Former President Donald Trump has taken to warning Americans that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His poll numbers in free-fall, his opponent Joe Biden, the man whose policies have seen millions of foreigners pouring across the souther border of the United States, is alleging that Trump lifted the phrase from Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, Hitler uses terms like “blood poisoning” and “blood pollution” to promote the idea of racial purity, arguing that racial intermixing, particularly between Aryan and non-Aryan races, would lead to the degradation of the Aryan race.
The controversy, which is having some trouble findings its legs, comes with the Supreme Court of Colorado, in a 4-3 vote (all of the dissenting justices in the Colorado court’s decision were Democrat appointees, for the record), exploiting the Fourteenth Amendment as a pretext for removing Trump from that state’s 2024 presidential ballot. This action is being used by corporate state propagandists to raise the specter of the Confederacy alongside the specter of National Socialism.
Leading presidential candidate Donald Trump
Whether they know it or not, the fallacy of reductio ad Hitlerum embarrasses those who use it. The confusion over the literal and the metaphorical is obvious and deliberate. The question of whether something is fascist or not is not a line in a book or in a speech by Hitler. The question of whether something is an instantiation of fascism or nazism is a political-economic determination. Questions to be asked: Is this social formation a belligerent form of corporatism, e.g., the corporate state resorting to lawfare to disqualify political actors it doesn’t want interfering with the establishment agenda? Are citizens punished for their utterances and compelled to act in bad faith by using speech aligning with a particular ideological line? Are street-level subalterns being mobilized by corporate state actors to intimidate and terrorize groups the establishment seeks to silence? Are the organs of the administrative state issuing decrees and mandates that bypass the democratic process and violate civil liberties and rights? Is the security state apparatus engaged in surveillance and harassment of citizens? If these things are present, then the corporate state has arguably moved from its soft corporatist character to a hard corporatism associated with fascism. In the current period, all these things are manifest.
What is not fascism is the desire by citizens and their leaders to defend national integrity. There’s nothing fascist about defending the republic, its national borders and its cultural traditions, which are the bases for having a functional and integral nation-state. Most European countries (most countries around the world, in fact) reckon citizenship through ancestry, literally using the Latin phrase for “right by blood.” The American principle of jus soli, i.e, citizenship by virtue of having been born in a territory, is, in it unrestricted form, unique to the hemisphere. If European countries are fascist (and many of these countries increasing are), it’s not because of jus sanguinis, but because of the political-economic character of the system. There’s nothing racist about recognizing that governments exist for a people, i.e., citizens who share a language, a culture, and a heritage. Ancestry is not race. Ethnicity is not race. Nation is not race. The Japanese are not racist because they wish to keep Japan Japanese. Etcetera.
The multiculturalists (or cultural pluralists) who accuse patriots of “fascism,” “nativism,” “racism,” and “xenophobia” are hard at work undermining social and national integrity in a decades-long project to culturally and politically disorganize the people in order to deconstruct the free republic and reintegrate depoliticized civilians in a global order of things. The slurs all reduce to “witch,” the accusation here being that the patriot is a heretic in the eyes of a religion progressives, i.e., those advancing the transnationalist agenda, have assumed for all of us. It’s the same trick being played with gender ideology, a project designed to disrupt intuitive and ordinary understandings of natural history. Gas lighting is a trick authoritarians play. You know them by their actions not their speech acts. They don’t seek deliberative democratic input on decisions that affect everybody because they know the people will resist. So they colonize the institutions, implement policies, create a web of assumption, and then target individuals for marginalization and cancellation when they bear witness and resist. If any one thing that is the chief characteristic of fascism—and it’s not coming the patriots who have put Trump at the top of the polls. It’s coming from the progressives who are doing everything they can to eliminate Trump as a possibility.
Whenever one leans into something, it behooves them to consider all the while whether the day will come when they will regret having done so. I went from supporting affirmative action to being skeptical of it before realizing it’s a bad idea. The skepticism piece is the key part of the step. Sometimes you come back to where you were. Sometimes you find yourself on the other side of things.
DEI (AI generated)
However, even when I supported affirmative action, I opposed quota systems either explicit or implicit. DEI is an instantiation of an implicit quota system. But it’s worse than that. DEI is a system of tokenism, where members of various tribes, inherited and inescapable or invented and stepped into, are selected to sit on the court of power to achieve a type of hegemony characteristic of imperial regimes. Because individuals are picked as tokens, aptitude and talent are neglected and mediocrity results. That’s the practical effect of diversity. In principle, diversity is antithetical to the ethic of individualism, which is the core of any free society. Diversity in inimical to individualism because it subsumes concrete persons into abstract groups.
Equity has its place, such as in the recognition that treating men and women equally requires recognizing that there are group differences (e.g., sports), but as a euphemism for equality of outcome, it has no place in a free society. See Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s “Harrison Bergeron” for a dramatic illustration of the problem. The quick version: mediocrity (again). Inclusion of identities, real or made up, demands not only the exclusion of certain opinions but submission to politics and ideologies that individuals may not support. In other words, inclusion is characteristic of authoritarian and illiberal desire. Compelled speech is a good useful example. While proper nouns are arbitrary, pronouns indicate real things.
In local news, on Wednesday, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents changed its stance on DEI, approving a previously rejected deal on diversity positions and salary increases with an 11-6 vote. Just four days earlier, the board had turned down the same deal but succumbed to political and financial pressures, ultimately accepting the agreement facilitated by UW System President Jay Rothman and Assembly Speaker Republican Robin Vos. Amy Bogost, the board vice president, emphasized the significant challenges confronting the universities as a driving force behind the decision. Three members, including Regent President Karen Walsh and UW-Parkside student Regent Jennifer Staton, altered their votes in favor of the agreement.
“You can attempt to justify it, that these roles are going to be reallocated or we’re going to improve the system in the future,” Regent Evan Brenkus said before his colleagues flip flopped. “But the truth is this: You are selling our minorities out for millions of dollars.” Many of my colleagues agree with Regent Brenkus. But there’s no selling out of minorities here. This was a compromise (which doesn’t go nearly far enough in eliminating DEI) that will allow some relief from the group-based politics and policies pushed by the Democratic Party. Vos expressed my sentiments when he said, “It’s a shame they’ve denied employees their raises and the almost $1 billion investment that would have been made across the UW system, all so they could continue their ideological campaign to force students to believe only one viewpoint is acceptable on campus.” To be sure, the Regents came around, but let’s not forget how progressives feel about that matter. Without Republicans willing to stand on principle, this madness continues unabated.
We all know what this is about. The professional-managerial class is determined to quash attempts to open the system to viewpoint diversity and restore equality in the system. They’re so committed to woke progressive ideology that they were prepared to deny workers in the system a much needed raise in the face of Bidenomics. It’s frustrating to be forced to suffer on account of ideology. My salary was being held hostage to crackpot ideas. By relenting, 800 million dollars is now available for employee salary increases and construction projects. As part of the agreement, 43 diversity positions across campuses will undergo restructuring, and the overall job count within the UW System will remain unchanged until 2026.
Like I said, that doesn’t go nearly far enough. The Republican position was moderate to a fault. DEI should be uprooted entirely from higher education. There is no place in public colleges and universities for identitarian politics. No faculty position should be based on any ideological or political considerations. What needs to happen is the emplacement of a recruiting system that prevents the discrimination of applicants based on viewpoint. The reason why the college and universities are so woke is in part because administrators and faculty screen applicants based on politics. Another big piece is that conservatives do not feel anthropology, sociology, etc., are welcoming to their political leanings, and so they avoid those fields. They’re right. So, woke in, woke out.
SHOCK: 79% of Americans between 18-24 believe that "white people are oppressors" and that this ideology should be "favored today at universities and for employment."
Here you can see how woke education has fucked up young Americans. Rufo has highlighted the 18-24 category. Nearly 80 percent of this cohort think white people are oppressors and should be passed over for opportunities in education and occupation. Look also at the 25-34 cohort. There it’s split. That’s bad enough. Taken together, tens of millions of Americans believe something that is empirically false and destructive to equality and freedom. Moreover, as we have seen, this ideology induces acts of harassment, intimidation, and violence against whites, especially Jews, and Asians. It is also associated with widespread mental illness and self-harm, on which the medical-industrial complex is all too eager to capitalize (literally).
This is no accident. This is the work of DEI. DEI is an anti-American/anti-Western project to disorganize the proletariat and prepare our youth for incorporation in the corporate state regime as dutiful subalterns, either professional-managerial types or docile bodies. DEI does this not only by turning non-whites against whites (and so-called white-adjacents) but by turning whites against themselves. It’s a project to engender in successive generations loathing of self and society.
DEI benefits the ruling elite and the professional-managerial class that operates the levers of corporate power, i.e., the administrative state and technocratic apparatus. This is the soft fascism of progressive corporatism and neoliberalism, what Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism,” which is rapidly deteriorating into the hard fascism of the police state, the instruments for which have already been emplaced. The Democratic Party is the operational tip of the project’s political-ideological spear.
Have you seen the comparison I share below? It’s meant to imply that there is an equivalency between Jews and Nazis. In the bottom photo, taken during World War II, Jews stand before a trench awaiting extrajudicial execution. This is a moment in the Judeocide, an event that saw the extermination of millions of Jews by Nazis and their allies. The top photo shows Palestinians who have been captured by Israel soldiers in the ongoing war between the state of Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas (and allied terrorist groups). The captives are not kneeling before a trench. They will not be executed. They will be taken to a detention facility and processed. There they will be fed, given clean water, and receive medical attention. Eventually, they will face an orderly judicial process.
