I am working on a lecture for my criminology class in which I demonstrate the relationship between surplus value and crime and criminal justice spending. This requires consulting the Annual Survey of Manufactures to calculate the rate of surplus value (exploitation, also productivity). I do this nearly every semester to stay current.
I set out to compare 1996, 2006, and 2016 (as I have early data archived). One finds a drastic increase in the rate of surplus value during the first decade measures (1996 and 2006), jumping from 4.25 to 5.60 (these a multiples of value added over wages). Clinton’s neoliberal policies really fucked the working class, who saw their wages stagnate even though they added a lot more value in production.
The rate of surplus value stays stable during the second decade (2006-2016). This is explained in part because of the Great Recession that began late in Bush’s second term and dragged on through Obama’s two terms flattened domestic production (there were other factors, of course, but I put them to one side). One may celebrate the fact that the rate of surplus value was flat (exploitation did not grow worse), but it was because the economy was awful—and that’s bad for working people. People lost their homes. They lost their jobs.
At any rate, curious, I looked at 2019, the last year before COVID-19, to see how Trump did. We know that economic growth was robust under Trump and wages grew rapidly. When wages rise in the context of economic expansion that cuts into the rate of surplus value. In other words, under Trump, workers kept more of the value added in production in wages.
Moreover, joblessness fell to its lowest point in decades under Trump. Supply and demand: shrinking labor surplus puts upward pressure on wages. That’s thanks to immigration restrictions. In other words, Trump suppressed the negative effects of globalization on American working families.
Well, it turns out that the rate of surplus value fell rather appreciably between 2016 and 2019—to 5.42. Trump’s economic nationalism worked for working families. Chalk one up to populism.
As Steve Cortes and Steve Bannon have repeatedly pointed out, the US under Trump was a striver’s economy in which the wealth produced in production was widely shared.
Finally, you may be wondering about the relationship between surplus value and crime and criminal justice spending. In 1994, in the scientific journal Crime, Law, and Social Change, Michael Lynch, Byron Groves*, Alan Lizotte, presents a theoretical and empirical examination of Marxian economy theory and criminology in which the rate of surplus value was found to explain most of variation in crime and criminal justice expenditures. As the rate of surplus value increases, so does crime and criminal justice expenditures. These findings confirm George Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s foundational work in Punishment and Social Structure (1939).
Is mainstream discourse around gangstalking the psychiatrization of a form of mobbing and surveillance to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victim? Gangstalking is a phenomenon where a group of people, in a coordinated and covert manner, target an individual for harassment. In a recent Quillete podcast, with the help of host Jonathan Kay, psychiatrist Andrew Lustig portrays gangstalking as a conspiracist internet subculture.
I do not argue in this blog there are no instances in which individuals falsely believe others are ganging up on them or that they are being surveilled. Individuals often attribute meaning to seeming patterns occurring around them. Individuals may develop delusions and paranoia. But there are also instances in which individuals become aware that others have ganged up on them or that they are being watched.
There are cases of workplace mobbing in which the goal is to gaslight the target in order to destabilize her consciousness and disrupt her mood in order to drive her from her job. There are also cases of Internet mobbing, where a gang forms and orchestrates a bullying or gaslighting campaign. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which an individual or group makes a person question his perception of reality, recollections, or sanity. Cancel culture sometimes comes with these features.
As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, an abnormal psychology professor described to the class a case from his clinical practice of a construction worker who, in his descriptions of mobbing, sounded delusional. Why would his coworkers want to do this to him? The lengths to which his coworkers would go to torment him seemed implausible. Maybe it was childish pranking exaggerated by his mind. The client was so sure this was happening to him the psychologist drove to one of the worksites and surveilled the scene. The client was not delusional. He was being mobbed. The professor told the class that getting to the bottom of a client’s situation sometimes involves checking out claims the client makes to see whether there is some truth to the claims. Other clinicians would very likely have diagnosed the man with a mental illness and medicated him.
Gaslighting, bullying, mobbing, gangstalking—these are real phenomena. A person’s emotional and psychological response to being bullied or gangstalked may be indistinguishable from “symptoms” cataloged by the diagnostic manuals of psychiatry. This is a revealing truth. Psychiatrists may falsely assume a world in which gangstalking could only be a delusional state of the mind in the targeted person, who suffers from a persecution complex, schizophrenia, etc. This redefinition of the problem, the professional denial of an actual phenomenon, serves ideological and political ends.
The psychiatric profession may even claim, exuding the authority of a licensed medial practitioner in an allegedly objective field of clinical practice, one guided by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, that those who argue that gangstalking is, at least in some situations, real, are themselves delusional. It is worth keeping in mind this historical analog: Those who challenged the witchfynder during the Inquisition and rejected the validity of the Malleus Maleficarum were themselves suspected of demon possession or of practicing witchcraft. If their resistance assumed a sophisticated form, they were designated heretics.
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The psychological state paranoia, from the Greek παράνοια, is synonymous with the concept of madness. This equivalency is useful for maintaining control over people and situations. When something occurs that most observers regard as accidental or coincidental, the person who believes—with good reason—that what is happening is intentional, often appears to suffer from mental illness.
Unless the cause referenced is some supernatural thing (in which case, because such things are impossible, mental illness may be suspected), the rational thing for others to do, if one is interested in the question (which he must be or he would not be attending to it) would be to confirm or disconfirm the claim being made. Otherwise, dismissing claims out of hand as “paranoid” is a method of denying the truth behind a claim without making any effort to disprove it (usually because investigating it would prove it to be, at least in part, warranted).
That a person fears her government on grounds that it spies on people or disappears them does not make him paranoid. Indeed, based on what we know and are willing admit to ourselves, it makes him sane. Indeed, what may qualify as mental illness is the belief that government spying, kidnapping, torture, and assassination either do not occur, do not extend to US citizens, or that, as long as they don’t include US citizens, then they’re okay. Although these are desired beliefs from the perspective of power, they are all instances of delusional thinking for reasonably well-educated people.
At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. ― Antonio Gramsci
There is power in repetition. This is as true for the truth as it is for the lie. Not everybody reads the things you have already written. Nor does everybody hear the things you have already said. What is more, not everybody gets things the first time they read or hear them. I want people to understand why I am not a progressive. And why populism is the future of freedom and democracy.
I have said something about this a few times before (okay, more than a few times). But because I am still getting signals that people don’t understand me or progressivism, I feel the need to say them again. Because a lot of self-identified leftists also self-identify as progressives (and indeed many of them they are), they are either confused by my language or think that I am on the political right.
