freedom and reason

The American citizen has to understand how significant the Joe Biden situation is. This is America against the enemies of freedom and reason. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he responded. 

Biden is corrupt to the bone. More than this, he is a Manchurian candidate, an agent of a globalist network integrating Big Finance, Silicone Vally and the Chinese Communist Party. Biden is not merely a national security risk (as if that weren’t bad enough); he is a quisling for the enemies of the American republic. What did George Washington say about foreign entanglements? Biden can’t be president.

But the crisis of democracy goes well beyond Joe Biden. The digital utilities provisionally operated by the tech oligarchs—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—are openly censoring organs of United States government, as well as suppressing the traditional media, whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Twitter locked out White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the New York Post story reporting on Hunter Biden’s hard drive. She is not the only one.

The New York Post was founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton, a founding father, way back in 1801. Hamilton, an advocate of a strong central government, is spinning in his grave right now. If you’re alive, your head should be spinning right now.

The founders would never has stood for corporations usurping government power. The individual, the press, the religious establishment—these have independence from the government, an independence protected by the Constitution, all fifty states incorporated. Corporations are not mentioned among the entities the First Amendment protects. The corporation is a creature of the government. This has been true for centuries. The corporation must be governed by the state for freedom to prevail. We cannot allow the state to be governed by the corporation.

I quote myself from May 11, 2020 on this blog:

“As [Richard] Grossman points out [in his talks ‘Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves’ and ‘Challenging Corporate Law and Lore’], not even the monarchs of feudalist and early capitalist period tolerated corporate power when it threaten sovereignty. Indeed, as Grossman tells us, corporations held power under absolutism, as well, but it was power delegated by the monarch. Corporations that exceeded their authority were called before the king to be reprimanded, the recalcitrant not dressed down but dismantled, their charters revoked. This is why Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the American Republic, said of banks and corporations that ‘the selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.’ His conclusion from the observation: ‘I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.’ The ‘aristocracy of moneyed corporations’ is an accurate description of power in the present-day state of affairs.” (We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears)

The republic is democratic. It is by law designed to defend personal liberty and freedom of association. Corporations are supplanting the republic. Representing the technocratic arm of corporate governance, progressives are okay with that. Corporations are private tyrannies. Democrats are the party of corporate tyranny. If corporations assume total power, then you will live in a totalitarian society. You may be able to buy spinning gadgets. But you will not be free.

Do you love your country? Do you value your freedom? These are questions Americans have to ask themselves right now. America is at a crossroads.

I realize the nation is consumed by the Amy Coney Barrett hearings before the United States Senate. But something much bigger is breaking. Much, much bigger. A smoking gun on the Biden crime family is now on the table. See War Room: Pandemic Episodes 437 and 438.

Here’s why you should pay attention to the things I tell you on my blog (which has now been accessed by thousands of people around the world). Let the record reflect the fact that in December of last year (“The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President”) I told you about the Biden crime family, how Don Biden bullied the Ukrainian government to drop an investigation into the energy company that employed his son, Hunter.

New York Post dropped a bombshell this morning: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” This is just a wedge of the massive pie of evidence against the Biden crime family.

Joe Biden is not small-time hoodlum. This is audacious. Joe from Scranton? No, Don Biden of the Biden crime family from Delaware. This is a criminal network that goes to the highest levels of the United States government and extends from Delaware to China. Biden says he knows nothing about what he family does. That’s what every mafia leader says. The media never follows up. That’s because they know. How does Obama not know about this?

President Trump was impeached for doing his job as president. He was attempting to expose the Biden crime family for the sake of our country. They tried to remove him from office to shut him up, to stop him from getting the bottom of this.

If the president knew about this, then you can’t tell me the FBI didn’t know this. What is FBI Director Wray up to? What master is he serving? Don’t forget, we know Clinton and the intelligence services of the deep state manufactured the Russian evidence against Trump. I tell you about that in that blog, as well. I’m not the only one who knew about this.

Please share this information with everybody you know. Read and share the New York Post story exposing Biden. Biden straight up lied during the last (and many only) debate and on many other occasions.

Biden just called a lid on today’s schedule. He’s heading back to his basement bunker.

* * *

Update (12:30 PM): CNBC headline: “Facebook makes editorial decision to limit distribution of story claiming to show ‘smoking gun’ emails related to Biden and his son.”

“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” tweeted Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020

Under Biden and the Democratic Party, this practice will become commonplace. Progressives will portray the de facto abrogation of the First Amendment as reasonable corporate governance. They already are. Biden is the chief state representative of corporatist philosophy. We are in the waning days of the American Republic.

Update: (8:00 PM):

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

—Article VI, Clause 3, The United States Constitution

Much of The Guardian article “‘It instilled such problems’: ex-member of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group speaks out” is a distraction. But one bit at the end gets at an issue that should be raised in the hearing now occurring before the American public, namely the liberal value of church-state separation. The United States is a liberal democratic republic. Right wingers and progressives have both confused the people about the character of liberalism. Liberals aren’t progressives. In many ways, liberals appear as conservatives today. I insist on progressives being honest about the authoritarian and technocratic character of their politics. And I appeal to conservatives to be open about their liberalism.

Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, points out that groups like People of Praise reject a secular view of separation between church and state. “I don’t think we should put her Catholicism on trial, but the Catholic conservative legal movement is putting liberalism on trial,” he said. “They want to change a certain understanding of the liberal order of individual rights, and that is coming from the religious worldview of Catholic groups.” (See my lengthy piece Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism for my views on the role of Catholicism in the Western and American history.)

I have been pointing this out for quite some time now. And I do worry about reproductive freedom. I have been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry for it. I won’t apologize for my criticism of Catholicism any more than I will apologize for my criticism of Islam, fascism, or any other “ism.” I have been called an Islamophobe on that score. I remain undeterred. Religion is an ideology, and all ideology are legitimately subjected to criticism and even ridicule. (Just look at the silliness that accompanied the appearance of a fly on the Vice-President’s head. Or white people prostrate on the ground before Black Lives Matter activists or washing the feet of its black members.) 

I don’t care what arrangement Barrett has with her husband. She can speak in tongues. She can lay on hands. It’s weird, but whatever. That’s religion. Religion is weird. What I care about is whether Barrett believes in the core liberal values upon which American is founded, and among these is individual freedom from the religious standpoint of other people. Freedom of conscience is fundamental to human rights and dignity. I have said this before: as much as I don’t like to accuse people of being anti-American, the one sure fire way to draw that accusation from me is to insist that separation of church and state is not a founding principle of the republic. There is no interpretation involved here. It is explicit in the body of the Constitution itself and in the First Amendment to that document. 

I am an atheist. But even if I were a Christian, if you attempt to make me live under any religious doctrine that is not an obvious restatement of secular one, I will resist. If you persist, I will rebel. I am very interested to know whether anybody who may take a seat in our judiciary at any level has a clear understanding of religious liberty. We cannot agree to disagree on this one. Freedom is at stake.

All that being said, there is a meme circulating that asks whether conservatives would treat the matter of Barrett’s nomination to the high court differently if she were a Muslim. Presumably, progressives would make all the same arguments conservatives are making in Barrett’s defense if a Muslim woman were nominated to the court. Any questioning of her Muslim faith would be met with accusations of Islamophobe, racism, and xenophobia. I would ask whether Christianity, an idea system rooted in Western culture and shaping its development fundamentally, is commensurable with an idea system rooted in Oriental culture sufficient to suggest such an analogy. I say this as a secularist with a healthy fear of religious systems generally while, at the same time, grasping the truth that history and culture are crucial to understanding the relative threat religious systems, again which are ideological systems, pose to our way of life.

Western civilization is both secular and Christian (secularism is, after all, part of the Christian doctrine). But a world governed by sharia cannot be a secular society. All life is put under doctrine in a society governed by sharia. Nuns choose to don the habit. Under sharia, women do not choose to wear the burqa, hijab, or niqab. Under sharia, there is no religious liberty. Non-Muslims are second class citizens. Muslims themselves tell us that Islam is the total solution, the answer to everything. However regressive some tendencies in Christianity may be, Islam is as ideologically close to fascism as any modern idea system gets. It is, indeed, a system of clerical fascism. 

There are many examples of the superiority of Christianity to Islam. Here is an outstanding one: For all its faults, Christian civilization inherited a world where slavery was normal and abolished it. There never was an indigenous abolitionist movement in Islam. Slavery in the Muslim world was only limited by the force of Christian civilization during the expansion of the European world economy.

Finally, returning to Barrett’s hearings, readers need to understand why Democrats are trying to derail the nomination process. Leading Democrats are trying to mislead the public by substituting the question of court packing with filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Democrats are projecting upon Republicans their own hypocrisy. For them, this is not just about keeping Barrett off the Court because of the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats mean to sink the 2020 election into chaos. The Democratic Party is a key player in a color revolution that involves the tactic lawfare. Democrats are already leveraging the judicial system to subvert the voting process. An evenly divided court makes a deadlock possible on matters that will surely come before the court. If they can’t win outright on election day, and if they can’t get every vote they produce certified, they will tie up the process until the election goes to the House where the House Speaker (and we know who this is) will conduct a special election. A potentially divided court could prove crucial for implementing this strategy.

Remember in the 1990s when the progressive left was in full meltdown over the violent actions of anti-government, anti-police right-wing types, that amalgamation of conservative and nationalist movements, far-right militias and survivalists? The name “Michigan Militia” was etched on the public mind. Remember how horrified progressives were to hear the police described as “jackbooted thugs” and their societal function characterized as oppressing the people on behalf of a privileged elite? It sounded crazy. All this talk of the New World Order and something about the “sovereign citizen.”

Imagine the horror if the Michigan Militia took over the streets of our cities, burned down buildings, looted stores, overturned police cars, assaulted black and brown people, physically attacked cops with bottles, clubs, sticks, and firearms, invaded and occupied neighborhoods, and marched through black communities demanding residents get out of their homes—the flags of white supremacy held aloft. Imagine how proud progressives would be to finally see an armed black couple defending themselves and their property against a white mob on the prowl for the black mayor of their beloved city. Imagine that the Michigan Militia received millions of dollars in financial support from corporate America.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are out in the streets engaged in anti-government, anti-police action, characterizing the police as “fascists,” “racists,” and “Nazis” whose function it is to oppress the people on behalf of a privileged elite. “All cops are bastards.” “Fuck the police.” Such anti-police rhetoric is commonplace in these circles. The things I just asked the reader to imagine the right-wing militia doing, Antifa and BLM are actually doing. They are armed, extremist, organized, and violent. Yet the progressive left, when it’s not encouraging the violence, rationalizes it as “chickens coming home to roost.” White people had it coming. “No justice no peace.” Corporations fund the rebellion.

