In politics and
sociology, divide and conquer
is gaining and maintaining
power by breaking
up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing
the strategy. The concept refers to a strategy that breaks up existing power structures and prevents
smaller power groups from linking up.
Traiano Boccalini cites
"divide et impera" in La bilancia politica, 1,136 and 2,225 as a common principle in politics.
The use of this technique is meant to empower the sovereign to control subjects, populations, or factions
of different interests, who collectively might be able to oppose his rule.
Machiavelli identifies a
similar application to military strategy, advising in Book VI of The Art of War[1]
(Dell'arte della guerra),[2]
that a Captain should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy, either by making him
suspicious of his men in whom he trusted, or by giving him cause that he has to separate his forces,
and, because of this, become weaker.
The maxim divide et impera has been attributed to
Philip II of Macedon,
and together with the maxim divide ut regnes were utilised by the Roman ruler
Caesar and the French emperor
Napoleon.
The strategy, but not the phrase, applies in many ancient cases: the example of
Gabinius exists, parting
the Jewish nation into five
conventions, reported by Flavius
Josephus in Book I, 169-170 of The Wars of the Jews (De bello Judaico).[3]Strabo also reports in Geography,
8.7.3[4]
that the Achaean League was
gradually dissolved under the Roman possession of the whole of
Macedonia, owing
to them not dealing with the several states in the same way, but wishing to preserve some and to destroy
others.
The strategy of division and rule has been attributed to sovereigns ranging from
Louis XI to
the Habsburgs.
Edward Coke denounces it in
Chapter I of the Fourth Part of the Institutes, reporting that when it was demanded by the
Lords and
Commons what might
be a principal motive for them to have good success in
Parliament, it was
answered: "Eritis insuperabiles, si fueritis inseparabiles. Explosum est illud diverbium: Divide,
& impera, cum radix & vertex imperii in obedientium consensus rata sunt." [You would be insuperable
if you were inseparable. This proverb, Divide and rule, has been rejected, since the root and the summit
of authority are confirmed by the consent of the subjects.] On the other hand, in a minor variation,
Sir Francis Bacon wrote the
phrase "separa et impera" in a letter to
James I of 15 February
1615. James Madison made this
recommendation in a letter to
Thomas Jefferson of 24
October 1787,[5]
which summarized the thesis of The Federalist #10:[6]
"Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only
policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles."
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant (1795), Appendix one, Divide
et impera is the third of three political maxims, the others being Fac et excusa (Act now,
and make excuses later) and Si fecisti, nega (when you commit a crime, deny it).[7]
Elements of this technique involve:
creating or encouraging divisions among the subjects to prevent alliances that could challenge
the sovereign
aiding and promoting those who are willing to cooperate with the sovereign
fostering distrust and enmity between local rulers
encouraging meaningless expenditures that reduce the capability for political and military
spending
Historically, this strategy was used in many different ways by empires seeking to expand their territories.
The concept is also mentioned as a strategy for market action in
economics to get the most out
of the players in a competitive market.
Clive R. Boddy found that "divide and conquer" was a common strategy by corporate
psychopaths used as a smokescreen
to help consolidate and advance their grip on power in the corporate hierarchy.[8]
The divide and conquer strategy was used by foreign countries in
Africa during the
colonial and post-colonial
period.
Germany and Belgium ruled
Rwanda and
Burundi in a colonial capacity.
Germany used the strategy of divide and conquer by placing members of the already dominant
Tutsi minority in positions of
power. When Belgium took over colonial rule in 1916, the Tutsi and
Hutu groups were rearranged according
to race instead of occupation. Belgium defined "Tutsi" as anyone with more than ten cows or a long
nose, while "Hutu" meant someone with less than ten cows and a broad nose. The socioeconomic divide
between Tutsis and Hutus continued after independence and was a major factor in the
Rwandan Genocide.
During
British rule of Nigeria from
1900 to 1960, different regions were frequently reclassified for administrative purposes. The conflict
between the Igbo and
Hausa made it easier for
the British to consolidate their power in the region.[citation
needed][9]
At the same time the Mongols imported Central Asian Muslims to serve as administrators in China,
the Mongols also sent Han Chinese and Khitans from China to serve as administrators over the Muslim
population in Bukhara in Central Asia, using foreigners to curtail the power of the local peoples
of both lands. Pakistan and India were also divided with this policy.[10]
Romans entered
Macedonia
from the south and defeated King
Perseus of Macedon
in the battle of Pydna
in 168 BC. Macedonia was then divided into four republics that were heavily restricted from relations
with one another and other Hellenic states. A ruthless purge occurred, with allegedly anti-Roman
citizens being denounced by their compatriots and deported in large numbers.
During the Gallic Wars,
Julius Caesar was able
to use a divide and rule strategy to easily defeat the militarily strong
Gauls. By the time the Gauls united
under Vercingetorix it
was already too late for them.[12]
The strategy of "Divide and Rule" was employed by most imperial powers in
Indian subcontinent.
The British and French backed various Indian states in conflicts between each other, both as a means
of undermining each other's influence and consolidating their authority.
^
"Julius Caesar: The first triumvirate and the conquest of Gaul". Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia
Britannica. Retrieved February 15, 2015. Indeed, the Gallic cavalry was probably superior
to the Roman, horseman for horseman. Rome's military superiority lay in its mastery of strategy,
tactics, discipline, and military engineering. In Gaul, Rome also had the advantage of being able
to deal separately with dozens of relatively small, independent, and uncooperative states. Caesar
conquered these piecemeal, and the concerted attempt made by a number of them in 52 bce to shake
off the Roman yoke came too late.
The conclusion of George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" includes these
two sentences: "Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are
meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since
you don't know what fascism is, how can you struggle against fascism?"
Doesn't this remind you of attempts today to deflect attacks on critical race theory? A
parental and governmental counterrevolution against CRT has exploded into life, and one of the
ways defenders try to protect it is to advocate a kind of political quietism -- since you don't
know what CRT is, how can you struggle against it?
Slate, a left-wing magazine, for example, tweeted last month, "Conservatives want to
cancel critical race theory. But they don't know what it is." This is gaslighting to make CRT's
opponents question their understanding and doubt the evidence of their own ears and
eyes.
It fits the progressive trope that conservatives are ignorant and stupid. Such contempt
(which is reciprocated) led, among other things, to Donald Trump's victory in 2016. And just as
it failed five years ago, it is failing again now. Which prompts the thought, if Left-liberals
are so smart, why can't they think of a new line of attack and stop repeating what is so
ineffectual?
Conservatives know very well what CRT is. It's not really a theory; it's the
unfalsifiable assertion of racial essentialism, stigmatizing white people as irredeemably
racist and privileged, and black people as systematically repressed. It is used to poison
the minds of children down to the elementary school level. Public and parental understanding of
CRT comes despite its advocates' efforts to obscure its meaning (which makes the Left's charges
of ignorance grimly ironic).
And this brings us back to Orwell's essay. His overarching argument was for clarity of
language in political debate. He demanded then, as we should demand at least as urgently today,
that language be used not to conceal meaning but to convey it.
Political argument is conducted as dishonestly in 2021 as it has been within living
memory. In a TV discussion a few weeks ago, I was confronted by Kristal Knight, former
political director of Priorities USA, a left-wing activist organization, who defined CRT as a
theory that "racism undergirds all the systems of this country, how racism exists in our
structure, and how racism was one of the foundations when our founding fathers created the
Constitution." Amazingly, this was intended as a defense.
She asserted that CRT is "not taught in K-12 education." Perhaps she should be introduced to
Bryan Lindstrom, a history teacher and union organizer in Colorado, who declared on Twitter
that "critical race theory is a component of everything I do." Many of this ilk are fully aware
that those who pretend CRT is an obscure academic discipline don't know or don't care about the
truth.
"In our time," wrote Orwell, "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible." That's certainly true of advocacy of CRT.
Their comments came after Austin Knudsen, Republican attorney general of Montana, wrote a
legal opinion about whether Marxist-invented critical race theory (CRT) violated the U.S. and
Montana constitutions as well as various federal civil rights laws. He was responding to an
inquiry by Elsie Arntzen, Montana's superintendent of public instruction, also a
Republican.
The opinion came as public resistance to CRT grows and intensifies among parents in
communities across the country who are fighting back by protesting and taking over local school
boards. In 26 state legislatures bills have been introduced or other steps have been taken to
prevent CRT from being taught , according to
Education Week .
But those measures have rarely offered a comprehensive rationale for banning CRT, which is
something Knudsen's legal opinion provides, sources consulted for this article told The Epoch
Times. Without tying objections to CRT to the Constitution or state constitutions, CRT
opponents had left their laws more susceptible to being overturned.
Acknowledging resistance to CRT in education is "absolutely grassroots" and led by parents
at the local level, Ian Prior, a parent who helped to found and is executive director of
Virginia-based Fight for Schools ,
said Knudsen did the right thing.
" Whenever one is taking action against policies being pushed downstream from the highest
levels of government authority, having a rock-solid legal basis for those actions is absolutely
necessary to accomplish required change and do so in a way that will not fluctuate with changes
in political powe r," Prior said.
David Randall, director of research at the National Association of Scholars, told The Epoch
Times that in his view "there has been a sudden spike of outrage by ordinary people, that the
professional political class has been caught off-guard by it, and that they are struggling to
catch up with popular outrage rather than fanning it."
Although legal opinions like Knudsen's are needed, much more is required for the fight, he
said.
"Our elite institutions have practiced unconstitutional race discrimination for decades,
regardless of the Constitution and the law. They will continue to do so until the people
reassert control over their authoritarian elites. The solution must be political as well as
legal. We need Knudsen, but we also need an effective political movement to remove all the
elite discriminators from the chokepoints of power."
Adam Waldeck, founder of 1776 Action, a nonprofit group, said " the tighter and more
grounded these anti-CRT laws are the better, and there are no doubt preexisting laws on the
books against discrimination that CRT opponents should look to as well. "
"That said, the opposition to CRT started at the local grassroots level and that must
continue, particularly in regards to school boards. It's up to voters to make sure that their
officials (and relevant candidates) state exactly what they believe and support, which is
exactly why we created The
1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools. "
In his legal opinion ,
Knudsen wrote that in many instances the use of CRT and so-called antiracism programming does
discriminate "on the basis of race, color, or national origin in violation of the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
Article II, Section 4 of the Montana Constitution, and the Montana Human Rights Act."
CRT, he noted, calls for teaching students how white people are supposedly by their nature
racist and for engaging in racial discrimination in the name of combating it.
What Is
Critical Race Theory?
" The driving force behind CRT and antiracism is the complete and total acceptance of a
specific worldview -- one that encompasses very specific notions about history, philosophy,
sociology, and public policy. Being a so-called 'antiracist' requires individuals to accept
these premises and advocate for specific policy proposals. Individuals who do not comply cannot
truly be 'antiracist,' and are, therefore, considered racist," Knudsen wrote.
" By its own terms, antiracism excludes individuals who merely advocate for the neutral
legal principles of the Constitution , or who deny or question the extent to which white
supremacy continues to shape our institutions," he wrote. "To that end, no one can be
antiracist who does not act to eliminate the vestiges of white supremacy, i.e., embrace the
specific public policy proposals of CRT and antiracism."
"For example, critics have suggested that there is one, and only one, correct stance on
standardized testing, drug legalization, Medicare for All, and even the capital gains tax rate.
This paradigm is conveniently constructed 'like a mousetrap,'" Knudsen wrote, quoting
Christopher Rufo.
"Disagreement with any aspect becomes irrefutable evidence of its premises of systemic
racism, bias, fragility, or white supremacy. CRT and antiracism are not merely academic ideas
confined to university critical studies courses. These ideologies have begun to infiltrate
mainstream American dialogue and permeate our institutions ."
Compelled Speech
Knudsen argues that, "Trainings, exercises, or assignments which force students or employees
to admit, accept, affirm, or support controversial concepts such as privilege, culpability,
identity, or status, constitute compelled speech," which is something the First Amendment
forbids the government from forcing people to do.
"It is obvious that CRT and antiracism programming take strident positions on some of the
most controversial political, societal, and philosophical issues of our time. Compelling
students, trainees, or anyone else to mouth support for those same positions not only assaults
individual dignity, it undermines the search for truth, our institutions, and our democratic
system. "
Some schools have proposed separate housing and advisors based on race, as well as separate
professional development training , he wrote. Some universities have been sued for diversity
programs in which "they make people get down on the floor and apologize for being white."
Key elements of CRT and antiracism education and training, when used to classify students or
other Montanans by race, run afoul of the U.S. Constitution and federal and state civil rights
laws, Knudsen wrote.
"The term 'antiracism' appears reasonable and innocuous on its face. After all, our
Constitution, our laws, and nearly all our citizens are 'antiracism,'" he wrote. But
"antiracism," when used to describe radical activists' worldview, is " an Orwellian rhetorical
weapon."
Knudsen added that the National Museum of African American History and Culture's website had
a page dealing with "Whiteness," that bizarrely claimed traits such as "individualism," "hard
work," "objectivity," "progress," "politeness," "decision-making," and "delayed gratification"
were hallmarks of "white culture."
Teaching CRT
CRT supporters have lashed out at critics. Michelle Leete, Vice President of Training at the
Virginia PTA (Parent Teacher Association) wished death on CRT opponents at a public event on
July 15. Two days later Leete, who is also a vice president of the NAACP's chapter in Fairfax
County, Virginia, was
forced to resign her PTA post. The American Federation of Teachers and National Education
Association have vowed to defend their members who teach CRT.
After he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden promptly rescinded former President Donald
Trump's Executive Order 13950, which banned teaching CRT to government contractors. Trump said
the ideology was "divisive and harmful" and "like a cancer."
Critical race theory -- whose proponents frequently denounce American culture and history as
"Eurocentrism" and "whiteness" -- is "a variation of critical theory applied to the American
context that stresses racial divisions and sees society in terms of minority racial groups
oppressed by the white majority, " according to the
report of the 1776 Commission, an advisory body created by Trump, which sought to move U.S.
education away from a radical curriculum that unduly emphasized race-related injustices of the
past.
"Equally significant to its intellectual content is the role Critical Race Theory plays in
promoting fundamental social transformation," the report states, "to impart an oppressor-victim
narrative upon generations of Americans. This work of cultural revolution has been going on for
decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in 1960s America."
Trump unveiled the commission last year as the New York Times-promoted 1619 Project gained
widespread acceptance among elites as it rode a wave of national revulsion over the death in
Minneapolis police custody last year of black suspect George Floyd which was popularly blamed
on anti-black racism by police.
The 1619 Project claims real American history began when the first African slaves arrived in
colonial America in 1619, and not on July 4, 1776 , when the colonists declared independence
from the United Kingdom. Educators helped to lay the foundation for the revisionist history
project years ago by teaching the ahistorical "A People's History of the United States," by
academic Howard Zinn, who was a member of the Communist Party USA. Millions of copies of the
book have been sold.
Leftists claim CRT promotes racial equality by highlighting the supposed damage that white
people have done to others in society. Left-wing sociology professor Robyn Autry of Wesleyan
University,
praised Biden for killing the commission, falsely claiming it promoted a "dangerous
alternative history," instead of seeking a return to the traditional way the country's history
has been taught.
Subversion
But critical race theory "is designed to subvert our system of government," Mary Grabar,
resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization told
The Epoch Times.
"Distorted history, such as The 1619 Project, is used to make CRT seem plausible. CRT is
inherently anti-Constitutional and cannot be justified at the K-12 and even undergraduate
levels because students are still learning history in terms of fundamentals and facts. They
cannot perceive its Marxist underpinnings."
Grabar's new book , "Debunking
the 1619 Project," will be published by Regnery on Sept. 7. She is also author of "Debunking
Howard Zinn," published in
2019.
bikepath999 6 hours ago
that bizarrely claimed traits such as "individualism," "hard work," "objectivity,"
"progress," "politeness," "decision-making," and "delayed gratification" were hallmarks of
"white culture." -- they are, what of it? These are excellent traits that are shared by
successful people
Zero-Hegemon 5 hours ago
By CRT logic it makes Asians "white" also
MaxMax 5 hours ago (Edited)
Universities now have black only fraternities and sororities, social clubs and sometimes
even buildings. Now imagine if some white students said they wanted some white only of the
same thing.
I run a business; I will hire the best qualified, lowest cost, hardest working person
out there. I don't care what color you are. I am here to make money and make the best
product possible.
Utopia Planitia 6 hours ago
CRT is a bolshevik tactic. That's it. It is a made-up story with the purpose of dividing
people. Just like the bolsheviks did in Russia during the first communist revolution.
Farmer Dave 6 hours ago remove link
My daughter is in med school at Tulane and they teach this crap all day long. She is
definitely my daughter and doesn't hold her tongue. So far she's doing well but only time
will tell if they try to cancel her. Then, they'll have me to deal with.
Stack Trace 6 hours ago remove link
Let's all focus on CRT instead of the a-holes strip mining the wealth of our
communities. A distraction that fuels the fake red-blue divide. Folks, it's a show it's not
real. This is a repeat of the same tactics as other "fake" social division issues. Lots of
bogeyman manufactured to keep the sheep off balance instead of focusing on the real enemy:
The Fed and the institutions and individuals it enriches
Without sound money there is no fuel to support movements that can affect real and
enduring change because the communities are starved of resources to support it. The only
communities that get some support the 0.001 percent and the thin sliver of the those that
serve them directly.
Epoch times strikes me as controlled opposition. I could be very wrong but I don't buy
their messaging.
ThaBigPerm 6 hours ago
CRT = National Socialism. Reheated Kaiser Wilhelm Institute leftovers. Just swap out the
"most chosen" and "least chosen" races.
ThaBigPerm 5 hours ago (Edited)
Classical Socialism (aka International Socialism/Communism), according to its authors,
is a framework that declares history is a struggle between oppressor classes and oppressed
classes, and provides that the government should be given plenary power to enact
remediation (dictatorship of the proletariat). If you scratch out "class" from the
framework and replace it with "race", you've got National Socialism. If you then rebrand
that as Critical Race Theory, then you have Critical Race Theory.
Greater Fool Theory PREMIUM 4 hours ago
Did you read the article? The main point is that conversation is not allowed. You agree
completely or you are a racist white supremacist.
Pdunne 5 hours ago
This is total nonsense scholastically but if shaping a "Race Relations" narrative for
use in a Political Campaign then it is useful.
BLM = CRT = BAD
Keep it simple keep it on a bumper sticker.
scraping_by 5 hours ago
One interesting admission here is that CRT is justification for Affirmative Action.
Affirmative Action was Nixon's way of continuing race divisions, and generally causing
hatred and discontent among the American people. Make getting a job a zero-sum game to keep
working people at each others throats.
Trying to keep conflicts away from economics, war and peace, and other things that
really matter since the late 1960s.
UpTo11 5 hours ago
Thank the dems for attempting to only pay farmers of color.
struck down by SC setting precedence
keep pushing back 'merica!!
4medicinalpurposesonly 6 hours ago
Nothing but deflecting blame for the outcomes their policies created
"... American universities are busy establishing black only dorms and black only graduation ceremonies. I really don't care if that's what blacks want, I'm all for freedom of association. But please stop ascribing segregation to white racism. ..."
1. Civic Pride: No littering. Nice parks. Nice walking areas.
2. Honest elections.
3. Quiet evenings.
4. Good policing. Low crime.
5. Good schools and stores.
6. Respectful neighbors.
7. A cultural norm that demands that violence be a rare and last resort for everyday disputes; not the normal first resort
for any dispute.
The fact that when I have the resources to live where I want, the population just happens to be higher than average Asian population
and lower than average Black population is a result of following criteria that has nothing to do with race... but, indirectly,
does due to cultural differences we're supposed to pretend don't exist.
Joseph Katz 30 minutes ago
If people choose to live near others with whom they feel they have something in common, it is no one else's business. New York
has characteristically Italian, Irish, Chinese, Jewish, etc. neighborhoods. There is nothing wrong with that.
Robert LaPorta 52 minutes ago (Edited)
As Mark Twain is purported to have said. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." and "Statistics is
the art of never having to say you're wrong."
Igor Liokumovich 53 minutes ago
American universities are busy establishing black only dorms and black only graduation ceremonies. I really don't care if
that's what blacks want, I'm all for freedom of association. But please stop ascribing segregation to white racism.
Ernest Montague 57 minutes ago
I live in a city, Oakland, with a large black community. My neighborhood is quite integrated. One of the things that we see here
is that many times black people enjoy living in a community where their culture is predominant and where they feel comfortable.
There are large, middle class black neighborhoods here where the resident could easily sell and move to more diverse areas. They
don't.
Bruce Lyon 1 hour ago
Am I the only person who questions why we have all of this racial scorekeeping to begin with? The nation's GDP would go up a few
points if all of these race-obsessed bureaucrats, analysts, academics, advocates, et al were actually engaged in productive activity.
Mark A. Rosasco 1 hour ago
I don't doubt our cities are becoming more segregated, they are mostly run by democrats, horribly mismanaged, and crime is reaching
very high levels.
People who can get out are leaving and in many cases only people who are too poor to leave are trapped there and a large majority
of them are African American.
Many cities are in a serious downward spiral and are in desperate need of better policing.
The defund the police movement is the exact opposite of what is needed.
Better relations between the law abiding citizens and the police is badly needed and better training of police officers so
less people get killed.
Community leaders should be doing everything they can to stop people from resisting arrest, you don't hear much about that
issue.
Obviously none this happens by reducing or eliminating police funding.
The exact opposite is needed, increase funding.
What a leadership vacuum.
BRUCE MONTGOMERY 1 hour ago
Highly recommended that Berkeley eliminate the "Belonging Center" and fund the Woodson Center instead.
The Woodson Center does the hard work in the streets.
Yuri Vizitei 1 hour ago
I am encouraged, relieved even, that the commentators are just worked up and outraged about progressive's statistical shenanigans'.
These days of insurrections and such, since some folks want to go back when things were great (again), say 1955? I was fully
expecting to see some expressing nostalgia for those good old segregated days.
But I suppose we haven't quite gotten back there yet.
Robert D 1 hour ago
The left lies. They need to make up fake statistics to even debate a topic. These are the same people say Republicans were the
ones defunding the Police!
James Rodden 1 hour ago
It's so easy to make up any "index" which shows whatever it is you want to show. This "index" will be taken as gospel by our wonderfully
"unbiased" press and then followed by all the liberal politicians who will spout it as fact"¦.
BRUCE MONTGOMERY 1 hour ago
Why is Univ. of Calif - Berkeley allowing an advocacy center to set up shop on its campus?
Academic research is supposed to aim for objective, dispassionate findings, not ideological advocacy.
Such a center only stains the university's reputation and credibility.
carl sanders 2 hours ago
Meanwhile, China must be laughing at how the Left in this country loves to trash our country.
China is focused on domination in all areas--which means talent over feelings.
We are becoming a Nation of weak minded people who look to the Government to run their lives.
Gregory Dolinajec 2 hours ago
As a graduate of UC Berkeley I can honestly say I am amused ( and saddened) by its loss of purpose. I routinely get emails from
the Chancellor which border on comedic. This study follows her lead. Diversity trumps academic rigor. Safe spaces trump the intellectually
demanding class. Drivel, clear thought. and so on.
J Seders 2 hours ago
Just like inflation. When the outcome doesn't fit your narrative, change the metric. Then feign moral superiority
Jack Johnson 2 hours ago
Thomas Sowell wrote dozens of articles and books that completely destroy this "study."
Carlos Lumpuy 2 hours ago
College graduates separated by race and ethnicity, so they graduate with others who look like themselves.
How disgusting is that?
Where is the outrage?
What on earth are we doing to our young?
People live where they can afford to live more than any diversity.
The real American Dream is not achieved through meritless affirmative action at work or in school but through providing all people
with the opportunity to better themselves through individual effort and skill, not by specially created classes.
These false collectivist narrative constructs are not the fulfillment of the American dream but its very debasement.
We are all Americans, human beings;
But until we stop looking at each other with this prejudice, I describe,
We will never be united, colorblind, and free.
Only the truly educated are free.
Woke yet?
BRUCE MONTGOMERY 2 hours ago
Can't trust any research study coming out of academia; contaminated by ideology and identity politics.
Academic researchers will twist and contort data into pretzels to produce their ideological outcomes.
They've nearly lost all credibility.
Martin Schneider 1 hour ago
Bruce; I have thought that was true for a long time but recently I have looked up things on critical race theory and the "facts"
they bring up defy the imagination. That race is only a social construct is one of the most absurd. It completely flies in the
face of common sense
ALAN T 3 hours ago
I'm am so tired and confused. Isn't African American now that are insisting on sperate but equal? I mean we have at their insistence
separate living quarters, separate graduation ceremonies, white free days on campus ..... I mean you really can't win can you.
No matter how you attempt to accommodate their demands every action is racist.
At its recent annual meeting, the National Education Association adopted an agenda item
stating, "It is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks
for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including
critical race theory."
Becky Pringle, the teachers union's president, declared that "if this grand experiment in
democracy is to succeed," then "we must continuously do the work to challenge ourselves and
others to dismantle the racist interconnected systems and the economic injustices that have
perpetuated systemic inequities."
Asked about the NEA's decision, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that President
Biden believes "children should learn about our history," including the view that "there is
systemic racism that is still impacting society today."
With this statement, Mr. Biden has plunged headlong into a roiling national debate about
critical race theory, and it isn't clear he can win it. The issue has become central to the
cultural agenda that Republicans hope to ride to victory in the midterm elections. The share of
Americans who believe its impact on our society will be negative is twice as large as those
with a positive assessment. Only 16% strongly support teaching critical race theory in public
schools, compared with 29% who strongly oppose it.
Between Feb. 1 and June 13, Fox News mentioned critical race theory more than 1,300 times.
Christopher Rufo, a young conservative activist who was instrumental in persuading President
Trump to issue an executive order restricting diversity training throughout the executive
branch, has a remarkably effective strategy. It's no secret: In a well-known tweet, he
described his plan for turning critical race theory "toxic" by putting "all of the various
cultural insanities under that brand category."
Elizabeth became increasing bold in stating her religious opinions openly -- as well as her
anti-slavery views and support for abolitionist John Brown.
So in 1860 her husband exercised his legal right to have her committed to an insane
asylum.
Elizabeth spent three years in the asylum before being deemed incurable. She was released
back to the custody of her husband, who locked her in a room and nailed the windows shut.
But with the help of a friend, Elizabeth managed to take her husband to court over the
confinement. A jury took only seven minutes to decide that she was healthy, sane, and deserved
her freedom.
Sadly, her case was not unique.
The records from one mental asylum from the era still survive, and they show vast amounts of
cases in which women were diagnosed as insane because they did not accept the prevailing views
of society, or of their husbands.
A common diagnosis was to rule a woman "insane by religious fantasy." In other words, she
did not believe in the exact same religious principles as her neighbors and family members.
Behaving and thinking independently was more than enough to deem a woman crazy and totally
ruin her life.
And everyone in her social circle -- friends, neighbors, family members, and even her own
husband -- was able to rat them out to the authorities for their dangerous, aberrant
behavior.
You'd think this sort of custom would have gone out of style long ago.
But thanks to a new program being developed by the White House, you too can soon report your
'insane' friends and family members who don't express approved social views.
And this new strategy includes programs for people to "seek help" from the government on
behalf of anyone they "perceive to be radicalizing".
Their objective here is to prevent violence and domestic terrorism. That sounds noble
enough.
But even basic truths about violence are completely tainted by ideology and politics.
Angry, menacing rioters rampaging through the streets, torching cars, looting stores, and
destroying property? They're "mostly peaceful", hence this White House program doesn't apply to
them.
But the man who grabs a weapon to defend his family against those angry, menacing rioters?
He's a violent radical who should be reported.
Then there's Dr. Aruna Khilanani, who earlier this month lectured at Yale University about
her fantasies of killing white people.
Again, though, she's neither considered radical nor potentially violent so she doesn't fit
into this new White House program.
Saying, however, that "a man cannot get pregnant," which was enough for
Twitter to ban a Spanish politician recently, is absolutely considered radical.
The rules are terribly confusing. Fortunately the US government will be bringing in the Big
Tech companies to monitor our behavior and keep us all in check.
It's also notable that the federal government is spending boatloads of taxpayer dollars
teaching US government employees about Critical Race Theory, which asserts that everyone is
racist and that you are either a victim or an oppressor based on your skin color.
I say this is notable because they don't spend those same taxpayer dollars on the principles
taught by Martin Luther King, i.e. that we should strive for a society where people are judged
by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
But MLK's view is now considered outdated by the woke progressives in charge.
And they even have 'science' to back up their assertions.
For example, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
published an article last month explaining that whiteness is "a malignant, parasitic-like
condition".
And as we've all been told, you gotta trust the science!
This is rapidly becoming the accepted social view, and any departure from this thesis is
considered 'radical'.
It's ironic that most of the bureaucrats and politicians mandating this training don't have
the first clue what they're talking about.
Recently General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that
teaching Critical Race Theory and "white rage" to military cadets at West Point (my alma mater)
was important.
Yet he simultaneously acknowledged that he doesn't know the first thing about Critical Race
Theory, referring to it as "whatever the theory is. . ."
And that pretty much sums up institutional leadership these days in the Land of the
Free.
Politicians in government, business executives, and now even military generals, are only
concerned about appearances, not substance.
They know nothing about Critical Race Theory. They just want to give the appearance that
they're doing something especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
Just about every big company and organization, from Coca Cola to Disney to Major League
Baseball to the Central Intelligence Agency, has jumped on board the Woke train and embraced
these idiotic principles.
Hardly a single so-called 'leader' has stood up to say 'I agree there are problems to solve,
but this approach is totally absurd and I'm not going along with it.'
These executives have too much to lose -- power, prestige, paychecks so they fall in line
and do what everyone else is doing.
Standing apart from the crowd, risking your reputation, and raising a voice of dissent takes
courage -- something that is sorely lacking in political and corporate leadership.
This weak, pitiful leadership is the reason why the entire woke movement has snowballed out
of control: no one with any real power is willing to stand against it anymore.
It's also the reason why looting Nike stores and rioting in the streets is seen as 'mostly
peaceful'.
Yet anyone with conservative views is considered "radical", worthy of being committed to
modern-day digital insane asylum (i.e. censored by the Big Tech platforms).
Frankly, if history is any guide, this trend is most likely going to become much worse. But
one day it will subside.
It may take years. But the woke Twitter mob will eventually run out of people to hate and
start feeding on its own fanatics. It's like the Soviet Union: sooner or later the entire
idiotic ideology will collapse on itself.
y_arrow 1
Greed is King 18 hours ago
The Hitler Youth were encouraged to "snitch", and they did, on their parents, their
teachers, everybody. The NAZI Concentration Camps killed Aryans as well as ****.
Welcome to the Elite`s brave new world.
_Conax_ 15 hours ago
Insane, huh.
The soviet communist party used their mental hospitals to silence and punish their
critics. I never trusted shrinks because their profession is based on the hack theories of
bearded hare brains. Everyone either hates their father or want to boink their moms
according to those quacks.
The treatment involves zombie pills.
Are our leftists so weak they can't face the free thinking in the war of ideas?
Absolutely horrifying. And that was in the 20th century, not the 15th!
indus creed 14 hours ago (Edited)
One NY judge tried to commit Dinesh D'Souza to a mental hospital during his campaign
finance hearing. They are gonna declare all old school thinking as insane.
jakevee 18 hours ago
Sounds like North Korea.
Dr Phuckit 12 hours ago
Snitching was a major part of 1984, you got rewarded with a few bread crumbs.
Baby steps until one day you realize ....
Obamanism666 7 hours ago
Bring me the person, we will find a crime
JustSayNo 5 hours ago (Edited)
Sometime this weekend, I'm going to have to find the time to post a little write up I'd
found on the persecution of the Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland in the late 1600's- early
1700's. This included crucifixion of their Presbyterian ministers, tossing their babies
alive into pots of boiling water, hunting the men down and murdering as in the style of an
English fox hunt. This occurred at the hands of the English, and though just one example of
the atrocities spurred by the English aristocracy and bankers of the times, the fate of the
Ulster Scots was probably the worst of it. The Ulster Scots migrated to the US in droves at
the time. They tended to push out into the American wilderness, getting as far away from
the systems of English rule and governance in the American cities as possible. Justifiably,
they hated the English. It seems, that the English aristocracy and bankers are still after
the descendants of the Ulster Scots today- labeling them "domestic terrorists", blaming
them for slavery (which was really to the profit of the English banking system and
investors in trade of the times, and was not of benefit to the average American ). To the
Ulster Scots and others who had suffered in Europe, and some other parts of the world, at
the hands of the English, slavery probably seemed rather tame, and pushing out to the
wilderness and frontiers the way that the Scots did, slavery of Africans was likely not
much a part of their universe . What the Ulster Scots cared about, was freedom from the
rule and governance of the despicable English aristocracy. And with good reason. They also
tended not to talk about what had happened to them, as our Irish-American ancestors tended
not to talk about what had really happened at the hands of the English. Its time to start
talking about the Ulster Scots. Much of the our ideas about freedom, about our relationship
to government, property. about the second amendment and the importance an ability of the
people to protect itself from government, come from the Scots. We need a reminder as to why
the Scots felt this way, based on experiences. Their experience of exactly what government
will do to a people when that people is unable to defend itself, and that government is
controlled by Khazarian and other bankers.
ebear 8 hours ago
"It's like the Soviet Union: sooner or later the entire idiotic ideology will collapse
on itself."
Ozarkian 2 hours ago
The media narratives no longer work. The movers and shakers are losing control and it
should scare the hell out of them. They might actually have to work for a living.
Aireannpure 14 hours ago
Do not comment on social dogma, rhetoric and platitudes dudes.
As
Peter Hitchens noted recently "the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector
from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is 'not as nuts' as the indoctrination now
forced on Western students."
One of Yeonmi Park's initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be
met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. "Did
you know," Ms. Park was sternly admonished, "that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They
were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you."
But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi
concluded: "Even North Korea is not this nuts North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this
crazy." Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the
land of her dreams.
Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new
situation: "She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree.
Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant
regimes, and let the drivel wash over her."
Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to
say.
You need to drink a lot of "woke coke" and wearing exclusively "woke Nike" to digest those
recommendations without laughing.
History repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce. White Guard rebels during Russian civil
War called Bolsheviks "Tovatitcshi"(Comrades) as they prohibited to say Sir to the officers.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many different things."
As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just
broken one of the cardinal rules of his "
Politics and the English Language ," but not his final injunction to "break any of these
rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") of politicised mind-bending. The sort of
language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage
in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare
being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of
meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat
the mind and eventually to subjugate it.
A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly
brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without
prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious
words and phrases as "picnic" and "you guys," for being "oppressive". "Picnic" is prohibited
because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.
The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable
words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in
bewilderment: "What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word
'picnic' at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] 'trigger warning'? Loss of
tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?"
Oppressive Language
Possible Alternatives
Explanation
Killing it
Great job!
If someone is doing well, we
don't need to equate that to
Awesome!
murder!
Take a shot at
Give it a go
These expressions needlessly use
imagery of hurting someone or
Take a stab at
Try
something.
Trigger warning
Content note
The word "trigger" has
connections to guns for many
Drop-in
people; we can give the same
head's up using language less
connected to violence.
Rule of thumb
General rule
This expression comes from an
old British law allowing men to
beat their wives with sticks no
wider than their thumb.
Pknk
Outdoor eating
Tlie term picnic is often
associated with lynchings of
Black people in the United
States, during which white
spectators were said to have
watched while eating, referring
to them as picnics or other terms
involving racial slurs against
Black people.
Go off tlte reservation
Disagree with tlie group, defect
This phrase has a harmful
from the group
history rooted in the violent
removal of indigenous people
from their land and the Itorrible
consequences for someone that
left the reservation.
_arrow
Not Your Father's ZH 8 hours ago (Edited)
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. " ― George Orwell
The constant reconstruction of language is a highly effective tool when employed against
weak minds... as most folks have only a loose association with the words in their
heads...
As meanings of words are changed the ideas associated with those words change...
consequently a society can be transformed into a different society without ever answering a
single argument...
1748 (in Chesterfield's "Letters"), but the thing itself apparently was rare before c.
1800 as an English institution [OED]; it originally meant "a fashionable social affair (not
necessarily out of doors) in which every partaker contributed something to the general
table;" from French piquenique (1690s), perhaps a reduplication of piquer "to pick, peck,"
from Old French (see pike
(n.1)), or the second element may be nique "worthless thing," from a Germanic source.
As in many other riming names, the elements are used without precision, but the lit.
sense is appar. 'a picking or nibbling of bits,' a snatch, snack .... [Century
Dictionary]
The word also turns up 18c. in German, Danish, Swedish. Later "pleasure party the
members of which carry provisions with them on an excursion, as to some place in the
country." Figurative sense of "something easy" is from 1886. Picnic basket is by 1857.
Picnic table is by 1858, originally a folding table used for outdoor dining.
Meanwhile the top Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Indian etc. schools concentrating on STEM
are laughing their asses off.
John Grady 6 hours ago
Activism is now a career path so to differentiate yourself as an activist you have to
have an angle so you look busy. Endless bickering about minutia makes it look like they're
doing something.
Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least
those isolated portions of it that are not internalising the sinister "new normal." But it is
seemingly to no avail. All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are
determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum.
As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just
broken one of the cardinal rules of his "
Politics and the English Language ," but not his final injunction to "break any of these
rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") of politicised mind-bending. The sort of
language we are permitted to use circumscribes the thinking that we shall be allowed to engage
in. The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare
being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of
meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat
the mind and eventually to subjugate it.
A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly
brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without
prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious
words and phrases as "picnic" and "you guys," for being "oppressive". "Picnic" is prohibited
because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.
The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable
words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in
bewilderment: "What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word
'picnic' at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed – S.K.] 'trigger warning'? Loss of
tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?"
All three punishments will probably be applied to reactionary professors who go afoul of the
list's rigorous linguistic requirements.
Not to be outdone by the progressive kids on the East Coast, avant-garde
California legislators have passed a law to remove the pronoun "he" from state legal texts.
The momentous reform was initiated by California's new attorney general, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan,
who after looking up the job requirements made the shocking discovery that the law assumed that
the attorney general would be a man.
Upon review, it turned out that the state code and other legal documents were enabling
unacceptable concepts by using pronouns "he," "him" and "his" when referring to the attorney
general and other state-wide elected officials. Appalled, Ms. Bauer-Kahan denounced these
linguistic lapses for not representing "where California is and where California is going." She
inarguably was right on that score at least, which has perhaps also something to do with the
massive exodus of California residents to less complicated parts of the country.
When lawmakers of a state which is rapidly turning into a North American Calcutta have no
concerns more pressing than to revise the use of pronouns in official documents, that sends a
clear message where that state is going, exactly as the smart and thoroughly up-to-date woman
said.
But as a Pakistani
immigrant father in Seattle, state of Washington, discovered to his chagrin, the linguistic
clowning can have very serious personal and political consequences. After checking in his
16-year-old autistic son for treatment in what he thought was a medical facility, Ahmed was
shocked to receive a telephone call where a social worker explained to him that the child he
had originally entrusted to the medical authorities as a son was actually transgender and must
henceforth, under legal penalty of removal, be referred to and treated as a "daughter."
Coming from a traditional society still governed by tyrannical precepts of common sense and
not accustomed to the ways of the asylum where in search of a better life he and his family
inadvertently ended up, the father (a title that like mother, now officially "number one
parent," is also
on the way out ) was able to conceive his tragic predicament only by weaving a complex
conspiracy theory:
"They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to
absolutely want to push us in that direction. We had calls with counsellors and therapists in
the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because
that's the only way he's going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state."
Since in the equally looney state of Washington the age when minors can request a
gender-change surgery without parental consent is 13, the Pakistani parents saw clearly the
writing on the wall and, bless them, they came up with a clever stratagem to outwit their
callous ideological tormentors. Ahmed "assured Seattle Children's Hospital that he would take
his son to a gender clinic and commence his son's transition. Instead, he collected his son,
quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington."
Perhaps feeling the heat from the linguistic Gestapo even in his celebrity kitchen, iconic
chef Jamie Oliver has come on board. Absurdly, Jamie vowed
fealty to the ascendant normal by dropping the term "Kaffir lime leaves" from his recipes ,
in fear that the alleged "historically racist slur" would offend South Africans. No evidence at
all has been furnished or demanded of complaints from South Africa in that regard. But it
speaks volumes that someone of Jamie's influence and visibility should nevertheless deem it
prudent to anticipate such criticism even though, should it have materialised, it of course
would not originate from South Africa but from white Western political correctness
commissars.
Jamie is now busy, but not just cooking. He is going over his previously published recipes
in order to expunge all offensive references to kefir leaves. Orwell aficionados will recall
this precious passage from 1984 : "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered." And now every recipe as well. The dystopia fits, does it not, to
a tee even something as seemingly trivial as a cooking show?
But it is not just recipes. Children's fairy tales are also fair game for 1984 revision.
Hollywood actress Natalie Portman ( Star Wars , The Professional , Thor ), inspired
apparently by the new cultural normal, has taken it upon herself not to write, but to re-write,
several classic fairy tales to make them "gender-neutral," so "children can defy gender
stereotypes." Predictably, pronouns were again a major target:
"I found myself changing the pronouns in many of their books because so many of them had
overwhelmingly male characters, disproportionate to reality," quoth Natalie as she put her
linguistic scalpel to such old favourites as The Tortoise and the Hare , Country Mouse and
City Mouse and The Three Little Pigs .