I am concerned with how people understand me. But I am particularly concerned that people who express populist sentiment self-identify as progressive. I am also concerned with the way populism is portrayed as a rightwing ideology and politics. This is corporatist propaganda designed to keep those with leftwing sympathies away from populist politics.
The short answer to why I am not a progressive is because I am a populist—and populism and progressivism are diametrically opposed. Populists profess a belief in individual liberty and democratic-republicanism. There are left and right expressions of populism. My populism is leftwing. This is in part because I am opposed to heterosexualism, patriarchy, and religion as organizing principles (these are, after all, harmful to individual liberty). Or course, I do not define my politics only in terms of what I oppose. However, left and right populists have a lot in common, so there is opportunity there. My view is that, despite my leftwing orientation, we should stop organizing our politics strictly around the left-right frame, since what is expressed as leftwing may be authoritarian in character and what is expressed as rightwing may be libertarian in character. The latter is useful. The former is terrifying. Hand over fist, rightwing libertarianism is preferable to leftwing authoritarianism.
The longer answer is that progressivism is the ideological-political position that accepts corporate governance, indeed enables and legitimizes it in practice by (a) fusing government and corporate power in regulatory bodies through which corporate power is able to control via the logic of state monopoly capitalism and (b) professionalizing the offices of government, and public institutions more broader, by adopting rationalist business-oriented management practices. Progressivism expresses an elitist faith of the competence and necessity of professional-managerial strata, which include the academics and administrators who run colleges and universities in line with the business community. This system also includes primary and secondary teachers. It’s through this apparatus that the offspring of the working class are prepared via indoctrination in pro-corporate ideology to reproduce the social logic of the bureaucracy throughout their lives.
One knows progressives by their support for technocracy, which suppresses government by, of, and for the people in favor of rule by corporate and government experts and officials. Progressives encourage citizens to defer to government agencies, such as public health agencies and figures, on questions of individual freedom, social interaction, and community relations, on the claim that these agencies and figures know what’s best for the ignorant masses. To accomplish this, progressivism defines social problems in technical terms, for example by deploying the language of medicalization, to expand and entrench control over the public, over its mind and behavior. Progressives use shame and fear to drive popular support for the elaboration of the technocratic control apparatus.
If one wants an example of what this looks like, perhaps one needs look no further than the COVID-10 pandemic and the lockdown of societies and forced mask-wearing of its citizens across corporatist nations. But another ready example lies in the technocratic approach to human relations seen in racial diversity training programs. Thanks to their own indoctrination in the prevailing ideology of their environment (they are zealous in their work), progressives assume a priori the public is racist and in need of collective discipline and rehabilitation. But tyranny lies in the preventative approach to thought and action. These trainings are also about transforming public consciousness and conduct in a manner conducive to deepening corporate legitimacy and control. The work of progressives is to condition the public to accept as normal a smooth Orwellian panopticism by changing the way we talk to and interact with each other in a myriad of extralegal ways.
I accept that there are people who self-identify as progressive who mean something different by that term. For some, progressive is a euphemism for socialist. But they are few in number and the progressive identity risks their enlistment in projects that are contrary to their expressed values. Moreover, socialist advocacy is rather frightening when accompanied by rhetoric soft on technocracy. However, at its core, progressivism concerns the management of people for the sake of the ruling class, i.e., the corporate class. Socialism in any emancipatory sense concerns the management of things for the sake of the people. But we must never forget that socialism sometimes comes in totalitarian forms. Socialist totalitarianism can hail from the left (the democratic centralism of the Soviet Union) and the right (the national socialism of Nazi Germany). Progressivism always teeters on the totalitarian pivot. Corporations are, after all, private tyrannies. Because they are not as crude ideologically as fascism, and because they often assert themselves as antifascist, their fascism flies beneath the radar. They nonetheless lean in that direction.
I want to conclude by distinguishing corporatism from capitalism. The domination of the corporate form such that it transforms capitalism in fundamental ways is a feature of capitalism at a particular stage of of development in this mode of production. Capitalism can and has existed without corporations as the dominant form of economic (and legal and political) organization, and, while I am not pro-capitalist, capitalist relations in their early forms were preferable to their current manifestation. In the current historical epoch, corporations are the dominant form and have assumed control over the legal and political apparatus. Because of corporate control over cultural production, corporations have assumed not only power over political economy, but command over pubic sentiment and values.
The rise of corporate power is why progressivism appears as the dominant form of governmental and public institutional organization. Populism was smashed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century while elites developed progressivism to circumscribe the range of options used to regulate the chaos of capitalist production and enlist segments of the working class in the corporatist project. In the process, the emancipatory socialist option was eliminated in the developed West. Progressivism allowed corporate elites to co-opt leftwing sentiments and put them to work for corporate power. Successive capitalist crises—war and depression—fully fused corporate power with the state in the twentieth century.
It was under Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party that a state monopoly model was fully implemented in a Western nation. Following WWII, steered by the United States, progressivism by another name (social democracy) achieved similar models throughout Europe. Progressives are keen on defending Roosevelt from charges of being a “socialist” by proclaiming that he “saved capitalism.” Actually, Roosevelt (who was not a socialist) served as midwife to the state monopoly capitalism that Eisenhower would alert the public to in his haunting farewell address in 1960, where he famously noted the fusion of corporate power with the military apparatus and, less famously, the fusion of corporate and government power with the production of scientific knowledge.
As for the transnationalization of this model, the subject of my last blog entry (Physical Capital, Human Capital, Technology, and Productive Work—These Drive the Real Economy), Mao’s communist revolution in 1949 led to the establishment of a state monopoly capitalist model there, covered by the rhetoric of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Beginning with the Kennedy-Johnson decade of the 1960s, with New Frontiers and the Great Society, among other things providing the capitalist class with access to more capital by slashing taxes and opening the country to mass immigration, followed by the opening of China by Carter and the Trilateralists at the end of the 1970s, a path prepared by Nixon and Kissinger, opening that country to foreign capital investment, the world was prepared for the melding of state monopoly models in a transnational system of global neofeudalism.
Progressivism is the faith behind the transformation of the world into a global corporatist order (the Democratic Party its political home). That’s the long answer to why I am not a progressive (or a Democrat).
