We should be terrified for our republic. We are seeing a color revolution unfolding before our very eyes. This time in the premier First World country. The strategy corporate elite fractions use in the Third World to construct governments conducive to their interests is being deployed in America thanks to neoconservatives, progressives, and the Democratic Party. With the debunking of the Russia hoax and the failed attempt by Democrats to remove Trump with impeachment (the Ukraine-Biden affair), the establishment has initiated a new and multi-pronged phase in the permanent coup against the President.
A color revolution is a type of coup in which powerful groups in opposition to a sitting government portray its leaders as authoritarian, corrupt, or otherwise illegitimate, organize mass protests in the streets, develop avenues for election fraud, use intimidation tactics during the electoral process, and dispute election results. The opposition in the current situation has in back of it the massive power of key capitalist forces—the Tech Giants and other corporations comprising the transnational capitalist fraction. The color revolution represents a revolution-from-above being waged by a power elite that represents global neoliberal forces. Those behind what Sheldon Wolin, in his landmark Democracy, Inc., called “inverted totalitarianism,” thwarted by the populist revolt that brought Trump to power, is fighting back with a vengeance.
Democratic operatives are pushing a narrative Bloomberg-funded Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn calls the “red mirage” that contends that, if Trump wins on election night (and 2016 told them that is possible outcome), he did not actually win. “We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Mendelsohn said. According to Hawkfish’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night. “When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said in published reports. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”
To confront this, there is a strategy already in place that one may characterize as “lawfare,” a type of warfare waged by leveraging the courts to dispute the votes cast for the undesirable candidate and find and count votes for the desirable one. To buy time in order to identify ballots for Biden, which we now know are being aggressively harvested via cash and intimidation, and work the courts after election night (Democratic lawyers are working the courts as I write this), the establishment and social media will hold off calling the election, even censoring voices that do. If they can’t find enough votes for Biden, or intimidate electors into switching sides, they will push the process into the House of Representation, where Nancy Pelosi as presiding officer will organize a contingent election in which states will vote for president. Democrats are in a frenzy over Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett because they know that the election chaos will wind up in that body. They want to keep the court at eight members and try to deadlock it.
Organizing the elite operations of the coup is a group called the Transition Integrity Project, or TIP, which presents itself as bipartisan, but is virulently anti-Trump. It is comprised of academics, current and past government officials, journalists, and pollsters in 2019. Members include Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, former chair of the DNC Donna Brazile, former chair of the RNC Michael Steele, and journalists Max Boot (Jean Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations), David Frum (Senior Editor at The Atlantic), and William Kristol (founder of The Weekly Standard), among others.
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The Biden campaign paints the candidate as “Joe from Scranton,” but before serving as Vice-President from 2009 to 2017, Biden was the Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009. Delaware is a unique state with its Delaware Court of Chancery. The Delaware General Corporation Law is the statute governing corporate law in the state. Due to the favorable legal environment, more than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States and more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state. Delaware has for decades been known at the premier corporate haven in America. From this perch, Biden has helped corporatists advance their globalist strategies. Perhaps no politicians has done more to hurt working families in America than Joe from Scranton.
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Some are wondering what Trump is talking about when he is asking for Biden to be drug tested before the debates. There are several drugs that can improve the cognitive performance of dementia patients. Cholinesterase inhibitors increase the amount of acetylcholine available to neurons. There are three drugs available that work along these lines: donepezil (Aricept), galantamine (Razadyne), and rivastigmine (Exelon). Memantine (Namenda) regulates the activity of glutamate. It helps learning and memory. Side effects include agitation, balance problems, and confusion (which is in evident with Biden). There’s a cocktail that combines donepezil and memantine (Namzaric).
These drugs are effective for mild to moderate dementia. They could get Biden through a debate with the media spinning the results and controlling the selection of soundbites. But drugs won’t keep him going for long. His dementia looks to be pretty far along. A lot of folks are in denial, but it’s obvious. He only does a couple of hours a day of campaigning when he can muster it. Most of his press conferences are fake. As the disease progresses the brain produces a vanishing amount of acetylcholine and the cholinesterase inhibitors will stop working. And most drug produce tolerances. Even with Namzaric, Biden’s dementia will sooner than later leave him disabled. The man is not fit to run for President. Perhaps that will become clearer tonight during the first presidential debate.
Those who fret over Trump not relinquishing power appear to be unaware of the plots to remove him from power (see The National Pulse for coverage)—not to mention dismissive of the strength of the republic to withstand the obstinance of a single man and his followers. I frankly don’t understand how anybody can be ignorant of either. I don’t think they are. Trump may not go quietly (is he ever quiet about anything?). But Trump will go. Maybe not this January. But the January four years from then.
I am fascinated but not surprised by how progressives feign unawareness that Democrats are blatant in their unwillingness to accept the 2020 election result if it doesn’t go their way. For those progressives who really are unaware, here’s Hillary Clinton on whether Joe Biden should concede the election if the Electoral College indicates his defeat.
Remember what Clinton said during the third presidential debate of 2016? Is she now running down our democracy and appalled at the words coming out of her mouth? Do we really believe she cares about the republic?
The threat to the American republic is not Donald Trump. It never has been. The threat to the republic is an establishment beholden to corporate power that is daily turning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into dead letters. That threat is operationally embodied by the neoliberals and neoconservatives who command the Democratic Party. Their hyperbolic rhetoric over Trump betrays concern for the future of their project. It’s not Trump per se that gets them worked up (if is it, then they are exceedingly childish to fall prey to such trolling). It’s populist nationalism that terrifies them. It’s the potential reconstruction of the American ideal that keeps them frenzied.
I am a democratic-republican, but I do not operate in the Democratic-Republican frame. I belong to no church or party. My arguments are never partisan in this way. My choice of comrades are working class and creative entrepreneurial-minded Americans—the people who produce value in human affairs. My commitments are humanist, liberal, nationalist, populist, and secular (mind those small letters). I am a patriotic citizen of the United States and committed to the America ideal, which is very much on the ropes. I don’t worry about Trump. I worry about what happens when the establishment returns to full strength. I don’t know how long the republic can survive that.
I recently explained this in a popular post on Facebook. I wasn’t posting for likes. I was trying to help people understand my arguments, which they appear to have great difficulty doing. That’s because they operate in the Democrat-Republican partisan frame. There’s an election coming up and experience has taught me to prepare people for my arguments, to remind them of my approach to such matters, to try and save them from the freak-out. It’s obvious that they want to understand me as one thing or another. If I am not a Democrat, then I must be a Republican. The dumbest question I ever get goes something like this: “You’re not voting for Obama? So you’re voting for Romney?”
It often seems a futile exercise, I will confess. When people say to me, “Trump is your boy,” or to others, “Andy’s become a Republican,” they are telegraphing the message that they don’t get me. They suggest they don’t care to. That’s okay. I have people who care to get me. More importantly, they show me they cannot think outside of the frame they have been given. This disappoints me because I expect better of them. I care. Of course, they expect things of me, as well. But my politics are obvious in everything I say: I do not subscribe to the “big man” theory of history (Trump is a result not an oracle); I cannot switch parties I have never belonged to; I cannot leave a church of which I have never been a congregant; I cannot leave a faith I have never subscribed to; I don’t use words deceitfully; I strive never to use terms ignorantly or stupidly (if I screw up I admit it); I loathe ideology; I have made my choice of comrades; I am not a contrarian; I have a center of gravity; I don’t imbibe in moral panic.
The partisan frame has made its appearance in spades with the decision of Republicans to go ahead with the confirmation of Donald Trump’s pending supreme court pick in the wake of the death of liberal jurist and feminist hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg from a long battle with pancreatic cancer. That her death was approaching could be understood by anyone who understand the challenge this type of cancer presents. So could the consequences of her reluctance to not step down from the Court during the Obama presidency. Immediately upon her death, Democrats preemptively charged hypocrisy—while immediately accusing Republicans of not allowing Ginsburg to rest in any peace—over Mitch McConnell’s certain decision to proceed with a constitutional-prescribed process. They pretended as if what McConnell did as majority leader of the Senate when Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland came to that body—McConnell did not move the nomination forward—gives the minority party justification for upending the principles of a republican form of government. As if McConnell is their leader. No political party legitimately owns the American republic. McConnell’s maneuvering as leader in accord with his constitutional authority doesn’t obligate any sympathy for the fanaticism of Chuck Schumer and his ilk. Sorry, not sorry, I cannot even appreciate that point of view. The ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg carries no hereditary status beyond her imagined community. Dead justices don’t reserve seats on the Supreme Court. Those seats belong to the people.
Asked in 2016 if the Senate had an obligation to assess Garland’s qualifications, Ginsburg’s answer was very clear: “That’s their job. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” Ginsburg was a consistent and principled jurist. She put the Constitution before politics. As I have said elsewhere, I will have to hear a recording of her contradicting herself before I will believe she was a hypocrite. Ginsburg’s legacy aside, if the roles were reversed, Democrats would fill that seat in a heartbeat—or the party wouldn’t be worth supporting. Does anybody seriously believe Scalia’s dying request would or should be revered? Elections have consequences and Trump was elected in part, if the opportunity arose, to replace one or more Supreme Court justices. And a Republican majority in the Senate would be expected to do the same. The president is president all four years (if the other party fails to removed him from office or he dies or is assassinated or otherwise leaves). The president has the power under the Constitution to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The majority party in the Senate has the authority to bring that nominee before its body in its capacity to advise and consent. That’s what matters. That and this: the Supreme Court needs an odd number to break ties. We can anticipate some tie-breakers coming down the pike before Trump’s term is up.