An Internet meme
Bad analogies are always in season, but this one isn’t merely bad, it’s dishonest. You might think it unnecessary to debunk the crude lie implied by this comparison, such an obvious piece of antisemitic propaganda, but intelligent people are sharing this image and they don’t think it’s antisemitic. They will tell you that there is a difference between antisemitism and criticisms of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and what they claim is the larger project, a white settler project called Zionism, i.e., the colonization of Palestine by European Jewry.
This kind of humiliation will not be forgotten. At what point were these people supposed to love Israel? If someone did this to you or a loved one, what would be your reaction? Stop occupying them!! Taking away people's dignity like this will drive forever hatred and forever war. https://t.co/RGcKU2Wa0f
The word “humiliation” is being heard quite a bit from the antisemitic left (if we can even characterize woke progressivism is left). But it’s hard to avoid humiliation when you’re a prisoner of war and suffer the consequences that come with the choices you made. You lost the battle and were captured. Captured Nazis were also humiliated. Even worse, perhaps you surrendered; you’re supposed to go down fighting. Your chance to be martyred gone, you will soon face justice for your crimes against humanity.
Members of the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades wearing bomb vests during a ceremony in the town of Jenin, West Bank, to commemorate Palestinians martyred by Israeli security forces during months in 2021.
But why are they stripped to their waist? That’s not obvious? The original fascists didn’t routinely wear bomb vests and explosive belts, so it’s hard to find images of Nazis stripped down to their torsos. This wasn’t done to humiliate the prisoners in Gaza; it was done for the protection of the soldiers who have taken them captive. Why does the IDF share these pictures? To show the progress the Israeli military is making in neutralizing the threat to their countrymen. It’s the propagandist on the other side who misrepresents the situation the images convey.
There’s no rational justification for Hamas action. There is no rational justification for standing with Hamas. Hamas is a death cult. At best, there is only unexamined Jew-hatred. Even among some Jews, tragically. It’s an obvious point, I know, but even intelligent people are made stupid by ideology.
Emotions are running high. I’m aware that susceptibility to this sort of propaganda is great. So always keep in mind October 7, when sharia supremacists, clerical fascists, carried out a pogrom against Jews as part of a project to eliminate Jews in the region, a project with a long history (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). That is what the chants of “intifada” are all about. Basem Naim, former Palestinian minister of health and a member of the political bureau of Hamas, said, “The battle was fought and won on 7 October. That marked a strategic victory for the Palestinian people on the path to liberation, despite the high costs we have paid and will continue to pay on this journey.”
7 October marked a strategic victory on the path to liberation, despite the high costs we have paid and will continue to pay on this journey. https://t.co/4perxL9Nql
Know that Hamas actions are taken in the furtherance of a goal whose analog is Nazism. Hamas are not liberators. They are not freedom fighters. They are today’s Nazis. They seek totalitarian ends. And now they are prisoners of war. Good riddance to them.
Here’s an honest historical comparison, slit trenches in the genocide against the Jews and the American Indian.
As human beings, all prisoners of war deserve mercy. As fascists, they gave up any hope of enjoying the respect of decent people. May they be treated humanely and receive the justice due them. I will drink tonight to their capture and the crushing of the Party of God. May reason and civilization and the forces that defend human decency prevail over the forces of barbarism. This is an existential war. Understand this. It’s in moments like this that the enemies of freedom and reason make themselves known. They are among us.
Stripped down terrorists in Gaza is not a sign of genocide. Photos of Nazis standing naked Jews before slit trenches is. Stripping Hamas terrorists is a rational and standard step that must be taken when dealing with people who have no concern for human life, not even their own. These are the worst human beings on the planet—perhaps in history. They raped their captives before executing them. They burn alive in their cars civilians attempting to escape them. The analogy is not between Jews and Nazis; it’s between Muslims and Nazis. The war waged on the civilized world by this deranged ideology is waged on one side by people who were either found or made sociopathic. Those on the other side, the Jews, are once more facing the evil force of antisemitism.
I leave you with a voice of reason:
"Friends, Islam is truly evil. The so-called Prophet Muhammad raped a young girl and gave slave girls to his henchmen. Islam is violence, hatred and barbarism by nature. It is incompatible with freedom”, says Netherlands' next PM Geert Wilders. pic.twitter.com/r21B0TKWW9
“Blacks can’t be racist because as a group that have no institutional power.” This is also known as the “myth of reserve racism.” You’ve heard these assertions before I’m sure. The first formulation often comes with a caveat: blacks who deviate from the acceptable narrative about black suffering are the racist agents of white supremacy. Many years ago I accepted the premise of these assertions and even rehearsed them in public (see Why Black People Can’t Be Racist … At Least Not Against Whites). You can find that in some of my earliest blog essays the logic of this statement underpins the arguments. This logic remains fundamental to the post civil rights rhetoric of woke progressivism.
Stokely Carmichael speaking at a Black Power rally
Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, a major player in the Black Power movement, is believed to have coined the term “institutional racism” in the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published in 1967. The book was coauthored with Charles Hamilton, professor of political science at Columbia University. Patricia Bidol introduced the formulation racism = power + privilege in her book The Black Woman’s Manifesto, published in 1970. These works argued that racism involves both prejudice and the power to enforce prejudice through institutional means.
The conceptualization emphasizes the structural and systemic aspects of racism, which requires a specialized theory to detect, which would arrive in its mature form as critical race theory (CRT). The theory posits that racism is not only about individual attitudes or biases but also about the ability of a particular racial group to enforce those attitudes through institutional power. In this view, members of historically marginalized groups, especially black people, may hold prejudiced views, but they lack the systemic power to enforce those views on a broad scale, therefore they cannot be racist (at least against whites).
What I didn’t realize when I was younger is that Black Power propaganda was taken up by rich and poor alike to (a) justify positive discrimination against whites and those considered white-adjacent (East Asians) and (b) rationalize crime and violence against whites, a category that includes Jews (but strangely not Arabs, who are also white), as well as East Asians. The concept of “positive discrimination” is a gloss for such practices as affirmative action, designated “positive” because these practices allegedly represent a good kind of discrimination. If institutional racism has any meaning, then, it’s manifest in the practice of positive discrimination and the assumption of white privilege (which is a fallacy).
These ideas have been taken up by corporate power to assemble a loyal court of “victims” from many tribes (the soul of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI), at the same time disorder the proletariat by dissimulating class power in the rhetoric of racism, sowing division among working people.
This is the New Racism. The New Racism works much the same way as the old racism and its function is the same with only the direction of hate and resentment reversed. It’s no surprise, then, that the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow would be the party of the New Racism. I’m talking about the Democratic Party, of course. The corporate and professional-managerial classes recognize the role of racism in maintaining capitalist hegemony over the working class. After the success of Civil Rights in the 1960s, racism was rejiggered and respecified.
Rutgers Professor Brittney Cooper says that white people are evil villains and need to be “taken out”
Cooper has a university press book, so an obvious question is: who writes her books for her? It could be that the University of Illinois Press gave her a pass in light of her race and politics. I will never know.
The truth is that blacks can be and often are racist. Many of you didn’t need me to tell you that. We see this in the black-on-white violence and the looting of white-owned stores that are daily occurrences in America, their frequency sharply increasing thanks to anti-racist politics. Anti-white prejudice has been internalized by many whites who go to great lengths to make their racial self-loathing in public spaces visible and shareable on social media. Seeing video of white progressives kissing the boots of black men in public is a disturbing sight. But that ritual practice of the Woke Church is only one signal that Western Civilization is in crisis.
Palestinian Hamas militants are seen during a military show in the Bani Suheila district on July 20, 2017 in Gaza City, Gaza.
In the new racial conceptions, racial self-loathing extends to an embrace of an especially pernicious political ideology that despises the West and seeks its destruction, namely the sharia supremacy of the clerical fascists. Polls are finding Holocaust denial, a form of antisemitism rampant in the Muslim world, more common among Democrats than other groups, especially the young. This is the fruit of postcolonial studies and the reductive oppressor-oppressed paradigm.
In this paradigm, the successful examples young people should be modeling are decried as the colonizer. Because Jews are an exceptional ethnic group, they’re the paradigm instantiation of oppressor/colonizer. Because the left has no critique of capitalism anymore, having been trained to see the world through the lens of race (and other social constructs), it was inevitable that we would arrive at a point where the myth of systemic racism (at least in the way the left thinks it works) would include the Party of God, the main reason hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims live in shit-hole countries.
There is a particular kind of racism in history, the racism associated with national socialism, or Nazism, that denies Jews their whiteness. Whiteness is used here in the racial sense, as in caucasian. As I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason, there are reckoned on basis of population genetics a handful of racial categories, only five likely, these determined by constellations of phenotypic traits revealed by factor analysis, albeit intuitively known for centuries. The caucasian race is distributed across Europe, Middle East and North Africa (MENAs or Arabs), and into the Indian subcontinent (e.g., Persians).
Supporters of Hamas gather at Harvard shortly after the terrorist group massacred and kidnapped Jews and others in Israel.