The doublethink ramped up recently when the FBI thwarted an alleged plot (there is a criminal complaint supported by an affidavit by an FBI agent that has yet to be subjected to cross examination) to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI arrested thirteen men, seven of whom were members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group based (of course) in Michigan. In court documents, Michigan law enforcement authorities write that “the Wolverine Watchmen have called on members to identify law enforcement officers’ home addresses in order to target the officers, have made threats of violence to instigate a civil war leading to societal collapse, and have engaged in planning and training for an operation to attack the Capitol of Michigan, and kidnap Government officials including the Governor of Michigan.” Sound familiar? Antifa and Black Lives Matter dox law enforcement officers (leading police and other law enforcement personnel to hide their names on their uniforms). Antifa and BLM are explicitly rebelling to establish a new social order, one without the police. They plan and carry out attacks on city governments. 

The media are associating the alleged Whitmer kidnapping plot with the libertarian anarchist movement the Boogaloo. To learn about this movement, see “The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think,” at Bellingcat. Boogaloo joins Antifa and BLM on the streets for anti-police action. Yet the news media separates them out by claiming they are “fascists” and “white supremacists.” Is this true? No, it’s not.

The Boogaloo movement is neither fascist nor white supremacist. They are for the most part non-racist, libertarian anarchist. In fact, the Boogaloo, like the Proud Boys, has a multiracial membership. The anarchist flag behind Brandon Caserta featured in his anti-government rants is intentional. There are plenty of pictures of Boogaloo members standing alongside Antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors during anti-police protests. The Boogaloo folk do indeed have a gun fetish. Because the movement is open, there is no mechanism for policing membership; a few white supremacists and neo-Nazis have claimed to be fellow travelers, but there are few actually involved, and they appear to be unwelcome. Gun enthusiasm is a powerful attractor.

Why are the people who are supposed to be informing us about such matters writing about it but not bothering to research it? Or are the running interference? If you feel the need to look and see what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about it, be my guest. Just remember that the SPLC is the same organization that claimed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz were Islamophobes. However, I have an advantage. I am a criminologist whose hobby has been for decades keeping up with extremist groups. But it’s not like this information is hard to find. After all, J.J. MacNab, a fellow for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, recently testified before the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism Committee on Homeland Security, on July 16, 2020, and talked about Boogaloo. J.J. MacNab is one of the nation’s leading experts on sovereign citizens, tax protesters, U.S. paramilitary militia groups, and related anti-government extremist organizations. What does she say about them?

MacNab tells us that, among other things, “Guns are common denominator in most anti-government extremist groups. Racism is not. For that reason, you could find the Oath Keepers taking to the streets to protect police from Antifa while Boogaloo members join forces with Black Lives Matter against the police.” As for any fondness for Trump, she said, “The non-racist side of the Boogaloo proponents are the exception in that consider themselves Libertarian and therefore prefer Jo Jorgensen.” Who’s Jo Jorgensen? She is the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. Frankly, I would support Jorgensen myself, but I cannot get past her stance on immigration. It’s pretty much open borders. But isn’t that interesting? White nationalists supporting the open borders candidate. Yeah, that seems likely.

The Boogaloo (that’s the name for the civil war devotees wish to provoke) consider Trump a tyrant—just like the progressive left, Antifa, and BLM do. They see Whitmer as a tyrant, as well. Of course, corrupted by doublethink, the progressive left does not see Whitmer that way. The media is telling the public that Trump inspire the kidnapping plot against Whitmer. But this is untrue. Whitmer’s draconian lockdown is what motivated the protests and plot against her. As libertarian anarchists Boogaloo do not recognize the official government as legitimate, in their minds they were going to affect a citizen’s arrest and try the governor for what they believe were crimes against liberty. It’s a lot like how Antifa and Black Lives Matter pursue justice on the streets.

Do I need to emphasize that I oppose anti-police and anti-government movements? I do. That’s why I oppose Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I am a small “R” republican who believes we need a police apparatus to secure public safety in order to keep citizens safe from crime and violence in order to maintain a functioning democracy. That means I oppose the Boogaloos. I just can’t sit by and corporate propaganda proceed unencumbered by facts.

I am aware that shitposting taken literally can lead to very wrong conclusions about the ideology of a group. Just because libertarian anarchists truck in Nazi tropes doesn’t make them Nazis. They’re being silly. They’re fucking with people. It’s a form of trolling. Most libertarian anarchists are not plotting to hurt anybody. They are keyboard warriors sitting in their parents basement. Many of them are just kids. Too many “experts” of extremism don’t know about shitposting or other activities on the Internet. But they do know how to work the public into a hysteria.

If we find it abhorrent to even consider commandeering a man’s body to keep alive with his organs another man with failing ones, then we must find it abhorrent to commandeer a woman’s body to keep alive a fetus who depends on her organs to exist.

If we believe that the woman can be treated as a human incubator against her will, then we must also believe it is appropriate to hold a lottery to procure kidneys for those who need them. After all, one needs only one healthy kidney to live and most humans have two healthy ones. More than one hundred thousand Americans are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, and around twelve of them die every day because they cannot find a suitable donor.