The fact is that Democrats don’t want another conservative on the Court and they seem too sure of the outcome of the 2020 election. Especially if they can deadlock the Court. They believe, because they have said so, that another conservative on the court is the end of everything good in the world. Don’t progressives tell us to hold our noses and “vote Blue no matter who” at the very least for the sake of the Court? Of course, “Blue no matter who” is more than a strategy. It’s a religious attitude.
There’s the problem with partisan thinking organized around political party: it leaves the subject without the critical independence needed to evaluate objectively the facts before him. He becomes an object, a pawn, not an agent. If one operates with a clear set of interests and from principle, and a party that he has supported betrays those interests or abandons principal, or if it becomes apparent that the party has not operated with those interests in mind or from principle, or that it cannot operate with those interests in mind or from principle, and the partisan follows that party where it takes him, then he abandons interests and principal, sacrificing his agency and autonomy to interests and principle that are not his own. In so doing, he betrays himself and his comrades. In that scenario, the function of the party is as shepherd leading sheep to an undesirable end. The party whose agenda does not align with the interests of a class or classes of people is not for the sovereign person and his comrades a mechanism with which to realize interest and principal in action. Following the crowd often finds a person surrendering to his enemies, doing very bad things in the name of solidarity, or walking over the edge of a cliff.
The partisan frame in the United States corrupts everything. Even science. Matthew MacWilliams, a visiting research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and alleged expert on authoritarianism, illustrates this in an article published yesterday in Politico, “Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of American,” in which he leverages alleged scientific research on authoritarianism to declare millions of Americans essentially fascists. The author’s claim to fame, according to his publisher (St. Martin’s Griffin) is that MacWilliams “was the first researcher to use survey research to establish a link between Trump’s core supporters and authoritarianism.” The blurb continues: “Early in the Republican nominating contest for president, he warned that Trump’s activation of American authoritarians would make his candidacy virtually unstoppable.” MacWilliams conceptual framework, one with pretensions to social psychology, appears to be inspired Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
MacWilliams writes in his Politico article that authoritarians “are more likely to . . . agree that the media is the enemy of the people rather than a valuable independent institution.” In what sense is the media independent? The media is a projection of corporate power. Its product is quite often propaganda in the service of this power. As the purveyor of the corporate life-way, the media represent the class enemy of the proletariat. The institution is elitist in character and its operatives routinely dismissive of the intellect and values of the ordinary citizens. MacWilliams, whose scholarly training is left in a publisher’s blurb at “award-winning practitioner of American politics” and “recognized expert” is insulting to those Americans Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.” Joe Biden calls them “bad people.” MacWilliams cannot simply allow Trump to stand in place of the people he loathes.
These authoritarians, MacWilliams writes, “are also more likely to think . . . that those who disagree with them are a threat to our country.” But this is a sentiment frequently expressed by progressives, the alleged defenders of democracy. Indeed, this article is an instantiation of authoritarian sentiment. Are not progressives constantly decrying conservatives and especially Trump an existential threats to America—a country progressives often condemn as irredeemably racist? Its undemocratic character reason to proceed undemocratically? After all, it’s progressives who, when not promoting riots, rationalize them—even lie about them. MacWilliams himself characterizes violent insurrection, still ongoing, as “peaceful protest.” Just last night in Seattle peaceful protestors beat a police officer about the head with a baseball bat. In Louisville, Kentucky, Larynzo D. Johnson, shot two police officers attempting to disperse a mob at Brook Street and Broadway who had set fires and damaged property. I could generate a very long list of this sort of violence going back for months. Moreover, MacWilliams ignores that fact that it’s the progressives who are pushing corporatism, globalism, and technocracy. Perhaps that’s because he cannot see it. The walls of his frame are blocking his view.
Here are several examples of propaganda from MacWilliams’ article: “[Trump] has sent paramilitary forces from the Department of Homeland Security to quell nonviolent protests, looked the other way when a foreign power interferes in American elections, . . . spent an election year casting doubt on the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system, rather than working to protect it—all without eroding his main base of support.” Trump sent law enforcement officers to protect federal personnel and property from violent insurrectionists. MacWilliams uses the term “paramilitary” to conjure fascist imagery. This is shameful. Russiagate was a hoax, perpetrated by that “valuable and independent institution” in cahoots with the Democratic Party and the deep state. Why did they push Russiagate? To undermine a democratically-elected president. Readers should reflect on the fact that it’s progressives who are casting doubt on our electoral system. They recognize that Democrats have so frightened the people with doom and gloom over COVID-19 (its authoritarian lockdowns and all the rest of it) that the people are scared to go to the polls to vote. Democrats are pushing to forego the secret ballot. And they’re winning. They intend to contest the election all the way to end, hoping Nancy Pelosi can fix it. (Again, see The National Pulse.)
MacWilliams and the progressive rank-and-file live in a partisan dreamworld. “American authoritarians fear diversity,” the expert on authoritarianism writes. “They are more fearful of people of other races, and agree with the statement that ‘sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.’” We hear this type of thinking from progressives all the time, do we not? We are told: White peoples are oppressors. Blacks can’t step outside without fearing white violence. White people should “stay in their lane.” Men should stay in their lane, too. Recall Mazie Hirono, Democrat from Hawaii, telling men to “shut up” and watch the Democrats besmirch the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh. Hirono said, “I just want to say to the men of this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.” Men do not do the right thing, according to Hirono. Not this or that man. Men. And then a perfect illustration of faith-based thinking: “Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed. They need to be believed.” Rarely should you not beware when a person tells you, “You need to believe me.” Cancel culture, censorship, deplatforming—progressives have little tolerance for diversity of opinion. The culture that prevails in our institutions is such that the heterodox are terrified to say what they think. They fear being smeared with the progressive slime of political correctness.
How can anybody be ignorant of the obvious that it’s progressives who routinely express support for the suppression of speech across social media? Those who argue for suppression of speech they don’t like on the grounds that “speech is violence”? Who attempt to compel speech by claiming “silence is violence”? Progressives portray peaceful marches organized by conservatives (which rarely happen) as fascist rallies, then applaud disruption of them and even terrorist violence perpetrated in “defense of the community.” Progressives complain bitterly that not enough attention is paid to the handful of actual white supremacists who cause mischief from time to time while denying the mass leftwing uprising on America’s streets with comical news items that recall a hilarious scene from Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun. Administrators put employees and students through struggle sessions in organizations private and public to change their attitudes—self-appointed thought reformers. I look at the tasks others obligate me to and only see their origins in progressive politics and policy. I would say that even our employee unions are more interested in carrying out the progressive agenda than in representing the labor interests of their members, except that I can now see that as a feature not a bug. I am, after all, a part of the technocratic corps.
Progressives are profoundly illiberal. They are reflexively and deeply intolerant of other opinions. Imagine if right-wingers mobbed Democratic politicians, marched on their homes, occupied neighborhoods, beat people in the streets, burned down and looted businesses. It would of course only be more hysteria by degree; imaginary fascism is enough to work up progressives. But what I just imagined on the political right describes the actual behavior of the political left in protests MacWilliams characterizes as “peaceful.” Today’s left is authoritarian and regressive. Denying that suggests a mental disorder. Indeed, MacWilliams article is a master class in projection. But Doublethink is not crazy in any clinical sense. It’s what can happen with partisan faming.
I wouldn’t want to be guilty of MacWilliam’s offense. The research presented in the article is absurd and I know what it is up to. The studies cited are designed as self-sealing exercises that assume as given that those who support Trump are more likely to be authoritarian. It is argument by definition. It pushes out a perception. The concepts are operationalized in an ideological direction. This is scientism, fake science the object of which is to disguise partisan propaganda as objective knowledge. The work attempts to depoliticize opinion by portraying it as the fruit of scientific labors. These labors work to pathologize conservative values, to locate them “objectively” outside the bounds of normal discourse via a “neutral” and “rational” framework. This type of work is representative of the technocratic impulse. It’s the social logic of the administrative state. Those who do not conform are not merely disagreeable; they are in need of an intervention.
One might think that over the last several decades we have seen a major shift in the interest matrix the major political parties of the United States represent. We certainly see a very different Republican Party today that we saw under the Bush/Cheney administration (effectively continued under Obama/Biden). However, to the extent that the Democrats ever represented working people (for me, that they have never done so became apparent during reconsideration of fact patterns), they are now fully agents of transnational corporate power. Whatever one believed the Democratic Party was before, it is perfectly obvious that it no longer represents the interests of my choice of comrades (see above) or the principles of my country. It follows from this that, beyond my general commitment to objectivity of thought in light of interests and principle (which allowed me to reach these conclusions), I would be a sheep to be shepherded if I framed my thinking in terms of contemporary partisan politics.
(That I should not say this because some will find it offensive is a desire that I should govern my speech according to the offensive sentiments of others. What was it that Christopher Hitchens said about the shepherd and his flock? The shepherd is not really sheep’s friend whatever his kind words and tender loving care. He is kind to sheep because his intent is to feast on, fleece, or fuck them.)
I will close with a montage of Democratic hypocrisy put together by the GOP. I have to share Republican Party propaganda because the establishment media is only interested in exploiting Republican action in 2016 to leave the Supreme Court understaffed, when, to reiterate, their status as majority party justifies their control of the agenda then and now. But the hypocrisy on the center-left is blatant and massive. In 2016, Democrats cited the Constitution and said the process must go forward. At the time it looked like they were defending the traditions of the republic. Their rhetoric was bold and patriotic. Now we see that they have no interest in that. They’re going back on everything they said and cynically citing Republicans as their authority. If Democrats have any authority, can we rely on it? Check it out:
Scrubbed from its webpage, the Black Lives Matters organization had previously stated in its “About” section: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” This statement cannot be understood independently of the Third Worldist/neo-Maoist ideology that informs BLM’s portrayal of Western civilization as not only a white supremacist project but also a patriarchal one (see “Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics”). The statement dovetails with the also scrubbed Smithsonian exhibit “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States” (see my podcast and blog on The Myth of White Culture—and be sure to check out my previous blog).
