freedom and reason

I’m sharing a talk I gave tonight at the event “What is Socialism?” held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The event was organized by the Critical Left.

It helps in answering the question “What is Socialism?” to compare it to what it will replace, namely capitalism. To introduce the distinction between capitalism and socialism, and make that distinction accessible, I reduce the respective political economic dynamics to the level of contrasting business firms.

Imagine a small company selling tables, each table has a $1000 price tag. Raw materials, equipment wear, energy costs, advertising, rent, and so forth comes to $200 per table. These are the constant (or fixed) capital inputs (or costs). The other $800 of the price comes from the value of labor expended, what in technical terms economists call value added. This is the variable capital component. It is termed “variable” because it adds more value that it takes to reproduce it, whereas constant capital is used up in production and only transfers the value contained in it. Out of it, $160 goes to the carpenter in wages. The working day is eight hours long, so the carpenter makes $20/hour. He makes a table per day. The remainder of the value added – $640 dollars – goes to the person who owns the company. Let’s say his name is Bob Fortner.

If Bob pays the carpenter the difference between what the table sells for and what it costs to reproduce the constant capital inputs, then Bob will have nothing at the end of the day. Bob is in business to make money. To make a profit, Bob must pay the carpenter less than the full amount of the value added in production. The larger the portion of value added is paid in wages, the less profit there is for Bob. Bob can reduce labor costs, and thus make more profit, either by paying lower wages or by increasing worker productivity. All this depends on Bob’s tables selling. Let’s assume that they are.

Let’s assume further that Bob employs ten carpenters and they produce ten tables/day. The daily constant capital inputs are $2,000. The daily variable capital costs are $1600. The value added by labor is $8,000. The company subtracts the $1600 a day in wages and banks $6,400 daily. By the end of the week, at $20/hour, each worker will have earned $800 in wages. The owner, earning $800/hour (what each worker makes in a day), will have earned $32,000 in the week. Annually, before taxes, the worker will have earned $41,600. However, Bob will have made $1,664,000 that year. By taking 75% of the value added in production, Bob makes 40 times what each worker makes in a year. Bob becomes a millionaire without making any tables.

Heres the math: Daily constant capital inputs: $2,000 = $200 X 10 tables. Daily variable capital inputs: $1600 = $160 X 10 tables. Daily value added: $8,000 = $800 X 10 tables. Daily surplus value: $6,400 = ($640 X 10 tables).

This is the basic premise of capitalism. The state and law protect Bob’s right to own a business in order to derive an unearned income from the labor of others, individuals who rent themselves to capitalists like Bob in order to obtain the resources they need to live. The prevailing ideology celebrates this arrangement as virtuous. Bob is a “risk taker,” a “job creator,” and the carpenters are expected to be grateful and industrious while he tells them what to do all day.

The capitalist scheme has some variability culturally and historically. In some societies/sectors, workers toil at the will of owners and accept the wages capitalists like Bob provide (it’s better than going hungry). In other societies/ sectors, workers have protections (e.g. no dismissal without cause) and can collectively bargain for wages and benefits (if there are unions). Such a society might even allow for popular elections and provide social welfare, universal healthcare, and public education to all its people. However much these improve the social situation, none of these features change the essence of the economic relationship: Bob appropriates the value of the carpenters’ labor.

Now, imagine a society in which the carpenters collectively own the company that produces the tables. The carpenters keep the value added in production, or $800 a day for each worker instead of the $160/day salary. At this rate, each worker will earn $208,000 a year, a salary that puts the carpenter in the top 2 percent of income earners in the state of Wisconsin.  This is the basic premise of a socialist society. Under these arrangements, the state and law protect and promote the carpenters’ right to collectively own the means of production and to derive their income from their labor efforts and prevent situations in which persons have to give up most of the value added in work to people like Bob who do not add value.

As with capitalism, the character of socialism is also variable. A socialist society might allow for popular elections, as well as provide for social welfare, universal healthcare, and public education. This is what would properly be termed “democratic socialism,” a term we are hearing quite a lot in the current political campaign (which I think it is misapplied in the case of Bernie Sanders, who is really a social democrat). Such a society may even decide to divide the social surplus among the population based on need rather than productive output, what Karl Marx called communism. However, a socialist society may instead be governed by an authoritarian state apparatus. Of course, authoritarianism is also a possibility in capitalist societies, and there are plenty of historical examples of authoritarian state capitalism, for example, Nazi Germany.

Since I am here to advocate, as well as define and explain, I want to note three possible benefits of socialism:

• Since control over the means of production is the locus of power that shapes other forms of power, a more equitable distribution of economic power carries with it the potential for deepening democratic culture.
• Whereas a capitalist uses labor-saving technology – robotics and automation – to generate more profits for a small number of families and enlarge the population of redundant and impoverished labor, a socialist might instead use labor-saving technology to reduce the amount of necessary labor performed by members of society, in turn using those productivity gains to create more free time for individuals, time that could be spent on friends and families and creative activities of their choosing.
• Capitalism’s imperative is to grow, and the more freely it is allowed the grow, the more destructive it is to humans and their environment. Tightly regulated capitalist countries, such as those in Scandinavia, have better living conditions and have a smaller ecological footprint than less well-regulated capitalist countries. However, production in the more democratic capitalist countries is still motivated by the growth imperative. By deepening democratic culture and raising the standard of living for everyone through the socialism I am describing, it is possible to devise systems of production based on renewable resources that sharply reduces our ecological footprint.

