The Conversation is a product of the Scientific-Industrial Complex. In its own words it “arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse—and recognition of the vital role that academic experts can play in the public arena.” That state alone telegraphs its gatekeeping function.
Howard is also a scary man. More scary is the fact that he is not alone. There is an army of Howards out there. The claims Howard makes in this article are not about dealing with an emergency situation in which some rights have to be temporarily limited. The desire expressed is nothing short of changing the way we live our daily lives—and, not surprisingly, in the direction of serving the interests of corporate power. What he puts in this article represents a terrifyingly positive regard for the use of state power, an exemplar of authoritarian technocratic desire.
The article starts from a bad premise: it assumes that we want to slow the spread of the virus. But if we want to build herd immunity, and masks prevent that, then we don’t want people to wear masks. We want healthy people to get out there and get the virus, as they have done in Sweden. (See Who’s Safer? and Hunkering Down for No Reason.)
“Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese epidemiologist and the country’s senior medical adviser, told CNN Saturday that a lack of immunity among Chinese residents could be a cause for concern in spurring another wave of infections.”
In other words, China was so good at locking everything down—because that’s the promise of totalitarianism we should all envy—that the Chinese population lacks the antibodies to protect them from the next wave of SARS-CoV-2.
“A new study found that 99.8% of recovered coronavirus patients that were studied tested positive for antibodies, suggesting that those who have recovered are immune to reinfection.” Remember when Dr. Anthony Fauci said in early April that recovered coronavirus patients will likely be immune to a second wave of infections that’s likely to spread in the early fall? That’s the logic of the Swedish strategy.
So open up and let healthy people get it. Vulnerable populations will be protected when the numbers of people with whom they will interact have immunity from this disease. Yet the science-as-religion folks are rewriting the history of the science of immunology (see Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion). They are rejecting natural history. Why would they do this?
More on that in a second. But I want to dwell for a moment on the absurdity of all this from a rational standpoint. If we accept the Howard’s premise, then we must also accept an argument that we must wear masks to prevent the spread of influenza viruses and rhinoviruses. After all, these viruses kill people, too. Influenza vaccines are notoriously ineffective. At best they are not very effective. And we don’t have vaccines for rhinoviruses at all. So we must wear masks. We should have been wearing masks all along.
What does natural history tell us? If people contract rhinoviruses and influenza viruses (as well as coronaviruses) healthy immune systems will respond and protect the body. On the other hand, if people are not exposed to these pathogens then their immune systems won’t develop and they will be susceptible to disease. Our immune systems are like our speech and visual systems. They need activity and stimulation to develop properly. Without the necessary inputs, they are undeveloped and we personal health care system is impoverished. Relatively harmless viruses will become deleterious. And up go the demands for more vaccines—because only corporations can save us.
Why would we work against the body in this way? It is almost as if we are to become dependent on corporations for our health rather than on healthy bodies. There might be some money in that. For his part, Howard assumes that we need to stop the spread of the virus until a vaccine is developed. Of course he does.
Reading this stuff one cannot avoid feeling that what influences the choice of premise is the convenient belief that vaccines are the appropriate method for dealing with viruses. I am not suggesting that a SARS virus broke out of a US-funded lab in Wuhan, China working on a vaccine for SARS in order to create a market for a vaccine that looks set to appear in record time. What I am arguing it that we need to fear viruses until there are vaccines for them. In the meantime wear masks and stay home. The mask and your unfreedom will be a reminder that we need a vaccine, that other humans are disease vectors, and that corporations are friend. The world is perilous, but corporations and technocrats will keep your safe. But you have to follow orders and not question authority.
How did humans live for those tens of thousands of years—possibly several hundreds of thousands of years—without masks and vaccines? This is not science. It’s religion; its doctrine is the profit motive.
What about those people who don’t wear masks? What if they cannot be shamed into wearing them. There will be laws mandating it and police officers to enforce it. Howard brags that he and one hundred other experts called on state governments in an open letter to compel people to wear masks. If there is ever a vaccine, Howard and his ilk will write an open letter calling on state governments to compel that, too. People will be dragged into rooms and jabbed against their will. And the injuries will be rationalized in the light of the common good. They already are.
The experts of the scientific-industrial complex have authoritarian minds. This is clear now. This is the social logic of state corporate totalitarianism.
According to the Wikipedia data most commonly cited by the news and talk shows, as of May 17, 21 people have died in Brown County, Wisconsin from COVID-19. As I have shown on my blog, Freedom and Reason, this number is likely exaggerated given that authorities are counting all person dying with COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2, the virus underpinning COVID-19, as COVID-19 deaths. But let’s accept this number for the moment.
Using the same source, the number of confirmed cases in Brown County is, as of May 17, 2,034. We calculate the case fatality rate, or CFR, by dividing the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases. Doing this, we find that the CFR for Brown County is just over 1%. We know—the media have stopped reporting this and irresponsibly never assume it in their reporting—that based on research by Stanford University and the University of Southern California (as well as conducted by scientists across Europe) that the figure of 2,234 is but a proportion of the actual number of cases in Brown County. This is because most people with the virus are not tested. In other words, the infection fatality rate, or IFR, is lower than the CFR. Much, much lower.
Anybody who reports on the lethality of SARS-CoV-2 who does not tell you this is either ignorant or lying. Why I keep hammering this point is because I want you to know what is actually happening so you can cut through the tangle of ignorance and lies and base your behavior on reason instead of fear.
I am now going to show you that the SARS-CoV-2 viruses is not nearly as dangerous as you have been told and that the lockdown policies are irrational, should never have been implemented, and must be discarded. The good news in Wisconsin is that the state supreme court stopped the extension of Governor Evers’ stay-at-home order. And while it is disappointing that Evers is scrambling to produce a new order that would lockdown the state for 150 days, it seems now that such an order is highly unlikely to survive the court’s judgment. You may have noticed that, with the economy in a tailspin, the lockdown rules are not benign. We cannot end them soon enough. Already the damage they have caused will last for a long time.
Okay. Here we go. Because of population density, we should probably not assume the upward end of the range of these studies, which produce an actual infection rate as much as 85 times higher than the confirmed case counts. I will use a conservative estimate of tenfold, which is much less than the lowest range of these studies (at around 25 times). This is the calculation I worked with back in March when I knew the government and the media were wrong in their statements and reporting about the lethality of the virus. Remember, and sorry to appear boastful, but studies subsequent to my estimates not only confirm the spirit of my calculations, but show that my estimates were well below the estimates of the best studies produced on this subject to date. In other words, I was more right all along then I knew. As I have explained, I did not want to exaggerate the numbers and so my calculations are modest even if I am not.
Based on my method, I am estimating 20,240 actual cases of COVID-19 in Brown county out of a population of 264,542 (as of last year), or 7.65% of the population. Keep in mind, scientists are confident that more than 20% of New York’s population has already had and survived SARS-CoV-2, so my estimate may be too low. At any rate, this calculation yields an IFR of 0.10%. I know you understand basic math, but I must emphasize the result—that’s one-tenth of one percent. The number of people dying from this virus is not one in a hundred or greater, which is what the media have been telling you, but more like one in a thousand. And that is using a conservative estimate.
The IFR is likely much lower than this. Even if we take the lower end of the range the scientific studies are finding and assume around 19% of the population has the virus we find a IFR of 0.04%. The more people actually have this virus, the lower the actual fatality rate. That’s why the number of confirmed cases rising is not a reason to panic, but a reason to celebrate. It means the actual fatality rate is lower than the case fatality rate and, moreover, that the confirmed number of people with antibodies is rising and thus we are progressing towards herd immunity, which is absolutely necessary to acquire if we want to minimize the impact of SARS-CoV-2 when it joins the seasonal flu in the fall. Remember, according to the CDC, influenza is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in the United States. I am wearing one of my many Sweden caps today to emphasize the point that the Swedes did the right thing by keeping their society open. When American reporters are aghast at Stockholm reporting more than a quarter of its residents having contracted the virus they are ignorant to the fact that this is what Sweden’s epidemiologists wanted to happened.