Based on a right to privacy, which is assumed but not explicit in the Bill of Rights, leaves the reasoning behind Roe vulnerable. However, liberty is blatantly central to the foundation of the republic. (The late jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this point in criticizing Roe.) Personal sovereignty and individualism represent the essence of the American way of life, explicitly identified in our founding documents. It is, moreover, universally true if human rights is to mean anything objectively.

Roe should have been decided on the basis that forcing a man to sustain with his organs the life of another man is paradigmatically tyrannical, a negation of everything for which the American republic stands. Liberty is America’s raison d’être.

I agree with those who argue that because women have the unique burden to bear children equal treatment requires we recognize this unique burden. (Ginsburg made this point, as well.) But there is also a general principle that makes the feminist struggle to secure reproductive freedom at the same time the struggle of men to preserve their freedom. Men are not allies in this fight; they are in this fight side-by-side with women for themselves as humans.

The desire to control a woman’s reproductive capacity, whatever the ideology, represents a moral double standard. Advocates of restrictions would never willingly agree to a regime that commandeered men’s bodies to exploit their organs for the sake of exclusively preserving individual life. They would find this offensive to morality. But women? It is so easy for too many to disregard their sovereignty. A stealth misogyny lurks there, masquerading as empathy. It’s worst form of objectification; it denies the woman’s humanity.

To be sure, we agree to commandeer bodies to defend liberty in war. This is in itself a difficult moral dilemma. But that’s not a contradiction. On the contrary. The fact that most of us would agree to war in defense of liberty makes the aborted fetus a martyr for human rights. I offer that consolation to those who feel anguish over the aborted.

I have said this before, but I want to reiterate the fact that I am on the left. I have voted for Democratic party candidates and Green party candidates in the past. I have never voted for a Republican in my life. I oppose war and imperialism. I am an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist, an environmentalist, pro civil rights, and gay and lesbian rights all the way. I am a trained sociologist with a specialization in political economy. That makes me about as left as one can be. I say all that because I want readers to understand that what I am writing about this election and the choice we face is not because I am right wing or conservative. It’s because I am objective and refuse to be gaslit by corporate propaganda.

I am fifty-eight years old, and I have never seen the profound depth and intensity of bias in our academic, cultural, and mass media institutions than I have witnessed over the last four years. As the election approaches, the hysteria is reaching a fever pitch. The establishment is carrying one candidate—a corporatist, transnationalist, neoliberal, neoconservative career politician—across the finish line, while vilifying his opponent—a pro-American, democratic-republican, populist, nationalist, free-speech businessman and political novice—in the most over-the-top manner conceivable.

Joe Biden is not merely the most dismal candidate the Democratic Party has put forward in my lifetime, but he is quizzing of the first order, a sell-out to global corporate power and the Chinese Communist Party. The forces animating him—he is a puppet—seek to denationalize our republic while portraying tens of millions of working class Americans as backwards deplorables. Biden and his masters are working to transfer governance of our nation from our political institutions to the banking and corporate apparatus.

The globalists had effective control over the United States for 28 years (and I deeply regret supporting some of its operatives in electoral action). These elites mean to assume total control and crush popular nationalist resistance. They are so eager to get back in the driver seat that they’re waging open information and political warfare on the American population. They’re doing to the United States what they’ve been doing to Third World counties for decades (it’s called a color revolution). If they return to power, that’s what we’re destined to become: a Third World country.

Their cause is global neofeudalism. If Biden wins this election, prepare for serfdom under the new aristocracy of the transnational banking and corporate elite, where an indebted population will be delusioned by consumerism and identity politics. They won’t be free. But they will feel happy. “Their” country will appear diverse in everything but ideas. A cosmetic pretension to justice.

Enjoy your gadgets, clothes, and hair styles.

According to the BBC article, “Pence v Kaine: Who won the vice-presidential debate?” by North America reporter Anthony Zurcher, “It was a scattershot debate marred by frequent interruption, where moderator Elaine Quijado lost control of the discussion for stretches.”

Having your cake and eating it looks something like this: An ambitious woman of color, in debate with a white man, proves the place of accomplished and courageous women of color in the rough and tumble world of political argument when she takes charge of a conversation and interrupts her opponent. But when her opponent interrupts her, which white men do all the time in argument with other white men (as occurred in the Vice-Presidential debate held on October 5, 2016 between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine), the ambitious woman of color can accuse her opponent of “mansplaining” and “microaggressing,” of which he is guilty by virtue of his sex and race.

This is the beauty of identity politics. It is a clever strategy. The woman of color delegitimizes her ideological opponent while scoring unearned debate points via the extra-rational means of ad hominem and red herring, cleverly avoiding answering questions or saying much of anything of substance and asserting superior moral virtue. After the debate, her side, which largely controls the narrative and the major institutions, can distract the public from all her lying and misdirection on critical policy questions by howling about sexism and racism—by portraying her as the victim of white male aggression. Her hefty record as the Attorney General of California and United States Senator notwithstanding. If critics describe her approach and attitude as “abrasive,” “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “smug,” the woke crowd can accuse them of sexism and racism for that, too.

She and her allies can do all this with absolutely no evidence of either sexism and racism and in the face of clear evidence that her opponent would do the same thing if she were a white male (again, as Pence did to Kaine). She and her allies can do this even though her appearance on the national stage—along with many other women of color—is confirmation that sexism and racism are, for the most part, no longer barriers to an ambitious woman’s rise to political power. For they find advantage in a quiver of magical arrows that only individuals lying at the intersection of her identities may wield. There is a caveat: the women of color must hold the correct opinions. We all know that, in the progressive universe, conservative women of color are only one of those things really.

