best: 

“When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, ‘slavery’ on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding ‘the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution,’ and maintained slavery to be ‘a beneficent institution,’ indeed, the old solution of the great problem of ‘the relation of capital to labor,’ and cynically proclaimed property in man ‘the cornerstone of the new edifice’—then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. … 

“While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

Here’s what I heard Marx saying: the American proletariat did not die in the hundreds of thousands to free black people from bondage to see the flag of a slave nation flying at the capitols of defeated insurrectionists. The only flag worthy of the Confederacy is the white flag of surrender. So take down this flag, Tate Reeves. Be the good Republican Lincoln (and Marx) was and relegate the symbol of slavery to the museums.

Kim Potter, police officer with Minnesota’s Brooklyn Center Police Department, has been arrested in the shooting death of Daunte Wright and is expected to face second-degree manslaughter charges, which, in Minnesota, is defined as “culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.” Potter earlier resigned from the force. Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon also resigned. Potter and her husband were forced to flee their residence after their address was shared on social media and a mob gathered outside.

Brian Peters, former commander with the Brooklyn Center Police Department, and current head of Minnesota’s police association, says Wright would still be alive had he not “set off” a deadly “chain of events” Sunday in Brooklyn Center. “You have to look at this situation as a chain of events,” Peters said. “This is going to be an unpopular statement, but you know, Daunte Wright, if he would’ve just complied… He was told he was under arrest, they were arresting him on a warrant for weapons. He set off a chain of events that unfortunately led to his death.” Peters then put Wright’s actions in a larger context, noting that “what we’re seeing, policing in these days, is that non-compliance by the public. Police officers are tasked with enforcing the law, enforcing the law that legislators create. And it’s a very tough job right now. It’s been a very tough job and this situation unfortunately also makes it more difficult.”

Peters is suggesting that this is a case of victim-precipitated accidental homicide. I am inclined to agree. Kim Potter made a mistake, but she would not have been in a position to make that mistake had Wright obeyed her commands and the commands of the other officers. One can say, “Potter shouldn’t have shot him,” but since nobody reasonably thinks Potter should have shot Wright, it’s a rather useless observation. Clearly Wright doesn’t think she should have shot Wright. She instantly regretted her error, as we hear on her body cam. No doubt, she wishes she had that moment back. She will dwell on that moment for the rest of her life.

However, when Peters says that Wright should have obeyed the officers’ command, he is not making a useless observation. It is neither true that everybody thinks it’s wrong to resist arrest nor that victims may contribute to the chain of events, even including those the victims intentionally initiate, that ultimately leads to their death. Moreover, Wright created an extremely dangerous situation by getting into his car and driving away with law enforcement officers right next to the vehicle. His actions put officers in jeopardy of losing life and limb. He was behaving recklessly.

Recall what Peters said. We’re seeing an increasingly problem of non-compliance by detainees and arrestees. Police officers are tasked with enforcing the law legislators create. It’s their job and their duty to carry out that law for the good of the communities they serve and protect. A rise in non-compliance makes their job and duty more difficult—and more dangerous. The reason for the rise in non-compliance is a consequence of influential voices actively delegitimizing the institutions of public safety by perpetuating the myth that the criminal justice system is racist and unjust. This is how the Black Lives Matter is undermining public safety.

Let’s be clear: the chain of events that led to Wright’s death were not initiated by law enforcement. Kim Potter did not create a situation where Wright’s actions were reasonable. Law enforcement had reason to stop Wright and to take him into custody. Wright chose to resist and escape in a car thus creating a critical situation, authoring the circumstances that increased the risk of human error, as well of injury and even death. There is no evidence of racism in this case.

According to Hennepin County Court documents, on December 1, 2019, in Osseso, Minnesota, in an attempt to rob a woman of more than 800 dollars, Wright allegedly choked and held a woman at gunpoint, threatening to shoot her. This is aggravated robbery. Wright was out on bail when a weapons charge caused his bail to be revoked, hence the warrant for his arrest. Engaging in action that puts lives at risk does not appear to be novel occurrence in Wright’s biography.

A culture of resistance is undermining public safety, which has the effect of diminishing the quality of life in vulnerable communities. That members of the ruling class, political elites, and prominent voices in the culture industry are actively delegitimizing the institutions of public safety, not only by encouraging resistance to law enforcement, but also by failing to correct the falsehoods that the criminal justice system is generally, and law enforcement specifically are racist, suggests an agenda that serves certain interests, or at least serve a convergence of interests. Since, as a matter of economic and political commitments, these entities do not represent the interests of the working class, we must suppose other interests are at play.

Citizens have an interest in the ability of law enforcement to safely enforce the law. By sacrificing Kim Potter upon the altar of antiracism, by giving into the irrational mob, more detainees and arrestees will be motivated to resist law enforcement in the name of racial justice or out of a false belief that law enforcement are racist. This endangers the safety of both civilians and law enforcement.

I have watched the body cam audio and video and it is clear to me that Minnesota police officer Kim Potter meant to use her Taser to prevent Daunte Wright from escaping arrest but accidentally drew her handgun instead and shot Wright once, killing him. Wright’s death has been ruled a homicide. Potter had been with the force for more than a quarter century. She just resigned. Predictably, Black Lives Matter took the opportunity to engage in violent action. Just as predictably, the media spun the event as another instance of racist policing.

There is no evidence at this point the police were racist or behaving in a racist manner. Officers had Wright out of the car and were attempting to handcuff him when he broke free and got back into his car to drive away. The body cam shows Potter telling Wright she would “tase” him. She is seen yelling, “Taser, Taser, Taser,” while Wright is trying to get back into his car. After discharging her weapon she says, “holy shit, I just shot him.” It is tragic that Wright lost his life. It must be devastating to a veteran police officer to accidentally shoot a man.