The news gets even better. Given what I put to the side earlier, that a proportion of those counted as dying from COVID-19 actually died with COVID-19 and not from it, the fatality rate is even lower than that. Moreover, only a small proportion of the population is at risk of dying from the virus. In other words, the IFR for healthy adults and children is vanishingly small. The vast majority of persons who contract SARS-CoV-2 are symptomatic or experience on mild to moderate symptoms with no complications. Most of those who do experience severe symptoms will recover. Those who are elderly or who suffer from compromised immune systems or obesity are at risk and our resources should be focus on protecting these vulnerable populations. One strategy in this area is to more aggressively promote proper nutrition, exercise, and immune-boosting activities. That means going outside, getting plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and engaging in social activities with others. We also need to encourage children to leave their bedrooms and their devices and get outside and play to steel themselves for the future. But right now, for the vast majority of the population, there is no reason not to go to work, attend schools, or recreate outside in all the myriad of ways Americans have done so for decades—without masks and scornful looks.
What becomes clear when one applies basic scientific reasoning to this problem (a capacity that seems to have escaped those who in charge of governing populations and those who hunker down in terror upon hearing their messages and following their orders) is that (a) this virus is not so dangerous that we had to shutter society, (b) now that we know that it is not particularly dangerous we must end the lockdowns immediately, and (c) those who continue to shelter-in-place and demand people wear masks and all the rest of it are operating on the basis of an irrational fear and need to strive to raise the level of their scientific literacy and become better consumers of news.
This is a super important article from my discipline from the year I was born: James C. Davies (California Institute of Technology), “Towards a Theory of Revolution,” published in the American Sociological Review in 1962.
Exhorting proletarians of all nations to unite in revolution, because they had nothing to lose but their chains, Marx and Engels most succinctly presented that theory of revolution which is recognized as their brain child. But this most famed thesis, that progressive degradation of the industrial working class would finally reach the point of despair and inevitable revolt, is not the only one that Marx fathered. In at least one essay he gave life to a quite antithetical idea. He described, as a precondition of widespread unrest, not progressive degradation of the proletariat but rather an improvement in workers’ economic condition which did not keep pace with the growing welfare of capitalists and therefore produced social tension.
I have been socializing this thesis to my students and comrades for decades, but it was not until yesterday, in a wide-ranging phone conversation with my father (who is also a sociologist), that I was reminded of the origin of this truth nugget.
I want to connect Davies thesis, often referred to as Davies’ J-Curve, with some of my recent arguments concerning street crime. The point of despair that results in inevitable revolt results not in revolution but in primitive rebellion—street criminality—the expression of the lumpenproletariat, abject and demoralized, when there are no avenues for constructive consciousness-raising through worker organization and education.
For example, I pointed out in my entry on the radical black proletarian movement in the United States the following: “One consequence of the demise of the Black Panther Party was the shattering of the truce the Panthers had negotiated among street gangs. With inner city conditions rapidly deteriorating amid the mounting crisis of late capitalism, gang violence escalated over the next two decades.” (For more on this see my Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.)
This is why the ruling class, after ingratiating itself to a segment of the proletariat (for example, the cultural manager), smashes the rest of them. The elite know that powerlessness begets powerlessness—and that affluence, if one is not bought out, affords one power.
The idea that the worse off are the workers, the more desperate their situation, the more totalitarian the bureaucracy, the more people are inclined to rise up against their oppressors, is misguided. The people rise up when they reach a certain level of affluence, gain access to knowledge and an understanding of networks, understand their power in numbers and their interests in common, are in possession of an adequate theory of the world, and develop a practice around these. This development makes the people dangerous.
The ruling class organized to disorganize the labor movement in the post-WWII period because it had to stop the progression to democratic socialism with an American character. As I have written about, it needed to raise the rate of profit, which had fallen with the rise of labor (as it should). However, it has yet to accomplish this, and economic growth has remained relatively stagnant compared to previous periods in American history.
Update (3.23.2025) In the video posted below, in announcing this blog entry, I go into greater detail about my thinking concerning the J-curve theory while also riffing on the medical and scientific-industrial complex, and more generally the problem of the progressive technocratic apparatus and the corporate state. I assure the audience that all these tie together and promise to make those connections in future blogs. However, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, my mind, as were the minds of many others, turned to the problems associated with the government response to the coronavirus, As a consequence, the podcast feels a bit disorganized at the end, especially for those unfamiliar with my writings. At any rate, here it is:
“I think we all were buying into the idea of quarantine to flatten the curve and I think there are a lot of questions now that it’s more of a house arrest to find a cure with people wondering exactly what that means as far as the future of the country and the freedoms we’re allowed to have at this point.”—Aaron Rodgers
I did not support the Trump approach of locking down the country in the face of SARS-CoV-2. Nor did I support governors who did the same. Elites have let the lockdown go on for too long. The lockdown was supposed to be a temporary measure to flatten the curve to prevent swamping hospitals with COVID-19 patients. Trump listened to the experts around him—Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, etc.—and followed their recommendations. And now the economy is in shambles. The world, in crisis.
We saw that many people were prepared to make sacrifices in the face of a crisis. The curve is flattened (how much of that is attributable to the lockdown is an open question). Hospitals are no longer overwhelmed (most weren’t anyway). Trump, who asked a lot of the public, by cajoling and ordering them to shelter-in-place and socially-distance, is honoring his end of the bargain, encouraging states to open up so people can get back to their lives and livelihoods.
But elites in the administrative state have moved the goal posts by revising the rationale for the lockdown. Now parents are told that they cannot feel safe sending their children back to school until there is/are vaccine/s or effective therapeutics. This is what Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Senate a few days ago.
Next up was Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research Authority and whistleblower momento, who claims he was ousted from his position because he was speaking out against the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak (i.e. a difficult and disgruntled employee), warned in testimony before Congress that the “darkest winter in modern history” is lurking.
The WHO (World Health Organization) says this virus isn’t going away. Who thought it was? The fraidy cats are telling us that if we come out of lockdown we will get the virus and that the virus is very bad. Like the orange bad man. The logic of their argument is essentially this: we have to lock down society to prevent the spread of a very bad virus that will never go away; because it will never go away, we will, without a cure, have to remain in lockdown. As absurd as this proposition is, it was not the reason we were told we had to lock down. Why are we putting up with it?
We’re not. At least some of us aren’t. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned governor Tony Ever’s stay-at-home order, ruling it “unlawful” and “unenforceable.” The court ruled that Evers’ administration overstepped its authority when the Department of Health Services extended the order to May 26. The justices wrote in their decision of Wednesday, May 13 that “an agency cannot confer on itself the power to dictate the lives of law-abiding individuals as comprehensively as the order does without reaching beyond the executive branch’s authority.” In other words, the stay-at-home order was intrinsically offensive to fundamental liberty. Evers, describing Wisconsin as “the wild west,” a feeble and insulting attempt to shame a frontier state, decried, “Now we have no plan and no protections for the people of Wisconsin.” Really? Why are you governor?
When overzealous executives use state power to direct the people in their daily affairs and interfere in their activities and livelihoods the courts must step in and restore the balance between government authority and personal sovereignty. The Wisconsin attitude needs to roll across the nation. States cannot force the people off the streets and into their homes en masse. It’s tyranny. In this moment in history, conservatives are the safeguard of our liberties. I say this as a Marxist because its true. Progressives simply cannot be trusted to protect the fundamental freedoms that make us American.