Okay, so let’s take the parable of the table-makers to the real economy. The Bureau Census routinely collects data on economic activity in the United States in its Survey of Manufacturers. If we take a look at the data from the manufacturing sector, we find that manufacturing workers earn on average $22.15/hour. That’s $886 a week or a before-tax annual income of $46,072. In 2014, the median family income in the United States was $53,657. A household earning the average manufacturing wage needs two income earners to have a chance of reaching the median household income. However, the hourly value added by a manufacturing worker is $151.50. This value is free and clear of the constant or fixed capital costs. Subtracting the wage paid to the worker, the surplus value is $129.35/hr. This means that the amount of value produced by the worker appropriated by capitalist firm is nearly six times greater than the wage the worker earns. Is it any wonder that the top wealthiest 1% of the US population possess 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80% can claim only 7%?

Now imagine if the manufacturing worker owned the firm collectively with her fellow workers and they were able to keep the full value of their labor. Assuming the averages that we have been discussing. Under these arrangements, each worker would earn $6,060 a week, or $315,120 a year. This would put them in the top 1% of wage earners. This is the truth that capitalists don’t want you to know or to act upon. Because if you did, it would surely bring an end to the gravy train they’re riding – at your expense. They’re living off your labor, comrade.

For those appealing to the religious freedom part of the US Constitution, a few reminders. Religion is specifically referenced in the US Constitution: “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That means that you can be President, dog catcher, whatever, if you believe in a god or gods—whichever god/s you believe in, it doesn’t matter—or if don’t believe in a god or gods at all. You can thank the founding fathers for this, as they were secularists who wanted to prevent the government from becoming an administration of religious doctrine.

Swearing on the Bible is a custom It is not a requirement. There’s no problem swearing on the Quran or a stack of law books or Spiderman comics. By definition, in the government’s eyes, you are a citizen of the republic first and a religious person second.

The First Amendment (found in the US Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution) refers specifically to religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” This means that, while you are free to exercise your religion (within reason), you are not free to use the public authority to establish religious institutions or further religious doctrines—and, in fact, the latter is circumscribed by the former.

In other words, you are free to set up an establishment of religion, but you cannot expect the government to respect that establishment, and that also means not everything your religion tells you to do is allowable. Is human sacrifice is part of your religious doctrine? Sorry. You are not being persecuted because the government will not protect your religious practice of ritual killing. Same goes for ritual rape. The same should go for mutilating the genitals of children, but clearly we have some work to do in areas.

So can we please get this straight? If you want to sit in a big elaborately decorated room listening to a man in a funny hat speak at you in Latin and put wafters on your tongue while incense smoke spirals around you, have at it, Hoss. But if you want the state to deny marriage to a lesbian couple because you think your holy book says that’s wrong, then you are living in the wrong country. You are certainly welcome here, but only if you follow the rules. And if you want to be president with the idea that you will impose religious doctrine on the public, then this is disqualifying.

Update (May 1, 2021): I have in subsequent blogs on Freedom and Reason walked back the argument made in this blog and the associated TruthOut op-ed published in 2016. I am pictured holding Mac Donald’s 2016 book, The War on Cops, which I should have read before writing my op-ed. In my defense, I was responding to her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Moreover, there was a string of research that came out after I wrote my op-ed that confirmed Mac Donald’s thesis (see links at the end of the paragraph). Nonetheless, the book is chockfull of statistics that anticipate that body of scholarly research and attention to her arguments would likely have at least moved me to write a more nuanced critique of her work. (See Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter; The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; “If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities.)

In her essay, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in The Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald writes that “fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths.” Citing The Washington Post database of police shootings, Mac Donald reports that “officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics and 258 blacks” in 2015. That means that 28 percent of those killed by the police in 2015 were Black. But blacks are only around 12 percent of the US population.

When Black Lives Matter (BLM) spokespersons say that black lives are at greater risk than white lives to be killed by the police, the evidence Mac Donald uses in her essay supports the movement’s claim. Demographically speaking, black Americans were more than twice as likely to be killed by the police than whites and Latinos combined in 2015. Yet Mac Donald concludes that black overrepresentation in police shootings is a myth. Moreover, Mac Donald’s lumping of whites and Latinos hides the disproportionate number of police shootings of Latinos compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Mac Donald next turns to the FBI’s 2014 homicide numbers to claim that the white and Latino victims of police shootings make up 12 percent of all white and Latino homicide deaths, a statistic that is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings. She claims that the lower proportion for black deaths is due to the significant black-on-black homicide rate. This is a red herring. The BLM protest is not about black-on-black crime, but about racial disparities in death by cop. Decrying black-on-black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.