The Brooklyn Center police have issued a press release that reads in part: “Officers determined that the driver of the vehicle had an outstanding warrant…. At one point as officers were attempting to take the driver into custody, the driver re-entered the vehicle. One officer discharged their firearm, striking the driver. The vehicle traveled several blocks before striking another vehicle.” This is unintentional homicide. The stop was legitimate. The officers had reason to take Wright into custody.

Also tragic is that this could have ended so differently. Teach your children that police officers are human beings who come with all the frailties of all other human beings, and the best way to safely interact with law enforcement is to obey their commands. If officers are wrong in stopping, detaining, or arresting a person, then that will come out later. What is crucial in the immediate situation is to stay alive. In the moment is not the place to challenge police officers. They have guns. Officers have a difficult job. Don’t add to an already confused and heightened sensory experience. One can obey their commands at the same time assert his constitutional rights, all the while staying alive.

People love you, so stay alive. This is what we should be telling our loved ones. But there is a different message young people are hearing today. They’re being told that the police are racist (they’re not) and they have no obligation to obey the commands of racists. Worse, they are being encouraged to resist for the sake of social justice. Telling a young man of any race that police have no authority to stop, detail, and arrest him increases the likelihood that he will resist arrest in defiance of law enforcement, as an act of primitive rebellion. He will do so out of a sense of injustice, from a place of anger. Resisting detention and arrest increases the likelihood that suspects and officers will be harmed. Don’t be a martyr for a cause rooted in myth.

You may believe that the police are not justified in detaining and arresting you, but, unless you are suicidal, staying safe in a civilian-officer interaction depends on you keeping that opinion from causing you to escalate a dangerous situation. I mention suicide not as a throwaway line. There are instances of suicide-by-cop where the detainee or arrestee resists officers in a bid to initiate deadly force. Whether this was a such a case is not yet known, but a person is putting his life in jeopardy by resisting arrest, so it is at least a species of victim-precipitated homicide.

There are those who will tell you that telling young men how to stay alive when dealing with the police is “blaming the victim.” But staying alive in the situation is no different that staying alive in any number of dangerous situations, yet we don’t fail to teach our children about those dangers and how to avoid or mitigate them. I have had the talk with my children. Have you had that talk with yours?

In an article in Fox Business, New York Post’s Isabel Vincent reports that Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a leader of the Black Lives Matters organization, has purchased a 1.4 million dollar home in an upscale Los Angeles enclave. Her real estate investments (Topanga Canyon is not the only one) comes in the wake of Khan-Cullors signing a multiyear deal with Warner Brothers. She is now fabulously rich. Vincent (and others) find this curious because Khan-Cullors is a self-described Marxist. Will Khan-Cullors soon preach what she practices? Or has she already been doing that?

Khan-Cullors’ Marxism would have to be self-described; I don’t see a materialist conception of history in the Black Lives Matter movement. I try to refrain from speaking for the dead, but I have closely studied the corpus of Karl Marx’s work and I feel safe in saying he would be horrified to see a corporate-backed race hustler laying claim to his legacy, parleying life-long sacrifices in the service of the proletarian movement into a multimillion dollar contract to misdirect segments of the working class.

I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong. That’s a misdirection play. The Communist Manifesto does not straightforwardly call for the abolition of the family. The Black Lives Matter manifesto, “What We Believe” (removed from their website, you can find it curated here), calls for “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” Rightwingers pull this quote to condemn BLM as Marxist. But the line is only superficially leaning on the rhetoric of the Manifesto.

In Chapter Two of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels write, “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”

Marx and Engels are lodging a grievance. As they survey history, they see class-based existence progressively and systemically destroying traditional family and kinship ties among those who produce surplus and value in society, alienating women from men and children from their parents and turning them into instruments for supporting history’s succession of leisure classes and, especially in the context of the capitalist mode of production, facilitating commerce. Engels wrote an entire book on this theme titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, based on Marx’s unpublished analysis of Lewis Morgan’s landmark Ancient Society. (In the present essay, I elaborate Marx and Engels’ argument. For a detailed analysis of the BLM line see my Disrupting the Western-Prescribed Nuclear Family Requirement. What Does That Mean? A Lot More than You Think.)

At the time Marx and Engels were writing the Manifesto, the family had practically disappeared among the proletariat (“practical” here in its actual meaning, as in practice). Family only really continues its existence among and for the capitalist class, and in a perverse form; for the bourgeoisie are the personification of prevailing class power and thus their family form prevails (as well as their morality). The point of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a socialism that puts a nation (workers “of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”) on the path to communism is not to abolish the family generally (or morality generally, etc), but to abolish the bourgeoisie family specifically, an action that will at the same time restore and raise up the proletarian family. Marx and Engels were committed to egalitarian relations between the sexes (which presupposes there are such things). They were feminists who saw class division as destructive to these relations.

When rightwingers and misguided leftists tell us that Marxist communism denies “eternal truths,” such as freedom and justice, that it seeks to abolish all religion, all morality, constituting these instead on a new basis, they apparently fail to see that these passages are in scare quotes or understand why they are in set off this way. Marx and Engels are mocking them. The passage in question: “‘Undoubtedly, it will be said, ‘religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change. There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.’”

The authors follow these passages with this (and this is the point): “What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.” They continue, “But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.”