Along with the attack on the nuclear family structure, BLM seeks to disrupt traditional and modern gender categories. Much of that language has been scrubbed from the page, as well. Yet the Black Lives Matter slogan is almost always in the streets paired with the Trans Lives Matter slogan. At least among the hard core of the countermovement. It is not enough for BLM to advance the liberal value of seeking equality before the law with special rights for none, the feminist cause of abolishing patrilineal and patriarchal rule, and the libertarian ethic of persons freely choosing their gender identity, all of which I advocate unreservedly, the organization has to attack the two-parent household and sex-based gender roles, human relations one finds cross-culturally that predate modernity and that provide a social-stabilizing function.
The characterization of BLM presented here comes with a reflexive rebuttal: The quote about disrupting the nuclear family is missing eclipses. The quotation is taken out of context. BLM only wants extended families. They want to see the community take up the role of the family. It takes a village. As if idealized primitive social orderings are appropriate to modern life of liberty. It is enough to share the heart of the ideology confronting America. (Do eclipses even matter in the wake of the statement’s official disappearance?)
From where does this idea of disrupting the nuclear family come? Having declared themselves “trained Marxist,” Black Lives Matters leaders do claim a revolutionary politics. “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors told Jared Ball of Real News Network in 2015. “Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”
Given that the founders are self-described Marxists, BLM’s position on the nuclear family might be read in the spirit of views expressed in the Communist Manifesto, appearing mid-nineteenth century, where the principle leaders of the European communist movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, acknowledge popular trepidation at hearing that Communists want to abolish the family, describing the abolition of these relations as their “infamous proposal.”
To be sure, Marx and Engels own it. But there is some nuance here. The communists argue that the present prevailing family form in the West, the nuclear family, is based on the bourgeois family. They then identify its complement—“the practical absence of the family among the proletarians”—and make a prediction: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”
In the communist worldview, the abolition of the family as it is presently known is bound up with the abolition of capitalism. What is more, Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously writes, “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.” This formulation, which has always struck me as self-evident, precludes any significant jettisoning or even skirting of the reality of biological sex differences. After all, Marx and Engels believed in natural history. They were fans of Darwin.
Marx and Engels also argue in that section that, under communism, society replaces home education—“the most hallowed of relations”—with social education. To be sure, there is under bourgeois rule a form of social education. But prevailing curricula, Marx and Engels contend, is designed to deepen false consciousness. “The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education,” Marx and Engels say of their solution; “they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
Given the current state of public education with its social justice curricula (critical race theory, the 1619 Project, etc.), it appears that Marx and Engels did not have to wait for the establishment of communism for education to work against the bourgeoisie family (and that likely would have made them suspicious). However, the BLM interpretation of historical materialism is comically juvenile. The founders of the countermovement are hardly super-versed in Marxism. Rather, their ideology is an approximation to neo-Marxism with some postmodernism and nihilism thrown in. Its racism exposes its anti-humanist orientation. As I said, it is neo-Maoist in character. It means to effect a cultural revolution.
Whatever one thinks of the Black Lives Matter/neo-Marxist take on the family and education, the ambition expressed raises an empirical question: Is disrupting the nuclear family and sex roles and establishing public school curricula that means to invalidate bourgeois values good for children and society? If not, who or what is it good for? There is an historical record we can look at.
For at least eighty years following the abolition of slavery, the nuclear family was the bedrock of black and white majority communities. More than three-quarters of black families were two-parent families and black-majority communities were stable and supportive. Workforce participation among blacks was similar to those of white majority communities. That changed with the full implementation of progressive policy organized as the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. Accompanying the vast expansion of the welfare state during this period, the United States opened its borders to mass immigration in 1965, while promoting globalization, displacing millions of native workers and undermining private sector union density, a trend that coincided with the expansion of public sector unionization, protecting the technocrats of the administrative apparatus. The consequences of these and related policy developments proved devastating for many black people.
Twenty-five years after Johnson, 68 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers. If not for the legalization of abortion, that percentage would likely have been much higher. Today, three-quarters of black families are single-parent families, the vast majority headed by women. Female-headed households are associated with higher levels of poverty. Black unemployment climbed to two and three times that of whites, as businesses relied on foreign labor and left for more dependable environments elsewhere. Rates of crime and violence exploded in black-majority urban neighborhoods. Today, despite being less than six percent of the US population, black males are responsible for more than half of all murders and robberies and around a third of assaults and burglaries. Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods, with rising fatherlessness and joblessness and rampant criminal violence, operated as open-air custodial facilities, conditions secured and perpetuated by progressive regimes that entrenched in city governments across the country, the same progressive regimes that are enabling, even promoting open insurrection in America’s cities.
Responding to the crime and violence explosion caused by the disintegration of the black nuclear family, governments expanded the law enforcement apparatus with considerable effect—and the shame of mass incarceration. Their efforts notwithstanding, in part due to racially-selective underprotection of their residents, levels of crime in these neighborhoods, along with family disintegration, poverty, and unemployment, continue to degrade the quality of life for black people. Paradoxically, Black Lives Matter and its allies push for disrupting public safety, calling on governments to stand down the police. BLM inspired rebellion and government rollback of law enforcement have resulted in markedly higher crime rates, erasing decades of progress. Black people are those most harmed by these developments.
Observers are shocked—some are thrilled—when they hear of BLM’s goal of disrupting the nuclear family. But BLM’s goal is not novel. We don’t have to go way back to nineteenth century European-style communism to find its inspiration. BLM’s political position is inspired by the function, if not the intent, of progressive politics and policy in twentieth century North America. BLM has internalized the social logic of global corporatism, a logic that has no need for families or nations. Progressivism is the technocratic arm of corporate governance, its politics and policies designed to manage populations affected by the inequalities globalization systemically generates in the pursuit of corporate profit.
Ask yourself why it is that when progressives hear criticism of the single-parent household in black-majority neighborhoods they hear an attack on moms and not condemnation of the dads who abandon their children? Why is advocacy for the nuclear family considered reactionary among progressives? One might think progressives are feminists. They say they are. So why aren’t they talking about a man’s responsibility to his children and how wrong it is to leave child-rearing solely to the woman carried financially by the state? Why do they hear as racist discussion of the facts that the police who shot Jacob Blake were there to protect a woman from assault and to serve a warrant for Blake’s arrest for felony sexual assault? Put another way, why does Black Lives Matter negate #MeToo? Why is Black Lives Matter pushing an ideology insisting that men have a right to define what a woman is? Why are women who assert their being as a real and a priori ontological category smeared as “transphobic”? Why is BLM dissimulating its politics by cleansing its web page of objectionable rhetoric? They still believe these things. Why, if Black Lives Matter founders are trained Marxists, do they avoid class analysis and criticism?
BLM and Smithsonian are not the only organizations scrubbing web pages. Remember these words crafted by Nikole Hannah-Jones? “The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative”? The statement now reads: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Hannah-Jones is denying that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with 1619. And she is fully aware of how her denial sounds. In a now-deleted tweet she writes, “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.” She did not mean to draw attention to her act of dissimulation.
Black Lives Matter, the Smithsonian exhibit on whiteness, the 1619 Project—these campaigns are elements of antidemocratic and illiberal propaganda, of the word and of the deed, aiming to delegitimize the American republic and Western civilization with falsehood and violence, namely that the West is intrinsically racist and its institutions and values exist to perpetuate white privilege and are therefore justifiably scheduled for annihilation. History and science are being problematized into ideological battering rams to smash objective knowledge.
Our institutions and values are being delegitimized because transnational corporate power means to denationalize the West to extract its wealth and assimilate the proletarians of these countries into a global neofeudalist order. The modern nation-state as the dynamic unit of world affairs and the family as the fundamental unit of human relations are obstacles to globalist ambition because the social logic of republican political and legal machinery is democratic, humanist, and liberal (and potentially socialist) and the family is the fulcrum of community stability. “Global citizenship” and “it takes a village” share another name: serfdom.
The California Department of Education announced new anti-racism lessons and teacher training for school districts (Education to End Hate initiative). This comes just days after President Donald Trump announced the 1776 Commission to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 project has been adapted into a curriculum guide for schools. The The 1619 Project Curriculum, promoted by the Pulitzer Center, obsesses over the history of slavery, portraying it as the root of alleged systemic racism in the United States. The project, which is fraught with errors, has gained momentum with the media-hyped moral panic over the debunked claim of racial disparities in lethal officer-civilian encounters (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters).
Trump announces the 1776 Commission
Facts appear to be unimportant to those pushing the narrative that portrayed the United States as a racially oppressive society. “We have continued to watch unspeakable acts of racism play out on our television screens, whether it be police brutality or those who want to hold on to symbols that represent hate against African Americans that go back to slavery,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a news conference announcing the lessons and trainings. “Sometimes I’m not sure what to do,” he continued. “But in those moments, I’m reminded education continues to be one of our most powerful tools to countering hate.” Translation: The institution of public education is a powerful instrument of indoctrination.