The managed decline of America is being accomplished with the financialization of the Western economy and the globalization of production, both offshoring and mass immigration (legal and illegal). This is not only hurting America’s working class, but shifting the balance of global power in a dangerous direction. Besides the threat of corporate bureaucratic control at home, the danger to human dignity and liberty to Americans comes as a rising China, a totalitarian state capitalist nation that has no regard for individual freedom and human rights. In this essay, I briefly explain and make recommendations for addressing the situation.
Financialization aside, four things drive growth in the real economy: physical (constant or fixed) capital, e.g., machines; human capital, e.g., engineers and scientists; technology and innovation, including methods of organizational rationalization; and productive work, which creates not only the value added in production, but also the aggregate demand that completes the circuit of capital, that is, that realizes surplus value in profit, without which there is no wealth accumulation and capital for investment. All this requires a national economic strategy to avoid crises of class polarization, unsustainability, including land and resource misuse and unchecked population growth, sectoral disproportionalities, and overproduction and underconsumption.
Why is China—the modern-day analog to national socialist Germany, replete with large-scale genocide, concentration and slave labor camps—rising while the West is in decline? Unlike the West, which is controlled by corporate power, a force bereft of loyalty to the nations that charter its constituents and subsidize and defend their material and ideological interests, the Chinese Communist Party has a nationalist agenda. I hasten to emphasize that the problem is not with nationalism per se. The problem is with a nationalism that that does not represent the interests of the people it purports to represent. The problem of China’s authoritarian nationalism comes with the problem of weak civic nationalism in the West. The melding of Chinese state capitalism and the transnational corporate establishment, both sharing the unfreedom of bureaucratic collectivism, is fueling the rise of a totalitarian nightmare.
For the purpose of advancing its imperialist ambitions, the Chinese Communist Party is powering China’s economic development by leveraging capital markets opened to them by Western governments, primarily the United States, the world’s largest economy (for now); inducing the relocation of industrial (including agricultural) production from the West to its vast industrial plantations, for example the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), established in the 1980s following negotiations with the Carter Administration (staffed by globalists) to inject foreign capital and technology into China and expand capacity for exporting goods to Western markets while leaving intact the Communist Party; stealing Western intellectual property by funding Western R&D and infiltrating the corporate-university apparatus; establishing and controlling supply chains across the planet, as well transportation routes via Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road initiative, a global infrastructure development project that will allow China to control most of the Eastern Hemisphere; and building a vast military apparatus with which China will wage kinetic war against its neighbors and the West—all this financed by the working classes of the West and of China.
China is now the fastest growing economy in the world. This has been true for a number of years. And none of this would be possible without the transnational corporation and its political establishments in the West, in the United States largely represented by the Democratic Party, betraying the citizens of their respective countries.
Rank-and-file progressives and social democrats in the trans-Atlantic space have a weak grasp of economics, let alone international political economy. Moreover, the rank-and-file have been conditioned to accept a politics of globalism and Western-loathing. We see this in the resistance to a national economic strategy and educational policy emphasizing domestic industrial production and the development of human capital in the United States. This is a tragic development. With technological advancements in production, with the rising organic composition of capital (i.e., the capital-intensity of production), investment in human capital has become more important than ever.
This fact is not lost on the CCP and the state capitalist oligarchy of China who have, as I showed above, focused a nationalist economic strategy on the development of domestic industrial capacity and pursued educational policies that develop their human capital. By focusing on human capital, China provides transnational corporations with armies of low-wage high-skill labor. Thus China has engaged in a conscious strategy to import capital and invest in the training and education of its citizens. Meanwhile, the United States, its high-tech manufacturing work progressively offshored, has shifted the focus of education away from human capital development towards social justice curriculum, which not only ill-prepares students for work in a technologically-advanced society, but conditions them to reject a world that requires such preparation. At the same time, open borders import cheap but high-skill foreign labor, while native workers are idled in urban ghettos and deindustrialized cities and towns. China’s success depends on the West abandoning nationalism as the principle of political and legal organization.
Globalism is wrecking America (and the West) and the establishment wings of the two major parties, controlled by transnational corporate and financial power, are swinging the wrecking ball. Our own elected leaders are betraying us. The solution is closing the border, disinvesting in China (temporary switching to India and other allies where we cannot ramp up domestic production ourselves), depriving China of access to our capital markets, punishing China for its human rights violations, and reinvesting in human capital at home on the basis of national economic priorities.
Economic nationalism is the way the save America and what America represents and that means marginalizing the corporate and political establishment that is now running our lives and revising our history. But we don’t have a lot of time. The Biden Administration, in coordination with the transnational elite, is preparing the ground for a massive top-to-bottom transformation of America that will foreclose opportunities to push back against the global neofeudalism they seek to establish. The meddle they desire is China-lite.
There are no such things as demons and devils, those unseen spirit forces that infect or possess people. I know people who subscribe to those particular religious standpoints that posit such things are convinced that such things are real. There are also religious standpoints that believe in such mystical notions as that guilt is inherited and carried in the blood. But whether demons and devils and all the rest of it are to be taken seriously, these can affect no law and policy in the United States of America because it is a secular republic. In America, the freedom to believe in metaphysical things comes with the freedom from the imposition of such beliefs.
I want to make a comparison and then pose a challenge to conclude this little essay. During the Middle Ages, the Inquisitor tortured those accused of demon possession or suspected of having inherited guilt from their ancestors or their tribe to extract from them a confession. A confession was often necessary because the Inquisitor usually had no way of objectively demonstrating the presence of a demon in the accused. The only evidence may be stigmata, that is the mark of the devil, or bizarre behavior (the cause, of course, a matter of interpretation in light of doctrine). But not everybody carried stigmata. And not everybody behaved in a bizarre manner. The truth of the presence of a demon could then only come from the accused confessing to such a presence.
In the case of blood guilt, there may be nothing about many Jews to suggest they were of the tribe that murdered Christ. Moreover, because they were part of that tribe, the success of Jews as a group implicated every Jew in justified feelings of resentment. Of course, as with blood guilt, the resentment of Jews for their success was also an irrational sentiment and no justification at all from a secular point of view. In any case, Jews were often tortured ahead of the stake and their wealth subject to confiscation.
Today, white Americans are confronting circumstance logically similar to those of the Inquisition. Antiracists believe that whites are possessed of an unseen force, an implicit bias that directs their behavior in a manner than harms others. Antiracists believe in the mystical notion that guilt is inherited and carried on the genes. Antiracists believe not only that there really are such things as races, but also that there should be such things and individuals should be rewarded and punishment on the basis of them.