Interesting how we find ourselves four years and a few days later in a similar situation: “For the last week, it’s felt a bit like Donald Trump was routed. His woeful first presidential debate performance was compounded by a series of unforced errors, capped by an early morning Twitter tirade and a damaging New York Times story about his near billion-dollar business losses in 1995. His poll numbers headed south. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s [Pence] primary job—really his only job—was to stop the bleeding and give the [Trump] campaign an opportunity to regroup. Mr Kaine’s goal was to keep him [Pence] from doing that. Mr Pence succeeded. Mr Kaine, while unloading a crate of opposition research on Mr Trump, failed.”

But it is not exactly the same situation, is it? Tim Kaine is a white man. Too bad for him that he couldn’t charge Pence with mansplaining and microaggressing after his poor debate outing.

In invited commentary on infectious diseases in JAMA Network Open, published September 25, 2020, Rohan Khananchi, Charlesnika Evans, and Jasmine Marcelin make several claims about systemic racism’s role in an infectious disease in “Racism, Not Race, Drives Inequality Across the COVID-19 Continuum.” I do not find the article compelling. However it is illustrative of the problems with this type of research.

Demographic disparities are not automatically indicators of racism. If one argues that racism drives demographic differences, then one cannot at the same time a priori define demographic differences as racism. That move conflates the dependent variable (difference/inequality) with the theorized independent variable (racism). The argument becomes circular/self-confirmatory/self-sealing. The argument commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating abstractions in a concrete way, as well as the ecological fallacy (I explain below). That the paper sneaks a claim of lack of fairness or justice into the situation by using the term “inequity” gives away the political agenda. The assumptions made in this article are unscientific.

If the paper were to proceed on a rational basis, it would define racism in a way that allowed for its evaluation as a causal factor (conceptualize/operationalize). The claim that race explains differences in human populations and/or laws/policies based on purported racial differences defines racism. What is the evidence that any human beings supposed in the literature were motivated by racist beliefs? Where are the laws and policies based on this belief? If there were laws/policies in place that segregated medical care on the basis of race, or forced blacks to live in impoverished communities, then institutional/systemic racism might play a contributing role in the demographic inequalities identified. But these systems were dismantled more than fifty years ago in America. Today it is illegal to discriminate against blacks on the basis of race.

The article states that “fundamental causes of COVID-19 inequity include systemically racist policies, such as historic racial segregation and their inextricable downstream effects on the differential quality and distribution of housing, transportation, economic opportunity, education, food, air quality, health care, and beyond.” To be sure, historic racial segregation was based on systematically racist policies. But the operative word here is “historic.” Past policies are not present policies. And while history is not irrelevant to understandings of the present, history is also not the present. Keep in mind that “inextricable” means impossible to disentangle. The pairing of “inextricable” with “downstream effects” is obscurantism. The authors assume as given a foundation that they must demonstrate. This is strange alchemy. An exercise in mystification.

The article continues, “Each of these factors is associated with the risk of COVID-19 exposure and severity through direct (e.g., work conditions, crowded housing, carceral overrepresentation) and indirect (e.g., limited access to health information or insurance; increased prevalence of comorbidities; cumulative life-course exposure to discrimination, low socioeconomic status, and other health risk conditions) mechanisms.” However, since the racial and ethnic differences are not about race, according to the article, but about racism, then one would expect to find white people living in these conditions do not suffer the same fate. But the article commits the ecological fallacy by substituting for the situations of concrete individuals aggregate demographic differences.

Controlling for cultural factors (but perhaps not all, since we can draw too fine a distinction between racial groups in this regard), is it true that whites living under near-identical conditions are differentiated from blacks vis-à-vis COVID-19? Do we suppose that “low socioeconomic status” whites living in conditions of crowded housing, with limited access of health information or insurance and increased prevalence of comorbidities, etc., have better outcomes than blacks living in these conditions? (If so, that might suggests actual racial differences). What is the measure of “life-course exposure to discrimination”? Again, that’s an awfully big assumption.

These types of studies are part of a general approach in academic work that operates from an epistemological frame (critical race theory) that manufactures an ontology built upon arbitrary abstractions. At the core of this is the problem of reification in science. Such work proceeds on assumptions that are far too sure of themselves. There is nothing in this article that presents racism as conceptualized and operationalized as either belief in genetic differences in human populations and/or laws and policies based on such purported differences. The structural problems identified are class-based and explicable in terms of the processes of capitalist accumulation. The term “socioeconomic status,” which eschews class analysis, should alert readers to the probable race-centric bias of the research frame. There may be cultural/ethnic differences, as well (for example diet and obesity), but these are unexplored in the study.

There is a twin tragedy with this approach that works to perpetuate capitalist class oppression. First, by obsessing over race, social class as a casual factor is relegated to the outskirts of social consciousness. The real dynamic working behind the scenes to produce differential health outcomes is thus mystified. Second, by obscuring class effects with the rhetoric of systemic racism, poor white people are disappeared. The situation is made to appear as if black people are the primary victims of social oppression, moreover victimized by a system privileging white people. In this way, the woes of the working class are denied and those who exploit and live off their labor, who are both black and white, are absolved of their responsibility in disparate health and other outcomes. Critical race theory works to disrupt class consciousness and entrench the capitalist mode of production.

