freedom and reason

Social media memes attempt to paint China as a victim of Western capitalism, as if China played no role in the appearance of the vast industrial plantations, known to economists as export processing zones (EPZs), that enslave millions who produce the gadgets and widgets upon which consumers in the West depend and desire. Economists call the practice of shipping production overseas or across borders “outsourcing.” Along with mass immigration, it is one of the two main methods used to undermine the working classes of the West.

One might suspect Chinese propagandists plant those memes. Perhaps they are behind some of them. But the woke left is eager to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t have to be told what to do. They know what to do. Maoist influence on the New Left from the sixties onward has built sympathy for the CCP and a loathing for Western values of liberty and human rights into woke leftism.

Outsourcing is very much driven by Chinese imperialism and its running dogs among the US corporate class, e.g., Silicon Valley. China’s long-range plan is to control global supply chains and produce debt-encumbered nations that are easily bullied by the People’s Republic of China. The CCP has no love for the Chinese people, either. The ruthlessness of China’s external behavior is surpassed by the ruthlessness of its internal behavior. The Communist Party enslaves tens of millions of Chinese and herd China’s ethnic minorities, for example the Uighur people, into concentration camps. How could China’s rulers have any love for the Chinese masses? Without the love of liberty, there is no real love at all. One does not love those whom he enslaves.

The CCP is directing Chinese corporations globally, stealing intellectual property across the First Word, luring Western investment to its EPZs, leveraging the pension funds of Western workers, assuming control of the periphery and semi-periphery by indebting those countries via its Belt and Road initiative, buying up property throughout the world.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing what military strategists Qiao Jiang and Wang Xiangsui, colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, identify as “unrestricted warfare.” Jiang and Xiangsui are very clear about what unrestricted warfare is meant to accomplish: it’s a master plan to destroy American and rule the world.

Traditional thinking about war is that offensive action is reducible to military action. Liang and Xiangsui identify alternatives to direct military confrontation: its Confucius Institutes, economic warfare, such a theft of intellectual property, international policy, sabotage, such as attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Indeed, traditional approaches to military preparedness, such as focus on the development of new weapons systems, crowds out consideration of the tactics of unrestricted warfare.

The PRC pursues unrestricted warfare because it is presently not powerful enough militarily to use kinetic warfare. But why would the PRC need to when the corporations of the West are working with the CCP to build a global neo-feudalist system of industrial plantations—even turning the United States into one?

Transnational corporations (TNCs) have no country. TNCs globe trot to amass wealth and they see China’s authoritarian model as optimal. This is why we see the shift in rhetoric from class to race among leftwing intellectuals in the West and the switch from free speech to speech codes among the rank-and-file of the progressive countermovement.

The woke left is decidedly illiberal in consciousness and practice. Whereas Marx believed in free speech and sought to inspire the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of communication to maximize free transmission of working class expressions, the woke leftist works with global corporations to restrict the free flow of ideas, even taking over free market rhetoric of private power to justify censorious desire.

As the corporate form is a manifestation of bureaucratic collectivism, it differs little in terms of its social logic from the bureaucratic collectivism of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Both are forms of state monopoly capitalism, with globalization having replaced imperialist motion in the West.

There is no real national interest held by the respective political establishments in the West because corporatists are the ruling class of the trans-Atlantic realm and their interests in the context of late capitalism lie in importing to the West the surveillance apparatus of the state capitalist model of China. We know this as the managed decline of America and the West, which involves giving up national sovereignty and turning Western countries into Third World countries.

China’s action express an imperialist intention to spread the PRC’s brand of state capitalism across the planet. The CCP uses globalism as a means to an end. There are plenty of elites in the West eager to betray their countrymen for the privileges that come with tightening authoritarian control over the population. We don’t have to infer this. It’s the long-standing goal of Chinese Communist Party to spread the PRC model globally. It’s open about it. 

Chinese imperialism and Western integration with the global system is an existential threat to West. The CCP is totalitarian. The Chinese people are slaves the CCP sells to the West. Transnational corporations are China’s customers. The CCP is exploiting transnationalist aspirations to take over the world. As midwives to the birth of a new order, the First World globalists, defended by the progressives of North America and social democrats of Europe, are moving to fuse the world economy and its legal structure with the logic of Chinese corporatism.

This is why the effort to stop the trans-Atlantic populist-nationalist movement has been so aggressive. It’s why popular democratic movements organized around economics and glass are smeared as “xenophobic,” “racist,” “nativist,” and “fascist.” But these popular democratic movements have arisen to confront the destruction of the West. 

I don’t want any readers to be confused about which movements I’m talking about. I’m not talking about such “movements” as Black Lives Matter. BLM is a corporate-backed anti-working class movement designed to stand in place of a genuine working class movement. BLM is a barely concealed ruse. That these movements reflect Maoist sensibilities straightaway reveals their purpose. The Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialist of America are also faux-working class movements. That these organizations work hand-in-hand with progressives in the Democratic Party tells you everything you need to know about where their sympathies lie.

Capitalism as it operated under internationalism is in trouble. Depletion of resources, overshoot and collapse, a chronic realization crisis, a legitimation crisis, mass economic migration, rising populism and nationalism—the world elite are moving to a different model to preserve their wealth, one that is already seeing global inequality worsening as more and more wealth is accumulated in the upper echelon. (To know what they are up to, see the World Economic Forum.)

In this context, the memes progressives share on social media represent pro-CCP propaganda or the thoughts of persons clueless about the geopolitical and international political economic situation. China is the most serious threat to humanity since Nazi Germany. As I have said, Biden is the Chamberlain of our time.

The PRC is particularly dangerous at this time because China is ascendant in the moment of managed decline of the American republic and the trans-Atlantic system. This is the model the transnational corporations are embracing—and the TNCs are calling the shots—and the Democratic Party is their party. The inverted totalitarianism Sheldon Wolin describes in Democracy, Inc. (despite misidentifying the midwife) is a new mode of totalitarianism, no less evil just more sophisticated.

Observers are estimating that China’s one-child policy, a program of forced abortion, has resulted in the termination of 400 million pregnancies. Female fetuses were overrepresented among those aborted, and now there are some 20 million young Chinese men who are bachelors. In other words, cannon fodder. Two of the three pillars of unrestricted warfare are in play—economic and information warfare. All that remains is kinetic warfare. China has the men to wage it. They await the opportunity.

* * *

Having mentioned the Communist Party USA, I feel it is necessary to write about my own history with this group. In the mid-1990s, as a graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University, a colleague and I established a small leftwing organization, the Committee for Social Justice, which published a short-lived journal Theory and Praxis: A Journal of Free Thought and Revolutionary Action. This and work on public interests shows for cable access at VIACOM drew the attention of the Communist Party USA who sent an organizer to Tennessee to organize a communist club (the name the CPUSA uses for its cells). We got a nice write up in what was then called the People’s World Weekly (formerly the Daily Worker). I still have a signed copy of Gus Hall’s Working Class USA which the organizer had brought with him to give me.

In order to be a member of the CPUSA, one must organize a club and actively recruit others to the CPUSA. It was this cult-like practice that kept me from becoming a CPUSA member. However, the CPUSA tapped me for some articles for its paper, which had been renamed the People’s World, the most notable of these, “The Victims of Capitalism,” published on June 23, 2007.

Another reason I disassociated myself from the group was its shift from working class socialism to woke leftism and its increasing ties to the Democratic Party. In the 1990s, the CPUSA still advocated, at least rhetorically, what Hall called “bill of rights socialism.” This is not the case anymore.

Today, the CPUSA and the DSA are effective fronts for the Chinese Communist Party and it is through these fronts that the CCP manipulates the policies of the Democratic Party when the Party is not directly serving the interests of the PRC. If you are curious to know how this happens, just look at who in the Democratic Party openly declares membership in the Democratic Socialist of America.

Long ago I repudiated the CPUSA. If I could deny any past association with this group I would. I find my flirtation with this group mildly embarrassing. But the Committee for Social Justice, the journal Theory and Praxis, my meetings with the CPUSA organizers, and my articles in the People’s World are all matters of pubic record and part of my biography, so I will have to own them. At least I can say that I am not and have never been a member of the Communist Party.

On March 5th, an ABC News headline warned, “Rise in anti-Asian American hate crimes may lead to mental health crisis.” I finished the article with this thought: Not telling me who the perpetrators are makes it difficult to understand what’s going on. I waited to see whether more stories would enlighten me on that very important piece of the puzzle. (I know what that puzzle piece is and I promise not to tease you more than a few paragraphs.)