Within this vast geographical area lie numerous ethnic groups that have in the development of the modern world become nation states. Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, is one of them. Nazis race science conflated ethnicity and race, seeing a myriad of racial groups in the myriad of ethnicities. Race theorists for the regime then endeavored to organize that myriad into a hierarchical system that placed ethnic Germans at the top of the ladder, with Jews located towards the bottom rungs. All along the truth was that Jews were as racially white as the ethic German. Both are caucasian. As we can understand, Nazis science was corrupted by ideology.
In June of 2019, I wrote a very lengthy (and frankly rather prescient) piece on the matter titled Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation. In the epigraphs that often adorn my posts, this one, by David Bernstein, law professor at the George Mason University and contributor to the legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, appeared at the top of that analysis: “Note that this does not mean that the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Arabs, and so on didn’t face discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority and occasionally even violence. They did. But historically, they were also considered white.” This quote was drawn from Bernstein’s essay “Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on,” published in the Washington Post on March 2017.
Bernstein is right. It was always understood in the United States that Jews were white. The distribution Jews faced in America was not on account of racial distinction but because Jews were confronted by a Christian majority. Jews were never under the rules of Jim Crow. Nor did the rules applied to black Americans apply to any ethnicity from the geographical regions described in the previous paragraph (Asian populations are a different story). Bernstein stresses that such historical facts exposes the distortions of ideologically-driven academic literature and political rhetoric. Indeed. With this as a departure point, my June 2019 essay explored the emerging trend among Jews questioning their whiteness, with some deploying a rhetoric suggesting that Jews had never been white. We are seeing in the streets of cities and towns across the trans-Atlantic space confirmation of Jewish concern over their status in Western society. No longer outsiders, they are included in oppressor class.
I noted in June 2019 that, given political developments, “the pariah status of whiteness has produced some curious effects.” I provided several examples. One of them was Seth Frantzman, writing for The Jerusalem Post, December 2018 (“Now they call us ‘White Jews’”), he cautioned his readers about the whitening of Jews. Tagging it the “new American antisemitism,” he warned of a “creeping hatred” towards Jews. “The labeling of Jews as ‘white’ and debates on how to ‘treat Jews,’” he said, “is a form of dehumanizing rhetoric designed to force Jewish people into a binary of ‘white/non-white’ that is currently trendy in US discussions.” He continued: “The new toxic discussion taking place primarily in the United States is designed to label Jews as ‘white supremacists.’” Despite conflating qualitatively different categories of things—ethnicity, race, and religion—, Frantzman had put his finger on something.
Fast forward to today. Those young Americans and Europeans out on the streets calling for the elimination of the Jews from their homeland see as the racialized minority the Muslim, the follower of a religion founded by another white people, the Arabs, the actual majority in the region where Jews have for millennia made their home. The actual minority in the region, the Jew, driven from Arab lands, seven million living in a space one-fifth the size of the state of Kentucky, becomes a colonizer in his own land. In the strange alchemy of social justice, Jews become the bad guys. Antisemitism finds its dissimulation in the jargon of post-colonial ideology. Frantzman’s concerns were warranted.
Venture capitalist David Sacks, appearing on the All-In Podcast (see above for full episode), tells us that in the aftermath of recent events, a growing number of Jewish individuals are recognizing a sense of disconnect from the political left (as the mainstream defines left). He anticipates that a significant portion of the Jewish community will shift towards the right, aligning themselves with the Republican Party—an alignment Sacks has personally maintained for some time.
There are several reasons Jews have historically supported the Democratic Party. The community has longstanding ties to social movements, including the civil rights movement, that have shaped the cultural and historical connections that influence contemporary political preferences. Jewish values often emphasize social justice and compassion, aligning Jews with Democrats on issues such as the environment, healthcare, and income inequality. Concerns about discrimination have led many Jews to support the party that, at least ostensibly, emphasizes inclusivity and equal rights. Higher levels of education and urbanization, common among Jewish Americans, are associated with Democratic Party support, as well.
Sacks notes that, over the past few decades, there has been a notable shift within the civil rights movement and the left, marked by the emergence of woke ideology, which emphasizes identity groups over colorblindness. Rather than bridging racial differences, this ideology accentuates them, manifesting in an equity agenda characterized by the redistribution of resources among different racial groups. This dynamic generates division and resentment.
Many Jews had not fully acknowledged the transformation of the left in this direction, perhaps stemming from the belief that, under this woke paradigm, Jews would naturally be considered a victim group. However, a realization is dawning that, within the framework of this ideology, Jews are perceived simply as white individuals with a Jewish background, making them members of the oppressor class. Many within the Jewish community, Sacks contends, are awakening to the realization that this ideology becomes destructive by casting Jews as adversaries.
Sacks tells his audience that, under these circumstances, it’s expected that a considerable number of Jewish individuals will reevaluate their political allegiances. A shift towards the right seems to be underway, he suggests, as more Jewish individuals become attuned to the evolving landscape of political ideologies. It’s hard to listen to Bari Weiss’ moving speech addressing the Federalist Society and not hear a collective voice in her words and her passion.
But the problem isn’t that Jews are white. It will not do to abandon Christians to the woke mob and escaping into a self-serving reracialization. As the great sociologists have pointed out, geniuses as grand and different as Karl Marx and Max Weber, practical Jewish life is realized in the Christian world with the rise of Protestantism. It is this historic development that makes possible capitalism and the Enlightenment and the incorporation of Jews fully into Western society. In contrast, Islam has no capacity for the emancipation of religion from the state—it’s fated to be a totalitarian ideology. And Jews are white in any case. Social constructionism has its limitations. Rather, the problem is woke progressivism and its antipathy to equality, individualism, liberty, and republicanism.
.@DavidSacks: "You're gonna see in the wake of this is that a lot of Jewish people are realizing that they don't have a home on the left anymore. And I expect that many Jews are going to start shifting right into the Republican Party, to a place where I've been for a while….… pic.twitter.com/71Vq6cHWZZ
Recently, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman raised the profile of this issue by going after the presidents of Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania for applying a double standard with respect to speech codes. Ackman has focused on the disparity between Harvard’s commitment to free expression and its ranking in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) free speech rankings. He notes that faculty members there have expressed concerns about a perceived narrowing of acceptable speech and self-censorship on campus. They confirm the existence of a perspective that associates whiteness at Harvard with oppression, normalizing hostility towards Israel and Jews. The Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (ODEIB) focuses on colonialism, denials of indigenous rights, and racism, which cases whites as oppressors. There are claims of discrimination against straight white males, Asians, and individuals of Indian origin in the hiring process.
I am proud to lead a bipartisan letter with @RepMoskowitz and 72 of our colleagues to the members of the Governing Boards of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn demanding that their presidents be removed after this week's @EdWorkforceCmte hearing.
This brings me to Emma Green’s 2016 Atlantic article penned a month after Donald Trump shocked the pollsters and won the presidency of the United States, defeating the establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. The article was titled simply “Are Jews White?” The subtitle is telling: “Trump’s election has reopened questions that have long seemed settled in America—including the acceptability of open discrimination against minority groups.” In the piece, Green goes after Steve Bannon, who she accuses of shilling for white nationalism, feeding an alt-right troll army engaged in antisemitism (i.e., shit-posting). Green noted that progressive groups were eager to mount a rebellion and Trumpism, and that Jews, three-quarters of whom voted for Hillary Clinton, believing that Trump won largely on account of racism and white supremacy, were eager to join in. However, some of the groups Jews sought allyship with had “singled out particular Jews for their collusion with oppressive power.” Green sense the approach storm before most did.
“These are rough sketches of two camps, concentrated at the margins of US political culture,” Green surmised. “On the extreme right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?” The suggestion that the political right in the United States sees Jews as “impure” and “faux-white” is wrong. One might object that she is talking about the extreme right. But she is lumping Trump and Bannon in with that tendency. Trump is a liberal New York businessman adored by the cultural and political elite until he sought the presidency. Bannon is hardly the fascist and antisemite she thinks he is. It is the progressive left that fulfills Green’s worst dreams. This is the crow that images a white-majority establishment seeking to dominate racialized minorities. Moreover, how does any of this raise the question “Are Jews white?” Asserting that Jews do not fit neatly into American racial categories, despite admitting that “[f]rom the earliest days of the American republic, Jews were technically considered white, at least in a legal sense,” the rest of Green’s essay involves rehearsing the debunked thesis that Jews, like many European ethnic groups, underwent a process of “becoming white.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, who is seeking the nomination to be the presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 2024, writes, “Yesterday, Van Jones called me a ‘demagogue’ for discussing the Great Replacement Theory. Well, here are Van’s words in 2021: ‘The request from the racial justice left: we want the white majority to go from being a majority to being a minority and like it. That’s a tough request, and change is hard.’” Van Jones says a lot more. Here is the video Ramaswamy shared:
Yesterday, Van Jones called me a “demagogue” for discussing the Great Replacement Theory. Well, here are Van’s words in 2021: “The request from the racial justice left: we want the white majority to go from being a majority to being a minority and like it. That’s a tough request,… pic.twitter.com/yPRvJ2VCUa
If Republicans in Congress were serious about addressing antisemitism, they would've voted for my resolution to condemn the white supremacist, antisemitic Great Replacement Theory. They aren't serious about addressing these issues and they aren't serious about governing. pic.twitter.com/UVCnL8zEF1
The Great Replacement Theory isn’t a theory. It’s a project. Elites have admitted it. They didn’t need to admit it, of course; motive is always determined by fact pattern (criminals lie). The millions flooding into Western societies with no demand to assimilate to Western culture confirmed the motive before Van Jones did (see The Progressive Politics of Mass Immigration; Biden’s Policy is Open Borders). However, elites working to diminish the white majority in North America and Europe—and this includes members of parties that appear oppositional to the casual observer—have never been bashful about their plans. As I have shown Freedom and Reason, a major piece of the plan was announced more than one hundred years ago (see An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion). Those who pursue this end cannot dissimulate the project by attaching the smear of antisemitism and white supremacy to those who speak the truth. Not now. Not ultimately. There is nothing intrinsically Jewish about the replacement project. Indeed, as we have seen, Jews are one of the groups targeted by the replacement project (see Frantz Fanon and the Regressive Ethics of the Wretched: Rationalizing Envy and Resentment—and Violent Praxis; Why the Woke Hate the West; Woke Progressivism and the Party of God). I will be blogging more about why the Jews are targeted by the progressive left this weekend.