Yesterday I published an essay (Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism) on the comparable threats of violent extremism to the American republic, comparing two extremist groups who were subjects of the first presidential debate. Watching the establishment media’s take on the debate, I can now affirm what I have been telling people all along—the media positively sanctions left-wing chaos and violence by either denying or justifying it. The purpose of this is to return corporatist forces to power to continue the globalist project. Antifa is an element in a color revolution currently unfolding in the United States. I describe this in a recent essay: Authoritarianism, Supreme Court Hysteria, and the Corrupting Partisan Frame.

The Democratic Party and the corporate media push the narrative that, despite the facts of left-wing violence raging in the streets of America and the establishment by progressives of legal and propaganda apparatuses to dispute the 2020 presidential election, against the backdrop of a perpetual coup against the president (deep state spying, manufactured Russian collusion, an attempt to remove the president via impeachment), the public is supposed to believe that it’s the president who is shaking our faith in our democracy. One angle is to hang around Trump’s neck the albatross of far-right politics and white nationalist sentiment. To install this assumption in the public mind, they fail to demand of Democrats condemn left-wing violence while insisting that Trump condemns right-wing violence—as if the president, unlike Democrats, is using right-wing violence to disrupt the election. In other words, by flipping reality, they hide Biden’s failure to condemn Antifa by misleading the public with a false claim about Trump’s statements on the matter. The maneuver is an obvious attempt to gaslight the public. But because this is not obvious to everybody, it is usefully explained.

Roughly thirty minutes into the first presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Biden said, “Close your eyes, remember what those people look like coming out of the fields, carrying torches, their veins bulging, just spewing anti-Semitic bile and accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. A young woman got killed and they asked the president what he thought. He said, ‘There were very fine people on both sides.’ No president’s ever said anything like that.” Biden is referring to comments Trump made following the Unite the Right rally, held August 11-12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was organized around the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Lee Park. The protestors were met by counter-protestors and the event devolved into chaos and violence. Tragically, a young woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car through a crowd. Field’s action wounded numerous others, some critically. In a bipartisan action taken in September 2017, Congress unanimously approved a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups in the tragedy’s aftermath. Donald Trump signed the resolution.

All along Trump condemned bigotry, hatred, and violence on all sides. But pulled from his many comments on the subject was the opinion that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The media and left-wing groups accused Trump of implying a moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who opposed them. For instance, Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, writing for The New York Times, suggested Trump was “equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville.” The journalists then cited right-wing figures thanking Trump for clarifying the situation before wrapping Trump’s remark in the on-going narrative of Republican politicians making “muscular appeals to white voters, especially those in the South on broad cultural groups” going all the way back to the 1960s. However, while Reagan and Bush condemned white supremacy, the journalists contended, Trump wouldn’t. So racism in the Republican Party moves from dog whistle to bull horn. Biden thus felt emboldened to openly call Trump a racist in the debate.

Yet Trump accurately conveyed the facts on the ground in that notorious press conference. There were, among the right-wing contingent, those who were peacefully protesting the proposed removal of the statues, just as there were those among the counter-protesters who were engaged in violent action. I have many friends—and not just southerners—who oppose the taking down of statues. I am happy to vouch for them. They are very fine people. To be sure, there were white supremacists among the right-wing crowd. But there were also present members of Antifa, as well the armed militia group Redneck Revolt. Just as we see in America’s streets today, there were armed left-wing forces in Charlottesville. By armed, I do not mean just body armor, clubs, helmets, noxious agents, shields, and sticks (as if these aren’t bad enough), but semiautomatic firearms, as well. Many of the left-wingers were also armed with a violent ideology. It is an article of the Antifa faith that anybody it designates as fascist—which in their view cuts a broad swath across the political spectrum—has no right to speech and assembly, while Antifa reserves for itself the right to violently disrupt rightwing and conservative gatherings in the name of “defending the community” (see The Problem with Antifascism). If Antifa, Redneck Revolt, and other left-wing extremists had not showed up at Charlottesville, or had not violently confronted right-wing protestors, would the protests have devolved into chaos and violence? Is it not the goal of anti-fascists to violently confront those whom they designate as a threat to the community?

On August 14, 2017, the president announced that the Justice Department had opened a civil rights investigation into Charlottesville. “I just met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the deadly car attack that killed one innocent American and wounded twenty others. To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable. Justice will be delivered.” The president described Heyer’s death and the wounding of several others as an “attack,” a characterization pushed back against the suggestion that this was in some fashion an accident. Trump characterized the violence as “racist” and promised to hold the perpetrators responsible. This framed the events in Charlottesville as an outcome of white nationalism. Moreover, it clarified that white nationalism is racist. The president urged the country to unite in condemning “hatred, bigotry, and violence.” He called racism “evil” and described those who carry out violence in its name “criminals and thugs.” He then called out hate groups by name: the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists.” He described them as “repugnant” and, in so many words, accused them of being disloyal to their country. He emphasized the importance of equality in our national creed, equality under the law and under our Constitution, while emphasizing the importance of the rule of law and the vital government function of ensuring a safe environment so that people can fulfill their destiny.