During his September 17 remarks at the White House Conference on American History, President Trump said that the 1619 project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” Decrying the project, he said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”
The president identified critical race theory as informing antiracist curriculum in our schools and workplace trainings. I have critiqued critical race theory in several essays on Freedom and Reason (see, for example, “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” “The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression,” and “Race and Democracy”) as well as discussed its role in racial diversity training programs. “A perfect example of critical race theory was recently published by the Smithsonian Institution,” Trump told his audience. “This document alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were instead aspects of ‘whiteness.’ This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity, and it is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.” (I discuss the document at length in “The Myth of White Culture.”)
As with most of his speeches, the president’s remarks White House Conference on American History were at moments inelegant, but in substance correct. Antiracism “education” socializes children to (1) see and treat people not as concrete individuals but as personifications of racialized categories; (2) assume all blacks are victims of white supremacy; (3) assume all whites are responsible for black despair, immiseration, and suffering; and (4) believe the American Republic was designed to secure and perpetuate the privileges of white power.
These are false teachings. Race is a social construction produced and sustained by racial thinking. There are millions of black Americans in positions of power and privilege. There are millions of white Americans suffering from poverty and in distress. No white person alive today is responsible for anything her or his ancestors did. Any white person who engages in discrimination is potentially subject to consequences under the law. Testifying to the power of its creed, the American Republic abolished the slave trade, chattel slavery, and de jure segregation, while instituting affirmative action. Attempting to deny this history, antiracist teachers sow the seeds of racial antagonisms and resentments in the nation’s children. The harvest of their toil is more social conflict in the future, conflict that harms the interests of all members of the working class. White children are made to feel guilty for things they have not done, while black children are taught that, no matter what they do, they will always face systemic racism. Unless, of course, the “structures of oppression” are dismantled, i.e., the principles of the American Republic are abolished or dead letters.
We won’t get rid of racism by telling little white kids that they’re responsible for the situation of the little black kids sitting next to them (as if their situations are monolithic). That story is a variation on the blue eyed/brown eyed experiment that shows how easy it is to create in-group/out-group conflict. It is unethical. But, also, the function, if not the purpose, of antiracist education is to sow racial division and perpetuate race-based antagonism. We won’t make progress on race relations by teaching our kids—in the face of a grand history of progress—that the republic is incapable of realizing its creed. We will get rid of racism when we teach our children that they are individuals who have a right to expect that they will each be treated equally before the law and that the story of their nation has been one of overcoming racism.
What public instruction should do is teach children the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world, make them aware that they live in a constitutional republic with a bill of rights where every individual is equal before the law, and inspire them to chart a path towards self-actualization and the realizations of their aspirations. To be sure, not every person can rise to the highest stations of their communities (not everybody aspires to reach for these heights), but adults do not help children make the most of themselves by teaching them that they are victims, that all those with their phenotypic features suffer the same fate and at the hands of those who don’t look like them, and that their situation is hopeless until the country they live in is no longer recognizable.
“[I]f you think there’s some biological fact of the matter about what race people actually belong to utterly independent of what race they think they belong to, you’re committed to a view of racial difference as biologically definitive in a way that’s even deeper than sexual difference.”—Adolph Reed, Jr. “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” Common Dreams, June 2015.
In his dissent in Plessy, 163 U.S. 557, John Marshall Harlan writes, “Every one knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white people from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.” He continues: “The thing to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.”
In 1892, in Louisiana, Homer Plessy, a man who passed as white, took a seat on a whites only car. He was told to take a seat on the black car because he was not legally white. To put this another way, he was compelled to remain in and be judged by a state-imposed racial category. He refused and was arrested. The case wound up in the Supreme Court where the justices (save Harlan) used it to establish legal justification for Jim Crow segregation. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) thus lent constitutional authority to the doctrine of “separate but equal.”
In back of segregation is an ideology constructing race as an actual thing such that a person who does not look black could be classified as black on the basis of his ancestry, a test that requires in its policing not only a profound invasion of privacy but also a profound restriction on the right to self-determination. Some entity not only wants to know what persons are—as if there really are races—but insists that people be this thing. It is not that Homer Plessy wanted to be white. He was, like Rosa Parks decades later in challenging segregated buses, a participant in a contrived test case to challenge the 1890 Separate Car Act. But had Plessy wanted to be white, as his skin suggested he was, he could not be. It was this imposed identity that determined which train car he could ride in. In this day and age, would progressives allow Plessy to be white?
One might think that if racial categories are used to discriminate against people, in light of the fact that race is a construct of racism, an ideology that holds that the human species can meaningful be divided into varieties with different aptitudes and sensibilities and ranked accordingly, the abolition of race would be at the heart of the movement for equal rights. Yet despite having abolished de jure segregation more than half a century ago, many, if not most insist on keeping race as a classification system, one that must be imposed even on those who may wish to be a race other than the one identified on her or his birth certificate or entirely raceless. If race isn’t real, why does anybody have to be a race at all? But at the very least, why can they not identify as the race they wish?
“Please understand me. I’m not a white woman with black skin and African hair. I’m a black woman with heart and soul. Getting more and more the body of a black woman is so a wonderful and liberating feeling for me. I don’t want to offend anyone! But I’m not only outwardly a black woman, I’m also with heart and soul a black woman, I swear that by God!” Those are the words of Martina Adam, a German woman whom who transitioned from white to black.
If there is no such thing as biological race, if a black person can be born and raised in Germany, and if a German person can transform herself into the gender she believes she should be, then why can she not also transform herself into the race she believes she should be? I know, asking this question risks an accusation of transphobia. But I have heard the question but I have not heard an answer. To be sure, people think they have provided an answer. Understand, my point here is not the problematize transgenderism. It’s to problematize transracialism.
Based on her words, Martina might be diagnosed with a form of body dysmorphic disorder. Rachel Dolezal, a former NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, “outed” as white, describes the same anxiety. Both believe they are black. They are changing the way they look to belong to the group with which they identify. They want their outsides to match their insides. Is it discrimination when that group doesn’t accept them for who they really are?
Rachel Dolezal
Are transwomen women, as the slogan says? Perhaps this is not perfectly analogous because gender has a clear biological basis, whereas race does not. While human populations may not be divisible into races, they are into sexes. Anomalies aside, the species is composed of two distinct genotypes, XX and XY. Chromosomes are not arbitrarily selected.
However, it is one thing to not accept transwomen as women, on the hand, and to destroy a transwoman’s career and life because she used to identify—or be identified—as a man. To be free means to determine for oneself which imaginary community with which one wish to identify. The headlines told us that Dolezal “pretended” to be black, deciding for her with which race she is allowed to identity. Can you imagine the uproar if the headlines told us to think in a similar way about Caitlin Jenner?
Jessica Krug, associate professor of history at George Washington University
Three more women have been outed or have come forward to reveal themselves as white. George Washington University recently suspended professor Jessica Krug after a blog post was published claiming she has, in the words of the news stories surrounding the case “pretended to be Black.” She also went by the name Jess La Bombalera, an activist persona in the Bronx. Krug grew up Jewish but, in her words, “assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” She claims to have “gaslighted those whom I love.”
Krug’s outing is triggering a string of what the media is calling “race fakers.” A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student, CV Vitolo-Haddad, who identifies as non-binary and goes by the pronouns “they” and “them,” resigned from from teaching role after admitting to lying about being black. She admitted to being Southern Italian and Sicilian. Then community activist Satchuel Cole admitted to posing as a black person for years in Indianapolis. She was a member of the Indy10 Blacks Lives Matter organization. In 2017, she was spokesperson for the family of Aaron Bailey, shot and killed by police in a traffic stop.
There are many other examples if, falling short of claiming to be black, have acquired a black appearance via surgery, deep tans, and makeup. Critics even identify artificial and textured hair as part of the ruse. The term used to describe such practices is “blackfishing.”
Our society does not give people the choice of picking their race. It popularly, and in some cases legally, insists on maintaining a caste system. So, while you can leave the working class for the capitalist, and you can leave the identity of a man for that of a woman, you cannot leave the white caste for the black caste without being declared a fraud or mentally ill.
This is made all the more interesting given the spectrum of human variation along lines of color and other relevant phenotypic features leads to misidentifying the race of people. Podcaster Dan Bongino, who is Italian, is asked if he is black or has black ancestry. While Bongino does not appear to see advantage or esteem in being perceived as black (it angers him to be mistaken for black), Krug obviously did. She wanted to sit on that car. But because she is not a person of color, she has no right to the advantage and esteem she sought in a different identity. She was riding on the wrong car. I wonder about blacks who “pass” for whites and whether their outing would feel the same way. Were they seen in the Jim Crow days as fraudulently accessing the advantage and esteem of the white car?
Which identities may be taken up and which are forbidden? Who makes these rules? Who polices them? For what purpose? Race is a social construction, yet there are those who work very hard to police it. This suggests that there must be benefits that accrue to it.
There is a politics at work here. Leftwing identitarians exposing individuals passing redefine selected white ethnicities—Arabs and Jews—as nonwhite. The present case is particularly interesting given that Krug is of European Jewish ethnic ancestry. For some purpose here, she is white. Leftwing identitarians will even define a religion as a race when it’s convenient to do so. Christians aren’t a race. Muslims are.
All this progressives have in common with rightwing race identitarians. And we know how that goes. Elizabeth Warren is a “fake Indian.” People are upset when Trump says this. But we didn’t see a lot of people defending Ward Churchill when folks were saying he was a “fake Indian.”
But what is real in any of these things? Should we follow the blood quantum rules (the rules that the folks who saw to it that the University of Colorado fire Churchill denied existed)? Or is it enough that Dolezal’s parents are white to wreck her identity? If we are going to assert race is a real thing, then how shall we determine its presence? Since race is not a biological thing, DNA testing will only tell you a person’s ancestry, not her race.