Need we go on, or does the sharp reader already get the general drift? How about
State University of New York student Owen Stevens , who was suspended and censured for
pointing out on his Instagram the ascertainable biological fact that "A man is a man, a woman
is a woman. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man." (Owen was snitched on by fellow
students, readers from the former Eastern bloc will be amused to learn.) Or the Nebraska
university basketball coach who was suspended for using in a motivational speech the
mysteriously offensive word "plantation"? Or the hip $57,000-a-year NYC school that
banned students from saying "mom" and "dad" , from asking where classmates went on vacation
or wishing anyone "Merry Christmas" or even "Happy Holidays"? Or
female university student Lisa Keogh in Scotland who said in class "women have vaginas"
(who would be better informed than she on that subject?) and are "not as strong as men", who is
facing disciplinary action by the university after fellow classmates complained about her
"offensive and discriminatory" comments? Or
Spanish politician Francisco José Contreras whose Twitter account was blocked as a
warning for 12 hours after he tweeted what some would regard as the self-evident truth that
"men cannot get pregnant" because they have "no uterus or eggs"?
As
Peter Hitchens noted recently "the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector
from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is 'not as nuts' as the indoctrination now
forced on Western students."
One of Yeonmi Park's initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be
met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen. "Did
you know," Ms. Park was sternly admonished, "that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They
were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you."
But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi
concluded: "Even North Korea is not this nuts North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this
crazy." Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the
land of her dreams.
Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new
situation: "She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree.
Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant
regimes, and let the drivel wash over her."
Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to
say.
ay_arrow
Plus Size Model 9 hours ago
No worries! We're talking about two different things. You explicitly mentioned meanings
of words in your initial post. Now you're also alluding to what a psyop officer would
describe as manipulating the cognitive environment of a target group. Cognitive
manipulation is a much larger toolbox and involves things like perception management,
information management, memory retrieval, what old timers refer to as symbol manipulation,
etc.
In psychological warfare literature, symbols are somewhat of a mental bookmark. You can
really mess people up by altering the bookmarks slightly or changing around the files they
reference in a prolonged campaign.
The Nazi swastika is probably the most successful symbol manipulation campaign ever. It
means different things to different people and these meanings have evolved substantially
over time. Each new generation and is indoctrinated with different presentations of the
swastika. The wide latitude of interpretation and extreme views associated with it have
consistently created huge social flash points over the past 90 years.
Lorenz Feedback 9 hours ago
I think somethings are being overlooked on this point, Semantic prosody concerns itself
with the way unusual combinations of words can create intertextual 'resonance' and can
suggest speaker/writer attitude and opinion. Consider the difference with using very
powerful versus utterly compelling when presenting an argument. Some words shape narratives
better than others and trigger a response well known to advertisers and propagandists...and
help shape public opinion.
Yes... changing the context of words has a huge impact...
ie the word white is now seen in the context of numerous pejoratives...
Cautiously Pessimistic 10 hours ago
I fit in here in America less and less with each passing year. I feel like a stranger in
my own country at times. I am sure that is by design.
Max Power 9 hours ago
On the other hand, as soon as people encounter real problems like hunger, bankruptcy, or
homelessness, all this ivy league brainwashing evaporates in an instance. Just a stupid
game played by wealthy white libtards believing in fairytales.
So even in 1971 corporate American understood usefulness of critical race theory and "black
bolshevism" for their needs. Otherwise Bell would never get a tenure in Harvard -- the bastion of
neoliberalism and corporatism.
As the theory is a typical pseudoscience in the best style of Academician Lysenko, it is
natural that " Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents
than from the theorists themselves."
The idea that "struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed."
remiinds me Eduard Bernstein's "movement toward goal is everything; goal is nothing" see
Eduard Bernstein's
Revisionist Critique of Marxist Theory and Practice Bernstein was a member of the German
Social Democratic party which was a particularly strong and important member of the Second
International conference. Bernstein's thoughts are encapsulated in his book, Evolutionary
Socialism, published in 1899.
Notable quotes:
"... ...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. ..."
"... The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis." ..."
"... Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken." ..."
"... To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?" ..."
In their book "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction," Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list
several of its core premises, including the view that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational,"
and that it "serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,"
that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to
the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile
cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times's 1619 Project and
bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an
Antiracist." Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other
institutions.
...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than
from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly
aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: "Faces at the Bottom
of the Well," the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather
of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today's controversies. In
"Faces," he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic
sense of "the permanence of racism" -- the book's subtitle. Bell's thought has been an
important influence on some of today's most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to
work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left
the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid
compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell's work: Can
traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans,
or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the
law?
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As
he writes in "Faces," "When I agreed to become Harvard's first black faculty member I did so on
the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be
the pioneer, the trailblazer." But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell
to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law
School.
... ... ...
The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality,
wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late,
esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress
since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that
Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his
claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis."
In the conclusion to "Faces," Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is
worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus,
who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an
absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action
must be taken."
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic
magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their
racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their
hard-won victim status?"
... ... ...
These experiences inform "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," which is made up of nine fables,
some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean,
with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a
system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks -- a kind of
cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
The question implies that state actors are specially qualified or motivated to subsidize
minority opinion in order to rectify the unfair treatment of minorities -- that the state is
the most qualified entity for intervening in opinion to favor minorities. But it is easily
demonstrated that the market provides more incentives to advocate for the fair treatment of
minorities than does the state. Markets encourage legal equality among buyers and sellers. The
state, meanwhile, has no monopoly on equal treatment -- to say the least. Quite to the
contrary, states have more incentives to discriminate against particular groups, as state
prerogatives often depend on discrimination. Consider the treatment of the Japanese and Germans
in America during World War II, or the treatment of Middle Easterners after 9/11. (Notice how
discrimination against Middle Easterners morphed into the consternation about "Islamophobia"
when the prerogatives of the state shifted from "the war on terror" under George W. Bush to the
incorporation of Islamic immigrants into the electorate under Barack Obama.)
Thus, we should be quite skeptical when states impose the opinion of minorities on the
majority through special programs in schools and elsewhere. Such programs likely involve
"positive discrimination" against particular groups, consistent with state objectives.
In fact, discrimination is precisely what is involved in the teaching of critical race
theory in schools, the military, the intelligence agencies, and in other government agencies
today. Critical race theory is a minority opinion that even most blacks do not agree with. It
is being foisted on the majority to establish discrimination against "whites," in order to
destroy a political contingent deemed inimical to the Democratic Party–run state. It is a
means for marginalizing oppositional elements and driving others into the voting ranks of the
Democratic Party by means of ideology. The state imposition of minority opinion does not serve
minorities.
Sounds like a great book for Tucker to recommend to that Army Chief of Staff!
Notable quotes:
"... I call it ROLE -- The Racism Of Low Expectations. This phenomenon has done ten times more to damage Black lives than can be attributed to CRT or institutionalized racism. ..."
"... A subset of ROLE is MVT. This is Manufactured Victimhood Theory. This comes about from influential Black "leaders" who, instead of teaching Blacks the truth about how to live good lives (work hard, develop skills, etc.), they told them to apply as their life strategy "say you are a victim." ..."
Recently the Joint Chiefs of Staff remarked that the US military should teach CTR to our
military essentially because they shoild teach all theories.
That doesn't make sense to me but I would like to put another theory into the public
sphere. I call it ROLE -- The Racism Of Low Expectations. This phenomenon has done ten times
more to damage Black lives than can be attributed to CRT or institutionalized racism.
A subset of ROLE is MVT. This is Manufactured Victimhood Theory. This comes about from
influential Black "leaders" who, instead of teaching Blacks the truth about how to live good
lives (work hard, develop skills, etc.), they told them to apply as their life strategy "say
you are a victim."
I am hoping that ROLE and MVT will become part of all aspects of American life -- all
levels of education, the military, businesses, the media, etc.
If the goal really is to improve Black lives, ROLE and MVT should be the rage over the
next few years.
Tom F
John Callahan 4 hours ago
Corporate America 'makes money critiquing itself.' The rest of us pay the price in
diminished freedom.
Wokeism is fascism dressed up in new clothes- the censorship, demonization of
groups and individuals and the physical violence against people and property remain the same.
Corporate America has one overriding interest- making money. Paying the left (and yes,
fascism is of the left) through critiquing itself and token monetary donations is a get out
of jail free card for Corporate America.
"Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily
subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it."
- Thomas Sowell
Dom Fried 4 hours ago
It will end the same. Almost, because there will be nobody to stop it.
Ed Baron 3 hours ago
Very well said, John. Fascism is a fundamental element or subset of Leftist or Marxist
thought. It demands conformity of the individual to the new "woke" state and it punishes any
who dissent. It's not incidental that American Leftists, including FDR, loved Mussolini prior
to WWII. That bromance has been washed clean, and attributed instead to the Right. Such a
typical transference technique used by Marxist.
Alex Guiness
I interpret your supposition 'White male global warming', as meaning White Males are
particularly flatulent hence are producing Green House Gases with their diets of greasy meats
(some on sticks), carnival funnel cakes, corn dogs, Philly cheese-steaks, Popeyes fried
chicken, all washed down with Bud Light. Would it kill them to have a salad now and then? How
can their spouses stand to be around them unless they are also consuming the same foods.
Imagine what it must be like at a sermon in a Lutheran Church, the whitest church of all.
They leave the doors open else a spark could set the whole place ablaze.
carol Perry
Thanks for today's chuckle Alex.
Alex Guiness
read my smurfs comment. i just posted it
Lynn Silton
Mr. Ramaswamy is right in every way! I don't belong to the Woke Church. I'll never join.
America is an inspirational country as is all it's written declarations. We, the people rule.
No religion can overrule it. We will not allow religious 'honor killings.' They are murder
here. We will not allow Wokism here it is the murder of our hopes and dreams which belong to
everybody regardless of appearance. I don't even know how appearance (of all things) became a
religion. The whole thing is so sick, people of all shades are speaking out and we will put
this crazy idea down. Here, we marry across all appearances. New people are often different
in appearance than parents. Woke will die of that alone. That's why we have an immigration
'problem' . People love our constitution and Declaration of Independence. People love that
they rule here, not the government. That's our creed and promise. Help protect it!!
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, responded sharply to questions
from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., on Wednesday about the examination of critical race theory in the
U.S. military.
"I've read Mao Zedong. I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a
communist. So what is wrong with understanding" having some situational understanding about the
country for which we are here to defend?" Milley said.
He continued brusquely: "And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United
States military, our general officers, our commissioned, noncommissioned officers of being,
quote, 'woke' or something else, because we're studying some theories that are out there."
C-SPAN captured Gaetz shaking his head while the Joint Chiefs chairman spoke.
The exchange came at a House Armed Services Committee hearing to discuss the 2022 Defense
Department budget.
Until recently, critical race theory was anything but a household phrase. Rather, it was
used to describe an approach to studying institutional racism, as NPR's
Barbara Sprunt has reported . But it has become a culture war issue, and the phrase has
been stretched well beyond its initial meaning, as conservatives in particular have used the
phrase to raise concerns about race in venues including state legislatures and local school
boards.
"... He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and "sustainability" have come to take their place. ..."
"... "Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone." ..."
"... Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were -- and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis, Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people." ..."
"... The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
"... He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges" America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else." ..."
"... The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides. ..."
"... Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity -- including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement, Coca-Cola apologized for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.") ..."
"... Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250 sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives." (Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and "we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.") ..."
"... Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute. ..."
"... Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds. ..."
"... Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent. These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more. ..."
"... One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human characteristic. There are more. ..."
A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every
inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth
grade. He's joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General
Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with
him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back -- a very Indian
filial act.
"I was probably the only person my age who'd heard of Antonin Scalia, " Mr. Ramaswamy, 35,
says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would
often rage on the way home from class about "some Scalia opinion." Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that
this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he
switched to being conservative at Harvard in "an act of rebellion" against the politics he
found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences --
the drug-development company that made him rich -- and write "Woke, Inc," a book that takes a
scathing look at "corporate America's social-justice scam." (It will be published in
August.)
Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie "Spotlight," which tells the story of how reporters
at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the
early 2000s. "My goal in 'Woke, Inc.' is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of
Wokeism." He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral
vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we
derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and
"sustainability" have come to take their place.
"Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the
blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a
cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is
getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone."
Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic
and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were --
and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says.
Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis,
Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad
guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people."
The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the
left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought,
'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and
minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in
Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials,
birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr.
Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
Mr. Ramaswamy says that "unlike the investigative 'Spotlight' team at the Boston Globe, I'm
a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong." He paraphrases a line
in the movie: "It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In
the case of my book, the child I'm concerned about is American democracy."
In league with the woke left, corporate America "uses force" as a substitute for open
deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "There's the sustainability accounting standards
board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from
BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that
board."
Was the board put in place by the owners of the trillions of dollars of capital that Mr.
Fink manages? Of course not, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "And yet he's actually using his seat of
corporate power to sidestep debate about questions like environmentalism or diversity on
boards."
The irrepressible Mr. Ramaswamy presses on with another example. Goldman Sachs , he says with obvious relish,
"is a very Davos-fitting example." At the 2020 World Economic Forum, Goldman Sachs CEO David
Solomon "issued an edict from the mountaintops of Davos." Mr. Solomon announced his company
would refuse to take a company public if its board wasn't sufficiently diverse. "So Goldman
gets to define what counts as 'diverse,' " Mr. Ramaswamy says. "No doubt, they're referring to
skin-deep, genetically inherited attributes."
He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political
debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges"
America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a
one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted
by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our
uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate
silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites
gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else."
The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over
the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the
woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look
the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This
arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides.
The rest of corporate America appears to be following suit. "There's a Big Pharma version,
too," Mr. Ramaswamy says. "Big Pharma had an epiphany in dealing with the left." It couldn't
beat them, so it joined them. "Rather than win the debate on drug pricing, they decided to just
change the subject instead. Who needs to win a debate if you can just avoid having it?" So we
see "big-time pharma CEOs musing about topics like racial justice and environmentalism, and
writing multibillion-dollar checks to fight climate change, while taking price hikes that
they'd previously paused when the public was angry about drug pricing."
Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements
about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is
to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity --
including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement,
Coca-Cola apologized
for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company
training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.")
Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's
history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250
sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the
while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives."
(Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and
"we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions
that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.")
... ... ...
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
Rod Drake 53 minutes ago
Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No
surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume
that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds.
In addition, I have been
saying for some time discrimination based on political belief desperately needs to be
included as a prohibited basis. Where are the Republicans, while the greatest civil rights
violation of our time is going on right under their noses?
Terry Overbey 1 hour ago
I love reading stories about people who are willing to take on the woke political class. For
most people, even if they strongly disagree, their only option is to bite their tongue and go
along. People aren't stupid. If you buck the system, you don't get promoted, you don't get
good grades, you don't get into elite schools, you don't get the government job.
Thank you Mr Ramaswany.
James Ransom 1 hour ago
Well. If nothing else, he just sold me a book. I think we should say that "Wokeism" tries to
"Act Like" a religion, not that it is one. Because of this fakery, we do not need to give it
"freedom" in the sense that we have "Freedom of Religion."
These misguided Americans perhaps need to be exposed to a real religion. Christianity and
Buddhism would be good choices; I don't know about Hinduism, but my point is that "Wokeism"
is more like a mental disorder. We should feel sorry for its victims, offer them treatment,
but not let them run anything.
marc goodman 1 hour ago
Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent
being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent.
These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more.
One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to
unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises
elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth
uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human
characteristic. There are more.
Humans need to believe in something greater than themselves. We fulfill this need with
religion, and historically, the "greater something" has been a transcendent being. Wokeism
fulfills this need for its adherents but without a transcendent being. Ultimately, Wokeism
will fail as a religion because it can't nourish the soul like the belief in a transcendent
being does.
Grodney Ross 2 hours ago (Edited)
Judgement will be passed in November of 2022. I don't see this as a Democrat vs Republican
issue. I think it's a matter of who is paying attention vs. those who are not. We live in a
society where, generally, the most strident voices are on the left, along with the most
judgmental voices. When the "wokeless" engage in a manner that conflicts with views of the
woke, they are attacked, be you from the left or the right, so you keep your mouth shut and go
about your day.
I believe that this coming election will give voice to those who are fatigued and fed up
with the progressive lefts venom and vitriol. If not, we will survive, but without a meaningful
first amendment,14th amendment, or 2nd amendment.
Barbara Helton 2 hours ago (Edited)
Being woke, when practiced by the wealthy and influential, can be extremely similar to
bullying.
"... It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of
the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion,
appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact
of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a
bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for
adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing
itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of
BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
That Leftist "wokeism" is the brainchild of a religious cult should've been obvious decades
ago. The purely religious belief in anthropogenic global warming, for example, which closely
mimics the spiritual rituals of ancient cultures by worshiping nature over man. The hierarchy
of color and gender as fetishes through which human relative value can be determined also
mimics the hierarchy of priests or shamans in other religions. Thus, a fairly vapid group
like BLM is exalted based purely on the melanin content of their skin, even though their
claims are ridiculously flawed (They "care" about the lives of 90 or so armed felons killed
by police, but call the 7,000+ black people killed by Blacks a "distraction"). Like many
religions that plagued humanity throughout history, they will torment and punish all
"deniers." Four years of the Trump Presidency made this clear. He faced the Grand Inquisition
because he refused to kneel.
"Stop indoctrinating our children. Stop teaching our children to hate the police. Stop
teaching our children that if they don't agree with the LGBT community that they're homophobic.
You have no idea each child's life," she said, adding "You don't know what their family
lifestyle consists of, you don't know the makeup of their life."
https://youtu.be/zxu3wdiXRF0
Ibrahim shut down school board members' objections several times - in between calling out
two teachers for posting their political beliefs online. When board members told her she wasn't
allowed to reference people by name, Ibrahim claimed those teachers called "for the death of a
former president," and that students who don't support Black Lives Matter should be "canceled
out."
"Why are we not allowed to say names? Why am I not allowed when they purposefully expose
themselves on social media, talking about calling for the death of a former president, or
saying that any child who doesn't believe in Black Lives Matter should be canceled out. Is this
what my tax dollars are paying for?" she asked.
"You're emotionally abusing our children and mentally abusing them," Ibrahim continued
RDinSC 1 hour ago
Never vote for anyone at any level of political office who does not openly and sincerely
oppose CRT and any and all woke indoctrination.
RedDog1 1 hour ago
I'm a super anti-racist. I'm especially against woke neo-racism.
BLOTTO 52 minutes ago (Edited)
Wait until she finds out that Drag Queen Roxy is reading 'The Hips on the DQ go swish
swish swish' to the kids at the local library.
Pooper Popper 1 hour ago
She Rocks!!!!!
Bang!!
high5mail 36 minutes ago
When I listen to this woman and look around me at all the fools who buy into the
"system" as it is, too scared to do what she is doing, it saddens me at the apathy and
cowardice of the general public which will sell their souls for protection on a non deadly
virus and take an unproved vaccine to virtue signal.
She is a modern day Joan of Arc. I would stand beside her in an instant. How many others
would do that or demand the same things she is demanding? Most are too busy trying to
figure out what gender they think they should be or trying on racist social agendas in the
"woke" category.
Two GOP lawmakers this
week launched a campaign calling on whistleblowers in the military to come forward with their
experiences in training programs that promote critical race theory or "diversity, equity, and
inclusion."
"We won't let our military fall to woke ideology," Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a former
Navy SEAL, wrote in a tweet on Friday while
linking to a website
where informants can submit their accounts.
"With written permission, we will anonymously publish egregious complaints on social media
and tell the country what's happening in our military."
"For too long, progressive Pentagon staffers have been calling the shots for our
warfighters," said Crenshaw about the web page posted in conjunction with Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-Ark.), a former Army captain.
House Homeland Security Committee member Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) speaks during a hearing
in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Sept. 17, 2020. (Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images)
They hope that service members "will anonymously publish egregious complaints on social
media" in order to "tell the country what's happening in our military," according to
Crenshaw.
"Progressive Pentagon staffers have been calling the shots for our warfighters," the
lawmaker added, "and spineless military commanders have let it happen. Now we are going to
expose you."
Earlier this month, the U.S. Space Force confirmed it relieved Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier of
his duties after he alleged that Marxism and critical race theory -- which draws heavy
inspiration from Marxist critical theory -- are both being spread in the military via training
courses that are required by Department of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other high-level
officials.
"Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lt. Col. Matthew
Lohmeier of command of the 11th Space Warning Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, May
14, due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead," the Space Force said in
mid-May, adding that Lohmeier's remarks in a podcast and in his self-published book
"constituted prohibited partisan political activity." The Space Force's statement didn't
provide an example.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) speaks during a hearing to examine United States Special Operations
Command and United States Cyber Command, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 25, 2021.
(Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Last week, Lohmeier met with Cotton, who tweeted after their meeting
that he's concerned "by what I heard" and promised to press "senior military leaders for
answers."
Critical race theory denounces U.S. and Western culture as a systematic form of oppression
that negatively impacts minority groups. Critics of the ideology -- which is sometimes referred
to as being "woke" -- have said its proponents apply the Marxist tactic of "class struggle" to
divide people along lines of race, gender, and ethnicity to label them "oppressors" and the
"oppressed."
At the state level, legislatures and governors have taken action against critical race
theory as well as The New York Times' "1619 Project," by barring them from being promoted in
schools and in government institutions.
The governors of Tennessee, Idaho, Arkansas, and Oklahoma have already signed anti-critical
race theory bills. In Texas, Arizona, and Iowa, similar measures have been proposed,
according to an analysis .
DonGenaro PREMIUM 2 hours ago
Crenshaw is a neocon *****.
I have more respect for Leftists - at least one knows where they stand.
Rid'n Dirty 2 hours ago
I'm glad to get help from anywhere it comes from but Cotton is a tool of Paul Singer the
greatest vulture capitalist in America. Singer destroyed Cabelas and their employees of 40
years to force a buyout by BassPro. Singer walked off with over $100 million for doing
nothing.
Cotton never saw any part of the illegal surveillance state that he wouldn't vote for,
eagerly. The guy with the eye patch is controlled by the same NeoCons. Who represents
us?
Giant Meteor 2 hours ago
Generally speaking this is called controlled opposition, or as I like to call it, really
fake **** ...
Rashomon 2 hours ago (Edited)
The level of absurdity here is astounding. The fact that so called representatives are
having to ask military personnel to snitch on "wokeness" is proof in and of itself that we
are in clown world. Nevermind that wokeness is even a thing.
vasilievich 1 hour ago (Edited)
BTW, not all Catholics are monsters out of the Inquisition. My wife and I are regular
attenders at Mass, readers at morning Mass a day every other week. One of our relatives has
been a missionary priest in Brazil for a missionary order. I have no reason to believe that
they're not very good and self-giving people. We know the faults of some members of the
Church, including priests. We don't worship them, idealize them. We should pray for their
reform, as I was just reading last night in Matthew, and we won't leave God in His
Sacraments because of them.
Krink26 2 hours ago
Obama more than decimated the flag officer ranks and replaced them with his yes men. It
has come home to roost. This isn't something that just appeared with the new admin, it's
just gone hypersonic. One of my closest friends retired about three years ago a highly
decorated Navy pilot in JSOC. I clearly remember him talk a lot about this in 2013-14 - the
start of Obama's second term. (The same time I witnessed my corporate environment become a
woke hell) I stayed with him earlier in the month and he told me that he knew two seals
that are leaving because of this crap. One with 14 years and the other with 17 years in.
That's talent, grit and experience you don't want to lose because of inclusivity.
PhilLeotardo 1 hour ago
Crenshaw carries water for Israel. That's all you need to know about this clown.
taglady 2 hours ago
Crenshaw pushed red flag laws and censoring of college students on the Israel issue.
"... The Black Liberation Movement has made millionaires out of their grifter leaders and enabled the left to remain in power in every city in which rioting occurred. Their local opposition has been cleansed or cowed into submission. The movement continues its success as seen by its adoption by corporations seeking to reduce the power and influence of middle class Americans and by politicians seeking to entrence their power electorally. ..."
The continuing hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter was displayed vividly over the past
weekend– BLM
declared solidarity with Hamas but said nothing about a slew of murders and shootings
targeting black
communities .
There were at least 11 mass shootings in the country over the weekend that combined left
at least 17 people dead and 35 more wounded, according to CNN reporting and an analysis of
data from Gun Violence Archive (GVA),
local media and police reports.
I found it curious that none of the reporting made any mention about the race of the victims
or the perpetrators. Left me wondering so I did some digging. It appears that the majority of
these mass shootings involved black Americans as perpetrators or victims.
At least 55 people were shot across Chicago over the weekend, 12 of them fatally,
including a 15-year-old boy who
was shot in the head on the front porch of a home in Lawndale, and three double
homicides.
These shootings took place in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Of course. Much political and social capital has been squandered in recent years, all in
an attempt to adumbrate the singular reality that the deeply engrained social pathologies
in the "black community" have more to do with their failure to thrive than white systemic
racism does. We, meaning white America, cannot help them with this no matter how much self
abnegation we indulge in. Black America needs to adopt standards of belief and behavior
that are socially, culturally, and economically functional and they need to teach their
children those values. I have seen this happen with a certain fragment of that demographic,
but it needs to happen more widely. This may be offensive to some readers, but there is
truth in it.
Reply
Do blacks themselves need to be uniquely empowered (and protected) to speak up against
black on black violence? What has prevented the peace-seeking black community members from
taking charge of their own neighborhoods.
What Reign of Terror are they living under that those of us outside these communities do
not understand.
Latino gangs terrorize latino communities as well. The violent tyranny of the few
against the decent lives of the many is very, very wrong and should not exist in our
country. But it is a daily reality in our rapidly devolving inner city neighborhoods.
Reply
These minority neighborhoods can't have it both ways:
They can't object to successful methods like stop and frisk and then complain
about crime. "Snitches get stiches" is another "cute" saying encouraging crime.
After a time trying to help people who won't help themselves and are often openly
hostile, the cops grow cynical and less proactive; can you blame them?
Because it's "racist" to criticize any form of minority behavior, there can not be an
honest discussion about solutions to this problem and the beat goes on.
People (including the self-hating, phony "guilty" white liberals, BTW) who can live in
segregated neighborhoods continue to live in segregated neighborhoods.
I used to live in CT – very liberal blue state – totally segregated; BLM
signs on the "right" lawns.
Reply
TV
Yes here in Mpls the same blue haired tattooed
Nose ring wokes make up a large majority of
The BLM protests. The obligatory signs festoon
Whole neighborhoods. Do they march or picket
The areas where the majority of the shootings occur
And whose victims are all black? Ha! Too dangerous.
The near North side aka Nomi has had continuous
Gunfire for near 1200 days. Now they have running
Gun battles with "Ak" type fully automatic weapons.
It's become a tragedy writ large. Not a virtue
Signal to be seen.
Reply
Yes, it's hard to believe that so many are taken in by the rhetoric of Black Lives
Matter when there's evidence on a near-daily basis of black-on-black violence and murder.
It's truly a crime that so-called leaders don't decry it and demand a call to action for it
to stop, a crime that there's so little public discourse about underclass blacks basically
exterminating each other with impunity. It's a taboo subject, and can't be broached without
accusations of racism. We only hear righteous outrage when a member of the black underclass
is killed by a cop.
Reply
Why does the charge of "racism" cause so many to immediately recoil and retreat? It is
just a word, yet it has risen to weaponized effectiveness.
What does this word trigger in so many people who will immediately back down and
retreat. Pretty powerful tool -until more don't blink and don't stand down at its mere
mention.
Always felt there was an implied threat of "black violence' that accompanied every one
of Obama's political moves. We need to cleanse that threat out of our own psyches or else
this nation will be held hostage by a mere word.
Reply
Isn't this an interesting bit of Democrat deja vu, including charges of rigged
voting machines in 2008 the GOP would use to prevent Obama from winning and thereby
triggering a Second Civil War -- "the streets will run with blood .if Obama loses
.."
Thanks to two great political pundits – Erica Jong and Jane Fonda. They did
capture the zeitgeist of the times however, and continue to do so. The threat of black
violence, if you don't do what we went.
Fast forward to 2020 – and the world yet again feared "the streets would run
with blood", but this if Trump won re-election and Democrat Biden did not win.
But this time it bloody well appears it was the Democrats who rigged the voting
processes. Yet again it appears it is the Democrats accusing the GOP of what they were
already doing themselves.
Reply
The Black Liberation Movement has made millionaires out of their grifter leaders and
enabled the left to remain in power in every city in which rioting occurred. Their local
opposition has been cleansed or cowed into submission. The movement continues its success
as seen by its adoption by corporations seeking to reduce the power and influence of middle
class Americans and by politicians seeking to entrence their power electorally.
Some people who were black were shot by others who were black? Quit saying that, you,
you, what's the word: racist!; as none of that has been proved in court. Did any of these
'leaders' care about all those shootings in the Sanctuary City of Chicago when President
Hope and Change was in charge? (2016)
Total shootings 4379 Shot and wounded 3664 Shot and killed: 715
Assailant race by percentage
Whoa: you're saying the left behaves hypocritically and is willing to take losses in
order to get what they want?
Such insight!
Ethnic hypocrisy is the ancient problem here, but this focus on contemporary black
antics obscures the issue and is simply another avoidance strategy.
The recent missile duel in the eastern Mediterranean has shown that white conservatives
are more willing to stand up for the safety of non- or dual-citizens overseas than they are
for safety of their own white constituents, whom they refuse even to name.
There is nothing wrong with Obama with his financial success to buy in predominantly
white Martha's Vineyard. The question that blacks should ask however is are those leaders
who use racism and race to gain political power doing much to alleviate the social and
economic issues they face?
There are many successful blacks in all walks of life. Why aren't they celebrated and
used as role models instead of someone like George Floyd?
Reply
When you first went on the "BLM website" you immediately were linked to ActBlue
– a fund-raising arm of the Democrat party. There was no independent or "private"
donation link for BLM. Calling BLM "private" in this case would be a stretch for me
after that initial experience with BLM.
So the bigger question is, why is the State Dept etc pushing an arm of the Democrat
Party fund-raising machine within government operations? Did BLM formally dissociate
completely with ActBlue?
Reply
Because the State Dept., like the rest of the Democrat party, has accelerated
faster and faster to the left.
They've been selling out America for decades and now, like the rest of the Democrat
party, the last mask has dropped.
Reply
Having grown up in Chicago and still living nearby I would say "predominantly black"
neighborhoods is a media fiction, part of the narrative to displace the blame onto others
than black. I assure you these are black neighborhoods, once white now ruined for
generations. I have sympathy for blacks, so much so that I suggest we organize to supply as
much ammo as possible to help them rid the hood of evil doers. Mostly 9mm, drop off crates
in front of playgrounds and street corners so they can be easily found.
Reply
Larry's point that BLM doesn't care about Black lives is graphically shown and described
by this Officer Tatum podcast (it's short) of local newscasts, not shown by national news,
of Black children murdered by Blacks.
"You can never be woke enough, that's the problem," Rogan stated in a recent conversation with stand-up comedian Joe List about
the effect cancel culture is having on comedy.
"It keeps going. It keeps going further and further and further down the line, and if you get to the point where you capitulate,
where you agree to all these demands, it'll eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk ," he added.
"Because it's your privilege to express yourself when other people of colour have been silenced throughout history," Rogan continued,
emphasising the justification of woke proponents.
"It will be, you're not allowed to go outside. Because so many people were imprisoned," Rogan continued, adding "I'm not joking,
it really will get there. It's that crazy."
"We just gotta be nice to each other, man. And there's a lot of people that are taking advantage of this weirdness in our culture,
and then that becomes their thing. Their thing is calling people out for their privilege, calling people out for their position.
You know, so, it's f***ing crazy times."
The topic is a continuation of a conversation Rogan had
last
week with Dave Chappelle , who said he hopes 'we all survive' cancel culture.
The host was immediately proven on point by the woke mob on Twitter who took issue with Rogan believing it's a bad thing that
straight white men are being silenced, and some failing to be able to hold more than one thought in their head at once:
In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter
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.
The Biden Administration has gone out of its way to show itself as absolutely
"woke-compatible" and even as a champion of "wokeness" (Foggy Bottom has just allowed US
embassies and consulates to fly the "gay pride" flag next to the Stars and Stripes. I bet you
they won't do that in Riyadh!). According to the hyper-politically correct Wikipedia , "woke" refers to the "
awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice ". This definition
is, however, misleading because, for example, it clearly is not intended to cover, say, social
injustice meted out to poor whites. In other words, wokeness is a one way street. What wokeness
does mandate is for my son (who is studying biology) to be told in his class that he is the
carrier of "white guilt" even though his ancestors never interacted with blacks, let alone
blacks in the USA.
As I have mentioned in the past, I do not consider categories such as "black" or "white" as
analytically helpful since they are not properly defined. That, however, does not mean that I
am not willing to use them in a specific context where the parties to an ideological dispute
refer to themselves, or to others, as black or white. By the way, "Asian" is another useless
category as, depending on whom you ask, it would include Pakistanis (who sure ain't yellow) and
lump them together with (brown) Indonesians and (yellow) Japanese people. The fact that these
categories are used in the western political discourse means that I cannot ignore them solely
because I find them ambiguous and misleading. Furthermore, the category "African" whether used
with "American" or not, is not helpful either since it would include people otherwise
considered white; say Elon Musk, even though nobody thinks of Musk as African-American.
Finally, the category black might include Tamils or Australian aborigines, but it is rarely, if
ever, used in that sense. Thus, when I will use the words black or white below, it will be in
the largely accepted US meaning of "descendants of African slaves" and "descendents of white
colonists" even though I am acutely aware of the reality of interbreeding (by rape or by mutual
consent) between these two groups and even though the woke ideology blames *all* so-called
"whites" for their putative racism and their supposedly "privileged" position in the US society
due to its alleged "systemic racism", even when they are new immigrants to the USA.
I don't think that I have tackled the issues of race or racism before, mostly because I am
horrified by all the nonsense one can hear as soon as these topics are mentioned. It is,
however, indisputable that the woke ideology is the main ideology of the Biden Administration
and this is why it cannot simply be ignored. Of course, other ideological trends of the US
ruling class (messianism, imperialism, self-worship, capitalism, etc.) have not been abandoned;
instead, they have been "wokified" in the sense that the woke ideology is now used to give
these traditional US ideologies some kind of politically-correct imprimatur , a kind of
"when we do that in the name of wokeness we are doing something morally right" label placed on
an otherwise deeply discredited set of "western values".
Of course, there is an apparent paradox here: how can the woke ideology be used to try to
give a semblance of respectability to a set of western ideologies when the woke ideology is
also rabidly anti-western?! The woke ideology is most definitely anti-western, and not in the
sense of condemning the West's thousand years of bloody wars and imperialism, that would at
least make some sense, but it is anti-western in the sense that it places an equal sign
between, say, J.S. Bach and the rapper "Ice Cube" with a "logic" along the following line: "
hey, who are you to say that Bach was more talented than the rapperIce Cube?! That is
racist!!! " Even mathematics are now considered "racist "! And
anybody disputing that is, of course, a racist.
What is missing here is the element of proof. Some kind of rules of evidence which could be
appealed to; let's use the modern term to "˜fact check' most of the assumptions made by
the supporters of the woke ideology.
For example, in my Swiss high school we had a huge mural declaring that "all races are
equal". No evidence for that statement was ever given. In fact, during my entire academic life
(1 undergrad and 2 graduate degrees) I have never seen any real evidence for this thesis. (I
have seen plenty of evidence disputing this, beginning with US Army IQ tests). By the way, that
does not at all mean that I affirm the opposite (that races are somehow unequal), only that in
a dogmatic statement like "all races are equal" even the term "equal" is extremely ambiguous
and, frankly, meaningless. Let's compare this statement to another famous one by Saint Paul
(Galatian 3:26-28 KJV):
"For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus . For as
many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ . There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are
all one in Christ Jesus . And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs
according to the promise .".
Unlike the vapid "all races are equal", Saint Paul clearly states that all humans are "
children of God " and he further explains how this happens when he says " by faith in
Christ Jesus ". He then clarifies that " all are one in Christ Jesus " (being "
one " in Christ is unambiguous, unlike being " equal "). And Saint Paul concludes
by explaining that through Christ there is a new generation of mankind " ye Abraham's seed,
and heirs according to the promise ". Unlike the woke ideology, Christianity does
truly unite all human beings, and Christianity does so without ever denying or
obfuscating the very real differences which makes all humans very much un equal to each
other, including a total equality in rights and privileges inside the Christian religion.
First, Saint Paul mentions our common filiation as children of God through Adam, to which he
immediately adds a further common filiation of those who have "put on Christ" by means of
baptism. The evidence here, the proof of the statement, is clear: baptism. One can, of course,
disagree with Saint Paul, but not accuse him of ambiguity (especially in the light of all the
other Apostolic and Patristic statements providing contextual support for this!).
Compare that with the woke ideology which categorically splits mankind into two groups: the
oppressed "minorities" and the (always) "white" oppressors, which even contradicts the actual
history of Africa which was invaded and colonized by (non-White) Arabs before the Europeans got
involved (something which the US blacks who take on Islamic names either don't know or try hard
to ignore).
The woke ideology also completely ignores racism internal to the so-called "Blacks". A good
friend of mine is a (very dark skinned) lady from Mali who traveled all over our planet and
told me one day that the worst anti-African racism she was ever subjected to was in Ethiopia
(whose population is just as dark skinned as my lady friend). I also knew a medical doctor from
Soweto who told me that there was plenty of hatred between South African blacks which he called
"racist hate". Of course, most US blacks know close to nothing about the history of Africa,
past or current (Arabs and black Africans still fight each other in many regions of Africa!)
and yet they think of themselves as "Africans" which makes absolutely no sense (especially from
the point of view of actual Africans, Arab, black or white).
I just used one example (racial equality), but the woke ideology has failed to prove pretty
much every one of its key dogmas. "Systemic racism" is another good one which appears to be
proven by none, accepted by (almost?) all.
Of course, none of the above proves any single aspect of the woke ideology wrong, but I
hasten to add that the burden of proof is upon the party proclaiming a thesis, and not upon
those this thesis is being forced upon. Likewise, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of
racism in the United States (including numerous cases of black on white and black on Asian
racial violence!), but irrespective of the actual figure of such incidents, the sum of these
incidents, however large, does not somehow automatically become evidence of things like
"systemic racism" or "white supremacy" (correlation does not imply causation).
Yet, somehow, the proponents of wokeness immediately get offended when their beliefs are
challenged and simply accuse any naysayers of "racism". One example: in the new woke-reality, "
twerking " is
a delightful form of "culture" which cannot be criticized, especially so by whites. To call it
a vulgar display of objectified women accompanied by noise which does not rise to any
imaginable definition of "music" is, of course, totally crimethink!
Apparently, for the woke-freaks, "diversity" does not include diversity of ideas, of
opinions. As Orwell astutely noticed, "some are more equal than others". Wokeness does not even
deny that! Hence its "Cancel culture" aspect, along with the violence of the BLM/Antifa
mobs.
For some, this is just a big money-making scheme for corporate "America" which is now
flooding all its advertisements with the "correct" races in total disregard to that race's real
percentage of the population and small money-making scheme for those who hope to get their
hands on some free money. As for the US homo-lobby, this is a surefire way to achieve power and
influence which they could not otherwise even dream about. In other words, Wokism is about
money and power, not justice.
Some might think that this is no big deal, that anti-racism is by definition good, as is the
notion that homosexuals should not be deprived of their civil rights on account of their sexual
dysfunction. But wokeness has already gone way further than these initial demands and it has
now turned into an obligatory form of virtue signaling !
By now most of us have seen new woke-compatible CIA recruitment ads. Frankly, when I saw it
I sincerely rejoiced, as a woke-CIA will be far less effective than the one which considered
homosexuality a major security risk (blackmail and comorbid psychopathology). But wokeness
submission is not just a CIA thing, check out this comparison of recruiting videos (thanks to
American Kulak for sending me all the videos below!!!):
Truth be told, I am not exactly heartbroken about the condition of the US armed forces as
such, but when I think of the many decent and honorable US officers I had the chance to meet in
my life, I do feel sorry for them as I can, I think, imagine their sadness and disgust.
Finally, I have to admit, to my great sadness, that this does not affect only the USA.
Pretty much the same form of collective insanity has clearly taken over the EU (with a few
countries still trying to resist). Wokism has become a global phenomenon.
Yes, the West went from the genius of Baroque to the insipid vulgarity of YouTube.
And so here is my question: why is there so little pushback?!
Yes, there is the accusation of racism. I get it. But the more people this accusation is
applied to, the more meaningless it becomes (the same goes for that old "anti-Semitism"
canard!). And, besides, nobody can live an honorable life without ever becoming the target of a
false and ugly accusation. All we can do is 1) ignore it 2) flush our mental toilet and 3)
resume the struggle.
I also understand that woke-compatibility is a "must" for new hires (you gotta love that
"corporate America"!). But what about all those of us who already have a career and who won't
be fired just because we push back against an ideology which not only is based on absolutely
nothing (it has zero empirical evidence to back its key tenets) but which destroys competence
(the famous US meritocracy) and replaces it with what I can only call an extremely intolerant
pseudo-diversity which is every bit as intolerant as the major totalitarian ideologies of the
20th century! Why are we silent?