AI crudely sketches the transnational corporate order
Let’s see what we see, shall we? The great replacement is an elite project to disrupt cultural integrity in the West in order to disintegrate the respective national proletariats of the trans-Atlantic space and reintegrate denationalized proletarians in a global system of transnational corporate control. Again, this is not a Jewish project. To be sure, Horace Kallen was a Jew. And, yes, George Soros is a Jew (never forget the way the elite went after Elon Musk for being critical of the tendency Soros represents; see Magneto, Soros, and Musk; more generally, George Soros and the Cudgel of Antisemitism). But then ask yourself, Is Klaus Schwab Jewish? For the record, Schwab is Swiss. He was raised a Catholic. Academic, media, and political elites really do think we’re stupid. They depend on you not knowing what’s going on, which should be incentive enough to get you looking into things. (See If We Allow This, We are Over. See also George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism.)
Progressive elites don’t really care about ethnicity and race except where they can weaponize it against the Enlightenment and Western Civilization. That’s what all this postcolonial gibberish is about. This is why such crackpot notions as poststructuralism and postmodernism and every nonsense theory that flows from them (gender identity theory aka queer theory, critical race theory, etc.) have colonized and corrupted our institutions (The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism). This is why a consequentialist frame of truth has replaced the ontological one, with the hierarchy of power in back of left identitarianism assumed. This is why BLM and Queers for Palestine. This is what underpins the color revolution of 2020 and the coming color revolution of 2024—already underway in 2023! None of this is accidental.
The world capitalist economy has long been in force. This was inevitable for reasons Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (the criterion-related validity of which can no longer be reasonably questioned). The step being completed now is national dissolution and universalizing of a global legal and political structure under which all workers will be ruled undemocratically and without liberal freedoms—and those displaced and replaced by machines and other rationalizations managed by the custodial state. (See The Globalist Project: The Managed Decline of the Modern Nation-State and the Rise of Corporate State Tyranny. However, I discuss this in several essays on this blog, some of which I have cited above.) Though what brought us here feels inevitable, the end game is not. But the People have to move with haste to stop it.
Changing the culture of the West is vital to the replacement project, a project determined to preserve the wealth of the few as capitalism in its corporatist phase, what Ernest Mandel described in the early 1970s as “late capitalism.” Mandal describes in his landmark Late Capitalism the ascendance of multinational corporations (MNCs, or TNCs) in the global economy, transcending national borders and reshaping economic relations, analyzing the pivotal role of finance capital, its integration with industrial and commercial capital, the deepening relationship between the state and the economy, with state intervention (regulatory measures, fiscal policies, etc.) becomes a defining feature, these directed by capitalist elites (control dissimulated in neoliberal rhetoric). Mandel scrutinizes the impact of technological advancements on the capitalist mode of production documenting their transformative effects on labor and productivity (see my own Physical Capital, Human Capital, Technology, and Productive Work—These Drive the Real Economy). The inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies in capitalism become ever more pronounced in late capitalism.
This explains the anti-Western sentiment and authoritarian and truly imperialist character of progressivism and social democracy across the trans-Atlantic space. This is why Western Civilization is reduced to whiteness and condemned for its success (see The Myth of White Culture). Elites are delegitimizing the modern nation-state. They are delegitimizing democratic-republicanism and classical liberalism. Their aim is totalitarian control over all the earth. Democrats are the tip of the spear for the American wing of the project. This is why operatives like Van Jones, Jamaal Bowman, and Joe Biden work so hard (and with Biden that must be hard work) to confuse the public by projecting the ethnicism and racism inherent in left identitarianism onto others—then brag about it while admitting the end goal. They have said it out loud: they want whites to be a minority across North America and in Europe. This is why whites (which includes Jews and Asians, the latter labeled “white-adjacent”) are demonized by today’s left. In order to diminish the relative proportion of an ethnic or racial group in a population, a crucial step is to make them out to be the bad guys, to dehumanize them. If they’re the bad guys, then you can replace them with the good guys (Muslims, for example). Who determines who the good guys are tells us who is pulling the levers of power (hint: it’s not the Jews).
25 year old Muslim man engaged to a 10 year old girl.
To drive home the point, according to queer theory, the eleven-year-old girl is a sexual being—was long before this, perhaps around the age of three—and knows what she wants. This is why “Queers for Palestine” does not strike the woke progressive as an odd slogan. From his standpoint, it isn’t odd at all. He shares the same ideas with respect to children as the man in the video, a widespread sentiment in this culture; children are to be controlled by the adults who seek to exploit them. These are the ideas that are borne by the culture bearers flooding the trans-Atlantic space. But they’re also ideas that find a source in Western paraphilias. There’s a reason why Michel Foucault wrote approvingly of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (see Foucauldian Seductions: Busty Lemieux and the Hijab; Since it is Not Possible to Change the Soul, the Body Must be Changed—Manifestations of Clerical Fascism; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). The Western elite is inviting the barbarians inside the city walls and defending them against the People who would safeguard children against the evil expressed here. And the elite find their foot soldiers in street-level expressions like Trantifa. This is just one element of the culture war being waged against the People.
“In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1948)
To be sure, the left loves to call their political enemies “fascists” and “Nazis.” But they don’t spend any time talking about Adolf Hitler’s theories or spreading fear about “Hitlerism.” This is because Hitler’s work was the work of a hack. High in emotional intelligence, as sociopaths tend to be, Hitler’s writing is ordinary and his theories crackpot. But the political right works overtime to spread fear about Marxism. This is because Karl Marx’s work is chockfull of profound sociological insights and his theories enjoy considerable criterion-related validity. Marx is to social thought what Darwin is to natural history, or Einstein is to physics. This is why Marx is taught in college classrooms, while Hitler’s writings are unnecessary to consider. The fact that Marxism is recognized as a legitimate scientific endeavor drives right wing ideologues up the wall. And so everything left of center becomes “socialist”—and everything socialist, “Marxist.”
The obsession with Marx doesn’t mean that his right wing critics spend anytime reading his work. Jordan Peterson, an educated man, in preparing for his debate with Slavoj Zizek back in 2019, skimmed The Communist Manifesto. Before and beyond that, by his own admission, he had never bothered to read any Marx at all. Yet he feigned to talk about Marxist thought as if he had given it the attention he’d given Carl Jung or Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. But, to his credit, that’s more Marx than most other right-wing critics have read. Most people attribute to Marx things other right-wing thinkers say, especially the influential intellectual dark web (IDW). So, when Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a 2015 video that surfaced in June that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists,” she had for America’s right wing made clear the movement’s ideological foundation. But it’s not true. Cullors and her associated are adherents to critical race theory. Now queer theorists are held up by right-wingers (some left-wingers, too) as Marxists for wanting to “abolish the family.” This is not true, either.
The importance of reading the corpus of Marx’s writings, as well as developing a good understanding of the work of Hegel and other relevant thinkers, is illustrated by the misreading of Marx’s fourth thesis on Feuerbach, a document he penned in 1845. There Marx writes, “Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.” Many think that Marx is calling for the abolition of the family. See, for example Richard Weikart’s essay “Marx, Engels, and the Abolition of the Family,” published in a 1994 issue of the History of European Ideas. (Weikart is the Intelligent Design advocate who blamed Darwin for the Holocaust.)
But Marx isn’t talking about the family at all in that passage. He is using the term as a metaphor. Marx is critiquing traditional philosophical approaches, most immediately that of Ludwig Feuerbach, who, according to Marx, stops at the contemplation of the material world without moving on to practical, transformative action. In the quoted sentence, Marx is expressing the idea that once we understand that the “holy family,” which represents the abstract and idealistic philosophy, i.e., ideology, is, in reality, rooted in the “earthly family,” i.e., the actual material conditions and social relations, we must go beyond mere theoretical understanding. The phrase “the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice” is Marx calling for a radical transformation of both theoretical and practical conditions. Put another way, the “earthly family” refers to actual social and material relationships among individuals, while the “holy family” represents the philosophical abstractions that have historically been detached from these real-world conditions. Marx is arguing for a dynamic and revolutionary approach that goes beyond contemplation and necessitates a transformation of both our understanding (theory) and the concrete social structures (practice). The goal is to move from understanding the world to actively changing it. He even says in the final thesis (thesis eleven): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” How embarrassing for Professor Weikart!