Four days later, Newsweek provided a clue in an editorial by Helen Raleigh: “Asian Americans Emerging as a Strong Voice Against Critical Race Theory.” “Critical race theory (CRT) is a divisive, discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color,” writes Raleigh. “It has penetrated our society—it’s in federal agencies’ and federal contractors’ ‘bias training,’ in school curricula and many corporations’ ‘diversity training.’ Few are willing to speak out against it for fear of being labeled racists or white supremacists.” But there’s good news: “Asian Americans, however, have emerged as a powerful voice against this pernicious ideology.”

Asians know what’s it’s like to be on the bad end of the CRT stick, including the violent end. CRT, announcing itself as an antiracist ideology, is the gospel of racial division and resentment. Policy based on antiracist ideology functions to divide the population in the way traditional racism functioned to divide the population: categorizing individuals by superficial phenotypic features and demanding requiring that some categories enjoy privileges that are exclusive to others. CRT is thus best described as the “new racism” (the new racists tried to get the jump on that term by defining criticism of the new racism as the new racism).

A moment ago I made the observation that, without identification of perpetrator characteristics, I did not know what to think about anti-Asian bias crime. I told you that I wouldn’t make you wait long. It’s a polemical way of saying that the media is not telling us who the perpetrators of anti-Asian bias crimes are because the media agenda is to blame the attacks on those who correctly identify the source of COVID-19, namely China, and may go on to suggest that the totalitarian government of that country does not have American’s best interests at heart (nor is it fond of the Chinese people). In other words, the establishment needs the public to assume that MAGA people are attacking Asians because of things Donald Trump has said about China and anybody who would do that must be MAGA (i.e., racist, xenophobic, and other bad names).

Looking at the data since the early 1990s, offender race is significantly variable across bias crimes perpetrated against Asians, blacks, and Hispanics, and the overwhelming difference is that bias crimes against Asian Americans are more likely than bias crimes against either African Americans or Hispanics to be committed by nonwhites, primarily black American. I want to make sure the reader understands this: it is not mostly whites who perpetrate anti-Asian bias crimes; it is mostly nonwhites, especially blacks.

Anti-Asian bias crimes have been happening for decades and that obviously means it has little to do with the term “China virus” fundamentally, albeit COVID-19 and its origins in China may has something to do with spurring violence. It’s not just because anti-Asian bias existed long before COVID-19 that I say that; despite the inroads Trump made into the black community in terms of popular support, there aren’t very many MAGA hat wearing black Americans. While COVID-19 may have increased incidents of violence, it is not the underlying cause any more than changing cotton prices in the postbellum South were the underlying cause of lynching. The underling cause of racial patterns in lynching was racism (I have published scientific papers on this, for the record).

One might object that CRT is a new thing. But CRT and its influences have been around for quite some time. We have known for decades that violence against Asians is driven by animosity toward Asians as a “model minority.” The “model minority” idea is a stereotype assuming that Asian success in economics, education, etc., represents a threat to the success of other nonwhite racial groups, which in turn leads to resentment that may manifest in bias crime. This is the same argument was (and to some extent still is) made about Jewish economic and educational success in Europe and America. Jews are a “model minority.” Nobody doubts that antisemitism lurks behind a great deal of violence against Jews. This is also the argument that we hear today concerning “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” This same resentment likely feeds violence against whites in the form of robbery and other crimes in which racist motives are rarely admitted.

Anti-Asian bias manifests in other ways beyond violence, such as race-conscious policies restricting access to Asian applicants to Harvard University. In 2014, Students for Fair Admission filed a lawsuit in US federal district court against Harvard claiming that university discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The suit was rejected in 2019, a decision upheld in the First Court of Appeals, but the plaintiff has asked for a hearing before the Supreme Court. In 2015, a coalition of several dozen Asian-American organizations filed a complaint with the US Education Department and Justice Department against Harvard demanding a civil rights investigation in Harvard’s race conscious policies. The Obama Administration rebuffed the group, but the Trump Administration reopened the investigation in 2017. With the 2020 election, it is unclear what will happen to the investigation. However, under Biden, the DOJ, citing the appeals court ruling in the Harvard case, dropped a similar investigation into claims Yale discriminates against Asian students.

Why would the media keep from Americans by not reporting the identity of those who perpetrate anti-Asian bias crimes? Three reasons are obvious, I think.

First, corporations and the Democratic Party frames social problems to their advantage. Favored minorities perpetrating violence against other minorities, as the progressives say, is not a good look. The look they’re going for is blaming the white majority for the woes of minorities, since this draws minority votes to the Democratic Party. Thus the Democratic Party, as the party of big corporate power, plays a major role as moral entrepreneur in perpetuating the myth of white supremacy. Democrats use the white supremacist boogieman to manufacture fear and resentment among Americans. They use it to justify building a wall around the Capitol while maintaining a porous southern border (open to more potential voters). They use it to justify weakening voter integrity law and policy. Etc.

Second, the Democratic Party is the political force leading the legislative and policy pieces of the transnationalization project (otherwise known as the managed decline of the American republic) and this means hiding from sight the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, which controls much of the global supply chain and is buying up property around the world, exploiting the pension funds of the American worker to finance it all, is the single greatest threat to the health, safety, and wellbeing of working class Americans. By blaming MAGA for anti-Asian bias crimes they marginalize nationalist criticism of the role played by the People’s Republic of China in globalization. Progressives smear populist politics as xenophobic and racist.

If Americans were to blame China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world, especially if Americans learn about the evidence that the virus was the result of gain-of-function research organized in Wuhan and other Chinese labs by none other than Saint Anthony Fauci (however justified for public health purposes, experiments indistinguishable from biological weapons programs), this will draw public attention to the vast industrial plantations transnational corporations use to produce their gadgets, to Chinese imperialism in Africa and Latin America producing the conditions that lie behind mass migration, and to the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people.

Third, critical race theory is ubiquitous in the institutions of the United States. Administrators, managers, and educators swim in the ideology of racial division and antagonisms, which they transmit to employees and students who then take these ideas to their family, friends, and neighbors. They double-down on racial division and conflict in the wake of the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s began not long after the foundation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society was established. This program, when the framing is not deliberate, produces a blindness of its own, in which the fact of inter-minority antagonism and conflict eludes awareness. That reporters can’t provide images of MAGA hat wearing perpetrators of anti-Asian bias crimes is mystified by the absence of any perpetrators at all. The ethereal creeping hand of anti-Asian bias shoves elderly Asian men to the ground.

Any of you who were around during the 1992 Los Angeles riots will likely remember the situation of Americans of Korean descent. (If you wanted a preview of a world where cops stand down and permit rioting and looting, Los Angeles 1992 was surely it.) At the time of the riots, many businesses in majority-black neighborhoods in South Central were owned by Korean immigrants. The immigrants were able to purchase the business as white owners who leaving the neighborhood because of high crime and violence. When police abandoned the neighbors to rioters in the wake of the acquittal of police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, Korean business owners and residents were left to defend themselves.

Distracting Americans from the problem of social class, Democratic politicians (who are mostly white) divide the world into whites and honorary whites, on one side, and people of color (whom Democrats used to call “colored people”), on the other. They appeal to white creatives and professionals, i.e., privileged workers in the culture industry and administrative apparatus, and ethnicized/racialized minorities for votes, while marginalizing white working class and rural voters.

To shame people into silence, the media and Democratic Party dissimulate the actual cause of anti-Asian bias and blame it instead on frank talk about the role of China in crushing 60 percent of small business and throwing millions of Americans out of work. Progressives blame Trump and MAGA to gin up fear of those who wish to preserve the American republic. The rise of anti-Asian bias crimes is useful to the power elite only as long as the fact that the perpetrators are mostly black is not well known.

To the extent that COVID-19 provides any motive for anti-Asian violence, (a) failing to provide a honest context in which it may be explained to the public that Asians in America are not to blame for the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, indeed that the Chinese people themselves are victims of the CCP (and global corporatism), (b) failing to expose the real reasons Asians in America are the victims of bias crime, namely the progressive preachments of racial resentment, and (c) obscuring the truth of (b) by blaming anti-Asian bias crime on criticism of China, the Democrats and the media perpetuate the suggestion that there is a link between Asians generally and COVID-19.