Far from seeing the family as a mere social construction in the modern sociological (i.e. postmodernist) sense, Marx and Engels both believed that the family was one of the foundational elements of human social relations. Necessary social relations have two purposes: in the first place to reproduce individual individual existence; in the second, to produce offspring and develop them in the context of family and community. Production and reproduction are the essentials of life. The second is imperative for propelling the species into the future. And it depends on the first. This is true not just for the human animal but for all animals. It must be remembered that Marx and Engels accepted the science of natural history. They were Darwinists in that domain. They build on to Darwin (before Darwin was known to them) an account of the social history of the human species. They show that the historically concrete form the family takes is shaped by the manner in which history is made—and history is made in the welter of material production. The crooked to be set straight is the injustice of humanity losing control over self and family with the emergence of social class and the ideological structures which conceal it. This is Marx’s theory of alienation. Marxism is a complete thought.

To thoroughly grasp Marx and Engels point, therefore, one must read the Communist Manifesto with a global understanding of Marx’s conception of human society, in which it is recognized that there is, as the product of natural history, an original sexual division of labor that underpinned the family structure in the context of democratic and egalitarian society. This is the initial position. With the emergence of social class and the state and law, human being becomes alienated from his species-being, women became alienated from and subordinated to men, women and children became property, and thus the natural division of labor based on sex was transformed into exploitative gender relations specified concretely with successive modes of production, each with a development driven by internal contradictions in the forces and relations of production ascertainable using the method of historical materialism. The mission of the proletarian is to get the world back to the initial position but at a higher technological level of development, where necessary labor is eliminated (or minimal) and we all enjoy the freedom and leisure now enjoyed by the bourgeoisie. This means the species must control the family, not abolish it.

Postmodernism doesn’t merely bury Marx’s straightforward theory under a pile of rubbish. It has nothing really to do with Marx’s materialist conception of history at all except to appeal to its name. Postmodernism is an idealist philosophy. Marx was a materialist. Rightwing thinkers like Jordan Peterson, and even center-left thinkers like James Lindsay, while getting the critique of identity politics superficially right, get the deep core of the New Left wrong because they fail to grasp the difference, a failure that allows them to continue supporting bourgeois arrangements. There is no evolutionary line from the New Left to historical materialism. It’s a clean break. Or, precisely, a return to Hegelianism. Marx stood Hegel on his feet. The New Left stands Marx on his head. That breaks the wrong chain.

Perhaps nobody gets Marxism more wrong that Khan-Cullors and her comrades. Deploying neologisms like “cisgender” and “trans-antagonist,” the Black Lives Matter manifesto does not identify the alienating social and ideological structures of class division and corporate power as obstacles to overcome but rather identifies as problems the natural and material facts of sex and family. Blacks Lives Matter is an expression of nihilism. As such, it piles on more layers of alienation, an ideology ideal for reproducing capitalist exploitation in the era of corporate power. That this quasi-religious doctrine is embraced by millions of workers is a spectacular propaganda achievement, a testament to the power inhering in possessing a monopoly over the ideological means of production.

Returning the question of personal gain in the name of social justice, Vincent reports that “Khan-Cullors, 37, signed a multi-platform deal with Warner Bros in October, although it is not clear how much she is paid by BLM since their finances flow through a complex web of for-profit and nonprofit corporate entities.” I have blogged about this on Freedom and Reason (see Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter.) Warning: dig into those entities at the risk of bring accused of conspiracism and racism. They mean to keep Marxists from a serious critique of Khan-Cullors and her collaborators. Critical theory is for them, not for us, because for them it isn’t critical at all.

The bottomline? Black Lives Matter is not a proletarian movement. It’s an elite ruse to divide the working class. It doesn’t take humanity to the justice of the original state of existence, to our democratic and egalitarian origins; rather, it brings us to a new state in which there is no justice, the state of corporate governance and technocratic control. It is preparing a generation for life as serfs in a neo-feudalist global order, an order replete with a new aristocracy. Khan-Cullors and her ilk are part of that aristocracy. Her preachments help make possible her practice.

Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson pointed out, in an April 8, 2021 dialog with Mark Steyn (good luck finding the segment online) that, by promoting immigration from developing countries and pushing policies of multiculturalism over assimilation, the immigration policies of the Democratic Party favor that party’s electoral hegemony over against Republican fortunes. The Anti-Defamation League, among others, has demanded Carlson’s firing. David Brock’s Media Matters presents the commentators words as if they are self-condemning.

Carlson’s critics are claiming that his observation is motivated by racism because he used the word “replacement.” Carlson anticipated the accusation that he was advancing a “white supremacist theory” popularly known as the “Great Replacement,” originally developed as an analysis of state policies that, by recruiting Arab and Muslim populations from Africa and the Middle East, sought to change European societies culturally and demographically. White supremacists in the United States adapted the theory to explain America’s situation, which means, by way of the fallacious reasoning typical of New Left thinking, anybody who suggests the theory enjoys even face validity is also a white supremacist or, at the very least, white supremacist adjacent.

Suspend reflex for a moment and let’s think this through rationally. According to progressives, conservatives worry that changing the demographics of the United States in a direction indicated by past, present, and future patterns of immigration harms the electoral prospects of Republicans. Progressives put it like this: The nation will be less white and, since Republicans are the party of white people (black and brown Republicans notwithstanding), and since a white majority signals white supremacy (which is a good reason for getting rid of the white majority), the concern is by definition racist.

Putting aside progressive loathing of white majorities, except perhaps to ponder in the back of our minds whether such loathing is appropriate when applied to other majorities around the world, isn’t this an admission by progressives that patterns of immigration do in fact harm the electoral prospects of Republicans? Nobody would seriously argue that, as a factual matter, mass immigration didn’t change Europe. Or the United States, for that matter. Why are progressives always talking about the value of diversity and eagerly anticipating the time when whites are no longer the majority in America? This isn’t what they want? Turns out we cannot put white loathing aside. It’s the proverbial elephant in the room.