Antiracists express resentment over the success of whites. The success of whites as a group implicates every white person in justifiable feelings of resentment. Every white person stands metaphysically condemned in the eyes of the Antiracist for the alleged actions of his ancestors and the attributes of his tribe (by alleged we mean assumed without proof). Even when no direct link can be made through the genealogical line to a past crime (no less an irrational exercise), the accused is condemned by his race. He is condemned by simply being born as a member of the tribe.
And, of course, aside from a handful of devil worshippers (there are still a few white supremacists around), white privilege is best affirmed by having the accused confess to his sins, to admit to be possessing by race privilege, whether he thinks he is possessed or not. The Antiracist’s struggle session is no less in principle the Inquisitor’s torture cell. It’s still an interrogation. If the accused resists the label, like the accused mental patient who rebels against the diagnostic label of a psychiatric manual, he is denying the truth of guilt manifest in his tribal stigma: his skin color and his ancestry. There is, as well, his ordinary behavior (re)interpreted in the light of doctrine.
Critical race theorists, the theologians of Antiracism, a new religion (and the new racism), believe that the rational system of adjudicating guilt and responsibility based on individual human agency and intentionality is the “perpetrator’s perspective,” so called because it conceals the truth that the racist actions of an individual who is white is really a crime committed by all whites. Social justice deems that all whites should pay for the crimes of the individual with the tribal stigma of white skin. His ancestry condemns him. The white man is to pay not only for others like him, but for the corpses he resembles.
This formula critical race theorists call the “victim’s perspective.” It assumes that all black people (and any other group deemed historically disadvantaged, which is sometimes difficult as we have seen with Asian-Americans), no matter how successful, are victims of the racism of the perpetrator, whites collectively, who are responsible for that collective suffering. Because of the collective suffering, the oppressed group is entitled to an epistemic and moral privilege, assuming a superior position from which to judge other people and history and, finding them guilty as charged, holding them to account, confiscating their wealth, and condemning their history (and thus their future).
So here’s an exercise for you. Take the formulas of the Antiracists and, substituting the words “white” and “whiteness” for “witch” or “Jew” and “witchcraft” or “Jewish,” see if this sounds like justice or if it sounds like a dangerous, destructive, and potentially lethal ideology. Let history be your guide. That’s what the Antiracists recommend.
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There is another superstitious element in Antiracism (which I am capitalizing because it is a religion) that one can find in other religious and cultural systems, namely the practice of scapegoating. Scapegoating is closely associated with witchfinding, so the explanation works for both.
Scapegoating is where a community, not understand why things haven’t been going well for them, takes an animal and loads it up with problems, defined as sins and the like, and then sends the animal to die in the wilderness, hoping that the sins will die also there in the wilderness. Witchfinding is a practice where the problems of the community are located in a person and the person is sacrificed and the community is purged of evil.
The anxiety felt by the community that manifests in scapegoating and witchfinding is often caused by some real disturbance—biological, climatic, cultural, economic, political, and so forth—but it is interpreted in terms of a doctrine that invents entities that embody these problems and explains their effects, whatever their actual causes. In other words, the unseen forces invented by the religion or the cultural system. The priesthood are there to translate phenomena in doctrinal style. A moral panic is engineered and mass hysteria spreads. Soon animals, including human ones, are punished, tortured, banished, and killed.
This is what is happening in the West. Globalization is the cause of the actual disturbance. It manifests itself in very concrete ways: work disappears, wages decline, careers are lost, homes are foreclosed on, neighborhoods are disorganized, traditions smashed, governments rendered ineffective, and so forth.
Without a sophisticated understanding of international political economy, or absent a democratic populist politics that articulates working class interests, and trapped inside racial and ethnic and other identitarian bubbles, the masses are susceptible to religious-like interpretations of their anxieties and trepidations, and rituals of scapegoating and witchfinding become the order of the day. The civilians turn on each other, and in the religiously-proscribed ways.
We are experiencing a moral panic engineered by the priesthood and pushed by the congregation of Antiracism. It translates the problems of ordinary Americans in racial and ethnic (and even religious) terms, finding witches in white people (excluding those identified as Muslim) and scapegoating them, heaping upon them what their religion defines as the transgenerational sin of wicked history in a world polluted by whiteness, and then banishing the animals to ignominy.
That’s the point of the ritual anyway. And the zealots will have their way as long the witches put up no resistance.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa killed ten people, one of them a police officer.
You know the establishment media wanted a white Christian shooter to be the perpetrator in Boulder, Colorado. They wanted a white man taken alive, shot in the leg, so they could exclaim, “Had he been a black shooter….” They waited to hear the excuse: “He was mentally ill.” Were there Asian-Americans in the store? Hispanics?
The media waited for a long time to tell us the name of the shooter. They had to come out with it because the Internet is still too open. They will likely never tell us that Al-Issa had ISIS sympathies and loathed homosexuals (or was anti-Trump). Facebook scrubbed Al-Issa’s pages and the screenshots taken by smart citizens journalists will likely never make it to the mainstream.
Al-Issa’s brother gave the media a different motive, if we can call it that: Al-lissa is mentally ill. The Daily Beast carried the headline this morning: “‘Very Anti-Social’: Suspect in Boulder Supermarket Massacre Was Paranoid, Brother Says.” Since Arabs are white, perhaps this can be thrown into “white shooters are always mentally ill” complaint after all. Anything but Islamic terrorism. That might make people wonder where Islamic terrorism went and whether Trump had anything to do with its (temporary) disappearance.
Have you seen this bit of woke leftist propaganda? By “white violence,” I assume violence committed by white people. It could mean, more abstractly, racist violence that results from white supremacy. Leftists are sharing the meme in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, crimes portrayed by the establishment media as a manifestation of white supremacy, so perhaps there’s a bit of both in the slogan. The Atlanta shooting is not an instance of anti-Asian bias crime, however, so that piece lies in the imaginary (see How Establishment Dissembling on Atlanta Denies Real Problems).
First, the idea that white crime is excused is false on its face. As I will document below, blacks are many times more likely than whites to perpetrate criminal violence, yet the media rarely cover it. The media pushed instead a narrative for months that police officers disproportionately kill black men in the face of decades of research showing that this is simply not true (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Far Podcast: The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters). The narrative depended in part on the public not knowing the extent of criminal violence perpetrated by black men, which, along with other contextual factors, explains the racial disparities in lethal civilian-officer encounters. However, when whites perpetrate criminal violence, the media is quick to report it.