Most of us know about the hidden scandal of the (apparently, neverending) lowering of
competency criteria in many professions (ask a firefighter!). But this is now even affecting
airlines ! I dread the day when a "diverse" crew will smash an airliner into the
ground because "mathematics is racist!". I am sure the skies will still be friendly, but will
they be safe?!
I wonder what it would take to finally get some serious reaction to this collective
insanity.
So what can we do? I submit that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's advice to the
Russian people living under the Soviet system could also be taken as a model by those
in the West who don't want their countries to be turned into some wannabe Wakanda:
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with
self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: "I am Violence! Make way, step
aside, I will crush you!" But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass""and it is no longer
sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its
ally""Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist
through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down
its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in
deceit""and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our
liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even
if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not
through me!
And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the
easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies
simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.
We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out
loud what we think""this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what
we do not think! ("¦) Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!
Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)""step back from
that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather
back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how
swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will
be exposed as such to the world.
This method of not allowing lies to survive through oneself is absolutely legal, non-violent
and does not require any organization or money. Most importantly, this method does not require
any unifying ideology. In other words, this method is a moral/ethical defense against any
totalitarian ideology. Best of all, it requires no money or power, and it is immediately
liberating to anybody using it. It is even compatible with the modern idea of "be the change
you want to see in the world".
The alternative is much scarier. As with any totalitarian ideology Wokism can also trigger a
strong blowback reaction and there is a very real risk of such a pushback reaction that it
could result in the birth of a new form of Fascism which could be even worse than Wokism. And
this is why I think that doing nothing and hoping that this will all somehow magically go away
is dangerously delusional.
Totalitarian ideologies must be confronted openly and frontally. Nothing else will do and
everything else is nothing but surrender.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here. If the entire US military is moving toward
robotics and missiles, what difference does it make that the operator is a trans-gender
mental lunatic? In fact, some of these depraved folks may perfectly fit the bill for
committing massive war crimes. There is no conscience in their mental depravity to begin
with.
Because woke culture warriors are no threat to men with money. Men with money fear
macho economic socialists in the Joe Stalin mode, and these people no longer exist. This is
what so many people on the conservative/nationalist right don't get. There is no push back
because rich whites have nothing to fear from theatrical woke BS.
The only victims are working and lower middle whites, who have no awareness of class
politics, are more interested in fixing their cars or riding around on dirt bikes..
And so here is my question: why is there so little pushback?!
American, like most humans, have to eat. Keep a roof over their heads. Etc.
As far back is the 1950s Europeans considered Americans deeply conformist. Even when they
went into non-conforming mode (eg, the beatniks in that decade) they all conformed to the
pack.
But now is not then: Jobs for mavericks are now scarce. Lighthouses are automated, no need
for lighthouse keepers. The old merchant ships have been replaced by container ships that
need few hands on deck or anywhere else. Have a good job, you also have to keep it. And it
often takes effort.
All the people from Jimmy the Greek in the last century on are rarely prosecuted. They are
almost always fired or forced to resign. Individual economics warns against being the nail
that sticks out.
This MIGHT be why Antifa, BLM etc has no problem getting a mob together: Torching a few
buildings, blocking traffic, getting white cops fired, is a great way to relieve stress and
burn off frustration.
BUT that only works for one side. Others must tread carefully and not push if they can't
afford to fall.
@anonymous
serve openly in the US Military"¦.And you can thank Admiral Mike Mullins for this.
Mullins knew exactly what he was doing:social engineering the larger American Society-and he
enjoyed being interviewed in his US Navy Uniform on the front covers of magazines that serve
the interests of the homosexual community. Yes, I am very suspicious that Admiral Mike
Mullins is a homosexual who has no problem with Public Libraries allowing Satanic looking
Tranny Freaks reading children's books to very young children. This is what Admiral Mike
Mullins has unleashed upon American Society. Admiral Mike Mullins would tell Conservative
Christian Chaplains who had issues with homosexuals serving openly in the US
Military:""˜YOU NEED TO PURSUE ANOTHER CAREER PATH""¦..
I've observed these white people, overwhelmingly female, display an incomprehensibly
religious fervor for BLM. I've never seen anything like this in my long lifetime.
These people are worshipping negroes, while at the same time, negroes are slaughtering
them.
After c.1980, the West, already showing the signs of crumbling due to economic implosion
and social, moral and intellectual decay, was led up two garden paths to the certain end
about to engulf it.
One was neo-conservatism, a project of formerly Trotsykite Judeofascist supremacists, many
former acolytes of the sinister Leo Strauss, who saw the USA as a puppet to destroy their
enemies, ie the Soviet, the Arab world and, as Jabotinsky said, "˜"¦anyone who
gets in our way'. This was the PNAC crowd who predicted the "˜New Pearl Harbor' of 9/11
because their friends in MOSSAD no doubt told them it was finally in the works, after years
of planning and "˜predictive programing' of the US public.This mob thought that the
world was theirs to do with as they pleased, after Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but they had not
bargained on Putin and on China's meteoric rise, hence their psychopathic loathing of
both.
The other dead end was neo-liberal capitalism, another predominately Jewish enterprise, from
the University of Chicago yeshiva and Milton Friedman et al. That created the great upward
transfer of wealth to the elites, in which Jews were and are massively over-represented, and
the steady immiseration of the vast bulk of US citizens, and those in puppet regimes in the
UK, the EU and other countries subjected to the economic shock therapy of the economic
hit-men of the "˜Washington Consensus'.
After forty years of these twin terrors the USA and much of the West are more unequal than
ever, more heavily indebted than ever, their industries defunct and economic activity
concentrated on the FIRE parasite rackets, and other forms of rentier extraction, millennial
pursuits of various Jewish elites. Israel itself is terminally belligerent and insatiably
cruel, and riven by inequality and political and religious fanaticism, but at least they can
be united by hatred and blood-lust, as we see today. The USA, in contrast, must rely on
"˜Divide and Rule' tactics, of which the deranged wokeism is the latest manifestation,
growing out of that other divisive strategy, Identity Politics. Wokeism simply pits the
downtrodden against other downtrodden, to the elites' delight. One faction, the Demoncrazy
Deep Statists, pits the wokebots against the Reptilian MAGAbots, while both are excited to a
racist frenzy by the prospect of annihilation in the Great Clash of Civilizations war with
Russia and/or China. All so the plutocrats can keep piling up their loot ad astra.
Foggy Bottom has just allowed US embassies and consulates to fly the "gay pride" flag
next to the stars and stripes. I bet you they won´t do that in Riyadh!
Au contraire
It is precisely intended to be flown in Riyadh, Warszaw, Moscow and Urumqi;
no different from siccing dogs and activist womxyn on the Muzzie helots,
sending incompetent Jews as ambassadors to Germany and Austria
or corporate heavyweights to South America.
The parallels to wokism and Orwell are obvious ""
the more shameless, stupid and obvious the lies they force us to repeat ("2+2=5"),
the better to break our will with.
"" Sending the Soros Barbie to harangue Erdogan was in the same vein,
and it backfired gloriously (I´m a bit conflicted re: Recep
Tayyip´s
passive-aggressiveness, but it has something deeply satisfying;
clearly that´s the way to go "¦ it is not coincidence Charles Boycott
was
a rent enforcer in Ireland "" maybe we cannot fight, but we can refuse to cooperate.
Tell them what you think of them "" so what if it makes their hair fall out ).
What kind of "˜pushback' do you expect when it's the political and mainstream
media establishments doing the "˜pushing'?
There is "˜pushback' by groups and individuals, as well as in alternative media, but
this is subject to censorship due to arbitrary ToS (e.g. no "˜misgendering' on Twitter)
and by platform providers (with no warning or justification, WordPress deleted the very
popular "˜Chateau Heartiste'; he can now be found on Gab ).
When you can lose your job by saying "˜White lives matter', or even "˜All
lives matter', people notice.
Because deep down inside everybody is some kind of cop, and we're scared.
We're scared of the bigger cop: The fed, the judge, death comes from above, the media, our
boss, our marriage, or getting disappeared""and for WHAT? Some clueless idiot who thinks
freedom is free?? Poor-bastard real life cops have to get up on stage and show how scared
they really are when it comes to doing what is right. Like walking around naked in public
with a target on their back. That's why the cops get crazy when you suggest they could do a
better job of the scam known as no good deed goes unpunished. Sanity? Got it. The woke public
"education systems" are full of queers and demons having rights to your children 8 hours a
day enforced by the fed and the judge and the media, and who at the least successfully
indoctrinate your child with hopelessness. The chaos is ascendant, overwhelming and
despressing in nature Okay people! Everybody on 3 push back "¦one "¦ two. Hello
"¦can you hear me in the back ?
The liberals are crazy with unworldy power""shock and awe crazy""but the right wing is
crazier to believe that the left wokeness can be overcome on worldy terms. The right wants to
think they can pushback, but they are scared because deep down inside, they know the liberals
are driven and enforced by powers much bigger than any earthly principal. A dark battlefield
saying used to go, "If they've got thermal, we're fucked." Indeed, the liberal left and their
enforcers can now see you wherever and whoever you are, and what's worse, you know it. Oh,
but let's go out and die. Mission? Sanity? For what?
That's why all the erstwhile tough guys don't push back, and the ones who do, get hated on
"¦ "stop it man, you're causing trouble." As for the rest of the poseurs, they have it
easy. Without having to actually walk the walk, they get to sit around and criticize the
ones who could , but won't push back.
On the plus side, explicitly left wing governments tend to have a short shelf life.
Probably the worst kind of left wing governments are those which are kinda right wing.
Tony Blair got Britain into a pointless war in Iraq and bought in massive numbers of
economic migrants. Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA which resulted in a huge surge of Hispanic
immigration. However, conservative voters didn't even notice what was happening because they
assumed these guys were sensible middle-of the-road politicians. In contrast Biden's and
company's in your face woke politics will galvanize the American right and probably achieve
little of long term consequence.
@Anonymous
ollective guilt for all the world's problems and no right to self determination.
An absurd, barbaric standard which is never applied to any other group.
Little Victoria Rose Smith was beaten and tortured to death by a fat racist black woman
spewing BLM propaganda on Twitter. Cannon Hinnant was executed while riding his bicycle in
his front yard.
But of course vermin like you don't care about the innocent victims.
You will just dismiss it or pretend it's not happening while venerating slime like the
rapist Jacob Blake or home invader George Floyd.
My entire lifetime the USA has thought that it would win wars with military
technology"¦and then subsequently was dragged into 20 year long savage guerilla
warfare.
"We can just airstrike them" was a common refrain when the Afghanistan war was announced
in 2001.
Twenty years later, Biden pulls the last troops out.
"I cannot shoot him"¦he's too gorgeous"
For that matter the thugs that took over USA cities have an IQ of 90 & have zero
education. But they have more primitive moral courage.
Technology is far more advanced now than 1992 during the LA Riots"¦and yet the
riots were worse.
@Anonymous
I only partially agree. White people in general do not personally hate other races. However,
they do like to self segregate into their own white communities as you yourself have just
pointed out.
In my native UK, you have a lot of "secret segregation" whereby native white Brits live in
their own towns and villages away from the ever growing multi-kulti cities. Its quite amazing
to actually leave a white British town or village and venture into the cities. It basically
feels like living on an Indian reservation in America!
Dont get me started on how segregated all the various groups are in the cities too!
So whilst white people pay lip service to the cult of diversity, they very rarely actually
practice it.
Machiavelli explained how wokeist phenomena can serve the powerful in 1513, "One of the
great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and
passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all
understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests."
What we are seeing today is the latest installment of the never-ending story called
"divide and conquer." The traditional goals of progressives are ending militarism, empowering
working people, providing a decent social safety net, and most of all, building a functional,
genuinely democratic government committed to limiting the corrupting power of great wealth.
These goals are race and gender neutral; they are basic human rights for all. They are
passionately opposed by society's worst predators, always have been, always will be, until
the influence of the predator class has been neutralized, and they are called to account for
their crimes.
Today's campaigns of moral absolutism widen the gaps among America's diverse peoples and
classes because such division is crucial to maintaining the power of the elites by deflecting
attention from their far more dangerous, institutionalized abuses of power. Boutique activism
converts ordinary people into partners in advancing those interests, in a dangerous form of
psychologically manipulative narrative control.
But "woke", not being based in objective reality, has no legs and will not endure.
Universities and other organizations are making a good faith effort to conform, the same way
they once excluded women and blacks when discrimination was fashionable. Ultimately the
demands of their donors and consumers will prevail, and change, and change again.
@Trinity
sianic militarism. When, especially during the Occupy movement, I saw that there were young
libertarians who seemed to share many of the same concerns and join in with the lefty
Occupiers, it seemed like a positive development that promised a unification, beyond
ideology, of intelligent concerned citizens who wanted to clear the air of the rampant
criminality of officialdom.
And then, all of a sudden, the SJW phenomenon burst on the scene and it all became about
Blacks and trannies and women. What happened?
It has been my feeling all along that the term "woke" was hijacked and applied to these
clueless narcissistic Gen-Z-types, who themselves had been infiltrated and manipulated. Who
did this? It smells like a psy-op to me.
It's a fool's errand trying to make sense of Applied Woke. Most Americans are ill-equipped
to do so because we grew up schooled in American common sense.
Say what you will, until recently the US of A got decent grades, impressive ones if
grading on a curve, for avoiding last century's bright ideas (e.g. communism; fascism).
That filtered down to the family and individual level, even for immigrants, under the
rubric of Assimilation.
Yet as the American Republic (and empire) has hit some rough sledding, coincident
unfortunately with the rise of CCP China, there's some bad modeling going on at the
moment.
The American ruling, governing and business classes like China's secret sauce. What's not
to like as long as you're sitting in the right place or willing to do or say anything to put
yourself and your family there.
This author is right to bring up Russia and Christianity. Though, as I've mentioned
before, I simply don't understand why those in the best position to inform about the lessons
we should be learning from post-Soviet Union Russia don't do so even though the rhythming is
so glaringly obvious it's almost a joke at this point.
At best "Biden" is a Yeltsin 1996-99. In other words, as if that isn't bad enough, it
doesn't account for his double and technical sleights of hand in the show. What you
characterize as "woke-compatible" is Antifa/BLM Brown Shirts integrated into the
Democrat/Deep State mix.
The salient struggle at the moment is taking place within these factions over whether,
after having succeeded in a monumental election steal, to govern as if 2020 was a "˜One
and Done' or that they will have to compete to win in 2022 and 2024.
Official, government and corporate, handling and messaging concerning Woke ideology and
the freaks themselves is one of the better indicators because there is simply no way a party
competing to win the consent of the governed can engage in a loud and proud endorsement or
even acquiescence to their madness.
This MIGHT be why Antifa, BLM etc has no problem getting a mob together: Torching a few
buildings, blocking traffic, getting white cops fired, is a great way to relieve stress and
burn off frustration.
That may explain the mass protest movements, but the police records out of Portland show
Antifa as a roughly even mix of children of the upper class, low level DNC wonks and drug
addicts. The three categories often overlap, of course.
Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory
in the state's public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as "based on false
history" and "teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other."
DeSantis made the remarks at a Friday press
conference in Pensacola, where he announced the
signing of a bill temporarily establishing several statewide tax-free periods on items like
storm supplies and back-to-school products.
"It's offensive to the taxpayer that they would be asked to fund critical race theory,
that they would be asked to fund teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other,"
DeSantis said.
Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis is seen during a meeting at the governor's office in
Tallahassee, Fla., on April 1, 2021. (The Epoch Times)
In a
recent interview on NTD's "Focus Talk," Yiatin Chu, an Asian mother of two and co-chair of
the New York chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), described
critical race theory as pushing the idea that disparate outcomes, such as academic competency
scores, can be reduced to a single variable""race.
Advocates of the theory, which she said is increasingly being taught at pre-college levels,
push the socialist notion of equality of outcome, and blame differences in outcomes on
entrenched privilege while dividing people into "oppressors" and their victims, the
"oppressed."
Republicans across the nation are trying to prevent the teaching of critical race theory in
classrooms.
Recently, South Dakota's Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took aim at both the "1619 Project" and
critical race theory and, like DeSantis, voiced opposition to their incorporation in school
curriculums.
"The 1619 Project relies upon the concept of Critical Race Theory to further divide
students based on the color of their skin," Noem wrote in a series of tweets
Friday.
"This is inappropriate and un-American. It has no place in South Dakota, and it certainly
has no place in South Dakota classrooms."
In this screenshot from the RNC's livestream of the 2020 Republican National Convention,
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the virtual convention on Aug. 26, 2020. (Courtesy of
the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images)
The "1619 Project," inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine,
attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America
instead of ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. The initiative has been widely
panned by historians and political scientists, with some critics calling it a bid to rewrite
U.S. history through a left-wing lens.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, responded to the GOP criticism
of the project during an interview with MSNBC on May 3, saying the 1619 curriculum being
allowed in schools is a matter of free speech.
"This isn't a project about trying to teach children that our country is evil, but it is a
project trying to teach children the truth about what our country was based upon, and it's
only in really confronting that truth""slavery was foundational to the United States, we,
after the slavery, experienced 100 years of legalized discrimination against black
Americans," said Hannah-Jones.
"Mitch McConnell and others like him want for our children to get a propagandistic,
nationalistic understanding of history that is not about facts, but it is about how they
would want to pretend that our country is."
Proponents of critical race theory
have argued that it's needed to demonstrate what they say is "pervasive systemic racism"
and facilitate rooting it out.
Critics draw parallels between critical race theory and Marxism, arguing that the concept
advocates for the destruction of institutions, such as the Western justice system, free-market
economy, and orthodox religions, while demanding that they be replaced with institutions
compliant with the critical race theory ideology.
Criminals who repeatedly targeted an auto shop in Spring Lake, North Carolina by leaving
racist graffiti referencing the KKK and Nazis turned out to be two African-American men after
the owner caught them on camera.
Business owner Dwyane Haynesworth (who is black) took action after having a car stole off
his lot and then discovering the racist graffiti, which included a drawing of a swastika.
After setting up the security cameras, that same night the criminals returned and broke into
more vehicles before smashing windows and attempting to hot wire one of the cars.
The footage revealed the culprits to be two black men.
"By now, police must know to narrow down their list of suspects whenever racist graffiti
is left at the scene of a crime. That doesn't fit the modus operandi of Caucasians,"
writes Dave Blount
.
"Leftists who demonize and attempt to defund or otherwise hamstring the police are not
siding against whites in favor of blacks, despite the way the liberal establishment frames
it. They are siding against Dwyane Haynesworth in favor of punks who pointlessly destroy
other people's property."
While the criminals in this instance clearly weaponized the racist graffiti in a bid to
deceive authorities, fake hate crimes have become an all too common occurrence in America over
the last five years.
Back in 2019, we
highlighted the case of Amari Allen, a 12-year-old African-American girl who claimed a
group of white boys cutting off her dreadlocks.
The entirety of the mainstream media, as well as lawmakers like Rashida Tlaib, fell for and
amplified the story before Allen admitted she made it all up.
The gunman in Boulder who killed 10 people at a supermarket back in March also routinely
threatened his classmates with threats of filing fake hate crime charges after violently
attacking them, eyewitnesses told the media.
"... If you find it useful that some counties are leaving Oregon and joining Idaho, or the conflict between the left and the right, democrats vs republicans, or whites vs blacks, or whites vs muslims, or vs lations is meaningful, you are simply doing the bidding of the masters, who thrive on pitting communites against each other, and are responsible for destroying the whole country. The easiest and the most fruitful way to bring about a real, benficial change to America would require bringing the American people, regardless of their color or creed together, to easily get rid of their overbearing masters. Regardless of what you claim to be, the fact that you embrace and advance the destructive strategy of pitting the American people agianst one another, and also spew so much hatred of Muslims, exposes your real agenda! ..."
"... The United States doesn't have "rulers" in as much as it has "owners". Consider ..."
One of the most promising movements, " Greater Idaho ," just won a huge
victory. Five counties
voted to leave Oregon and join Idaho. More counties in eastern Oregon may
join . Idaho Governor Brad Little admits creating a new state may be difficult but
says , "They're
looking at Idaho fondly because of our regulatory atmosphere, our values. That doesn't surprise
me one bit."
This should be just the beginning. Frederick County in western Virginia could join West
Virginia. West Virginia State Senator Charles Trump
supports the idea. It could also be a compromise to the DC statehood question. Northern
Virginia is a cancerous outgrowth of federal employees. Booting it
out of real Virginia and tying it to a DC state would mean greater self-government for both
regions.
... ... ...
Existing institutions can be the basis for reform and revolution. From the Parliament that
challenged the king in the English Civil War, the Continental Congress that made the American
Revolution, and the state legislatures that voted for secession, we see a clear pattern in the
way we Anglos operate. We are legalistic, even when it comes to revolution. We don't have the
French tradition of mass protests to topple governments. Our revolutions are according to
Robert's Rules of Order. Even the January 6 protesters who marched into the Capitol did so
because they thought they were saving democracy.
I can understand the frustrations and rage of certain folks.
If you're a worker on an oil rig, a truck driver, a policeman, or some such jobs, there's
bound to be moments when you're angry as hell. So, even though such people say crazy things
once a while, I can understand where they're coming from. They need to blow off steam.
But the professor class? These lowlife parasites sit on their asses and talk shi*. They
produce nothing and make a living by spreading nonsense. And yet, they act like they are
soooooooooo angry with the way of the world. If they really care about the world, why hide in
their academic enclaves?
Academia needs a cultural revolution, a real kind, not the bogus "˜woke' kind made up
of teachers' pets.
Hopefully we can reform into a nice looking North American Federation once this mess hits
a bloody climax of some sort or another. Greater Idaho sounds wildly fun. I still wish we
formed the States Cascadia and Arcadia, personally.
The empire WILL become weaker if it promotes incompetents to positions of high
responsibility and authority and enlists women into the armed forces. An empire cannot
sustain itself with sub standard soldiers, administrators, leaders and law makers. This woke
crap will destroy itself. Historians in the future will look back and say "what the hell were
they thinking?".
If the IQ of officer candidates drops below 110 (it's 120 on average currently for the
Marine Corps and has been declining for 40 years) then the positions will be left vacant.
Dumb people can't do the job.
Since Cromwell and even more so the overthrow of James 2 by the invader Dutch William 3
the Amsterdam Jew banker puppet Britain has been nothing more than a Jewish banking
headquarters.
If you find it useful that some counties are leaving Oregon and joining Idaho, or the
conflict between the left and the right, democrats vs republicans, or whites vs blacks, or
whites vs muslims, or vs lations is meaningful, you are simply doing the bidding of the
masters, who thrive on pitting communites against each other, and are responsible for
destroying the whole country. The easiest and the most fruitful way to bring about a real,
benficial change to America would require bringing the American people, regardless of their
color or creed together, to easily get rid of their overbearing masters. Regardless of what
you claim to be, the fact that you embrace and advance the destructive strategy of pitting
the American people agianst one another, and also spew so much hatred of Muslims, exposes
your real agenda!
Dear Mr. Hood, anything undertaken to change a nation's political organization will always
lead to violence. If there is one thing history shows, it is precisely that. If you are
trying to change Idaho's state borders, that qualifies as a drastic change in the US
political organization, if only because if successful, it would set an example that would
find many, many followers, as you are implying yourself.
What the US promotes and condones abroad (secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903,
occupation of Cyprus by Turkey in 1980, occupation of the Western Sahara by Morocco in 1976,
secession of Kosovo, creation of Southern Sudan, etc., etc.) it does not want to see at home.
Of course you are also aware that in the 1860s, Secession has been met with brutal
violence.
In this respect, it comes as a relief lo learn that the Deep State is busy trying to turn
the US Army and the CIA into open psychiatry wards.
Very interesting that video ad on the girl "raised by two moms." Poor thing: knowing only
two dykes (her father must certainly be Hans Brinker), all her life she has been yearning to
meet real men. Apparently, she did not find them in college, where the boys are being
terrorized by feminists and forced to become faggots. Thus only the army remains as a place
where one might still find a few real men, the kind that one sees so finely portrayed in the
Russian army ad.
(Come to think of it, that US army ad may also be an attempt at subversion of prevailing
policy!)
America is in danger, not because of some external threat, but because our rulers
are the Republic's greatest enemies.
The United States doesn't have "rulers" in as much as it has "owners". Consider
it private property to put things in proper perspective "" then! Stake your claim. Forget the
law(they own that too) and the idea of a republic "" owners don't like to share. The banking,
tax code, and debt have got you by the balls, and they'll always keep you thumbed under.
Psaki was always a walking joke, the spokeswoman with the hidden goal to discredit any
administration she serves. Gaffes are her trademark: "Psaki is the only person on the face of the
earth that makes Biden look intelligent." Logically after her statement Psaki should resign to
make way for a minority candidate, preferably to certified descendant of a former slave. Anything
less is merely virtue signaling.
Like is the case with pornography normal person sense racism when he sees it. 1619 project
does not pass this test. It looks more like "political gangsterism" of some clique, quite similar
to Mao's "cultural revolution"
It is interesting to read the list of corporations which finance this "Cultural revolution
2.0" in the USA as an attempt to save neoliberalism and political power of financial
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... It's actually a brilliant strategy. They have their own voters completely ignoring everything you mentioned, and they have divided the country over these other problems that are created out of thin air. The two Teams want everyone focused on climate change and racism while they loot the country ... ..."
"... 1619 drivel has one purpose--to divide and sow discord. ..."
"... The Spanish were pouring slaves into the Americas a hundred-plus years - before 1619. And, the United States wasn't even a country until 1789. ..."
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said it is responsible for colleges to
teach the idea that racism is embedded in the American system, dismissing criticism that such
teaching aims at indoctrinating American youth.
In a
White House press briefing , Psaki was asked about a proposed legislation by Sen. Tom
Cotton (R-Ark.) that would place an one percent tax on the value of the endowments of the
country's wealthiest private colleges, and use that money to support vocational education and
training.
The reporter noted that Cotton's proposal would affect institutions that teach "un-American
ideas" such as those of critical race theory and the New
York Times's "1619 Project," which argue the United States was founded as, and remains, a
racist nation.
An outspoken critic of the 1619 Project, Cotton last year introduced the "Saving American History
Act of 2020" that would reduce federal funding to public schools where the highly
controversial narrative is taught as actual U.S. history. The bill is currently in
consideration in the Senate Education and Labor Committee.
Kreditanstalt 4 hours ago (Edited)
I've never understood why, faced with military aggression, raging income inequality,
asset-price manipulation, rigged "markets", rigged wages, rigged prices, soaring price
inflation, falling living standards, massive debts, public & private...in the last few
years the pseudo-non-issues of "man-made climate change" and "racism" have suddenly been
pushed and pushed...
It beggars belief.
Pdunne 2 hours ago remove link
1619 certainly presents a different perspective. I suspect some of it is incorrect but
that is why people should review it and understand at least the basics of this in American
History.
Bringing Africans to American fundamentally changed the country, that is something to be
understood.
StephenHopkins 2 hours ago
Irish were slaves, **** were slaves there are slaves for sale right now in Libya. Do
something.
Politinaut 2 hours ago
Fundamentally changed? You mean destroyed it. Complete cancer. Our ancestors screwed up,
then paid the toll of correction with 650k soldiers and untold white civilian lives lost. One
dead white man or woman for every 3 slaves to right our ship.
And yet, the retards on the left want to egg this dead conflict on to line their pockets
and destroy the system. I think not.
LetThemEatRand 4 hours ago
It's actually a brilliant strategy. They have their own voters completely ignoring
everything you mentioned, and they have divided the country over these other problems that
are created out of thin air. The two Teams want everyone focused on climate change and racism
while they loot the country ...
TightLiner 3 hours ago
I doubt this woman has ever driven down an MLK Blvd.
GreatUncle 2 hours ago
The woman is a f^7king twat ... critical race theory in itself is indoctrination let alone
all the other stuff.
Plus Size Model 3 hours ago
An important part of indoctrination is rewriting the past. Most people just don't know how
pervasive slavery has been throughout history. First off, it's not easy to define and life
was very very rough up until about the 20th century. Indentured servitude also comes to mind,
child labor is terrible and was also prevalent until the 20th century, primitive factory work
as well as mining was dangerous and lots were permanently injured or killed, there were press
gangs for war, etc.
Completely overlooking antiquity and the east, slavery was ubiquitous almost everywhere up
until the 19th century . THIS INCLUDES ALL RACES, NATIONALITIES AND CREEDS .
Here's just a few instances of slavery that have been written out of the history books
most here are familiar with.
The Barbary slave trade refers to slave markets on the Barbary Coast of North Africa,
which included the Ottoman provinces of Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania and the independent
sultanate of Morocco, between the 16th and middle of the 18th century. The Ottoman provinces
in North Africa were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, but in reality they were mostly
autonomous.
European slaves were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on
coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and the southwest of Britain, as far
north as Iceland and into the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman eastern Mediterranean was the scene of intense piracy. As late as the 18th
century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean."
For over three centuries, the military of the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde
conducted slave raids primarily in lands controlled by Russia and Poland-Lithuania as well as
other territories.
Their main purpose was the capture of slaves, most of whom were exported to the Ottoman
slave markets in Constantinople or elsewhere in the Middle East. Genoese and Venetians
merchants controlled the slave trade from Crimea to Western Europe. The raids were a drain of
the human and economic resources of eastern Europe . They largely inhabited the "Wild Fields"
"" the steppe and forest-steppe land which extends from a hundred or so miles south of Moscow
to the Black Sea and which now contains most of the Russian and Ukrainian population . The
campaigns also played an important role in the development of the Cossacks.
Here's a video of British miners from 1901. Tell me they don't look like slaves. Lots of
them won't even make it to middle age. I'd argue that the majority of them have lung disease.
You can see some men are obviously malnourished.
If you are against racism don't build your self-esteem based on your race; be an
individual.
AlfieDolittle 3 hours ago
It's utter garbage anyway, the Africans who arrived in 1619 weren't slaves, they were
indentured labourers who signed up for 7 years after which they were given a plot of land.
This was a common way of working at the time, even for whites.
It was one of their fellow blacks, Anthony Johnson, who challenged indenture in the courts
as he wanted to hold on to them for life..
Shouldn't it be the previous year, 1618? Namely when Africans captured and sold their
fellow blacks for dirty lucre and a bottle of wine?
Giant Meteor 3 hours ago
Politicians white and black have successfully used all this race baiting to deflect
attention away from their own grifting, and glaring failures, of the people they claimed they
were helping, for the last 50 plus years.. Today we see the resulting train wreck, and of
course the doubling down on the latest insanity ....
On the other hand there is Jen, and her ilk .. the new breed. They are so dumb, they don't
even know they're dumb .. This is the promise and legacy of "public education."
The film "Idiocracy" .. was not suppose to be a documentary ..
Giant Meteor 3 hours ago (Edited)
During an interview with conservative Mark Levin, Robert L. Woodson Sr., president and
founder of the Woodson Center, said that what is happening today is a "perversion of the
civil rights movement," and that claims of "institutional racism" are a "ruse," a "lie" to
deflect attention from certain black leaders who have failed to help their communities
because they pushed policies that do not work.
Woodson, whose organization works directly with people and groups in neighborhoods
nationwide, also denounced the idea that the "legacy of slavery and discrimination" is
responsible for problems in some black communities, such as unemployment, crime, and
out-of-wedlock births. "That's another lie," he said.
"I don't know what systemic racism is. Maybe someone can explain what that means," Robert
Woodson
Woodson, who left the civil rights movement goes on to state ..
"In the past 50 years, $22 trillion has been spent on poverty programs. Seventy percent
goes not to the poor but those who serve poor people," he said.
"So many of those people taking office use this money to create a class of people who are
running these cities, and now after 50 years of liberal Democrats running the inner cities,
where we have all of these inequities that we have, race is being used as a ruse, as a means
of deflecting attention away from critical questions such as why are poor blacks failing in
systems run by their own people?"
Robert L. Woodson, Sr. founded the Woodson Center in 1981 to help residents of low-income
neighborhoods address the problems of their communities. A former civil rights activist, he
has headed the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, and has been a resident
fellow at the American Enterprise Foundation for Public Policy Research. Referred to by many
as "godfather" of the neighborhood empowerment movement, for more than four decades, Woodson
has had a special concern for the problems of youth. In response to an epidemic of youth
violence that has afflicted urban, rural and suburban neighborhoods alike, Woodson has
focused much of the Woodson Center's activities on an initiative to establish Violence-Free
Zones in troubled schools and neighborhoods throughout the nation. He is an early MacArthur
"genius" awardee and the recipient of the 2008 Bradley Prize, the Presidential Citizens
Award, and a 2008 Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Manhattan Institute.
Teach that ...
wellwaddyaknow 3 hours ago remove link
1619 drivel has one purpose--to divide and sow discord.
2021: Current Secret "Buzz" words. Remember "multi-culturalism"? This dangerous thinking
has mutated to "critical race theory"
mabuhay1 3 hours ago
1619 is a hoax and a sham and needs to be banned from ANY level of education, except as an
example of just how far stupid people will attempt to fool others and push their
ideology.
Brazillionaire 2 hours ago
Hoax and sham yes. They are not stupid. They're evil.
nsurf9 4 hours ago (Edited)
The Spanish were pouring slaves into the Americas a hundred-plus years - before 1619.
And, the United States wasn't even a country until 1789. And, before that, North America
was occupied as Spanish, French and British colonies - with a lot of Native Indians.
END 60+ YEARS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION - SYSTEMIC DISCRIMINATION - NOW !!!!
WorkingClassMan 2 hours ago remove link
EVERY country that was ever founded was built on or with "racism," in mind. That is one of
the benefits of a monoracial society--you don't have competing racial factions tearing the
unity of a nation apart.
That said, the 13% are really narcissists to think they are important enough to have
fought at least two wars over. Overpriced farm equipment that should have been RTS'd from the
get-go.
Nik-ole Hanna (or is it Jones?) is an overpaid antiwhite who doesn't know how to check her
black privilege. In her paradise of Africa, a country--for example--named Rwanda had two
BLACK ethnic groups. To outsiders they just looked the same--black.
But to each other, they were VERY different. And, a few years ago, the Hutus (or is it the
Tutsis? I don't care) decided to slaughter the other group. Hundreds of thousands died
officially, likely many more. And they had NO racist crackas to get involved.
She should go to Rwanda or Liberia or Somalia or Sudan where slavery still exists! No
racist crackas.
"... The Global Financial Syndicate will use all kind of distractions to mask the MONETARY power and divide the populace to continue its control & dominance through monetary imperialism. The world is a playground for "evil spirits." ..."
One need to understand the STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT correctly, clearly, and comprehensively
to live & light our world. What is your strategic construct of the national and
international control system?
The Global Financial Syndicate will use all kind of distractions to mask the MONETARY
power and divide the populace to continue its control & dominance through monetary
imperialism. The world is a playground for "evil spirits."
How does the Financial Empire increase its control & POWER over a region? It likes
turning each region into its suzerainty and an Animal Farm (Top-Down Control Structure -
Democracy/Republic/...) internally by controlling its money supply through the
central-private banking system.
Global Financial Empire's strategy:
– Capture LANDS
– Constitutionalize to control the suzerainty & LIVES
– Create LOANS through private creation of money by the private banking system
(Credit/Debt) & give preferential access-terms to kleptocrats (Kleptocrats/Finance --
> Business/Media -- > Politicians/Bureaucrats -- > people)
– Conserve control & power through Consumerism - lifestyles (Labor &
Leisure)
Monetary Power = Lands x Lives x Loans. The key CONTROL elements of the Financial Empire
within a suzerainty are:
– credit/debt - LOANS
– consumerism/desires - LIFESTYLE
– circuses/distractions. - LOST & trivial
When it comes to the international realm it seeks following freedoms:
– freedom of capital movement,
– freedom of trade,
– freedom to provide services, particularly financial
– freedom for warfare
The Global Financial Syndicate controls, finances and corrupts policies such as those in
the U$A administration by its financing the substitution of national leaders with employees
of the Financial Syndicate, such as Biden, Draghi, Yellen, Juncker, Macron,... Globalization
is meant to establish the global financial syndicate's rule everywhere, hierarchically from
top to bottom, in contrast to the democratic right of citizens to self-determination and the
responsibility of governments towards their citizens.
Who wants to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt?
"... My life story is very similar to yours -- blue collar upbringing, worked graveyard shift in factories during college, made it all the way to Wall Street --- and I completely agree with you. The Democratic Party might have been the party of the working-class families many years ago, but it's absolutely not that now. ..."
"... The most interesting aspect of party realignment in almost every country is the movement of the Anglo-Saxon elites to the parties of leftist authoritarianism, whether in the UK, US, or Canada. Since elites have always had “fluid” political values, one can only assume that they see tyranny as our destiny. ..."
I am a retired attorney but was reared in a blue collar home. I have not lost the values I
learned where my father returned home from work six days a week as a railroad brakeman.
Thanks to my pre-law curriculum I am well read in history and literature. My undergrad major
was history and my minor literature.
Having acquired a love for reading in college I have read both all my life but it has not
changed me from the son my father reared. I worked construction and general labor jobs to
help pay for college and law school and am very aware of how hard those jobs are and I have a
healthy respect for the men and women who provide us with the essential goods and services we
all need.
I therefore have no use for attitude of most on the left and some on the right who have no
respect for average working people and small business.
It seems many in Britain have the same outlook. My Dad was very proud I became a lawyer
but I am just as proud of the job he performed to give me that chance.
SUBSCRIBER 5 hours ago
I therefore have no use for attitude of most on the left and some on the right who have no
respect for average working people and small business. It seems many in Britain have the same
outlook.
My life story is very similar to yours -- blue collar upbringing, worked graveyard
shift in factories during college, made it all the way to Wall Street --- and I completely
agree with you. The Democratic Party might have been the party of the working-class families
many years ago, but it's absolutely not that now.
SUBSCRIBER 4 hours ago
Most democrat leaders are career politicians like Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Schumer. They
never had a real job and paid any taxes. They love raising taxes for big government and dole
out. Can’t wait for midterm election and take back the congress. R
SUBSCRIBER 14 hours ago
The most interesting aspect of party realignment in almost every country is the
movement of the Anglo-Saxon elites to the parties of leftist authoritarianism, whether in the
UK, US, or Canada. Since elites have always had “fluid” political values,
one can only assume that they see tyranny as our destiny.
A US Space Force commander was reportedly
relieved as commander of the 11th Space
Warning Squadron
"due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead," after he appeared on a podcast to
promote
his
book
which claims that the US military has been infiltrated by a neo-Marxist agenda which is transforming military culture
and policy.
"Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander,
relieved Lt. Col.
Matthew Lohmeier of command
of the 11th Space Warning Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, May 14, due to loss
of trust and confidence in his ability to lead," the Space Force told the
Washington
Examiner
in a statement.
"This decision was based on public comments made by Lt. Col. Lohmeier in a recent podcast. Lt. Gen. Whiting has initiated a
Command Directed Investigation (CDI) on whether these comments constituted prohibited partisan political activity."
Lohmeier
self-published
Irresistible
Revolution: Marxism's Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military
this
week.
The book, according to the description, explores the "impact of a neo-Marxist
agenda" and the manner in which the "
Black
Lives Matter
movement, anti-racism, postmodernism, [and] political correctness" affect the national security of the
United States.
Lohmeier said
that he had informed his superiors, public affairs staff, and lawyers for the military about the book prior to publication
,
but it was not subject to a pre-publication review.
Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 prohibits active-duty personnel from engaging in
"partisan political activities."
Service members are, however, permitted to express
their personal opinions on political candidates and issues in their personal capacity and when
not
in uniform
. Lohmeier denied intending to participate in partisan politics. -Washington Examiner
"My intent never has been to engage in partisan politics. I have written a book about a particular political ideology
(Marxism) in the hope that our Defense Department might return to being politically nonpartisan in the future as it has
honorably done throughout history," Lohmeier, and Air Force Academy graduate, told
Military.com
.
The demotion comes after Lohmeier criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's diversity
and inclusion "agenda."
"I don't demonize the man, but I want to make it clear to both him and every service member this agenda -- it will divide us.
It will not unify us," he said, after Austin imposed a 60-day force-wide extremism "
stand-down
"
to determine how to rid the military of extremism following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Lohmeier says
he was asked to give his troops extremism training and was given a
"70-page" booklet of "talking points."
The booklet reportedly began with an overview of the Capitol riot, and
included examples of "white nationalists that have been caught at some point in the last decade and punished for it and kicked
out of the military, or a radical Islamic terrorist."
"The diversity, inclusion and equity industry and the trainings we are receiving in the military ... is rooted in critical
race theory, which is rooted in Marxism," said Lohmeier, who also knocked the Defense Department for saying that the military
has "too many white pilots" during a pilot shortage.
Citing a diversity initiative in which service members read So You Want to Talk About
Race by Ijeoma Oluo, in which the U.S. is referred to as a "white supremacist nation," Lohmeier told the Information
Operation podcast that the young service members are inundated by a "hyperpoliticized work environment where diversity and
inclusion initiatives are being pushed constantly."
Lohmeier added that conservatives in the military who are willing to voice their
opinions are painted as "extremists."
-Washington Examiner
"What you see happening in the U.S. military at the moment is that if you're a conservative, then you're lumped into a group
of people who are labeled extremists, if you're willing to voice your views. And
if
you're aligned with the Left, then it's OK to be an activist online because no one's gonna hold you accountable
," he
added.
According to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, "There were members, sadly, of the active-duty force participating and espousing
these radical beliefs," adding "We don't know the full breadth and depth of it."