What does it mean to condemn interracial adoption because white parents can’t teach the children their heritage? I get it that there is asymmetry in group power, but just imagine white people arguing that black people adopting white children is problematic because, “Who will teach the white child his heritage?” For white people, heritage is racism. Maybe we should ask the cops. They seem to know for sure who is who.
There is a strange essentialism at work in identity politics. It draws a hard line at race. The Washington Post pitches in by making sure their readers know Dolezal is a “white woman who posed as black.” She is not a transracial person. That’s not even a thing. (Actually it is.) Consider if she were also transgender. What would the headline be then? Are there white brains and black brains? There’s no want of people asserting it or trying to find it. She fails the blood quantum test? Or is Dolezal white because the social and cultural rules demand white stay in their lane? Are we permitted to make this claim about other identities with reputation intact?
One of the reason Dolezal is so hated is because she moved among black and white populations without anybody knowing. They believe they know race when they see it. But not a single person had a clue. It took her hateful mother to rat her out. She was upset because Dolezal was a race traitor. Dolezal is the one wrecked and gaslighted.
Bottom line, if Dolezal passed, what’s the big deal? Who would have known? Why does it matter? What we are witnessing is selective suspension of belief on the terrain of social construction. The problem is one of reification. It matters to a particular system of imagination. It’s racecraft.
Here’s an idea: stop caring about how people identify and turn your attention to the problem of economic inequality and social class. That’s where you will transverse the terrain of the real.
In a recent blog (The Establishment Media Running Down the US Pandemic Performance) I noted that four counties—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—had death rates comparable to those of the United States. I used the similarities to push back against the establishment media claim that the United States is an outlier in COVID-19 deaths, a claim used to attack the president.
The World Health Organization is expressing concern that COVID-19 cases are rising in Europe (The new Covid-19 case surge in Europe, explained). They have declared it a “very serious situation.” The four countries I used in my comparison are among the affected nations. I present the change over time in four graphs below, obtained by searching “COVID-19 cases [country name].”
We see that COVID-19 cases are on the rise in all four countries, most drastically in France and Spain, where the current number of cases is higher that the previous peak, which occurred months earlier. For these countries, the rise in cases started back in July. For Italy and the United Kingdom, increasing frequencies becomes clear by early August.
With the warning lights going off, we need to step back and ask the most important question: are the increases in cases associated with increasing deaths? After all, if we tested for any virus and found a growing number of cases we would need to have some reason for this to cause alarm other than the mere presence of a virus. Most viruses are not particularly lethal or even consequential. For example, rhinoviruses are common in human societies yet we don’t test for them nor do we panic when we perceive colds are appearing with greater frequency. The next four charts document the frequency of death in these four European countries.
In only one country (Spain) does it appear that deaths are on the rise in any significant number, and this is the country with the greatest number of new cases. To be sure, if deaths follow, a lag in frequency is expected. Yet, in France, where a dramatic rise in cases began in mid-July, we see only a slight uptick on in the second week of September. Moreover, both Italy and the United Kingdom show very little increase in deaths despite a steady rise in cases. Perhaps this will change over time, but at present it does not appear they rise in cases is associated with increasing death.
Let’s take a look at the United States, where frequency of cases has been much greater since June. As you can see, this is associated with a rise in the frequency of deaths, but the visual comparison is striking in how the number of cases of death was much greater during the period with fewer cases of infection than in the period with more cases of infection.
What are we to make of this? Why was there so much greater death in the earlier periods than in the later periods? One reason for this is likely aggressive testing. The more testing authorities do the more cases we uncover, which in turn increases case frequencies. In may be that, in the early months of the pandemic, many more people had the virus that we thought but, with testing constrained, few cases were uncovered, thus producing a much higher case fatality rate, which created the exaggerated perception of the virus’ lethality. As testing ramped up, we began to develop a better understanding of the virus’ true lethality, which was not nearly as great as we initially thought.
This is, of course, assuming the virus has a stable rate of death. Natural history suggests that this is a bad assumption. In nature, the proliferation of virus depends on its successful replication. If, in the replication process, a virus sickens its host to the point where the host cannot effectively spread the virus, then this particular variation cannot spread as effectively as those variations that do less damage to the host. A virus is not trying to sicken or kill its host. It is simply trying to exploit the host’s cellular machinery. With the proliferation of less lethal varieties of SARS-CoV-2, death rates fall while infection rates rise.
It is likely that all of these are simultaneously occurring. There were early on certainly more cases than were detected by testing. The initial case fatality rates were thus based on underreporting of cases. I knew this at the time and reported on it my blog. But the viruses has under evolutionary pressures attenuated over time. It is less lethal than it was before. A rise in cases accompanied by a drastic decline in cate fatality rates should be cause to celebrate, but the establishment media and medical-industrial complex are spinning the statistics in a manner that at least functions to frighten the public. They have switched from death counts to case counts. They are hiding the good news for political purposes.
It may be that the lethality of the virus was magnified by those who were most likely to die from it, namely the old and the infirm. Of the 182,095 deaths recorded by the CDC to date, 104,661, or 57.5 percent, were over age of 74. Including those in the 65-74 age range raises the number to 143,790, increasing the percentage to 79 percent. Including those 55-64 accounts for more than 90 percent of fatalities. Approximately half of all those who died were in long-term care facilities, so it was not just age but health condition. For the other four-fifths of the population, 14,871 died from COVID-related causes. That is two percent of all causes for those age groups. For schools aged children, from daycare through undergraduate, COVID-19 related deaths account for just 1 percent of all deaths for those age groups. (All these stats are from the most recent CDC provisional death reports.)
In late August, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested that only 6 percent of people who died of COVID-19 actually have COVID-19 as the sole diagnosis on their death certificate. This isn’t just an issue when COVID-19 is a factor. Underlying diabetes, coronary artery disease, etc., are common diseases that contribute to mortality, They are triggered by influenza, pneumonia, or some other infectious process. When doctors talk about “triggers,” they mean the proximate cause of death. Unfortunately, the media is not educating the public about proximate and ultimate causes.
If you are healthy, a cold virus won’t kill you. Indeed, getting cold viruses as you mature will protect you against cold viruses throughout your life. This improves your quality of life. But if you are very old, with late-stage cancer, have health problems associated with obesity, etc., with an immune system in decline or depleted, then you might not be able to fight off the cold virus. The cold virus is the proximate cause of your death. But the ultimate cause is something on that list I just enumerated. Eventually, sooner than later, all those with underlying conditions will die and their death will likely be the ultimate cause of their death (if they aren’t hit by a bus, struck by lightning, slip in the bathtub, murdered, etc.). The virus—the trigger— could be a rhinovirus, a coronavirus, or some other virus. The point is that the virus is not the ultimate cause of death because it rarely kills anybody by itself. If it does kill somebody by itself, then a deeper investigation is warranted. The doctors missed something. Or foul play is suspected.
Consider a man who has been shot in the chest. He survives, but the injury exposed him to an antibiotic resistant bacteria that invaded his lungs. Should we absolve the man who shot him of murder because the proximate cause of death is a bacterial infection? No, because the ultimate cause of his death is the gunshot wound to his chest. The man who shot him is responsible for this death. His ultimate passing was triggered by the bacterial infection.
The establishment is using a COVID-19 diagnosis in counting deaths to leave the impression that each of us share the same risk of death if we contract SARS-CoV-2. In fact, most of us who are infected won’t even present with symptoms. Half of us probably already have an immunity to the virus because of a lifetime of exposure to coronaviruses (T-cells exhibit cross-immunity). Indeed, the perception conveyed by the media is so false that any expert who does not make sure the public understands this is lying to them. Virtually everybody the media puts in front of you is lying to you. And they’ve been actively censoring those contradicting the official science on this matter. The good news is that you don’t need to be a virologist to understand the logic of science. You just need to be a scientist or think like a scientist.
Finally, a comparative point. Sweden pursued a different strategy in handling COVID-19. They sought to build herd immunity while mitigating the worst effects of the disease and thus soften its impact. As you can see by the numbers, this was a sound choice. They are not seeing the rise in cases that the other European countries cited are seeing. There almost no deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden, a diverse country of ten million people.
Mr. Justice Strong, Olcott v. The Supervisors, 16 Wall. 678, 694, said: “That railroads, though constructed by private corporations and owned by them, are public highways has been the doctrine of nearly all the courts ever since such conveniences for passage and transportation have had any existence.”
Read this with respect to social media, which, although held privately, function as public utilities. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies are analogous to the railroads and telephone systems.
In Township of Pine Grove v. Talcott, 19 Wall. 666, 676, “Though the corporation [a railroad company] was private, its work was public, as much so as if it were to be constructed by the State.”
In Inhabitants of Worcester v. Western Railroad Corporation, 4 Met. 564: “The establishment of that great thoroughfare [railroads] is regarded as a public work, established by public authority, intended for the public use and benefit, the use of which is secured to the whole community, and constitutes, therefore, like a canal, turnpike or highway, a public easement. It is true that the real and personal property necessary to the establishment and management of the railroad is vested in the corporation, but it is in trust for the public.”
Although the establishment and management of social media is vested in the corporation, it is in the trust of the public, and therefore must submit to the authority of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Just as “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” neither should corporations acting as public utilities. Only time and place restrictions apply. An actor cannot interfere with another actor’s expressions such that his right is diminished.