Mac Donald attempts to justify police shootings by claiming that officers are killed by black people at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which black people are killed by police. She claims that 40 percent of assailants in cop killings are black. Mac Donald doesn’t specify a time frame, only that these are data the FBI has been collecting for some time. If we look at the FBI figures from 2014 (the latest available), which suits Mac Donald’s analysis better, we find that 22 percent of assailants were black.

That figure, while considerably lower than the figure she uses, still indicates overrepresentation of black Americans in the killing of cops. But what is this comparison supposed to tell us? Forty-two cops were killed by guns in 2015. Using Mac Donald’s percentage of 40 percent, that means 17 cops died at the hands of black assailants (almost twice as many as the FBI’s 2014 figure indicates). If the point is one of comparison, then the number of black people killed by police in the time frame Mac Donald is using is more than 15 times greater than the number of cops killed by black people (almost 30 times greater using the 2014 figures).

Finally, the statistic about white officers being less prone to threat misperception is yet another red herring. Again, BLM is primarily interested in the race of the victim, not the race of the perpetrator per se (although the movement does call for ethnic and racial proportionality in law enforcement to match neighborhood composition). Moreover, Mac Donald’s point rests on the false assumption that racially biased practices must necessarily match the race of the perpetrators. Black officers take up racially biased practices in training and expectation, racially biased practices that put black lives in danger.

“The Black Lives Matter movement has been stunningly successful in changing the subject from the realities of violent crime,” Mac Donald concludes her essay. But who is changing the subject?

As noted, the trend in the number of law enforcement fatalities is lower today than any time since the 1940s. This is due mainly to two facts: violent crime is at historic lows in the United States and gun control. This also means lower levels of fatalities from interpersonal violence generally. Gun ownership has declined sharply over the last half century. America is a much less violent place than it used to be – if by violence we mean civilian-on-civilian violence. 

Yet police killing of civilians is at historically high levels. The year 2015 wasn’t remarkable. In 2014, police killed more than a thousand civilians. For every civilians killed (by gun, vehicle, Taser, beating, suffocation etc.), there are hundreds more injured (brain damaged, paralyzed, traumatized) and thousands more left with their rights violated. The vast majority of victims of police brutality and homicide are unarmed civilians who are in principle innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and, in any case, have done nothing serious even if there is some underlying crime in the situation. They vast majority 0f civilians killed and injured represented no realistic threat to police. Many are elderly, disabled, and mentally ill persons.

Those of us who work in the field of criminal justice have recognized this problem for a long time. So have governments. And experts have long known the reasons this problem exists, persists, and has grown worse. Yet, even when they admit to the problem, governments won’t address the problem with any significant reform agenda. On the contrary, many governments are moving to make it easier to kill and maim civilians without consequence.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are paying out millions of dollars to victims who bring successful law suits against the police, while most other victims remain uncompensated for their injuries and their lost loved ones. Of course, nothing can replace the loss of somebody you love. But there must be accountability, and as long as the police are literally allowed to get away with murder and assault, then taxpayers will continue to bear the cost of an institution out of control.

The solutions to the problem are obvious (or should be): drastically reduce force levels (we have too many cops); end the war on drugs and public order offenses; end confrontational practices of broken windows, stop-and-frisk, checkpoints, and roadblocks; demilitarize the police (no more armored personnel carriers and tanks on our city streets); use SWAT only in live shooter situations; disarm most officers (including Tasers, which have killed hundreds of people and injured hundreds more); train officers in conflict resolution and peacemaking (soldiers are better at this than cops); have high standards in recruiting, keep those with low IQs or abnormal psych profiles off the force (policing it not a good space for bullies); Have every act of force by a police officer reviewed in the same way that any other act of force by any other citizen against another citizen is review; and end the practice of indoctrinating cops by showing them a video of a one-time situation in which a cop runs around in circles begging for his life while a right-wing gun fanatic shoots him multiple times.

“Our officers just want to go home their families.” So do we all. The vast majority of officers go home to their families and eventually retire (early) with their lives and their pensions intact.

See also: Changing the Subject from the Realities of Death by Cop, TruthOut, July 20, 2016.

Jacobin has published an interview with Deepa Kumar, an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University and the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. In the interview, titled “The Roots of Islamophobia,” Kumar says that interfaith dialogue is not enough (why even desire such a thing?) to marginalize Islamophobia. She calls on the left to “organize demonstrations, rallies, and other actions.” More than this, she calls on the left to develop a strategy that “addresses the root causes that make these. . . threats possible.”

What is the left being asked to do? Defend Muslims from discrimination? Or advance the cause of Islam?

Kumar’s relationship to the left ought to be strained after her rejection back in 2006 of the values of free speech and religious criticism in the Danish cartoons controversy. Opposing publication of the cartoons, in a Monthly Review article titled “Danish Cartoons: Racism has no Place on the Left,” Kumar complains about “the anemic response by the left in this country” to what she characterizes as “anti-Muslim racism.” She describes the “free speech” defense of “racist cartoons” and speech “condemning the protests against them” as “liberal cover for right-wing arguments.”