Of note,
Lohmeier's book is currently the #1 seller in Amazon's Military Policy, as
well as Communism & Socialism sections
.
BarnacleBill
1 hour ago
Yes. America's state of
permanent warfare
pits
its weapons against the dwellers in mud huts everywhere. While the generals and colonels pretend to prepare to defend
the country against the latest bogeyman (Russia, the Taliban, North Korea), the lower ranks are ordered to kill
hut-dwellers wherever they can find them. Increasingly, this has meant a war against women and children - as
practised by Israel this past week, as we see. I noted this new (and safe) war in my personal online journal nearly
ten years ago. It's not Pulitzer Prize stuff, but it reports the situation very fairly. Hit the link for the whole
two-minute read. I wrote there about today's "grunts",
They
are sociopaths, pretty much by definition, and we should be very afraid of them. They will be our children's and
grandchildren's guardians and torturers
.
https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-war-against-women.html
techengineer
7 minutes ago
Lohmeier is exactly right.. The are pushing the liberal/marxist dog**** on everyone and the young men and
women are eating it up.. And the managers are although don't believe the liberal dog**** don't want to lose
their jobs so they play along..
It's disgusting!
GunnerySgtHartman
2 hours ago
remove
link
This is Obama's politicization of the military bearing fruit. The military appointments made by Obama were
purely on ideological grounds; those appointments are now in positions of authority in the Pentagon and are
now spreading their evil gospel.
Virgil Krenshaw
PREMIUM
2 hours ago
That's why coups (or, in this case, counter coups) are typically executed by colonels not generals.
RedDog1
2 hours ago
The Obama regime finished what the Clinton regime began.
Virgil Krenshaw
PREMIUM
2 hours ago
(Edited)
When you're criticizing wokism, you're engaging in partisan politics. When you're promoting wokism, you're
not being partisan at all.
Marcuse argues that "the realization of the objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward
prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and
opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." He makes the case for "liberating tolerance", which would
consist of intolerance to right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing movements.
[5]
Marxists have been working towards this for
decades
American Dissident
2 hours ago
remove
link
Fun Fact: He knew The System would destroy his career for dissent, but he spoke up anyway. It will take men
like this for us to win. Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier deserves to be honored.
overbet
2 hours ago
(Edited)
Buying his book is a good start. Support him and encourage others. Gift it to a liberal.
An
Outstanding Rebuttal to CRT from a Frontline U.S. Military Officer
5.0 out of 5 stars
An
Outstanding Rebuttal to CRT from a Frontline U.S. Military Officer
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2021
Verified Purchase
Critical Race Theory (CRT), the fraudulent spawn of another failed ideology – Marxism
– is a mind-cancer invading American society. It has metastasized to the point it is now being taught in the nation's
military academies, effectively a "new gospel" of how the world should work. At base, however, it is simply the latest spin
on an utterly-failed theory under which over 100 million people – as a conservative estimate – were slaughtered trying to
make Marxism "work". And that's in the 20th century, alone. Our children don't know this because our schools don't teach
this.
Lt Col Lohmeier demonstrates he, at least, is well aware of Marxism's dangers, no matter how they are disguised and
re-gift-wrapped. A clear scholar of Marxism's history and failures, in his outstanding work Lt Col Matthew Lohmeier exposés
this "new" ideology, CRT, a mind-virus of the type evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad refers to as "The Parasitic Mind", in
the psychologist's book of the same title. Lohmeier recounts how Marxism has morphed from a class-warfare "struggle" –
really, a man-made conflict set up to cause differing societal classes to wage war on one another – into the race-based
"struggle", CRT. This "new" ideology comes complete with its "intersectionalism" add-on, just to make sure everyone is
covered by *some* "oppressed" "group" of one flavor or another. So the Boogey Man is everywhere. Racism is everywhere. Just
because you can't see it directly, you know it's there: It's "institutional racism", after all.
Lt Col Lohmeier analyzes such false claims under the searing light of the truth, showing the actual damage caused to
today's military and the potential for far worse damages to both our military and our society, if this movement is not
stopped dead in its tracks. And Lohmeier has the credibility and facts to back up his analysis: A highly-decorated,
current-active-duty, "fast-burner" (early selection to ranks) squadron commander who commands a premier, frontline U.S.
Space Force squadron, Lt Col Lohmeier provides a "boots-on-the-ground" look at what's happening to the U.S. military as a
result of CRT's brainwashing agenda.
Lt Col Lohmeier has taken the extraordinary step of publishing the book while on active duty, fully aware of the risks such
publication might raise. But the message is too critical to wait. Lohmeier "gets" that, knowing the stakes nonetheless.
This book is a wakeup call. Every American should read it – certainly every U.S. military servicemember, at the very least:
Forewarned is forearmed. Get this book. Read it. And learn about the fight to come: the fight to save our nation from this
Marxist cancer.
>
5.0 out of 5 stars
I
lived in the USSR
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2021
Verified Purchase
WAKE UP!!! I lived in the USSR. What is taking place in the United States RIGHT NOW is
textbook Marxist/communism. The history explained by the author in this book is unimpeachable and accurate. This book will
help anyone who reads it quickly and easily gain a clear understanding of what is currently happening in America; and why.
The warning at the end of the book is chilling and true to history.
"Inside BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors' million-dollar real-estate buying binge.
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors has gone on a real-estate buying binge in
recent years, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to
property records.":
No doubt the US/UK deep state, now more than ever, are busy trying to sow conflict and
division in Eurasia, to divide-and-rule Mackinder's "World Island" and hence the world.
"... No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold. ..."
"... Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality. ..."
My two cents. People are mimics. It is fascinating when you realize this.
People don't muse, contemplate and chew over the circumstances and issues in their environment and then resolve - "aha! I have
got it." That is not where people get their belief systems. For example, a million and more people didn't all independently study
the Bible and then realize that their interpretation was fully consistent with those of the Roman Catholics and therefore they
should go join the Catholic Church.
No, people get their belief systems (religious, political, economic, cultural) from their identity groups. **Then** (if
called upon) they apply the intellect to rationalize the beliefs that they **already** hold.
The epiphany came to me when I observed intelligent people falling for Russiagate. WTF !! I thought intelligent people
would get it. Russiagate would be a flash-in-the-pan that would disappear in a few days (or less!). Boy was I wrong. The intellect
does not rule, group identity does. Those that identified Democrat (generalizing here, of course) fell in step with the beliefs
common to Democrats, including Russiagate.
Rationalizing the Russiagate nonsense was seemingly inevitable with the 24/7 help of the MSM, and the continuous chirping
of Democrat politicians. The intellect was not a lighthouse beacon that led intelligent Democrats through the fog of 24/7/52 issued
propaganda, rather; the intellect was the tool that solidified vaporous forms into false-reality.
To find one's identity in groups is deeply human. People are dominated by their need to be group-accepted. It is unsurprising
that group acceptance and group identity produce what we call fashion - fashion in style, fashion in vocabulary, fashion in beliefs.
This applies to Wokism. People are mimics.
For years, I and others have argued for body camera (and police interrogation cameras) to be
used in every jurisdiction. Despite the obvious value of such cameras, jurisdictions like Los
Angeles County have resisted and still do not have this basic protection for both officers and
citizens alike. Likewise, prosecutors in cities like Chicago
long opposed the filming of officers by citizens .
The recent controversy over a traffic stop in L.A. shows the importance of such body
cameras. In the video, an officer pulls over a self-described teacher for using her cellphone
while driving and is met with a barrage of racist slurs. The officer was only able to show his
side in the encounter because he paid for his own camera. It is absurd that Los Angeles County
forces officers to pay for their own cameras to guarantee a record of such encounters. In LA
County, it is bring your own camera (BYOC) or engage in policing at your own risk.
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The African-American teacher is shown in the video immediately attacking the hispanic
officer with a litany of racist slurs and insults from repeatedly calling him a
“murdererâ€...
"Yes, I started to record because you're a murderer," she says.
"You're threatening to kill me and my son," she says at one point in the encounter.
...and then it escalated as the woman is heard telling the deputy,
"You're always going to be a Mexican. You'll never be white, you know that, right?"
"You'll never be white, which is what you really want to be," she says after signing a
citation. "You want to be white."
Police say the woman is well known for bringing baseless charges against officers.
Here is the body cam video of the April 23 incident in San Dimas:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jwy9lB2q8YE
The officer remains calm despite the litany of insults.
My anger at the video was not just over the racist slurs but the fact that this officer had
to equip himself in Los Angeles.
As many of us have argued for 20 years, these cameras
protect officers and the public alike . If this officer did not have this videotape, this
could have been an incident where there are two wildly different accounts between the driver
and the officer. If a harassment claim is filed, the matter would likely be treated as unproven
rather than untrue. It would remain on the officer’s record that he was
accused for racism and harassment.
While many politicians are now calling for body cams, it was not long ago that they remained
silent on the issue or failed to object (or
joined ) as
police departments demanded delays in the release of such records. In April 2018, the LAPD
began releasing body
cam footage to the public from officer-involved shootings.
One of the issues delaying such deployment has been the insistence of officers to have
greater control in turning on and off cameras. There should be no such debate in terms of the
cameras operating as all times in public movements and encounters
play_arrow
GeneKelly 2 hours ago
She does NOT have the right to say : "You're threatening to kill me and my son," except to
the extent that she is prepared to face civil and criminal penalties for slander and false
accusations.
Unknown 5 hours ago
The Neoliberal brainwashing worked as planned to divide Americans.
This one-to-one replay of Red Guards - Wikipedia but with quite
different sponsors ;-) "Hóng Wèibīng was a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao
Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Notable quotes:
"... there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality. ..."
"... The more binary and controversial the better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless waste of time and my life is better for that realization. ..."
"... Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even mentioned, like climate change. ..."
"... Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke' for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake. ..."
I think that there is an on-going effort to create fads/movements in which the public
becomes caught-up and distracts the from reality.
The more binary and controversial the
better. Red/Blue. I used to be a big fan of sports but have the opinion it is a pointless
waste of time and my life is better for that realization.
Additionally/tangentially, I feel there is a habit in the English language in particular
to create new words to describe things these words are not well define and generate a lot of
discussion and heat about things that nobody knows what they are actually talking about and
end up arguing the meaning of the words.
People who don't know the new words must try to catch
up or be left out of the discussion. I don't direct this at your discussion. I just wonder how
we might see things if we were constrained to a limited vocabulary - as I am as a programmer
of sorts.
Characteristics of the Woke: They always attack, especially with insults, like "paranoia
nonsense". They never address the actual point made, instead they reinterpret the point to
make it appear pure evil. Which allows them to attribute the worst possible motivations on
the person they are attacking. Naturally they invent things the other person hadn't even
mentioned, like climate change.
Again the whole woke 'identity' culture that cancels dissent and promotes 'minorities' in
positions of power is simply woke fascism. Just as military recruitment is about turning
violent video games real for young men, so too is CIA recruitment about inviting the 'woke'
for murder and mayhem in the name 'freedom' without which the woke could not wake.
I will believe that any of this is worth a shit when Snowden wades in with his
opinion...until then its just another distraction
The CIA is why we can't have "wokeism" about the right issue like global private/public
finance.....where is Occupy 2.0?
The current wokeism is like the pet rocks of old days.....would want folks to focus that
woke on the inherited class structure of the private property West, would we?
"... you make the best point: you have to have something seriously "wrong" with your mind to want a job with these spooks in the first place. you can't spell "sociopath" without "c-i-a". ..."
I asked Google (and thus Wikipedia) what cisgender means?
cisgender /sɪsˈdʒɛndə/ adjective
Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender
corresponds with their birth sex. "this new-found attention to the plight of black trans folks by primarily cisgender allies
is timely and necessary"
On the same page as the search result is a teaser headline:
"How An (the) Ad About Cisgender Backfired Spectacularly"
I've formed the opinion that the BIC (the Billionaires In Charge) want societies atomised
to reduce the likelihood of a revolution involving rope, and nooses. So guess how surprised
I'm not that the BIC's loyal servants/savants, the CIA, are attempting to popularise such
vacuous tosh as yet another addition to the LBGTQUERTY "landscape?"
you make the best point: you have to have something seriously "wrong" with your mind to
want a job with these spooks in the first place. you can't spell "sociopath" without
"c-i-a".
both the bold - and to a lesser extent the italics - are terms people use to sound
interesting when they're not. especially the tendency toward self-diagnosis that westerners
have; "i'm not dumb with no attention span ...i have " ADHD " or "i don't have
low self esteem or work-related anxiety based on the inner knowldge of how inept i am...i
have " imposter syndrome ".
the woke types tend to be this kind of malleable and empty vessel...which is what the
"company" wants.
Thanks for bringing this issue to the main page in a brief article, b. I linked to
this
article, "CIA & The Woke Totalitarian Generation" , on the Week in Review thread, but
it generated no additional comment despite its being one of several recent essays on the
issue of the contrived Wokeism "culture" that Alastair Crooke's written about on several
occasions over the past months and Pepe Escobar made the focus of his most recent essay.
Crooke argues that Wokeism is the peculiar and singular outcome of the American Malaise
prominently exposed by Christopher Lasch in his 1994 Revolt of the Elites , which
we've seen in the trenches as the war being waged against the State and citizenry by the
Neoliberal Rentier Class that was explained well in this Renegade Inc
interview from last year .
The Outlaw US Empire is clearly trying hard to get its
Neoliberal vassals to adopt the Woke insanity, which proves beyond doubt Putin's assertion
that the Liberalism of the West has died or worse evolved into something profane and
loathsome.
'The Who' legend Roger Daltrey says the 'woke' generation is creating a miserable world that
serves to stifle the kind of creative freedom he enjoyed in the 60s.
The iconic frontman made the comments during a recent appearance on Zane Lowe's Apple Music
1 podcast.
"I don't know, we might get somewhere because it's becoming so absurd now with AI, all the
tricks it can do, and the woke generation, " said Daltrey.
" It's terrifying, the miserable world they're going to create for themselves. I mean,
anyone who's lived a life and you see what they're doing, you just know that it's a route to
nowhere, " he added.
The singer noted how he was lucky to have lived through an era where freedom of speech was
encouraged, not silenced.
"Especially when you've lived through the periods of a life that we've had the privilege to.
I mean, we've had the golden era. There's no doubt about that," he said.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q-ONJ8UuvhU
Daltrey also slammed the negative impact that social media has had on the world, saying it
has undermined truth.
"It's just getting harder to disseminate the truth. It's almost like, now we should
turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth and start to read
books again," he said.
While Daltrey's comments may not be mind-blowing, any celebrity speaking out against the mob
that has cannibalized culture is something to be applauded.
Once again, this only tends to happen with older celebrities who have already passed their
peak of fame and entered icon status. They are beyond cancellation.
For any up and coming celebrity, or even one who is at the top of their game, to question
'generation woke' is career suicide.
Which makes it all the more ludicrous to continue to see identitarians, notably the LGBT
movement, continue to claim they are 'fighting oppression' when their mantras are echoed by
every cultural institution, media outlet and corporate entity in the west, while anyone who
utters a whimper of dissent is swiftly cancelled.
In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes
of my latest book,
Raging Twenties .
In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more lethal,
wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all across the
spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the average citizen is
discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.
Top political analyst Alastair Crooke has attempted a
sharp breakdown of the broader configuration.
Geopoliticallly, the Hegemon would even resort to 5G war to maintain its primacy, while
seeking moral legitimization via the woke revolution, duly exported to its Western
satrapies.
The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business
– that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to
barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.
The great panacea, actually the ultimate "opportunity" offered by Covid-19, is the
Great Reset advanced by Herr Schwab of Davos: essentially the replacement of a dwindling
manufacturing base by automation, in tandem with a reset of the financial
system .
The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will "move closer to a
cleaner capitalist model". One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership
with the Catholic Church.
As much as the pandemic – the "opportunity" for the Reset – was somewhat
rehearsed by Event
201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as
Cyber Polygon ,
which warns against the "key risks of digitalization". Don't miss their "technical exercise" on
July 9 th , when "participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a
targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time."
A New Concert of Powers?
Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of
the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no
holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the
weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.
The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of
the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.
It's under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic
Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond
geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It's
bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.
Hegemon oracles such as the perennial Henry Kissinger at least are taking a pause from their
customary Divide and Rule shenanigans to
warn that the escalation of "endless" competition may derail into hot war –
especially considering AI and the latest generations of smart weapons.
On the incandescent US-Russia front, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sees the lack of
mutual trust, no to mention respect, as much worse than during the Cold War, analyst Glenn
Diesen
notes how the Hegemon "strives to convert the security dependence of the Europeans into
geoeconomic loyalty".
That's at the heart of a make-or-break saga: Nord Stream 2. The Hegemon uses every weapon
– including cultural war, where convicted crook Navalny is a major pawn – to derail
an energy deal that is essential for Germany's industrial interests. Simultaneously, pressure
increases against Europe buying Chinese technology.
Meanwhile, NATO – which lords over the EU – keeps being built up as a global
Robocop, via the
NATO 2030 project – even after turning Libya into a militia-ridden wasteland and
having its collective behind humiliatingly spanked in Afghanistan.
For all the sound and fury of sanction hysteria and declinations of cultural war, the
Hegemon establishment is not exactly blind to the West "losing not only its material dominance
but also its ideological sway".
So the Council on Foreign Relations – in a sort of Bismarckian hangover – is now
proposing a
New Concert of Powers to deal with "angry populism" and "illiberal temptations", conducted
of course by those malign actors such as "pugnacious Russia" who dare to "challenge the West's
authority".
As much as this geopolitical proposal may be couched in benign rhetoric, the endgame remains
the same: to "restore US leadership", under US terms. Damn those "illiberals" Russia, China and
Iran.
Crooke evokes exactly a Russian and a Chinese example to illustrate where the woke cultural
revolution may lead to.
In the case of the Chinese cultural revolution, the end result was chaos, fomented by the
Red Guards, which started to wreak their own particular havoc independent of the Communist
Party leadership.
And then there's Dostoevsky in The Possessed , which showed how the secular Russian
liberals of the 1840s created the conditions for the emergence of the 1860s generation:
ideological radicals bent on burning down the house.
No question: "revolutions" always eat their children. It usually starts with a ruling elite
imposing their newfound Platonic Forms on others. Remember Robespierre. He formulated his
politics in a very Platonic way – "the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the
reign of eternal justice" with laws "engraved in the hearts of all men".
Well, when others disagreed with Robespierre's vision of Virtue, we all know what happened:
the Terror. Just like Plato, incidentally, recommended in Laws. So it's fair to expect that the children of the woke
revolution will eventually be eaten alive by their zeal.
Canceling freedom of speech
As it stands, it's fair to argue when the "West" started to go seriously wrong – in a
cancel culture sense. Allow me to offer the Cynic/Stoic point of view of a 21st century global
nomad.
If we need a date, let's start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the
early 5th century. Follow the money. That's the time when income from properties owned by
temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic power. By
the end of the century, even gifts to temples were forbidden.
In parallel, a destruction overdrive was in progress – fueled by Christian iconoclasm,
ranging from crosses carved in pagan statues to bathhouses converted into churches. Bathing
naked? Quelle horreur!
The devastation was quite something. One of the very few survivors was the fabulous bronze
statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, in the Campidoglio/ Capitoline Hill (today it's housed
in the museum). The statue survived only because the pious mobs thought the emperor was
Constantine.
The very urban fabric of Rome was destroyed: rituals, the sense of community, singin' and
dancin'. We should remember that people still lower their voices when entering a church.
For centuries we did not hear the voices of the dispossessed. A glaring exception is to be
found in an early 6th century text by an Athenian philosopher, quoted by Ramsay MacMullen in
Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries .
The Greek philosopher wrote that Christians are "a race dissolved in every passion,
destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to
cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security."
If that sounds like a proto-definition of 21st century Western cancel culture, that's
because it is.
Things were also pretty bad in Alexandria. A Christian mob killed and dismembered the
alluring Hypatia, mathematician and philosopher. That de facto ended the era of great Greek
mathematics. No wonder Gibbon turned the assassination of Hypatia into a remarkable set piece in
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ("In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of
wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most
illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher").
Under Justinian – emperor from 527 to 565 – cancel culture went after paganism
no holds barred. One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions, which was in
effect since Constantine in 313.
If you were a pagan, you'd better get ready for the death penalty. Pagan teachers –
especially philosophers – were banned. They lost their parrhesia : their license
to teach ( here is Foucault's
brilliant analysis).
Parrhesia – loosely translated as "frank criticism" – is a tremendously
serious issue: for no less than a thousand years, this was the definition of freedom of
speech (italics mine).
There you go: first half of the 6th century. This was when freedom of speech was canceled in
the West.
The last Egyptian temple – to Isis, in an island in southern Egypt – was shut
down in 526. The legendary Plato's Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in
its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.
Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.
Those were the days – in the early 2nd century – when the greatest Stoic,
Epictetus, a freed slave from Phrygia, admirer of both Socrates and Diogenes, was consulted by
an emperor, Hadrian; and became the role model of another emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the West.
It was a target of cancel culture.
In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more
lethal, wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all
across the spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the
average citizen is discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.
Those that can think for themselves are ahead of the curve.
"If we need a date, let's start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the
early 5th century. Follow the money. That's the time when income from properties owned by
temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic
power."
Yes, then, as now, follow the money.
The current "woke" culture didn't naturally well-up from within the population.
This "thing" has been artificially engineered, manufactured and steered in the direction
"the money" forces want it to go.
From Covid to the French Revolution to Rome – all made to LOOK natural, as if they
just appeared out of the blue or were a natural progression that couldn't be stopped, but
when you pull back the curtain you see the hands of "the money" firmly on the steering
wheel.
Some people say the Bible was invented during this time in order to bring down Rome.
They're probably right.
History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the
West. It was a target of cancel culture.
Killed then misrepresented: In The Darkening Age , Catherine Nixey rolls out all
the details. Christianity's greatest crime was the rise of a level of superstition and fear
never before witnessed. Even stone atheists will cringe at the lies -- propagated at the top
-- that Church leaders pushed on their victims. It was worse than some of us suspected.
Nixey's book is not a fun read.
The Greek philosopher was spot on with his observation:
"a race dissolved in every passion cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to
cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness "
If by "womanish in its thinking" he was referring to nothing but emotional (and being
Greek it's likely) he was right on the money, then and now. From BLM to the selling of the
Covid death vaccinations, emotion has become the West's preferred form of discourse. What
killed the Elder Culture now destroys their late-era survivors with a mass nervous
breakdown.
Hey Pepe, study the Punic Wars and try to understand what Rome had against Carthage.
Because the Romans would never demonise their enemies would they? I mean who could imagine
that? The Romans were lovely people and would never do anything perverse or barbaric, no
honestly.
Repressive and non-repressive governments ,democratically elected governments and those
governments imposed from outside ,all have been cancelling messages that they do not like
"Who is "the money"?"
Pepe gives us the answer --
"The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business
– that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling
to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie."
The "woke" are tools to fracture nations, a people, patriotism, social norms, families,
morality, the future & anything which could possibly hinder the progress of the 600 odd
(multi-billionaire) families who RULE this planet.
The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big
Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war.
this is why it's very important to be deliberately offensive. saying "nigger" is a
revolutionary act. but in the age of the beta male, revolutionaries are too few to succeed
and are punished.
"If they want to boycott us why don't we boycott them," Paul said during an appearance on
Fox News on Tuesday. "This is the only thing that will teach them a lesson. If Coca-Cola wants
to only operate in Democrat states and have only Democrats drink them, God love 'em. We'll see
how well they do when half the country quits drinking Coca-Cola."
"Let me be crystal clear and unequivocal, this legislation is unacceptable, it is a step
backward and it does not promote principles we have stood for in Georgia, around broad access
to voting, around voter convenience, about ensuring election integrity, and this is frankly
just a step backwards," Quincey said.
A slew of other companies followed, including Delta Air Lines, JP Morgan Chase and Major
League Baseball, which pulled its annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta over the bill's
passage.
Democrats have argued the bill makes it harder for many people, particularly minorities, to
vote. Republicans say the bill is needed to beef up election security amid a growing distrust
among conservatives with the electoral process following the 2020 elections.
Coca-Cola is headquartered in Atlanta.
Former President Trump last week called on his supporters not to support Coca-Cola and other
companies that have voiced opposition to the Georgia elections bill and similar measures being
proposed by Republicans around the country.
"For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when anything
from that company is done or stated in any way that offends them. Now they are going big time
with the WOKE CANCEL CULTURE and our sacred elections," Trump
said in a statement over the weekend. "It is finally time for Republicans and Conservatives
to fight back- we have more people than they do- by far! Boycott Major League Baseball,
Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS and Merck. Don't go
back to their products until they relent. We can play a better game than them."
A group of GOP state lawmakers in Georgia wrote a letter to the CEO of the Georgia Beverage
Association asking their office no longer be stocked with Coca-Cola products.
"Given Coke's choice to cave to the pressure of an out of control cancel culture, we
respectfully request all Coca-Cola Company products be removed from our office suite
immediately,"
the letter reads . "Should Coke choose to read the bill, share its true intentions and
accept their role in the dissemination of mistruths, we would welcome a conversation to rebuild
a working relationship."
An anti-discrimination group is challenging Coca-Cola's attempt to impose racial quotas on
outside counsel.
Writing on behalf of the Project on Fair Representation, D.C. attorney Boyden Gray accused
Coca-Cola of violating the Civil Rights Act with a new rule, which would punish contracted law
firms unless a certain percentage of their billed associates are "diverse attorneys."
In
the letter , a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon , Gray
argues that policy violates federal law, which "prohibit[s] all forms of racial discrimination
in private contracting." Coca-Cola "appears to be following the view of 'antiracist' activist
Ibram X. Kendi," with their new requirement, Gray writes.
Former Coca-Cola counsel Bradley Gayton, who last week was appointed to serve as a strategic
consultant to the company's CEO, announced
in January that law firms partnering with Coca-Cola would face a 30 percent reduction in
payment unless 30 percent of the firm's billed associates and partners came from diverse
backgrounds. Half of those associates must also be black.
While the practice may have been implemented with good intentions, quotas "perpetuate"
racial categorization, Gray told the Free Beacon.
"Coke's outside counsel policy may be well-intentioned, but racial quotas and the notion of
group rights perpetuate pernicious racial categories and rest on a false, offensive, and racist
notion that blacks and other racial minorities cannot compete," Gray said. "Federal law
prohibits this kind of racially discriminatory balancing. It is not enough for Coke to pause
this policy; it needs to publicly revoke it. Coke should disavow race-based contracting,
period."
Gray is acting on behalf of the Project on Fair Representation, a nonprofit legal group that
fights racial and ethnic discrimination. The group's president, Edward Blum, told the Free
Beacon he believes the company must withdraw the rule immediately.
"It is obvious to all observers that Coca-Cola's recently enacted law firm contracting
policies are illegal. The company should publicly withdraw these racial quota requirements
immediately."
Blum helped organize Students for Fair Admissions' lawsuit against Harvard, which claims the
university discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The group recently
petitioned the Supreme Court to take up their case. Blum is also the architect of
Fisher v. University of Texas , the last case that mounted a frontal attack on
affirmative action before the High Court.
Federal law bans race discrimination in private contracting, as Gray's letter notes.
Lawsuits regarding contract discrimination go straight to federal court, unlike others that
first must go through a years-long agency process. And unlike other anti-discrimination laws,
there's no cap on monetary damages under the fair contracting. Coca-Cola could be on the hook
for a hefty financial penalty.
The soda company landed in hot water in February after leaked documents from an internal
diversity and inclusion training session
asked workers to "be less white." Coca-Cola did not respond to the Free Beacon 's
request for comment in time for publication.
The idea that someone can't succeed in America because of their skin color, gender,
whatever, is as stupid as it is bigoted. Weirdly, it seems to always be espoused by people
who've "somehow" beaten the odds. How many times have you seen a black Ivy League professor on
TV talking about "systemic racism"? How'd they get a tenured, high six-figure gig, book deals,
speaking engagements, and a cable news contributor contract in such a rigged system?
They never answer that question because the only people who'd ask it of them are their
colleagues on TV and they're on the same team. But the answer is obvious: they worked for it;
they earned it.
The woke crowd doesn't want minorities to realize that, and neither do racists. Both want to
keep people down because it serves their needs.
Racists want segregation; wokesters want segregation too. One in the name of bigotry, one in
the name of "tolerance." Does the motive really matter if the outcome is the same?
In fact, to listen to the demands of the leftists in the streets, you'd think they were the
Klan.
"Black people can't succeed without government help," "They can't get ahead without a
government program," "They'll only end up in jail if they don't get handouts." Again, seemingly
different motivations, but all those statements could've been uttered by either group.
The infantilizing of black people by the progressive left is actually worse than anything
the Klan is doing because the KKK is a non-entity in American life in the 21st century. In my
book, I wrote about the size of the KKK. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates there are
between 5,000-8,000 members of the KKK in 2016, down from about 4 million a century earlier.
That's a huge drop – to go from millions to a rounding error smaller than the average
attendance of a WNBA game as the population tripled should be cause for celebration. But
leftists will tell you racists are everywhere and running the show.
Boycott Nike Campaign : 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Share via E-mail More share options
On Monday, Nike rolled out a new ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback who gained national attention
when he began taking the knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. Nike’s new ad features a black
and white photo of an unsmiling Kaepernick. The words written across his face read “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing
everything.â€
Kaepernick hasn’t played for the NFL since he became a free agent in 2017, but he continues to be in the public eye. Just last
week, a judge ruled
that Kaepernick’s lawsuit against the NFL for alleged collusion can go forward. Nike’s new ad campaign has garnered a lot of
attention, with people on both sides of the issue reacting intensely. Serena Williams, who also is a Nike spokesperson, tweeted that
she is now “prouder than ever†to be part of the “Nike family.â€
At the same time, many people, angry at what they see as Colin Kaepernick’s unpatriotic politics, have announced that they will
boycott Nike.
Looks like an attempt to redirect anger against neolibel elite into racial antimosity does nto work well. A least for this UNZ commentariant.
They are not folled by woke nonsense.
In any case it looks like the USA is a divided country.
Never underestimate the insanity of Zionists, be they full Jews, half-Jews, or soulless Jew-wannabes like Joe "I am a Zionist"
Biden. We're in unprecedented territory -- an empire run by Zoglodytes. They'll run it into the ground sooner or later, but just
how quickly and at what cost to the humanity is anyone's guess.
Of course, none of it would be possible but for the Anglo-elites doing deals with ((bankers)) in search of post-Imperial easy-living.
In fact, that's probably what caused WW2.
Today, gangsters from every creed, race and religion want in on the Zionist action, and happily signal to their criminal lodestar
that they're "all in" with virtually unlimited aid, wars and diplomatic support in Congress for the Jewish state.
The New World Order. How do you like it, whitey? You just had to listen to the gold-plated promises of the Jew confidence man.
The streets will be paved with gold, right?
If you're white and in the armed forces/police, you're a moron.
The fact is Americans are nothing but the Jew's bitch, killing for them. There isn't one American, who's defended their country,
well, you'll have to go back to the war of independence for that. Every, serving member of the armed forces is a mercenary, paid
by the US taxpayer, to kill fire Israel as they establish greater Israel.
So STOP looking at your armed forces as heroes. They aren't, not one, single one! See them for what they are, braindead, brainwashed,
fighting machines, WHO DON'T FIGHT FOR YOU! And that's what's worrying. Throughout history every armed force has been turned against
its own nation and its just a matter of time with the US. THEY WILL use them against you, to push nationwide vaccination.
The armed forces, like the police, are your enemy and I strongly suggest that if you know anyone in them, or a friend whose
family members are in them, tell them to leave ASAP before they institute martial law. Remember, the armed forces don't serve
you, so leaving them is doing the people good while staying within is causing them harm.
I'm suspicious of Biden's planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. The troops will probably get reassigned to the Middle East or
the Polish Border. Trump's "withdrawal" from Syria just amounted to shipping those troops to Iraq.
The Biden administration is a revolutionary one. It is not American and doesn't pretend to be. Like Lenin's early revolutionary
Bolshevik government it is comprised of mostly Jews and racial/ethnic minorities who are antagonistic towards the majority population
and its history and traditions.
I believe that the Jews, radical blacks and others who are really in charge of the Biden administration have no plans to relinquish
power in 2024 even if they lose the election. Since the courts refused to provide a legal remedy for battleground states breaking
their own elections laws to massively increase Democrat mail-in ballots then they will just do it again unless Republicans can
win the gubernatorial elections in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But that might not be possible with mail-in ballot schemes
that were illegally put in place.
Will whites support a globalist regime that picks fights abroad and wars against them at home? The mood of the country is
comparable to East German during the 1980's. Resignation and apathy. The last election was a fraud, the media are liars, the courts
are political, privacy and free speech aren't being protected, and half the country declares it hates the other half.
Go ahead, try to conjure a false flag to rally Team America
There are no signs whites are about to repudiate the Evil Empire. Trace Adkins, Gerald McRaney are on tv advertisements imploring
whites to provide financial support to the fools who came back crippled from fighting in Israel's wars.
"Will Whites Support A Globalist American Empire That Picks Fights Abroad and Wars Against Them At Home?"
The answer is YES, they will.
Why?
Because they've been zombified by 150 years of corporate media whose only purpose is to use subliminal messages 24/7 to control
them. Worse of all, they pay monthly fees in order to be zombified!
Wait for the next false flag attack against the US "Interests" at home or abroad and you'll see how the zombies behave.
Elites, oligarchs, plutocrats, super-rich, whatever, but don't slime the Yankees.
And while I agree with much of this, don't forget that in the late 1960's the elites imported Mexicans to specifically replace
blacks. And then cried a river of tears at how blacks were mysteriously losing ground!!!!
Oh and also: nobody NEEDS cheap labor to run factories. History has shown that without cheap labor factories run perfectly
well. It's just that the elites need cheap labor to stay elite
The real enemy of the American working class and middle class all of them is neoliberalism ! Coupled with a two party plutocracy
that disenfranchises the same Americans who desperately need a more equitable society! Nothing to do with Russia or China we caused
it all by ourselves!
This is why there needs to be White Liberation from Jewish Supremacism. But Jewish Power tries to preempt this by making a
big stink about 'white supremacism'.
No more white support for Jewish supremacist tyranny over Palestinians and mass murder of Arabs/Muslims. If, after 2020, any
white person still harbors sentimentality about Jewish Power, he or she is cuck-roach. Useless and worthless.
Currently, an indebted, belligerent, imperialist U.S. is being propped up by naïve, well-meaning whites.
These "well-meaning whites" are the enemy. "Well-meaning whites" have always been the greatest enemy of Whites. A lot of people
here consider Jews to be our greatest enemies. But why are they here in such huge numbers and why are they in control? It started
with the Powdered-Wig Gang (a.k.a. the Founding Fathers) giving them citizenship on the basis of their shit "Enlightenment" ideology,
which held that religion was merely a private matter and of no importance. No country at the time gave Jews citizenship save Poland,
which had fallen under their sway and paid an exceedingly high price for it. Then France followed the American example when they
had their own powdered-wig revolution.
The tragedy of the US is that nearly every fair-skinned, non-Jewish individual who has any influence here is a "well-meaning
White". Generations of brainwashing have done that. Their latest bit of tomfoolery is the belief "Uncle Tim" Scott, a dim, charmless,
venal, ugly black mediocrity, will be their savior. By the way, the first time I laid eyes on Uncle Tim, I said myself, "They're
going to want to make that fellow president." That's no reason to brag, however, because "well-meaning whites" are nothing if
not predictable.
"Well-meaning whites" have no common sense and can't learn from experience. They could not conceive the idea "diversity" is
the problem. "Diversity" elected Joe Biden, through bloc-voting by non-Whites and by she-boons in black-dominated counties bringing
in suitcases of fake ballots, but guess what: as far as "well-meaning Whites" are concerned, "diversity" in the form of "Uncle
Tim" Scott is the solution.
What it comes down to is that if Whites want the White race to survive, then "well-meaning whites", who can accurately be called
"liberals", have to go. Whites cannot afford to be sentimental about "well-meaning whites".
@xyzxy the Zio-western imperialists decided ( ie "backed down") not to risk crossing them.
Incidentally JK I don't disagree with this position --
"Rather than feeling anger or shame at this national humiliation, instead I feel something like schadenfreude against them --
along with righteous indignation on behalf of the countless patriots used up and spat out by a System unworthy of their sacrifice."
But perhaps you could spare a few words & emotions for the poor bloody average Afghans who have died in their 100's of 1000's
in this vicious, stupid war.
A lack of sympathy for & indeed basic knowledge of, other peoples is part of the reason the US constantly gets stuck in these
ridiculous wars. (Had they the "leaders" we have now , the Vietnam War would probably have limped to a halt sometime in
the late 80's).
Hmm. Kirkpatrick doesn't seem to realize that 911 was sort of an official beginning to the elites domestic threat problem?
There was never a reason to enter Afghanistan because Afghanistan never attacked us and nor did Osama Bin Laden.
As long as ppl believe the official story there will always be a reason the American citizen can support for invading middle east
countries
Like the holocaust, it is a lynch pin lie that is the pre-requisite for all sorts claims and behaviors that without them would
otherwise not give validation
I doubt Russia has any regard for Turkey – it has a very long history of wars against them and knows just how treacherous they
are.
Russia alone is powerful enough to end life in USA
USA has lost Europe already- Merkel is aligning with China
Americans think Russian gas binds Germany rather than export markets like China and the fact EU needs semiconductors and Asia
is where they are produced
No one takes USA seriously any more it is peripheral as in 19th century. You forget Europeans cannot travel to US and frankly
fear to do so anyway
This cannot be said nearly enough. WASP culture is WASP elites hating all 'other' whites and pretending not to hate
a few non-WASP white groups when they (the WASPs) can use them against the whites they most hate or fear at the moment. WASPs
discard all groups they use as soon as they no longer need them to wage some type war against still other whites.
The Scotch-Irish are probably the best example of what WASPs think of even those who serve them most ruthlessly.
The mood of the country is comparable to East German during the 1980's. Resignation and apathy.
The last election was a fraud, the media are liars, the courts are political, privacy and free speech aren't being protected,
and half the country declares it hates the other half.
Go ahead, try to conjure a false flag to rally Team America.
It does look like resignation and apathy – which is sort of logical – given that all centers of power are in the hands of the
totalitarians (same as in the old East Germany).
The totalitarian Communist East German regime actually collapsed when it became caught up in the mass demonstrations of neighbouring
countries (Poland Feb. 1989 and Hungary the following month). The Communists didn't have the political will/ability to suppress
demonstrations on this scale and ceded power. Two points here are 1) that the public in each country overwhelmingly opposed the
government 2) each country was ethnically united (Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary and Germans in East Germany) and viewed
their oppression as sourced externally (the Soviet Union).
The US looks different, since the population is split both politically and ethnically. So if anything is going to happen (unlikely)
then it's either a civil war, a military coup or a world war (nuclear) removing most major American cities + Israel.
@anonymouseperson c accountants uncovering the depths of Israel and its fifth column's theft of many tens of billions of our
war matériel and of our most guarded military secrets, which were then sold to China in concert with the Greenspan/Goldman Sachs
plan to transfer of our industrial intellectual assets and over 50,000 factories to China in preparation for a new order based
on joint Israeli-Chinese technocratic hegemony.
My point is that the uninterrupted, elaborate efforts at 9/11 concealment legally constitute, by themselves, sufficient proof
of the Pentagon's complicity and guilt in 9/11 and, therefore, make it an alien occupation force that serves Israel, its fifth
column, and no other. A war completing the "Bolsheviks" effective extermination of white Christian Russia at the same time as
exterminating white Christian America appears to be the objective of International Jewry, whom alone Joe Biden and his Pentagon
answer to.
When I was in the US Army, I never met anyone who signed up to 'fight for the Anglo-Zionist empire'. We were there for a variety
of reasons, no job, to get training, money for college, adventure or maybe running away from a crazy girlfriend. As the grandson
of immigrants, I was probably the most patriotic, the rest of the guys, not so much. Young men will always join the military,
whether the military oppresses its people or not. How many Irishmen served in the British military when they had few civil rights
back home? In the military, a young White man can learn a trade, learn military tactics, earn money for college and become a real
asset to his community. You can also get killed or maimed, but at 18 or 19, we didn't think about that.
Will Whites Support A Globalist American Empire That Picks Fights Abroad and Wars Against Them At Home?
If they are members of Congress, the military leadership, the police, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the MSM, or the leadership
of either political party the answer is clearly a resounding YES!!
I believe a large percentage of whites in America have a Stockholm syndrome of some kind going on. The title of the article
has rolled two very separate issues into one. As far as continuing to support wars abroad that aren't benefiting the average person
of whatever color is not an issue that can be specifically directed at Marxist oriented regimes such as that of Obama/Hillary
and now Sleepy Joe & Camel Toe. One can never forget the years of the faux conservative Bushlet regime. Whites as a group more
overtly support the military than do other racial groups (even though blacks and Hispanics make up a large percentage of our military).
They are very reluctant to criticize American foreign policy as unpatriotic and somehow react to military interventions as if
they were a sporting event.
Their concept of patriotism is very puerile. Many never ask the question of who benefits? (bankers, weapons manufacturers
and Zionists). As far as the war on whites is concerned, here is where the Stockholm syndrome comes more into play. Our people
have been psychologically beaten into submission by accepting whatever the Marxist intelligentsia throws at them.But there is
also a cultural flaw primarily among Northern European Protestant whites which consists of being perceived as NICE. Stop being
NICE, especially to people who wish you dead. Is this some sort of perversion of Christianity? Maybe. Rather than throwing the
whole Gospel message out the window, a recalibration of one's Christianity needs to happen as well. The churches have not been
our friend either.