To deflect attention away from the fact of the matter, progressives smear conservatives as “racists” for expressing concern with open borders and multiculturalism. That’s really what’s going on. Progressives do the same thing in Europe (they go by social democrats over there). The organized response to the effects mass immigration has wrought, namely the populist and nationalist movements seeking national sovereignty and cultural integrity, have been so frequently paired with so many awful labels—“white supremacist,” “white nationalist,” “fascist,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist,” “xenophobe,” even “Nazi”—that now simply announcing “populist” and “nationalists” will do to make most audiences recoil in disgust and horror. Conservatives are finding that their label in increasingly producing the same inference.

We see a similar thing election integrity in the United States. Weakening election integrity benefits Democrats. This is, presumably, why Democrats oppose measures that protect and strengthen election integrity (their arguments about racist voter suppression in Georgi are bogus). Pointing this out risks drawing a charge of racism. We wait to see whether Europe, in the wake of the importation of Black Lives Matters politics there, will move to weaken their own electoral systems to avoid “voter suppression.”

* * *

Okay. So it’s become the standard tactic of progressives to reframe as white supremacy opposition to attempts to secure one-party rule. We know that well enough. What is less well known is how the New Left has changed the meaning of words to increase the efficacy of the tactic. Those who promote mass immigration and multiculturalism make culture about race in order to marginalize and silence those who favor rational immigration policies, as well as assimilation and integration.

As I have written about on this blog, such concept creep on the left is not accidental. (See my essays Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Criticism of Culture is Not Racism; Racisms: Terminological Inflation for Ideological Ends). The New Left has, for political purposes, expanded the definition of racism to incorporate culture and religion, and they have infused the definition with an essentialist ideology that reduces concrete individuals to reified categories based on phenotype. They label this ideology “antiracism.”

The irony of antiracist essentialism is that it’s racist in its logic (just as antifascism is what is claims to confront). Consider the recent fetish for “health equity” and advocacy for preferential care in medicine. Hospitals are now exploring policies to address “systemic racism” in the administration of health care. One Boston-area hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will actually administrate health care based on the ideology of critical race theory (follow that embedded URL to read my critique of such an application). The solution: blacks will get free health care. Even the rich ones? What about poor whites? Does the paucity of melanin in their skin exude money that pays for medical services? One should see how using race as a proxy for class cleverly allows class relations to be dissimulated. Economic inequality is translated as race inequality—which allows inequality to go unchecked. This is the trick of using the word “equity.”

On that last matter, I was pleased to see Bryan Dyne at World Socialist Web offer a full-throated condemnation of racial preferences in health care. “It must be stated from the outset that not only is such a racially-based program medically unethical, it is illegal,” he writes. Indeed, according to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity,” including “education, health care, housing, social services.” Emphasizing a great accomplishing in the history of justice, one that I have written about extensively on Freedom and Reason, Dyne writes, “The [the Civil Rights Act] was passed during an upsurge of the working class in the US in the 1960s, which had as one of its principles the ending of official discrimination along racial lines, including in health care.”

“Above all,” Dyne concludes, “calls for race-based health care are aimed at blocking the emergence of a unified movement of the working class against corporate profits and the capitalist system that is the source of inequality, poverty and racial discrimination. Genuine progressive movements have always fought for unity across racial lines, not the stratification and division of the working class.” Dyne’s terminological error excused (he means populist, not progressive), his critique is spot on: antiracism is a corporate strategy that carries over racism to the progressive left, reinventing a highly successful divide-and-conquer strategy appropriate to the era of woke capitalism.

I spent time on what may feel like a digression to make a larger point. Political populism and economic nationalism are not rooted in racism. Tucker Carlson, one of the leading voices in today’s populist-nationalist movement, isn’t arguing from a position of white supremacy. He is crossing the intersection of culture and politics. That’s very different from racial politics. It’s his critics who are playing racial politics. As I have explained on this blog (check out the links provided throughout this essay), culture is not a product of race unless one believes either or both that (1) there is some metaphysical essence that qualitatively differentiates people of different skin colors and possesses them with differential and automatic collective agency or (2) cultural tendencies are encoded on racial genotypes, which presupposes distinct genotypes, that are passed down to their offspring.

Antiracists are not likely to agree with the latter, since biological race is (for now, at least) a reactionary concept. Yet, in practice, progressives work from both. This is how it’s possible to absurdly claim that a white child born in American today is responsible for something a white man did four hundred years ago. New Left identitarians have actually managed the feat of synthesizing such ancient religious concepts as collective and intergenerational transmission of guilt and trauma with pseudoscientific notions of race-born culture. It’s literally (and soon I expect explicitly) a blood guilt ideology. Nothing is more racist than that.

This delusional and irrational way of thinking is a feature of the postmodernist conflation of epistemology and ontology, and a fetish for abstract power, wherein the “truth” of the world is determined not by actuality, which informs us that, among other things, all members of humanity comprise a single species (albeit sexually dimorphic, another fact increasingly denied by New Left elites) and culture is the product of historical and social relations, but by moral entrepreneurs who claim authority on the basis of and to speak for those who share their skin color (or some other superficial phenotypic trait).