While Kumar is right to proclaim that racism has no place on the left, she is wrong to assume that the Danish cartoons are racist or have something to do with racism and, moreover, that European society is shot through with anti-Arab bigotry. The cartoons have no racist content. A Muslim is not a member of a racial category by virtue of his adherence to Islam; Muslims can be African, Asian, or European. The problem isn’t Arabs. The problem is ideology. Religion and culture are about ideas, not biology.

The cartoons are having a go at religion. In the West, that’s okay; every religious and political ideology is subject to criticism and even ridicule. Europeans have inherited the grand tradition of critical thinking that Karl Marx, in a letter to Arnold Ruge (in 1943), captures nicely: “if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” It’s one of the things that makes the West free and progressive. It’s a culture worth defending.

Kumar’s standard Marcusean new left formulation, that the equal-opportunity argument for ridiculing religious identity does not apply to “oppressed and disempowered people,” creates an illusion of Muslim victimhood. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. There are around 50 Muslim-majority countries, most of which run on sharia (Islamic law). And while Muslims are a minority in Europe, Europeans have been more than generous in allowing Muslims entry into their countries and providing them with public assistance, education, and housing – even passing laws punishing hate speech against Muslims and obscuring crime perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. All Europeans want – whether they say it or not (and many don’t for fear of being accused of bigotry) – is to be able to continue European culture, a culture that respects the rights of gays and women, enjoys a tradition of irreligious criticism, and possesses an irreverent sense of humor, traits conspicuously missing from Islam.

Piggy-backing off such terms as “Negrophobia,” “xenophobia,” and “homophobia,” those wielding the term “Islamophobia” mean to imply either that the speaker is mentally disturbed or that the concerns he has are unreasonable. It is an attempt to render the speaker and his speech illegitimate by suggesting that he is motivated by irrational fear and loathing of Muslims. Yet the evidence is clear that Islam is an oppressive ideology. It chains law and policy to a religious worldview. Its culture puts men over women, imposing upon the latter a regime of modesty and restricted movement. Its practitioners surgically alter the genitalia of children, persecute homosexuals, and push death for apostasy. Moreover, Islam is a religion, which by definition constitutes a system of false and alienated claims about the world. (Kumar would benefit from visiting Karl Marx’s withering critique of religion or any of Christopher Hitchens’ lectures on the subject.)

The question of whether fear and loathing of ideology is irrational depends on the character of the ideology and its effects. An audience of leftists would laugh out of the room any person who dared claim that fear and loathing of fascism was a mental disorder or an irrational position. Fascism is an ideology that, among other things, sees women as properly subordinated to men, homosexuals as degenerate, and demands the subordination of the individual to a totalitarian idea. Imagine antifascism described as “fascophobia.” Conscience obliges antifascism.

The term “Islamophobia” is designed to conflate Islam with those individuals who have either been indoctrinated or converted to Islam. But ideology and people are different things. The individual is the possessor of human rights, among these the right not to be punished for her beliefs. An ideology is not a person. It does not possess human rights. It cannot be discriminated against. It needs no protection. On the contrary, it needs confrontation. The effect of conflating ideology and people is obvious in this case: a weapon to smear those who speak out against Islam.

In her Jacobin interview, Kumar calls for “dismantling the institutional and structural foundations upon which Islamophobia is built.” She claims that “Islamophobia [is] integrated into the very fabric of US society because it serves to justify empire and the bloated national security state.” Every aspect of this claim is false or misleading.

Before Islamic terrorism became a problem, Americans were, for the most part, unconcerned about Muslims. Most of the Muslims they knew were either African Americans or white Arabs. In my childhood, Arabs were the heroes of our favorite films (such as in Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad movie series, steeped in Asian mythology). Lebanese and Syrian celebrities moved through our television and radio worlds without a prejudicial remark. In her talks on the “construction of Muslims as the enemy,” Kumar continually depicts Muslims as “brown men.” But this is not the way those of European and those of European descent have generally viewed Arabs.  The racialization of Arabs as “non-white” is a recent phenomenon – it goes hand-in-hand with the project to Islamize western sensibilities. Muslims are not, for the most part, being racialized by the general population or right-wing ideologues. The source of the racialization is coming from Islamic and leftist academic activists. In the era of diversity politics, they see value in recoding Arabs as non-white. It allows Muslims to leverage the rhetoric of “white privilege.”

It is not true that anti-Islamic sentiments are used to “justify empire and the bloated national security state.” In the wake of the attacks on the United States by Islamic terrorists, the leaders of national security state moved to disconnect in the public mind Islamic terrorism and the ideology that motivates it. They went all-out in an effort to disabuse the public of any notion that Islam was behind the attacks that killed thousands of people. President George Bush repeated incessantly the slogan that “Islam is a religion of peace.” Senator Hillary Clinton parroted the line, adding that Islam had nothing to do with terrorism. President Barack Obama repeated these lines, as well. If anything, terrorism was as perversion of Islam, he said. In the face of every “Allahu akbar,” US politicians and corporate media pundits shielded Islam from responsibility.