In the spring of 2017, CNN wrote a retrospective on Los Angeles 1992 and pushed it into the network’s unrelentingly anti-Trump frame. “Asian immigrants, once a conservative bloc, have steadily moved to the center and left of the political spectrum, especially as their US-born children identify with more liberal beliefs,” writes Kyung Lah, in “The LA riots were a rude awakening for Korean-Americans.

“In 2016, exit polls showed Asian-Americans broke 65% for Clinton to 27% for Trump. As the country’s fastest-growing immigrant group, the trends don’t bode well for the GOP, who lagged behind the Democrats in Asian-American engagement in 2016.” CNN interviewed Robert Ahn, a LA planning commissioner, who told them that Latinos, African-Americans and Korean-Americans have “a lot more in common than differences.” The tone of the article makes it clear that that common interest is antithetical to populist-nationalism. “What I’m hearing from Trump and the rise in hate crimes in this country is scaring me,” Chang Lee, one of CNN’s interview subjects, said. “Los Angeles had this painful past. Now it’s time for minority ethnic groups to talk to each other, stay bound together, understand and support each other.” Nowhere in the story is the other point of view voiced. Odd given that more than one if four Asian-Americans voted for Trump.

So, you may wonder, how can Joe Biden come before the nation and tell us that COVID-19 was met by silence and denial for days, weeks, and months? Does Biden think he has a Neuralyzer in his pocket? I was there. I remember what happened. I was blogging about it in March 2020. I watched the Democrats telling us to go to Chinatown, calling Trump a racist and a xenophobe for banning travel from China. But it was administration official Peter Navarro who put Fauci in this place when Fauci tried to talk Trump out of the travel ban. Biden smeared Trump as a racist for banning travel. I remember Fauci telling the country we didn’t need masks—in fact, he said masks would only make things worse because the proles would be fiddling with them.

Biden’s address to the nation the other night began with a lie. He then went on to talk about hate crimes against Asian-Americans as if identifying the origin of the virus (China) is the reason for anti-Asian bias crime. He is simultaneously suggesting perpetrators while making anti-Asian bias appear acute rather than Chronic. The Biden administration dropped the investigation of anti-Asian discrimination at Yale University. Biden, a running dog of the Chinese Communist Party, has one overarching goal: to keep the public from talking about the role of China in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Update (03.11.21): Jerusalem Demsas and Rachel Ramirez, writing for Vox, in confronting the evidence that most perpetuators of bias crimes against Asians are black, blame the history of tensions between Asian and black Americans on white supremacy. One can expect such attempts at rationalization will likely be suspended in light of the shooting of massage parlor workers in Atlanta, many of whom were Asian. Now they have a presumptive white supremacist to hold up.

However, the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, may not have committed a bias crime. Cherokee County Sheriff is reporting that there is no indication of racial motivation in the deadly spa shooting, but rather the perpetrator had issues with sexual addiction. Long apparently frequented the establishments he targeted in the attack. The Atlantic Journal Constitution, in “Cops: Shooting suspect says he targeted spas because of sexual addiction,” is reporting, “The 21-year-old man accused of killing eight people at three metro Atlanta spas said it was a sexual addiction—and not the race of victims—that led him to the alleged crime spree, police said Wednesday.

Returning to the Vox story, the authors admit therein that “anti-Asian sentiment in the United States is not new.” Demsas and Ramirez ask the reader to “just look to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942 that put Japanese Americans into internment camps.” The authors also admit that “the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and Black Americans.”

However, not bothering to look at data I shared above (and there’s more: “When ‘white supremacists’ aren’t even white”; “Dirty secret of black-on-Asian violence is out”), the Vox article claims to have “found no evidence that Black Americans are predominantly responsible for this rise in attacks, or that they are particularly hostile to Asian Americans relative to the rest of the population.” Yet the authors go on to write that “the narrative of Black-Asian hostility is rooted in immigration and economic policies.” Then the article explains everything in light of overarching white supremacy. It other words, the authors shift the discussion from the capitalist practice of using immigration to undermine working class communities to blaming white people for what capitalists do.

Having disregarded the material fact of capitalist mode of production in favor of an ideological construct, the authors wax hopeful: “There is already a long history of Black-Asian solidarity against oppression and structural racism, which has been obscured by these recent fissures. In the late 1960s, for instance, Black and Asian activists led the Third World Liberation From movement to establish race and ethnic studies in college and university curriculums in California.” And this is how mainstreaming an ideology by designing academic curricula around it that functions in the corporate-university alliance to systematically dissimulate the material fact of class exploitation reframes oppression as social justice.

“It’s not that Asian-Black tensions or racial hierarchies don’t exist today but that there is a failure to remember what got America to this place: white supremacy.” That black Americans are assaulting Asian Americans does not obviate the ubiquity of white supremacy. “The fact is that Black Americans are native-born Americans, and, like all native-born people, they are susceptible to xenophobic and nationalistic sentiments that can place blame on an ‘other’—in this case, Asian Americans, who can be seen as ‘forever foreigners’ even if they, too, are native-born.”

Then this: “While Black Americans (who are overwhelmingly Democratic) often have more liberal views on immigration reform, there is also existing research that indicates that Black people may feel economic competition with new immigrant communities that can manifest as broad anti-immigrant sentiment and racism.” Note the use of the word “feel.” It’s not that immigrants actually put black people at a competitive disadvantage in their own country. It’s that blacks made feel that there is economic competition and that can manifest itself as racism.

Finally, this historical note: “In 1965, the United States ended the quota-based system of immigration and began to push for high-skilled labor to enter the country. One group that was able to enter the country were Korean Americans who were hyper-selected—that is, they had much higher socioeconomic and educational attainment relative not only to their country of origin but also to the native-born US population.” In 1965, the unemployment rate was four percent. Perhaps there was a need for high-skilled labor. But what happened as a result of the change in immigration law was a massive influx of immigrants, high-skilled and low-skilled, with the result the chronic displacement of black labor with consequences for the black community, including high crime and violence and family disintegration.

Something else about the time line. What was happening in the United States in the 1960s? Driven by rising expectations amid civil rights and guided by a radical ideology, rioting and urban violence was commonplace. The violence drove white businesses and residents from the cities. Affluent Asians, in particular Koreans, entered the country and bought the properties abandoned by whites. They became the business owners and slum lords. Radical ideology told blacks their woes were attributable to oppression not to the dysfunctional culture associated with disorganized neighborhoods. Without whites around, “honorary whites” became the substitute targets of envy and resentment. Rising displacement from mass immigration fueled animosities that, the language of class struggle denied the masses, translated into racial terms.

To say all this is due to white supremacy is to suggest that whites are sufficiently organized to develop a strategy to protect their racial privilege. This is a conspiracy theory that should be seen as obviously wrong because most white people are not racially privileged. The reality is that capitalists are organized and, moreover, operate on the profit imperative, a confluence of interests, and this is what lies behind the policies that created the circumstances that brought Asian immigrants and their descendants into conflict with native-born black Americans. By making this about race, the organic intellectuals of the bourgeois class (critical race theorists and all the rest of it) disorganize the proletariat by defining the problem in racial terms. This is the new racism. Same as the old racism.

Update #2 (03.11.21):

The spree killer Robert Aaron Long was a devout Christian, hyper-religious it appears and he frequented spas aka massage parlors and he was deeply conflicted. Long’s age suggests his conflict may have occurred in the context of an emerging psychiatric condition.

Long’s parents contacted the Cherokee sheriff’s office to identify their son. They informed deputies that a tracking device could lead authorities to his vehicle. His parents were apparently worried about Long (why a GPS tracking device?). Long was captured in Crisp County, about 150 miles south of Atlanta, en route to Florida. Sheriff’s spokesman Jay Baker said Long viewed Florida as a hub for the porn industry. Long told him the Atlanta area “spas” were “temptations to him he wanted to eliminate.” This was a disturbed young man. He was delusional and hyper-religious. It isn’t hard to figure out what is going on here.

But the media, which has obscured the identity of the perpetrators of violence against Asian Americans, latched on to this story because it to fit the narrative they are trying to construct: that it Trump, MAGA, and rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” that is behind the violence.

I have watched the ever obnoxious Shaun King flipping out on Facebook over this story. Why didn’t the police drag Long out of his truth and suffocate him? Another white man taken alive! Etcetera. Race hucksters are so consumed with attention-getting and pushing the (false) narrative of a ubiquitous white supremacy they never wait to see what is actually going on. And the media is obsessed with suppressing the populist-nationalist movement. The establishment thinks it’s at war with the American people. And, in war, as we all know, truth is the first casualty. Even when they have to walk something back, they know how first impressions stick with a lot of people, especially those who want to believe the shit they’re shoveling.