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My wife is Swedish. My two sons are dual citizens. I have been to Sweden several times. I have planned a research project in Sweden this fall (my sabbatical, no less). Because of the COVID-19 hysteria, those plans are in jeopardy. If I don’t wind up going, it won’t be because I fear going. I probably had the virus in March (we’ll see what the antibodies test show when they are widely available). But more importantly, Sweden will be safer than the surrounding countries that had stringent lockdowns. SARS-CoV-2 is coming back around, and the second wave will be more severe in populations that haven’t achieved some functional level of herd immunity. Sweden leverages the power of science.
Sweden’s scientific approach to the problem has befuddled the woke press in America. Vox, in the article “Has Sweden found the best response to the coronavirus?”, illustrates perfectly the idiocy that marks the quality of consciousness that dominates the progressive left today. The subtitle of the article telegraphs its angle: “Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is worse than America’s but better than New York City’s.”
The article contains a moment of lucidity: it cites a New York Times story that makes the case that “to a large extent, Sweden does seem to have been as successful in controlling the virus as most other nations.” Without sacrificing fundamental liberty. And Sweden isn’t exactly a Bill of Rights exemplar. “Sweden’s experience would seem to argue for less caution, not more,” went the article. It would seem. Surprising coming from the New York Times. From there, the Vox article goes horribly off the rails.
Alex Ward, author of the Vox article, visually suggesting Sweden’s confirmed infections are proportionally the highest in the world, after noting that the United States—not proportionately—has the largest number of confirmed infections, appears to be completely unaware that it was Sweden‘s intent to infect a large proportion of its population. This is embarrassing. Since this virus is asymptomatic in most people it infects, for those who do show symptoms, mild to moderate, and in all but the most severe cases not fatal, with no vaccine in sight, Swedes chose natural immunity over societal devastation. And they didn’t destroy a year of their children’s education.
* * *
I appreciate Trump taking a stand against Fauci. Fauci is a very suspect character at this point. Fauci has not disclosed the metrics he uses in his recommendations. He makes up stuff as he goes along. Given how accomplished he is, if feels like there is an agenda beneath all of this. As Rand Paul observes, the epidemiologists have been wrong over and over again (he destroys Ferguson of the Imperial College). We know Fauci’s models are not rooted in reality because the facts do not support his recommendations. Reality damns his expert advice. You don’t need to have a list of abbreviations after your name to recognize this. Fauci is a functionary of the administrative state, going back nearly forty years. He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of NIAID. Trump needs to ditch him.
President Trump and members of the coronavirus task force are pushing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to modify its coronavirus death-toll methodology in a way that could lead to fewer deaths being counted. Why would Trump want fewer deaths counted? Because, as I reported here on the Freedom and Reason blog, the deaths counts are exaggerated (see “How Deaths are Classified, Good and Bad Comparisons, and Other COVID-19 Insanity”).The media is relentless in pushing back against this reality. You will hear them say that the death toll is “likely an undercount.” They have to keep repeating this because the cat’s out of the bag and it has to be strangled.
The Daily Beastcited five anonymous administration officials working on the federal government’s response to the pandemic who claimed that Trump, suspicious they may be incorrect or inflated by the current methodology, questions the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States. According to The Daily Beast, “Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the administration’s coronavirus task force, has urged CDC officials to exclude from coronavirus death-count reporting some of those individuals who either do not have confirmed lab results and are presumed positive or who have the virus and may not have died as a direct result of it.” Remember when Birx said she could not trust the CDC? The establishment media treats questioning CDC methods as if it’s scandalous. But Trump is pushing back against the administrative state, which for some reason (I will let you think the obvious) wants or needs more deaths from COVID-19.
I’ve been saying from the beginning that this virus is now a part of the annual viral mix. Just like the Hong Kong flu (H3N2) in 1968-69. Years earlier, the Shanghai flu (H2N2). Once these things emerge they stick around. Maybe in 100 years, 200 years—whatever, they’ll go away. But it’s not going away next year or the year after that or the year after that. And we may never have a vaccine for it. Which is why we should never have locked down; we can never be unlocked down if the reason we locked down was in the first place was legitimate. But it wasn’t. Which is why we are clearly being led by a bunch of morons.
Have I pointed out yet that having a science degree doesn’t guarantee a scientific mind and that having a scientific mind doesn’t require a science degree? Some of the dumbest people I know have PhD’s. they surround me.
* * *
“If you don’t like the face mask, then you’re really not going to like the ventilator.”
“The end of stay-at-home orders doesn’t meant the pandemic is over. It means that currently have room for you in the ICU.”
That’s two of a seemingly endless supply of idiotic slogans shared on social media by the shut-in crowd. You know what I’m talking about. Do you think people who share nonsense like this will ever look back and say, “On my, was I demented”? I think they are more likely to look stupidly and say something like : “I would never say anything so stupid.”
For the honest, if you want to cut yourself off from the world and life, then that is your prerogative. But you cannot expect other people to be a slave to your fears. It’s the same with your sensibilities. If you don’t like being offended by what other people do or say, then don’t participate and don’t listen. We can no longer tolerate a world where the fears and delicacies of others dictate what we think, say, and do.
When you see all those shuttered business, jobless citizens, empty houses, abandoned pets at animal shelters, and the myriad of other distressing sights, remember this: a virus did not do this—government did this. Politicians, informed by experts (who have been wrong about almost everything), and hectored by the media (whose agenda is obvious), authored the destructive rules that have disordered human life. They did this with clear evidence in plain view that it was unjustified.
Elites must have known that the consequences would more devastating than the effects of a virus that for the vast majority of people is at worst mild and cold-like—if it is felt at all. If they did not know this, then they are incompetent. However incompetent our leaders are, had they simply erred on the side of liberty all of this could have been avoided. But they do not appreciate our freedom. Why should they? They’re inside the castle walls. They won’t suffer like the fate of the proles ad serfs. Not in the short term, anyway.
For all of those who are horrified by police officers harassing black and brown people in predominantly black and brown communities (Democracy Now has become hysterical in their coverage of this, see “‘Weaponized and Racialized’: Police Departments Use COVID-19 to Target Black & Brown Communities“), why don’t they write a letter or make a phone call to the progressive mayors of those cities passing these draconian rules and ordering their police officers to enforce them and tell them to stop? Progressives dwell on power, but they do nothing to challenge it. Indeed, they are instruments of it.
Mayor Muriel Bowser threatens Washington, DC, residents with jail and fines if they leave their homes during the lockdown. Nearly half of the population of the city is black.
If rank-and-file progressives knew anything about the character of inner-city urban life in America they would know that the enforcement of shelter-in-place rules is going to fall disproportionately on black and brown people. They want to blame on “white privilege” a situation those whom they admire created. In reality, this is the result of the actions of progressive politicians.
This is a very simple truth to grasp: When a big city mayor orders police to arrest people who are on the streets and in the parks in neighborhoods that are disproportionally black and brown, then black and brown people are more likely to fall under the control of the police who are tasked with enforcing that law. Here’s another truth: affluent white people are not going to grasp or admit to the reality of this. It’s too good of an opportunity to signal superlative virtue by trashing the cops.
Let a Marxist sociologist explain this.
White people are more likely to live in communities with large houses, big yards and comfortable dens, individual bedrooms with privacy, easy access to games and other enjoyments with which to while away the hours. Whites are, on average, better off than black and brown people, and therefore can more easily shelter-in-place to work and recreate. Parents in these communities can turn their kids loose in the backyard—or, more accurately, force them to outside on their own property (the coddlers don’t let their kids go to the park, anyway). The more affluent can spread out.