The emergent attitudes towards Muslims in the United States (and Europe) is not because of the ahistorical and propagandistic view that “Islamophobia is integrated into the very fabric of US society because it serves to justify empire,” but because secularism is integrated into the very fabric of US society (our country is founded on it). A strong commitment secularism preserves religious freedom and advances human dignity. It is the threat to liberalism and secularism by a large and aggressive religious power – one that sees the West as decadent and sinful and seeks to bend culture and law towards its own irrational ends – that makes westerners uneasy. It is the West’s experience with a belligerent Islam that is (finally) pulling from reluctant westerners recognition of the threat Islam poses to the continuation of western culture and the values of equality, liberty, and tolerance. The West resists Islamization (yet not vigorously enough) in the same way it resists Christianization (at least the way those on the left have resisted Christianization).

This reality leads us to the core problem with Kumar’s argument. If Islamophobia is opposition to Islam and Muslims, and if resistance to Islam is a reflection of the West’s dedication to liberal values, then “dismantling the institutional and structural foundations upon which Islamophobia is built” means, at the very least, weakening western commitment to secularism, free speech, and the separation of church and state. And that’s the point to all this.

Outrage over cartoons depicting Muhammad reflects the desire of fundamentalist Muslims to spread Islamic rules to the West. It’s not enough that Muslims don’t depict Muhammad in images, they demand that everybody practice this newfound obsession with Islamic aniconism. The victory of the Enlightenment in the West means that westerners do not have to live under blasphemy laws. Muslims and their allies can’t impose religious-based blasphemy rules on western society directly, so they sneak them in by claiming that criticism of their prophet is racist. They exploit the West’s flagging commitment to free speech and free thought and the neoliberal reordering of society that underpins its erosion.

The desire to punish people for expressing their opinions or for drawing cartoons is a deeply illiberal impulse, one that strikes at the core of our culture, a desire that Muslims are eager to enact using violence or the threat of violence. For Kumar and her ilk, Muslim belligerence is to be resolved not by punishing violence and demanding assimilation to western values, but by diminishing the West’s commitment to a free and open society. This view has no place on the left. It is an authoritarian vision.

What is particularly troubling about the project to silence irreligious criticism of Muslims in Europe is what those who advance this line really want. The propaganda term “Islamophobia” is part of a strategy to soften and suppress opposition to the Islamization of the West. It not only aims to punish speech critical of Islam, but to shame people into open displays of affection for an ideology that views women as inferior to men. In order to show they are not Islamophobic, western women don the hijab and express “solidarity” with Muslims. Populations are being conditioned to celebrate the normalcy of Islam. This is how Islamization worked in Muslim-majority countries. And this is how it will work in the West.

Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-i-Taliban, for speaking out about the practice of banning girls from school. In the Tehrik-i-Taliban interpretation of faith, speaking out in this way is speaking against Islam. For many Muslims, modern education, especially for girls, who are easily corrupted, is un-Islamic; not only is education believed to undermine Muslim identity, faith, and practice, but when Muhammad said Muslims have a religious duty to acquire knowledge, many Muslims interpret that to mean religious education only.

This is why it was surprising when Malala said the following: “The more you speak against Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists it will create.” Did she mean this to say that her own actions in speaking out against the Islamic belief that secular education is un-Islamic produced the terrorist action that nearly killed her? I would never think to blame the action taken against Malala on her willingness to speak out against oppressive Islamic practice. I encourage more Muslims to speak out against Islam in this way. To be fair, although I did not assume she was intentionally blaming herself for her own suffering, I suppose this could be an interpretation of her words. However, I took Malala’s words at their plain meaning, that is, as a threat. What I heard was a blame-the-victim frame: If you speak against Islam, the terrorism that follows will be your fault. 

The quote I provided was immediately followed by: “So it’s important that whatever politicians say, whatever media says, they should be really, really careful about it.” Far from changing the meaning of the first sentence, this second sentence doubles down on the threat. Watch what you say, be careful with your words, or the violence that follows will be on your head. That’s what I hear. To make sure we get the meaning of her words, Malala repeats the same argument. Then she says, “So it’s important that they try to show harmony towards Muslims and say that they’re accepted in this world.” Not only is Malala telling us that speaking against Islam will create more terrorism, but that not joining hands with Muslims and accepting Islam commits the same offense.

These are very troubling words. But I wonder about Malala’s state of mind. How could she not see the irony in telling us that we should not speak against Islam – that indeed we should embrace it – lest we suffer more terrorism when, at the very least, that logic suggests that she is responsible for the terrorism she suffered for daring to speak out against Islam? Can you imagine a racist telling you to lay off the criticism of white supremacy or else black people will suffer more? Can you see the contradiction? Can you see the threat? I certainly don’t accept that Malala is allowed to speak against Islam and I’m not.

Many progressives twist themselves into knots to deny what Malala told the world. I know they would sing a different tune if, on the grounds of deeply-held religious beliefs, a Christian extremist shot a Christian girl who survived to tell us that criticizing Christianity will cause more Christian extremism. We would say, rightly, that it’s sad that this young Christian woman is so deeply affected by her religious indoctrination that she would go on the road to tell her audiences that, in order to avoid what happened to her, others should not to speak against Christianity, that people needs to be very careful what they say about Christianity and Christians, and, moreover, that we should embrace Christianity. Malala has been picked as a spokesperson for human rights. But she is either being used or seeks to be a shill for Islam. 