Where does this idea that Marxists advocate for the abolition of the family come from? What did Marx and Engels have to say about the family? Michèle Barrett, in her entry “Family” in the encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxist Thought, tells readers that “Marx himself did not develop an analysis of the family independently of that produced by Engels, and indeed the evidence suggests that his own conception of the family was naturalistic and uncritical.” She notes that The Communist Manifesto calls for the “abolition of the family,” but that this has often been interpreted as a call to replace the bourgeois family with a proletarian, socialist one, usually assumed to be based on heterosexual serial monogamy. Even if there are errors in Barrett’s entry (and there are—Marx had quite a lot to say about the subject and the polemic referenced is more subtle than the suppose consensus), there’s nothing there to support the claim that Marx and Engels call for the abolition of the family—or turn children over to the state, the warning that typically follows. If we cannot find support for the vulgar anti-socialism of the political right in an entry in Tom Bottomore’s definitive dictionary of Marxist thought, then perhaps we can find it elsewhere.
Karl Marx, the founder of the Materialist Conception of History
This is the matter I wish to take up in this essay, which is a continuation of my on-going exposé on postmodernist-corrupted ideology of the left, showing once more that gender ideology and elements of the academic and popular progressive agenda bears no resemblance to the materialist conception of history found in Marxism, but is instead an expression of a quasi-religious development commonly called “Wokism.” Wokism is not Marxist; it is the popular cultural and ideological expression of corporatism and managerialism under late capitalism. What feeds the culture and ideology is the nihilistic tribalism of poststructuralist/postmodernist and identitarian ideas and politics. These and other reactionary philosophies provide the source of queer theory (see Foucault), post-colonial studies (see Said), and all the rest of it—that is, the anti-Enlightenment and anti-Western movement currently threatening democratic-republicanism and liberal arrangements (see (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism; Why the Woke Hate the West). In academia and corporate boardrooms, woke manifests as soft fascism (speech codes, DEI, etc.; see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). On the streets, the fascism is quite a bit harder (Antifa, BLM, the Party of God; see The Woke-Islam Alliance and the Threat to Secularism; Woke Progressivism and the Party of God). Marxists loathe all of this. Moreover, where’s the class struggle? The alleged left today talks about everything but social class. References to capitalism are at best code for cisgendered white supremacy. As I recently clarified in a back-and-forth on X (Twitter): “Marxists are not the problem. It’s the people running struggle sessions at your workplace and marching around with ‘Queers for Palestine’ banners that ought to worry you,” before adding: “And corporate control over culture and information.”
I am moved to write this essay because of an Internet exchange. The day before yesterday I made a comment (which I will come to in a moment) vis-a-vis Karlyn Borysenko’s freakout on my X (Twitter) timeline yesterday (which was spectacular). Borysenko is an organizational psychologist who runs consulting business and wrote a book called Zen Your Work. I followed her on X (Twitter) because I had caught her on an August 2020 episode of Triggernometry “Anti-Racism Training Doesn’t Work” and found her interesting. She was saying many of the things I had been blogging about. I even referenced the episode in a September 2020 blog essay The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What You Think. In my comment to account (I had never commented there before), I merely clarified the Marxist position on the gender binary; Borysenko badly garbled the position in a question to a Marxist-turned-libertarian professor appearing on her Discord server. She blew up and blocked me and another user. To be sure, Borysenko’s personality borders on pathological narcissism (something I picked up from her Discord server), but the speed with which she went from zero to hyperventilating surprised me—that is until I realized that my intervention undermined her grift. An Internet acquaintance explained this to me (the one she blocked): she can’t have somebody who has read and understands Marx coming between her and her audience. It helped me understand why, despite closing her discussion with Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin on Triggernometry with telling them that her central concern is the addiction to anger that marks the social justice movement, she would blow a gasket over a benign comment.
For context, in the comment I will share in a moment, I’m responding to comments implying that what I’m arguing is correct but then go on to say that this isn’t what today’s Marxists believe and therefore my point is irrelevant. “Why are we arguing over things men who died a long time ago said” was the general sentiment. By today’s Marxists, the crowd means adherents to queer theory, crackpots with whom I strongly disagree; as I will explain in a forthcoming essay on Freedom and Reason, elaborating arguments I have already made, queer theory is the result of postmodernism and sexology, deeply problematical projects that stand in opposition to Marxism with respect to the gender binary and the theorization/fate of the family. Indeed, the conflation of Marxism and queer theory is among the most vulgar of right-wing conceits about left wing politics.
So here’s my comment (it was to one user, but addressing several of them): “Thanks for recognizing I’m right about Marx and Engels. But it’s not just them. There’s a long history with historical materialism. However, for you and others desperate to avoid reworking the ‘critique’ you’ve been handed, pretending queers are Marxists because it fits your narrative is dishonest and self-deluding. To be sure, queers (not the slur for gays and lesbians, but adherents to gender ideology and the anarchist praxis of transgression) want to abolish the family. This is because they want to get at children. Marxists seek the abolition of capitalism because it’s destructive to working class families and harms children. That the exploitative bourgeois family is abolished in the process is not the abolition of the family per se. To not get that straightaway exposes the speaker as ignorant. I always assume people are willing to deepen their understanding. I’m charitable that way.” That final statement honestly contains no snark.
My clarification to Borysenko’s feed that started all of this was merely this: “Marx and Engels argue that there’s a natural sexual division of labor and that this division is a primordial fact of the species—just as it is for all mammalian species. The gender binary not only precedes capitalism, but all societies based on social class. Engels wrote a whole book about it, a book based on Marx’s notes on Ancient Society by Morgan. I don’t know of any Marxist who argues that the gender binary was created by capitalism. In fact, anybody who claims to be a Marxist who would tell you that doesn’t understand Marxism at even the most basic level.” Since Borysenko is not a Marxist, my criticism wasn’t meant to tear her down. Also, note that I said nothing of family abolition. I was specifically responding to Borysenko’s malformed question with a clarification. What I see now is that right wing certainty about the gender binary, which is warranted, is held in tandem with right wing certain about the patriarchal family, which is mistaken.
— Karlyn Borysenko, the modern day Yuri Bezmenov (@DrKarlynB) December 1, 2023
Borysenko responded to my clarification with the above video, which she purports expresses the Marxist standpoint, but which couldn’t possibly, since the speaker, Mary Bowman, assistant professor at DePaul University, argues that the gender binary is an ideological construction of bourgeois society. As I had already noted, correctly, Marx and Engels assume that the gender binary is primordial, i.e., that it has always existed. Moreover, they recognize that, from time immemorial, there has been a sexual division of labor. Even if they had made this explicit in their world, those familiar with their work infer this since Marx and Engels operate from a scientific materialist standpoint that accepts the Darwinian model of natural history. For Marx and Engels there are only men and women. Moreover, they seek to establish a social order that will allow men and women to live for one another rather than for capitalist production. In other words, Marx and Engels seek the opposite of what queer theorists seek, which truly is to abolish the family (as well as any solidity to gender categories); except where she apes the jargon, Marx and Engels’ work refutes everything Bowman says.
Refuting Bowman is no difficult task, to be sure. Ridiculously, Bowman argues that the gender binary is a white supremacist invention, a claim is so absurd that one can easily imagine Marx and Engels rolling their eyes at the corruption of knowledge in colleges and university—not the corruption of Marxism, mind you, but of basic historical and anthropological knowledge. And while there is a relation between class and family in capitalist society (which I will turn to in a moment), Bowman mystifies the relation by discussing men in general, something Marx insisted one never do in working from a materialist conception of history. Such questions concerning class, consumption, family, production, etc., must always specify the spatial-temporal and developmental context: Which class in what type of class-based system at what point in time? What type of consumption relative to what mode of production at what developmental stage? What type of family relative to what social class and what mode of production? And so on. This is what trips so many people up in reading, e.g., The Communist Manifesto: they miss the adjective (bourgeois) before the noun (family).
Errors abound in this clip. Bowman claims that women’s work was “feminized.” Here, she is denying that women are natural beings, typical of queer theory where, as Judith Butler tells her audience, “woman” is a “performance” (how the performance was feminized is typically mystified). But the reality is that women are feminized because of natural history (albeit along a continuum, since plainly there are masculinized women, as evidenced by the Bowman’s visage). The gender binary is not, as Bowman claims, “one aspect of the cultural devastation wrought by colonization.” Or species is sexual dimorphic. The claim that follows that, prior to the emergence and spread of the Enlightenment via the world capitalist economy, there were other genders is therefore obviously false, since there are only two genders. To be sure, one can find a culture here or there that managed gender nonconformity and other deviations by creating unique statuses, but this doesn’t change the fact that, e.g., the fa’afafine in Samoan culture is a man (fa’afafine means “in the way of a woman”) anymore than the schizophrenic-cum-shaman in in actual communication with the spirit world. Moreover, the fact that women controlled their reproduction capacity in ancient times is an ordinary fact of human life. In fact, as a matter of natural history, the female of our species hides estrus for this purpose. Other animals control reproduction, as well. The claim that the oppression of women and other gender status categories is a unique tool of white supremacy is more nonsense. The oppression of women has been occurring for millennia, for reasons Marx and Engels explain. Frankly, I could not have selected a clip that illustrates my argument better so succinctly than the video Borysenko believes contradicts my point (it’s only 1:46 long).