In contrast, black and brown people are more likely to live in overcrowded neighborhoods in cramped apartments with no yards. They live much of their lives outside where there is space and fresh air (what fresh air there is given the NIMBY-shaped distribution of pollution). The inner-city poor need streets, parks, and other outdoor spaces in which to move around. When politicians make shelter-in-place rules, then, with the social media world always present and waiting, the public is going to see videos of police harassing black and brown people.
Predictably, progressives bash the “racist pigs” for enforcing rules they’re ordered to uphold by progressive mayors. It’s a tick (you also see it in the calls to abolish ICE among the open borders activists). But one needs to ask oneself a simple question: Who controls the police? Who do you think runs Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, St. Louis, and the other big cities? Right-wing libertarians who care about civil liberties? Or progressives who have no qualms about imposing restrictions on freedom of movement, who play the race game to stay in power, but then do little to lift up the communities they claim to represent? You know the answer. Progressive city leaders talk up civil rights, but then pass rules that sharply curtail them, ordering police to enforce them on the folks who are going about their life.
Police are working men and women doing their jobs. Rank-and-file progressives trash the cops for doing the jobs elite progressives order cops to do.
Given policing patterns in a class-ordered system, what we are witnessing is the predictable consequence of passing laws and ordinances that criminalize normal behavior and trample on civil rights and liberties. This is not about the police. It is about the politicians—many of them Democrats—who authored the lockdown and all the liberals and progressives who support them—the same liberals and progressives who are horrified when police stand down from enforcing unjust orders.
* * *
I get pushback from self-identified progressives when I point out that it is progressive policies that lie behind so many of the woes of working class people. I understand the identification with progressivism. I used to be one—albeit never comfortably because I am a civil libertarian. Then I deepened my understanding of history and the scales fell from my eyes. It was the activist Richard Grossman who really woke me up on this (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”).
Many of the self-identified progressives I have spoken with would likely be more comfortable identifying as comrades on the populist left, those who support small “d” democracy, local control, and personal freedom. They are alienated from their identity based on professed values. Their understanding of their politics is corrupted by ideas that don’t belong in the totality of their value system. We used to have a populist tradition in America before corporations took over and engineered big city progressivism to provide reformist cover for their wealth and power, a cynical strategy to gain the trust of the people with whom they would damned if they would share in the the wealth produced by the community.
Progressivism insinuated itself into leftwing circles as part of what Antonio Gramsci calls ideological hegemony, where the establishment rules the people by incorporating them into the structure of power. The imperialists have long depended on collaborators to control the proles, just as the feudal lords used them to control the serfs and the kings the peasants. Plug the practice into the modern domestic situation and you have diversity, equity, and inclusion, what is more honestly known as tokenism. It’s the New Civil Rights and progressives use it to bash the proles and serfs with nonsensical notions of “white privilege” “white fragility” and “microaggressions.” Just look at happens when you transgress the doctrine laid down by the theologian of the progressive order. You’re a heretic. A racist. A xenophobe. A pariah. You’re not just wrong. You’re bad. You’re evil. A sinner. This is the way monarchs operate: the king selects among the obsequious and compliant tribal leaders and puts them in position of privilege while tasking them with controlling the other tribal members. The beauty of the nation-state is that it detribalizes the people. The ugliness of progressivism is the people’s retribalization to produce collaborators.
Progressivism is not just a dead end. It’s a tool elites use to control those who would and should oppose them. So it must be those racist cops who are the problem, not the perverse urban politics that keeps down and in line the lumpenproletariat.
This story from local NBC affiliate 25 News in Chicago “IDPH Director explains how COVID-19 deaths are classified” might be helpful for those of you who have not yet fully understood what is going on. Watch the embedded video of Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, speaking about how COVID-19 deaths are classified. Note the governor of Illinois to her left looking on.
Dr. Ngozi Ezik, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
The ordinary way in which a profound truth is being transmitted is what is so striking about this clip. Those paying attention are being told matter-of-factly that COVID deaths are not from COVID but are listed as COVID deaths because the person who died had been diagnosed with COVID at the time—even if what killed them was clearly something else. It would be like being given a few weeks to live from terminal cancer and contracting influenza and having your death classified as an influenza death.
Remember when I told you on this blog that, in Pennsylvania, 70 percent of those who died were in long-term care facilities and that nationwide around 5% of persons are in long-term care? This population is typically in long term care because they are at the end of their lives, aged and/or dying of often multiple health problems. If they had COVID at the moment of their death, were they listed as a COVID death? Any other year and the death certificate would say something else—cancer, heart failure, etc.—but this year, in these months of mass hysteria, COVID is the cause of death?
In New York City, the majority of hospitalizations involved people who sheltered-in-place. Turns out that they are disproportionately aged and/or suffer from poor health. They are not sheltering so much as they are firm and homebound. New York governor Andrew Cuomo was recently scratching his head over this. But isn’t it simple, Governor? This population is at risk for hospitalization throughout the year. This year, if they are diagnosed with COVID, are they listed as a COVID death?
These numbers Johns Hopkins keeps feeding the public, how many of these are people who died with COVID and not from COVID? Even CDC’s more reasonable provisional numbers. From COVID? Or with COVID?
Is COVID being determined by a label arbitrarily applied by doctors who have been incentivized to list COVID as the cause of death? This is what Elon Musk was recently talking about Joe Rogan’s show (cued up below). This is what the doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, CA were saying—you know, the doctors whose press conference YouTube censored because it violated “community standards.” Hospitals could do this with any number of labels, but why would they? Unless they get more money if they list the deaths as a COVID deaths.
Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan Experience, May 7, 2020
Progressives are now up in arms because Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force says she can’t trust the CDC’s numbers and that the number of COVID deaths is being exaggerated. I doubt Birx is a MAGA hat wearing Republican. But this is the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, Dr. Ngozi Ezike saying these things. I can’t be sure Ezike is not a MAGA hat wearing Republican. I don’t want to make any hasty assumptions. But I bet she isn’t.
To amplify my point, this is what Ezike said back in April:
“If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who’s listed as a COVID death doesn’t mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death.”
Here’s a suggestion: If COVID is not the cause of death, then it isn’t a COVID death. I have been saying this all along, so I’m not astonished by the fact of the matter. That she said it—that’s a bit astonishing. And she said it with governor of Illinois standing right beside her. Do I need to note that the media has made nothing of it? What was it that Michael Parenti said about this? “The media does not so much tell you what to think. The media tells you what to think about.”
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This article in The Washington Post, “There is a more accurate way to compare coronavirus deaths to the flu,” is a weak attempt to beat back the skeptics. It suggests that deaths assigned to COVID-19 are caused by COVID-19. We have established that, as a matter of policy, if you die with COVID-19, it will be recorded as a COVID-29 death—even if you die of something else. (See above)
The CDC estimates flu deaths because they have reason to believe that deaths caused by influenza are undercounted. But in the case of COVID-19, we have deaths being attributed to COVID-19 that have a different cause, but default to COVID-19. This inflates the count of COVID-19 deaths. If we were to assign deaths to a rhinovirus when that rhinovirus is present, we could horrify the public. A lot of people get colds. Some people die from them. That’s right, rhinoviruses are a cause of acute lower respiratory tract problems with a fatal outcome.
In most cases of flu-like and cold-like illnesses, the actual virus or other pathogen is undetermined. You may have experienced a severe flu-like illness and test negative for the influenza strain(s) the test covers. You could well have a coronavirus or a rhinovirus. You could die from either. But if you’re healthy or not too old (if your immune system works properly), death is very unlikely.