As such, “modesty shaming” means to be the opposite of “slut shaming.” But it’s not really the opposite. The “virtue” of modesty reconstitutes women as sexualized beings (in contrast to sexual beings), a fact that must presuppose the act of covering the body to avoid shame. Hiding the body in this way is not merely reifying and amplifying an initial act of sexualization; by drawing attention to the sexualization of the body inherent in the act of covering it for this reason, the practice of modesty functions as a statement condemning immodesty, which by definition includes those who remain to some degree uncovered (the ultimate standard of modesty being to dress in a bag of some sort or to live in a box). 

Thus the cartoon that tries to accuse the West of hypocrisy by portraying a woman in a niqāb and a women in a bikini looking at each other with ethnocentric gazes, represented with thought bubbles containing statements condemning the manner of dress, creates a false equivalency. To be sure, the sexualization of women showing cleavage, in bikinis, or women with no clothing at all, is also the product of the patriarchal gaze; but this is not something given by the manner of dress, but rather something that resides in the sexualized eye of the beholder. A woman dressing in a way that displays the sexualized regions is refusing to be covered. The woman forced – by this we usually mean shamed – into covering herself (as we see even in the act of breastfeeding in public) by definition cannot or finds it very difficult to refuse the sexualization of her body from confining her freedom and self-expression. Moreover, to suppose both are the victims of patriarchal pressure is to suppose that all cultural systems are equally unfree. The woman in the burqa could not wear a bikini if she wanted to.

“The General Assembly…calls upon all Governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence….” (Measures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities and all other forms of totalitarian ideologies and practices based on apartheid, racial discrimination and racism, and the systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms)

The United States has failed in its duty to educate its youth about the essential character of moral commitment to fundamental human rights.

It is the essence of fascism to see moral action as primarily dependent on power and ambition. As such, fascism is the paradigm of moral relativity. Yet large portions of conservative and liberal communities also practice moral relativity. For them, determining whether something is right or wrong depends on what the goal (complicating the matter is false consciousness about whose interests are served by concrete policies). They do not really base their moral understanding on the “dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small and [the need] to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom….”

While fascism is not the only ideology that teaches people to disrespect international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms, it does seem to be the least hypocritical of the lot. We should end the hypocrisy by reaffirming the necessity of human rights and democracy to advancing human freedom and dedicating considerable time in our classrooms to the matter. And we must insist that our government adheres to a standard of conduct befitting these ideals.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.”

This quote, attributed to journalist H. L. Mencken, should immediately prompt a contentious person in a sufficient state of cognitive arousal to ask: What is the degree of morally uncertainty about genocide, rape, and slavery? Are those of us who are horrified by the sight of starving children culturally inferior? Are we uncivilized for objecting to this situation? Will we really make moral progress when we question whether it is truly wrong to starve children?

I must count myself among the uncivilized who cannot tolerate genocide, rape, and slavery. I cannot even bring my-culturally-inferior-self to be skeptical of the moral demand that we never fail to be intolerant of such things.

What is the source of H. L. Mencken’s view that civilized and culturally superior men must be uncertain of moral truths? The answer to this question is an easily discoverable and unambiguous one: Mencken was a committed social Darwinist. Like the sociopathic Ayn Rand of Atlas Shrugged fame, and any thoughtful fascist, Mencken believed that morality and democracy were tools that inferior men used to hold back superior men. For Mencken, what should determine right and wrong is the “will to live” (Schopenhauer’ notion which Mencken conflated with Nietzsche’s “will to power”), a judgment to which only a handful of superior men should be entitled – and perhaps will if a succession of supermen appear and save the world from democracy.

Pressing the philosophy of his idol Nietzsche into his own hyper-individualist and anti-democratic worldview, Mencken writes, “There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection – that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak.”

To preempt the convenient delusion that Mencken is expressing only a possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s views and not his own, one should recall that Mencken said on his own account: “The great problem ahead of the United States is that of reducing the high differential birthrate of the inferior orders, for example, the hillbillies of Appalachia, the gimme farmers of the Middle West, the lintheads of the South, and the Negroes. The prevailing political mountebanks have sought to put down a discussion of this as immoral: their aim has been to prosper and increase the unfit as much as possible, always at the expense of the fit. But this can’t go on forever, else we’ll have frank ochlocracy in America, and the progress of civilization will be halted altogether.” (For those unfamiliar with the term ochlocracy, it means “mob rule,” which is how Mencken viewed democracy.)

“Linthead” was Mencken’s favorite term to refer to southern textile workers, a reference to the fragments of fabrics that clung to their hair even after their always arduous and sometimes deadly day in the factory. It was hardly a term of endearment. Mencken said of Southern whites, “Only a rare linthead girl remains a virgin after the age of twelve. Her deflowering, in fact, is usually performed by her brothers, and if not by her brothers, then by her father. Incest is almost as common as fornication among these vermin, and no doubt it is largely responsible for their physical and mental deterioration.” Working people – to a civilized and cultural superior mind like Mencken’s – were inbred mentally retarded and physical deformed vermin.