It is, therefore, wrong for Facebook or Twitter, etc., to censor any post or comment or remove any user who is not violating constitutional norms. Social media companies, like the conductor in a railroad car, must be neutral in the administration of his duties.
What of our property rights as they pertain to our utterances and creative works? Back to Olcott: “Very early the question arose whether a State’s right of eminent domain could be exercised by a private corporation created for the purpose of constructing a railroad. Clearly it could not unless taking land for such a purpose by such an agency is taking land for public use. The right of eminent domain nowhere justifies taking property for a private use. Yet it is a doctrine universally accepted that a state legislature may authorize a private corporation to take land for the construction of such a road, making compensation to the owner. What else does this doctrine mean if not that building a railroad, though it be built by a private corporation, is an act done for a public use.”
In other words, while our speech acts can be possessed by the corporations establishing and managing public utilities, they are so possessed not exclusively for private use, but also for public use, and the person to whom these speech acts originally belonged should be compensated in some fashion by the corporation acting in the public trust.
It seems to me that the transaction tacitly entered into between users and owners/managers of social media companies so that the former may speak freely is a fee the former pay the latter that takes the form of user content accessible to advertisers and marketers and the subsequent exposure of the user to corporate messaging. Users of social media should not be told how or on what topics to speak any more than a conversation on a railroad car should be censored by the conductor—even as a matter of company policy, as such a policy is illegitimate on constitutional grounds.
Social media has no more right to censor or label user content between parties voluntarily consenting than a cellphone provider does given analogous circumstances. It is not for corporations providing public accommodations to determine access, participation, and utterances on the grounds of content except where that content represents an actual and imminent threat to the safety of concrete and identifiable persons. Cellphone providers do not police the truth content of user utterances on their services. Nor should social media companies.
The establishment media misleads the public in its campaign to blame President Trump for COVID-19 deaths. For example, CNN’s Jake Tapper cuts Peter Navarro’s mic and tells his audience that the United States is less than 5 percent of the world population, yet has more than 20 percent of the world’s deaths from COVID-19—as if this claim settles the matter.
“Okay. Peter Navarro, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today,” says Tapper. Then, with Navarro out of the way, says, “I would just like to remind the American people watching that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and the United States has more than 20 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. That is a fact. It does not matter how many times he insults CNN.” CNN is an entity capable of being insulted?
This is propaganda. By telling his audience that the United States is less than 5 percent of the world’s population, by making us seem small and by assuming all countries are comparable, Tapper leaves the impression of a great disparity between the US and the world.
With 328 million people, the United States is not only the third largest country in the world (only China and India are larger), but it is the nexus of the world economy, with a high volume of international travel and densely packed cities. Moreover, many large countries with lower death rates aggressively deployed therapeutics, for example, hydroxychloroquine, in treating COVID-19 patients. Physicians in Western countries were constrained in prescribing cheap therapeutics by the actions of profit-driven medical-industrial complex, which has captured the regulatory process. And what about relevant demographics and health metrics?
With these factors in mind, let’s do a comparison between the United States and four large European countries—France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom—that have been similarly affected by COVID-19. Respectively, these countries have experienced 30,950, 35,624, 29,849, and 41,637 deaths. With a combined population of 240 million people, the four countries have experienced a combined 138 thousand deaths. The United States has experienced 194 thousand deaths.
I think you can already see how this is going to go. The percentage of deaths relative to population? The four European countries combined: 0.0575%. The United States: 0.0591%. Virtually the same. However, the percentage of deaths relative to population is even higher in Spain and the United Kingdom than in the United States. The percentage of deaths is the same for Italy and the United States. France’s relatively better numbers brings down the overall number for the four European countries. If I had left France out of the mix, the United States would have fared better in the comparison.
Why doesn’t Tapper inform the public that the United States is comparable to the four hardest hit European countries? That, in fact, the United States has a better than record than Spain and the United Kingdom? Shouldn’t news programming actually focus on informing the public? Clarifying the statistics? Contextualizing the facts? I think you know why they aren’t.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party, which is responsible for unleashing this virus on the world, is not only not the subject of news coverage in the United States, but the public is admonished for even talking about where this virus came from. It’s racist to call it the Chinese virus. The governor of New York, whose state alone experienced 32,629 death (with a population much smaller than each of the four countries I have used for the comparison), refers to the virus as the “European virus.”
Listening to the way Andrew Cuomo has been going on, Trump is to blame for the deaths in the United States. Cuomo angrily threatened Trump’s safety over a planned trip to New York. What is the percentage of deaths in Cuomo’s state? Very high. At 0.167 percent, it is also three times higher than in the four worst-faring European countries. Take the state of New York out of the statistics, and the United States fares much better. So why is the press giving Cuomo a pass? I think you know why they are.
If there are structures that organize social relations by race, then it is morally incumbent upon those who benefit from this organization to work with those who are oppressed by it and work with them to change conditions for all those affected. If the oppressor group refuses to change, then a range of protest actions are justified. If protests are insufficient to bring about change, then violence may be warranted.
The American republic has demonstrated over many decades a remarkable ability to address the problem of the racism it inherited, albeit in one instance with catastrophic war. With the Act of 1807, passed in March, the US Congress gave all slave traders nine months to close down their operations in the United States. As the trade was in black Africans, the system was racist in character. After January 1, 1808, the Act declared it unlawful “to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to service or labour.” Thus, within two decades of its founding, the United States forbade its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Little more than a half century later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing chattel slavery in the United States was proclaimed. Unlike the abolition of the slave trade, this change came after a long-fought civil war that claimed the lives of more than a million Americans, hundreds of thousands of them soldiers. Within a century, segregation by race would be abolished. This time, relatively peacefully. The Civil Rights Movement was a powerful statement of the American creed of colorblindness, that all persons should stand equally before the law.
The United States is now experiencing what the media characterizes as a reckoning on the race question. A narrative of an American history bereft of progress on race relations is promulgated by academics and activists, now taken up by corporations and governments. In this account, all whites are portrayed as complicit in a stealth system of anti-black oppression. All whites enjoy white privilege, which includes a psychological wage by virtue of being born white. White supremacy is America’s original sin. It’s in our national DNA. It is the warp and woof of the American tapestry. Etcetera. The act of denying white oppression, privilege, and sin is tantamount to not merely an admission of racism but to recalcitrance. Whites are being asked to atone for this sin, to renounce oppression, and forfeit their privilege, thus affirming the existence of systemic anti-black racism.
Yet, unlike the history I began with, there are no structures enslaving, oppression, or segregating black Americans. As I detailed, these structures were long ago abolished. Indeed, it is now illegal in the United States to discriminate against black people. More than this, at all levels of government, programs of reparations have existed for decades in the form of affirmative action (positive discrimination). And federal funding for education, housing, etc., disproportionately benefit black Americans. Given this, how have so many Americans come to believe that systemic racism continues to shape American life? Why are so many Americans going along with rhetoric that makes whites out to be racist oppressors and trashes the culture that has made America the envy of the world?
In the place of actual structures of oppression and segregation, which are themselves of course, as with other structures in the world, conveyed conceptually and theoretically, ways of speaking about the world can also creates the perception that imaginary structures are actual and real. Concepts may refer to both real and imaginary things, but the ability of human beings to always determine which are which is variable across time and space, and across persons.
We can see the way this works in theological constructions. Theology creates a universe where imaginary entities and locations and forces—gods, angels, devils, heaven, hell, evil and sin—appear as real things. Via a process of reification, the supernatural is transformed into a perceived reality, where concepts substitute for actual things. Real events are then interpreted within an all-encompassing framework. The framework makes particular sense of the evidence. Constructing a false account of the world is given plausibility by being articulated by authorities. In religion, these authorities are the church, mosque, and synagog, with their ministers, imams, and rabbis respectively. There are prayers, rituals, and scriptures. For a religion to be successful, it must build a congregation, acquire converts to doctrine. This means mounting a successful program of inclusion and indoctrination. When the program is societal-wide, pushed by society’s major institutions, it becomes a powerful force. Those who refuse and resist stand as apostates and infidels. Those who criticize doctrine are heretics.
This description of theology applies to the doctrine of critical race theory, which is the ideology guiding not only Black Lives Matter in street-level action, but also in the anti-racism and diversity training that students, teachers, and workers are compelled to undergo in corporations, government, and universities. In many cases, one does not have a choice but to participate. Employment, grades, pay, and promotion are attached. Knowing what happens to refusers and resisters, many more go along to get along.
The principle targets in this training are white people, who are told that they are racist even when they don’t know it. They suffer from “implicit (or unconsciousness) race bias.” They commit “little murders” against non-whites everyday with their words, with their “microaggressions.” See my last podcast or read my last blog entry (The Myth of White Culture) to learn about the many features of so-called “white culture.” During reeducation, white people will learn to see the structures of racism that have heretofore escaped their perception. They will learn to see the unseen by acquiring a new way to talk about the world—an argot, a jargon. They will be told to go into the world and promulgate this new gospel so that others may see it. They will be told to hold accountable those who refuse and resist the message.
Image drawn from a diversity training website Ready Training Online
It is promising that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget notified agency heads on September 4 of this year that federal workplaces will no longer be allowed to conduct training that focuses on race theory and white privilege. “It has come to the president’s attention that executive branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” OMB director Russell Vought wrote in a memo to agency leaders. In the memo Vought notes that “employees across the executive branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism.’”
We can trace back contracts for diversity training at federal agencies to an initiative started through an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2011. The Governmentwide Inclusive Diversity Strategic Plan issued in 2016 as a result of that order focused on a “New Inclusion Quotient,” calling on agencies to “provide training and education on cultural competency, implicit bias awareness and inclusion learning for all employees.”