Corporations
have taken advantage of Republicans for too long. I won’t take their PAC
dollars anymore.
... ... ...
In my nine years in the Senate, I’ve received $2.6 million in
contributions from corporate political-action committees. Starting today, I no longer accept
money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues at all levels to do the same.
For too long, Republicans have allowed the left and their big-business allies to attack our
values with no response. We’ve allowed them to ship jobs overseas, attack
gun rights, and destroy our energy companies. We’ve let them smear
Republicans without paying any price.
As America’s greatest basketball player observed years ago, Republicans
buy sneakers, too. We cast votes, too. And we pay attention when CEOs come after our own just
so they can look good for a few editorial pages and radical activists.
To them I say: When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory
change, I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not. Starting today, we
won’t take your money either.
Mr. Cruz, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Texas.
The ambassador rose to give the not-so-loyal toast.
He began with the inevitable nod to the two nations' divergent histories, noting that some
time earlier, in their great wisdom, his compatriots had decided to go it alone.
"Oh yes!" cried the prince from a sedentary position, fortified, no doubt, by a couple of
glasses of the embassy's very good wine. "And how's that working out for you?"
It was a good question then, and it's more apt than ever now given America's current
predicament. The people that once boldly threw off the tyranny of a distant monarch now seem to
be meekly submitting to the diktats of a regnant class and ideology that tolerate less
independence of thought and action than King George III did
... Today the woke movement questions the very idea of truth. Intermixed with millenarian
frenzy and American Puritanism, Maoist mob rule and hyper-liberal culture war, there is a strand
that echoes Duranty's crypto-Nietzschean philosophy.
Notable quotes:
"... Live Not By Lies ..."
"... "You have to suffer for the truth because that's what makes you authentic. That's what makes that truth credible. If I'm not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be nothing more than an ideology," she tells me. ..."
"... Suffering is a part of every human's life. We don't know why we suffer. But your suffering is like a seal. If you put that seal on your actions, interestingly enough, people start to wonder about your truth -- that maybe you are right about God. In one sense, it's a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value of suffering, because suffering has a value. ..."
It is for the cause of helping good and decent people to endure this coming destruction, and
to suffer for truth, no matter what the totalitarians throw at them, that I have written
Live Not By Lies . A passage that you have not yet seen:
Mária Komáromi teaches in a Catholic school in Budapest. She and her late
husband, János, were religious dissidents under the communist regime, and bore many
burdens to keep the faith alive.
"You have to suffer for the truth because that's what makes you authentic. That's
what makes that truth credible. If I'm not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be
nothing more than an ideology," she tells me.
Komáromi elaborates further:
Suffering is a part of every human's life. We don't know why we suffer. But your
suffering is like a seal. If you put that seal on your actions, interestingly enough,
people start to wonder about your truth -- that maybe you are right about God. In one
sense, it's a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life
without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value
of suffering, because suffering has a value.
...Suffering for truth has dignity and weight; accepting lies because they make you more
comfortable is contemptible. The fact that public intellectuals like Fran Maier and John Gray
recognize the totalitarianism within wokeness, and how wokeness in power compels everyone to
affirm lies, tells me that neither I, nor the survivors of Soviet communism who talked to me
for the book, are being alarmist.
Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American
Conservative . Joanis B • 9 months ago • edited
It's hard to see such famines, albeit politically determined ones, occurring in the US or
Western Europe, considering the way developed economies function today: based on consumption,
not national production (largely outside of the agricultural, financial products, service
sector, etc, arms industry). What not only USSR and Maoist China, but also British Imperial
Ireland and India, had in common was a situation of both extreme poverty and imperial
despotism.
So yes Stalin and Mao were horrible, but, honestly, considering what
neoliberalism/neoconservatism has done to the world since 9/11, I think most of the world
perceives the US to be the greatest aggressor of post Cold War times (and it has nothing to do
with Wokism, though Wokism might be a reaction to it).
P.S. I would add, only have facetiously, it's not a good idea to be around when empires
implode, whether it be the Russian, Chinese, French (Algeria, Indochina), German, or even the
British (certainly in the context of Indian partition).
Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic
Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the
information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no
meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Analysis: US
blinks first on Russia-Ukraine tensions
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The
New York Times on the so-called
“Bountygate†story the outlet broke in June of last year
about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in
Afghanistan.
“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story
(originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence
officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,†Greenwald
tweeted .
“So media outlets - again - repeated CIA stories with no questioning:
congrats to all.â€
Indeed, NYT’s original
story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only
“officials,†yet this latest article speaks as though it had
been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the
lying, torturing , drug-running , warmongering Central
Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New
York Times
first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s
assessment,†with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no
mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA
was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.
The Daily Beast , which has itself uncritically published many articles
promoting the CIA “Bountygate†narrative, reports the
following:
It was a blockbuster
story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great
Game†in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central
Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry
from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the
White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.
But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had
“low to moderate†confidence in the story after all.
Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the
story is, at best, unproven â€" and possibly untrue.
So the mass media aggressively promoted a CIA narrative that none of them ever saw proof of,
because there was no proof, because it was an entirely unfounded claim from the very beginning.
They quite literally ran a CIA press release and disguised it as a news story.
In totalitarian dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories
to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In free democracies, the government spy
agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!†and the
news media unquestioningly publish it.
In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “ The CIA and the Media
†reporting that the CIA had
covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had
over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as
Operation Mockingbird . It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media is meant to
report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the
agendas of spooks and warmongers.
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too
propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New
York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news
pundits . The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor ,
and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence
agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets
now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper,
Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha
Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash,
Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known
CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are
CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like
Tucker Carlson.
This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse.
Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the
CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even
any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if
people’s votes aren’t being cast with a clear
understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world, and if
their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government
they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most
powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to
the electorate whatsoever. It’s just an immense globe-spanning power
structure, doing whatever it wants to whoever it wants. A totalitarian dictatorship in
disguise.
And the CIA is the very worst institution that could possibly be spearheading the movements
of that dictatorship. A little research into the many, many horrific
things the CIA has done over the years will quickly show you that this is true; hell, just
a glance at what the CIA was up to with the
Phoenix Program in Vietnam will.
There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government
agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil
things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by
mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is
comfortable, and for literally no other reason.
The CIA should not exist at all, let alone control the news media, much less the movements
of the US empire. May we one day know a humanity that is entirely free from the rule of
psychopaths, from our total planetary behavior as a collective, all the way down to the
thoughts we think in our own heads.
May we extract their horrible fingers from every aspect of our being.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is
to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email
notification for everything I publish. My work is
entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around,
liking me on Facebook
, following my antics on Twitter , or
throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy
my books . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying
to do with this platform,
click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,
has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else
I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
It's imprudent to weigh in on issues that don't directly affect the company.
A few CEOs have expressed their point of view about the new Georgia voting law. They have
issued statements indicating their opposition on the basis that the law will suppress voting.
Other senior executives, retired and active, have joined them. I know most of them by
reputation and some personally. They are people of goodwill, who sincerely care about the
nation, their companies and their employees and customers. Most have done excellent work as
leaders of their companies. All have my respect and I believe have earned the respect of the
public. But I believe they are wrong to take public positions on this law.
I believe both that voting ought to be relatively simple for citizens and that verification
of eligibility to vote should be strict as a matter of principle. It is clear that any
verification of ballot integrity will increase difficulty. In my view, the Georgia law reaches
a reasonable trade-off between those two objectives.
But the reason I think CEOs should be silent on this issue isn't because I disagree with
their judgment on the merits. It's because I think it is wrong for executives to take a company
position on public-policy questions that don't directly affect their business, for four
reasons.
First, while these CEOs have the right to their own opinions, they can never speak merely as
individuals; they always speak for and represent the companies they head. As CEOs they have the
right, and perhaps the obligation, to speak out on matters affecting their organizations, but
unless they have asked their boards for approval before speaking, they don't have that right on
unrelated matters.
Second, inevitably their announcements on purely political issues will alienate many of
their employees and customers. Those positions will always lead to unintended consequences. In
the Georgia situation, it immediately prompted Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game
to Denver, which then brought on charges of hypocrisy because of baseball's close ties to two
dictatorships -- Cuba and China. It also generated calls to boycott two major Atlanta-based
companies. This won't be the end of the backlash.
Third, these and other executives will be pressured in the future to comment, pro or con, on
other states' voting laws. That will lead to further charges of hypocrisy, more boycotts, more
publicity, more ill will. At the end of the day corporations and the idea of capitalism will be
in lower repute.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, there is no limiting principle to this problem. If
business heads can be pressured to comment on issues unrelated to their businesses, they will
be compelled to weigh in on more current events and issues and will have no basis for refusing
to respond. What do you think of catch and release at the border, what do you think of no-bail
laws in New York? It will go on and on.
Boycott Nike Campaign : 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Share via E-mail More share options
On Monday, Nike rolled out a new ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback who gained national attention
when he began taking the knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. Nike’s new ad features a black
and white photo of an unsmiling Kaepernick. The words written across his face read “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing
everything.â€
Kaepernick hasn’t played for the NFL since he became a free agent in 2017, but he continues to be in the public eye. Just last
week, a judge ruled
that Kaepernick’s lawsuit against the NFL for alleged collusion can go forward. Nike’s new ad campaign has garnered a lot of
attention, with people on both sides of the issue reacting intensely. Serena Williams, who also is a Nike spokesperson, tweeted that
she is now “prouder than ever†to be part of the “Nike family.â€
At the same time, many people, angry at what they see as Colin Kaepernick’s unpatriotic politics, have announced that they will
boycott Nike.
Something strange is occurring in the gutter of "liberal comedy"... After four years of constant attacks on anything 'Trumpian'
and constant ignorance of anything 'Left', one man has begun to realize that there is plenty of farce on both sides of the aisle
and virtue-signaling to your cocktail party co-conspirators just doesn't pay the bills anymore (
cough CNN cough ).
Last week, Comedian Bill Maher used his HBO show to highlight some awkward 'facts' and ask some uncomfortable questions about
media and politicians approach to COVID .
This week, he has taken aim at the heart of the problem - American Millennials and Gen Z and their total ignorance of history.
"In India, young people touch old people's feet to show reverence. In Japan, there's a national 'respect for the aged' day.
You know the reason why advertisers in this country love the 18-34 demographic... because it's the most gullible .
A third of people under 35 say they're in favor of abolishing the police ...not defunding, but doing away with a police force
altogether... which is less of a policy position and more of a leg tattoo.
36% of Millennials think it might be a good idea to try Communism... but much of the world did try it... I know most of Millennials
think that doesn't count because they weren't alive when it happened... but it did happen, and there are people around who remember
it. Pining for communism is like pining for BetaMax or MySpace.
So when you say 'you're old, you don't get it', get what? Abolish the police? ...and the Border Patrol? ... and Capitalism?
... and cancel Lincoln?
No, "I get it"... the problem isn't that I don't get what you're saying or that I'm old. The problem is that your ideas are
stupid .
If you say "let's eat in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen" , yeah, that's a new idea, but I wouldn't call it interior design.
You think someone 80 is hopeless because they can’t use an iPhone? Maybe the one who is hopeless is the one who can’t stop
using it .
You think I'm out of it because I'm not on Twitch? Well maybe I 'get Twitch' but I just think people watching other people
play video games is a waste of fucking time .
20% of Gen Z agree with the statement that "society would be better off if all property was owned by the public and managed
by the government" and another 29% say 'they don't know if that's a good idea'...
Here's who does know... anyone who wasn't born yesterday!"
Watch the full monologues here (timestamped to begin at 5:13)
Manthong 8 hours ago (Edited)
You know when Bill Maher is right...
I hate when that happens.
But if you listen to the whole piece, he is shilling for a fool who is wholly owned and he is wrapping truth around deception
and falsity... very crafty.
But that's what they do.
various2 5 hours ago
Billionaires do not allow their direct peasants millionaires to deviate from left-right allocation. If he utters a word of
nationalism, he would be canceled fast.
Billionaires destroy America, and need firmly control over common peasants.
Money printing billionaires bought out all big tech and big media as fast as they become public.
Only Trump was allowed to speak certain limited truths like “China - enemy globalist proxyâ€, “Russia is America’s only
ally on a planetâ€.
But that was an experiment in compromise that billionaires failed.
Macho Latte 4 hours ago (Edited)
Maher is part of the problem, not part of the solution. His salary depends on that. The only reason he has "changed" his tune
is because he got permission to do it or he was told to do it.
DemonRats: The EVIL that lives among us.
Max Hunter 3 hours ago
He didn't change his tune that much, if you watch the first 5 minutes he is drooling all over Biden and shilling the orangeman
bad mantra.
Enormous sums of money have poured into racial justice groups since the May, 2020 murder of
George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department. "The foundation widely seen as a steward of
the Black Lives Matter movement says it took in just over $90 million last year," according to
a
February Associated Press review , while at least $5 billion was raised by groups associated with that
cause in the first two months alone following Floyd's death.
Two weeks after the Floyd killing, The New York Times said
that the "money has come in so fast and so unexpectedly that some groups even began to turn
away and redirect donors elsewhere," while "others said they still could not yet account for
how much had arrived." Propelled by the emotions and nationwide protest movements that emerged
last summer, corporations, oligarchs, celebrities and the general public opened their wallets
and began pouring money into BLM coffers and have not stopped doing so.
Where that money has gone has been the topic of numerous media investigations as well as
concerns expressed by racial justice advocates. AP noted that BLM's sharing of financial data
in February "marks the first time in the movement's nearly eight-year history that BLM leaders
have revealed a detailed look at their finances." That newfound transparency was prompted by
what AP called "longstanding tensions boil[ing] over between some of the movement's grassroots
organizers and national leaders -- the former went public last fall with grievances about
financial transparency, decision-making and accountability."
In December, ten local BLM chapters severed
ties with the national group amidst questions and suspicions over the handling of
activities and finances by one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, who had assumed the title
of Executive Director. On April 10, The New York Post
published an exposé on what it called Cullors' "million-dollar real estate buying
binge." The paper noted that as protests were unfolding around the country, the BLM official
was "snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property
records," including a California property valued at $1.4 million. The article also revealed
that the self-described Marxist and her partner "were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit
at the Albany," an "elite enclave laid out on 600 oceanside acres," which "features a private
marina and designer golf course." The Post included photos of several of the properties
obtained from public real estate listings.
... ... ...
How is it possible that the ACLU is all but invisible on one of the central free speech
debates of our time: namely, how much censorship should Silicon Valley tech monopolists be
imposing on our political speech? As someone who intensively reports on these controversies, I
can barely remember any time when the ACLU spoke up loudly on any of these censorship debates,
let alone assumed the central role that any civil liberties group with any integrity would, by
definition, assume on this growing controversy.
In lieu of the traditional, iconic and organization-defining willingness -- eagerness -- of
the ACLU to defend free speech precisely when it has been most
controversial and upsetting to
liberals , what we now get instead are cowardly, P.R.-consultant-scripted excuses for
staying as far away as possible: "We don't have anyone who is closely plugged into that
situation right now so we don't have anything to say at this point in time." That sounds like
something Marco Rubio's office says when asked about a Trump tweet or that a corporate
headquarters would say to avoid an inflammatory controversy, not the reaction of a stalwart
civil liberties group to a publicly debated act of political censorship.
In this particular case, it is not difficult to understand the cause of the ACLU's silence.
They obviously cannot defend Facebook's censorship -- affirmatively defending the stifling of
political speech is, at least for now, still a bridge too far for the group -- but they are
petrified of saying anything that might seem even remotely critical of, let alone adversarial
to, BLM activists and organizations. That is because BLM is one of the most cherished
left-liberal causes, and the ACLU now relies almost entirely on donations and grants from those
who have standard left-liberal politics and want and expect the ACLU to advance that
ideological and partisan agenda above its nonpartisan civil liberties principles. Criticizing
BLM is a third rail in left-liberal political circles, which is where the ACLU now resides
almost entirely, and thus it again cowers in silence as another online act of censorship which
advances political liberalism emerges. Indeed, BLM is an organization which the ACLU frequently
champions:
Like so many liberal-left media outlets and advocacy groups, the ACLU was suffering
financially before they were saved and then enriched beyond their wildest dreams by Donald
Trump and the #Resistance movement he spawned. "The American Civil Liberties Union this week
laid off 23 employees, about 7 percent of the organization's national staff,"
announced The Washington Post in April, 2015. But in the Trump era, the money flowed in
almost as quickly and furiously as post-Floyd money to BLM. In February, 2017, said AP , the
group "is suddenly awash in donations and new members as it does battle with President Donald
Trump over the extent of his constitutional authority, with nearly $80 million in online
contributions alone pouring in since the election." So that is the donor base it now
serves.
The ACLU's we-know-nothing routine for abstaining from commenting on Facebook's censorship
of the BLM article is, for so many reasons, preposterous. The group funds what it calls its
Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and some of its best lawyers oversee it. Clearly they focus
on these issues. And the ACLU in general has taken a firm and borderline-absolutist position
against online censorship by Silicon Valley monopolies: principles whose application to this
particular case would be easy and obvious. The ACLU has a section of its website devoted to
"Internet Speech," and its position on such matters is stated explicitly :
The ACLU believes in an uncensored Internet, a vast free-speech zone deserving at least as
much First Amendment protection as that afforded to traditional media such as books,
newspapers, and magazines .The ACLU has been at the forefront of protecting online freedom of
expression in its myriad forms. We brought the first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court
declared speech on the Internet equally worthy of the First Amendment's historical
protections.
In a July, 2018
article published on the group's site entitled "Facebook Shouldn't Censor Offensive
Speech," the group praised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's controversial pledge "to keep
Facebook from diving deeper into the business of censorship" as "the right call."
Unlike in response to the BLM controversy, the ACLU had no trouble back then recognizing
that "what's at stake here is the ability of one platform that serves as a forum for the speech
of billions of people to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own
determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is offensive." The ACLU's stated
policy on these controversies could not have been clearer: "given Facebook's nearly
unparalleled status as a forum for political speech and debate, it should not take down
anything but unlawful speech, like incitement to violence. " In light of that principle, how is
it remotely hard to denounce Facebook's censorship of the Post 's article given that it does
not even arguably fall within the scope of those narrow exceptions?
Because the ACLU still employs a few old-school civil libertarians among its hundreds of
lawyers and staff, those employees manage to do work and express views that are consistent with
the ACLU's old-school civil liberties agenda even when contrary to the interests of liberal
politics. But the tactics used by the ACLU in those cases to downplay or hide those aberrations
are as transparent as they are craven.
When three Silicon Valley monopolies united to
remove the social media app Parler from the internet in January, 2021 after influential
Democratic lawmakers demanded it -- one of the most brute acts of monopolistic censorship yet
-- an ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, was cited in The New York Times as labelling Parler's
destruction "troubling," telling the paper: "I think we should recognize the importance of
neutrality when we're talking about the infrastructure of the internet." But on the ACLU's
highly active and influential Twitter
account -- the group's primary platform for promoting its work, expressing its views, and
soliciting donations, where it has two million followers and often tweets up to fifty times a
day -- the group said absolutely nothing about the removal of an entire social media app from
the internet:
... ... ...
4 hours ago
The ACLU was founded in the 1920's by a group of leftist lawyers for the purpose of
providing legal support for Communists. That is all one needs to know to understand what they
are all about. play_arrow 27 play_arrow
MRob 2 hours ago
Listen to the interview of Ira Glasser with Rogan, he's the former head of the ACLU and
guy who really transformed it from a small enterprise to an household name. Listen and it
becomes clear he's a frothing at the mouth left wing ideologue, and a fcking hypocrite at
that. He entire argument about not enacting laws to ban free speech, is that if you do, you
opponents (on the right) will be able to use those laws against you. Which leads to the
obvious conclusion - it is OK to restrict your opponents free speech, if they cannot do the
same to yours, so the goal is to manoeuvre yourself into that position. As the left has done
today. He didnt mention that it was morally unacceptable to ban free speech, and that it
leads to totalitarian evils. The concept of a free market of ideas, wasnt discussed once.
At another point in the discussion, he said that everything in politics could be
interpreted in multiple ways, that there is never an absolute "correct" everyone will agree
on. And then later he said that it was a fact that a vote for Trump was a vote for racism,
white supremacism, bigotry etc. An absolute fact, that you just couldnt argue with. WTF. I
stopped listening at that point. I was interested to begin with, but by the end, and on
further reflection of the discussion, I despise the man with a passion.
Ms. Erable 4 hours ago (Edited) remove link
'Stalwart civil liberties group'?
Back away from the crack pipe, dude. The (((ACLU))) has never been about civil liberties.
play_arrow
hegger 3 hours ago (Edited)
So much LGBTQ+ symbolism.
These people create both an individual and a collective identity based solely on what they
do with their d1cks/vag1nas in their free time.
That's it. Lizard brain stuff. No greater ideals, no thousand-year philosophy, no plans
for the future, no interest in science or the arts.
If you haven't noticed, the United States is reorganizing itself into two Americas -- blue
and red. Although there is a president of the United States, state governors are in many ways
now driving the national narrative in this new America.
The president and the vice president are who they are now because six Republican-controlled
states forwarded questionable electoral votes, and Vice President Mike Pence missed a historic
opportunity to challenge those votes. The current president and vice president seem trapped in
foggy and abstract ideological slogans rather than providing executive leadership. Vague
generalities and virtue signaling aren't replacements for executive leadership.
And who are the true executive leaders of the two Americas? Florida and Texas on one side,
California and New York on the other side. Their governors essentially dominate the bully
pulpit formerly occupied by a sitting president. Many of the rest of the American states have
aligned with one side or the other.
The American political conversation has become a modern Dr. Seuss's "Sneetches With Stars"
on steroids as Americans are now beginning to group, assemble, and march separately according
to our ideologies. Both sides have equal ownership of this behavior -- neither side should be
excused or let off the hook on this matter.
Two Americas/Two Systems
A part of this blue/red separation is the manifest " Digital
Apartheid " that is being applied by the
blue side to the red side to create two social media systems. This Digital Apartheid is
pervasive and driven by the new, vicious, lockstep, "social justice" mantra that has taken over
the automatons who lead U.S. social media.
We are experiencing an unprecedented shakedown by groups such as Black Lives Matter (
BLM ) and
Antifa who broadcast through their relentless bullhorn of social media and old media.
There are now two business systems in America -- blue and red. Many of the businesses that
lead major market sectors have now revealed themselves to be de-facto thought police to enforce
Social Justice.
MyPillow CEO
Mike Lindell is the poster child of this, as he has been targeted for elimination by the
self-appointed high priests of "wokism."
We're also finding out there are
two financial systems in America, as those with capital now act as the gatekeepers of who
receives capital and who is excluded. Bank of America has become "Bank of who I decide to allow
access to the capital system." That's a
far cry from the intent of its founder, who wanted to make sure all had access. The modern
bank staff has now become an appendage of the virtue-signaling synchronized chorus.
There are now
two media systems in America. The Hollywood award shows are now a Roman circus of
self-loathing, lecturing, and virtue signaling. Few are watching these award shows -- in fact,
few are watching legacy media as ratings collapse.
It's curious from an agnostic business perspective how CNN even survives at this point in
time. Somehow the citizen's pocketbook is being fleeced by corporations and advertisers who
recycle ad revenue through "woke" media to keep them alive when it's patently obvious the
viewership has imploded -- but that's the beauty of the new era of crony capitalism (which is a
transition phase to socialism).
The citizens of our nation have consciously or unconsciously chosen sides. If you're angry
at yourself for not being woke enough and have righteous virtue-signal signs in your yard
lauding BLM, you're likely on the blue side. If the drivel of virtue signaling makes no sense
to you, you're probably on the red side.
The author of the article you link too is a bit late to his wokening. It is a digital
iron curtain; I commented on that here almost a year ago. His initial comments on " trapped
in foggy and abstract ideological slogans rather than providing executive leadership." are
off. They are imposing by executive action precisely the cultural transformations their
ideology demands.
It would be interesting to further divide these transformations into those
sourced from their own ideology and those derived from the corporate sponsors
behind their PAC oxygen supply. Both subsets would contain interesting lists of
names and connections.
We already have the command economy, and command media, of a socialist state. The
mechanism just has a stage of indirection, to borrow a term from the software world. If
you're a money losing business of any kind you can always raise money by floating shares or
issuing bonds that are miraculously bought by "the market", ahem, Blackrock. That they get
to skim their vig in the process is a "feature not a bug". Business then devolves into a
contest to see who can be most craven to the official party narrative. With the Fed
printing money in the form of zero interest "loans" to insider controlled hedge funds and
investment banks like it was going out of style, this can continue until the dollar
inflates away or the Fed, through the banks, owns just about everything. Market
Socialism!
Excellent analysis of the current state of the Red vs Blue situation. I live in the
epicenter of The ongoing SJW disaster , Minneapolis. The Downtown, which was once lauded as
" the Minny Apple", is no more. Between the Covid and Chauvin trial it is an ongoing
disaster.
I walk the skyway system twice a week yearly and Have done so for 50 years.
Approximately 150k People used to work there with all the attendant Amenities. Stores
restaurants bars etc. were the Lifeblood of the ever growing and liveable space. On a 2 to
3 mile walk through the 8 plus mile Labyrinth I might encounter 50 to 100'people if That.
Noon hour used to be in the thousands.
Two retail stores, Target and Walgreens, the only Two open. Fights and assaults common
near those Stores. The defund clowncil rescinded the no Loitering ordinance. This is the
result.
All major store fronts have been boarded Up and the world has seen the fencing and
Barricades everywhere. The future here is bleak Indeed. The Mayoral and council are up for
Re-election this November. If no changes the U-haul caravans and for sale signs will sprout
Like the proverbial mushrooms. It was a nice Run despite the climate.
That is such a sad report. On a visit to Minneapolis a few years back staying at a
downtown hotel (the converted bank hotel) We hit the streets the next morning looking
for breakfast, only to find almost no street life in this major city. How strange we
thought, for such a major and apparently healthy looking city.
It was only later in the day we learned street life was all going on inside the
remarkable Skyway – what a magical world that was, and what a perfect way to
create year round community vitality.
You can join the rapid decline of California city street life too – taken over
by vagrants, closed shops and sad out door dining operations. And a recent rash of
crazy people with guns, knives, obscene conduct in public, gang fights and out of
control vehicles jumping curbs and running into flimsy restaurant parklets..
Something has clearly gone very wrong in pubic decorum and decency expectations. But
we do have docks for electric bicycles. So you can at least try to get away faster than
if by toot.
IMO, the article glossed over the risk posed by big corporations moving from storing
their data on "the cloud/AWS" in today's revolutionary political alliance with big biz,
especially the tech biz and even more especially tech biz owned by "socially active"
megalomaniacs like Bezos.
I've recently been involved in some related corporate discussions. The lure of cost
savings and scalability represented by the cloud is swaying decision making in its favor.
No one seems to be seriously looking at the downside. Once the data and extract/reporting
processes are out on AWS, if the political activist powers that be decide they don't like a
corporation for whatever reason, they have that corporation's ability to access the data
and do business held hostage. That would be a nuclear sized disaster in an industry sector
like insurance, but is, really, pretty damaging to any industry since everything about
business is now highly data driven. If Bezos decides to shut you out, you're done for. You
would not be able to re-build internal infrastructure in time to save your operation.
Would a Bezos pull that trigger? I think so, when the time is "right".
Look at how companies like Nike are willing to alienate 50% of their potential
customer base. Ditto Facebook, professional sports The list of woke kamikaze corporations
is growing longer every day. They appear willing to take the losses if it beats their enemy
("deplorables" like you and me) into compliance in the long run.
While I agree woksterdom is a mile wide and an inch deep, the other side of the coin is
that we are not going back to some proverbial happy place. American culture(why is the
United States the only country in the world without a term specifying the citizen? No
United Statian.) is built on several centuries of geographic, economic, industrial and
technological growth, topped off with 40 years of exponential debt to keep the party going.
What happens when we try looking inward?
We are not the Old World, with millennia of cultural history to fall back on, when he
current civil structures implode. Contrary to Dick Cheney, debt doesn't matter, until it
does. We are determined to max out the national credit card and the most everyone seems to
do, is point to the other guy wasting it, not looking in the mirror.
I've been saying for over a decade, our kids are not going to be wondering what side of
whichever Middle Eastern conflict we will be pouring money and material, but how many
countries the US break into. Now it is happening. As for a deeper observation, logically a
spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of
wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which
we are aware. The Ancients were not ignorant of monotheism, but as there was no division
between culture and civics, it equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as that was how they
modeled multicultural societies, with many aspects and distinctions, from two sexes to the
regeneration of the population. The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified
and any remnants of the Republic were shed. Though the Trinity was a nod to the Greek year
gods. Father, son, mother. Consequently the default political model for the West, for the
next 1500 years, was feudalism and monarchy, all about the Big Guy at the top. When the
West went back to more populist forms of government, it required the separation of church
and state, culture and civics. The problem with confusing the ideal with the absolute, is
that it creates the belief one's aspirations should be universal and beyond question. An
ideological basis for both the current left and right. Though the pendulum swings back and
forth, depending on the momentum. Where are we today? Is anyone about to seriously question
their cultural assumptions, or just keep blaming the other side?
John, It's an old Cosa Nostra trick. Get them in debt to you and then pull the plug.
When they can't pay, ruthlessly take control of the business.
Speaking of La Cosa Nostra, something that impressed me, negatively, about Italy,
especially the South, is how there isn't even sufficient electrical power for people to
properly bath or wash their clothes. So much for the strength of ancient cultures.
People in the US take way too much for granted. We suffer from something like
"Affluenza" and are committing cultural suicide nit picking our collective conscience
because we don't realize that we have already pretty much achieved relatively as close
as humans can get to utopia.
1929 isn't ancient history, unimageable today. It is only an idiotic decision or two
away, and idiotic decisions are now the norm because an exceedingly ideological
government is trusted by 50% and seizing control anyhow.
Totally agree that the current economic policy is not sustainable. Only wise and
cautious leadership could steer us back to a sustainable path. We don't have any of
that.
IMO, we don't have socialism. What we have seen over the past 50 years is a steady
evolution to classic fascism. The merging of Big Business and Big Government. The merging
of the National Security State and Big Corporate & Financial Interests.
The pandemic response exemplifies it best. The government through edict shut down and
bankrupted small businesses while they allowed big business and big finance to further
consolidate their market power. We now have the most concentrated market power in American
history. Even greater than a century ago which led to the reforms like anti-trust and
Glass-Steagall, which have all been successfully eroded. We now have the greatest wealth
inequality and concentration of economic and political power.
The 2 Americas is the tale and theater designed to further entrench power. The bottom
90% in both blue & red America have allowed themselves to be enslaved, precisely
because of their infatuation with narrow cultural identities and the faux culture wars.
The behind-the-scenes puppeteers of both blue & red America are the same. Obama used
the race and BLM canard to political gain. His personal social network however are the
Richard Branson's and David Geffen's. His own $12 million home is on "white supremacist"
Martha's Vineyard. Trump sold the Deplorables on Draining the Swamp and then proceeded to
hire the Swamp to run his administration. Mitch McConnell epitomizes the duplicity.
The left/right, Red/Blue, Liberal/Conservative faux battles are precisely the
entertainment that the "owners" as George Carlin labeled them want, to keep the bottom 90%
distracted & divided. What has changed from the Roman "bread & circuses"?
>IMO, we don't have socialism. What we have seen over the past 50 years is a
steady evolution to classic fascism. The merging of Big Business and Big Government.
The merging of the National Security State and Big Corporate & Financial
Interests.<
Agree. This isn't socialism at all; it's capital- F Fascism.
Andrei, Never under-estimate the stupidity of the typical American.
My grandfather barely survived the Armenian genocide, made his way to America,
joined the Army, was so strac he was promoted directly from private to sergeant in WW1.
After service, he organized Armenian business owners in Detroit to arm themselves and
successfully fight off the Purple Gang (a Jewish mafia, predecessors of the Italian
mafia in Detroit). He made actually money during the depression. Real tough guy.
He was offered an opportunity to invest in Disney Land (world?) on initial offering.
He laughed it off as a con. Who would pay good money to travel across the country to
spend time with unskilled actors in stupid cartoon mouse costumes? My father, another
street wise tough guy, WW2 vet, and by that time, an attorney and advisor to the
family, agreed. Idiotic concept.
When I was a young man my father and I sat down and did a ballpark calculation of
what that offering would have been worth, at present, had my grandfather gone for it.
It was a staggering amount. It was a lesson the old man wanted me to learn.
I understand what you are saying about "big tech" versus the real thing. However,
the so called big tech people don't need to be very real or stellar to be highly
influential. True quality has always been, and only can be, appreciated by a small few.
The masses are always appeased by shallow, crude, garbage. It's a sad truth that the
few tend to overlook, because it's offensive to them. Cynics exploit it.
In our summer of discontent, of protests and then riots in what many view as a racial reckoning following the death of
George Floyd at the hands of police, we've seen previously radical ideas such as defunding the police become the norm.
Not only that, we've seen liberal institutions such as The New York Times bow before "woke" mobs and cancel all who don't
conform to the whims of the radical left.
And we've seen corporate America almost universally endorse Black Lives Matter, a radical organization with Marxist roots.
Two writers in particular have risen in popularity on the left, dominating national bestseller lists while gathering
increased media attention: Robin DiAngelo, a lecturer and author of "
White
Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
," and Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for
Antiracist Research at Boston University and author of "
How
to Be an Antiracist
."
Although their works are distinct, both writers promote an ideology they call "anti-racism."
These two authors are shaping the modern discussion over "wokeness" and the ideas that are becoming politically mainstream
in America, at least on the American left.
It's critical to have an understanding of what they believe.
For instance, why would a mob opposed to white supremacy attack statues of both a slaveholder and an abolitionist?
Is this an example of mindless, wanton destruction? Or perhaps the rioters are embracing a larger set of ideas that creates
a ruthless dichotomy between racists and anti-racists?
According to both DiAngelo and Kendi, there really are only two paths any person may take: racism or anti-racism. Being
"not racist," as Kendi writes, is not good enough, nor does it mean one isn't a racist.
DiAngelo defines "white fragility," the topic of her book, as a process whereby white people return to "our racial comfort,
and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy."
"Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement," DiAngelo
writes. "White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection
of white advantage."
Essentially, if a white person is uncomfortable talking about race or denies his fundamental whiteness, as well as his
racism, he is guilty of white fragility.
In fact, according to the arguments of both DiAngelo and Kendi, even a denial of racism can be construed as evidence of
racism.
As several other writers,
including
Mark Hemingway at The Federalist
, have noted, this is what's called a Kafka trap, a rhetorical device "where the more
you deny something, the more it's proof of your guilt."
Kendi and DiAngelo argue that racism is not just an individual act of discrimination or prejudice toward a person or a
people based on their race.
Instead, racism is redefined as a collective condition leading to inequities in society.
Kendi argues that those whom many Americans see as actual racists are far less dangerous than the real threat of widespread
acceptance of color blindness. He writes:
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right's unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular
American's drive for a 'race-neutral' one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood
by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans toward equity is 'reverse
discrimination.'
Kendi decries "assimilationists" as being essentially as bad as "segregationists."
Kendi opposes the assimilationists, as he defines them, because he says they attribute behavior to the unequal outcomes for
different races.
In fact, even asking the question of why different groups of people have statistically differing outcomes in a society may
be construed as racist.
DiAngelo adopts Kendi's construction of racism, writing that "if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity
in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination."
The argument essentially is that any racial discrepancies in society are examples of racism.
So, if a society has a disproportionate number of rich white people compared to rich black people, that is racism. If one
race has a higher mortality rate from a disease than another, again the culprit is racism.
Kendi is, of course, highly selective in the statistics he cites to demonstrate that "there may be no more consequential
White privilege than life itself."
As Coleman Hughes
wrote
for City Journal
: "By selectively citing data that show blacks suffering more than whites, Kendi turns what should be a
unifying, race-neutral battle ground -- namely, humanity's fight against deadly diseases -- into another proxy battle in the War
on Racism."
Hughes, like Kendi, is black.
2. Colorblindness Is the Problem, and Racist
The concept of equal opportunity is fundamentally rejected by the doctrines of DiAngelo and Kendi. They argue that in a
deeply racist society conditioned to white supremacy, equal opportunity under the law perpetuates only more inequality.
Both DiAngelo and Kendi rebuke the idea of colorblindness in how we treat race. DiAngelo does so more in a cultural sense.
She argues that colorblindness is essentially a sign of white privilege, a manipulation of the message of Martin Luther
King Jr. to perpetuate more racism.
"Color-blind ideology makes it difficult for us to address these unconscious beliefs," DiAngelo writes. "While the idea of
color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, in practice it has served to
deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place."
White people must build their racial "stamina," DiAngelo argues, to overcome their white fragility.
The way for white people to do this is by recognizing, embracing, and critically examining collective "white identity" as
an antidote to white fragility. DiAngelo writes that "as an insider," she can speak for the white experience, but that she
uses her white identity as a way to "challenge racism."
DiAngelo lays on white people the responsibility -- the burden, one might say -- of attacking and defeating racism and
"whiteness."
3. Racism Is Solved Through Discrimination
Kendi leans more strongly into creating laws that specifically promote anti-racism. To be effective, he says, they must be
discriminatory.
Discriminatory laws, Kendi argues, can be desirable and in fact necessary as a way to promote equity:
If discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.
Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is
entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into
relative wealth and power until equity is reached. The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist
discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
As long as the discriminatory finger is on the button of "equity," however Kendi and the anti-racists define it, it is
good.
Christopher Caldwell, author of "
The
Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
,"
wrote
for
National Review that Kendi rejects the notion -- stemming from many civil rights advocates -- "that everything will be well as
long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect."
"It is illegitimate. It is a 'racist' obstruction," Caldwell added.
Kendi proposes an anti-racist amendment to the Constitution,
which
he wrote about
in a short piece in Politico. It's worth quoting in full:
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that
enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different
racial groups are equals.
The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public
officials (with 'racist ideas' and 'public official' clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the
Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.
The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state, and federal public policies to ensure they won't yield
racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor
public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and
against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.
This proposal by Kendi effectively would end self-government and nullify the Bill of Rights. A cadre of intellectuals
ensconced in the Department of Anti-racism would have the power to decide who can and can't run for office, and which laws
can or can't be passed based on their interpretation of what is racist.
Again, racist being defined by Kendi as "one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or
expressing a racist idea."
Which policies fall under the rubric of being racist or anti-racist?
"Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or
equity," Kendi writes.
For those who believe they can escape the ugly culture war implications of these ideas and focus on economic or fiscal
policies, it's worth noting that embracing socialism and fighting capitalism is a critical element in promoting
anti-racism.
Therefore, a supporter of lower capital gains taxes -- or even someone who isn't actively opposing lower capital gains
taxes -- may be barred from running for or serving in office by a team of unaccountable bureaucrats in a permanently funded
federal agency.
Gone is the very bedrock of the system created by the Founders, the Constitution that has bent the flawed but exceptional
American system toward liberty and justice.
Perhaps the Biden presidency is the first woke/cancel culture one in history. Not (
necessarily ) for the sexual part, but because wokism is emotional not rational. What
is happening in the deep recesses of the Blinken or Biden mind is based on absolute certainty
and emotionally ingested tripe.
The original Deep State and democratic manipulation was to give the population a binary
"choice" between Trump-bad and Putin-Bad. Any third possibility, that neither were as "
bad as all that " was not spoken of in the MSM. For four years, both "choices" were
hammered by the Democrats into the supine brains of the US masses. which has given rise to
"automatic" and forceful unthinking attitudes. ( All bad because I say so and I am right,
and I know I am right because I say so ). It is the basis of our censorship culture. Over
four years they have brainwashed themselves as much as the "plebs" .
Then the Democrats "won" the election with a bit of help from the deep state, and found
themselves in power.
When Blinken was anchoraged , he expected to tell the Chinese what to do, think and
he possibly even expected the Chinese to take a knee to honour the "self-evidence" of his
wisdom . He probably got into a hussy fit when they didn't agree with he knew
emotionallly or had been told by the CIA, Bowder or Bidens favourite sweet-smellin' lobbyist.
What Politicians now do is ; when in a stresssful position they revert to emotional dominated
reactions and do not follow orders from the deep state, oligarchs or lobbies.
Now we come to Ukraine and Taiwan. For the center of the democratic party, Biden Pelosi,
Blinken, what they "know" is all there is to know . So they don't listen to
anyone .
The lobbies, military profit-makers and the Deep State are equally sure they know but they
cannot change the brainwashing that they helped install in others.
Washington is emotional and the Intelligence/Military are the cold-killers. Whatever one says
the other will contradict it. So we have a forked tongue "Adminstration".
What has happened and one of the aims of both Putin and Xi, is to move a "woke"
adminstration out of it's comfort zone. Outside it's usual certitudes. The pressure will now
be coming from East Eurasia. In many fields -
ie. Even the Czechs are already walking back their expulsion of Russian Diplomats as they
hadn't expected a strong "retaliation". Tough for the five Czechs left in Moscow. All part of
the plan to drive home that actions will have repercussions.