Consider the long list of white perpetrators of violence that have become household names: David Berkowitz, Lizzie Borden, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Edward Kemper, Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway (the Green River Killer), Jack the Ripper, Aileen Wuornos, the Zodiac killer. The list is far from complete. I haven’t included any school shooters. I haven’t included mass murderers.
If you read that list and thought of names of serial killers I forgot to include, then you understand the point. You probably thought of Columbine and Sandy Hook and all the other school shootings. You probably know the names of those shooters. You certainly know their race. You thought of Anders Breivik, Charles Whitman, Dylann Roof, Craig Paddock, and James Holmes, didn’t you?
For all the news stories, books, documentaries, and movies about the real-life killers, even more books, movies, and television shows have been made about mass murderers who never existed. Are the killers in those movies black or white? Was Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb a real or fictional serial killer? (Jame was a clerical error on his birth certificate.)
If no or few black perpetrators of mass murder came to mind, you get the point even more. Or Muslim. Did you forget Omar Mateen (Orlando)? Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino)? Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood)?
Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa would make the notable mass murderer list had he been white Christian and named Bobby Ray Jones.
According to Statista, “Between 1982 and March 2021, 66 out of the 121 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 21 mass shootings, and Latino in 10. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent and eight percent respectively.”
Whites are between 67 and 73 percent of the population. Blacks are less than 13 percent. Since most Latinos are white, we might assume that increases the white percentage. At the same time, given the overrepresentation of blacks in mass shootings, it possible that those Latinos carry a black identity. But you get the picture. Why do you falsely think that mass shooters are disproportionately white?
Second, it is not excusing “white violence,” to recognize that, given the nature of the crime, a person is likely suffering from a mental illness. Indeed, the claim that whites are falsely excused by mental illness (the notion that the excuse is an expression of “white privilege”) is betrayed by research conducted by Grant Duwe who compiled an exhaustive set of numbers for mass public shootings, identifying 160 cases between 1915-2013. Of those, 97 involved shooters who had either been diagnosed with a serious mental illness or showed signs of one. “The 61% is actually a minimum estimate,” writes Duwe (see Mass Murder in the United States: A History).
That the circumstances surrounding Atlanta suggest mental illness is just being honest about the fact pattern. Why should we deny fact patterns because others have an agenda to make killings by white people fit a particular narrative? Because they call the facts racist? Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s brother says he was mentally ill. Is that allowed? Ahmad was described as white in early news stories (he still is, according to standard race theory).
Here’s another meme that twists the truth. Shaun King is spreading this one. It doesn’t show you armed black men taken alive and unarmed white men killed by police. You wouldn’t know from everything you hear through the establishment and legacy media that twice as many white men are killed by the police than black men every year even though black men commit half of the most violent crimes—homicide and robbery—in America. This propaganda has been thoroughly debunked but it keeps coming. It manufactures an illusion of systemic racism, a thing that does not exist. The system of racism was dismantled more than half a century ago.
The charge of racism is because the memes are debunked by fact patterns. If we speak in the manner of the left, where everything is about race, but speak with facts, it becomes clear that the establishment media and progressives on social media suppress reality while elevating a manufactured narrative concerning crime in America. If they want a conversation about race, then let’s have an accurate one.
For a detailed analysis see my Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History. The statistics are dramatic. Black men are more than six times more likely to murder than white men. The most dangerous places in America are black-majority inner-city neighborhoods. White men are underrepresented in the commission of homicide. Because blacks murder at much higher rate, and because of the intraracial nature of murder, many more blacks are murder victims than whites. Black lives matter? The woke left doesn’t care about that. Those victims do not advance their narrative. Inconvenient facts. The left cares about black people like the Chinese Communist Party cares about the Chinese people. (“If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities)
Black men are less than six percent of the population overall, but in raw numbers, they commit more than half of all homicides. The United States is the most homicidally violent county among advance industrial societies. Moreover, black men are more likely to kill white people than white people are to kill black people (Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?). Black men commit more than half of all robberies. To be sure, most robbery is intraracial, but the fact is that white people are far more likely to be the victims of robbery committed by black people than the other way around (and not by a little). Black men commit approximately one-third of all aggravated assaults. These are the most serious assaults. In other words, less than six percent of the population commits one third of all aggravated assaults. One wonders whether telling black people that their troubles are due to white privilege has anything to do with blacks targeting white people for homicide, robbery, and assault. How much of these crimes are in truth bias crimes? It plays no role in target selection? Reparations? Retribution? We heard this justification in rioting.
The media cannot wait for the next mass murder committed by a mentally ill white person so it can hypostatize white supremacy. But where is the reporting of the routine mass murder committed by gangs in America’s inner cities? Do the children caught in the crossfire of gang violence not matter? Do bystanders in drive-by no matter? Apparently not, because the left wants to defund the police. If you don’t see why this is relevant, understand that mass murder is defined as the killing of three-four people in a single event including murders occurring in multiple locations over a short temporal period but involving the same perpetrators. If you know anything about gang violence, you will know that mass murders occur routinely in America’s inner-cities, and the perpetrators are not often white, and these crimes are rarely reported.
The media loves a good story about the lone white person committing a heinous crime, but where is the reporting about the cartels operating north and south of our border murdering people on a daily basis? Have you been following the reality of the transnational trade in human beings supported by the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church? You should. If you care about people. Where is the reporting on China, which is committing genocide and is responsible for the mass murder of millions of Chinese and the forced abortions of hundreds of millions of fetuses? We’re told that it’s racist to criticize Central and South American and Chinese criminals.
When it comes to violence against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, all the rage in the establishment media at the present moment, the vast majority of those who perpetrate such crimes are black. This gets virtually no media attention. Telling folks that Asians are a “model minority,” the implication that they are responsible for black poverty and suffering, lurks behind violence against Asians (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite). As suggested above, it lurks behind anti-white violence.
The media makes it sound as if there is a crime wave of whites committing violence against minorities. It’s not true. The media are smart enough to know it’s not true. That makes it a lie. It’s propaganda. We hear endlessly about the January 6th “insurrection,” and how the greatest threat to the republic is white supremacists and white nationalists, while we hear constantly downplaying and rationalizing about the months of criminal violence committed by BLM and its left allies that the establishment encouraged. When we discovered that the vast majority of people milling about the Capitol that day, many of whom were invited in by the police, were not members of any extremist organizations, selected experts told twisted this to mean that threat wasn’t from extremist organizations, but from ordinary conservatives (“A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous).