Antiracism poisons our workplaces by requiring white employees to align their values with a worldview in which the work ethic and all the rest of it are degraded. Listen to Anti-Racism Training Doesn’t Work with Karlyn Borysenko (from the podcast Triggernometry). According to Vought’s memo, workers are being told “that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.” This program of indoctrination is not just harmful to the whites compelled to participate. It is harmful to blacks, as well, as it treats them as members of a group that cannot measure up to the standards of the society in which they live. It says that, in order for blacks to succeed, the standards have to be lowered or whites have to refrain from working with these standards in mind. Anti-racism represents a massive project of social engineering imposed on the American population without their consent. It means to change American culture.
If you read my blog, you will be familiar with my criticisms of Robin DiAngelo and her concept of “white fragility” (The Psychological Wages of Antiracism; Dividing Americans by Race to Keep America From Democracy) as well Ibram X. Kendi and his instructions on how to be an anti-racist (Reparations and Blood Guilt). But readers should know that their rhetoric comes from corporate psychology. So here’s a bombshell: the chart used by the Smithsonian on whiteness that I took apart on my last podcast (The Myth of White Culture), was adapted from a 1978 book, White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training by Judy H. Katz. It’s not that the Smithsonian chart and her book share points of contact. The verbiage of the chart is lifted from a book that is more than forty years old. (Katz is also responsible for the 2002 book The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity.)
To save all of us time (Lord knows we already wasted enough time reading DiAngelo and Kendi), the book is usefully summarized by Social Work Research and Abstracts. In Katz’s book “a group training program is presented in which white people work together in a nonthreatening environment to alter deeply ingrained, often unconscious racist attitudes and then embark on a program of behavioral change. The program has been used with measurable success in many settings. It can be adapted to the specific setting and needs of the participants. After an introduction explaining the principles on which the program is based, a detailed step-by-step training format is presented. The six group experiences, called stages, center on the following themes: racism, definitions and inconsistencies; confronting the reality of racism; dealing with feelings; cultural differences; exploring cultural racism, the meaning of whiteness; individual racism; and developing action strategies. Instructions and suggestions for conducting each session are provided, along with recommended readings, lists of materials required, and sources of materials.”
Katz’s work has a deep intellectual background. White Awareness hails from applied and organizational psychology, a technology designed to align the consciousness of workers with corporate ideology. As such it is a hallmark of progressivism, the technocratic worldview of the white collar sector. Psychologist Kurt Lewin is the central figure in this. Along with Ron Lippitt, Ken Benne, and Lee Bradford, Lewin founded the National Training Laboratories (NLT) Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in 1947 which established the foundations of corporate training regimes, a methodology called T-groups (training groups, or encounter groups or sensitivity training groups), and founded The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. This direction is associated with the human relations movement, led by Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, and Warren Bennis, a movement that has profoundly shaped corporate management strategies. Because the structure of capitalist society compels a population to work for income, individuals are forced into structures that risk producing a subjectivity that is contrary to the material interests of their social class. Human relations and workplace training regimes are designed to proactively integrate workers with this subjectivity.
Deploying various social behavioral and cognitive strategies (small group interaction, role playing, that sort of thing), assimilation is obtained via various brainwashing techniques that leverage the behavioral and cognitive sciences to transform people into compliant corporate citizens. There is an analogy to all this that should, if people grasp the horrifying reality of all this, shake people out of their daze. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the “struggle session,” where a victim was forced to admit to wrongdoing, to confess to some crime, was often conducted at the target’s workplace surrounded by his fellow workers. The encounter session in the corporatist West is essentially a type of struggle session where a “facilitator” conscripts employees into coercing other employees into accepting the functional subjectivity. The parallel should frighten any one who cares about human freedom. It’s not an analogy. Bureaucratic collectivism and corporate bureaucratic organization share an affinity for externally-imposed rationalization—efficiency, predictability, uniformity, and control. The Chinese communist system dovetails easily with the transnational corporatist order. This is not theoretically supposed. We are seeing this convergence occurring before our eyes.
The establishment media is mainstreaming and normalizing the cultural revolution. “In this moment of historical reckoning, many Americans are being introduced to such concepts as intersectionality, white fragility, and anti-racism,” writes David Remnick in introducing his podcast with Isabel Wilkerson for The New Yorker. (See my podcast The Problem of Good White People). But this is not a moment of historical reckoning. Academic jargon shaped by the corrupting ideas of critical theory and postmodernism are constructing a reality that isn’t really real.
The very notion of a “historical reckoning” is mystification. The real reality is that we’re in a struggle between those who believe in republicanism versus those who believe in globalism, those for democracy versus those for technocracy. The question is whether we want to live in a society that protects individual liberty and defends civil rights in the context of a nation state that is answerable to the people and an international legal framework that defends human rights as a universal standard of regard, or live under the tyranny of transnational corporatist rule, a rule that works hand in hand with the Chinese Community Party. That’s the historical moment we’re living in. Black Lives Matter is street-level action in what is a corporatist revolution-from-above. That is the real fascistic threat facing humanity.
What we have been seeing over the last several decades is a shift from Old Left politics, or what we might call, following C. Wright Mills, plain Marxism, what I call classical Marxism, which I have been representing now for years (which seems to have really confused people who thought they knew how to represent my politics in their minds), to New Left politics, or neo-Marxism, which works against the humanism, liberalism, and secularism intrinsic to classical Marxist thought (i.e. the materialist conception of history). This derangement represents the corrupting influence of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and other regressive and authoritarian spirits, particularly those ideas refracted through the prism of French thought. The New Left countermovement against democracy, nationalism, and republicanism dovetails with the bureaucratic corporatist project of globalization, or transnationalization, as well as the bureaucratic collectivism of the Chinese Communist Party, in a common desire to denationalize the West and establish a global neofeudalist order.
Critical race theory, and critical theory in general, is part of the landscape in social science. As a social scientist tenured in the university, I teach critical race theory alongside feminist theories, historical materialism, structural-functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and other theoretical systems. However, even when I was sympathetic to elements of critical race theory, I never taught it uncritically in a classroom. I now recognize critical race theory as a toxic ideology, but even when I didn’t, my belief that higher education is no place for demanding conformity to a particular line of political thought always guided my classroom ethics. I would never teach students that there are bad people for refusing to accept, say, structural-functionalism as a grand theory for explaining their lives. Doing something like that on the basis of race would add an extra layer of horror to such a practice. Nor should critical race theory be represented as a definitive or settled view in training sessions in academy, corporations, or government agencies. Not only is critical race theory toxic, but the practice of compelling speech from administrators, students, teachers, and workers is tyrannical. It is entirely antithetical to the educational enterprise.
The latest OMB memo instructs federal agencies to identify all contracts for diversity training that covers “‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.” That’s a start. But we need to reckon the moment we are in. Anti-racism training is part of a much larger problem for the working class, and that is the problem of transnational corporate power. Anti-racism is a project to align popular consciousness with an ideology that elites find beneficial to some ends. That corporate power is backing anti-racist training based on critical race theory tells us that those ends are not in the interests of working people.
Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Richard Thompson Ford, author of The Race Card: How bluffing about bias makes race relations worse,” tells his audience in an op-ed for CNN, “There is no ‘White culture’.” I have written about Ford before (see Race and Democracy; Race-Based Discrimination as a Model for Social Justice) and appreciate his work, so I was excited to see his essay appear in my news aggregator.
The matter around which Ford organizes his essay is the exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” The chart introduces the subject this way: “White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States. And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we have all internalized some aspects of white culture—including people of color.”
See that? People of color are said to have internalized aspects of “white culture.” Let’s be clear about what this means: white cultural notions identified in the chart are not intrinsic to black culture, but an alien, external thing that has wormed it way into the heads of black people, colonizing their minds. Supposed ideational patterns, the products of history and ideology, are hypostatized in the abstraction of racial type. Can one know in the tangle of hundreds of years of shared life what ideas belong to which race? Or should we concern ourselves with which ideas advance collective interests and personal development? Might we find these among the items the Smithsonian identified as common “white culture”?
Here’s the chart:
Rugged individualism sees the person as the primary unit of history. Autonomy, independence, and self-reliance are values embodying individualism and there are rewards for embodying them. An alleged tenet of whiteness is that, having more deeply internalized these values that other groups, white people more readily ascend the ladder of success. In an individualist conception of society, the nuclear family is the ideal social unit. There is a husband and wife. A small number of children have their own rooms. They are expected to be independently minded and responsible for their actions.
In the antiracist worldview, “white culture” makes a fetish of the scientific method—i.e. objective, rational and linear thinking, cause and effect relationships, a focus on quantitative operations. Scientific thinking, which is held by its practitioners to be universal, stands in contrast to postmodernism, which conceptualizes the scientific method not only as one of innumerable narratives that project power, but deny that there is any external, mind-independent reality and truth. There is no reality in itself, only accounts of it, and prevailing accounts of it, as well as the epistemic character of those accounts, alert the observer to the prevailing structure of power. French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued, “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Or, more succinctly: “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
The whiteness of science goes also for Western Judeo-Christian traditions, which are considered primary by white people and nonwhite people who have internalized whiteness. The Protestant work ethic looms large here: the values of hard work, work before play, and accepting personal responsibility for failure. Put another way, white culture prefers an internal locus of control, where success and failure are a function of the character and quality of human agency. This is bound up with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christianity is normative and other religions are considered foreign and their practitioners outsiders. Islam is the alien religion that looms largest here. As I have pointed out in past writings, those at war with white culture makes a fetish of Islam. Paradoxically, the postmodern left has so othered Muslims in its war against the West that it reflexively treats Muslims as people of color, even though Islam is, if we use antiracist rhetoric, a product of a white culture—just not the European one.