So, let’s turn to Marx and Engels’ argument. For starters, I should remind the reader that Barrett’s article I cited at the top has errors. She is particularly interested in The Origin of the Family, where Engels contends that the bourgeois family is founded on a material basis of inequality between husband and wife. He describes the wife’s role as producing legitimate heirs for property transmission in exchange for necessities, likening it to a form of prostitution. Engels thesis is rather more sophisticated than Barrett lets on. Engels book is based on Marx’s notes on the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, work that Barrett characterizes as “dubious.” Since Barrett doesn’t appear to know that Marx had a rather well-developed theory of the family, which I will cover in detail in this essay, it is unclear her source in making the claim. However, Barrett does have a point in noting that Engels account “underplays the palpable domination of men in the proletarian family as ‘residual,’ and fails to consider the domestic division of labor and the burdens imposed on women undertaking a ‘double shift’ of wage labor along with childcare and housework at home.” We cannot expect Engels to fully escape his place in time.
Friedrich Engels, author of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
While Engels’ analysis has faced criticism, notably in that it minimizes male dominance in proletarian families and overlooks the domestic division of labor and the added burdens on women juggling childcare, housework, and wage labor, it provides a distinctively materialist perspective on the family, explaining variations in family forms across different social classes. Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously writes, “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.” (Obviously, this formulation precludes any significant jettisoning or even skirting of the reality of sex differences.)
Moreover, in “actually existing” socialism rooted the Marxist-Leninist tradition, Marx and Engels’ arguments form the basis of official family policy. For example, in the Soviet Union, there was an emphasis on involving women into productive labor (which was the case of proletarian women already under capitalism), while combining the wage with a social provision of childcare facilities. Official ideology exalted the “working mother.” To be sure, as Barrett points out, while Lenin argued for the socialization of housework, such socialization was never understood as involving men undertaking domestic chores. However, whatever other problems state sociological had, the demand that women would participate in the work force without having to abandon their children to uncertainty or impoverishment was met. (This is not an endorsement of the state socialist model. For my assessment of this mode of production, see my 2003 review essay The Soviet Union: “State Capitalist” or “Siege Socialist”?)
Barrett is disappointed that Marx and Engels don’t present a more radical critique and solution to the problem of the family (here her post-structuralist leanings poke through). Such a “socialist family,” she tells the reader, falls far short of critiques of the family in more general radical thought. “Marxist thought on the family has therefore tended to be less uncompromisingly critical than utopian socialist, libertarian, anarchist and feminist positions.” The anarchist piece covers queer theory. This is not to say that Barrett would agree with Bowman’s assessment of history; rather it is to say that Barrett wouldn’t endorse Bowman via the Marxist route. (Without reading into Barrett’s work I cannot say for sure, but from what I have read, her work is leagues more substantial than Bowman’s, who appears as a graduate student waved through and put on the tenure track for reasons of diversity and inclusion. Sorry to sound cruel, but this is not high-quality stuff.)
To understand Marx, one must start from his starting point, which is the question of property, as well as grasp his critique of Georg Hegel’s theorization of the family, and his use of Ludwig Feuerbach’s transformative method. Perhaps there is no more compelling voice on the matter than Shlomo Avineri and his Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx, published in 1968. Before I turn to an analysis incorporating his work, I want to briefly acknowledge Avineri’s passing on Friday, December 1 at the age of ninety. This news shook me. Amid the discussion of Marx’s views on gender and the family, and in preparing to pen this blog essay, I pulled from my shelf the next morning Avineri’s book. I wanted to see what he thought about my argument. His work affirms it. I then turned to the Internet to see what Avineri was up to these days and discovered that he had died. I met Avineri at the United Nations University in Amman, Jordan back in 2006, when we were assigned the task of lecturing on religion and politics (see Journey to Jordan). We stayed in the same hotel and had lunch and dinner together for several nights. He was a fascinating man and I regret not staying in touch.
Some of what follows are close paraphrases from his book. You can find his words on pages 28-29, 89-91, and 163 of the 1996 edition to compare. Avineri begins by noting Marx’s use of Feuerbach’s transformative method to show that property inverts the relations between the human subject and the world of objects. To summarize Feuerbach’s method, which he presents in his book The Essence of Christianity, published in 1842, a critique of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the same way that Absolute Spirit attains self-awareness through manifesting itself in the finite world, the finite spirit attains self-knowledge by projecting itself into the concept of God, recognizing the outward projection as merely serving as the framework through which the human spirit unveils its intrinsic essence. Put another way, being is not the result of thought, but rather thought comes from being. According to Marx, Hegel transforms property in his method from being an object of the will into the master of the will. By asserting that an individual is defined by their class status, one essentially declares that humanity becomes a predicate of its possessions.
In the passages that draw Marx’s focus, Hegel examines the status of the landed gentry holding entailed estates. Comparable to England, in Prussia, primogeniture was applied to the landed property of the gentry. This practice ensured that the family estate transferred in its entirety from the father to the first-born son. The eldest son inherited both the title and the estate, with all other children excluded from the inheritance concerning landed property. This arrangement, by rendering the landed estates of the nobility and gentry essentially inalienable through sale, effectively curtailed the potential fragmentation of noble estates, preserving them in their entirety. Thus, the form of family was functional to the reproduction of the property structure, which means that the class imperative used the wife as a producer of heirs.
Hegel not only endorses this arrangement but also perceived it as a manifestation of, and assurance for, the elevated ethical conduct of the gentry. He contends that the entailed estate (a type of ownership where property on transfers to specific family members) places the property of the aristocracy not in the hands of arbitrary individuals but within the family unit. According to Hegel’s system, the family serves as the repository of substantive ethical life; thus, any social group linking its property to the family minimizes the capricious impacts of civil society on its members. Possessing property immune to state interference and relatively impervious to unforeseen market fluctuations, the aristocracy is exceptionally equipped for roles in civil service and political leadership (this is a view advanced by James Madison and other elites during the founding of the American Republic). Hegel asserts that individuals within this group could be anticipated to exhibit greater freedom from interpreting their functions as public servants through the lens of self-interest compared to any other segment of society.
Marx criticizes this perspective by highlighting the inconsistency in Hegel’s advocacy for a form of property immune to the influences of both civil society and the state, which contradicts Hegel’s earlier conceptualizations of property (obviously, a complete account of this is beyond the scope of this essay). By shielding the noble estate from reliance on state authority and societal demands, Hegel implies that the unadulterated concept of property, as exemplified in the entailed estate, exists in isolation from its social surroundings. While Hegel initially defined property as an object subject to the free disposal of its owner, he now appears to suggest that property is entirely divorced from individual will. Moreover, the detachment of entailed property from the social fabric poses an even more profound dilemma. The Hegelian state was initially depicted as a universality that reconciles concrete interests; however, it now appears that the class deemed most suitable for governing the state possesses a form of property whose social connections have been severed entirely. The claimed ethical significance for the nobility becomes susceptible to criticism. Hegel asserts that the nobility’s dependence on family enhances its ethical character, but Marx highlights the contrary reality for the noble estate. In essence, entailed property undermines family solidarity, as only the eldest son holds any stake in it. Hegel envisions the family as the “ethical spirit in its natural and immediate phase,” yet he diminishes this solidarity, stripping it of genuine significance.
Marx reflects on this: “That class founded [according to Hegel] on the family [the aristocracy] lacks therefore the basis for family life—love as the real, active, and determining principle. It is family life without spirit, the illusion of family life. In its highest form of development, the principle of private property contradicts the principle of family.” This understanding never changes in Marx’s work (contradicting Weikart’s superficial understanding). “This is then the sovereign magnificence and superiority of private property, landed property, about which in modern times so many sentimentalities have been uttered and for whose sake so many multicolored crocodile tears have been shed.” Marx exposes the inconsistency in Hegel’s stance by comparing his definition of private property in the Philosophy of Right as alienable and freely disposable with his subsequent observations on entailed estates. According to Marx, these statements are incompatible. Entailed property, in Hegel’s view, shapes self-consciousness and the essence of personality. However, Marx contends that if property is deemed inalienable, it renders all other aspects of human existence, such as personality, self-consciousness, ethical life, and religion, alienable: “‘The non-transferability of property amounts to the transferability of free will and ethics.”
“Marx’s way to socialism is not a collectivism which subsumes the individual under an abstract whole; it is rather an attempt to break down the barriers between the individual and society and to try to find the key to the reunion of these two aspects of human existence,” Avineri writes. “Within this context Marx sees communism as the ultimate trend of human life, the identity of man with the circumstances of life.” Marx defines communism as “the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation [and] therefore as the return of man to himself as a social, i.e. really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development.” The desired outcome allows man to live according to his natural other-directedness, which is more sensually expressed in his sexual relations with his betrothed.
Marx thus identifies a blueprint for the future paradigm in the family, or more precisely, in the dynamics between the sexes. According to Marx, the distinctive nature of these relationships holds a systematic significance, allowing them to serve as a general model for the structure of human relations in a socialist society. Sexual relations, in Marx’s view, possess both necessity and spontaneity, epitomizing an exceptional focus on the other. The inherent interdependence in the sexual relationship, where one’s satisfaction relies on the satisfaction of another, signifies a reciprocal nature. Marx contends that if these relations become one-sided, they lose their character as a true relationship, reducing the other person to a mere object rather than an equal participant. In the chapter on communist society in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx extensively delves into sexual relationships, emphasizing their integral role in shaping the envisioned societal structure.