Whites are underrepresented either or both absolutely and proportionally in the most serious violent crimes. So why are we being subjected to these memes telling us to stop making excuses for white violence? The left is playing the race card hard to delegitimize the American republic, which they equate to whiteness, which they reduce to white supremacy. Crime by whites is amplified or manufactured, while crime by blacks is downplayed or ignored. The truth is flipped. The memes are designed to present an inverted truth. They make this about race to dissimulate and drive the dismantling of the nation.
Anti-white propaganda is a corporatist strategy to ingratiate the capitalist elite to minorities by manufacturing a fake enemy and making the machinery of liberty and democracy appear as oppressive tools of white supremacy. Identitarian education and training is designed to make minorities feel like their exploiters care about them and see their comrades as their adversaries. The corporatist propagandist manufactures an enemy—this time white people—to distract from the real adversary, namely the corporate elite who exploit minority labor and control their life chances.
The objective in all this is to keep minorities from recognizing what they share in common with the majority, namely membership in the working class. Simply put, it is divide and conquer. But the same power that exploits minority labor and controls their life chances also exploits the labor and controls the life chances of the majority.
The old racism covered the exploitation of minorities by giving whites race privilege (whites were not slaves and enjoyed superior facilities). Dismantling the system of white privilege forced a modification in the ideological system. The focus was shifted to make whites the target of racial resentment. This is the new racism. Same as the old racism. Put another way, the revolution-from-above is no revolution at all. Same boss.
The promise of civil rights and national integrity was to produce a unified cultural foundation for the organization of collective political consciousness and action around social social class. The corporate elite weren’t about to let that happen. So, antiracism, the ideology the depicts whites as privileged racist violent oppressors.
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I want make sure people understand something. When I say that 54 percent of murderers in America are black men, I am not saying that most black people are murderers. Heavens no. In fact, only a small percentage of black men are murderers. It’s like when I say that most poor people in America are white, I am not saying that most white people are poor. Most white people are not in fact poor (neither are most black people).
With respect to murder, it is an important question to ask: Why are black men so drastically overrepresented in murder? Black men are drastically overrepresented among murder victims, as well, their murderers mostly other black men, so it is indeed an important question if black lives matter. Whatever the reason, it’s not poverty, as the analog I just used makes clear. If poverty were the reason, white men would be overrepresented, not underrepresented in murder.
Facts aren’t racist. If one hears the statistics of black overrepresentation in serious crime and thinks these statistics are offensive, it’s because, in possession of racial consciousness, that person feels the statistics reflect poorly on the black community. A lot of blacks feel they do. And many people think we should start talking about it and do something about it.
I was raised to worry about sharing facts like these because I was taught that there is an epistemic and moral privilege to be granted historically-oppressed minorities. This privilege runs in a perverse direction. Indeed, progressive whites are supposed to cover up uncomfortable facts. (For example, the poor academic performance of blacks as a group compared to Asians and whites. For example, the number of black children born out of wedlock. There are lots of facts like these.)
It was part of my indoctrination to believe I enjoy a race privilege I never possessed and that, for this reason, I have a special responsibility to keep quiet about such things as a tax on my alleged inherited advantages. In other words, history has already paid me to be silent on certain subjects. When you re told you can’t say certain things because you are white, that is exactly what that means.
I write about such things because (a) I am a criminologist who studies such things (race, class, crime, punishment, etc.) and (b) there is a political campaign to make white-as-a-group appear as privileged racist violent oppressors. (a) Means I have a professional obligation to frankly speak the facts. Because I am a criminologist, I know (b) isn’t true.
I know that, as a white man, this defamation potentially affects me and my family. It already enlists our participation in programs that assume was are racists or the beneficiaries of racism. The fact that there is no systemic racism perpetuated by the white majority and that whites are underrepresented in criminal violence demolishes the campaign’s truth claims. That’s what makes the claims libelous and slanderous: they’re false and malicious. But it doesn’t stop whites from being punished for them.
If it were true that whites were these terrible things, even though I am not these terrible things, there would be no defamation (except to the extent that I should have to suffer for the actions of other people) and I would wonder what was going on with white people. In fact, when I believed these things were true, I wondered this. But these things are not true and everybody in my line of work either knows it, isn’t very good at grasping demographic and crime statistics, or—like the old me—deceiving themselves by rationalizing the statistics.
To the extent that whites may be thought of as a community—and it seems the academy and the media very much want whites to think of themselves as such—one might expect that, as soon as enough whites learn the truth and stop apologizing for their race, the entire progressive structure, built as it is on a multitude of false assumptions and claims, will be delegitimized and crumble.
The problem with the notion that only you can know your truth—this woke leftwing “lived experience” narrative—and therefore nobody can speak for you or your situation except perhaps some moral entrepreneur who looks like you (or maybe some ally who claims to know your pain) is that really there is only one truth and it lies outside of you and your situation and billions of other people live in that truth with you. Moreover, the “lived experience” jive precludes the reality that some people understand your situation better than you do. It’s a dumb subjectivity they’ve created for you. They teach this to keep you ignorant. Or because they are.
Among other things, C. Wright Mills taught us in the Sociological Imagination, that, on the one hand, there are personal troubles, i.e. the local, immediate, phenomenological experience of your situation, while, on the other hand, there are public issues, the objective structures that surround you—the economic, legal, and political systems that shape the former—and that shape even your subjectivity. You have to grasp the latter to understand the former. You have to locate your biography in that one and only reality. It’s not that your life experiences are irrelevant. Biography matters. But biography is a result of a constellation of social, psychological, and other forces that bind many biographies together into a society. You are never really alone.
For example, if you are jobless, you may blame your motivation or your skill level or your personality. Maybe there is something to one or more of these. Get motivated. Develop your skills. Work on yourself. But maybe what is also going on is a business recession and there are millions of your fellow citizens thrown out of work on account of that. You are among them because you belong to that same social class. Or maybe your government has thrown open the borders to cheap foreign labor and there are noncitizens working the jobs you used to do. Or maybe the government has facilitated the offshoring of your job, so now foreign workers do the job you used to do in some other country that you tax dollars go to in foreign aid. Or maybe government policy and big corporate power has ruined your small business. Whatever it is, you won’t be able to confront it with a “lived experience.”