He was hardly kinder to African Americans. On the contrary: “So long as we refrain, in the case of the negro loafer, from the measures of extermination we have adopted in the case of parasites further down the scale, we are being amply and even excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which makes constant war upon expediency and common sense.” To Mencken, black Americans were not as evolved as whites of his own social caste. “In any chance crowd of Southern Negroes one is bound to note individuals who resemble apes quite as much as they resemble Modern Man, and among the inferior tribes of Africa, say the Bushmen, they are predominant.”  

Is there any hope for black Americans? “I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

However much one might credit Mencken with having, along with Mark Twain and a handful of others, established a unique U.S. literary tradition (Mencken’s lasting claim to fame), uncivilized people cannot allow a man with such repugnant opinions (and I have here provided but a sampling of his vileness) to stand among those luminaries who are so easily quoted as if their words reflect some deep wisdom to be heralded or emulated. Mencken was an antidemocratic, antisemitic, classist, negrophobic snob. So crude was the man that Dorothy Parker, having come to Baltimore with great interest in its literary scene, was compelled to leave Mencken’s presence when he turned to his pastime of making derogatory racial remarks. 

We should likewise be compelled to leave the presence of the myth of Mencken’s greatness. His legacy should instead serve as an example of how even moral degenerates can possess a knack for phrase-turning.

Tim Groseclose’s methodology is an ideological contrivance (Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind). Consequently, his results are unsound. For example, Groseclose categorizes the right-wing pro-military RAND Corporation as liberal. This begs the question: what does that word “liberal” mean?

If we grant the classification, then just about everything to the left of RAND is liberal. It will follow that journalists more often cite liberal sources than conservative ones. In other words, Groseclose’s measure is designed to find liberal bias. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And not a very clever one.

Here’s another example of squirrelly methodology: Using Groseclose’s criteria, we can rank the American Civil Liberties Union as conservative, with the National Rifle Association as only slightly more conservative. Self-evidently, this is a useless metric.

The statistic given that 93 percent of Washington DC reporters vote Democratic may be correct, but meaningless in light of the way institutions actually work. Journalists are workers. Like most workers, managers and owners dictate their work, designing the product and telling them when and in what amount to make it.

In the media, the managers are editors. Editors control the hiring of reporters and the news that is reported. Studies consistently find that the editors’ bias in these matters reflect the sensibilities of the owners and advertisers (see Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality to learn more about this).

But the 93 percent figure is misleading. What studies consistently find is that roughly 40 percent of journalists across the nation describe themselves as being liberal (around 30 percent describing themselves as just “a little to the left”), which means that 60 percent describe themselves as “middle of the road” or leaning towards the political right. Groseclose not only leaves out the political character of journalists across the country as determined by scientific polling, but he uses Washington DC journalists to illustrate a general media bias. This is a choice driven by ideology.

Even if we were to suppose that party loyalty represented actual bias (a case of the prisoners running the prison), the claim of a left-wing bias on account of support for Democrats is misleading because the claim assumes, first, that the Democratic Party represents a left-wing politics and, second, that liberalism is a left-wing philosophy. If the Democratic Party is a center right political organization, and if liberalism is a center-right political philosophy, then 100 percent of journalists can vote Democratic and self-identify as liberal and there will be zero left-wing bias in the media—unless the editors and owners are leftists, which would be an absurdity in a capitalist society.

Socialism is an example of a left-wing political philosophy. Support for the social democratic Green Party would indicate left-of-center orientation. What was the degree of attention given to the Green Party by the corporate media during the last election? Slightly greater than zero? What mainstream journalists are socialists? I cannot think of any, but a handful would hardly prove the claim.

What scientific studies of media bias generally find is that journalists, while relatively liberal on social policies, are significantly to the right of the public on domestic economic and foreign policy issues. Why? Because this is a capitalist society. There is no mainstream left-wing journalism in the United States. Claims of left-wing bias is rhetoric designed to dissimulate right-wing corporate power.

Groseclose doesn’t hide his right wing ideology very well. Consider his prediction that eliminating left-wing media bias (by which he must mean social liberalism) would shift the political spectrum to the right. Obviously he desires that collective American thought move from right-of-center to far right. He also admits that the corporate media is an effective tool of thought control.

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Van Jones has never denied, indeed he has always been quite open about the fact that he, like a lot of young Americans, tried out various ideologies during his early political development before settling on his current pro-capitalist stance. A number of influential conservatives began their political lives as Marxists (a fact conservatives never seem to find troubling). David Horowitz, a favorite among conservatives, is a case in point.

However, the claim that the mainstream media did not cover the Jones scandal is false. I recently performed a search of LexisNexis (a database of all major media) and it returned more than sixty hits on the story. To be sure, the mainstream media didn’t dwell on it like rightwing radio, but they covered it extensively.