******
Donbas? More shelling than ever before but the Russian red line is known. No Children or
other civilians to be killed. There is a tweet available, with sounds of shelling in the
background and children playing in the street ........ The Ukes have woken up to the fact
that a sea "invasion" is possible and now are sending (fast !) tank loaded trains back
towards Odessa.
The whole BLM/Metoo movement is "political" and primarily driven by
media/academia/think-tank elites. Yes, mostly white males and females along with the token
members of the "aggrieved" class. I don't get the psychology but denouncing their own
race/ethnicity/gender/identity through virtue signaling to achieve political ends is the game.
Cancellation and destruction of careers are all part and parcel of techniques to suppress
dissent and breed compliance to the overlords.
This trend has not occurred overnight. It is many decades in the making with creeping
fascism – the melding of Big Business and Big Authoritarian Government. This is not just
Democrats but Republicans too. The division and fracturing of society on the basis of identity
is deliberate. Gullibility is no excuse. The vast majority of Americans have fallen for
identity politics across many generations.
Reply
I am in full agreement with your comment, Sam; except perhaps for the last sentence.
Woke-ism is an *elite project*, serving primarily to get the little
people to fight each other, rather than the vastly-wealthy Very Few..
Walrus,
I don't know about all of that. As much as I despise "woke" culture, I think these concerns
are little overblown; or at least they are in *my* experience as a corporate manager for a
major US company. A caveat being the since the Covid panic/woke control of the world, we've
all been working virtually and all business trips are cancelled. So there is little to no
opportunity for situations to arise.
I have a couple of relevant rules from which I never deviate; 1. Never discuss politics
at work unless it is in a purely analytical way that is related to impact on our business.
2. Do not meet with female employees – whether they be higher-ups, peers or staff
– one on one, outside of the office (e.g. not at a happy hour). The former I
implemented from day 1 in my corporate career and the latter I developed based on early
experience, but not the experience you may think.
I entered the corporate world in my late 30s and well into my 40s I was a very fit
handsome devil (I'm getting fairly long in tooth now, in my late 50s). I have been told by
my superiors that I exude a quiet, calm confidence and it seems that people perceive me as
being intelligent and polite. Apparently women find that mix attractive. As recently as ten
years ago, I had all kinds of women, from work, coming onto me. I know the difference
between some harmless flirting and the real thing, though, IMO, as inevitable as it may be,
even the harmless flirting should stay out of the work place. An attractive female employee
is in a boring meeting with me, I catch her looking at me, she smile coyly, bats her eyes,
flips her hair back a little and looks at me again with a sultry smile. That's harmless
flirting. Used to happen all of the time. Debriefing over a cocktail on a business trip
with a female employee, in the hotel bar, and she starts running her foot up my leg, that's
crossing the line. That kind of scenario used to happen frequently too. Married women,
single, older, younger, peers, bosses, staff – and, especially, when they were
engaged to be married. Are they going to be ticked off and vengeful if I turn them down?
Would they destroy me later if I take them up on their offer? I didn't want to find out.
Best to avoid the situation.
Anyhow, it seems to me that hiring high quality people in the first place diminishes the
risk significantly. No one with talent and ambition wants to sacrifice a rewarding
corporate career by starting trouble over "me too" nonsense. That goes for both the alleged
perpetrator and the alleged victim in scenario. So far, I haven't become aware of any
accusations or legal issues at work.
As for the grandfather/woke grand daughter thing, I hadn't thought about that, but,
sadly, you have a good point there. Idiot school counselors and poorly raised scatter
brained friends can sway a forming young mind to say all kinds of damaging things.
Reply
Pray tell – what is wrong with single sex schools? I grew up in Germany when all
schools were either for male or female students, and I maintain I had a more respectful
attitude towards females because of that.
But I forget – sex does not mean anything, as anyone can freely choose Zir, Hir,
Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir preferred possessive pronoun for Zir, Hir, Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir preferred
gender..which makes establishing schools for about 63 genders ( http://www.hoschl.cz/files/6035_cz_Genders.pdf
) rather improbable .
Reply
Time to explore the prevailing wisdom that led to some of those "stuffy, old-fashioned
codes of conduct" that maybe were not to silly after all.
Perhaps they offered more freedom, than our modern version of freedom has afforded.
Freedom from STDs; freedom from false accusations; freedom of movement in public
settings; freedom from drunken harassment and freedom morning after remorse; freedom from
solo parent impoverishment -- though the story of the "plucky orphan" was long fodder for
coming of age literature classics .
Just re-watched the Shirley Temple "Heidi" – plucky orphan on steroids, matched
only by Anne of Green Gables as female empowerment role models who did thrive in a world of
code of conduct restrictions..
Reply
Walrus, unfortunately I have to agree with you. We are approaching the point where
husband and wife need to sign a consent agreement to have sex. Young adults' are simply
avoiding the subject due to social pressures.
Our experts are deflecting "Liberal" ideas with other factors:
Annotated freedom of association, set forth in statute.
But at one time, no did mean no so there was no need for this. But also over time,
fostered by the "free sex" social changes, saying no did not matter – and rape
laws already on the books were somehow deemed insufficient. He said, she said created
the impasse this statute attempted to correct. But did it?
Regarding "the demonisation of White heterosexual Males in all its forms",
I would like to add some evidence, and some historical background.
The two links below, of articles written by an anonymous American professor, give some
vivid evidence.
Each link is followed by a quote from the linked page.
"In the midst of all of this "inclusion," one can look in vain for anything positive for
Whites, Europeans, etc.
The only mention of Whites, as a group, is always in a purely negative sense."
"The curriculum of my institution is to be changed to prioritize "social justice" over
all else; indeed, we have been told that we need to de-emphasize actual scholarship, the
teaching of objective facts, and providing a truly enlightened liberal arts education in
favor of politicized far-left talking points. The entire curriculum is to be subordinated
to radical anti-White propaganda. Please note that this trend in American academia is not
restricted only to undergraduate education, but also extends into post-graduate education
of all sorts: graduate school, law school, medical school, etc. With respect to the latter,
the scientifically illiterate and hyper-politicized hysterics of the AMA are used to
justify curriculum changes at the level of medical education; one set of political hacks
justifies the lies and distortions of another group, and vice versa. All of these academic
and professional organizations are completely dominated by the Left."
I first encountered the demonization of my value system during my stint at Brandeis
Univ. from 1967 to 1973.
There, much to my amazement and shock,
the soldiers of the U.S. Army were called "babykillers".
Of course, there may have been isolated instances where Vietnamese children were wrongly
killed,
but it was commonplace to generalize this to the whole U.S. Army in VN.
Likewise, police were called, for no evident reason, "pigs".
It wasn't just the U.S. Army and the police that were trashed.
"Smash the establishment" (sometimes more specifically "Smash the WASP establishment")
was a commonly expressed demand.
Also, "the bourgeoisie", or "bourgeoisie values", were to be despised and scorned.
I am sure there were many at Brandeis who did not support such radical ideas, but they were
certainly more common there than in my previous environments.
As to hatred of whites and the then-mainstream white culture, there were three prominent
(non-Brandeis) examples;
1. Susan Sontag: "The white race is the cancer of human history"
2. (Somewhat later) Tim Wise
3. Weatherman John Jacobs, quoted in Mark Rudd's Underground : "We're against
everything that's good and decent in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We
are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
There's another possible outcome. That is one where the bottom 80% of men (the ones that
the average woman thinks are 'below average' in attractiveness) can't get a middle-class
job at all. They are limited to jobs which are dangerous (e.g. police officer, firefighter,
construction), dirty (refuse collector, sewage worker) or unglamorous (e.g. bicycle-based
delivery operative – jobs which the women don't want. The 'top jobs' are all held by
women and the small number of men they are interested in.
Reply
You left out race. Having had to fire a couple of protected class employees over the years
was only marginally better- in regards to the negative blowback on the manager – than the
problems you describe. In addition to the grandfathers you should realize father's have faced
such false allegations since at least the '80s. Try giving your 2 year old a bath today and see
what accusation you might have to defend yourself from in a decade. Thank feminists and the
lgbt+ movements for that. walrus says:
April 11, 2021 at 9:09 am
Fred, I've never fired a member of a minority. What works better is to declare them
"redundant' (ie: their job just disappeared) so its no fault and a tax free $30k – $50k
compensation payment on top of their legal entitlements to make it a little sweeter.
Fred says:
April 11, 2021 at 12:11 pm
Walrus,
These employees committed theft. The last one pre-commited company funds then provided false
documentation multiple times to the general auditors office. I didn't fire that one, I had to
do the retraining route. He decided to leave on his own accord .
Reply
Do these things happen by mass hysteria, or by intent ? The former tends to burn itself
out when the promised rewards do not arrive. It would be interesting to work up the chain
to the source of the money and intellectual force required to power all this and to co-opt
government acquiescence.
Walrus, may I add two more:
5. An attempted capture of the new power center, that being instant access to the minds
of the public, created by social media in the last fifteen years, in a way proven
successful by the lodgement of 'progressive' forces within education systems decades
earlier. Nature, and 'progressives' abhor a vacuum, and it's well underway now.
Nothing decisive would result, merely the capture of newly available ground. Note that
existing ground held by established powers are left untouched.
6. In the US, a division between 'woke' States and the deplorable States, characterized
by deliberate legislative differences and measured by the movement of people to States that
reflect their ideological preferences. Will the 'woke' States offer full employment
economies, and would that even matter to the woke refugees ?
The key word of point 6. is 'division', and the US cannot maintain it's place in the world
in that condition. All of this will not be reversed except by force and with the backing of
the majority, even a bare one, of the US population. That force will need to be headed by a
non-conforming leader with the credibility to muster it and to administer what comes after,
and that ain't Karmala.
Reply
A friend of mine's sister went to a therapist who convinced the sister her parents had
messed with her mind by performing satanic rituals on her when she was young and and had
suppressed the memories. Supposedly, the therapist had helped her recover these traumatic
events when, in fact, the therapist had implanted them. This took place in the 80s when
many innocent people were accused of performing satanist rituals, sometimes including human
sacrifice. There were some real devil worshiping killings but it turned into an out of
control witch hunt.
The sister eventually recovered her sanity after tormenting her family for a couple of
years and made up with her parents. Therapists track most of their patients problems back
to the parents, based on Freudian theory, even when the problem is drug and alcohol abuse,
as it was with this woman. The father was a Methodist minister.
Today sexism and racism are as over blown as satanism was in the 80s. I wonder what the
next media implanted Big Trauma will be?
Reply
I'm not sure how widespread therapeutic malpractice is but at times I wonder how
rigorous is the field of psychology? I think it is important to study human behavior
but I question if it can be generalized and whether it is capable of capturing nuance.
The one problem that I have with the practice is the incentive structure. It is
$/billable hour not $/outcome. The incentive is clearly to increase billable hours.
In any case I recall well the McMartin case and the surrounding media hysteria and
witch-hunts. Reminiscent of the current woke and cancel culture hysteria.
I don't know, but will try to find out and post here.
That witch-hunt felt *very fishy* even at the time..
almost like there was a subtext-in-the-making.
I wrote a post on the above-mentioned subject but I deleted it. I will not discuss the
demonisation of White heterosexual Males in all its forms for fear of cancellation. I will
instead leave you with my conclusions – which are consistent with The Walrus Law;
Governments achieve the reverse of their stated objectives.
Conclusion 1. No white male corporate manager is going to risk their career by engaging in
any of the following actions:
– Mentoring female subordinates.
– Taking one on one meetings with any female.
– Participating in any but the most innocuous social functions with female subordinates
and certainly not where alcohol is present.
– In fact avoiding any one on one situation with a female.
– It also stands to reason that women will not be employed or promoted if sufficient
excuse can be found. There wasn't a glass ceiling. There is now.
Why? Because a female subordinate can now permanently end a males career in a microsecond by
the act of alleging any impropriety thanks to #metoo. No proof is required.
Conclusion 2. The British/ European/ American class system is coming back with a vengeance.
Young men and their parents will confine their search for partners and social interactions, to
females of the same social strata, values, financial resources and background as their own.
This is not a guarantee of marital harmony, It does however decrease the likelihood of a male
being accused of relationship and career destroying improprieties twenty years after the
alleged event. You can forget marrying 'for love' outside your social class.
Conclusion 3. Male behaviour in the upper and middle classes is indeed going to change. We
will witness the return of the Chaperone for males. We will witness the end of many mixed sex
parties and entertainments because of the ever present threat of denouncement. Expect single
sex private schools to flourish. Co -education is an invitation for a young males career to be
finished before it even starts – all it takes these days is an allegation made perhaps
years and years after the alleged "event". The first a young male will know about it is when he
is arrested and handcuffed.
Conclusion 4. The nature of families is going to change. We are going to see the return of
stereotyped roles. Case in point? As a Grandfather I have decided I will have nothing more to
do with the informal upbringing of grand daughters – there is too much risk that if they
go off the rails in puberty or get involved in drugs, mental illness, etc. they will
conveniently blame sexual abuse by a relative as the cause. That means I will never allow
myself to be alone with them or be responsible for them ever and the rest of the family know
it. Period. The personal risk is just too great
I have examples to back up each conclusion but I will not share them with you.
I have not addressed the American race and firearm based issues but I would expect that
changes to firearm laws and characterisation of various behaviors as "extremist' will also have
the same opposite effect from what Government intended.
Indeed. I suspect that if I were of dating age (and single) today I would go on to die
celibate. A minority of women have made engaging with the entire gender entirely too
dangerous.
Reply
We are an adaptive bunch; witness how successful Prohibition was, or the alleged 'War on
Drugs'. Look at how Trumps border wall was rapidly shot to hell with a few acetylene
torches and some hinges – making really nice gates for the coyotes to run people
through.
It's interesting that there is no actual, physical way that the number of guns out here
'in the wild' is even known, much less can be seized. Guns can be seized by the
ATF/FBI/etc. making a huge raid on a single family and killing them all as examples –
but once that card is played, the ante will be upped and things will not be as easy for
them. The gun grabbers are literally about 200 years too late, as the gun cow is long out
of the barn.
The Covidian Cult is waning finally – in spite of the push by the globalist CDC,
WHO, Big Pharma, MSM and many others. It's hard to push fear of dying when there is nothing
to base it on any longer.
So now we are back to Ukraine, where Biden is both well known and well connected. Russia
will swat anything approaching her borders, and may swat hard. I would not be surprised to
see our puny couple of ships in their sea crippled electronically, again. But Russia
doesn't want what NATO and Biden are serving for dinner.
It's the same old SSDD of world ending disasters to keep everyone afraid of everyone
else while the big wheels in government are sending contracts out to their family members
and their various foundations using money leveraged against our grandkids.
57 genders; women cannot be approached without opening yourself to legal actions and yet
they are all in the military and government positions in far larger percentages than people
realize. Our local school principal was recently accused of "inappropriate conduct" with a
female teacher who is so obese she requires an electric scooter to move her bulk about.
Having actually seen this female, it was obvious to me, as a man with normal appetites,
that approaching her would have resulted in disgorgement of the previous meal and not
engorgement of anything.
It's human nature that when you forbid something unilaterally, it becomes more
attractive to many, just for the sake of flouting convention. Perhaps that is what the
morbidly obese teacher is striving for?
We are entering the Land of Unintended Consequences, and there is no way but
through.
The replace class conflict with race conflict. What can go wrong ?
Professional woke revolutionaries like
Chanequa Walker-Barnes
who is the
author is racial hate prayer (is not this a hate crime?) are similar to Russian Commissars. History repeats itself, first as
tragedy, second as farce.
A prayer book called "A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal," is a number one bestseller on Amazon in the
category "meditation".
One prayer, called "Prayer of a Weary Black Woman," by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a theology professor at Mercer University,
starts:
"Dear God, Please help me to hate White people. Or at
least to want to hate them I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better,
that they can stop being racist."
The "prayer" then describes the type of White person they want to hate -- not the actual blatantly racist ones, but the "wolves in
sheep's clothing" who "don't see color", are friendly and accepting on the surface.
"
Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in
people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better.
Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded
robes standing in front of burning crosses. Let me see them as hopelessly unrepentant, reprobate bigots who have blasphemed the
Holy Spirit and who need to be handed over to the evil one."
"Grant me a Get Out of Judgment Free Card if I make White people the exception to your commandment to love our neighbors as we love
ourselves."
This is a sick, insane, religious cult of hateful people.
But institutions like
churches, schools, and corporations are pushing this blatant racism mainstream.
The book is also available at Target --
a
store which banned a book
that gave voice to transgender people who regretted their decisions to transition.
play_arrow
hmmmm
35 minutes ago
Maybe
include a prayer in your book... "Dear God, Please help me to hate black people. Or at least to want to hate
them I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better,
that they can stop being racist."
Md4
57 minutes ago
""
Lord,
if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being
hopeful that White people can do and be better."
Instead of whining...why not just leave?
America
isn't
the right place for a
lot
of
people anymore...
...so
just
go.
You'll
be happier.
And
we'll
be
happier.
You'll
see...
Meatier Shower
1 hour ago
"
It
was not part of their blood, it came to them very late, with long arrears to make good, when the Saxon began
to hate.
They were not easily moved, they were icy – willing
to wait til every count should be proved, ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low. Their eyes were
level and straight. There was neither sign nor show, when the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd. It was not
taught by the state. No man spoke it aloud when the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred. It will not swiftly
abate. Through the chilled years ahead, when time shall count from the date that the Saxon began to hate."
-
Rudyard Kipling
Sol Invictvs
2 hours ago
(Edited)
They're worshiping the devil. There's no room for racial hate if you believe in God.
Kanzen Saimin
1 hour ago
remove
link
"If you or anyone in your
household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or
other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a
vaccine."
Health Vermont does not explain why there is a
racially segregated line for the Covid vaccine -- apparently it's just the woke thing to do these days
Health
Vermont does not admit eugenics is in play.
12Doberman
1 hour ago
They've become what they supposedly despise. They clearly have believed their own propaganda. Makes you
wonder what's coming next...white's to be deprived of their property?
homeskillet
1 hour ago
(Edited)
This is beyond the pale, the elites are pushing for a race ware - chaos and violence.
They are the
entities that should be destroyed.
jonesbeach
1 hour ago
Progressivism is not a religion of peace.
HonorSeeker
1 hour ago
(Edited)
It's more like a cult. Its members are recruited for their vulnerability, for their desperation, and for
their willingness to blame others for their failings. The members are groomed, brain-washed and then
released upon the nation they are to act like parasites against by sapping the nation's spirit and sowing
discord.
Liesel
1 hour ago
remove
link
I just
saw the book on Amazon. Interesting enough, there were "666" reviews. You just can't make this stuff up.
secretspaniel
1 hour ago
remove
link
Blacks
are not behind this, this whole issue is being weaponised to foment a race war to destroy us
JohnGaltsChild
1 hour ago
I refused to go
into a Target the moment they started blended gender toy departments.
They're sick.
A Girl In Flyover Country
1 hour ago
There
is no stopping the decline of the American empire. I wish I was wrong.
Macho Latte
1 hour ago
(Edited)
WOKE
HATE IS JUST GETTING STARTED
GET
YOUR CHILDREN AS FAR AWAY FROM PUBLIC SCHOOL AS YOU CAN
11.
The Public Schools - will ramp up their level of political indoctrination including severe anti-family,
anti-white rhetoric and Woke Hate. History will be re-written destroying every level of pride in America.
Prepubescent children will be made to question their gender. Heterosexual white boys will be emasculated and
demonized. Interracial sex for white girls will be encouraged. The destruction of childhood will be the most
horrible consequence of Woke Hate which will be administered mostly by hateful, indoctrinated, white women
with children (mothers). The incalculable psychological damage to our youth will last generations.
Demoralized, many will become addicted to prescription drugs. Many will commit suicide.
Neo2021
1 hour ago
I
guess that's not racist. I stopped reading after learning the author's name; Dr. Chaneqa Walker. I was
laughing too hard. Where is the outrage?
Ms No
PREMIUM
1 hour ago
remove
link
People
should buy a copy of that. It will be worth money as a Bolshevik relic. This won't last for ever but it's
most insane displays will have shock value forever.
NewMouldy
1 hour ago
remove
link
Like rap music. I remember saying in the 80's "this will only be a fad" (sigh)
secretspaniel
1 hour ago
The
elite are really pushing for a race war that they know will cause minorities to suffer most of all - they
are literal Nazis and the real racists. Let's not forget that the people pushing this only consider
themselves white when it suits their purposes. They hate black and white equally and are total extremists.
Xena fobe
1 hour ago
(Edited)
Chanequa has some kind of mental health disorder.
Paranoid or schizophrenic.
Hyper Entropy
2 hours ago
How
come no Targets got burned down during the riots?
Huckleberry Pie
1 hour ago
Because the looters were trying to get home with all their 'reparations'. Hard to start a fire, when your
arms are full of stolen $hit.
Miler52
1 hour ago
This
absurdity needs to stop. Keep stirring the pot with this divisional crap and all hell well erupt
eventually. Not all 12.6% of America which is the black population support this stupidity and those that do
are imbeciles and incapable of making a difference anyway. Some people are itching for a racial explosion
and a completely unsafe America. They will find it very regrettable supporting such a toxic ideology.
5G-Powered Nanobots
1 hour ago
I
would bet 90% of blacks in America don't support this nonsense.
mike6972
1 hour ago
It may
not be 90%. But it's probably at least 75%.
Miler52
1 hour ago
Whatever the percentage actually is, the majority of Americans of any ethnicity do not support this ongoing
assault on Americas ability to respect one another. And the majority of Americans are angry about the open
border, the massive, abusive spend, raising taxes, the misleading HR1, packing the Supreme Court, the arrack
on the 2nd Amendment, etc. This is all being done by a minority of people to collapse America.
Sol Invictvs
1 hour ago
All
race hustlers need rope or lead.
For
the sake of humanity.
Kanzen Saimin
1 hour ago
remove
link
If
you've never seen the movie 'Crash', I would highly recommend it. This "Chanequa" reminds me of the
character (wait for it...) Shaniqua.
That is a FAVE shock fake event. Write a racial slur on the wall somewhere (with a member of the victim
class doing the writing), then send a letter to all the alumni from the college president decrying the
episode whilst beating the drum for more indoctrination/re-education. When my college did this to me as
an alumnus, and I couldnt respond to the college president's email (bounceback), I called the alumni
office and cancelled all further contact with the school.
Ms No
PREMIUM
2 hours ago
It's a
favorite tactic lately.
"The
suspect who allegedly vandalized four synagogues in Brooklyn with anti-Semitic graffiti over the weekend has
been identified as 39-year-old Emil Benjamin, who is a Jewish man from Brooklyn."
"The
person arrested for a spate of anti-Semitic graffiti in New York is
apparently
just mad about a business dispute
and not on a hate campaign against ****; in fact, he's Jewish."
(Really, they accepted that excuse? That wouldn't work for us)
"An
alleged anti-Semitic attack on a kosher-style café in Winnipeg, Canada was staged by the owners of the
restaurant, police now say."
All the day's Opinion headlines.
PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBE
The talk shows and editorial pages are full of questions. What is the basis for acting so forcefully against Georgia? If Georgia
is racist, how can baseball talk of doing business with China? Mr. Manfred failed to spell out specific criticisms of Georgia's
voting law. Now he's put himself in the awkward position of having to defend Colorado's voting laws.
During my time as commissioner, I learned that the American people view baseball as a public trust. They want the game to stand
for the best and noblest of our national virtues. They see baseball as the repository of their dreams, even as they root for
their favorite teams. They don't want, and won't accept, anything that separates them from the game's history and leadership.
Major League Baseball can't become a weapon in the culture wars, a hostage for one political party or ideology. It can't be only
for the rich or the poor, nor can it only be for one race, as it was until 1947. Baseball must always stand above politics and
its dark elements of corruption, greed and sordid selfishness. It can't go wrong by standing for national greatness.
The situation calls to mind the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, when many erred -- like Mr. Manfred has here -- by leaping to a conclusion
based on assumptions rather than carefully considered facts. I've done the same thing, to my regret. Much rides on Mr. Manfred's
shoulders so he must be prudent. Perhaps he now sees how complicated these issues can become. I wish him well.
Mr. Vincent was commissioner of baseball, 1989-92.
Truth SQ 1 hour ago Here's a crazy idea - how about hire the best person for the job? Reply
4 JBer 46 minutes ago The interest might be there, the candidates probably aren't. Reply 2
Jones 44 minutes ago These statements are just game plays to project an image as being a good
company. At the end of the day the higher ups / managers have their own buddies / crownies /
clowns that they keep promoting. Reply 2 Yo 15 minutes ago Companies are making public
statements because they fear being canceled more than they fear losing money on bad decisions.
It is the old Pleasure Pain equation. When the pleasure derived from taking an specific action
exceeds the pain involved by taking the action, you are more likely to take the action. When
the pleasure derived from taking a specific action is exceeded by the pain of taking the
action, you are more likely to not take the action. Corporations are making these judgement
calls on everything from social justice, climate change, and the woke religion. Corporations
are interested in one thing... how to separate you from your hard earned money. When "wokism"
no longer pays, corporations will stop the insanity. Rational people need to start making
corporations pay for choosing wokism over rational thought.
Anthony 16 minutes ago The race card over and over. Hire qualified and be open minded and then
satisfaction will follow.
eric 1 hour ago Oh good, hiring based on race. What is the worst that could happen?
This is a classic "divide and conquer" strategy for corporation, which distract population from neoliberal abuses of Wall Street
banksters and financialization of the economy. It also helps to suppress the wave of populism, heat from which corporation felt very
well. Paradoxically the leaden of the most pro-corporations Party voiced his objections against such behaviour of major
corporatins.
Mr. McConnell accused Democrats of spreading misinformation about the Georgia legislation to justify their plans to ram throuth
Senate
For the People Act
,
which facilitated voting fraud. The bill passed the House, 220-210. No Republicans voted for it.
"This power grab is impossible to defend, so the left wants to deflect. Instead of winning the debate, they want to silence debate
by bullying citizens and entire states into submission," Mr. McConnell said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Monday warned of "serious consequences" if corporations continue to use their
economic power to support 'far-left causes,' the latest being a lemming response to the new voting law in Georgia, according
to
Bloomberg
.
"From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep
dabbling
in behaving like a woke parallel government,
" he said, adding
"Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside
the constitutional order."
McConnell's rebuke comes as
a number of
corporations, including Delta Air Lines Inc. and the Coca-Cola Co., have criticized Georgia's new election law. Major
League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta, a move endorsed by President Joe Biden
.
McConnell dismissed comparisons of Georgia's new voting laws, passed by Republicans, to
the Jim Crow voting restrictions for African-Americans. He said
many states run by
Democrats, including New York, have fewer days of early voting than Georgia's new law requires, and he cited polling
showing most Americans favor voter ID requirements
. -Bloomberg
"Nobody really thinks this current dispute comes anywhere near the horrific racist brutality of segregation," said McConnell -
mocking Democrats for their dramatic Jim Crow analogy.
"Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex," McConnell added. "
Americans
do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing
signaling
."
JimmyJones
2 hours ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Eat a Big
"icecream cone" McConnel, you POS. You knew that last election was a complete fraud and you did nothing even
worse actively worked against the uncovering and exposing of that fraud. As if we don't see through your fake
outrage. I hope you are primaried and replaced.
McConnel
you are a Traitor, we all know.
znilboy
2 hours ago
Guess
he thinks enough time has passed and we forgot already..
Ghost of Porky
1 hour ago
Nearly
50 years as a conservative in public office.
Hasn't
conserved a damn thing.
Buzz-Kill
19 minutes ago
(Edited)
remove
link
Mitch's public service, for the people, has made him very wealthy.
How
did that happen? Term Limits PLEASE!!!
Kayman
1 hour ago
remove
link
Despite McConnell doing nothing about clipping the wings of this Woke Corporatism, at least he is mouthing
the words,
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says there is surging "aggression against white
people" in the United States and that it is harming efforts to fight racism.
Lavrov made the comments during an interview with political scientists that was broadcast on national television.
"We were pioneers of the movement promoting equal rights of people of any skin color," said
Lavrov, adding that
"everyone wants to get rid of racism."
However, he emphasized how it was
important "not to switch to the other extreme which we saw
during the 'BLM' (Black Lives Matter) events and the aggression against white people, white U.S. citizens."
Lavrov also insisted that
forces within the U.S. were trying to spread a "cultural
revolution" around the world by forcing "diversity" down everyone's throats.
"Hollywood is now also changing its rules so that everything reflects the diversity of modern society," he said, labeling it "a form
of censorship."
"I've seen Black people play in Shakespeare's comedies. Only I don't know when there will be a white Othello," Lavrov said.
"You see this is absurd. Political correctness taken to the point of absurdity will not end
well,"
he concluded.
As we
previously
highlighted
, after every mass shooting, journalists and leftists rush to blame white people even before the perpetrator has been
identified.
In the case of the Boulder supermarket shooting, this backfired massively after it was revealed that the gunman was an Islamist
immigrant from the Middle East.
After the Atlanta shooting attack which targeted massage parlors, the media once again whipped up hysteria over "white supremacy,"
despite the fact that authorities found absolutely zero evidence the assault was motivated by race.
This led New York Times contributor Damon Young to assert that
"whiteness is a pandemic" and
"the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it."
"He was not fired from his job at The Root and the New York Times refused to condemn him -- such proclamations are what they pay him
for!"
writes
Chris Menahan
.
This narrative, in addition to Critical Race Theory, which teaches that all the United
States' problems are the fault of white people, has clearly created an atmosphere where race hate directed towards white people is
not only tolerated, it is openly encouraged.
Lordflin
6 hours ago
(Edited)
I feel as
though I have woken up on the other side of the looking glass...
We are the ones
on the 'other side of the iron curtain' my friends...
Something of a
surreal experience, wouldn't you say...?
r0mulus
5 hours ago
(Edited)
It's a
convenient scapegoat the hegemons are hoping to hide themselves in while the USA wanes and the USD/American
dream slowly melts into a supranational corporate, fascist dystopia. We're a good way on our journey, not
too much further to go now. Writing is and has been on the wall.
r0mulus
5 hours ago
I
honestly don't know enough about the upper reaches of the "deep state" power structure to be able to say for
sure, but I do know that they are interested in dominating everything forever in a self-perpetuating rentier
and seignorage friendly autocracy, and that as subjects to their power, we've no rights to fair markets, no
rights to fair legal systems, and even increasingly no rights to fair scientific/empirical systems
(definition of reality). How could one living with an honest understanding of that situation ever want to
support such a society?
Misesmissesme
6 hours ago
South
Africa part deux
DPLETTENBERG
6 hours ago
Similar but not quite like South Africa. Here a small minority (16%) of the population is somehow given
power and control over the majority.
Christian whites have been ingrained with the idea of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. This belief
may well cause our destruction. It's time to value truth over turning the other cheek.
r0mulus
5 hours ago
Well
said- I've been curious as to what the thoughts of non-"black" Afrikaaners have been about their society...
two hoots
6 hours ago
(Edited)
Life
is like the yellow brick road, as you approach the end you discover the many perceptions and beliefs that
provided your support along the way are mostly fallacies, manipulations and deceptions. Once there, don't
linger on it, accept it and find your peace. Life is.
eatthebanksters
5 hours ago
Except
the percentage of the population who are white and who agree the left is nuts is far larger than in South
Africa. South Africa didn't need to cheat to win an election.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0
6 hours ago
As
someone who served in the former West Germany during the Cold War, yes, it is a very strange time.
Sir Edge
6 hours ago
Russia's Lavrov Warns
Of
Surging Anti-White Racism In US
Wow...
There goes Russia again meddling in USA affairs by
telling
the truth
...
chunga
6 hours ago
This
Lavrov is an impressive individual. I don't think we have anything like him in the US.
Ignatius
6 hours ago
(Edited)
My
concern is that Lavrov's statements -- which, in isolation, I agree with -- feeds
the
narrative
that if one is against CRT then one is obviously a Russian agent (aka, more "Russian
collusion" BS).
Our
current overlords are a clever, though evil lot. Don't underestimate them.
chunga
6 hours ago
The
fake news experts will say that. Who cares.
I
remember a few years ago there was a fake news conference of some sort and a bunch of the talkers were
shouting questions at Lavrov like maniacs and Lavrov just laughed at them, completely un-phased and said
"where are your manners?" The guy is clearly cut from a different cloth.
Biff M
6 hours ago
...white people and males. [there. I fixed it for ya]
enjoy
your S Africa experience.
SQRT 69
6 hours ago
remove
link
Big
difference in S. Africa where whites were an overwhelming minority to blacks. Here in the US whites are
still the majority while blacks are roughly 13%. The intelligent ones know that this is a setup by the
ruling class (Anglo Zionist Cabal) to create a polarized society that doesn't notice the show going on
right before their eyes, i.e. the Cabal looting the nation and leaving behind a hollowed out corpse.
harvester0fsorrow
6 hours ago
Russian leaders are far more intelligent and honest than ours. Sad that the once free-est nation in the
world is now turnimg quickly fascist. no...it cannot end well
WorkingClassMan
6 hours ago
Turning quickly maoist. This is almost the exact same playbook, complete with Red Guard mobs.
TBT or not TBT
6 hours ago
And
the Marxist struggle sessions. It's amazing to see my wife's zoom style meetings during the faux plague
spending time on trading confessions of guilt for all imaginable bias and insensitivity.
Portal
6 hours ago
remove
link
It's
not entirely about racism.
Democrats want to deconstruct America.
Destroy small businesses, the bastion of free market capitalism. Destroy traditions. Destroy cultural
sports. Destroy the military. Destroy the Constitution. Destroy elections. The list goes on...
cforeman44z
6 hours ago
remove
link
WHO
owns the media? If you know, then you will know WHO is behind this cultural revolution and WHO the TRUE
ENEMY is.
LeadPipeDreams
6 hours ago
...
forces
within the U.S. were trying to spread a "cultural revolution" around the world by forcing "diversity"
down everyone's throats.
Uh...these (((forces))) within the U.S. have been trying to spread a "cultural revolution" in every country
for millenia. The U.S. is simply (((their))) primary target at the moment.
Iron Noob
4 hours ago
remove
link
Russia
wants sanity to prevail so that it can avoid a nuclear exchange with the US. That is why it is trying to
make common cause with the sane people in the US.
So, "black bolshevism" is onthe upswing. "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as
farce."
And those executives who signed the letter actually are trying to prolong the rule of
neoliberalism in the USA, the rule that hurts black population equally or more than white
population outside of top 10%.
ID
requirements are no more racist at the ballot box than they are on a Delta flight.
Corporate chieftains last year criticized Donald Trump for denying his re-election
defeat. So it's quite a spectacle to see them actively spreading the left's own big lie about
elections.
According to Delta
CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes
of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia's Republican Legislature used the "excuse" of
voter fraud to "make it harder for many underrepresented voters" to "exercise their
constitutional right to elect their representatives," Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to
employees.
Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the
CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate
colleagues to fight "undemocratic" and "un-American" GOP efforts across the states to "assault"
the "fundamental tenets of our democracy." Coca-Cola , Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying
outraged press releases.
Nancy Pelosi
couldn't be more thrilled. Democrats and the activist left have long honed their techniques for
intimidating corporations. They successfully pressured companies into withdrawing contributions
from free-market groups, into embracing a climate-change agenda, into refraining from political
contributions, into adopting new "social" investment criteria.
Enlisting corporate America to help peddle a patently false narrative is their biggest
success by far. The left spent last year using litigation and political pressure to alter and
weaken election standards across the country. Democratic lawmakers and the Biden
administration moved swiftly to cement this effort with a federal takeover of state election
law, the bill known as H.R.1.
Its enactment is still no sure thing, so the left is trying to block election-reform efforts
at the state level. Central to this campaign is the dishonest claim that Republicans are
launching these efforts only because they lost the White House and because they want to cripple
the minority vote. Activists have spent weeks threatening companies that didn't join them with
boycotts, protests and the label of "Jim Crow racists," and companies have complied.
Thus the sight of the nation's top business leaders monotonously reciting a fact-free
narrative. As they know, state legislatures are moving to reaffirm longstanding rules and
restore confidence in electoral systems that were arbitrarily remade during Covid. ID
requirements are no more racist at the ballot box than on a Delta flight. Some 36 states have
them, and they've been upheld by the Supreme Court. It isn't Jim Crow to codify the use of
the ad hoc drop boxes that sprung up last year. It isn't voter suppression to reaffirm that
activists aren't allowed to approach voters in line, especially to solicit votes with gifts
(contrary to urban legend, the Georgia law allows poll workers to provide water). The Georgia
law expands voting, adding early voting on more weekends and providing additional equipment and
poll workers in larger precincts.
Mr. Bastian's moralizing memo fails to cite a single one of the supposedly "egregious
measures" in the bill that will suppress the vote, although he does stress he hears his
employees' "pain."
The letter from the 72 executives misstates the Georgia rules, suggesting the only way to
satisfy the ID requirement is with a driver's license, even though "200,000 Georgians lack a
license." In fact, voters can also use a free, state-issued nondriver ID, and those who lack
one can fulfill the requirement with a Social Security number or even a copy of a "current
utility bill, bank statement, government check, or paycheck." The letter suggests the Georgia
"playbook" -- enacting rules less onerous than those in many blue states, as Karl Rove has
noted
in these pages -- is of a piece with "police dogs, poll taxes, literacy taxes." One can only
hope Merck is more rigorous when conducting pharmaceutical trials.
Corporate CEOs may think this virtue signaling will spare them the left's boycotts or
Democrats' punitive legislative measures. That's a sucker's bet given this week's Democratic
plan to siphon $2.3 trillion from corporations to fund new spending. Meanwhile, longtime
Republican defenders of corporate activity are rapidly losing interest in aiding CEOs who
promote partisan conspiracy theories. Witness Sen. Marco Rubio's fuming tweet on Thursday
calling Delta a "woke corporate hypocrite," noting that the company is "business partners with
the Chinese Communist Party," raking in "billions of dollars in a country that doesn't even
have elections."
Smart executives have long understood the value of political neutrality. Corporate America
is now throwing its lot in with one of the most partisan, brass-knuckle, dishonest campaigns in
recent political history. It will be a long time mending fences with Republicans -- if that's
even possible.
If you lived in an urban area through the 60s-90s urban crime wave, you could have
predicted this with more precision than Mr. Sharkey.
If you're looking for a sinister oligarch angle which explains people like Warren Buffett*
supporting BLM, perhaps the idea is to tank the values of gentrified urban property again in
order to make money by chopping up exurban/suburban farms into tract housing and selling it
to the urban refugees for the next 30-40 years. Then you scoop up the low value urban
property anticipating that the normies will actually demand policing again like they did in
1994 they can sell "redeveloped" real estate in cities to the kids who grew up in boring
suburbs again. Population churn yielding increased profits for eternity . . .
* a few years ago Buffett got into the realty brokerage business for some reason.
Americans are experiencing a crime wave unlike anything we've seen this century. After
decades of decline, shootings have surged in the past few years. In 2020, gun deaths reached
their highest point in U.S. history in the midst of a pandemic. In 2021, although researchers
can't yet say anything definite about overall crime, shooting incidents appear to be on the
rise in many places.
... Sharkey anticipated both the summer of anti-police protests and the possibility that
souring police-civilian relations would contribute to an increase in violent crime.
Thompson: The subtitle of your book Uneasy Peace is The Great Crime Decline, the
Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence . Is it safe to say that the "great
crime decline" has come to an end?
Sharkey: I would say it is very clearly paused. What remains to be seen is just how
anomalous last year was. There's a possibility that this was just a year when social life was
completely destabilized in so many ways, and that resulted in a huge surge of violence that was
temporary. That's the hope.
Their public spaces have not been maintained. Their schools are underfunded.
"Underfunded" is a euphemism for "have students with low test scores." E.g., "Washington
D.C.'s underfunded schools." Presumably, it means "underfunded relative to some theoretical
amount of money, such as a gajillion dollars, that would be sufficient to raise these students'
test scores to average."
Unlike The Atlantic , I came up with 274 more murders in Chicago in 2020 and in 103
other cities back on January 6 in Taki's Magazine , which
has no paywall.
Since the Racial Reckoning was declared, blacks have been shooting people, mostly other
blacks, at a high rate.
Sharkey: My work looks most closely at where crime is happening, not at individual
victims. But there are some things we think we know. Intimate-partner violence increased in
2020. So did hate crimes against Asians. But the overall demographics of victims is
incredibly consistent over time. It's young people of color, particularly young men of color.
I don't see anything yet to indicate that's changed dramatically.
It's all those dark-skinned Tamil Brahmin young men of color shooting each other in suburban
New Jersey.
"the overall demographics of victims is incredibly consistent over time. It's young
people of color, particularly young men of color."
That's it for the victims all right. Tragic for sure. But let's focus on the perpetrators
for once, shall we? The perpetrators are bullets , and shots which ring out .
These things come from guns .
These things happen all by themselves, of course, so the solution is to make sure that
law-abiding people are never in control of these things, which happen. Have I got this right
now?
Sharkey is trying to take a victory lap. As a sociologist in his 30s, he "predicted" that
historically low crime rates would not stay historically low, confident he would be proven
prescient. He blamed it on not giving enough to blacks, which is catnip to sociologists, the
NPR crowd, and the media. His profession and clowns like Coates make him famous in his field
because he is available for soundbites suggesting that reparations are necessary. A few years
later, when the crime rate inevitably rises, he can say I told you so. He thought it might
take many years, but it was only about 6.