In the final analysis (if you do the analysis), you are going to need to join with others who share an objective situation with you, find solidarity with them, become politically conscious, become politically organized, and rise up against the forces that are screwing you over.
Withdrawing into ethnic and racial categories while failing to grasp your relationship to others beyond those limiting categories is a failure to grasp your species-being, that is the fact that you and everybody else are the same animal but that some of your brothers and sisters, perhaps even you, have been thrown into cages, made ignorant, trapped in your own constrained subjectivity. The “lived experience” angle is designed to get you to define your biography in terms of race or other limiting identities and subjectivities. It teaches you to deny your species-being and see yourself as a category. You are alienated from yourself and others.
This is problem the founders of the American republic confronted when they established the truism that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the point of a free republic: a constellation of public institutions that articulate, defend, and advance the common interest—which includes individual liberty and rights—over against the narrow interests of business and the like. It’s the way we collectively preserve our individuality. This is why it is so important to be a nationalist: to understand that a common language and culture and creed constitute the essential basis for preserving the political-legal machinery that protects your essential liberties and rights—a machinery you can affect through rational deliberation and democratic engagement.
Those who want to keep you in racial and other boxes tell you nationalism is racist. The truth is the opposite of this claim. It is antiracism and multiculturalism that fracture humanity. And the powers-that-be want humanity fractured to control people.
The freedoms made possible by republicanism cannot exist under global corporate governance. Big banking and corporate power is private tyranny. Even the public sphere is captured by this power under the terms of corporate governance. Your taxes pay for your own subjection. State monopoly capitalism is asking you to allow them to dictate your life. They want you to vote for living, not work for a living. They want you to think like a serf. That’s what the welfare state is all about. That’s the point of a guaranteed income. They control your finances, they control you. What working people need are jobs, and the only way they can have jobs—and decent paying jobs—is to stop corporations from shipping our jobs overseas and importing cheap foreign labor.
Those who seek to dismantle the nation-state and reorganize our society into racial categories and ethnic enclaves, the disuniting ideologies and practices of antiracism and of cultural pluralism (or multiculturalism), mean to control people by circumscribing consciousness and narrowing horizons. It’s a plantation life.
We are meant to be citizens of a republic. Corporate power is turning us into the neoliberal subjects of quasi-private estates—estates controlled by transnational corporate power. This ideology and the transnational project that underpins work to prepare the masses for integration in a global neo-feudalist order. You are being prepared for serfdom. And the “lived experience” narrative is big piece of that preparation.
Babies see difference, but they don’t see race. They see skin color. They note eye shapes. Hair color and texture. But race is a definition of a person based on an ideological system called “racism” or “racialism.”
Some might push back and ask whether learning to see race is the same thing as learning racism. Leftwing race identitarians, for instance, argue that, in order to combat racism, children must be taught racial identity and, moreover, to assume racism all around them, not only in those with whom they interact, but in their culture and in their social institutions—and in the legacy of history that determines the present and the future. To fight racism one must first see race, seems to be the angle.
For example, implicit race bias is said to be learned through ordinary socialization in a world in which white supremacy is ubiquitous, and therefore children need help developing and elaborating race consciousness in order to combat unconscious bias. In this sense, one is not taught racism, but rather one learns it by virtue of being immersed in world characterized by systemic racism. To combat this, children must be taught a form of racial consciousness and practice called “antiracism.”
One assumption in this view of things is that all white people are racist and enjoy race privilege. Race privilege is an invisible but no less real advantage that operates automatically or normally—precisely because it is invisible, woven into the warp and woof of Western society, the overarching culture of which is white supremacy. Since individuals do not normally assume that all whites enjoy race privilege, given the overwhelming objective evidence to the contrary, for example seen in the fact that most whites are working class (exploited labor) and not a small proportion of the white working class is poor (in fact, most poor people are white, and not just by a little), this form of racial thinking requires indoctrination or, as the indoctrinators who assume the existence of some thing for which evidence is otherwise rationally required like to put it, “consciousness raising.” (You see this notion in strains of feminism, as well.)
Of course, antiracism is a form of racism. Racism is an ideology in which it is supposed that the human population is meaningfully and usefully divisible into categories based on superficial phenotypic characteristics and ancestry and that these categories exist in a hierarchical structure with creativity, dispensation, obligation, rights, sensibility, and so forth differentiated by this hierarchy.
In light of this way of thinking, one way that we could create a world in which children were not taught racism, or otherwise learn it, would be to stop teaching them to see themselves and others, as well as rights and responsibilities, in racial terms but rather in colorblind terms of human rights, which rests on universally shared species-being, and individual responsibility. Human rights and individualism constitute the humanist path to equality and justice. The way of eliminating racism lies along this path.
One does not get rid of racism by doubling down on it. Beware those who teach you to think of human variation along lines of skin and eye color, hair texture, facial features, and ancestry as constituting some thing called “race,” that it is essential, that is owns culture, and so on. Whether it hails from the left or the right wing ends of the ideological spectrum, the construct of race is false, dangerous, and pernicious. The new racism (antiracism) is an especially pernicious form of racism.
Aaron Long was visiting Atlanta’s massage parlors, or spas, for explicitly sexual reasons. Several people have attested to this fact. Atlanta has a considerable sex industry. There are many Asian sex workers there. Some of the workers are part of the large and complex networks of human trafficking enabled by globalization and progressive immigration policy. Long targeted the massage parlors because he believed they were a source of what he described as “relapses.” Long was being treated for sex addiction. He spent months at Maverick Recovery, an Atlanta halfway house that provides space for those with addictions of various sorts. His parents were tracking him with a GPS device. There’s a history here.
What Long did was horrific and wrong obviously, but there is no evidence that his actions were driven by anti-Asian bias or were acts of terrorism. Some suppose that the fact that the majority of his victims were Asian (Korean, specifically) builds racism and even terrorism into his act (his mug shot helps their narrative). This supposition is a product of a particular ideology presently prevailing in the West. We know that Long did what he did because he held beliefs that shamed him for desiring and being intimate with women. He was obsessed with sex and pornography. Long would feel remorse after acting on this obsession. He targeted the source of his shame and remorse. He blamed women for what he was taught and what he believed was moral indiscretion and perversion. He felt guilty in the eyes of God and, in a perverse attempt to remove sin, he removed the temptation to sin. He was an ambitious agent of his religion. Had law enforcement not stopped him, he would have killed again and again. He was a sick person.