* * *

If opposition to mass immigration is not racist, then what is it? Human beings are culture bearers, by which I mean that they are socialized to think and feel in certain ways and they take the cognitive and emotional patterns with them wherever they go. Not all cultures are conducive to preserving republican values of democracy, humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism, values superior to those of other cultures, as demonstrated by the comparatively greater freedom and progress they enable and foster. American culture, and Western culture more broadly, are in proven fact conducive to those values (the West largely founded them), whereas many immigrants are coming from places with cultures that do not value those things. Not only they, they come with harmful norms and values already defeated in the West. Therefore, immigration should be gradual, limited, and rational, with resources in place and time enough to assimilate foreigners into the national culture, that is, to integrate immigrants into our communities. Moreover, if people have a right to protect the integrity of their culture and nation, which is why there are borders, then Americans has just as much right to protect theirs as any other nation. That’s not racist. For those who conflate race and culture, the desire to see white culture with its norms and values disappear is a racist desire.

What is racist is the conflation of American and Western culture with whiteness (see above). And that racist move is performed by the New Left identitarians and their corporate backers. They equate humanism, individualism, liberalism, and rationalism with white supremacy. They equate the modern nation-state that protects and reproduces in law and government those values—free and democratic nations depend on them—with racism. They then use these equations as cover for the denationalizing project that’s undermining democracy, humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism to strengthen state corporate and global financial power (see Antiracism and Transnationalism: Convergent Developments Shaping the Present Moment; see also Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism).

The conflation of race and culture is also racist in another way. It is possible, and there are historical and contemporary examples, for subcultures to develop in the context of a racialized population, subcultures that hinder the development of these historically-marginalized populations, even after their marginalization has been abolished. Of course, this is a problem to overcome, not a situation to embrace. Conflating race and culture has led to a reluctance to criticize subcultures that are injurious to the people who hold the associated dysfunctional values and norms. As if that isn’t bad enough, leftwing identitarians celebrate dysfunctional subcultures, which are often profoundly homophobic and sexist, while condemning those who do not applaud along with them. This is a feature of New Left ideology known as the bigotry of low expectations. It is at the same time a form of infantilization. Black Americans are not personally responsible for their situation. Any problems they experience must be theorized by progressive academics and experts and addressed by progressive politicians and policymakers.

Transnationalists proceed by confusing the public in these (and many other) ways. They take what make America and the West the freest and most advanced civilization in world history and make it appear as reactionary and regressive. What is reactionary and regressive is progressively transgressive and celebratory. This is how Western feminists can wear hijabs while mocking Christians. Those who defend America and the West are portrayed as the defenders of white supremacy. That which is not American or Western is probably good or at least not as bad. Cultural relativism, which at first falsely claims all cultures are equal (Biden rationalizes concentration camps for the Uighur people in China this way—and they’re Muslim, so go figure) is really about supposing a cultural hierarchy that’s not relative or equal at all, but in which the advanced West is inferior (and originally sinful) to the backward cultures that lie beyond its scope, a scope paradoxically depicted as comprehensive. (It’s a religion. It doesn’t have to make sense.) The propaganda trick to constructing words like “antifascism” and “antiracism” is that it makes those who oppose these fascist and racist politics appear as if they’re defending fascism and racism. It is a self-inoculating formula.

* * *

I have written extensively about why corporatists, progressives, and religious groups wants open borders. Corporations seek cheap labor that will not only yield greater profits, but also undermine proletarian consciousness and politics. Progressives work for globalist agenda to undermine the nation-states of the West. To do this they need voters who will elect and reelect their candidates. Churches need congregants, which are increasingly short supply domestically. All these interests are advanced by portraying the United States and the West as intrinsically white supremacist.

Conservatives provide a concrete target for their propaganda (progressives must portray themselves as allies and saviors). You can see this in the way the January 6 Capitol riot is built up into an “insurrection” with American conservatives en masse in back of it. The very idea that a commission in the style of the 9-11 or Pearl Harbor commissions should be stood up to examine the problem of conservative politics is a clear signal as to what’s going on—citizens comprising half the electorate are to be equated with Islamic terrorists and Japanese imperialists who fly plans into buildings and navel vessels.

But I am trying to understand why people of color would risk their lives to get into such a profoundly white supremacist country where they will experience systemic racism at the hands of a privileged class of white oppressors. The race hustlers are telling me that people of color get up every day not knowing whether they will be the victim of racist violence at the hands of white police officers or white citizens. Sounds like no place to live. Thank goodness these are utterly false characterizations of America. (Shame on those who traumatize children with such falsehoods.) I get why people would climb over walls to escape racist oppression. Why they would escape to racist oppression is puzzling. Also puzzling is why people of color aren’t fleeing the oppressive conditions of the United States for less racist countries around the world. It’s as if the United States isn’t the shithole country that antiracists say it is. It’s as if the people of American enjoy a life that others around the world envy.

It’s not a life that has in back of it a cornucopia, we must emphasize. We are a country of more than 330 million people. We’re the third largest country in the world. Humans are more frequently encountering wild animals in everyday life as the need for resources and space encroaches upon the resources and space of other species (they don’t wish to be colonized, either). We don’t have enough jobs for our own citizens, million of whom are idled in ghettos which extraordinarily high rates of crime and violence. Our public infrastructure and services are overburdened. And we are losing our commitment to values necessary to sustain our republic and to keep making progress.