On a related note, I am beginning my book on how the introduction of critical race theory
into preschools, the banning of racist Dr. Seuss books, Netflix algorithms forcing people to
see previews of Beyonce's Black is King every time they touch their remote, and the new
privately-funded welfare programs for non-whites only have caused the crime rate to fall from
2020-2021 back to more typical levels. Watch for my interviews before 2030.
Yep, Sharkey made himself a major young academic star, and Steve explains how and why:
But crime rates mostly seem to go up and down depending up what Important People want.
E.g., from the early 1990s onward, Important People were sick of all the murders in New York
City, so New York eventually became the least homicidal big city in America.
The Elites wanted this rise in violent crime, so they could blame racists, the white
trash, the Deplorables, Middle America, whiteness, etc. That serves as cover for their
Satanic level of wealth accrued at the same time that they are murdering the middle class and
reducing the working class to beggary from Big Government.
This is not the only example of fake scholarship being employed to confirm the nonexistent
and implement damage on the Black community. In
Oregon , the Department of Education is urging teachers to register for training in what
they called "ethnomathematics." The reason being is that out of the blue they "feel (without
research or proof)" that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right
answer in Math. This is based on their premise that amidst a pandemic, importance should be
placed on "dismantling racism in mathematics" rather than teaching skills that make black
students competent in Math.
More dumb shit for lack of a better descriptor. Now correct me if I am wrong, if math is so
racist, why do more half of Asians/Pacific
Islanders ( 52% ) scored at or above the
proficient level in math in the United States?
The results from the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), from 2015,
placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science.
According to the most recent data, the US is behind China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea
and ranks 37th
in proficiency in Math globally.
The progressive liberal academic is a heretic – an unprincipled person who as George
Orwell described in Animal Farm, thinks that some animals are more equal than others.
They know what is best for all and as such, all should think like them, be forced to think like
them or be censored if one thinks or dares to state otherwise. Thus, in their purview, even the
ridiculous becomes sane. Even if it means asserting that math, objectivity and science are
inherently racist. The
Seattle school district believes this, that math is a representation of white privilege and
structural racism. Why, for no other reason than the Oregon department of education does
– that showing your work and coming to the correct solution is something black students
can't do...
Woke Supremacy - Way Worse than White Privilege and Systemic RacismWhen you
promote Anti-racism, you get Anti-ArgumentTorrance
Stephens, PhD Mar 22 6 2
I am a relic. I am a child of segregation and remember the marches in Memphis during the
garbage strikes in 1968. I unlike many today claiming the experience of racism, was born in a
black only hospital in Memphis – John Gaston hospital .
Yesterday a friend of mine asked if I saw the Grammy's. I take it he already knew that my
answer was no, so he sent me two video clips. I gave up award shows decades ago for in my
purview they were merely a reflection of mindless celebrity twaddle. But being the person, I
am, I watched and saw something of a pornographic depiction during prime television. Couldn't
wrap my head around it, or how this was even considered to be TV friendly given the present
environment in which the Looney Tunes French skunk
Pepe Le Pew is suggested to propagate the toxic masculinity of rape culture and that
Dr.
Seuss books are racist. But what would one expect from a collective of folk who mandate
having a vagina or the color of one's skin is more important than competency for filling any
job or political appointment.
Then again, maybe two black women (questionable) shaking azz surrounded by other half naked
black women (questionable) twerking in cages, rubbing their puzzies together is the
representation of black female empowerment as defined most likely by white feminist. Strange
given that calling them women and the use of the word female reflects the patriarchy (see how
dumb these arguments or anti-arguments can be.) Things change so fast that it is difficult to
take any of this emotional dissonance serious. Just a year or two back, scientific papers were
published and even lauded that theorized about the " overt objectification and
dehumanization of Black people "and how " Black women
are sexually objectified at an interpersonal level ." Others lectured on " how
racist, sexist, and classist ideologies contributed to sexual objectification experiences
(SOEs) among African American women " and how "black women are more likely than white women
to be sexually objectified and perceived less than fully human."
There is so much going on in the age of woke supremacy that you cannot literally keep up.
Used to be that segregation was evil, now they segregate under the progressive guise of keeping
Black people safe from white people. Truth of the matter using FBI and Department of Justice
data, black folk would be way (more) safer around white folk than another Black folk. I am not
hating, just stating a fact, just like blacks are more likely to die from drowning , in particular kids
ages 5 to 14
, or a Stroke than by a white
cop. But my fault, I forgot that Math is racist. This is how the anti-argument of woke
supremacists functions.
All this idiocy started with the agenda of convincing US citizens that this country is the
worst and most racist ever has been going on since the 1960's. Each decade it's gotten worse. I
believe the goal is to condition people to accept extreme change. People will accept it because
they believe our present system is so hopeless and they're winning because it has substituted
the significance of narrative over fact and reason. The examples are too numerous to count
because the dialectic of woke supremacy is not rooted in science and ergo non-existent.
Take the recent shootings in Atlanta that targeted several message parlors. The quick take
for the purpose of narration was that this action was a hate crime and that it evidenced that
white supremacy was the cause of this given that the man charged killed eight people, six of
which were Asians and two whites. Thus, it was easy for an unsubstituted contention –
that this was confirmation of a rising tide of violence against Asian Americans (mostly Korean)
based on white supremacy and the words of Donald Trump regarding a virus originally from China
was why this happened. Although the record notes this man was a confirmed sex addict, who spent
time in rehabilitation for sex addiction and an eye witnesses report he always talked about
dealing with his
sex addiction by shooting up the message parlors that (lets be honest) take advantage of
illegal immigrants and turn them into prostitutes. Dude was on his way to Florida to do the
same. Also, data documents that Atlanta is one of the largest
hubs for adult and child trafficking. This was too reasonable and fact-based for the woke
anti-argument crew. All that mattered was the color of the folk he shot and that he was white,
not even to be considered was that one would think a white supremacist wouldn't shoot two white
people dead, pay to have sex with Asians in places he had visited or be motivated by a fear of
a virus called something by a former President.
There is also avoiding the fact that according to the
FBI and Urban Institute , Atlanta has an internal child/human sex trafficking
issue , in which minors , many recruited and
exploited for sex. It is estimated that around 100 adolescent girls are exploited each night in
Georgia via escort services, erotic/nude massage parlors, internet-based exploitation and other
avenues. The big cities presently reporting an increase in anti-Asian violence are place like
Oakland, San Francisco and New York (large democrat run places where most attackers are
non-white Blacks), not Atlanta. Thus, it is possible in the Atlanta shooting, race was not a
factor.
Yet this is too logical for the typical woke supremacist so they double down. Once upon a
time Kamala Harris was the first Asian American female senator, then became the first African
American Vice President and now she over night has changed into the first Asian American Vice
President to meet the narrative. The Anti-Argument woke supremacist do not and cannot
self-correct for it would support the notion that facts, math, science, reason and objectivity
are real, and that they could be wrong.
Sad truth is that this has been occurring since the
1980s in America. The Rev.
Al Sharpton had the gumption to suggest that former President Trump inspired this wave of
anti-Asian violence happening around the country. He forgets that in the 1990s he led a boycott
against Korean immigrants in Brooklyn which resulted in several Korean immigrant businesses
going out of business. The same was true during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots which resulted in
more than
2,000 Korean-owned businesses being looted or burned (45 percent of all damages caused by
the riot). As I recall, none of the police who beat Rodney King were Asian.
The woke know this, and that this is an endemic behavior exhibited by the wokiest Blacks in
America. In past tweets, San Francisco school board's Vice President
Alison Collins called Asian Americans as 'house n***ers' and has been asked to resign but
indicates she will not. This is how woke supremacy is – be racist to others while at the
same time claim to be fighting anti-Black racism and white supremacy. The lack of
self-awareness is thick. Same is true for
Alexi McCammond , the short-lived Teen Vogue editor. She also had to go after her tweets
presenting racist tropes of Asian-Americans while in college surfaced. Prior to this, she was
wokity woke-woke.
Woke supremacy is dangerous. The problem isn't that the woke want to destroy everything, the
problem is that they will take everybody down with them just to divide everyone by skin color
alone. Merit-based activities by their axiological nature are racist and equal white supremacy
although such has been practiced around the world for centuries prior to the establishment of
America. No country that punishes folk for intelligence and hard work can survive. Sad thing is
the people who are the main pushers of this behavioral Fentanyl are the wealthiest of the
wealthy and most privileged Blacks in America – Lebron James, Oprah Winfrey, almost every
dimwit in Hollywood, Joy "homophobic" Reid and Don Lemon among others (one reason most people
hate Hollywood and celebrities at this point). Nobody gives a hoot what they think. Only the
woke supremacist would consider a multi-millionaire white black hybrid royal duchess oppressed.
If you can't concede to this then it's off with your head.
Unfortunately, there will never be an honest media again if we do not stand and fight back.
We are too far gone for words and conversations. These people have no good intentions. They
want revenge. They have no problem lying to further their goals because they are disingenuous
actors to begin with. If Americans aren't ready to stand up and treat these people as tyrants,
then it's really going to get worse. Why? Because these people are so focused on grievances
they forget to live, and pull everyone down with them. Me, I only live when I sleep, then I
awake. Had no reason to become woke for I already was. The thing is with these cats is that
like in a clique of cannibals, one day, it's your azz on the plate. 6 2
It's nice to know that intelligent people are as fed up with woke insanity as I am. Hang in
there, doc, by the end of Biden's term (Harris, rather) enough dummies will be on our side to
enable the MAGA movement to return in triumph.
@Alfred ent to spend a weekend in Oslo she was shocked how we would go through some areas
where you wouldnt see any white people.
If no one told you that was Oslo, you wouldnt had figure it out by yourself.
When i registered to take Norwegian classes, that i was paying, a few days before the
course started i was informed that i have lost my position to someone because they had
refugee status WTF?? I am paying and still i dont have priority? Their reply but you are
European, others need more than you.
Every other ad has a mixed couple, every company makes sure their image, etc is associated
with "diversity".
Seriously, is no different from Netherlands, France, etc
There is absolutely no reason at all for any American, especially white ones, to fight and
die for the Zionist-Washington empire. Even America's "decline" is misleading. It is the
American EMPIRE in decline, not the continental heartland of the USA itself. Don't join the
military.
" .whites have no reason to fight for a government that discriminates against them,
replaces them through immigration, and scorns their heritage."
This is perhaps more true and more dangerous than the author realizes.
In the US Army the combat arms-infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineers-are staffed at
the enlisted level mostly with patriotic middle class whites from rural backgrounds. Support
jobs like cook, field wireman, supply clerk, etc. are populated with folks having a different
socio economic profile.
If the very people the USG-and especially the current Administration-are doing their
utmost to alienate stop enlisting and reenlisting, well, who is going to pull the
trigger?
@anonymousperson unauthorized Capitol tour upped the ante even more. The US government is
demonizing the very backbone of the US military – right-leaning white [men] – to
an absolutely astounding extent. It's like they are trying to collapse the empire. Maybe they
are.
Anyway I brought all this up with this guy and he just said "I don't really follow all
that." And for every uninformed and apathetic vet like this guy, there are probably a few
uninformed and apathetic 18 year olds who want to enlist. Perhaps the saving grace is that
these boys (and girls) will not reenlist like they used to, thus starving the military of
NCOs, or at least white ones.
In the US Army the combat arms-infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineers-are staffed
at the enlisted level mostly with patriotic middle class whites from rural backgrounds.
Support jobs like cook, field wireman, supply clerk, etc. are populated with folks having a
different socio economic profile.
If the very people the USG-and especially the current Administration-are doing their
utmost to alienate stop enlisting and reenlisting, well, who is going to pull the
trigger?
Hopefully, it will be Re'derrik, Enrique, Mohammed, Aahan, Chao, Stevie ( formerly Sally )
and Juan.
@AndrewR Concept of the operation is to turn the US into a South Africa or Zimbabwe
analog: not influential internationally, but with a regime protection force and no law to
speak of. To do this, the US military must be turned from a combat force into a regime
protection force. The US Army has largely given up direct combat employing conventional
infantry, has realized that special operations don't have a strategic effect (it's
essentially a force multiplier, an analog to the "forlorn hopes" of medieval warfare). That
is, the US Army is no longer a combat force. It is not, however, a regime protection force
and cannot be with current personnel. It would have to be re-populated (as was academia)
before it can be fully converted into a regime protection force.
Whites who don't hate themselves should welcome America's geopolitical decline and
eventual displacement. Anything that weakens this anti-white satrapy leading to its total
collapse is a good thing.
"Woke" racism is a form of financial oligarchy control of population. Specifically the
attempt to rule by classic "divide and conquer" strategy and hide the problems connected with the
collapse of neoliberalism in the USA under the smoke screen of racial injustice. So yes this is
replication of Bolshevik's practices.
Notable quotes:
"... I am appalled at what is currently occurring in schools in the U.S. Sadly, under the guise of progress, history is repeating itself in the country I chose to escape the nightmares of my early childhood. ..."
Mr. Bartning's account of his children's grade school's new "curriculum" hit a nerve in me.
I grew up in Poland, born shortly after World War II, so my early childhood experiences
included attending school in Stalinist and communist times.
We, too, were encouraged to report on each other and our parents: their habits, what radio
stations they listened to, etc. Since kindergarten we were spoon fed stories of heroic young
pioneers who, as activists, valued their country's leaders and its agenda above their own
families. We were taught two versions of the history of our country: one, official and
propagandized in school, the other, real and truthful at home. My parents later told me they
were afraid I would say something in school which would result in them being arrested.
I am appalled at what is currently occurring in schools in the U.S. Sadly, under the
guise of progress, history is repeating itself in the country I chose to escape the nightmares
of my early childhood.
Is not this a new variant of Soviet promotion of sons and daughters of "workers and peasants"
in university education on the new level.
Notable quotes:
"... But what colleges love more than anything are untalented, hard-working individuals that will stick around for years to get that degree. The tuition money just keeps rolling in and it doesn't matter whether it is mom and dad's money or the governments. ..."
"... Why do you think colleges have separate categories for military members using the GI Bill? Because even if they're dull the college knows they will pay their bill. ..."
Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would
eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their
stated purpose was "reducing and simplifying demands on students." Such a burden.
One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English "to combat
the effects of academic 'tracking" because it "ultimately separates students of different
socioeconomic and racial backgrounds." It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas
aren't adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem,
they dumbed down high school.
... ... ...
Virtually all universities and now many companies have D&I departments, for diversity
and inclusion. Sounds worthy. But as far as I can tell, the No. 1 job of a D&I department
is to hire more people into the D&I department. No one ever mentions
excellence.
T
Terrence M Ryan SUBSCRIBER 4 weeks ago Regression towards the mean is now more than a
statistical phenomenon, it is a policy. 5 Share link Report flag
B Barbara Shamah SUBSCRIBER 4 weeks ago This has been going on for a long time. By dumbing
down admissions for everyone, it's just now more open. China doesn't have to lift a finger.
Self destruction is here 19 Share link Report flag
B Blanche O'Brien SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago It's true that colleges are making it "easier" to
get in or more "holistic" as he says but that's because enrollments are down. The open
admissions policies like some have are making it harder for other colleges to "compete" in the
capitalist framework that they are all now using. So let's face it, it all comes down to money.
So what the author is really saying although it's probably not his intention ha ha, is that
capitalism is driving mediocrity! Don't get me wrong, the Boomer generation really did everyone
a disfavor by raising an entire generation of millennials to think that everyone is a "winner"
and to not be able to handle criticism. However, I think his argument is a bit off here as to
who (or what) is to blame.
J joseph barbato SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago The article mentions Hampshire College. Both the
author and the readers might appreciate this additional information about the school.
Enrollment between 2018 and 2019 was down 94%.
In other words, conservatives and Christians need not apply. 3 Share link Report
flag
W William McIntire SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Mediocrity isn't new. This trend has been in
place a long time. When I was in college in the early 80's it was already in place. After
recently being downsized in the engineering industry, where I worked for over 30 years, I would
note that college grads generally have no idea what the heck they are doing, as a rule. I got
to the point that more than 20 years ago I would not hire a new college grad from an
engineering school to work in my department. Few of them can think and even fewer can
articulate a basic sentence much less develop a study report. The last 10-15 years have been
the worst with functional illiterates being sent to my office for interviews that knew nothing
about the company they were interviewing for and could not demonstrate basic engineering
skills, much less communication skills. Their entire lives are centered around social media and
without cell coverage they are lost. I think about this every time I cross a bridge or overpass
these days. Doug Eaton SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago
Mediocrity isn't new.
What is new is the institutionalization of it.
C Charles Clemmons SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Thank goodness for Equity! College professors
will no longer have to fend off those bright students who ask pesky, penetrating questions.
Their classes will be filled with nescient victims giggling over their tired Bon mots. One can
hardly wait for a stampede of stupefication to hit grad school and the employment market. This
re-defined Know-Nothing movement should last at least as long as it takes an equity-selected
crew to crash a space vehicle. Like thumb_up 6 Share link Report flag
D Deirdre Hood SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago If you haven't watched the movie "Idiocracy", please
so so. We are there now...
Like thumb_up 6 Share link Report flag
P Paul Runge SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Vonnegut nailed it with his short story "Harrison
Bergeron". Welcome to the monkey house. 9 Share link Report flag
R Ross Johnston SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago I believe this was all indirectly predicted 25 years
ago in the Bell Curve. Ever since I read that book (which you can't unread) I wondered how it
would play out in a diversifying world - and now I see . Outperformance is now called "unfair
advantage" and merit is looked upon like Pol Pott's soldiers in the "Killings Fields" who asked
for the "academics" to step forward for "reeducation" - which landed them dead in a field with
a plastic bag tied around their head.
It really is the dumbing down of America, but I'm sure it's a global phenomenon. The SAT
Board has already had to dumb down the test twice over the past 15 years to keep scores moving
up as the cohort taking the test scored lower and lower on average. The elimination of the
modules is a logical next step if want to dumb it down further.
I doubt you want your Medicare/Medicaid covered heart surgeon to be from the Bahama's School
of Medicine - hired for reasons of diversity quota - with no class ranking - do you?
C Christopher Petersen SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago You don't get it, do you?
Colleges created diversity programs to create a larger clientele. Colleges still want the
smartest kids because having alumni become Nobel Laureates creates bragging rights. Colleges
also want really smart kids that are going to drop out and create amazing things because their
name will be attached to them forever. But what colleges love more than anything are
untalented, hard-working individuals that will stick around for years to get that degree. The
tuition money just keeps rolling in and it doesn't matter whether it is mom and dad's money or
the governments.
Why do you think colleges have separate categories for military members using the GI
Bill? Because even if they're dull the college knows they will pay their bill.
As for government...If you're mad about mediocrity and you got a stimulus check, either
donate it or put it in the shredder. If not, you're complicit in this.
P
Parul Dutt SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago This article feel like a rant that colleges have done away
with SAT and there is an undesired focus on Diversity and Inclusion. While I agree that America
must strive for exceptionalism , the author seems to be blind to the challenges that exist for
underprivileged students and minorities. Challenges are real and the playing field is not
leveled.
There has to be conversation on equitable education so that an underprivileged child has an
equal chance of success. Also, don't forget American colleges are not producing engineers and
technologists but relying on foreign students to fill the STEM void (I don't have statistics
but Silicon valley is built on the labors of engineers who come to the U.S. for higher
education or better future). Just doing away with the SAT may not be the ideal solution but
maybe the beginning of a conversation.
R Ronald Ganim SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Maybe a wealth tax isn't such a bad idea. We could
confiscate the wealth of the tech oligarchs and thereby eliminate their power to censor us on
social media. How about a law that no one can have wealth greater than $20 million (I'm under
that figure)? John Kerry would have to give up his private plane (thus helping the environment)
and Jack Dorsey wouldn't dare shut down anyone else on Twitter. As conservatives, maybe we
should start thinking outside the box!
B bruce miller SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago I have elsewhere advanced the same notion.
Why does progressivity in the IRC stop at $500K? Is an accountant, electrician or other small
business owner, earning $500K on the same footing as a tech plutocrat earning $50 million? Of
course not. Why are we defending these people who do not have our best interests at heart? Tax
the earnings above $1 million per year at escalating progressive rates. Heck, Buffet wanted
that. Oblige him! 1 Share link Report flag
J Jean Samuel SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago I am a "woman of color" married to a White man who's a
pediatrician. I am an electrical engineer with an MSc in mathematical sciences. I earned my
degrees and my well paying job through hard work and sweat equity same for my husband. We both
find racial preferences and the dumbing down of college level courses simply revolting. Of
course if you choose to major in modern dance you have earned your job at Starbucks. Mediocrity
only wins out if you allow it.
G George Rebovich SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Kudos to you and your husband.
My parents were the first generation to be born in America. My father worked in an oil
refinery most of his life as an hourly wage earner. We lived modestly and within the family
budget. My father worked many overtime shifts so his children could go to college, the first
generation of our family to do so. We learned the value of education, hard work and postponing
gratification for long-term happiness.
My daughter is an MD ... the story line of how that happened is similar to my brothers and I
being the first to go to college.
America is a great country that offers opportunities to citizens that are only dreams
elsewhere. But those opportunities don't arise from mediocrity.
J Jason S SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago I'm not sure the author really understands why colleges
and universities are dropping standardized tests. It's not that they're unfair. That's just the
cover story.
The real reason is the trouble Harvard got into from excluding Asian Americans. Those kids
had the grades and the test scores and used them to prove (in court) that Harvard wasn't using
those metrics to determine which kids to admit. Could (or still might) cost Harvard a lot of
money. :-s
But here's the thing, if you don't use standardized test scores as part of your admission
process, well, guess what, you can't be sued as easily for recruiting/admitting whoever you
want.
This opens up the door to going after students from richer families who can actually pay
full price. Who really cares about test scores anyway when your budget is on the line?
L LEONARDO ROSENFELD SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Mr. Kessler touches on a dozen examples of what
he sees as liberals disincentiving merit in favor of mediocrity. What he seems to ignore is the
fact that most people who have been successful in life have had some help along the way,
whether through the privilege of their parents, a high-quality education (afforded to those who
can pay for it through private school or living in expensive suburbs), or another form of
support (connections, etc.). If you want to see more children grow up to be successful and get
to fulfill their own version of the American dream, then recognize that our society is not
equal and that the American experience is not the same for everyone.
The initiatives Kessler cited are far from perfect, but at least they're acknowledging that
there is a problem that continues to grow with each decade as income inequality becomes more
extreme. Maybe this isn't a problem for you, Mr. Kessler, but it is for many others who work
hard and still cannot get ahead.
G Greg Barry SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago I will agree with those challenging "American
exceptionalism" in as much as I believe that we will enjoy no special protection from our bad
decisions. Take a look at historical examples of what embracing class warfare and mediocrity
yeild on a societal scale, and you have a window into our possible future. Like thumb_up
3 Share link Report flag
J Juan Vega SUBSCRIBER 1 month ago Mediocrity and the pursuit of what is trivial and
irrelevant. Never in the history of the world has a great nation chosen to commit self
immolation by become deaf, dumb, and blind.
However, to those that think that they have won the recent events are not unlike when
Churchill was confronting the reality of Nazi Germany after Dunkirk when members of his own
party were trying to convince him to surrender and negotiate. Those of us that look beyond the
horizon of the next few years realize that now is definitely the time to stand.
I thought that as smart as the left was in orchestrating the electoral coup they need to see
that it did wake a sleeping giant of 75 million that went out and voted. We do not need Trump
to keep the dream of a free, fair, and proud America. Freedom is in this nation's blood and
soul.
Many of the 80plus million already see the mistake and how they we lied to. Hunter Biden's
thievery is true. Catholics that voted for Biden will see him as a hypocrite.
Vrettos: 1. We're waiting to see how the rhetoric of the new Biden administration will play
out in actual policies.
Hudson: Biden's long political career has been right-wing. He's the senator from Delaware,
the country's most pro-corporate state – which is why most U.S. corporations are
incorporated there. As such, he represents the banking and credit-card industry. He sponsored
the regressive bankruptcy "reform" written and put into his hands by the credit-card companies.
As a budget hawk, he's rejected MMT, and also "Medicare for all" as if it is too expensive for
the government to afford – thereby making the private sector afford to pay 18% of US GDP
for health-insurance monopolies.
Hardly by surprise, Biden has chosen cabinet members as corporate lobbyists, including the
new Secretary of Defense. And on February 9 he invited Jamie Dimon and other business leaders
to the White House and asked them what they recommended. These billionaires said that they
didn't need $1.400, so why should anyone else? They pretended that spending money might cause
inflation – yet we are in the midst of debt deflation and falling disposable income for
most families.
Biden's prejudices are why the Democratic National Committee pushed him as their candidate
over Sanders, and why Rep. Jim Clyburn made his pharmaceutical industry backers happy by
pushing Biden over the top in South Carolina, delivering the black vote in that state's big
primary.
What amazes me is the ability to attract this vote despite the degree to which Biden has
sponsored legislation that hurts blacks and other minorities: his cutbacks in welfare spending,
his anti-crime laws falling mainly on the black community, his bankruptcy laws, and of course
his denial of universal public medical care to that part of the population with the highest
death rates, shortest lifespans and worst medical care.
He has tried to cover up this history by appointing Neera Tanden as head of the budget,
claiming that she's a progressive presumably simply because she's non-white. Yet she's a
leading opponent of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All proposals.
V: In our polarized economy, wages have stagnated since 1971 – home ownership rates
have fallen as foreclosures, evictions and homelessness have jumped dramatically during the
2020-2021 Covid pandemic.
The big decline in home ownership was the result of Obama's double-crossing his campaign
promises by bailing out the banks and leaving all the junk-mortgage debts and other fraudulent
loans on the books. This led to foreclosures and evictions of about 9 million American
families, most of them Hispanic and black. Home ownership rates plunged from 68 to 61 percent
of the population (an enormous and rapid 10% drop).
The covid epidemic is leading to enormous arrears mounting up – for renters and for
mortgage debtors. Evictions have been suspended by moratoriums that expire in March or April,
and unpaid mortgages have been added onto later due dates (with appropriate penalties making
this remunerative for the banks).
So the question is whether Biden can outdo Obama in reducing U.S. home ownership rates by
another 10% -- say, to just 56% of the population.
Let's look at what could be done – today and a decade ago. Obama and Biden COULD have
written down the junk mortgages to realistic market prices (and thrown the mortgage brokers and
bankers in jail for fraud). Instead, they supported the fraudsters against the voters who had
been promised "hope and change." Most of the millions of foreclosed homes were bought by
absentee owners and turned into rental property. Companies such as Blackstone were major
players. The evicted families entered the rent market – and U.S. rent charges have
soared. So consumer income has been spent much more on real estate, finance and insurance than
for goods and services.
V: It's most severe and unstable at the bottom of the housing market where tenants who have
lost jobs have amassed $11 billion in rental arrears -- a broader measure which includes all
delinquent renters puts the number at $53 billion.
There are two kinds of results. The first will be an enormous accrual of back-rent debts and
mortgage arrears to be paid off. For commercial businesses such as restaurants, these arrears
are so large that they probably will choose to go out of business rather than paying all the
profits for the next few years to their landlords.
Unless these debts are written down, most of the population is too debt-strapped to buy
goods and services. So corporate profits can come only from rising prices, or getting
government subsidy,
A second result is going to be a rise in homelessness in many cities. Entire camps of
evictees will be forming in tents, perhaps in the major parks – or on the subways as in
the past.
Many properties will be sold – yet housing prices are still rising.
V: What are some of the specific racial effects of this housing and job crisis, what's been
the Bidden administration's response so far and how does this relate to your own work on racial
reparations measures?
The low rates of black home ownership reflect a vicious history of red-lining. Limiting the
areas where non-whites can buy has gone together with charging much higher interest rates than
white buyers receive.
Housing is the basic criterion for joining the middle class. And for a century, blacks were
excluded, not only by banks but from the government mortgage-insurance programs dating from
FDR's reforms in the 1930s. That's what made black buyers "more risky" and hence charged higher
interest rates.
I grew up in Hyde Park, in Chicago. The University of Chicago and its property management
companies were among the worst abusers. For them, a "free market" meant a market free of
blacks. But in the late 1950s they saw that they could do "block busting," that is, selling a
home in a white neighborhood to a black buyer. This panicked the neighboring owners, who sold
their homes. The buyers were largely the speculators, who flipped them to black buyers at
marked-up prices.
That happened on my block, on 48th and Dorchester, a block from where Obama has bought his
home. Once a few houses had changed hands, Mayor Daley condemned the block. My house was torn
down, as were others, and the land is not gentrified.
To put the issue in perspective, think of the situation in 1945. That is when the great
increase in middle-class wealth – today's middle-class net worth – took off. It was
limited to white people, because they were the only people who qualified for the great increase
in net worth created by the house-price boom over the past 75 years.
The norm was that banks limited their mortgages to a level that would absorb up to 25% of a
buyer's salary. The buyer would get a self-amortizing mortgage, to be paid off in 30 years free
and clear. This limit on debt leveraging kept housing affordable.
You and I have spoken about the issue of black reparations before. It's very hard to pay
reparations for slavery, because the enslaved families have died long ago. The reparations need
to be paid to the living – and after all, it's the living blacks who remain injured.
There is one way to make the black population economically as resilient as the white
population has been. That is to give it the same deal that created most white middle-class
wealth. The government should buy or build homes – private homes, just like white
neighborhoods, not public housing. They should offer buyers the same deal that was given in
1945. Any black family would be given a home, with a mortgage of 25% of the household head's
income, to be amortized over 30 years.
Suppose the black buyer earns the minimum wage, or about $25,000 a year. Then 25% of this
would be $6,250 – just about $500 a month. Over 30 years, the buyer would pay $187,500
– much of it in interest, guaranteed by the FHA.
As a practical political matter, of course, such a windfall would have to be offered to all
Americans across the board. Hispanics and white poor would qualify.
That is the only way to create economic resilience of a class that has been excluded on
racial lines, and which remains excluded today.
Without special subsidy of this sort, there cannot be any serious talk of equality. Minority
buyers were the great victims of the junk-mortgage run-up and the Obama evictions.
V: In a recent N.Y. Times piece, David Leonhardt raises the question of why the U.S. economy
has fared so much better under Democratic presidents than Republicans?
In fact, he argues the gap is "startlingly large" when one measures annual growth rate, Gross
Domestic Product growth rate, jobs, incomes, productivity -- even stock prices.
Well, the New York Times has been the leader in "fake news," not least for its support of
real estate and financial interests, and of the Democratic Party.
The focus on growth rates as measured by GDP is a travesty of reality. Since 2008, GDP for
95% of Americans has actually declined. We are still in the Obama Depression – that was
the state of affairs when the covid-19 crisis hit. Pavlina Tcherneva at the Levy Institute at
Bard College has produced the statistics.
When debtors fall behind and have to pay penalty interest rates to banks and credit card
companies, this is counted as an "increase in GDP," classified as "financial services." As if
the banks are providing a service by charging higher fees to indigent debtors who are unable to
keep current on their living costs.
About 7% of GDP is hypothetical "homeowners rental value" – what homeowners would have
to pay themselves if they rented out their homes to themselves as tenants. As rents have risen
(largely by absentee owners who bought homes that were foreclosed), this increases GDP. It
leaves out minority owners, whose home ownership rate is much lower than that of whites.
What The New York Times and others looking at GDP leave out of account is how unequal the
distribution of wealth and income have become since 2008, and indeed since the 1980s.
Economists are now talking about a K-shaped recovery: up for owners of stocks and bonds (about
One Percent of the population owns something like 80 percent of these securities), and real
estate. But wage earners are being squeezed. The "recovery" is not a recovery for them. It's a
boom for the wealthy, for the rentier class, mainly in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
(FIRE) sector.
That sector is the main audience for The New York Times. And most of the Democratic Party's
donor class comes from the FIRE sector. Despite this, the Democratic success at identity
politics has created a political situation in which only the Democrats can enact anti-labor and
anti-black policies, because their politicians are able to deliver the labor and black
votes.
I don't see how there can be real progress unless the Democratic Party is replaced, at least
with the DNC leadership that has turned its politics into demagogy. Its identity politics is
based on every identity except being a wage-earner.
V: Central to Biden and America's neoliberal vision of world order is an economic philosophy
of privatization and financialization. How do you think this will play itself out in the Biden
administration's foreign and economic policy of military spending and arms sales and use of
military threats and force if necessary, to enforce U. S. international dominance and
technological hegemony?
Biden has spent his career defending the financial sector, and its leading policy is to
privatize basic infrastructure. That means blocking governments from providing basic services
at cost or on a subsidized basis – education, health care, roads and communications. Yet
that is how America became the leading industrial economy from the late 19th century onward.
Financialization and privatization have left it a high-cost economy, uncompetitive in world
markets. that is why the economy is de-industrialized.
Privatized and financialized economies are high-cost. America spends 18% of its GDP on
health care – far more than any other country. And then there is the military budget. A
year ago January, Biden wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in January 2020 promising that his
incoming "foreign policy agenda will place the United States at the head of the table."
So what is he going to lead? He's already said that he's not going to negotiate with Iran,
but to keep the Trump administration policies in place. He's appointed neocon hawks to
leadership positions, especially Victoria Nuland and other anti-Russians. Biden seems to want
to use sanctions to isolate countries he sees as rivals or enemies – which is turning out
to be a rising share of the world's population, from Russia and China to Venezuela and
Iran.
The reality is that the United States is isolating itself! It is trying to block Europe from
importing Russian gas, and insisting on U.S. IT monopolies directed against China. And Biden
has as little respect for treaties as Trump had – that's why he's retaining Trump's
withdrawal from the Iran deal.
Even if Biden makes a new treaty, Congress would have to approve it. But Congress has
remained firm that no foreign countries can set policy for the United States. It therefore
insists on not subjecting itself to any international rule of law not drawn up by its own
political donors.
The looming global fracture is becoming a fight against the most basic organizing principles
of economies throughout history. All successful economies have been mixed. And to promote
survival and prosperity, it is necessary to subordinate private gain-seeking to public
objectives benefitting the 99 Percent, not just the One Percent.
That isn't Biden's policy or any other Democratic or Republican policy.
V: You see a basic conflict between financialized rentier economies and democratic-socialist
ones that seek to promote public objectives benefiting the 99 percent, not just the one
percent.
Privatized economies are high-cost economies. This is mainly because basic infrastructure is
a natural monopoly: roads and other transport, communications, the post office. When they are
privatized, they are run for a profit – consisting mainly of monopoly rent, over and
above normal profits, plus capital gains as these rentier claims are capitalized into stocks
and bonds at rising prices.
The policy of American industrial capitalism in the 19th century is the same as that of
socialism: to minimize the cost of living and doing business. Privatization is largely
responsible for de-industrializing the U.S. economy. While leaving 95 or 99 percent of the
population to stagnate, it has been a bonanza for the 5 to 1 percent.
V: Could you expand on what you mean by that conflict and where you see the Biden
administration heading on it?
The conflict often is put by juxtaposing Wall Street to Main Street – that is, the
FIRE sector to the industrial goods-and-services economy. Wall Street's objective is to
increase wealth. This is done largely by capital gains, not by hiring workers to produce more
goods and services – such investment is done mainly abroad by today's multinational
firms.
V: How does the $1.9 trillion stimulus aid package fit into this debate?
I don't think you should call it a "stimulus." It's disaster relief. The idea is to catch
up. The aim should be to at least put the economy back where it was before – that is,
still in the Obama Depression.
What WAS a "stimulus" was the $6 to $8 trillion created by the Federal Reserve to buy stocks
and bond, including junk bonds, to fuel the Wall Street boom. That is the essence of the
K-shaped recovery. Rising prices for wealth, falling wages and net disposable income for living
labor, after deducting the payments to the FIRE sector that families have to pay off the top
– rent and debts, medical insurance contributions, FICA paycheck withholding (the most
regressive tax), and monthly payments to privatized utility monopolies.
The $1.9 trillion checks of $1,400 or $2,00 actually should be sent out monthly, not part
time. Europe pays its laid-off work force 80 percent of their normal wages, so that they will
not be plowed under by the covid shutdowns.
V: There's profound disagreement about how to handle increased bankruptcies here and in
Europe.
Biden himself is largely responsible for the bankruptcy problem. He was the politician who
steered the regressive bankruptcy reform through Congress, making it harder for low-income
families to wipe out their debts – and making it impossible to wipe out student debt
through bankruptcy.
In that sense, he "owes" it to the economy to make up for his opportunistic water-carrying
for his campaign backers in corporate-run Delaware.
Will he do it? Can he do it? He's a deficit hawk, and has appointed deficit hawks such as
Neera Tanden to his cabinet. He also promised that "nothing will change." This is just how the
Obama administration was run (demagogically running on a slogan of "hope and change"). So will
Biden be Trump 2.0 or Obama 3.0? It really doesn't matter much. Because both Obama and Biden
were basically Republicans running with a different ethnic profile for the voters that they
delivered to their campaign contributors.
V: Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings in the U.S. rose in the third quarter to the highest level
since the 2010 financial crisis. In the last week 900,000 Americans have filed new unemployment
claims.
John Williams' Shadow Statistics puts the real unemployment rate at 20 percent. Many people
have dropped out of the work force, as no jobs are available, at least, no jobs for them.
The rent moratorium has enabled many unemployed or low-income workers to remain in their
homes. If they're evicted and become homeless, how can they work? The real crisis is scheduled
to fall in March and April. Small businesses such as restaurants and stores will give up and
close.
V: Europe has been more receptive in extending national programs to keep troubled businesses
afloat, but there too a sharp debate exists as to whether a strategy of protecting businesses
and workers "at all costs" will cement a recovery or whether it will leave economies less
competitive and more dependent on government aid when the pandemic recedes.
Europe and other countries are trying to avoid disaster. U.S. policy is to see disaster as
an opportunity. It's easier to make fortunes in a disaster than in normal times, at least if
you are wealthy, liquid and have access to bank credit to buy up distressed businesses and
properties.
The aim of Europe – and of economies through the ages – has been to provide
resilience. That is what is missing here. The doctrine of "individual responsibility" is a
euphemism for letting the financial classes take control of economic and social planning. And
their objective is their own self-enrichment, not that of economies as a whole.
What is it that can be "recovered"? To most politicians, it means that creditors – the
economy's top One Percent – can "recover" the money that is owed to them by the indebted
99 Percent.
In Europe's system of parliamentary politics, third parties can arise to promote a social
policy of economic resilience. That isn't possible in the United States, because of the
two-party duopoly. Duopolies resolve themselves into monopolies, which is what we really have
today: pro-Wall Street and anti-labor, pro-creditor and anti-debtor.
Thanks for alerting me to the
new Hudson item : "The Democrats Role in Distracting with Identity Politics," which is
far more about economics that ID politics. An outtake:
"The looming global fracture is becoming a fight against the most basic organizing
principles of economies throughout history. All successful economies have been mixed. And to
promote survival and prosperity, it is necessary to subordinate private gain-seeking to
public objectives benefitting the 99 Percent, not just the One Percent....
"The policy of American industrial capitalism in the 19th century is the same as that of
socialism: to minimize the cost of living and doing business. Privatization is largely
responsible for de-industrializing the U.S. economy. While leaving 95 or 99 percent of the
population to stagnate, it has been a bonanza for the 5 to 1 percent....
"I don't think you should call it [the $1.9 Trillion] a 'stimulus.' It's disaster
relief . The idea is to catch up. The aim should be to at least put the economy back
where it was before – that is, still in the Obama Depression.
"What WAS a 'stimulus' was the $6 to $8 trillion created by the Federal Reserve to buy
stocks and bond, including junk bonds, to fuel the Wall Street boom. That is the essence of
the K-shaped recovery. Rising prices for wealth, falling wages and net disposable income for
living labor, after deducting the payments to the FIRE sector that families have to pay off
the top – rent and debts, medical insurance contributions, FICA paycheck withholding
(the most regressive tax), and monthly payments to privatized utility monopolies.
"The $1.9 trillion checks of $1,400 or $2,00 actually should be sent out monthly, not part
time. Europe pays its laid-off work force 80 percent of their normal wages, so that they will
not be plowed under by the covid shutdowns." [My Emphasis]
And there's much more. Hudson sees the real crisis as yet to come, and warns not to expect
any help from Biden as many of the bad policies now in place were his doing. One thing is
clear: Europeans won't suffer much at all compared with the Outlaw US Empire's citizens. The
Obama/COVID-Trump Great Depression will only involve one nation, although it will certainly
try to blame others for its failed policies; and given its great immaturity, might even end
humanity in a fit of pique.
What the hell is 'inclusivity' and how is that a principle?
I know what ethics is. And I know what fairness is. It means in meritocratic competition,
let the best person win. Don't favor someone based on family, color, or some such.
But what is this baby talk of 'inclusivity'? Doesn't fairness cover the rules of
acceptance or inclusion on the basis of qualification? The principle of fairness dictates
that one's admission into an industry or institution is incumbent on one's qualification and
ability.
By adding 'inclusivity' to the equation, it suggests that some people should be 'included'
despite lack of ability because what? They happen to be black, and that's qualification
enough?
Fairness means entry by qualification. 'Inclusivity' implies entry by something other than
qualification. Thus, it is not fair and undermines the very foundation of principles.
Btw, 'inclusivity' seems to apply mostly to blacks. I mean, NO ONE talks about how the NYT
should include a Palestinian American columnist or how the White House should hire some Arabs
sympathetic to Palestinians. And it's perfectly fine to suppress BDS, and it's never a
problem when there are TOO MANY JEWS. Or TOO MANY BLACKS. NBA is hardly diverse. It's mostly
black and lack diversity, but no one complains about how it should 'include' more non-blacks.