I am now reading articles attempting to associate sex work with exploitation (see, e.g., The Washington Post) and racism (e.g., The Independent), depicting sex workers as victims, with Asian-American sex workers depicted as the special victims of racist exploitation (paradigms from the usual suspects Buzzfeed and CNN.) Abstract theories of the exotic. Talk of fetishes. Etcetera. While it is certainly true that some sex workers are exploited—and that immigrants and the victims of human trafficking are superexploited—exploitation under capitalism is hardy special. Rather, it is systemic (a word progressives very selectively apply). Capitalism is an exploitative mode of production. So the questions we should be asking are these: Why is sex work per se portrayed as specially exploitative? Why is the exploitation of immigrant labor assumed to be intrinsically racist? Why is Asian and Asian-American bias crime assumed and depicted in a manner than shifts attention from the actual character of the crime and identity of the perpetrators to a narrative politically-useful to suppressing criticism of China? Whose interests are advanced by the prevailing narrative and who is harmed by it?
I am troubled by the way in which women, especially racialized women (we should see people as individuals and women as universally human first), are depicted as having no agency, as if no women would engage in sex work if they were not in some way victimized by the desire of those who purchase their services. The suggestion here is that women in pornography, for example, who occupied Long’s consciousness, never enjoy their work, that they are compelled for some reason to engage in sex work against their will. (We should not forget the men in porn and other sex worker. What compels men to perform porn? Are men to be granted agency but not women? What about so-called “ladyboys,” otherwise known as kathoey or phuying, or other genders in porn? A lot of stories deploy the word “fetish” to describe these things. Is that fetishism in a Freudian sense or a Marxist one? Why is finding Asian women attractive a fetish and not a preference?)
If we are going to talk about exploitation, then why is renting one’s body for sex any different than renting one’s body for any other exchange relation? Labor is exploited when a portion of the surplus value produced by that labor is appropriated by somebody who did not perform that labor. This is no less true for somebody working the assembly line at a manufacturing firm than somebody working in the back rooms of a massage parlor. The owner of a temp agency is analogous to a pimp; he rents to clients the labor he controls and derives his income from this practice. If prostitution is wrong because it is exploitative, then most work in a capitalist economy is wrong for the same reason. If voluntarily selling one’s labor, i.e., renting one’s body to another person is not exploitative, then how is voluntary sex work exploitative?
Why is prostitution illegal while pornography is legal? Pornography is prostitution that enjoys a First Amendment pass. Whether in front of a camera or not, a woman or a man is paid for having sex either way. Why isn’t porn merely photographic evidence of a crime? Because it’s acting? So what is prostitution? According to Statista four percent of websites are porn and 13 percent and 20 percent of Internet searches and mobile searches are for porn respectively. Assuming the Marxist view of things, is sex work always exploitative? What about independent contractors? Cooperatives? What if I decide to receive money for sex on my own? What if I form a cooperative with other men and women to sell sex for money and distribute the proceeds among us on the basis of who has need?
Why is prostitution depicted as wrong and immoral but other forms of work consider dignified and virtuous really? The characterization of sex work as immoral apart from its presence under capitalism and in human trafficking is not because it is intrinsically exploitative but because of religious notions of women that still haunt modern secular society. We need to have this conversation. Or, more accurately, people need to get over their sexual hang ups. Puritanical values inherited from our Christian past and sustained by our Christian present inform the loathing of women and sex. It’s not sex that makes a person feel guilty. Sex is a natural pleasure of our animality. Thank evolution for that. Animals like to fuck. It’s man-made religious strictures that make a person feel guilty for having sex. It’s what makes a young boy feel shame for masturbating or for having sex with other boys in route to discovering his sexuality. It’s likely why women have trouble achieving orgasm. Etcetera. Puritanism denies men and women their animality and their experiences. That is what is perverse in all this.
These are the same religious notions that moved Aaron Long to commit these heinous acts. A social construction prepared the crime and mental illness propelled it. To be sure, there are many people with possessed by the same religious notions. It moves them to decry pornography and criminalize prostitution. Sex workers are rounded up and their clients publicly shamed. Many of the people advocating oppressive social control over sex are unaware of how deeply such religious ideas have penetrated their moral and political attitudes and actions. It’s how the right and left can come together to develop law and policy in a desire to dictate human behavior. Yet, of course, they do not commit homicide. They ruin lives in other ways.
However, these beliefs combined with certain psychiatric maladies may result in the horror of Atlanta. One of the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia is hyper-religiosity and an obsession with sexual morality and heightened sexual self-perception. Given Long’s age and mental health history and especially the presence of extraordinary parental surveillance, it is shaping up as a fairly typical story of paranoid schizophrenia. Long’s parents apparently knew exactly what was happening. They gave the police the GPS info they had. They were tracking him. Long, on his way to Florida to deal with the porn industry, was delusional. (Most schizophrenics are not violent. At the same time, aggression and impulsivity is common and, combined with delusions and paranoia, make this disorder potentially dangerous.) Maybe it is not such a good idea to fill the heads of young men with notions that sex is sinful?
While establishment and progressive voices make Atlanta about race to serve their political ends of smearing Trump and the populist critics of China—tying Long’s crimes to COVID-19 and the January 6 “insurrection”—in a move that hides the actual dynamic that lies behind anti-Asian bias crimes (see “The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite”), other things are also being hidden: the misogyny and objectification of women, that is the treatment of women as things and not as human agents, as human beings incapable of deciding for themselves how they will use their bodies, as well as progressive immigration policy that enables transnational human trafficking.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Declaration of Independence.
I’m sure Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence recognized individual differences.
Men and women are, on average, different, but they are equal if there is no discrimination based on sex in our educational, legal, and political institutions.
Equality is about treatment of individuals in law and policy. Equal treatment rests on the moral claim that individuals, whatever their differences, are not to be treated unfairly. This is a justice claim.
It’s time again to remind people that equality and sameness are therefore not synonymous. Otherwise, we cannot determine when a standard presumed to apply equally is unjust.
Consider the ability of a wheelchair bound man to enter a building to vote. Is there a ramp? No? Then difference results in an inequality. That is unfair. Yes? Then he is different from but equal to a man who is not wheelchair bound. That is fair.
Life can be fair (just) for citizens if the government considers individual differences in light of the principle of equal treatment across our educational, legal, and political institutions.
Civics education and social studies should be devoted to helping citizens understand this foundational—and humanist—principle of liberal secular civilization.
freedom and reason 