It is important to understand that pneumonia isn’t just a thing in itself. Pneumonia is an infection that inflames the tissues of one or both lungs. The lungs fill with purulent material, (albeit not always) causing cough and fever. A variety of pathogens, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, can cause pneumonia. Bacteria and viruses can and often are copresent. Every year in the United States, hundreds of thousand of people are hospitalized with pneumonia. Tragically, tens of thousands of them will die. Without testing every case, we cannot know how many pneumonia deaths are from the flu or from something else. The objective way to proceed is to assess all deaths from pneumonia by testing to determine what pathogens are present. We then have to establish a cause.
In the end, the article becomes unsure of itself and resorts to asking us to trust certain experts. But the experts are redefining the normal as something extraordinary and using the redefinition to scare the wits out of the public. As I have said, this is a classic moral panic. And it has been remarkably effective. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe they cannot return to work without a vaccine. Dr. Fauci is suggesting that schools cannot reopen until there is a vaccine because students cannot feel safe without one.
Anthony Fauci suggests that we can’t go back to school without a vaccine
First, there may never be a vaccine. But, more importantly, we don’t need a vaccine to go back to our lives. This virus is not that serious.
This video of Anthony Fauci is more satisfying. US Senator Rand Paul takes Fauci to task for his failed predictions and, more generally, the failure of epidemiologists to forecast the character of the pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul goes after Anthony Fauci
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Here’s another example of scaring the public, in this example an attempt to scare the public away from their right to assembly and free expression. The Independent recently published an article with this headline: “72 people test positive for coronavirus after mass lockdown protest in Wisconsin.” This bit in the article exposes the headline as exemplary of fake news: “The information comes to light after last month hundreds of people in Wisconsin attended a mass protest at the governor’s stay-at-home order. However, it is not possible to say if any of these cases trace back to the rally as the health department is not tracking attendance of specific events.” In the article’s body, it’s admitted that the headline is made up. “But it is technically true,” I can hear people say, “At least it’s not technically a lie.” Be honest: the headline is substantively false.
Can readers have a story about 72 people who tested positive for coronavirus who did not attend any mass gathering? Don’t tell me they don’t exist. There are thousands of cases of coronavirus in Wisconsin.
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The media reinforces the double consciousness that is characteristic of the progressive mind. I have spend some time in the CDC data this morning and found something interesting. As reckoned by the CDC’s cumulative record of death certificates that identify COVID-19 as cause of death, more than half of all deaths in the United States from COVID-19 occurred in just two states: New Jersey and New York. New York accounts for 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide. New York City alone accounts for more than a quarter of the deaths in the United States.
The New York situation is quite revealing. Trump is being blamed for the deaths from the virus (he’s a racist for suggesting that reporters take a look at China) and now he is social Darwinist extraordinaire for wanting to open up the country (so people can work and feed their families). At the same time, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who is opening up his state, is receiving very little media wrath. Quite the contrary. His state accounts for 40 percent of the deaths in the country and the media finds his CNN chats with his hypocrite brother, Chris, to be “just the thing we need.”
Sheltering in place is a First World luxury. It will come back to bite the affluent. But for the rest of the world, the lockdown is devastating now and will grow worse in the near future. “Hunger is already rising in the poorest parts of the world, where lockdowns and social distancing measures have erased incomes and put even basic food items out of reach.”
The article goes on: “The economic devastation the pandemic wreaks on the ultra-poor could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself.” I will tell you this now: it will kill more people than the virus. I have been saying this from the early days of the crisis (read my blog), as soon as it became clear that the those in charge of our lives and livelihoods were intent on carrying on with it for any longer than a short while.
Some folks couldn’t wait to share pictures of corpses and caskets to shame those of us who were concerned about the totality of policy effects. What about the corpses and caskets from starvation because the lockdown devastated the global economy? Are you eager to share those? I’m not.
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Finally, in local news, The Green Bay Press Gazette tells us “Why people shouldn’t skip regular health care due to the COVID-19 crisis.” I will cut to the chase. Hospitals across the country are experiencing too few customers. Between COVID-19 not panning out, the mass canceling of “elective” procedures and surgeries, the media frightening citizens away from seeking medical attention, and the government telling people not to leave their homes, profits for the medical-industrial complex are flagging and they are laying off staff. More importantly, the shareholders are sad. They need money so they don’t have to work. So don’t wait for a vaccine (except to send your kids back to school). Head down to your local hospital and get seen today by the veterans of the war against the invisible enemy.
“You’ve said many times that the US is doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing. Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you when every day Americans are losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases, every day?” asked Weijia Jiang, a CBS reporter.
CBS reporter Weijia Jiang leveraging her racial and ethnic identity on behalf of the globalist fraction of the corporate class
The president is a cheerleader for American success. He is trying to give Americans some hope that the nation is on top of the situation. It’s Trump’s modus operandi to be upbeat and patriotic. His attitude is in stark contrast to those in the establishment who are pessimistic and reflexively down on America. Trump’s optimism, which is characteristic of his business career, is interpreted in the frame of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a syndrome fueled by a grim view of American exceptionalism.
Trump responded calmly to an absurd question: “They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world and maybe that’s a question you should ask China—don’t ask me, ask China that question.” Trump has frequently deflected criticism of his presidency and the administration’s response to this crisis by pointing to China. Anybody who has watched only a handful of his press conference is well aware of Trump’s pivot-to-China strategy.
In back of Trump’s response is a frustration that the president and I share. Why aren’t reporters going after China? China failed to contain the virus and lied about and distorted the situation for weeks while the virus spread across the planet. The deaths in question should be laid at the doorstep of the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, indeed especially in light of China’s culpability, why is the press praising China’s response to the virus while treating criticisms of China as “racist” and “xenophobic”? Trump was responding to a pattern. His intent behind his question is obvious to an objective observer. But journalism is not objective. It’s partisan.
You see the pattern in conversations with people on social media. Recently, I was accused of pursuing a “yellow peril” narrative when I criticized the totalitarian regime of China for its actions. I pursue a critique of the Chinese Communist Party because, as a Marxist, I care about the working class generally and the proletarians of China in particular (since they’re the ones under the thumb of the CCP). The CCP as the embodiment of the Chinese people is a necessary assumption in order to make the claim that criticism of the CCP is racist—an assumption that is on the face of it absurd. Noam Chomsky was recently recorded pursuing this absurdity in an attack on populism. The tick emanates from the stealth Maoism that has long demented the Western left.
But don’t expect the media to explain that to you. They have an agenda. It just so happens that the reporter who asked the question is Chinese-American. Without hesitation, she leveraged her racial identity to fashion an opening for the media to once again push the narrative that the president is a racist. The charge is blindly accepted by the regressive left: a racist president at the helm of a racist nation obsessed with liberty.
Ms Jiang said to the President: “Why are you saying that to me—specifically—that I should ask China?” Her question was a rhetorical one, of course. Fleshed out it reads: “I am racially Asian and ethnically Chinese, how could you say such a thing to me? Because you’re a racist. Didn’t you call this the ‘China virus’?”
Reflect on this for a moment: “Why are you saying that to me—Specifically—that I should ask China?” Because you’re the one who asked the question?
The president responded with, “I’m not saying it specifically to anybody, I’m saying it to anybody that asks a nasty question.”
“That’s not a nasty question,” Ms Jiang stated.
But it is a nasty question. And Jiang exploiting her racial and ethnic identity to paint the president as a racist is just as nasty. I regret that it has be pointed out that there was nothing inherent in that answer that makes it racist, but in the present situation, I have to point that out, even if it means that I will be accused of supporting a racist president (I don’t support Trump, for the record). I’m making this point not only to defend the person who has been unjustly treated in this regard from the very beginning, whatever his flaws, but as an observer who is deeply concerned with the way in which the establishment uses race to polarize the American people in order to advance the managed decline of the American Republic and, more broadly, Western civilization. The goal of making this about race is all about delegitimizing a populist president in order to increase the likelihood that the establishment candidate (presently Joe Biden) will win the White House and the power elite who have been running down this country for decades will once again enjoy the power to push their globalist agenda, which includes empowering China culturally, economic, and politically.