I quoted at length from Trump’s statement in my last blog so I won’t repeat those passages here. It is worth noting that, in that statement, Trump also said, “In times such as these America has always shown its true character, responding to hate with love, division with unity and violence with an unwavering resolve for justice. As a candidate, I promised to restore law and order to our country, and our federal law enforcement agencies are following through on that pledge. We will spare no resource in fighting so that every American child can grow up free from violence and fear. We will defend and protect the sacred rights of all Americans, and we will work together so that every citizen in this blessed land is free to follow their dreams in their hearts and to express the love and joy in their souls.”

It’s as if the president never said any of this, as if he never signed an unanimously approved resolution from Congress condemning white supremacy and racist violence. It doesn’t help the cause of enlisting the federal government in pursuit of justice to demand Trump say the right thing and then, when he does, cynically dismiss his words—then later disappear them. It’s especially crucial that his supporters hear these words and consider deeply where they stand with respect to white nationalism and racist violence. Not only is the media delegitimizing a president for political purposes, but they are working at cross-purposes with the anti-racist message they purport to proclaim. Yet the failure of the establishment to tell Trump’s alleged racist supporters that their president condemned their racist beliefs and actions did not result in rampant racist violence on the streets of America. Instead, it appears to have contributed to rampant anti-racist violence on the streets of America by making the president appear to support white nationalism.

A transcript of the press conference to which Biden was referring how antagonistic the press is to Trump and the way they have used his comments to portray him as a white nationalist. I close with some of the transcript of the spectacle and leave readers with the question: will Joe Biden and the Democrats condemn antifascist violence?

REPORTER: Do you think what you call the alt left is the same as neo-Nazis?

TRUMP: Those people—all of those people, excuse me—I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.

REPORTER: Well, white nationalists—

TRUMP: Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So—excuse me—and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

[In light of what transpired over the summer, Trump’s words are prophetic here.]

TRUMP: But, they were there to protest—excuse me—you take a look the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

REPORTER: Does the statue of Robert E. Lee stay up?

TRUMP: I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.

REPORTER: Are you against the Confederacy?

REPORTER: On race relations in America, do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office with regard to race relationships?

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So, you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame—yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So, will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats—you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.

REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?

TRUMP: No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So, I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country. 

At the outset, I want to make clear that I condemn right-wing violence and have done so throughout my life. As a criminologist and political sociologist, I am quite familiar with right-wing extremism. I know how destructive it can be. I have shelves in my library and space on my computer devoted to books and reports on the topic. My goal here is not to downplay right-wing extremism, but to give my readers some perspective on the relative domestic threats facing the American republic. I focus in this essay on Antifa and the Proud Boys since their names were dropped in last night’s presidential debate (the first of three scheduled). Trump turned some heads when he said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” What he meant is not exactly clear. However, the Proud Boys took it as an endorsement. So did progressives and the media. “The president has denounced white supremacists repeatedly,” Peter Navarro countered in an interview on MSNBC. “You guys just aren’t hearing that.”

Moderator Chris Wallace took sides last night during the debate. At many points he seemed to be a debate participant himself rather than a moderator. And he was almost always directing himself as Trump’s second debate opponent. He asked the president, “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.” Surely Wallace knows that Trump has on more than one occasion condemned white supremacy, calling out racist organizations by name, including the Ku Klux Klan and neonazis. Yet Wallace’s question to Trump assumed the president hasn’t.

In 2017, Trump said of his administration that “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.” He continued: “And as I have said many times before: No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God. We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.” He then condemned racism in the strongest possible terms and identified racist groups. “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” He reiterated the American creed: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.” Has Trump changed his views since 2017? Just this month, in introducing his plan to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into black communities, Trump proposed to prosecute the KKK. And last night he answered Wallace in the debate with, “Sure, I’m willing to do that.” He said, “I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.”

However, more startling than Wallace’s question was Biden claiming that FBI director Christopher Wray said Antifa is only “an idea.” Did Wray actually say that? No, he didn’t. “Antifa is a real thing,” Wray is on the record saying. “It is not a fiction.” He had to say this because progressives and the media keep insisting that leftwing extremism is a fiction. What is Antifa, then? “It’s a movement or an ideology,” according to Wray. Wray told Congress that the FBI has documented Antifa engaging in “organized tactical activity” at the local and regional level. “We don’t view how nationally organized something is as a proxy for how dangerous it is.” Wray has also said that the FBI is investigating Antifa’s “funding, their tactics, their logistics, their supply chains and we’re going to pursue all available charges.” “Organized tactical activity” and “supply chains” sound like a lot more than just “an idea.” So either Biden is misinformed or he is downplaying Antifa.

The Democrats and the media, which portray Antifa and Black Lives Matter as peaceful movements in the civil rights tradition, want the public to focus on the Proud Boys, a much smaller group than Antifa. To be sure, the Proud Boys are an obnoxious bunch. They are occasionally violent. I will condemn their violent actions without hesitation and so should Trump. But Biden downplaying Antifa, a violent extremist movement that has made a mess of American cities, is the buried lede coming out of the debate. The real threat to public safety today is not the Proud Boys. It’s Antifa. Antifa is destroying property and assaulting civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Proud Boys are small fry in comparison. This does not mean that law enforcement should ignore them. The more important question is why Democrats, progressives, and the establishment media put so much energy into denying the problem of left-wing extremism and violence. We must allow the Proud Boy’s antics to distract the public from the reality of what it happening in our country.