Joe Conason (with whom I have dined), essentially a Democratic Party operative, has entered the fray over Dr. Seuss in an essay at The National Memo. He admits what happened: “The Seuss estate, which oversees the 60 books and other properties he left to posterity, decided to pull a half-dozen of them because their content includes dated and offensive stereotypes.”

A lot of folks in my newsfeed deny anything happened. They characterize what Conason speaks about as merely books going out of print. Hey, it happens. Nobody wants to buy those books anyway. No, the book were pulled because images in them were presumed by left woke standards of political correctness to be dangerous to groups of people the establishment has defined en mass as fragile people.

Infantilizing minorities is rampant practice on the woke left. I swear to you, an example of transforming entire racial and ethnic groups into the collective victims of trauma just popped up on my email server. “The mission of BIPOC R.I.S.E. (Reaching Intersectional Strengths through Engagement) is to provide BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and multicultural students) with academic, emotional, psychosocial, relational and professional support. This is achieved through engagement with academic, peer, community and professional mentors who desire to be in long-term, ongoing relationships with BIPOC students.”

This language transforms BIPOC into trauma victims in need of counseling and mentoring. I presume it’s the professionals in the “white establishment” who are to be their counselors and mentors. But isn’t the “white establishment” also the perpetrator according to Critical Race Theory? Focus on the language here: “emotional,” “psychosocial,” “professional support.” Every person in the BIPOC categories is presumed to suffer from emotional and psychological trauma. The term “relational” conveys that there are relations, presumed to be broken, in need repair. The victims of those broken relations must certainly be protected from the careless unprophetic cartooning of a well-meaning but unreflecting Dr. Seuss. They’re too fragile. They’re too delicate.

Describing Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss was his pen name) as a “liberal humanist,” Conason, like his woke progressive brethren, seems unaware of what liberal and humanist mean with respect to freedom of ideas and the significance of history. At best, the feign it. “When you remember that his first book was published more than 80 years ago, that dissonance seems almost inevitable,” writes Conason. Like Mark Twain’s work? There’s dissonance there. Kids read Twain. “The estate’s decision, a sensible response to changing standards, was plainly designed to protect both the Seuss brand and the memory of Theodor Seuss Geisel as a liberal humanist.” Not to mention all the patients woke progresses are in charge of counseling, many of whom are actually doctors (of education and philosophy).

Conason predictably flips things Orwellingly: cancelling Dr. Seuss “is the opposite of ‘canceling’ Dr. Seuss,” adding, “anyone who wants to read the old titles can still find them.” Try finding a high-quality copy of Disney’s Song of the South (grab Dumbo and Peter Pan uncensored while you will still can).

What Conason and the “sensible response to changing standards” crowd are up to is biographical and historical revisionism. Conason finds Winston acting in the best interests of the proles of Airstrip One. The Ministry of Truth, having deemed they know such things, needs to send wrong thoughts down the memory hole for their own good. Seuss cannot be seen as a man of history really. There is no history except that which advances the power of the present for the sake of its future. Geisel’s work is scheduled for cleansing in light of contemporary standards proclaimed by those in power to be universal.

Marx and Engels suggested to their audience that when they hear the word “morality” they ought to think “bourgeois morality.” Woke leftism means to redefine standards according to the terms of current-day political correctness pitched as organically emergent but actually constructed by a particular point of view that holds liberalism humanism is low regard. Political correctness is in fact the work of the “radical left” that Conason means to deny, albeit I would hardly describe this left as “radical” (more like reactionary).

Conason can’t resist loving on Democrats: “The irony is that Dr. Seuss was himself a lifelong Democrat whose advocacy of liberal causes dated back to the New Deal, when he drew scores of blistering cartoons for the left-leaning daily New York newspaper PM, usually on the subject of Republican perfidy.” I can see irony, but I don’t think it is the irony Conason intends.

Or hating on Trump. Conason implies that Trump and his movement—“Trumpism,” he and his ilk fancy it—represent fascism and racism. Hence the reason to get “ism” and “ist” into the discourse. Geisel “despised Hitler, Mussolini, Charles Lindbergh, and the original ‘America First’ movement; he deplored racism and anti-Semitism; and he served patriotically in the war against fascism. He would have low regard for the Trumpists who are now misusing his good name.”

There may be racist and anti-Semites among those who voted for Trump, just as there are racists and anti-Semites among Democrats and progressives. But so-called Trumpism is neither racist nor anti-Semitic. It’s a patriotic populist-nationalist movement against the corporatism and globalism that is laying down the Newspeak and undermining the livelihoods of working class Americans.

Unlike Conason, I won’t presume to speak for Geisel, but if he would have had low regard for Trumpists for the reasons Conason suggests, then it would only mean that Geisel, like a lot of people, didn’t understand politics as well as he could or should have. I do, however, wonder whether Geisel would have been troubled by the insinuation that at least six of his works were racist and harmful to the fragile victims of woke progressivism.

Amanda Gorman, a Harvard graduate and the youngest inaugural poet in US history, claims she was racially profiled by a security guard who “tailed me on my walk home.” She claims the incident occurred Friday night, but she has neither identified the security guard nor the company for which he worked. “He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious,’” Gorman tweeted. “I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. Gorman tweeted that this is “the reality of black girls.” “One day you’re called an icon,” she tweeted, “the next day, a threat.”

The novelty and relative insignificance of her contribution to western civilization, and the fleeting fame that comes with that, appear to be behind her story. I have seen this drill too many times to accept it without a lot of evidence (and even then, it sounds like an overreaction in the spirit of Oumou Kanoute at Smith College). Gorman tweeted: “In a sense he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be. A threat and proud.” An ego this big needs attention. A spoken word treatment coming to a venue near you.

CNN, always on the lookout for anecdotes to help them rationalize egging on BLM arson, looting, vandalism, and violence across several months in 2020, connected the alleged incident to the zeitgeist: “The encounter with the security guard Gorman describes is reminiscent of police violence and aggression against Black Americans, whose deaths have sparked national movements, including #BlackLivesMatter.” CNN continues: “Black men are approximately 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police over a lifetime as compared to White men, according to research by the National Academy of Sciences.”

As a criminologist, using statistics this way drives me up the wall. They like this NAS statistic because it is not an explanation. The fact of disparity does not indicate injustice. It could be that black men are approximately 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police over their lifetime as compared to White men because black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to put themselves in situations were police officers are more likely to use deadly force to protect themselves or others. In fact, that is the reason. I have blogged extensively about this on Freedom and Reason. I understand that CNN does not read my blog. But they either don’t read or ignore the scientific studies that inform my blog. That is inexcusable.

The facts debunking establishment media claims (i.e. propaganda) keep coming. A new report, by J. Beck, a BJS statistician, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Ofenders and Arrestees, 2018, based on data with which I am quite familiar as a criminologist, finds no racial disparities in crimes committed versus arrests made indicating systemic racism.

The study found that, based on data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, black people are overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious nonfatal violent crimes (36%) relative to their representation in the US population (13%). In contrast, white people are underrepresented. White people account for 60 percent of US residents in the study (it’s actually between 67 and 73 percent), but 46 percent of all persons arrested for rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and other assault, and 39 percent of all arrestees for nonfatal violent crimes.

Beck compares these data to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to determine how much offense and arrest differences by race and ethnicity may be attributed to differences in criminal involvement, Overrepresentation of blacks in found in all measures. Black people accounted for 29 percent of violent-crime offenders in the NCVS, 35 percent of violent-crime offenders in incidents reported to police (UCR), and 33 percent of all persons arrested for violent crimes.

Among the most serious incidents of violent crime—rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault—there were no statistically significant differences by race between offenders identified in the NCVS and persons arrested per the UCR. In other words, white and black people are arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and in proportion to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.

As I have confessed on this blog, some of this I should have known. Some of it now known in research that has emerged over the last few years. My political-ideological sympathies positioned me to believe the myth of systemic racism in the criminal justice system (and more generally in American society). I uncritically trusted arguments that reinforced that belief and pushed to the side studies that challenged it. It’s an error called confirmation bias. It was Heather Mac Donald’s 2016 The War on Cops that began turning me around. Then empirical studies starting emerging in which no researcher could find any evidence of bias in lethal civilian-police encounters. Could they be right? I took the studies apart. Yes, they are right. I revisited Wilbanks’ 1987 The Myth of the Racist Criminal Justice System (I had trusted Reiman’s critique of it) and found that Wilbanks was right. And he wasn’t the first one. And it’s not just lethal civilian-police encounters. It’s everything. American criminal justice is systemically not racist.