* * *

Past, present, and (if, we don’t act, very likely) future patterns of immigration, especially at a rate that precludes assimilation to the values and norms of the national culture, favor the party that has signaled, at home and abroad, its eagerness to relax its borders for immigrants, provide for them with the jobs of its native workers, as well as give them access public infrastructure and resources financed by the taxpayers. Carson is right: the party sees immigration as the path to electoral success, success they need to continue the vicious cycle lying at the heart of the denationalization project, the managed decline of the American republic. The natives are to suffer for this, as they always do when their territory is opened to a flood of foreigners (see my Observations from Sweden, just one of numerous articles on the problem of immigration). Democrats don’t care. It doesn’t even matter if importing foreign labor hurts native black workers. Democrats believe they control the majority of those votes, too,

To be sure, there are racial politics in play. But it’s the Democrats who are the players. Through the lens of New Left identity politics, which conflate race, culture, and politics, progressives see immigration in racial terms (just as they see much of everything else in racial terms). Race essentialism sees the world not as concrete individuals and material classes rooted in economic structures (after all, identitarians of any persuasion can be neither liberal nor democratic socialist), but in terms of essentialized identity groups based on ethnicity, race, and religion. This is how a religious affiliation, namely Muslim, can become a racial category and those who criticize Islam racist. Same with Arab and Mexican. This is how rich blacks are oppressed, while poor whites are privileged. It’s obvious that mass immigration and cultural pluralism, by increasing ethnic diversity, as well as weakening election integrity by allowing people to vote without verifying their identity and allowing activists to harvest ballots, favors Democrats. Why is it racist to acknowledge the obvious? It’s not. Reject their smears.

Voter suppression is a strategy used to systemically discourage and prevent citizens from specific groups from voting. There are a range of tactics used in the strategy of voter suppression, from making it unreasonably difficult to vote to intimidation and violence. Examples of voter suppression in the US past associated with the system of Jim Crow were literacy tests and poll taxes. These were judged discriminatory and abolished along with the Jim Crow system in 1960s. Rules emplaced to ensure a genuine election as specified by international and human rights norms and standards that do not systemically discourage or prevent citizens from a specific group from voting are not examples of voter suppression. There is nothing in recent George election reform law that can reasonably be called voter suppression.

When shit shows like the 2020 elections occur in developing countries, observers suspect electoral manipulation and widespread voter fraud. When several states temporarily shut down the counting of ballots only to reemerge a few hours later with flipped tallies, reasonable people are suspicious. When companies that make the voting machines refuse to let state officials who use those machines from knowing how the machines work, reasonable people are suspicious. When the establishment media that carried water for one candidate tells the suspicious that their suspicions are unreasonable, reasonable people remain suspicious. And when that same media and the corporate power they represent characterize legislation strengthening election integrity as the “New Jim Crow,” reasonable people may be convinced that the fix is in.

Within days of Georgia governor Brian Kemp signing legislation passed by the Georgia legislature along party lines, major corporations (Coca-Cola, Delta, ViacomCBS, among others) condemned the bill as racist. Major League Baseball relocated its All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado. President Biden, adding to a decades long list of idiotic comments, exclaimed that the law made Jim Crow look like “Jim Eagle” and encouraged large corporations to wage war against popularly-elected republican government. Remarkably, the President of the United States acted as if he were president of Corporate America and not the leader of a sovereign nation that constitutionally guarantees to its citizens a republican form of government.

The betrayal of Democrats to one side, does the law reestablish the voter suppression regime of the Jim Crow era? Hardly. If anything, it doesn’t go far enough. Georgia legislators debated and then rightly rejected banning Sunday voting. But they also rejected getting rid of no-excuse absentee voting. Moreover, the machines are staying. However, by adding an ID requirement for absentee voting, the core problem with no-excuse absentee voting presented has been ameliorated considerably (in theory, at least). The law doesn’t get rid of drop boxes, which were never authorized in law in the first place, but codifies their use; the boxes must be located inside the clerk’s office or inside a voting location, accessible during early voting hours and closed when early voting period ends. Chain of custody issues have been partly resolves with the reforms (again, in theory).

Requiring voter ID to vote by mail is perhaps the most controversial reform. (Why ID was required for in person voting and not for mail-in voting frankly astounds me.) The voter will have to provide a driver’s license number or a state ID number. If the voter does not have either of these, they may submit a photocopy of a different form of valid identification, such as their Social Security number. (This is typical in electoral integrity rules throughout Europe.) The county registrar’s office may issue free state ID cards. This reform replaces the disastrous signature verification process. The complaint is that voter ID requirements disproportionately affect black and other minority voters. Critics point to the proportion of rejected ballots in the June 2020 primary. Yet they don’t mention the near absence of ballot rejection in November 2020 general election. As for difficulty obtaining ID, that’s a problem to be addressed providing every citizen with a valid ID, not by making it easier for individuals to cast fraudulent votes.

(It should be emphasized that lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud is a reason neither to weaken election integrity or fail to tighten integrity. As noted, genuine elections are internationally recognized as a human right. If there is an opportunity for fraud to occur, reforms should be emplaced to limit that opportunity.)

Absentee ballots must be requested 78 days before and received 11 days before the election. No unsolicited ballot requests may be sent to voters. Only requested ballots will be sent. The law does not, however, prevent third parties from sending out ballot request forms as long as the source is clearly identified. This reform is designed to curtail the practice known as “ballot harvesting,” which can be used to pressure voters into voting or casting votes for particular candidates. While the postal voting period has been shortened, the bill expands early voting. There must be at least 17 days of early voting, which begins 22 days before election day, including at least two Saturdays, and the polls must open at least by 9 am and close no earlier than 5 pm with the option of operating from 7 am to 7 pm.

Another contentious provision in the law is Georgia’s ban on giving voters food or drink while waiting in line at the polls. The press reports it as ban on water, but the law specifically refers to drink. Such provisions, which exist in other states, forbid people from handing out food and drink because these are apparent acts of charity used to influence voters. This is the well-known problem of “treating,” where food and drinks and other items are gifts. It’s a form of political corruption. Prohibiting this follows the same logic of not having campaign paraphernalia within a certain distance from the polls. The law clearly states that poll workers can make available to voters self-service water as long as it is not provided in a way that could potentially influence votes. The law does not prevent a person from bringing his own food and drink for personal use.