“The immediate, natural, and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman,” Marx writes. “In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation it is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being a human being. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him. It also shows how far man’s needs have become human needs, and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.”
Reread that passage and note this line in particular: “The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being.” Here Marx is saying, in the most explicit way possible, that there are men and women and that their relations are the most natural relations between humans. This is not a person who denies the gender binary. Nor is it a person who seeks the abolition of the family—if by family one means the separation of men and women in committed relationships marked by the sexual dynamic. This is what Marx meant when he said this.
Avineri writes, “These considerations may also help to explain Marx’s vicious, if not vulgar, attack on the bourgeois family in The Communist Manifesto. The text of the Manuscripts reveals the depths of Marx’s feelings about what he conceived to be the utmost travesty of sexual relations. According to him, the nineteenth-century bourgeois world made even the limited reciprocity of family life impossible and turned the woman into a mere object.” (I’d say this does in fact explain Marx’s polemic.) Avineri then quotes Marx directly: “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production…. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting the more, by the action of modem industry, all family ties among the proletarians are tom asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.” Marx wasn’t seeking to dissolve the family but to save it. Save it from what? Exploitation and estrangement under capitalism.
Avineri writes, “There are clear Hegelian overtones in this discussion, though Marx’s construction of them is highly original.” In Philosophy of Right, Hegel perceives the family as inherently ethical due to its foundation on reciprocity. However, he believed that the egoism prevalent in civil society erodes this reciprocity, leaving it preserved only within the confines of internal family relations. Marx, in contrast, argues that civil society, characterized by egoistic pursuits, renders even this ethical sense of family life impossible. As long as civil society persists, it will obstruct the reciprocal essence of family life. Marx rejects the notion of constructing a society modeled on the family, considering it a romantic fallacy. Instead, he sees the family and sexual relations as a potential paradigm only insofar as they indicate the feasibility of other-oriented relations. The challenge lies in avoiding romantic idealization of the family or sexuality while simultaneously devising a solution that transforms the fundamental structural principle of sexual relations into a universal guiding principle for social organization. According to Marx, achieving this transformation hinges on a correct understanding and overhaul of the production system within the societal framework.” This is everything.
The source most people cite to make the claim that Marxist want to abolish the family is The Communist Manifesto. The foregoing renders the meaning of the pamphlet clearly. Marx and Engels tell their audience that, according to their critics, communists propose the abolition of the family and note that this is a notion that even the most radical individuals find shocking. But to understand the proposal, an examination of the foundation of the present family, specifically the bourgeois family, which is rooted in capital and private gain, is in order. This familial structure the communists are critical of is fully developed only among the bourgeoisie, while among the proletarians, the practical absence of the family is evident. Both parents are forced into wage labor, the children either left to fend for themselves or forced into wage labor, as well. Indeed, bourgeois rhetoric on the sanctity of family and education (a response to the communist plan for public education) becomes repulsive in the context of capitalism’s impact, tearing apart family ties among the proletarians and reducing their children to mere commodities and labor instruments.
Marx and Engels theorize that the existence of the bourgeois family is intricately linked to the presence of capital. This feels somewhat like a tautology, but it is part of the materialist conception of history that family and sexual relations are tied to modes of production and to class positions with those modes. The family’s demise, both the bourgeois family and the proletarian family, is envisioned as a natural consequence when its complement, i.e., capital and the exploitation of labor, vanishes. Consequently, the bourgeois family and capital will both cease to exist together. If the proletarian family is abolished, it is only in the sense that the demoralizing conditions under which the working class attempts to make families will be replaced by conditions that allow the man and woman to have a truly sensual relationship on egalitarian grounds as described above.
Marx and Engels also take on the related accusation that communists aim to introduce the “community of women.” The community of women is a situation where all women are available to any man seeking to have sex with them. Weikart and other conservatives want to make this about the problem of “free love.” But it is really about prostitution. The bourgeois perspective is biased on the matter since they view women as mere instruments of production. As explained in the earlier discussion about the entailed estate, the elite see the family as a mechanism for transmitting wealth down the father’s line (patrilineage), the eldest son receiving the inheritance. As instruments to this end, the wives of the bourgeoisie are already in a sense prostitutes. Thus the bourgeois misconception arises from the belief that common exploitation of production tools implies a shared fate for women.
The goal of communism, as Marxists see it, is to eliminate the subjugation of women as instruments of production. The bourgeois indignation towards the supposed introduction of community of women by communists is therefore deemed ridiculous, as this arrangement has existed for centuries. Have you yet picked up on the fact that the The Communist Manifesto is a polemic and Marx and Engels are debunking bourgeois propaganda, a polemic that is at times dripping with ferocious sarcasm? Go back and read the document with new eyes. The critique is devastating, punctuated by Marx and Engels observation that bourgeois marriage is in fact a system of shared wives, with the bourgeoisie not limiting themselves to the wives and daughters of proletarians. This is no call for the abolition of family, but the abolition of conditions that make the other-directedness of a loving man-woman dyad difficult if not impossible.
The proposed abolition of the family by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto is thus intricately tied to the elimination of the bourgeois family, which is fundamentally based on capital. The critique of communists as promoting a community of women is unfounded, as the true objective is to eradicate the exploitation of women as mere instruments of production, a notion that has persisted throughout history and is evident in bourgeois practices. The goal is the abolition of the present system of production, leading to the eradication of both public and private forms of prostitution. Marx and Engels are feminists. Not queers in the sense conveyed by gender ideology. They are socialist feminists.
As the reader can see, the argument that capitalism created the gender binary and the standard model of the family, the man-woman dyad, i.e., the idea of a heterosexual pair forming the core of a family unit, is rather easily blown up. The gender binary is primordial and all the rest of is has cultural and historical foundations that extend far beyond the capitalist economic systems and its emergence. The man-woman dyad is traceable back to ancient civilizations, where marriage and family structures were integral to societal organization. To be sure, various factors, including cultural norms, economic forces, and religious beliefs, have influenced the development of family models throughout history, but the man-woman dyad is the most common form—and remains the most common form.
Therefore, while it’s true that societal changes, including economic shifts such as the Industrial Revolution, influence family structures, the man-woman dyad is not a creation by capitalism or of white supremacy. To make such a claim is to profess profound ignorance of anthropology and history. One must accept that capitalism, or any other economic mode of production, even if the Marxist standpoint is rejected and economics is seen as lesser part of a broader historical and cultural context, has played a role in shaping societal structures, including family dynamics. It’s essential in any scientific analysis of history and society to consider the multifaceted influences on family structures, acknowledging the contributions of cultural and religious traditions, economic systems, and social norms throughout history. The man-woman dyad has been a prevalent family model across various societies and time periods, shaped by a complex interplay of historical, cultural, and social factors. Moreover, the gender binary is an anthropological truth, timeless and unchanging. Queer theory rejects all this, and is therefore crackpot.
As for Borysenko, like many animals of the Internet, she seeks and consumes information from a rather closed circuit containing ideas that conform to ossified and reductive thought, what I call the practice of cerebral hygiene, a practice reinforced by the fans she has accumulated. Why grow when one’s ideas find such a receptive audience who don’t know enough to challenge you, especially when you can always block those who do? Her PhD obtained from an online for-profit degree mill, in the field of organizational psychology no less, it’s doubtful Borysenko attended many seminars of substance or bothered to read deeply into the literature she feigns to critique, all of which is evident in the output. Before the Internet, individuals of this sort were marginal, as their self-assessment as intellectuals wouldn’t have sufficed to get them where they would have a critical audience, namely the academy (which, today, is itself a closed circuit). The rationalization for all this is, of course, Freud’s defense mechanism of reaction formation, which finds right wing figures boasting about not having taught at a college or university, which they tells us is a hellscape of Marxist corruption, despite the fact that the academy, with a few notable exceptions, is almost entirely devoid of Marxists. The boasting and resentment now has purchase, thanks to the Internet. Since this avenue allows a few to distort the knowledge base, and because the academy has become corrupted by woke postmodernism, I, too, have become an animal of the Internet.
George Santos, New York Republican, is the sixth member to be expelled from the US House of Representatives. There were 311 votes to expel George Santos from Congress. One hundred and five Republicans voted to boot Santos. Only two Democrats voted against expelling Santos. Santos is the first to be kicked out of Congress without having fought for the Confederacy or being convicted of a crime. This is an unprecedented and truly dangerous action congress has taken.
Rep. George Santos speaks on the House floor, Nov. 30, 2023
Here’s what folks have to understand about today and why it matters to them. First, this establishes a terrible precedent: if the establishment doesn’t like a member, they get him indicted and remove him from Congress. This is lawfare. Second, Santos was under a federal criminal indictment. He was not convicted of the charges leveled against him. The man is innocent until proven guilty. Congress made itself the judge and jury. Third, expelling Santos disenfranchises the voters of his district. Instead of the voters deciding Santos’ fate, politicians from other districts did.
I don’t care if you don’t like Santos, or you think he did what he is accused of, or you just want to see a Republican suffer. All that is beside the point if you believe in the rule of law and the democratic principle. If Santos is ever convicted of a crime, then that’s a different matter. But if you understand how easy it is for a prosecutor to accuse a person of a crime, then you must know that meting out consequences for somebody not convicted of a crime risks making a whip for your own back. We have to defend legal innocence in this nation or we lose everything. This is one of the few principles standing between freedom and tyranny.