Here’s the reality of where we are: Black Lives Matter has no actual issue upon which to justify its existence as a protest movement. Its arguments are false. Even anecdotes it uses have been debunked. “Hands up” didn’t happen. Jacob Blake had a knife. Etcetera. Systemic racism is a mirage that dissipates upon closer examination. It is sustained by faith-belief, not be reason or evidence. It is reinforced by corporate media propaganda.

To be sure, woke lefties don’t think I am wrong about what I said back then. They think I’m wrong about what I am saying now. Instead of changing their views on the basis of fact and reason as I do, they say I have been radicalized, that I have fallen under the spell of rightwing ideology, that I have been “red-pilled” (as if that’s a bad thing). I would say that that’s their problem, but in today’s climate, it’s my problem, too. But I cannot knowing lie about it. To continue believing something that is not true is worse than accusations of disloyalty, of heresy, of apostasy.

Not a little bit worse. A lot worse. And not just because I value integrity. The fact is that black men are drastically overrepresented in serious crime compared to whites. The police, in doing their job, arrest more black men than white men relative to their population and even absolutely because black men commit more crime. Black men, only around six percent of the US population, are responsible for more than half of homicide and robbery and a third of aggravated assault and burglary. Cops don’t arrest more black men because they are racist. Sure, there are racist cops. There are racists in a lot of occupations. But law enforcement is not racist. America is not racist.

The question we need to ask ourselves, if we care about black people, what we need to explain: Why are black men overrepresented in serious crime? It’s not because of poverty. There are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. The explanation is complex. Blaming law enforcement for doing their jobs won’t unravel that complexity. It more than a distraction. We cannot defund the police. We cannot depolice our communities. When we don’t adequately police our communities, we put our citizens at risk. Crime drives out business and jobs. Children cannot learn when they are not safe. Residents who can afford to leave—the very residents who help bring stability to these communities—leave for more orderly communities. This is bad for black people. Until order and peace are restored in these neighborhoods, these communities cannot develop and meet the needs of the people living there. But crime control is a crucial piece of investing in these communities.

My lovely wife was born and raised in Sweden. Her family lives there still. I met her in her twenties when her English was just okay. She is outraged at a muppet mocking her culture and language. The Swedish Chef is culturally insensitive and offensive. Little Swedish children will feel belittled and stupid seeing this depiction of the dumb and incompetent Swede. It’s a stereotype. Thank goodness they have warning labels that confess to culturally insensitive characters.

Actually, my wife is not offended at all. She was raised in a time and a culture where children were taught to be resilient, not fragile. She thinks the Swedish Chef is funny—even though she doesn’t understand a word the muppet is saying. Her upbringing did not prepare to be offended by everything. She was raised to be resilient.

When publishers decided they weren’t going to publish cartoons of Muhammad so as not to offend Muslims, especially since Muslims were protesting, rioting, and even murdering cartoonists and editors over it, we were already far down the path that would find it ordinary to censor cartoons of Chinese people or remove from libraries classic books using period language.

We got a big heads up when they started labeling records and CDs. The PMRC. Content warnings. “Words,” Zappa’s voice echoes through my head. Maybe books would be better without them? Remember how goofy it still looked when conservatives freaked out over Ice T’s “Cop Killer”? (Why isn’t that song an anthem on the woke left?)

Imagine Cheech and Chong trying to make it in today’s fragile climate. “Up His Nose.” “Basketball Jones.” Or Don Rickles. How many years ago did they ruin Michael Richards? And Andrew “Dice” Clay? Remember the outrage on SNL? That was no Kaufmanesque bit. Those weren’t conservatives who did that. That wasn’t the rightwing.

Warning labels are a form of censorship that pretends to respect liberal values. “It’s not like you can’t see or hear it.” Right, but you have told me that I will probably regret it, or that is (partly) false, or it will damage my children, so maybe I should pass. Why would somebody put out something that could offend me or mislead me? Thank you for warning me about this. Come to think of it, why do we allow this sort of stuff at all? Don’t publish it. Disinvite him. We need a Ministry of Truth. Where is the commissar? Doubleplusgood!

I’m a child, too. Decide for me. I don’t know how to obtain a ID card. (Thank goodness I need one of those for the bank or the library.) Can’t you just mail my vote for me?

Political correctness is to liberal secularism what blasphemy is to religion. Call-out culture and cancel culture come with rules indicating words only the chosen people can say, as well as a selective aniconism. Equity is not about equality but about power. Otherwise, why would anybody care about speech rules somebody else thinks ought to be imposed?

We might call this the First Church of Woke. It is designed to make the congregation so frail that even words become crushing. The gatekeepers use this as a method of thought control—that is, political control. That the flock wants it, thinks it’s normal and necessary, is the point of indoctrination. Those who control you always need you to believe that their interests are your interests.

Gramsci called this ideological hegemony. Despite being thrown into prison by Mussolini, he understood that power doesn’t usual work by coercion alone. There are more effective forms of cancelling than incarceration. Hegemony happens also by engineering consent, by normalizing power over you. Controlling the means of communication is the prerequisite. That’s what Ed Bernays understood. It’s what corporate power, the administrative state, and the culture industry understand.

We know it today as as “inclusion” and other bellyfeel. Perhaps you have attended a struggle session or two where you were conditioned to accept it. If you didn’t leave feeling welcomed to the cognitive and behavioral training apparatus perhaps, then you should revisit your experience. It’s why tolerance has become such a bad word. Tolerance has become, in the eyes of Marcuse’s children, repressive.

All that enlightenment work opening up society, emancipating thought and expression from the censorship by corporate bodies and powerful elites from the constraints of speech codes that shackle opinion—that work is now just an overreaction in the eyes of the new class of moral entrepreneurs, so many of whom are young and zealous. They don’t realize that all the other freedoms flow from the freedom of speech and expression.

Beware those who downplay the significance of ideological hegemony. The culture of inclusivity is stealthily stealing our liberties. Subscribe. Share. We’re going to have to fight if we want to remain free.

From The New York Times story “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College,” by Michael Powell:

“Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.” Did they “offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation”? Nope. 

Instead, Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. “In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories—as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her ACLU lawyer—set aside for Black students and other students of color.”

In other words, in a case where there was no racism that spazzed in a decidedly racist manner. Why did they believe Kanoute? Because they believe the myth that black people are persecuted simply for being black. Who is pushing this myth? Who benefits from making the safest places in America (our college campuses) out to be sites of intersecting oppressions?

Bret Stephens follows up Powell’s article in a New York Times opinion piece “Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain.”

I confess, not being a conservative, my leftwing sympathies caused me to miss for many years the threat to liberal freedoms (many of which are also part of modern conservatism) that woke leftism presented. I will brag a bit and point out that I saw it sooner than many (which is likely the reason why I lost dozens of Facebook friends over the last year). Most of the people I know on the left either still don’t see it or openly dismiss it as an overreaction by those who actually still profess devotion to liberal values—you know, equal treatment and freedom of association, assembly, conscience, and speech.

In his opinion piece, Bret Stephens characterizes Michael Powell’s account of the “eating while black” hoax at Smith College this way: “It’s a striking—and increasingly familiar—tale of the battle the Woke left is now waging on well-meaning liberals who don’t seem to understand the illiberal nature of what they are facing.” Illiberal is precisely the correct term; this is an authoritarian countermovement against the Enlightenment.

I do not use the word “hoax” lightly. As Stephens points out, Kanoute’s claims turned out to be “comprehensively false.” I have curated on this blog several hoaxes of this sort. 

As a consequence of the hoax, a janitor and a cafeteria worker were smeared as racists for calling campus security. Neither of them called campus security. No matter. “#BelieveHer.” (So what if they had?) Powell reported that cafeteria and grounds workers “found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive.” 

This was part of “anti-bias training,” otherwise known as a struggle session (see Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-1976 aka the “Lost Decade”). I have been making this comparison for months now. Finally mainstream media is allowing the connection to be made between woke progressivism and Maoist-era communist ideology. Stephens makes the reference. Push out his content!

Stephens rightly asks, what Heather Mac Donald asked a while ago in her excellent The Diversity Delusion, why do these moral panics over hoaxes and microaggression happen at the most progressive universities, at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr, and Dalton? Because these are points at which the ideology of social justice is promulgated. The students there are conditioned to see as real myths that flows from decades of critical race theory and its variants combined with an enabling and practicable ideology: “restorative justice.” 