The media makes a point of long lines and waiting times as reasons for the necessity of providing voters with food and drink. The new law is designed to reduce lines and waiting times. The law requires counties to create additional precincts based on previous numbers and times (2,000 voters or over an hour of wait time), as well as provide additional resources to increase the ease and speed process. There are also rules to reduce confusion and provisional voting. If a voter shows up at the wrong location, they are directed to the correct location and discouraged from casting a provisional ballot, which have a high rejection rate. They are still allowed to cast a provisional ballot is they are unable to make it to the correct location.

Finally, the law contains provisions that establish a more nonpartisan election board, allow counties to report results in a more timely fashion, and provide greater protection against illegal behavior and voter intimidation. The new election board will no longer be chaired by the secretary of state, which is a partisan office, but by a non-partisan chair. The processing but not tabulating of absentee ballots must begin 15 days before the election so they are ready for tabulation. Counties must report returns for absentee ballots by 5 pm the day after election day and report the number of early voting and absentee ballots by 10 pm on election day. The law calls for the establishment of a hotline to report voter intimidation and illegal activity. Although the law makes it easier to challenge a voter’s qualifications to cast a ballot (the illegal activity piece), the state board is permitted to establish procedures to restrict illegitimate challenges so as not to burden legitimate voters.

Rules emplaced to ensure a genuine election are fundamental to meeting international and human rights norms and standards. These rules must not systemically discourage or prevent citizens from a specific group (class, race, sex) from voting. As stated at the outset, there is nothing in recent George election reform law that can reasonably be called voter suppression. The range of tactics used in voter suppression are not apparent in the legislation. The hyperbolic comparisons of the law to Jim Crow era rules is really about weakening electoral integrity by smearing reformers and reforms with racist motive and intent.

Morries Hall, George Floyd’s alleged drug dealer, who was allegedly in the car with Floyd and his girlfriend that fateful day (May 25, 2020), invoked his First Amendment right against self-incrimination. Why? His lawyer contends that anything Hall says about his activity with George Floyd could leave him vulnerable to being charged with the murder of George Floyd.

How could Hall be vulnerable to (third degree) murder charges? Because Floyd ingested more than three times the lethal dose of fentanyl in pills combined with methamphetamine and Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, is a witness to Hall providing Floyd with those drugs. Her testimony is supported by the physical evidence. In addition to the autopsy and toxicology reports of the drugs in Floyd’s system, pills containing fentanyl and methamphetamine were recovered from the car Floyd was driving, as well as on the floor of the squad car where Floyd violently resisted arrest—with Floyd’s saliva on them.

The state could give Hall qualified immunity to receive his testimony, which is obviously relevant, indeed crucial to the case. But this would mean calling a witness that could potentially exonerate Chauvin of the charges levels against him. Hall’s testimony would at the very least buttress the defense case that it was a lethal dose of fentanyl (combined with other drugs and other factors) that killed Floyd, not a nonlethal control hold (safely used hundreds of times by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department). Wouldn’t justice demand that the state grant Hall qualified immunity and compel him to testify? After all, only the prosecution can do that. Why won’t they? And why isn’t Hall on trial for the third degree murder of George Floyd? The answers are obvious to me.

The case against Chauvin is a travesty of justice. The state is pursuing this case against reason. Knowing now that Floyd had consumed an extremely high dose of fentanyl, the evidence that Floyd was overdosing is present the moment he is extracted from the car. Watch the entire tape. Floyd keeps repeating “I can’t breathe.” He says this more than two dozen times, many times before he goes to the ground (at his request). Shortness of breath is the most common sign of fentanyl overdose. Estimated to be up to 50 times stronger than heroin, Fentanyl is considered especially dangerous because it interferes with breathing. Death from fentanyl is typically hypoxia caused by drug-induced asphyxia. Moreover, Floyd had congestive heart failure (75 percent arterial blockage), was hypertensive, had an adrenal disorder, and was suffering from COVID-19.

What we are witnessing is a show trial orchestrated to perpetuate a false narrative, namely that the police are racist and that George Floyd is a martyr to the cause of racial justice. Chauvin is a human sacrifice to appease an angry and irrational mob. The perceived legitimacy of months of deadly and destructive rioting depend on a trial and a guilty verdict. If the second shoe doesn’t drop, if Chauvin is acquitted, expect more rioting (we hear the threats).

Is there any evidence Chauvin is a racist? Had he contributed in some way Floyd’s death, how would that support the claim of systemic racism in policing? Yet the media reports on this case as if it is a slam-dunk for the prosecution and, furthermore, that it’s not just a racist police officer on trial, but racist policing in America.

There’s a real fight going on in the Republican Party between the neoliberal-neoconservative establishment, i.e. the corporatist-globalist wing of America’s political-ideological apparatus, and the populist uprising led by democratic-republicans and economic nationalists, what insiders refer to as the Trump wing of the party. Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, daughter of long-time establishment figure Dick Cheney, understands the problem economic nationalism presents to the establishment, recently using dramatic language to awake her fellow Republicans to the danger. Essentially, she characterized the MAGA movement as neo-Marxist.

Cheney was prompted to make this characterization after Representative Jim Banks wrote a memo to Leader Kevin McCarthy last month encouraging the leader to urge House Republicans to embrace issues important to working-class voters if they wanted to take back the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections. “You may have seen that I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of our party and how we capitalize on the gift Donald Trump gave us, which was his connection with working-class voters,” Banks writes “Because of Trump, the GOP has undergone a coalitional transformation and is now the party of the working class.” He adds, “We should embrace that. Not fight it.”