Part of the way the left confuses the public is by playing loosely with the term “militia,” reserving the term exclusively for the right. What is a militia? When we refer to a militia in terms of insurgent civilian movements, we mean an irregular paramilitary force engaged in insurrection, rebellion, and/or terrorist activities. This describes Antifa as much as it describes the several rightwing militias that we see around the country. Why the failure to accurately describe Antifa in the media? Why the double standard from the Democrats and the corporate media? Because, as I have shown in my blogs, Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the street-level forces of the corporate-led suppression of populism in America.

The Proud Boys have a paramilitary wing: the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, or FOAK. FOAK’s leader is Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman. At the same time, the Proud Boys in no way represent a mass movement on the right like we saw historically with the second KKK (formed in the same year as The Birth of Nation was released (1915), a movie screened in progressive Democratic president Woodrow Wilson’s White House). Indeed, organized white supremacy has been a vanishing problem for decades, exaggerated by alarmist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-defamation League to keep their audiences on edge. These groups publish reports about the proliferation of Proud Boy chapters in various counties, but they never report on the corporate-funded Black Lives Matter chapters proliferating across the West. Yet even these organizations are reluctant to identify the Proud Boys as white supremacist, describing them instead as “misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigration,” to quote the ADL Maybe that’s because the Proud Boys, who describe themselves as Western chauvinists, have black and brown members.

In considering domestic threats, one should look at the character of actual violence in society. Who is doing what? What is the scope of their actions? I have already documented widespread arson, looting, and interpersonal violence perpetrated by left-wing extremists. We should also consider in our assessment violence against law enforcement. In the context of his testimony regarding extremism, Wray has noted that that rate of violence against law enforcement “is up significantly this year from last year.” More police officers were killed in felonious acts so far this year than all unarmed civilians (black or white) killed in 2019. Are the perpetrators of these murders white supremacists? Not that I can tell.

I have to say, folks have been punked a bit with this Proud Boys distraction. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t bring up Gavin McInnes’ men club. Biden brought them up because he knows jack about white supremacist groups (which the Proud Boys aren’t). Except the Klan. Biden knows about the Klan because Robert Byrd, formerly Exalted Cyclops and then the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, was a dear friend of his (and the Clintons, as well). Trump either didn’t know who the Proud Boys were or knew that they’re a joke orchestrated by comedian Gavin McInnes. The media knows this, too. They are gaslighting the public who they know doesn’t know the ins and outs of right-wing extremism.

The much bigger issue here is why Biden and Harris not merely fail to condemn Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but why they promote their actions. Black Lives Matter is a racialist organization. By definition. How is that not completely obvious? The approach of Black Lives Matter is to reduce individuals to demographic categories and treat them on that basis. This is what critical race theory is all about: seeing race before people and making policy decisions based on grouped disparities. It is a cracked academic theory taken to the streets, where it burns buildings and cars, loots stores, and assaults civilians and law enforcement personnel. The Democrats find all this chaos useful.

I am sure readers are familiar with the claim that antifa simply means antifascism. First, this is insulting to the people who took on actual fascism. Fascism of the sort Antifa says it’s fighting is not an actual threat. So Antifa defines anybody who is on the right or conservative as a “fascist” and “white supremacist.” They’re like the witchfynders during the Inquisition. Hitler and fascists are the secular versions of Satan and his demons. Only the first were real and they are no longer with us. But since the modern left is not particularly religious, they can’t name check Satan, so they name check the Proud Boys. Second, Antifa is a highly organized anarchist-communist terroristic countermovement against republican government and liberal values. It is itself fascistic. It is authoritarian and sadistic. Just as antiracists are racists because they organize their politics not around individual freedom and democracy but racialist thinking and action, Antifa is fascistic because it uses the same street-level tactics that the Blackshirts and Brownshirts used during the European fascist period. Moreover, it is in the service of corporatists powers who share its goal of quashing the populist rising to neoliberal and technocratic oppression.

The Anti-Defamation League can’t say for sure, but, as is its habit, CNN can muddy the waters. Case in point: Enrique Tarrio, a member of the Proud Boys, is the leader of the Latinos for Trump movement. Tarrio is Cuban American. He is one of the many non-white members of the group. CNN and Democrats are freaking out because Trump is popular among Latinos. There are a lot of Cuban Americans in Florida. The Democrats must win Florida. That’s why Michael Bloomberg offered to personally pay off criminal fines so people could vote—a practice otherwise known as bribery. 

For some reason the position of Tarrio’s Latinos for Trump that “all guns laws are unconstitutional” has some bearing on the matter, as if opposition to gun restrictions was a white nationalist issue. (CNN should talk to all the black people buying guns and forming militias and see what they think about that.) CNN is also perplexed because, while Tarrio is brown and Proud Boys claims a diverse membership, its central tenets of closed borders and Western chauvinism seems to indicate something else. What exactly strict immigration controls and Western chauvinism has to do with anti-diversity is unclear. We do know that open borders are harmful to the economic interests of black and brown people. But somehow that isn’t anti-working class. The United States is and has been a very diverse country for a very long time, with people of all races and ethnicities distributed throughout the social structure. The same is true for the West generally. To confuse the public over matters of diversity, CNN conflates mass immigration with racial and ethnic diversity. 

Perhaps the most interesting piece of all this it was Biden not Trump who has made the Proud Boys a household name.