Coddled students are primed to take up the myths because they provide attention-getting opportunities (see Jonathan Haidt). Lots of virtue signaling, ego stroking, (more) special treatment, and lawsuits. They are amplified because the accounts advance the discourse that America—a multiracial and secular nation that abolished the slave trade, abolished chattel slavery, early among nations with universal suffrage, abolished racial segregation, banned discrimination against nonwhites, instituted affirmative action, pumped trillions into impoverished neighborhoods, universalized marriage—is a oppressive racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc. nightmare. 

Stephens is no shit when he writes that “the Woke left has the liberal left’s number. It’s called guilt.” (See Shelby Steele.) We have come to a point, as Stephens points out, that absolution is not enough for this crowd. They want reparations. They want stuff. More than that, they want to renegotiate the liberal ideals that underpin all the freedoms and advancements that I noted a moment ago. And the liberal left has allowed a handful of elites guilt them into giving away the most precious thing of all: liberty. 

Stephens: “In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of ‘restorative justice’ for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings. All of this has left many of the traditional gatekeepers of liberal institutions uncertain, timid and, in many cases, quietly outraged. This is not the deal they thought they struck. But it’s the deal they’re going to get until they recover the courage of their liberal convictions.”

Folks have asked me, “Andy, what happened to you?” My answer is simply this (thanks Stephens for giving me the phrase): I recovered the courage of my liberal convictions. You need to do the same. Before it is too late. Tragically, it may already be.

CNN’s article, “Trump unleashes new threat to American democracy,” sounds like an article from a high school newspaper (no offense to high schoolers): “Donald Trump has no remorse about the deadly violence he incited with his lies about a stolen election in his uprising against the US Congress. […] In his first public remarks since leaving the White House, he…dangerously lashed out at Supreme Court justices for failing to intervene to throw him the election he clearly lost to President Joe Biden…. …Trump fumed in an authoritarian speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Orlando, Florida, referring to false fraud claims thrown out by multiple judges.”

Note that he refers to the president as the “ex-president,” when the norm has always been to refer to a president, vice-president, or senator by the honorific title after they leave office. We don’t talk about “ex-president Roosevelt” or “ex-president Reagan” or even “ex-president Nixon.”

Is this the level at which Stephen Collinson actually thinks or is this propaganda aimed at an audience CNN presumes to have the intellectual capacity of the average eight-year old? I listened to Trump’s speech. It was a policy speech and terribly boring. Trump is always boring when he gives this type of speech. His speech on January speech, which detailed voting irregularities, was also boring. Trump is no Reagan. He doesn’t fly at 30,000 feet. He’s Castro-lite. He so drones on. And where is the historical context in Collinson’s “analysis”?

Look at that first sentence. “Donald Trump has no remorse about the deadly violence he incited with his his lies about a stolen election in his uprising.” Why would a president have remorse over something he did not do? He did not incite violence. The second impeachment was as bogus as the first one. The Democrats are using impeachment as a political weapon, not as a legitimate constitutional process. Trump told the crowd to peacefully and patriotic walk to the Capitol and let their voices be heard. Since there is a lot of evidence of election irregularities and fraud, the president wasn’t lying. And to call the actions of gangs of professional disrupters the president’s uprising is absurd. The president wanted the electoral process to go back to the states where there were problems. Millions of Americans wanted that, too. That’s not an uprising. That’s what democracy looks like. It’s what speech and assembly look like.

The next sentences have Collinson claiming the president “dangerously lashed out” at the Supreme Court, that he wanted the Supreme Court to “throw him the election.”

Let’s consult history. Recall that on December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes. The machines had missed more than 60 thousand ballots. That’s a lot of votes. The Republican candidate, George W. Bush, was only winning by fewer than 600 votes. The Bush campaign requested that the Court intervene and stay the state court’s decision. The campaign did not want those votes counted. They knew Bush would lose. The next day, the Court granted the stay.

On what grounds did the Court stay the state court’s decision? Conservative justice Scalia cited “irreparable harm” to the presidency if the recount proceeded. The recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over the legitimacy of Bush’s presidency. In the dissent, liberal justice Stevens wrote that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.” (That’s what Trump was seeking, by the way, namely counting every legally cast ballot.) There were arguments and, in the end, Bush prevailed on constitutional grounds: hand counting votes violated equal protection since the other votes had been machine counted. In other words, the Supreme Court threw the election to the loser, Bush, who then proceeded to fill his administration with war hawks and launch disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet in 2020 and 2021, courts did not intervene in circumstances clearly violative of equal protection.

Of course the Democratic candidate in 2000, vice-president Al Gore wanted the Supreme Court to rule in his favor, to allow the counting of every lawful vote to continue, to determine who actually won Florida (analysis shows that Gore did, in fact, win the election). Did Gore want the Court to “throw him the election”? Presumably CNN would think so, as it appeared to all the world that, given the way they covered the election, the establishment media wanted Bush to be president.

So Bush can beseech the Supreme Court to intervene in an election but Trump cannot? What if the Court had ruled against Bush in 2000-01? What if the votes were counted and Gore turned out to be the winner (only Florida stood in his way to presidency). Would this have cast a “a needless and unjustified cloud” over “the legitimacy of the presidency”? Would this have constituted “a threat to democracy”? If Bush were displeased with that outcome, would this make him “dangerous”? After all, Bush tried to thwart democracy by trying to the counting of lawful votes. Indeed, he succeeded.

Wait, there’s more. Remember the Brooks Brothers riot? A lot of you won’t because the establishment media didn’t toss it into their echo chamber. I remember it. It was caught on video (of course, as we saw in 2020-21, you do not see things caught on video if it does not fit with the official narrative).

On November 22, 2000, at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, a mob, with paid Republican operatives participating, orchestrated a riot with the goal of shutting down the recount. It was none other than John Sweeney (R-NY), who gave the signal to stat the riot. “Shut it down,” he instructed an aide. And so they did. The violence persuaded local officials to shut down the recount. The Washington Post wondered in 2018, “Eighteen years after a chaotic recount, debate still rages over whether the antics went too far.” Did they go too far? Let’s review:

It was clear that the media was in the tank for Bush in 2000-01, just as it was clear that the media was all in for Biden in 2020-21. Gore and Trump were insufficiently establishment. The power elite did not trust them. Gore wanted to secure entitlements by putting the budget surplus in a “lockbox,” a term the media relentless mocked him over. Wall Street wanted that money. The defense industry wanted that money. (Bush gave it to them and was guaranteed reelection, Ohio notwithstanding.) Trump was too critical of China, globalism, and military intervention. He had to go. He was a “threat to democracy.”

CNN played a chief role in engineering elections of establishment figures. To be sure, 2016 caught them by surprise. But the establishment media was ready for 2000. Now they have to undermine the legitimacy of Trump in case he or some other populist runs for president, hence the constant repetition of “lies” and “danger.” They are working to similarly delegitimize other populists seeking office. Understand that CNN is not down with American first and working class politics. CNN, and the rest of the establishment media, is the propaganda arm of global corporatist power.

“I think it is plain to me that there is discrimination and widespread disparate treatment of communities of color and other ethnic minorities in this country,” Merrick Garland said during his confirmation hearing at the Senate, after being asked by Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, to define systemic racism. “They have a disproportionately lower employment, disproportionately lower home ownership rates, disproportionately lower ability to accumulate wealth,” he explained.

Garland is making an ideological argument, not an empirical one. Disparate racial outcomes is not systemic racism. This is a fallacious conclusion and it is very troubling to see a man who will be attorney general of the United States answer the question this way. Systemic racism is a feature of a system with laws and policies in place that systematically oppress members of one group while systemically privileging members of another group on the basis of racial designation. This system was dismantled when I was only two years ago, a very long time ago.

Kennedy later asked, “If you say an institution is systemically racist, how do you know what you know? Do you measure it by disparate impact, controlling for other factors? Or do you just look at the numbers and say the system must be racist?”

This is the right question to ask (Kennedy is a smart fellow) and it exposed the core flaw in the systemic racism argument. Those claiming that systemic racism is an enduring problem of United States society are falsely conflating racism with demographic differences between races. Demographic differences described in racial terms is not racism.

Racism is a discredited theory or practice and relations based on and justified by that theory positing that the human population can be meaningfully divided into groups that can in turn be hierarchically arranged and differentiated by degrees and quality of cognitive ability, behavioral proclivity, and moral integrity. Systemic racism would be the character of a system where racism was manifest in formal system, indicating law and policy, in which members of one or more groups suffer systematic oppression while members of one or more other groups enjoy systematic privileges on the basis on racial categories. This is different from but often informs race prejudice and discrimination, only the latter an actionable offense.