Finally, Republicans actually diminished their narrow majority by expelling Santos. What was up with that? Don’t tell me principle.
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Speaking of tyranny, did you see this?
Heated exchange during Senate Judiciary Cmte. roll call vote.
Chair @SenatorDurbin dismisses calls by committee Republicans to debate two judicial nominations.
As I have noted in previous essays and blog entries, gender refers to genotypes in a sexually dimorphic species. For all animal species gender is binary. For mammals, reptiles, and birds gender is unchangeable. There are females and males, their respective sex determinable by chromosomes and gametes. In our species, adult females are called “women” and adult males are called “men.” In swine, the analogs are “sow” and “hog.” In horses, “mare” and “stallion.” Etcetera. Pronouns refer to these realities. Crucially, gender is not subjective, However/whatever a man might think of himself or believe himself to be, he is objectively a gender—and only one gender. To claim otherwise, to refer to him by his imagined gender, is to deny scientific reality. Gender is not subjective. Truth has its own integrity. An honest society proceeds on the basis of truth.
In a news item from the Yale School of Medicine, dated September 19, 2021, Carolyn Mazure, Professor in Women’s Health Research, and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, writes, “Perhaps at some point in time [gender and sex] were used as synonyms, but this is no longer true in science.” Not “perhaps.” Gender and sex were synonyms in science for centuries (see, e.g., Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms). Mazure is engaged here in a classic propaganda technique called “mystification,” which involves distorting or obscuring history to make certain facts appear uncertain. The facts are no uncertain. The synonymous character of gender/sex still holds in material science.
The “authority” Mazure cites, now under the umbrella of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), is the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which organized the Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender Differences in 2001. “The committee advised that scientists use these definitions in the following ways: In the study of human subjects, the term sex should be used as a classification, generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement [generally XX for female and XY for male]. In the study of human subjects, the term gender should be used to refer to a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation. In most studies of nonhuman animals, the term sex should be used.”
The committee “concluded there was more than sufficient evidence that, beyond reproductive biology, there were major differences in the biology of women and men that greatly affected their health and influenced treatment and prevention strategies.” Notice that the terms “women” and “men” are used here. It’s a binary. Despite the slogan “Trans women are women,” one would hope that the medical industry would continue treating trans women as a men and vice-versa in light of these major differences. Perhaps now the document would be rewritten to substitute “women” and “men” with “female” and “male,” but clearly these terms are synonyms, merely different words indicating the same reality, and clearly there is a binary. It is difficult to wriggle out of the truth.
Focus on recommendation that medical science drop the term “gender” when referring to “nonhuman animals.” As I have shown, scientists have referred to gender in nonhuman animals—and plants—for centuries and there is no justification from a scientific materialist standpoint for jettisoning the term gender with respect to nonhuman animals or for repurposing the term for human animals to convey “self-representation as male or female,” or to describe how social institutions respond to that person on the basis of the individual’s self-presentation, the human animals. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have had no problem conveying human subjectivity or cultural and historical variation in sex roles.
Why gender is dropped for nonhuman animals and repurposed for human animals is because humans can be confused about their gender and this confusion comes with great benefits to the medical-industrial complex. In other words, the redefinition is for commercial purposes (as well as for normalizing paraphilias). The Yale School of Medicine news item is an instantiation of corporate propaganda produced by a functionary of the medical-industrial complex, disinformation designed to market “life-saving gender-affirming health care,” a multibillion dollar transnational enterprise integrating biotech, chemical manufacturers, and pharmaceutical industries with medical firms and health insurance companies. The more people who are confused about gender the more customers for the industry.
Source: @NoGender on X (formerly Twitter)
At the bottom of the article is a brief glossary which includes the construction “cisgender,” defined as a term used to describe “an individual whose gender identity aligns with the one typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth.” The entry tells readers that this term that is preferable to “non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman. This neologism is preferred because it is paradoxical and thus furthers the mystification. Consider once more the slogan “trans women are women.” If one accepts that trans women are women, i.e., that some men are women, then the category women no longer refers to all women, as only some women are women. Women become defined as a subclass of a greater class of women, which means that there really is no such thing as a woman in gender ideology. One might object that a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman,” but that is merely a circular definition with no meaningful content (see Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions). It is true that non of these terms—“non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman—are desirable. That’s because we already have a term exclusive of men. The term is woman.
In an October 7, 2021 video report, VICE News obtained access to the tunnels Hamas’ built to conduct terrorist operations against Israel. Reporter Isobel Young conducted an interview with a 25-year-old individual who had joined Hamas during adolescence. During the interview, Young stated, “You guys fired the first rockets,” to which the Hamas terrorist responded, “The first aggression is the occupation.” Rank-and-file Hamas are taught to think this way by such figures as Omar Baddar, an anti-Israel propagandist based in Washington DC associated with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and other pro-Palestinian organizations, who argues that Palestinians shouldn’t bear the blame for violence, citing Israel’s status as an occupying power as the root cause. Torturing and massacring Jews is not an act of terrorism, in this view, a rationalization that many Western intellectuals are eager to soften, but just retaliation for Jews occupying their land. Muslims burning babies and raping and killing women is the Jews’ fault. They’re responsible. Indeed, what the West calls “terrorism” is actually the righteous struggle the Algerian psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon cast as that of the victim against his executioner, today couched in the rhetoric of “oppressed and oppressor.”
If you listen to what Hamas sympathizers in the West are saying, which parrots what the Hamas terrorists are saying, you can see how easy it has been for Western youth, taught to think this way in their college courses, and even by ideas embedded in K-12 curriculum, to rationalize the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Jewish and other civilians in Israel. It’s what also permits Western youth to rationalize the extraordinarily high levels of criminality in black-majority neighborhoods, i.e., to define deviance down. It’s what allows Western youth to rationalize violent Antifa, Trantifa, and Black Lives Matter action in America’s streets. And it’s why the core ethics of the West, ethics based on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, are rejected, while those chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” embrace authoritarian and illiberal ideas and practices. The new fascism in our streets comes to us wrapped in a rhetoric of social justice and victimhood.
This viewpoint absolves those who portray themselves as the oppressed for any moral responsibility for their actions—for the theft and destruction of property and the maiming and killing of civilians. Just as whites, however much they seek allyship, no matter how many feet they wash, are a permanent problem for the woke progressive, the mere existence of Israel is the problem for Palestinians—and this justifies the violence. The narrative of Palestinian victimhood is fueled in the West by the body of critical theory corrupted by postmodernism, a viewpoint that at once asserts and denies universal truth, while reducing discourse to action all around. The narrative serves to empower terrorists foreign and domestic. It also serves to rationalize the invasion of the West by Third World culture bearers who refuse to integrate with the social and cultural systems of the host countries. The call to reject these ideologies and prevent their propagation in universities is emphasized by the rational to counteract this belief system; however, the oppressed-oppressor narrative has successfully colonized Western institutions and its agents in positions of power portray attempts to return to sanity as chauvinist, fascist, and racist.
In his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocated violence not simply as legitimate action in the struggle for liberation but as a necessary step in overcoming the psychic complex of black inferiority, which was the result of centuries of demeaning white European colonization. Because all blacks are demeaned in this way, the victims of intergenerational trauma, they are not merely justified in using violence against any white person, but should do so for purposes of collective self-dignity and self-esteem. Social justice from the Black Power standpoint is not about justice, then, but about retribution. But it’s not only about settling the score. It doesn’t seek equality after that, but instead a new racial hierarchy, one that flips the script, with whites are on bottom and blacks and other oppressed minorities on top enjoying appropriated white wealth.
Frantz Fanon 1961 The Wretched of the Earth. Note the subtitle.
Fanon’s thesis, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “a classic of anti-colonialism in which the Third World finds itself and speak to itself through his voice,” has been taken up by Third Worlders everywhere to cover for the criminal desire to appropriate what the West built. The success of the West is perceived by Fanon and his followers as not only purchased at the experience of wretched, but as the source of their wretchedness. The Third world looks the way it does not because the people there neither developed nor adopted the ways of the West but because the white man is a racist. Fanon’s thesis was joined with Mao Zedong thought to globalize the social logic of revolution against the West and shift the struggle from social class to racial identity (see The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; Maoism and Wokism and the Tyranny of Bureaucratic Collectivism; The Cultural Revolution; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).
The hatred of Jews is not because Jews stole Palestinian land. As I have shown, Jews had a continuous presence in what is today Israel for some 3500 years—before there was even an Arab culture and language (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). No, the hatred of Jews throughout history has been because Jews have been one of the most successful ethnic groups in history. The source of the hated and loathing is envy and resentment. With the Protestant Reformation, Christians became like the Jews and, like the Jews, became highly successful. Indeed, the most dynamic economic system in history, capitalism, is the result of Christians taking up rational economic behavior exemplified by Jewish culture and spreading it throughout the world. The United States is especially despised by the victims of culture and history because this country is the paradigm not only of capitalism but of civil liberties and rights and democratic-republic government. The US is a secular nation that accepts all races and all religions, that defends freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. America led the way in abolishing slavery and establishing universal human rights. It follows that America would be portrayed as the “Great Satan” and the founding ethnic group as “white devils.” (See my recent essay The Education of Bill Maher—and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion to Christianity for a longer discussion of this point.)
freedom and reason 