Those who pursue this agenda have no shame. The utterly mediocre Brian Stelter at CNN said that “what we saw in that exchange with Weijia Jiang was something that has racial overtones. It’s racist to look at an Asian American White House correspondent and say, ‘Ask China.’” For Stelter and others the race of the person asking a question carries magical powers that transform a question that has nothing to do with race because Stelter and his ilk can only see people in racial terms. Jiang, a US citizen, is routinely identified as an “Asian American reporter.” When is a white reporter ever announced as a “European American reporter”? Answer: never.
Remember when the media took Trump’s “Some very find people on both sides” remark, made in the context of the Charlottesville situation in the summer of 2017, out of context to make it appear as if he supported white nationalism? Rosie Gray, of The Atlantic, a publication that recently lamented Western concern for personal liberty while praising China’s systematic violation of it, wrote at the time, “President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday.” In the case of Jiang, the media are making out Trump’s frustration at the failure of the media to hold China accountable for their actions to be anti-Chinese racism (the trilateralists pulled a similar trick during the 1970s-80s when Americans workers grew concerned over Japan’s unfair trading practices). They set him up for this up weeks ago by demanding that he talk about the virus in a way we have never before talked about virus, by avoiding reference to it by its origins.
Rank and file progressives are out of touch with reality. But the work they’re doing with their accusations of racism has a function, namely to marginalize those who raise questions about a totalitarian regime that the transnational elite counts among its partners in the global network of banks and corporations, a structure that is in its fundamental character set against the interests of working people.
Jiang is also female, which is also being leveraged against Trump. He’s a sexist. Indeed, Joe Biden must be elected president whether he pushes a staff member against a wall and forcibly inserts his fingers into her vagina because Trump is a sexist. That’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I remember as a kid that we said we were striving to overcome racism because it divided the people. But the establishment realized that dividing the people this way was too good of an idea to let it go. So they kept it going. The New Civil Rights is about keeping racial antagonisms going, leveraging them as a weapon to wield against ideological enemies. And Trump is the ideological enemy of the moment. But Trump is, of course, the face of populism in the moment. Populism must be stopped. That’s how somebody like Adam Schiff can persuade half of Congress to impeach and vote to remove the president. The people narrowly avoided the overturning of a fair and democratic election. They do not intend to allow four more years of this.
In his Farewell Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of a military industrial complex. He also warned us about big science.
In this farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower, two-term President of the United States, and Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force in the European theater in the great war against Fascism, said the following:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Many of you will recognize these words. Particularly those of you on the libertarian left who are concerned with the concentration of power in the military-industrial complex. Much as been made of them. However, less has been made of the words that immediately followed:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in its entirety
We have become Eisenhower’s worst fears. Enabled by progressivism, the technocracy has won. Science and technology are now concentrated in the hands of a vast corporate power, the media mouthpieces of this small network of corporations running interference by projecting an official scientific outlook while marginalizing those doing the important work in science: dissenting from doctrine.
Famously, albeit years late, and too partisan for my tastes, political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, described our situation as “inverted totalitarianism,” a managed and illiberal democracy, run by corporations, economic concerns trumping all other considerations.
Richard Grossman, director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, understood inverted totalitarianism as progressivism’s triumph over populism, the latter an attempt to bring power back to the people, to make government accountable to concerns closer to them. Grossman lay out his argument in several talks available on the Internet (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”). In his account, progressivism, its institutionalization totalized under the Roosevelt Administration in the crisis of depression and war, vanquished populism; or, more accurately, banished it to conservative circles, and with it labor democracy. This was the roots of the war on labor and the left Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pursued in earnest, laying the groundwork for the aggressive transnationalization of the corporate establishment, successive administrations moving farm and factory overseas and drawing cheap labor here to replace American workers, ceding national sovereignty to the international order of financial innovators. In a word, globalization.
As Grossman points out, not even the monarchs of feudalist and early capitalist period tolerated corporate power when it threaten sovereignty. Indeed, as Grossman tells us, corporations held power under absolutism, as well, but it was power delegated by the monarch. Corporations that exceeded their authority were called before the king to be reprimanded, the recalcitrant not dressed down but dismantled, their charters revoked. This is why Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the American Republic, said of banks and corporations that “the selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” His conclusion from the observation: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The “aristocracy of moneyed corporations” is an accurate description of power in the present-day state of affairs.
In theory, corporations are animals of the state. But, unlike their predecessors, states are now the servants of corporate power. Corporations have not only captured politics. They have captured science. And they relentlessly distort its assumptions, methods, and findings.
So we see a thing like the permanent-military complex come into existence in the post-WWII period, fully arrived in Eisenhower’s day. The trepidation in his words telling us that he didn’t see it coming or he was keen on convincing himself that its coming lay in the future. In the latter, he could then could wax noble in his farewell and warn of its coming, while absolving himself of the tyranny realized in his day, that emerged under his watch, masking his failure to stop it. Frankly, he looks haunted in that video.
Whether Eisenhower saw it in real time, C. Wright Mills saw it clearly in the moment. In The Causes of World War Three, written in 1959, he wrote:
The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as “functions” of a rational social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima—are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally—and absurdly—planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.
Weber might have written these words. Indeed, he did write these words in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905:
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage.But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.
Military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory…. organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suit-able methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production.On this basis, the American system of “scientific management” triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is robbed of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm though the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort
This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized.This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, analyses the situation of a man who was merely “doing his job” and “obeyed orders,” that he “obeyed the law.” The work covers the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962. Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, had tasked Eichmann with managing the logistics of transporting Jews from the ghettos to the extermination camps during the Judeocide. Eichmann carried his task forward with no inconsiderable success. His ambitions, Arendt argues, were more bureaucratic than ideological.
Noam Chomsky, author of the landmark Manufacturing Consent, put this well in his notorious debate with William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1969:
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
One of the benefits of listening to voices who see things clearly and see things coming is that they give us a perspective beyond the consciousness that blinds us to the enslaving structures that produce that consciousness. It may be the case that in a future world we won’t be able to see the reality in front of us. For many people, that world is the present one. Contemporary progressivism is a clinic in false consciousness. The scientific-industrial complex, its latest manifestation the medical-industrial complex, has become an ideological force shaping our worldview. It appears to be even more destructive than the military-industrial complex, which of course it includes, but taken on its own reasonably reassessed as a tick of American-style rationalization. The scientific-industrial complex has overtaken the world.
This essay is not about Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael. The men have been charged with murder and a court will likely hear the case. This essay is about the way a collection of moral entrepreneurs are plugging the shooting into a narrative they portrays contemporary America as a country where anti-black prejudice is ubiquitous. From that standpoint, Arbery’s death is not just the homicidal actions of two white men with guns in a pickup truck, but the result of a pervasive white supremacy that puts all black men at special risk for racist violence.
There was a time in our country where such a generalization would hold up under scrutiny. The literature on the history of racism and lynching in the United States is extensive. I have contributed to this literature in an essay published in The Journal of Black Studies, “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” and an empirical article in Crime, Law, & Social Change, “Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control: A Preliminary Investigation into Execution and Self-Help in the United States, 1930-1964.” I also blogged about this on Freedom and Reason, in the entry “Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.” But the narrative no longer holds up and I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ideological practice of selecting and amplifying events in ways that distort the relative risks black people face in America.