After acknowledging that he answered what he thought was a different question, Garland answered Kennedy’s follow up this way: “The authority the Justice Department has to investigate institutions is to look for patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct and if we find a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct, I would describe that as institutional racism within that institution.”

This is heartening. This is a different understanding of racism than that held by the antiracists. Antiracists (critical race theory types) define racism on the face of it as demographic differences between racial groups. In doing so, by making the statistical fact of group differences a matter of racism by definition, they skirt the necessary work of demonstrating causal explanation for these differences, differences explicable by reference to other causes—which is why they don’t want to put themselves in the position of having to show that the evidence does not support their claims.

However, Garland should clarify that what he is talking about is institutional or organizational discrimination on the basis of race. He is right that it is is one of the obligations of the Justice Department to investigate institutions or organizations to look for patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct. Crucially, patterns are not enough, as these may have many causes. Instead, patterns alert officials to look for and identify practices that may run afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. One cannot assume racism is the cause of the patterns detected. Racism has to be positively demonstrated empirically. If racism can be demonstrated in practices, then the Justice Department has a case.

Kennedy also asked Garland to explain from his standpoint the difference between people who are racist, on the one hand, and institutional racism, on the other, as well as the “concept of implicit bias.”

“Implicit bias just means that every human being has biases. That’s part of what it means to be a human being,” Garland said. “And the point of examining our implicit biases is to bring our conscious mind up to our unconscious mind and to know when we’re behaving in a stereotyped way. Everybody has stereotypes. It’s not possible to go through life without working through stereotypes. And implicit biases are the ones that we don’t recognize our behavior.” Garland then said, “That doesn’t make you racist, no.” He’s right. It doesn’t.

The media is keen on contrasting Garland from William Barr, who correctly resisted the demand that government acknowledge the existence of systemic racism in law enforcement in the United States. He admitted, as anybody should, that there is racism in the United States, but repeatedly refused to agree with others that the police as an institution practice systemically racism. The paradigm of systemic racism in law enforcement is racial disparities in lethal civilian-officer encounters. Extensive empirical research over several decades fails to demonstrate that racism explains those disparities. If facts matter, the systematic racism argument is over.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, criticized Kennedy for asking the question, describing it as a “waste of time.” He suggested that Kennedy’s questions were racially motivated. “I found it unfortunate that he would focus on something not relevant to whether or not that Judge Garland is competent, and qualified to serve as attorney general, honor the Constitution and represent the people of the United States. And for him to take the time to use their line of questioning was a waste of time. We need to move forward as a nation.” He added, “Senator Kennedy knows all too well the paralyzing effects of systemic racism has had on the south, in Louisiana and on this country.”

The question was not only relevant but, in the context of what has been occurring over the last several years, with Black Lives Matter and the specter of reparations, also obligatory for any politician who takes his charge seriously. How Garland answered this question bears directly on whether he is competent and qualified to serve as the attorney general of the United States. The name of the body he will lead contains the word “justice” in it. He and that body are obliged to honor the Constitution and represent the people of the United States.

Sometimes the desire to manufacture perceptions fails spectacularly.

Consider the antics of—sorry, I can’t resist—Alexandria Ocasio-Smollett. Of course, I mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka Sandy Ocasio, the congresswoman from New York’s 14th district.

In a February 1 90-minute Instagram Live video that Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan tells her readers “revealed our collective trauma,” the congresswoman describes her experience on 1/6 when, to paraphrase Ilhan Omar’s remark about the 9/11 attack on New York City, some people something.

(The date 1/6, when protestors entered the Capitol building, is the new 9/11. Pelosi is seeking to establish a 9/11-style commission to study the matter. The label “domestic terrorist” to describe the protestors is being widely socialized by the establishment media and Democratic Party figures.)

Ocasio-Cortez was not in the Capitol building at the time. She was in the Cannon House Office Building some ways away. There were no rioters at the Cannon. Nonetheless, the congresswoman tells a story about how an unknown man—a Capitol Police officer—knocked on her door and entered her office.

Of course, the congresswoman could have thought that rioters were in the Cannon building. It was a confusing situation. But she could only have thought this for a short while, as she was quickly apprised of the situation by that same Capitol Police officer, and nearly a month passed between that day and the day of her notorious livestream.

Ocasio-Cortez’s story is more than a telling from the standpoint of what a subject believed at one point in time. The personal is the political. The case makes me wonder: is there such a thing as lying in a post-truth world? Does personal standpoint stamp narratives with truth?

After all, in identity politics and its attendant postmodernist epistemology (or anti-epistemology, as it were), trauma and subjectivity, the “truth of experience,” is what matters, not objective facts. According to the ethics of the “lived experience,” we’re supposed to “believe her.” It’s what the placards instruct. Acknowledge the trauma of the “survivor.” Who are we to say Ocasio’s truth isn’t true? It’s her truth, not ours.

But if this is true, then why believe anybody? Can there be any basis for asserting a shared reality? What is the method by which a common existence could be known?

Not that there’s no sanity on the far left side of things. Postcolonialist feminist philosopher Sandra Harding says an objective reality can be known. She writes, in an essay I assign my research methods students, “Beyond the Neutrality Ideal,” “No critics of racism, imperialism, male supremacy, or the class system think that the evidence and arguments they present leave their claims valid only ‘from their perspective.’”

But Ocasio doesn’t operate on Harding’s level where regret can be expressed (see “Newton’s rape manual”). Ocasio is an organic manifestation of a popular post-truth condition.

All Ocasio had to do was tell the truth about her experience on January 6, the truth known to her as she live-streamed her account. In doing so she did not need to hide her feelings.

She could have said that she did not know at the time, especially since she was in a separate building, what was happening and appreciated very much the Capitol Police officer stopping by to check on her. She could then have mentioned that she enjoyed a cup of coffee with a colleague down the hall immediately afterwards. She could have said, just so there was no misunderstanding, that there were no rioters outside her door, which she would have emphasized was a door in a separate building, that she was safe, but of course empathized with what others in the Capitol went through, an ordeal investigators are sorting out.

Instead, timed for an impeachment based on absence and ignorance of facts (the Senate trial began on a week later and resulted in another acquittal of Donald Trump), Ocasio made the Capitol riot all about her, presenting herself as a victim to her throng of adoring fans (and others among her 12.5 million followers on Twitter and nearly 9 million on Instagram)—all for maximum propaganda effect.

When it was obvious that she could not be an actual victim of 1/6, she “contextualized” matters by telling the audience that she was at one point a victim. She then used this claim to berate those who dared to criticize her.

“The reason I say this and the reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize,” she said with wet eyes. “These are the same tactics of abusers. And, um, I’m a survivor of sexual assault.”

These are the tactics of an emotional blackmailer. It’s not a technique just anyone can use.

Nobody doubts the congresswoman’s savvy as a demagogue. In the livestream, she unfolded a story she knew was false, brazenly changing it as she told it, seemingly hearing the lies as she told them in her baby voice, while leaving the desired impression, namely that her fear, manufactured or real, is the truth of her experience.

There were men yelling and pounding on her door trying to kill her. Okay, one man. Okay, a Capitol police officer checking on her safety. But she didn’t like the way he looked at her (“ACAB”!). And Ted Cruz is trying to have her killed. She actually tweeted that—unfiltered by Jack Dorsey. (Remember Jon Lovitz’s SNL character the Pathological Liar? That.)

Now she is beseeching her Twitter army to demand the platform take down the tweets of those who exposed her Smollett.

As Jack Posobiec of One America News noted on Steve Bannon’s War Room, everybody remembers that one girl in high school who makes everything about her. The drama queen. The actress. Like Jussie Smollett.

Ocasio-Cortez is Hillary Clinton “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia. Maybe Hillary was telling the truth. After all, it was her experience (#Ibelieveher). The trauma tells the truth.

These aren’t big mouths in high school. They’re big time influencers in the national arena.

I was wise to Ocasio-Cortez a long time ago. This is from my blog June 2019 and there’s more where that came from. Her followers exist in a religious-like space and state and she is their idol, their totem, their cult leader.

I am told that the congresswoman’s past stint as a bartender makes a claim on working class bona fides. But her brand of woke leftism does not represent working people. It can’t. Woke politics is the ideology of relatively affluent members of the academic and professional-managerial strata and their offspring.