For the sake of accuracy, we should note that Groseclose’s desire to red-bait Jones overwhelms any obligation to get the controversy right. What Jones actually resigned over was for having called Republicans “assholes” and for having signed a petition calling for an investigation into 9-11, complaints that hardly seem resignation worthy.

For the record, Van Jones’ comments regarding environmental racism are well-founded. Blacks tend to live in poor parts of the city, and elites do in fact steer land fills and other toxic repositories away from their neighborhoods and into the poorer neighborhoods, which disproportionately affect blacks. As a consequence, the impact of environmental pollution is substantially greater in the majority black neighborhoods than in majority white neighborhoods. This is true for a range of social facts, from how food is distributed to how the police operate.

* * *

The video uses a standard trick typical of conservative anti-tax rhetoric. The pie chart shows the percentage of income taxes paid by the rich as a proportion of all taxpayers. If the rich have more money as a result of a tax cut, then they will pay a greater proportion of the income taxes by virtue of having a greater share of the income.

By every measure, the Bush tax cuts benefited the wealthy more than other classes. They also wiped out the largest budget surplus in history. Combined with military spending, this resulted in a massive fiscal deficit. Who finances the national debt? Rich people. Who collects the interest?

I expect most mainstream media outlets refrained from reporting this “fact” because the corporate media tries, for the most part, to appear objective and fact-minded. To present a meaningless chart would be self-discrediting. However, plenty of guests interviewed by the mainstream media made the spirit of this argument and their hosts did not object. Conservatives did the same thing during the Reagan years. It’s not a new story.

As for debt creation, this is intentional on the part of Republicans. It’s called “starving the beast.” By ramping up the debt, they can then justify cutting social programs for ordinary people. It’s part of the neoliberal privatization scheme. Does the “left-wing” media dwell on this? Not at all. Mainstream media is largely supportive of the privatization of everything. Why? Because they also are mega-corporations that benefit from the extraction of public wealth.

* * *

I have to say something about the source of the video. Groseclose is a real professor (of Economics at George Mason University) but Prager University is not a real university. It’s a right-wing propaganda site run by conservative Dennis Prager.

Among the secular leftists Prager says are conspiring to undermine America’s alleged Judeo-Christian foundations are labor unions, which have almost disappeared from the American scene, the ACLU, a libertarian organization defending the Constitution from authoritarian state policy, and civil rights organizations, that is, those organized groups of oppressed minorities trying to make America a more just country. 

We find a useful instance of Prager’s bigotry in his demand that authorities prevent Keith Ellison from swearing his oath to office on the Quran, the Muslim holy book. Such a remark should lead conservatives to wonder how committed Prager is to the US Constitution. (The Constitution states: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”)

In defending his position, Prager claimed that every president since Washington took the oath on the Bible. This is a false claim. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, did not swear his oath on the Bible when assuming office in 1901. John Quincy Adams also did not swear his oath on the Bible when he assumed office in 1925 (he used a law book). In fact, there is no hard evidence that any president from John Adams to John Tyler used a Bible.

Christian bigots are going after our homosexual brothers and sisters with renewed vigor. The forces of acceptance, love, and justice really need our liberal and progressive Christians friends to step up and stand with us against the hatred and intolerance in their ranks. They have to show the courage they showed against the racist bigots who spoke for Christianity in the past.

Some of you are old enough to recall that Christian bigots made the same arguments against race mixing. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix,” said Judge Leon M. Bazile on January 6, 1959. US Senator Theodore Bilbo wrote in 1946: “Purity of race is a gift of God…. And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God,” he said.

I could continue for quite a while sharing quotes about how race mixing is un-Christian. But you are familiar with the arguments. Growing up, we all heard – and some of you, sadly, and hopefully regretfully, uttered – the same self-serving rhetoric against interracial marriage. I heard it from Christians all the time. “Andy, I got nothing against black people, in fact, some of my best friends are black, but the practice of interracial marriage is against God’s and natural law. It’s just wrong. But I still love everybody.” No, you really don’t. Racist bigotry in Christianity is still alive.

However, the Bible cannot legitimately be used to justify sexist bigotry any more than it can be used to justify racist bigotry. The Bible cannot be the moral and ethical guide for society. The Bible declares slavery to be a moral right and prescribes the rules by which one man can own another (Exodus 21:2-11,20-21; Leviticus 25:44-46). The Bible declares honor killing to be a moral right and prescribes the rules by which a father can murder his daughter (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). God of the Bible instructs his followers to perpetrate genocide (Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:6, 13:15, Joshua 6:21, 10:40; 1 Samuel 15:2-3) and rape (Deuteronomy 20:10-14; Judges 21:10-24; Numbers 31:7-18). All decent people condemn these terrible acts and commandments.

It is the moral duty of all Christians, if they truly bring the love they claim to bear, to reject the bigotry and hatred and terrorism of the scripture and work together with people of other faiths, and of no faith at all, to advance the universal humanist values that will finally bring us together in beloved community. Tolerance is not enough. We all must accept our brothers and sisters if we really mean to get away from irrational hate. We have to condemn bigotry. And, Christians, it would be most helpful if that condemnation occurred in your spheres of influence.