Before moving to a discussion of why the narrative is not only wrong but harmful to black Americans and the general interests of the American working class regardless of race, I want to clarify the matter of appropriate and inappropriate resort to abstraction. Race is a social invention constructed from ancestry. Racism is the ideology in which phenotypic or physically apparent variation are said to be meaningfully organized into groupings called “races.” Since there is no underlying biological truth to this claim, supposing race is a real thing commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or reification. However, aggregate statistics on demographic and behavioral characteristics can provide evidence for meaningful generalizations. Whereas it is inappropriate to substitute an abstraction, such as white person, for a concrete individual identified as white and attempt to make all whites responsible for that individual’s actions (there is no empirical basis for such a generalization), it is appropriate to look at the demographic patterns of crime and violence to determine the relative risk individuals with certain identities face. The progressive left elevates the inappropriate resort to generalization to the level of truth, while dismissing the appropriate use of abstraction as so much noise. This is emblematic of the postmodernist sensibility that underpins identity politics.
Let’s look at appropriate abstractions. Blacks constitute approximately 12 percent of the US population. Black males are less than half that percentage. Yet black males are responsible for more than half of all homicides that occur in the United States. The victims of black male homicide are overwhelmingly other black males. The intraracial character of crime is typical across several Index Crime categories identified in the Uniform Crime Report published by the FBI. While the UCR has been problematic in the past, it is accurate with respect to the most serious crimes. Moreover, overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime is also found in the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
These facts are not controversial in terms of their broad accuracy of representing actual phenomena. To the extent that there is interracial homicide, white people are more likely to be victimized by a black perpetrator than a black person is to be victimized by a white perpetrator. When it comes to robbery, to take another serious crime of violence, black males are much more likely to target white victims than the other way around. The brute fact is that black males are overrepresented in serious crime. Indeed, over half of all prisoners are violent offenders and their overrepresentation in our penitentiaries is explained by their overrepresentation in serious crime. (See “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.”)
In sum, the facts do not support the claim that the greatest risk to black males are white people. Quite the contrary.
Moreover, the statistics do not support the claim that black men are more likely to be killed by police officers than a white man, a particular narrative Arbery’s death is (inappropriately) being leveraged to sustain (social media is flooded with memes of this character). See the work of Roland Fryer’s 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” See also my entry on this topic which summarizes these and others findings: “Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.”
So while it is true that the police are more likely to interact with black civilians, as pointed out by Kevin App and colleagues in Pulled Over, in part because blacks are more likely to be engaged in activities that draw the attention of the police, police are loathe to shoot black males. What we are seeing presently in the moral panic about the shooting is not based on a legitimate resort to evidence, but the agenda of progressives trying to resurrect Black Lives Matter in an election year, for political purposes, a movement that was from the beginning based on a myth about interracial violence present-day America. Whites are being made out to be folk devils sui generis.
This agenda has been given a powerful voice in the figure of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a possible Vice-Presidential candidate to run alongside former Vice-President and long-time Senator Joe Biden (who has a troubled history with respect to race relations), who accuses President Donald Trump of using rhetoric that green-lights racists. Bottoms claims that the lynching of Arbery (and I will leave to one side conceptual quibbles about how lynching should be defined) can be traced back to Washington.
“With the rhetoric that we hear coming out of the White House,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union, “I think many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.” The connection between Trump’s rhetoric and Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael is a claim made without any evidence. I could not with any integrity pin this shooting on Trump. I suspect that he is as horrified by the video as the average person. But readers should note that Bottoms is in the same breath acknowledging that what happened to Arbery is so rare that it would likely not have happened without a Donald Trump presidency. Just leave out the bit about Donald Trump and Bottoms is on solid ground.
What Bottoms’ admission means is that those journalists who make this shooting out to be representative of race relations in America, especially those progressives who have taken to social media to once more raise the alarm about white privilege, are wrong to leverage such a horrific event in this way, even if the perpetrators acted with racist motive. This is not the America of the post-Reconstruction period. It is a very different America, an America where the risk to blacks by white racist violence is vanishingly small, extraordinary in its occurrence.
Indeed, the risk to blacks in America is far greater in the black community, where structural inequalities and cultural attitudes have disorganized society and made violent crime an ordinary fact of daily life. Rather than dealing with this reality, the progressive left, while skirting the problem of social class (which I will come to), reflexively strives to portray whites as the singular cause of the problems of the black community, a claim for which there is no evidence, wrenching out of context a rare event and misrepresenting it as a sign of an epidemic of white supremacist violence enabled by the original sin of white privilege. This claim has the character of theological truth, This is not our reality.
Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of the McMichaels is a terrible thing. The justice system is working as it should in bringing them up on charges of murder (although it may have hesitated when it shouldn’t have). But Arbery’s death cannot (or at least should not) be purposed in the way pundits, politicians, and progressive memes suggest. More than the inappropriate resort to generalization, to only care about the victims of homicidal violence when their perpetrators are white or police officers suggests a genuine lack of concern about the fate of black males in American society.
All this indicates that black homicide victims are only important when they can be used to perpetuate a political agenda that claims that the United States is a society that operates fundamentally on the basis of white supremacy, an objectively false narrative. And it must be pointed out that the exploitation of Arbery’s deaths for these purposes functions to further divide the proletariat by race, disorganizing the solidarity the working class so desperately needs in its struggle against capitalism. What lies ultimately at the heart of the urban violence that disproportionately harms black Americans is a social system that is inadequate to human rights and needs. Progressivisms appear to exist today only to disrupt our consciousness of this reality.
The divisive piece is why Joe Biden has taken up the agenda. His pandering has a grand purpose. Arbery’s shooting “resonates in so many ways across threads of our history into the present day,” he said at a virtual roundtable with black lawmakers, pulling the past too easily into the present. “By now many of us have seen that harrowing footage of Ahmaud Arbery out on a jog on a beautiful day in February in Florida, in Georgia, shot down in cold blood, essentially lynched before our very eyes, 2020 style.” It’s as if only the year has changed. Biden noted that the family deserved justice before adding: “But our nation deserves it as well. We need to reckon with this, this goes on. These vicious acts call to mind the darkest chapters of our history.”
“This goes on.” Let those words roll around in your brain. It does not go on. Those dark chapters are in our past. We have reckoned with this. Decades ago. To be sure, our history is undeniable to those prepared to admit to it (count me among them), but it is also undeniable that the supremacy of whiteness is not our present or our future. To make this murder out as an indictment of America not only sustains a false narrative about our country, it denies the progress we have made as a country. That we overcame white supremacy is a sign of what is right about the American project. Denying this accomplishment drives a wedge between the working people of this country on the basis of race, which, when you strip everything else away, is what racism was about in the first place.
As with the press conference with doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, California on April 24, 2020, Plandemic, a documentary about the COVID-19 hysteria, is being pummeled by the running dogs and useful idiots of the medial-industrial complex. As with the doctor’s press conference, YouTube (along with Facebook and other social media platforms) quickly moved to censor the documentary. While this blog entry, as was my blog entry on the Bakersfield doctors, is inspired by the media frenzy and social media action surrounding the documentary, I will not pursue here a defense of Plandemic. I simply cannot pursue that matter right now given other commitments. However, I will take this opportunity to make some points about how the rhetoric and status of science are used by corporate propagandists and their lackeys to discredit and marginalize those who raise objections to the medical-industrial complex.