Banks understands that Donald Trump won 75 million votes in the 2020 election largely thanks to the turnout of working class voters, including black and brown citizens, who are waking up to the realities of the managed decline of the American republic. In the memo, Banks writes, “Democrats will keep alienating working-class voters because that’s what their donors demand, and Republicans should welcome them with open arms by fully embracing an agenda that’s worthy of their support.”

Banks’ characterization of the Democratic Party as alienating working class Americans is epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s notorious 2016 smear of half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” This basket, she said, is “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Presumably she wasn’t referring to the business and middle class voters who were supporting Donald Trump. She was talking about working class Americans and reframing their individualism and traditionalism in critical theory terms. She was talking about a the good people back in my home state of Tennessee.

Clinton was echoing Barack Obama from eight years earlier. “They get bitter,” Obama said; “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” In his characterization of the “deplorable,” Obama is at once telegraphing his politics: hostility towards gun owners and Christians—and his globalist agenda.

Clinton and Obama’s characterization is standard among progressives who loathe the working class and rural Americans who love their republic and want responsive small-d democratic government. I know this first-hand. I am a professor at a public university. I am surrounded by progressive academics who look down on ordinary Americans. For them, a working class man critical of corporate exploitation of foreign labor to undermine his standard of living is a xenophobe scapegoating immigrants. I hear such expressions of elitism all the time. Frankly, it has become so bad I find it difficult to socialize with colleagues. Piling on more insult, administrators don’t wait for an employee to act in a manner contrary to the doctrines of diversity, equity, and inclusivity; employees are compelled by threat of disciplinary action or withholding of pay raises and promotion to take routine mandatory training in woke ideology. (Do I even need to add that the Democratic Party can safely count on their votes?)

The Democratic Party, like the Labour Party in the UK, has become the party of transnational corporate power, the affluent middle class (that is, the academic, administrative, professional-managerial strata), and a constellation of identity groups, among whom the party has promoted victimhood and created dependency. The aims of this anti-working class and elitist alliance are antithetical to the interests of ordinary American citizens of all races, religions, and ethnicities. There’s no future for working class and rural citizens in such a party. Nor for America as a republic. Corporate governance and the pursuit of globalization is destroying the nation.

According to Melanie Zanona of Politico, Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach President Trump on the absurd charge that he incited the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and who is backed by corporate insiders and former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, responded to Banks’ memo by insisting that “the GOP is not the party of class warfare.” She argued that “dividing society into classes while attacking the private sector is neo-Marxist.” But there is class warfare. Political parties don’t divide society into the social classes. Capitalism does that.

Cheney is giving voice to an establishment—and this includes Democrats—desperate to tamp down the move by conservatives to give political representation to working class and rural citizens across the nation. The Democratic Party, closed to populism, progressivism ubiquitous in the Democratic Party, no longer serves as a vehicle for working class politics. Cheney’s frantic rhetoric makes obvious the recognition that the Republican Party has become a potential organ for the populist-nationalist rebellion against globalization and denationalization. The Democratic Party is likewise terrified that shifting working class sentiment could drain away members of their coalition (hence the scramble to enlarge the voting base and weaken election integrity). The ruling class is surely pining for the 1990s.

Of course, the populist uprising is not neo-Marxist. Ironically, neo-Marxist posturing has become the angle of woke capitalism and its functionalities, the forces against which the populists are rebelling. But it’s not Marxist, either. Obviously.

How should Marxists feel about all this? Marxists should oppose globalization and denationalization. Most acutely felt in offshoring and mass immigration, denationalization disempowers working class people, undermines their communities, and lowers their living standards. Marxists should oppose identity politics, as well. Identity politics fracture working class consciousness and under the development of working class politics. Marxists should not support a political party that is unified in pushing globalism, mass immigration, and identity politics.

When I hear self-described leftists arguing that the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils, I am reminded of how profoundly contemporary leftwing thought retards class consciousness and the capacity to reckon the situation. The Democratic Party is the greater evil. The Republican Party, still the party of big business, is the large-scale political apparatus most open to working class politics. It matters less whether it’s left or right wing. It matters that, whatever the name of the party, that is democratic-republican and liberal in its support for the principles of equality and liberty. It is to be expected that the elitist progressive looks down her nose at the working class and rural voters who see in the Republican Party the only apparatus responsive to their interests and values. The progressive attitude towards working people exudes pity and contempt for ordinary Americans, whom they see as backwards and bigoted—rubes who, as Obama put it, cling to God and guns. Part of moving forward requires those who identify as leftists pulling their heads from that space.

This means recognizing the threat of corporate governance, something Marxists used to be good at. It is therefore interesting when prominent Republicans speak out against corporate governance. “From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government,” Senator McConnell said yesterday. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

I wouldn’t describe corporate governance as a “far-left mob.” However, I understand why McConnell would given that corporations funds are useful to the Republican Party. Moreover, the rhetoric of the woke corporate administrators is drawn from far-left ideology, including neo-Marxist doctrines. The senator has to be careful not to alienate sources of funding. But it’s clear what he is talking about when he accused the private sector of behaving as a parallel government. However the manner in which McConnell said this, it is promising that he raised the issue. This is the real danger to our republic. It’s bad enough that corporations would influence legislation and public policy via their money power. But openly colluding and acting to undermine the legitimacy of the federal or state governments and acting as if a corporation is a legitimate government agency of these territories presents a clear and present danger to national integrity.

Economic nationalism is the solution to the problems of the working class. Close the borders and marginalize China. Dismantle corporate governance. The functionaries of the corporate establishment understand this. Suppressing populism is imperative. This is why conservative and liberal voices are being systematically silenced across the mediascape. This is why a prominent establishment Republican would be moved to absurdly characterize MAGA as neo-Marxist. The rhetoric signals fear and desperation.