Ocasio-Cortez is a creation of the Justice Democrats, a group organized by the once-populist Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sander insiders Saikat Chakrabarti and Jack Exley, Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, and Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, key social influencers for enlisting young Americans in the progressive establishment, who self-identify as “democratic socialists.” (This was crowd that Jimmy Dore had to get away from because they are so subservient to state corporate power. I have watched Dore’s awakening in real time. He still has sleepies in his eyes, but he’s drinking the coffee. He now calls Ocasio-Cortez a coward, a gaslight, and a liar.)

Self-described democratic socialists are the faux-left. You may know them by their jargon. If you hear “crypto” (as in “cryptofascist”) to refer to a critic, or if there is expressed a fetish for some DSA sanctioned drama queen, or if some old sellout in mittens at Biden’s inauguration is the bomb and memed incessantly or, alternatively, if his grumpy chic is an expression of white privilege, then you know you have a faux-leftist in your midst. A piss-poor understanding of science and deep contempt for such core liberal values as equality of opportunity and free speech are also dead giveaways.

This crowd thinks puffed up antifascist rhetoric is a proper substitute for working class politics. They believe they constitute the left end of what they perceive to be a popular front against a rising tide of rightwing reaction that mostly exists in their imagination. At best, they’re wannabes.

Matt Taibbi has an interesting piece on Substack concerning Herbert Marcuse and the notion of “repressive tolerance.” Tabbi’s piece can be found here: Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual. I wrote about Marcuse on the pages of Project Censored back in the summer of 2018 in defending a free and open Internet (the canceling of Alex Jones was the impetus of my essay). I want to follow up on my thoughts in light of the consternation on the left over Taibbi’s essay. I will not engage Tabbi’s essay, as you can read it for yourself, and Tabbi can defend himself well enough. I will be setting forth my own interpretation of Marcuse’s arguments.

Reading Marcuse crucially depends on how one defines tolerance. Understanding the piece also depends on understanding Marcuse’s deep roots in a particular reading for Freud, an analysis of which I will leave to one side except to note that Marcuse reads Freud as believing that our animal instincts require repression, “progressive and liberating repression,” and the necessity of alienation as “the constant and essential element of identity,” not in the way Marx saw it as a condition and state to overcome (see also Eros and Civilization). Remember, in “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud argues that, while he did not believe in God, God would never go way because the ordinary man needs a father, and that religion serves the Hobbesean function of keeping man in line. 

There was a missing paragraph in Marcuse’s original essay that tells us what Marcuse understands tolerance to mean, and it is what I understand the word to mean, i.e., to allow ideas to be expressed without constraint and punishment. I tolerate Nazis marching down the street with their placards and chants. I tolerate conservatives gathering in Washington DC to rally against the 2020 election. I tolerate student groups bringing to campus speakers expressing ideas with which I disagree. But, for woke progressives, allowing these is repressive tolerance to be countered by progressive repression because such repression is liberating. To be sure, this depends on your politics and identity, but, for Marcuse, this is a settled matter. This is where critical theory and postmodernism meet—the rejection of the grand narrative that liberalism has value (with Marcuse finessing it by distinguishing “authentic liberalism,” where, for postmodernists, the authentic is “lived experience”). 

The missing paragraph: “Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. [This is the spirit of antifascism and antiracism, deeply illiberal standpoints.] The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed)—it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness.” Stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness.” 

How shall we do this without controlling the means of communication and the production of knowledge? One is Gramsci’s long march through the institutions, which has only provided the content corporate power adapts to fracture the working class (see this summer). The other is using the corporate machinery to cancel and censor. That these developments are interconnected should not escape anyone. 

But Marcuse wants to make sure the reader fully understands him. For if you were wondering whether he is really advocating censorship, he wants to make sure you know that, indeed, he is, and, worse, he is advocating canceling voices before they have a chance to be censored, or precensorship, a type of popular prior restraint (deplatforming, etc.): “To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.” What is this “hidden censorship”? That’s the whole point of the essay: the power of the capitalist class to control discourse (see One Dimensional Man). The progressive left must censor and precensor: “Where the false consciousness has become prevalent in national and popular behavior, it translates itself almost immediately into practice: the safe distance between ideology and reality, repressive thought and repressive action, between the word of destruction and the deed of destruction is dangerously shortened.” Speech is violence. Silence is violence. It all follows. 

Shall we spend more than a second pondering why this paragraph went missing? Perhaps to ponder why those paragraphs that remain are not obvious enough?

The woke left today takes the central point of Herbert Marcuse’s essay to its logical conclusion, justifying street level violence to silence speech and assembly they believe retards the progress of “social justice,” seeing liberal values as right-wing tools, as well as leveraging the private corporate machinery to censor speech. Canceling, censoring, deplatforming, disrupting, doxing, labeling, mobbing, struggle sessions—the neo-Maoists (and that’s what they are) regard these interventions as politically necessary and ethically reasonable on the grounds that certain forms of speech are harmful and oppressive and, furthermore, that there is no right to racist and offensive speech.

Extending Marcuse’s argument, they flip the goals of “freeing language from the tyranny of the Orwellian syntax and logic [and] developing the concepts that comprehend reality” into Newspeak and postmodernist anti-epistemology themselves. This is why the woke left is so censorious, illiberal, and authoritarian. This is consequence of connecting power and knowledge in the realm of culture rather that organized class struggle and the generation of class consciousness, which the practices of identiarianism and progressive repression. This is the core flaw of Frankfurt School-style neo-Marxism. Moving the rhetoric from the means of production to the means of consumption (which Baudrillard later picks up) and the alleged pathology of Western civilization (the Culture Industry and the evils of the liberal bourgeois order) sets neo-Marxism up for its integration with postmodernism, postcolonialism, and thirdworldism. This is why the New Left and woke progressivism parallel Maoist cultural revolution. Listen to the arguments of his disciple Angela Davis.

Marcuse is hardly subtle when understood in the corpus of his thought, which incorporates not only elements of Freudian thought but also Heideggerian notions. In the essay, Marcuse argues for “liberating tolerance” from the liberal values of equality and neutrality, condemning “what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance” of a diversity of opinion as a framework “serving the cause of oppression.” He proposes a “discriminating tolerance,” which “would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movement which promote,” for example, “discriminating on the grounds of race and religion.” To be sure, we should not allow discrimination those grounds, but to stop speech and assembly? If this were the case, then we would have to withdraw tolerance for those seeking reparations for slavery, the bill now being dropped in Congress to study the matter. As much as this bill must be opposed and defeated, to censor those calling for it would be profoundly authoritarian.

We see Marcuse’s inspiration in practice today on college campuses where students organize to disrupt speakers and events. Marcuse argues for a dialectic that differentiates truth from falsehood (of course. we have that already, it’s enshrined in liberal, secular values of an open society, which Karl Marx himself defended), then suppresses the latter for the sake of emancipation from the administered, effectively totalitarian world of monopoly capitalism. To be sure, I share this goal, but this is an argument over means. And the means we are arguing for have promoted not liberation from oppression, but the socialization of the goals of woke leftists who desire an administered, effectively totalitarian world of monopoly capitalism.

The only tolerable tolerance for Marcuse is one that works towards liberation as Marcuse understands it, freedom from repression as he sees it, and that work should exclude or restrict repressive speech. He sees liberalism as tolerance “extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.” He is arguing that only “in a society where real equality has been achieved, can the freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.” 

“As long as these conditions do not prevail,” he writes, “the conditions of tolerance are ‘loaded’: they are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society.” His use of the word “compatible” parenthetically, in the corpus of his work, means that the liberal principles of equality before the law and equality of opportunity are used to further and legitimize capitalist exploitation. “In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their ‘connections’.” Here he is calling for violence ad suppression by those who stand outside the legal and privileged order of things. Why should state and corporate authority be the only powers that can repress people? They represent regressive repression. The left represents progressive repression. 

Take a look at what Marcuse himself said reflecting on his original essay (his 1968 postscript): “I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for ‘the other side’, I maintain that there are issues where either there is no ‘other side’ in any more than a formalistic sense, or where ‘the other side’ is demonstrably ‘regressive’ and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.” Then there is this more than suggestive line: “If the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail.”

He closes with: “Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination. For this struggle, I proposed the practice of discriminating tolerance. To be sure, this practice already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve. I committed this petitio principii in order to combat the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society. The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority—minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.” Antifa, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture. These are Marcuse’s children.