This would be the case regardless of whether Plandemic was correct in whole or part. It was not unexpected that Plandemic would trigger pro-vaccine zealots. The memes and takedowns had to come fast and furious on social media. It’s a reflex. As some readers will surely already know, one of the targets of pro-vaccine zealotry has been lawyer and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The true believers go after him the same way industries across the spectrum went after Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson (remember how the chemical manufacturers came after her?), and anybody else who stood and stands up to corporate power and the corruption of conflict of interests. It doesn’t matter whether RFK, Jr. or Dr. Judy Mikovits, the research scientist featured prominently in Plandemic, is a crank. RFK, Jr. is routinely painted as an “antivaxer” even while he is pro-vaccine. “I am for vaccines,” RFK, Jr. said in an interview with Science. “I am pro-vaccine. I had all my kids vaccinated. I think vaccines save lives.” But if you don’t swallow hook, line, sinker the claim of the pharmaceutical oligopoly, then you are an “antivaxer” even when you vaccinate your own children. Just like if you question what chemicals we should inject into our environment and bodies and with what processes we manufacture these chemicals you suffer from a psychiatric disorder called “chemophobia.”
Why does the truth matter so little to these people? Because it is the demand that the medical-industrial complex change the way it does business that is at issue not vaccine safety. Vaccine safety doesn’t matter to the industry. They are protected from liability anyway (learn about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and its billions of payouts bankrolled by your tax dollars). What matters is the billions in profit vaccines generate. Its about the shareholders not the stakeholders. Given the number of viruses in the world, the sky is the limit in terms of large and sustainable profits for the investor class. So industry propagandists recode skepticism as paranoia. This is a standard method for shutting down critical thinking. This intervention has been most powerfully effective among progressives, who operate with a profound double consciousness concerning regulatory institutions such as the CDC and the FDA. On the one hand, we must uncritically accept their claims regarding pharmaceuticals, while acknowledging that the Washington establishment is beholden to the industries polluting land, air, and waters, what is called regulatory capture. Progressives are horrified by the FDA and USDA regulation of the meat industry, to take the obvious example. Pharmaceuticals? Meh.
So here we are with folks in a frenzy on social media admonishing us in the most strident terms imaginable to “trust science.” Be a good dog. Don’t spit in the fan. But, hell, a good scientist doesn’t even trust himself. That’s why a scientist never claims to have proven anything and why he gets up everyday trying to disprove his claims and the claims of others. Faith in science is why the history of science is littered with the corpses of stupid ideas—and the human and other victims of policies and practices based on those ideas (not to mention the research subjects upon whom those ideas were “established”). They never talk about how scientists as human beings are status and wealth seekers with massive egos, insatiable appetites, and destructive ambitions. They never talk about how industry pulls eager scientists into their money-making web, directs their research, and corrupts them.
Have you noticed that most of the people saying “trust science” are not scientists themselves? How they will mock those who also aren’t scientists for thinking they know science when they themselves are not scientifically literate but are absolutely sure they know which scientist is right? How they don’t usually even spend any time actually looking at the science in question? Rather they appeal to some authority who “confirms” their opinion, opinion generated by partisan ideological commitments. Or they just attack those whose claims do not align with their opinions with memes and ridiculous analogies, even when their targets are scientists. The “new skepticism” on the progressive left is not skepticism at all, but a mob who finds (more like fed) experts in support of their views and then promote them as if they represent the One True Science. Actual skeptics become conspiracy theorists, cranks, quacks, and wing nuts—like the person who might ask the Witchfynder General whether the Malleus Maleficarum is the best way of dealing with persons with disturbed psyches. Or, for that matter, whether the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is. Watch out for pitchforks and torches while they gaslight you.
If two groups of scientists make competing claims, who are you supposed to trust? Of course you go with the group of scientists who are saying what you wish to be true. Wrong. Confirmation bias. You educate yourself and study the science. Or you tell the truth: “I don’t know.” Or, even better, be honest and say, “I don’t care to know. I only care to believe this because it serves some agenda I may or may not know I serve.” Appeal to authority is not science. Experts make stupid claims—often claims that they don’t even believe. Take Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College (please!). This isn’t the first time this man has been spectacularly wrong. “But he is an expert!” Yeah, so were the monsters who performed lobotomies. Thanks for the global economic meltdown, Neil. Hope your trysts were satisfactory (I hope she or her family are not at risk from your COVID-19 infection).
The appeal to authority is a faith-based exercise. Cherry picking scientists you want to tell you to be afraid so you hide in your basement is like relying on clergy for doctrine and guidance. COVID-19 is like the devil. What does Donald Trump call it? “The invisible enemy”? Whatever we think we can trust in the world, the last trustworthy practice is that which is based in faith. Yet, after centuries of Enlightenment, people are treating science like religion. And since there are plainly different churches on the terrain of this picture of science, scientific debate becomes a sectarian affair. Each have their own clergy. But only one of them has the truth. And that is why the zealots want social media corporations to censor information. They have to smash the heretics. And they have the corporations and the assets class at their back.
So it is that you either you believe that the virus was the result of a person in eating an infected bat at a wet market in Wuhan China (the theory the Communist Party promotes) or you believe it was a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese government (which the Chinese Communist Party denies). Are these the only two options available?
We might as well just toss away the first option without much trouble. The first documented cases weren’t found in people eating bats. Bat-eating proles represent the Chinese Communist Party slagging the average Chinese person, whom they loathe (you do not deny people freedom if you love them). The authorities bleached the wet market in question so it’s not like you can falsify the claim anyway. It’s a stupid theory.
As for second option, why would the virus necessarily need to be created in a lab? Is it not possible that the biotech labs in Wuhan working with coronaviruses, in particular SARS type coronaviruses (this one is SARS-CoV-2, the successor of SARS-CoV), had an accident? Why, in 2018, were US science diplomats sent on repeated visits to the lab working on this reporting back to US State Department of serious problems with the work being conducted there, especially around safety? (State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses, The Washington Post.) Why would the chief researcher at the Wuhan Institute of VirologyWuhan, Shi Zhengli, tell Scientific America that, when the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention called her in to look at samples of the virus, she wondered, “Could they have come from our lab?” (“How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus.” She changed her story to say she knew it could not possibly have come from her lab.) Why would this researcher suspect the virus came from her lab if her lab wasn’t working with SARS-Cov viruses? Why would they call her in if they assumed that it was possible that it did? Why did the international community come together in 2014 to emplace a moratorium on gain-of-function research when it learned that researchers were altering potentially lethal viruses to become infectious in humans? And why would the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci at the heart of this research, announce in 2017 that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving, among other things, SARS coronavirus. (“Ban on gain-of-function studies ends,” The Lancet.) Is it troubling that Fauci is so sure that this virus did not come from a lab? Is it not true that the SARS-Cov virus from 2003 has on more than one occasion escaped containment and sickened individuals? All these questions are based not on conspiracy but on facts. All these questions are simply matters of record turned into questions. Does anybody really believe that the Chinese Communist Party intends to abide by international law? The CCP is the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi Party. They put people in concentration camps and harvest organs from prisoners and political enemies. It appears that blind trust in science begets blind truth in communists. But why is the United States taxpayer funding research in knowingly unsafe labs in China working with SARS viruses?
So how about a third option? All the evidence suggests that this came from a lab accident that the CCP tried to cover up, thus allowing the virus to escape China and infect the world. This is branded a “conspiracy theory.” Why is challenging the official narrative of the Chinese Communist Party and the scientists in their employ a conspiracy theory? (By the way, there are conspiracies and one can have theories about them. Ask any prosecutor who has works a criminal conspiracy case.) Whose side are people on? The people of the world, which includes the Chinese people, or the Chinese Communist Party?
As for Plandemic and the people asking how to stop it, you don’t stop it—you rebut it. And you do so in a sober and charitable manner. Like a good scientist. That’s the way things work in a free and open society. Totalitarian societies like China remove posts and videos. Free societies don’t. I understand why Forbes and other corporate state propaganda units push totalitarianism. Liberty is for them contingent on their interests. I know progressives admire China’s approach. For them, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is an instruction manual (sorry to be cliché). But this is America. Wave the freedom flag high. Trust the proles to figure it out. Stopping being such an elitist snob.
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freedom and reason 