In white culture, notions of justice are based on common law, where the logic of law is pragmatically discovered through dispute resolution typically between individuals and small groups, and culpability is shaped by attribution of intentionality. Adjudication of the law proceeds a lot like adjudication of science, with the goal to find truth through an adversarial dialectic. Individualism comes with personal responsibility and just desserts. Those of you who have been following my podcast and blog have heard me talk about critical race theory and the distinction this standpoint draws between, on the one hand, the “perpetrator perspective,” emphasizing individual responsibility and culpability/intentionality, and, on the other, the “victim perspective,” where assertions and feelings expressed are valid by virtue of hailing from an oppressed category. The oppressor advocates the former perspective because it protects his privilege. It isn’t really better, rather it’s the narrative that prevails because the oppressor is in charge and can make it so. Indeed, it is worse, because it is the perpetrator’s perspective. From the victim perspective, justice does not require proving the individual acted intentionally; all that is needed is that some group harm is alleged and supposed to result from the actions of—or the failure to act by—the other group. This is how one gets notions of “white privilege,” where no white person stands outside whiteness (by definition), all are stigmatized by it, and therefore all are responsible for the harm resulting from its wages.
This is not merely a cracked theory of justice. It is dangerous, and we can see why in the riots occurring on our streets. Here’s what makes it dangerous: From the Western justice standpoint, an individual who harms another individual is held responsible in a process that (ideally) carefully examines the facts in a criminal or civil procedure. Only those persons materially involved in the wrongdoing are held responsible for it. We don’t punish others who look like the wrongdoer in some way; not everybody with blue eyes is responsible on account of the perpetrator having blue eyes—or blonde hair, or freckles, or whatever. Only the perpetrator is held responsible because the perpetrator perpetrated the wrongdoing. If, in contrast, we suppose that every member of a group is responsible for the behavior of individual or individuals presumed to belong to that group, then any individual of that group is a suitable target for retributive or restitutive. The concrete individual is a stand-in for abstract group. Any white man can substitute for any white man. If, furthermore, the harm claimed is abstract, then adjudication in a rational process becomes impossible. All that is left is targeting of individuals on the basis of race. We have a word for that: racism.
There are several other features noted in the chart. Competition. Mastering nature. White culture is said to be action oriented. The majority rules with the caveat that only when whites have power, a caveat failing to acknowledge white minority rule in Rhodesia, South Africa, and, after othering Arabs, Israel (if they don’t other Jews, as well). White culture emphasizes written communication, reason over emotion, privacy, civility, and politeness. The chart identities the Western civilization values of respecting authority, property, and space. White culture is future oriented: planning, delayed gratification, optimistic, promoting progress. Life—work and leisure—is time-oriented, with schedules, the commodification of time. Of course, none of this is white culture. If you want to put a label on it, how about bourgeois culture, at least in many of its elements?
Before turning to a fuller analysis of Ford’s take on “white culture,” I want to expand on the bourgeois culture tag by summarizing an op-ed by Amy Wax, a law professor at University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, law professor at the University of San Diego, “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” published in The Philadelphia Inquirer in the summer of 2017. This op-ed riled up the cancel culture warriors, who drew up a petition (and secured several thousand signatures) to get Wax fired. It didn’t work.
According to Wax and Alexander, bourgeois culture “laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.” Insisting on the relevance of bourgeois culture in a progressive America, Wax and Alexander write, “Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.” I hear a lot of things on the Smithsonian’s white culture list.
If you find bourgeois culture appealing, welcome to the club (Heather Mac Donald has also extolled the the values of bourgeois culture). These are the values that have produced the most advanced civilization in world history. These values emerge from the dynamic of nationalism, an approach to organizing populations in which legal and political structures elevate individuals from subjects to citizens, placing them under the rule of law, and affording them democratic processes to affect change, to expand and entrench democracy itself, detribalizing them by emancipating them from the provincial structures that limit personal development and self-actualization, providing for them a common culture and language and access to common knowledge for problem solving. As I argue in my writing, individualism is the necessary basis for human rights, as it allows individuals to become defined not by the tribe or the religion but by their universal connection with all human beings independent of ideology, i.e. their species-being. This is an objective standard. Group right, in contrast, are destructive to human rights because they assume relative ontology, putting the subjectivity of the tribe or religion before concreteness of individuals and then put those individuals defined by tribe and religion above the individuals of other groups.
Turning now to Ford’s op-ed and the Smithsonian controversy …. After receiving blowback, interim director Spencer Crew apologized and removed the material in mid-July (which had been online since May 31), not because it he considered it wrong and racist, but because it did not contribute to the discussion as planned. Indeed, Crew insisted that the chart was not racist. “We’re trying to talk about ideology, not about people,” he said. “We are encouraging people to think about the world they live in and how they navigate it. It’s important to talk about it to grow and get better.” But while criticizing culture is not inherently racist, condemning a culture because it is said to be white is profoundly racist.
Ford argues that the notion that there is a “white culture” with these features “ignores the contributions and achievements of generations of industrious and self-sufficient Black scientists, philosophers and writers, to say nothing of Black Protestants who made an ethic of non-violence a guiding feature of their lives.” Ford contends, for example, that it is “an insult to suggest that King ‘internalized’ his faith or his ethic of nonviolence because a White power structure imposed them on him.” He points out that “‘White culture’ in fact reflects the ideas, experiences, sensibilities and perspectives of people of all races—especially African Americans whose contributions to American culture are as widespread and profound as those of the stereotypical Mayflower pilgrims.”
Ford identifies a paradox in the “white culture” narrative: “A defining feature of White supremacy has been to take credit for the labor and accomplishments of other races, whether that labor involved physical toil extracted without wages or intellectual and cultural work copied without attribution. The idea of ‘White culture’ advances this White supremacist project, crediting Whites for the work ethic, when no group of people in human history have worked harder and for less reward than Black people; for the Christian faith, when Black faithful and religious leaders have both furthered and revitalized Christianity and set the tone that Whites have later adopted, for good and for ill; for ‘delayed gratification’ when generations of Black people delayed their own gratification even up to the day they died in the hope that their children might have better lives in a more just society.” He also criticizes the identification of the “written tradition” with “white culture” given that “many renowned White authors incorporated aspects of literary traditions developed by Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks. This isn’t a case of cultural appropriation but of a cultural conversation between people of all races, yielding new forms of expression that no one race can lay exclusive claim to but that all can take pride in.”
Ford writes that “there is no White culture—only American culture,” because of this “people of color deserve some share of the blame as well as of the credit.” He continues, “We bear some of the responsibility for an ethic of ‘rugged individualism’ that, at its worst, has fostered alienation and selfishness; if the veneration of the nuclear family has stigmatized other ways of caring and physical intimacy, we get some of the blame for that too.” He suspects that the narrative the charts is shaped by a counter-cultural intention to disparage “soulless American capitalism and uptight bourgeois respectability” in order to relieve the burden of shared responsibility for that by supposing these were impositions, but finding that denying black responsibility also denies black accomplishment. This is “insulting and dehumanizing,” he contends. “Because there is no White culture—only American culture—people of color deserve their share of the blame as well as of the credit. That’s what it means to be a vital part of a culture and a civilization—not to have ‘internalized’ it as passive victims but to have been a part of it in all of its glory and horror.”
“The idea of White culture—indeed the idea that any set of cultural practices belong to any race—ignores or repudiates the defining development of the modern world: the cosmopolitan mixing of older, face-to-face cultures made possible by the expansion of communication and migration,” he writes. “Black Americans are not displaced Africans who could return to an ancestral homeland.” Blacks are “the children of modernity, a new people born in the violent encounter with avaricious and ambitious Europeans who created a new identity and new culture from that trauma. For better and for worse, the United States is our only home: we have no ‘pure’ traditions to go back to. What we have instead are our profound contributions to what remains, for all of its flaws and hypocrisies, one of the most dynamic, inventive and promising civilizations to emerge from the chaos of human history.”
That Western civilization emerged in Europe, a region inhabited by lighter skinned people, lighter skinned because of an unintended process of human development (the development of large-scale agriculture), doesn’t make it “white.” If history had been such somewhere else, the values of the Enlightenment might have emerged there. But it didn’t. And we can’t change that. We are fortunate that it emerged at all. It’s not just that there is no need to racialize culture, Ford contends that racializing culture is a bad idea. The values of Western civilization are to be preserved and advanced because they are the values that abolished slavery and racism, emancipated women, and achieved equality for gays and lesbians. Western culture is for everybody.
Tragically, though, we see a countermovement prevailing that is racializing the West in order to delegitimize it on that basis—by promoting hatred and loathing of white people and making all of the good it has done for the world problematic on that basis. This is the central problem with Black Lives Matter and its sister countermovement Antifa, both variations on a synthesis of critical theory, postmodernism, and Mao Zedong thought (for a wonderful summary of the development of the toxic mixture sans Maoism, listen to Social Justice Explained with James Lindsay on Triggernometry). The sentiment is anti-West and sees in rhetoric equating the West with whiteness, an ideology promoted by intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences and progressives in corporations and government, an opportunity to bring down modernity with third worldist and tribalist sensibilities.
Make sure to catch my next podcast, coming very soon, in which I follow up on this episode and blog by telling you where the idea of the Smithsonian exhibit on whiteness came from and show how it represents the basis of diversity and racial sensitivity training.
freedom and reason 