No one gripes about TOO MANY JEWS in Biden's administration.
Jews talk about Diversity, but they don't want diversity of opinions in NYT columns. How
many Palestinian-American columnists did NYT feature?
Some of New York's most prominent female Republicans derided and mocked Speaker Nancy
Pelosi's proposal to
eliminate gendered language from the official House rules.
"Instead of reviving the economy, restoring our Constitutional freedoms and delivering
results for the American people, Speaker Pelosi has chosen her debut legislation -- which would
ban words like mother, sister and daughter," upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik told The Post.
"Obviously she is triggered by the historic number of GOP women elected to Congress who will
fire Nancy Pelosi once and for all in 2022."
Staten Island's Congresswoman-elect Nicole Malliotakis also had words for the new rules.
"There are millions of Americans suffering, our economy is hurting, vaccine distribution is
lagging and Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats are worried about this nonsense," she said.
"Here's a gender neutral word to describe this legislation: ridiculous."
Proposed changes to the rules of the House of Representatives would "honor all gender
identities" by eliminating such specific terms as mother and father, son and daughter, and aunt
and uncle.
Instead, only gender-neutral terms such as "parent," "child," "sibling" and "parent's
sibling" would be allowed in the text of the House rules.
Outrage even made its way to the all-important Georgia Senate runoff, where Republican
Kelly
Loeffer warned it was reason enough to vote for her.
"The far-left's priorities, everyone. If you'd like to still be able to call yourself a
father, daughter, mother or son, vote for me and @Perduesenate on Tuesday," she tweeted
Saturday, adding, "Sincerely, A Proud Daughter."
Meanwhile, top Dems in Congress took credit for the new regulations.
"I'm proud to start the 117th Congress by drafting these historic rules changes," Rep. Jim
McGovern said in a tweet.
However both Pelosi and McGovern continue to use gendered terms to describe themselves on
their respective Twitter pages Saturday.
The new rules are expected to be voted on when the house reconvenes Sunday.
The rules also got a big boost from progressive Queens/Bronx Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
who said she
was "grateful for@RepMcGovern's leadership" during the process.
One Capitol Hill insider told The Post the idea for nixing gender from the new rules package
likely originated in the House's Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The same rules also
enshrined the office as a permanent new addition to the Capitol.
The agency was created by Democrats in one of their first acts at the start of the previous
Congress.
"This office is charged with submitting to Congress a diversity plan to direct and guide
House employing offices to recruit, hire, train, develop, advance, promote, and retain a
diverse workforce," reads its official about page .
Is this site really starting down this path? Isn't identity politics precisely the red
herring that will divert debate from real questions like the division of labour,
financialisation, consequences of economic and military imperialism and the question of the
future of the late capitalist West? Let's leave this one in the way-too-hard-basket as the
distraction it is.
Who are these people on opposite sides of the barricades?. Would the analogs
from past conflicts supposed to be the same as the root , recognize one another in
the modern context. Marxism was a pseudo religion, with blessings from the self declared
intellectuals of the day, and that is what gave then a degree of cohesion. yes many were Jews
which added another element of clan to the glue. Today, the WOKE religion and it's blessing
by those who would put this academic vanguard in charge, provide the unit cohesion for the
left. The poor and economic class warfare nonsense is kicked to the curb in the new left side
of the barricade. They fight for their "side", their clan, and the spiritual core of it is of
little consequence practically, but listen to their "I hate Ignorant Trump wall mart
deplorables" talk coming from those who embrace corporate and even foreign interests, without
a twinge of irony. The root enemy from a theoretical level, are the university lefties who
are hungry for the rest of us to recognize their wisdom and put them in charge where they
belong. There we have it. Same as 1917 in Russia and Germany in the street. Their graduates
seek to wear the mantle of learned and wise as their teachers. Go to the streets of Madison
and Ann Arbor and observe BLM and Antifa, see their afinity to WOKism and their teachers.
"It's the height of hypocrisy for people who claim to be the champions of rights for women
to deny the very biological existence of women," former Democratic presidential candidate
Tulsi Gabbard, who just might be the last Democrat in DC with a functioning brain, told
Tucker Carlson. "Instead of doing something that could actually help save people's lives,
they are choosing instead to say 'You can't say mother or father.'"
I would ask for an 'Amen!' at this point, but, thanks to the clown work of lawmaker
Emanuel Cleaver, who ended his congressional prayer opening of the very unsexy 117th
Congress with the words "amen and awoman," even that simple gender-free term (which simply
means 'so be it') is now tainted with foul political intrigue.
With these sort of unforgivable stunts under the belt, the Democrats should be very
grateful they have perfected the art of 'winning' elections, otherwise they would probably
vanish from the political landscape simply out of lack of doing anything positive for the
nation. Indeed, the term 'Democrat' may be on the way out faster than that of 'male' and
'female.'
A lot of talk here but no really effective strategy or tactics. Here is something that
might well work.
Larry Fink, do know him? You should,, you REALLY should.
Larry Fink heads Blackrock Investments. This firm has a massive $7.6 trillions of dollars
in investments. Fink is also the one person who was most responsible for successfully pushing
"wokeness" onto our present day American corporations.
Fink is the absolute czar of "wokeness". He is probably the biggest reason for American
corporations caving into this new trend.
He did this by first threatening to remove these corporations' heads using his massive
influence, (based his firm's stock ownership in these firms) on the companies' boards of
directors. If this threat failed to work he then threatened to dump Blackrock's massive
holding of these companies' stocks, thereby potentially crashing their stock prices.
Fink's tactics proved to be VERY effective. Virtually every US corporation folded under
such an onslaught. Then, these craven cowards were pressured to prove their newborn fealty
to"wokeness" by, among other things, financially supporting "woke" groups like Black Lives
Matter and The Antidefamation League and contributing additional funds to Democrat
politicians while also lightening up in their support to "unwoke" Republican candidates.
Blackrock has mutual funds and ETFs (exchange trade funds) that many UNZ readers might
own. "Ishares" are probably the best known ones. No patriot should hold any security
controlled by Blackrock. Boycott Blackrock. Fight back by hitting them in the pocketbook.
Here is a list of Blackrock investment funds. Go through it carefully. Do you own any of
these? If so, dump them and tell your friends to do likewise.
Agree, here is what Nathan Rothschild infamously said, I care not what puppet is placed on
the throne of England to rule the empire, for the man who controls the money supply controls
the British Empire and I control the British money supply.It is the same here in America.
The zionists who own the FED control America and until the FED is abolished nothing will
change, wars and debt all coming from the zionist owned FED.
Recommend the book The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed, it can be had on amazon, and
also recommend reading The Protocols of Zion.
That's the essence of identify politics. The key idea is put various groups at each other
throat so that neoliberal oligarchs are safe. If you do not understand this you understand
nothing...
Journalist Matt Taibbi joined Hill.TV's "Rising" on Thursday and suggested that partisan
media circles resulted in echo chambers that have left many Americans without factual, reliable
sources of information.
Taibbi told hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol
grounds on Wednesday were victims of misinformation and conspiracy theories resulting from
these echo chambers.
"We have two basically conflicting media ecosystems...and what ends up happening when people
get an uninterrupted stream of information of this type for long enough, is they just
completely lose their ability to assess situations rationally, and they will eventually lash
out," Taibbi said.
Partisan media sources, Taibbi added, are driving "different groups to hate each other."
Leaders in the House of Representatives announced on Friday a rules package for the 117th
Congress that includes a proposal to use " gender -inclusive language" and eliminate gendered
terms such as "'father, mother, son, daughter," and more.
James McGovern (D-Mass.) speaks during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 21,
2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Terms to be struck from clause 8(c)(3) of
rule XXIII , the House's Code of Official Conduct, as outlined in the proposed rules (
pdf
), include "father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew,
niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law,
brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother,
stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, [and] granddaughter."
Such terms would be replaced with "parent, child, sibling, parent's sibling, first cousin,
sibling's child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild,
stepsibling, half-sibling, [and] grandchild."
According to the proposed rules, "seamen" would be replaced with "seafarers," and "Chairman"
would be replaced with "Chair" in Rule X of the House.
... ... ...
The rules package will be introduced and voted on once the new Congress convenes.
bloostar 1 hour ago remove link
What gender was the pig's head? Is it correct to refer to it as a pig?
researchfix 1 hour ago
Well, my father and mother are dead already. So they will never know, that they are not my
father and mother.
Al Gophilia 1 hour ago
These idiots should no longer be honorably idenified with the noun Represtenative.
judgement put 29 minutes ago
Actually, 'repressed-tentative' isn't so bad.
Ms No PREMIUM 1 hour ago
I think it was Lenin that said "The last enemy of Marxism is the family"
Et Tu Brute 1 hour ago (Edited)
When politicians cannot deliver a $2K stimulus that affects 30%+ of the population but
have time to promote laws representing the interest of less than 0.6%* but still affecting
the over 95% who do or will have a family, you know it's not just a matter of ineffective
governance and culture wars, it is deliberate Psychological Warfare, coordinated through
Mainstream Media, aimed at dividing and demoralising the population.
"*******" is an appropriate non-gendered term referring to all the Democrats in
Congress.
St. TwinkleToes 1 hour ago
So now we're supposed to appease 1% of the population who are gender confused freaks by
removing thousands of years of family relationships?
RocketPride PREMIUM 1 hour ago remove link
Democratic Congress continues to endear themselves to true American values. F-ing idiots,
I hope they are all voted out in 2022
sgt_doom 1 hour ago remove link
On Dominion voting machines?????
sgt_doom 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Exactly why there should be laws against geriatric dementia-suffering twits who once were
financially connected to Saddam Hussein in congress.
The twitch Pelosi wants to destroy the family unit: Job #1 of the Maoist agenda!
Itinerant 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
Just look at how much they are improving the world, fueling inclusive economic growth
!!!
In France they've already moved to force you to fill in parent1 and parent2 instead of
mother and father.
Medical Experts are now saying that boy/girl should be removed from birth certificates as
clinically irrelevant.
Right, no need to check for descended testicles or abdominal hernia in little boys, or
anything else.
What you circumcise, may as well be your thumb, right?
I just had an operation on my testicle, of course it is clinically irrelevant to find the
right doctor for anything to do with your prostrate or testicles, or any gynecological
issues, for that matter.
We are going insane ... we are already in the lemmings rushing to the cliff stage.
There was a very specific plan in development since at least the mid-1970s by the Ivy
League fraternity secret society set (their right hand in action is the CIA so I usually just
refer to that organization for rhetorical shorthand). This plan was to finally bury the
threat of communism in the imperial heartlands by redefining to the population that conflict
in society is an identity issue rather than one of conflicting interests of socioeconomic
classes. This plan was going to be a massive multi-channel, multi-media affair involving
every aspect of contemporary culture. Sports, literature, music, movies and TV shows,
classroom content, workplace cultures, and of course political discourse all would be guided
to lead to this capitalist Utopia of a population fixated on their personal perceived
socially constructed non-class identities.
Of course, this project has been in development for some time now and those developing it
knew it would take decades to implement. That implementation process started its roll out at
the turn of the Millennium with accelerated changes in mass media products intended to soften
up the population. The changes were intended to transition from a largely media push to
tangible impacts on the broader population with the 2008 elections, accompanied by
over-the-top fanfare surrounding America electing its first woman president. This was to be
followed by a drumbeat of elections (and accompanying mass media priming of the population)
in which successive under-represented populations get represented. After Clinton's victory in
2008 gave cultural "representation" to women then in 2016 Black Americans would get
their "representation" by Obama, followed in 2024 with LGBTQXYZ identifying people
achieving "representation" with Butt-gig in the White House. With that America would
have finally arrived at the "End of History" and achieved the perfection of capitalist
culture.
Of course these plans went to shit because they are based upon the retarded nonsense
notion that capitalist culture can be perfected, which is patently absurd to anyone who
actually understands how capitalism works (Marxists, for instance). Obama was just supposed
to be getting his debut to national audiences like a political debutante at a kind of
national debutante ball in order to prepare for being installed in the presidency in 2016, in
exactly the same way that Butt-gig was debuted in 2016 for his/its installation in 2024.
Obama was scripted to sound rash and radical in 2008, which his image managers in the CIA
felt would sink in his chances for victory in 2008. Obama would then spend the intervening
years until his scheduled turn as President in 2016 "maturing" and being cloaked by
the mass media in artificial "gravitas" . In a surprise to the plotters, though, the
voters eagerly embraced the imaginary "radicalism" of Obama and took a pass on
Clinton's bland "maturity" .
The elites firmly believe in the moronic "identity" narrative that they are pushing
and think that they just have to educate and civilize the "deplorables" to bring them
on board with it. As a result these elites who are far less intelligent than they give
themselves credit for totally misinterpreted Obama's success with the voters. They were sure
the voters were demonstrating greater respect for Black people versus women rather than the
voters responding to Obama's more aggressive political rhetoric and promise of Single
Payer.
Well, the CIA's cultural engineering plan had some flexibility so they swapped Obama for
Clinton and moved Clinton's presidential installation date up to 2016. In the meantime,
though, Clinton had to be kept in the public eye so she could run again in 2016. Even more
important was that Clinton had already been brought up to speed on the empire's covert
"ratline" and "ratfucking" operations around the world and they needed someone
who already knew the script to handle the public relations side of those ops (Obama was still
too green at the time). Since the US State Department is nowadays nothing more than an
appendage to the CIA but with a high-profile public face, the Secretary of State was the
obvious place to plant Clinton.
Of course, Clinton losing in 2008 was a bit unsettling for the plotters. They thought they
had it set up just right. They were not willing to take any chances in 2016. To make
absolutely certain that Clinton won this time they frauded the DNC primaries to clear the
field on the left and cleared the right by making sure the most ludicrous buffoon running (in
their own perception) got that side's nomination.
Here is where their failure to comprehend Clinton's loss in 2008 came back to bite them.
Completely counter to all the bad analyses by the miseducated morons in their stink tanks and
newsrooms and boardrooms, the voters actually voted on issues rather than identity :
End war and create jobs.
[Aside: The Post Trump Stress Disorder victims will shriek in their typical
hysterical way and with ALL CAPS "But... but Trump never intended to do those things! I
know that because I am psychotic... uh, I mean psychic!" . It doesn't matter what Trump
intended to do. He was simply the only candidate in the general election to even pay lip
service to real issues and so he was the only one for the "deplorables" to vote
for.]
"Deplorables" are too stupid to vote on issues, aren't they? It is all just emotion
and knee-jerk behavior for them, in the elites perspective. The establishment had those sides
of things sewn up, so what could possibly have gone wrong? It must have been the
Russians!
In any case, that is why Clinton had to be installed at the top of the US State Department
in 2008. It might sound complicated but it is really quite straight forward.
There was a very specific plan in development since at least the mid-1970s by the Ivy
League fraternity secret society set (their right hand in action is the CIA so I usually just
refer to that organization for rhetorical shorthand). This plan was to finally bury the
threat of communism in the imperial heartlands by redefining to the population that conflict
in society is an identity issue rather than one of conflicting interests of socioeconomic
classes. This plan was going to be a massive multi-channel, multi-media affair involving
every aspect of contemporary culture. Sports, literature, music, movies and TV shows,
classroom content, workplace cultures, and of course political discourse all would be guided
to lead to this capitalist Utopia of a population fixated on their personal perceived
socially constructed non-class identities.
Of course, this project has been in development for some time now and those developing it
knew it would take decades to implement. That implementation process started its roll out at
the turn of the Millennium with accelerated changes in mass media products intended to soften
up the population. The changes were intended to transition from a largely media push to
tangible impacts on the broader population with the 2008 elections, accompanied by
over-the-top fanfare surrounding America electing its first woman president. This was to be
followed by a drumbeat of elections (and accompanying mass media priming of the population)
in which successive under-represented populations get represented. After Clinton's victory in
2008 gave cultural "representation" to women then in 2016 Black Americans would get
their "representation" by Obama, followed in 2024 with LGBTQXYZ identifying people
achieving "representation" with Butt-gig in the White House. With that America would
have finally arrived at the "End of History" and achieved the perfection of capitalist
culture.
Of course these plans went to shit because they are based upon the retarded nonsense
notion that capitalist culture can be perfected, which is patently absurd to anyone who
actually understands how capitalism works (Marxists, for instance). Obama was just supposed
to be getting his debut to national audiences like a political debutante at a kind of
national debutante ball in order to prepare for being installed in the presidency in 2016, in
exactly the same way that Butt-gig was debuted in 2016 for his/its installation in 2024.
Obama was scripted to sound rash and radical in 2008, which his image managers in the CIA
felt would sink his chances for victory in 2008. Obama would then spend the intervening years
until his scheduled turn as President in 2016 "maturing" and being cloaked by the mass
media in artificial "gravitas" . In a surprise to the plotters, though, the voters
eagerly embraced the imaginary "radicalism" of Obama and took a pass on Clinton's
bland "maturity" .
The elites firmly believe in the moronic "identity" narrative that they are pushing
and think that they just have to educate and civilize the "deplorables" to bring them
on board with it. As a result these elites who are far less intelligent than they give
themselves credit for totally misinterpreted Obama's success with the voters. They were sure
the voters were demonstrating greater respect for Black people versus women rather than the
voters responding to Obama's more aggressive political rhetoric and promise of Single
Payer.
Well, the CIA's cultural engineering plan had some flexibility so they swapped Obama for
Clinton and moved Clinton's presidential installation date up to 2016. In the meantime,
though, Clinton had to be kept in the public eye so she could run again in 2016. Even more
important was that Clinton had already been brought up to speed on the empire's covert
"ratline" and "ratfucking" operations around the world and they needed someone
who already knew the script to handle the public relations side of those ops (Obama was still
too green at the time). Since the US State Department is nowadays nothing more than an
appendage to the CIA but with a high-profile public face, the Secretary of State was the
obvious place to plant Clinton.
Of course, Clinton losing in 2008 was a bit unsettling for the plotters. They thought they
had it set up just right. They were not willing to take any chances in 2016. To make
absolutely certain that Clinton won this time they frauded the DNC primaries to clear the
field on the left and cleared the right by making sure the most ludicrous buffoon running (in
their own perception) got that side's nomination.
Here is where their failure to comprehend Clinton's loss in 2008 came back to bite them.
Completely counter to all the bad analyses by the miseducated morons in their stink tanks and
newsrooms and boardrooms, the voters actually voted on issues rather than identity :
End war and create jobs.
[Aside: The Post Trump Stress Disorder victims will shriek in their typical
hysterical way and with ALL CAPS "But... but Trump never intended to do those things! I
know that because I am psychotic... uh, I mean psychic!" . It doesn't matter what Trump
intended to do. He was simply the only candidate in the general election to even pay lip
service to real issues and so he was the only one for the "deplorables" to vote
for.]
"Deplorables" are too stupid to vote on issues, aren't they? It is all just emotion
and knee-jerk behavior for them, in the elites perspective. The establishment had those sides
of things sewn up, so what could possibly have gone wrong? It must have been the
Russians!
In any case, that is why Clinton had to be installed at the top of the US State Department
in 2008. It might sound complicated but it is really quite straight forward.
Even with direct and damning evidence, it is too late to expect the directors of major
media to give up their activist role. They have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the academic
collective. If I were King, academia would be the focus, the place to begin eliciting change
to the very radical and biased directions promoted at these institutions. For decades Che
Guevara, and others of that same ilk, have been heroes to the elitists in higher education.
It is the liberal educators who have embraced the revolutionary agenda, in their minds
finding a warped sense of purpose promoting today's mania of cultural revolution. Notice the
openly Marxist leaders of BLM, and the white, progressive followers. This group is not the
downtrodden seeking to redress wrongs. Many are spoiled rich kids looking for a life, a cause
to believe in, because they have been told they are special. But in the end, they are just
one of many with too much student loan, and a degree in art history which doesn't pay very
well.
BinAnunnaki 4 hours ago
As a Professor at a Tier 1 university. It dawned on me the damage of Critical Race Theory
indoctrination being taught by my colleagues when during a podcast two gender muddled 20 year
olds discussed banning Dr. Seuss from bookstores bc he didn't have people of color in his
stories.
I wanted to grab these two twerps by their necks and scream. Theodore Seuss devoted his
entire life to childhood development. What the foq have you little bastards done to improve
society?
Cancel Culture is their first arrow out of the quiver. By all means blame Academia for
this mess. 40 years of gender, race, and ethnic studies programs.
WorkingClassMan 6 hours ago
I dunno, I for one TOTALLY trust the corporate junkenpresse. They would never lie to me.
When they call Whites racists simply for being White...I believe them! When they tout
"systemic racism," as the cause of all the worlds' ills...I believe them! When they ignore
the astronomical black-on-White murder sprees from year to year and instead focus on the rare
White-on-black killings...I believe them! When they say Trump is the worst thing since
cancer...I believe them!
For the last four years, Americans have become increasingly polarised -- divided between
Democrat crusaders who are determined to save America from becoming a racist, sexist Nazi
dictatorship under Donald Trump, versus Republican crusaders who are determined to save America
from becoming a liberal Marxist state under a Democratic reign.
This fervour has become so extreme that families can no longer meet for the holidays without
a conversational blow-up. No longer are people "entitled to their opinions." This has become a
crusade between Good and Evil. ("I'm good. You're evil.")
The absurd nature of this dichotomy has reached the point that even Dr. Phil is increasing
his viewership by featuring disputes between siblings who are on opposite sides of the
political divide and are no longer speaking to each other.
At this point, all that remains to be done by the networks would be to air a Red versus Blue
television game show in which contestants compete with their own family members to "Win the
White House."
Until November, the great majority of Americans appear to have been hoping that the November
election would end this strife one way or the other.
My take on this has been that the opposite would happen after 3rd November. The fireworks
would increase exponentially after the election. The election would be hotly contested by
whomever was the apparent loser.
This should easily have been foreseen, as the media on the right have insisted for months
that the Democrat encouragement for mail-in ballots was a precursor to election fraud.
Similarly, the media on the left have insisted for months that Donald Trump's suggestion
that he may not accept the election results meant that he was planning a coup after he
(presumably inevitably) lost the election.
It's been estimated that 93% of all Fox watchers are Republicans and 95% of MSNBC watchers
are Democrats. Since neither side watches the other's news programme, each side is cognizant of
only its own team's heavily slanted rhetoric.
The conservative media is awash with details of voter fraud by Democrats, whilst the liberal
media states with equal conviction that Mister Trump and his lawyers have provided no details
whatever.
Therefore, those who voted Republican will conclude by watching their own "unbiased" news
channel that Democrats have tried to steal the election and thereby steal control of the
country.
And those who voted Democrat will conclude by watching their own "unbiased" news channel
that Republicans have tried to steal the election and thereby steal control of the country.
But how did this get to be so bad? Americans have not been so wound up -- nor so polarised
-- since 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War.
Indeed, the post-election fervour is as strong as though Fort Sumter had just been fired
upon.
More importantly, what will be the outcome?
Will the courts rule against the claims of Mister Trump?
If so, that decision will enrage an already angry right-wing crowd, refusing to vacate the
White House and defending it against the pinko mob.
Or will the courts rule in favour of Mister Trump?
If so, that decision will unleash nationwide riots, intent on bringing down the evil
dictator.
Either way, we can anticipate that the US will be in flames. If for any reason the level of
strife is insufficient, those with deep pockets will hire squads of shills as mercenary
soldiers.
The populace will be in terror. Republican voters will beg the federal government to bring
in the troops to contain Antifa and the BLM mob.
Democratic voters will beg the federal government to bring in the troops to quell the
Republican militias.
In such an upheaval, the one thing both sides will have in common is that they will both beg
for the creation of a police state.
And the federal government will answer that call. Martial law would be declared, possibly as
a "temporary measure," until normalcy has returned.
But what if normalcy does not return? What if pockets of violence continue to pop up all
over the map with regularity?
If that occurs, martial law would need to continue for as long as it was deemed necessary,
which would be likely to translate into a permanent police state.
At one time, the media was for the most part impartial and benign, but in recent decades it
has been bought out by four large corporations. And some of those corporations own and direct
both liberal and conservative networks, which would seem to be at odds with each other.
However, they are not. Today, the objective of the media is not to offer news. It is to
create strife -- to pit one half of the electorate against the other. In doing so, the ruling
elite have the justification to lock down the entire USA under martial law.
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Once that has been accomplished, the elite may do as they please. As in all countries where
a police state has been achieved -- such as Nazi Germany, Mao's China or Stalin's Russia --
once military control has been put into place nationwide, meaningful protest ends.
In each of the above cases, the populace was whipped up into a frenzy of hate and violence
against the Jews or the aristocracy or whatever other demon had been invented. But the real
objective and the result were the subjugation of the populace.
At this point, it's not too late for people to stand back, take a deep breath and ask
themselves if they're not being conned into their own subjugation. But it would appear that
they've been wound up so tightly that such objectivity is unlikely to occur.
However, if they do not, they risk losing what remains of their once-proud democracy.
* * *
Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path
that's not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating
quickly toward boundless decay. In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of
any kind. That's exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just
released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey's Top 7
Predictions for the Raging 2020s .
"Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even
communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace
impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful."
Surely so. But I'm not sure whether this was deliberately planned by the plutocrats as a
political strategy, or whether this bifurcation spontaneously emerged from tech company
algorithms designed only to increase their profits.
Clearly, the plutocrats have seized upon this bifurcation to keep the populace divided and
engaged in a kind of civil war, but it's sort of like the pandemic – was it a plot
hatched or an opportunity exploited?
This might not seem to matter at this point, but IMHO the answer helps to determine not
only what we're up against but also the best ways to fight the bastards.
SHOCKER / NOVEMBER 24, 2020
https://www.wakingtimes.com/tyranny-standing-rock-govt-divide-conquer-strategy-work/
`
"Divide and conquer.
`
"It's one of the oldest military strategies in the books, and it's proven to be the police
state's most effective weapon for maintaining the status quo.
`
"How do you conquer a nation?
`
"Distract them with football games, political circuses and Black Friday sales. Keep them
focused on their differences -- economic, religious, environmental, political, racial
[gender- pandemic] -- so they can never agree on anything. And then, when they're so divided
that they are incapable of joining forces against a common threat, start picking them off one
by one."
JWK / NOVEMBER 24, 2020
"We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only
criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers' products to generate greater
profits for the internet giants,"
Which precisely explains how we got the recent POTUS candidates, displayed as the "best and
brightest". Really? That's the best they have? You can look across the board at ALL of the
two party's leadership and get the same picture. These are far from the "best and brightest".
They may be bright, since psychopaths are often quite intelligent, but they certainly have
zero qualification for best.
KHATIKA / NOVEMBER 24, 2020
Regardless. The democrats ignored people like Tulsi Gabbard and Sanders to flock to Biden.
This is just a sign of how brainwashed the people have become. The propaganda is working
quite well.
ANARCISSIE / NOVEMBER 24, 2020
This raises the question of why these people were selected. I think Trump sabotaged the
Republican fix for 2016 by exploiting weaknesses in its pseudodemocratic primary structure,
but the choice of Biden is hard to figure from any angle. Someone should investigate. About a
year ago I was conversing with some deplorables about Biden and a perfectly intelligent young
Black woman hotly defended him against all criticism. Anita Hill, the crime bill, the
invasion of Iraq, his creepiness, just bounced off her shell. How do people get this way?
JULIUS SKOOLAFISH / NOVEMBER 24, 2020
in passing
. WESTERN VALUES™ . The country that judges other countries' elections just
had an election. Somebody won. One day a court will tell us who. Apparently counting votes is
a tremendously difficult task, requiring enormous amounts of time.
. http://russiahouse.org/current_news.php?language=eng&id_current=3183
.
See also (via Fort Russ – Matthew Ehret)
Ah, Ms Johnstone, my fellow United States citizens love their " echo chamber comas "
because it allows them to completely suppress any and all logic, justice, empathy, and shame
for the blood-thirsty Evil Empire that they cherish and support. The Evil Empire has no soul
at all; and it requires its subjects to be soul-less as well. Resistance is futile!
Damn, Krystal dropping one of her classic heaters today: "Affirmative action is the type of program that poses little
threat and only benefits to affluent white liberals. It's the college admissions version of identity politics: more
about getting brown faces in high places to make WHITE people feel good than it is about actually addressing the very
real problems it seeks to ameliorate." - Krystal Ball
As a black person I hate to admit that I've bought into the BS all of this time but she is absolutely right. All of her
data is correct. AA is just a tool for bourgeoisie blacks to get into better schools. Period. Nothing else. Stop trying
to sell it as some saving grace that it is not. The point about student loans is exactly right. If you want to help a
ton of black people with college then do something about this BS student loan situation.
"White Saviors" is a way to say what we've been saying all along. Affirmative Action IS racist. You are saying that
someone needs help because of their skin color, as if that makes them inferior. Racist.
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, by Ira
Katznelson (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005), preface, appendix, index, 238 pp.
Elizabeth Bartholet correctly point out blatant disregard of law and witch hunt atmosphere on MeToo movement. This aspect
is easily exploitable by female sociopaths who want to remove a men who did not reciprocate their "favors" or just represent
obstacle on their career path. Teachers are especially vulnerable to such a blackmail.
Notable quotes:
"... However, I am concerned that in the recent rush to judgment, principles of basic fairness, differences between proven and merely alleged instances of misconduct, and important distinctions between different kinds of sexually charged conduct have too often been ignored. Similar problems plagued the imposition of new sexual harassment guidelines for colleges and universities by the administration of former President Barack Obama. I was involved in attempts to push back against those guidelines and to develop at Harvard Law School our own policies, better designed to balance the important values at stake. ..."
"... My fairness concerns with the #MeToo phenomenon include the ready acceptance in many cases of anonymous complaints, and of claims made by women over conflicting claims by men, to terminate careers without any investigation of the facts. ..."
"... Sometimes the alleged conduct is so egregious, or alleged patterns so suspicious, that suspension is warranted while facts are determined. Sometimes allegations are demonstrably credible by virtue of independent evidence. But where facts are in doubt or conduct is subject to different interpretations, efforts must be made to investigate what actually happened and how the different parties understood the events. ..."
"... I am also deeply troubled by over-expansive definitions of wrongful conduct. In the current climate, men are called out for actions ranging from requests for dates and hugs on the one hand to rape and other forced sexual contact on the other, as if all are the same and all warrant termination. ..."
"... The legal definition of sexual harassment in employment and education is a helpful guide to what sexual conduct should be the focus. It is illegal to engage in quid pro quo harassment, namely conditioning an employment or educational benefit on sexual favors. It is illegal also to create a "hostile environment" through unwelcome sexual advances that are severe or pervasive and that limit the victim's ability to enjoy employment or educational opportunity. ..."
"... Finally, I am concerned with the cynical exploitation of sexual harassment cases and related scapegoating of individuals. ..."
"... Corporate and political leaders, who must have been at least generally aware of these problems, did little to address them until this moment of public shaming. Now they dismiss alleged perpetrators overnight, often with no regard for the facts but clearly with significant regard for their corporate reputations and electoral strategies. ..."
"... All this puts real reform at risk. It undermines the legitimacy of action against serious sexual misconduct and abuse of power. It creates the potential for backfire. ..."
Like many others, I am outraged by the
egregious incidents of sexual misconduct made public recently through carefully documented journalism. I applaud the removal
of many alleged perpetrators who have clearly abused their positions of power, often through force and even violence. I celebrate
those who have stepped forward to call out sexual misconduct and demand changes in the degrading culture that has characterized working
conditions for women in too many settings for too long.
However, I am concerned that in the recent rush to judgment, principles of basic fairness, differences between proven and
merely alleged instances of misconduct, and important distinctions between different kinds of sexually charged conduct have too often
been ignored. Similar problems plagued the imposition of
new sexual harassment guidelines
for colleges and universities by the administration of former President Barack Obama. I was involved in attempts to push back against
those guidelines and to develop at Harvard Law School our own policies, better designed to balance the important values at stake.
My fairness concerns with the #MeToo phenomenon include the ready acceptance in many cases of anonymous complaints, and of
claims made by women over conflicting claims by men, to terminate careers without any investigation of the facts. Some argue
that women who speak out should simply always be believed. Others argue that if some innocent men must be sacrificed to the cause
of larger justice, so be it. I find this deeply troubling. I do not contend that mini-trials should always be required before action
can be taken. Sometimes the alleged conduct is so egregious, or alleged patterns so suspicious, that suspension is warranted
while facts are determined. Sometimes allegations are demonstrably credible by virtue of independent evidence. But where facts are
in doubt or conduct is subject to different interpretations, efforts must be made to investigate what actually happened and how the
different parties understood the events.
I am also deeply troubled by
over-expansive definitions of wrongful conduct. In the current climate, men are called out for actions ranging from requests
for dates and hugs on the one hand to rape and other forced sexual contact on the other, as if all are the same and all warrant termination.
I do not believe that all touching by a man in power is the same as touching that is clearly unwanted or the deliberate abuse
of power to obtain sexual favors. I do not believe that all romantic and sexual overtures should be banned from the workplace, even
between people on different hierarchical levels. Some recent cases involve
peremptory dismissal for behavior
that may involve nothing more than that. Women are not so weak as to need this kind of protection. Banning all such activity from
the workplace would reduce the quality of life for everyone, including women.
The legal definition
of sexual harassment in employment and education is a helpful guide to what sexual conduct should be the focus. It is illegal to
engage in quid pro quo harassment, namely conditioning an employment or educational benefit on sexual favors. It is illegal also
to create a "hostile environment" through unwelcome sexual advances that are severe or pervasive and that limit the victim's ability
to enjoy employment or educational opportunity.
Objective standards apply, so the question is whether a reasonable person in the position of the alleged perpetrator or alleged
victim would have thought the conduct was sexual harassment, not simply what the alleged victim subjectively felt.
Finally, I am concerned with the cynical exploitation of sexual harassment cases and related scapegoating of individuals.
The #MeToo movement has helped demonstrate to the world the toxic level of sex discrimination and sexual misconduct that have characterized
work life for too many women in business, entertainment, media, and government. Corporate and political leaders, who must have
been at least generally aware of these problems, did little to address them until this moment of public shaming. Now they dismiss
alleged perpetrators overnight, often with no regard for the facts but clearly with significant regard for their corporate reputations
and electoral strategies.
All this puts real reform at risk. It undermines the legitimacy of action against serious sexual misconduct and abuse of power.
It creates the potential for backfire.
Elizabeth Bartholet '62 is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
The left's latest ideological obsession isn't limited to BLM protests -- it's all the rage
in top law schools, and it's breaking into Congress.
There's a lesson I've learned: if it's a fad, be wary. The tulip craze in Holland in the
1500s led to one of the first economic bubbles. The internet replicated the problem in 2000, as
did cryptocurrency in 2019. At one time, the hula hoop was all the rage.
Today, there's a social philosophy that's building up a bubble of
its own: critical race theory (CRT). CRT has been around since the 1970s, but has blown up in
the past few years as terms like microaggression, white guilt, white privilege, and white
supremacy have come to dominate the popular lexicon. All of it is rooted in CRT.
CRT -- though it's known to most as a potent political force, and the ideological
underpinning of the Black Lives Matter organization -- has always been, first and foremost, a
legal philosophy. It starts with the premise that the United States is rooted in white
supremacy and that this white supremacy is written into the law. This inherent racism is
presented as the explanation for any disparity in outcome, such as that drug convictions and
death penalty sentences are more likely to be rendered on minorities.
Mari Matsuda, a CRT luminary, described it as "the work of progressive legal scholars of
color who are attempting to develop a jurisprudence that accounts for the role of racism in
American law and that works toward the elimination of racism as part of a larger goal of
eliminating all forms of subordination."
Far from being a grassroots philosophy formulated by radicals on the streets, it can be
traced back to the faculties of some of our nation's most elite law schools. From Critical
Race Theory: An Introduction :
Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and
legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady
advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being
rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler
forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman,
and Richard Delgado (coauthor of this primer) put their minds to the task. They were soon
joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison,
Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989.
All three -- Bell, Delgado, and Freeman -- were law school professors. Derrick Bell was
teaching at Harvard Law School when he published the seminal CRT treatise Race, Racism, and
American Law . Freeman taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Buffalo,
and others. Delgado is currently teaching at the University of Alabama, and has previously
taught at UCLA, the University of Colorado, and elsewhere.
"The Law as Microaggression," another pioneering work on CRT, was written by NYU Law
professor Peggy Davis and published in the Yale Law Journal in 1989. One especially successful
CRT practitioner is Patricia Williams, who currently holds the title of Director of Law,
Technology, and Ethics at Northeastern University. From 2000-2005, she was the recipient of a
$500,000 MacArthur Grant. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, another CRT heavyweight, is the
Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
Crenshaw, in addition to her professorial duties at Columbia, heads up the university's
Center for Intersectionality and Interpolicy Studies. That center advertises:
The Center for
Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies was established to examine how social
structures and related identity categories such as gender, race, and class interact on
multiple levels to create social inequality. The first such center of its kind, the Center's
research projects and initiatives will bring together scholars and practitioners from law,
sociology, feminist and gender studies, human rights, social justice, and other fields to
explore the relationship of intersectionality to their work, to shape more effective
remedies, and to promote greater collaboration between and across social movements.
It's a good gig, if you can get it. But it's far from her only one. Crenshaw is also the
founder of a 501(c)(3), the African American Policy Forum, which promotes CRT to both popular
and academic audiences. The forum's mission statement :
Founded in 1996, The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) is an innovative think tank that
connects academics, activists and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural
inequality. We utilize new ideas and innovative perspectives to transform public discourse
and policy. We promote frameworks and strategies that address a vision of racial justice that
embraces the intersections of race, gender, class, and the array of barriers that disempower
those who are marginalized in society. AAPF is dedicated to advancing and expanding racial
justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the U.S. and
internationally.
Among other AAPF activities, Professor Crenshaw hosts a regular webinar, Intersectionality
Matters. One recent webinar, released shortly before the election, was entitled, "Black Men for
Trump? The Overdue Conversation on Patriarchy and Misogynoir in Black Politics." This
election's result, with the greatest share of black voters breaking for a Republican since
1960, is clearly seen by CRT advocates as a problem to rectify, rooted in internalized racism
or misogyny.
Another webinar which AAPF put on
recently -- "Under the Blacklight: Politics, Power, & the Struggle Against Black Precarity"
-- gives a good idea of the influence CRT is gaining. It's not so much the topic that's
interesting here as the guests.
Perhaps the most recognizable speaker was Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts congresswoman and
member of "The Squad." Pressley, as so many CRT advocates do, presented the legal movement and
the activist movement as inextricably linked: "If you believe that Black Lives Matter, then you
believe that Black healing matters and Black justice matters."
Joining Pressley were Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Kim Foxx, the Cook County State's Attorney
who let off Jussie Smollett. During the webinar, Foxx made it clear that she drew no lines
between her racial identity and her legal duties, professing, "I'm unapologetic that I come to
this role as a black woman."
Heather MacDonald looked closer at Foxx's identity prosecuting in City Journal :
Foxx is a leading figure in the recent national wave of progressive local prosecutors who came
to power by playing race politics. She campaigned on the Critical Race Theory credo that the
criminal-justice system is endemically biased. She inveighed against the so-called
school-to-prison pipeline and promised to reduce racial disparities in prosecutions. Last
month, she dismissed aggravated battery charges against a 16-year-old student who had
attacked two Chicago police officers; the Chicago police union argued that her dismissal of
the charges fit a pattern of favoring offenders over police officers. Foxx operates in a
cultural
milieu that holds that the fact that a hate crime is a hoax is less important than the
fact that it could have been true.
Two congresswomen and a district attorney is no mean collection of power and influence. Even
still, the devotees of CRT are far from attaining any kind of governing consensus in Congress
or in the criminal justice system. But radical progressive prosecutors like Foxx are sweeping
into offices across the country, and all four members of the Squad won reelection -- these
ideas, and their radical proponents, are on the rise.
The only question is, how much bigger will the bubble get before it bursts? BillDaytona
• 21 minutes ago Critical Theory has become entrenched in the universities. It's not a
bubble. It's a takeover.
JOHN: "Human nature does not change" ( 10:00 ) is not a conservative
insight. It is a 'religious' insight, which conservatism recognises. But no 'religion'
analyses human nature, and recognises it for what it is, better than the teachings of a young
Galilean around two thousand years ago. Unfortunately his teachings on our 'human-ness' were
important for the first two hundred years after his death and resurrection; but have, since,
been absorbed, and subsumed, into the image of the 'Christos', in order that the 'leaders' of
the Church might achieve POWER. We see these pathetic 'career-clergy' men and women clinging
to their 'clerical power' to this very day: but covid has found their empty gospel
wanting.
Very good interview and excellent questions. Dan is very intelligent and has a common
sense, down to earth, moral attitude to life and as a congressman. Do not agree with all of
his judgements politically but respect his thorough investigation and research into the
matter. Really respect his mature attitude and personal comport. Do not agree with his
disdain for the Pres even when agreeing with the Pres actions. There is a personal problem
due to an encounter or some other personal conflict on a deeper level. Credit due to
separating it from the office he holds.
"SYSTEMIC RACISM" EXISTS! 11:58 It's called "Affirmative
Action" -- allowing the skin color of an applicant to weigh in on whether or not to accept
the applicant.
As far as BLM and CHAD and racism is concerned look at South Africa today and what's
happened in South Africa since Mandela and the AMC took power in South Africa after
Apartheid!
It took to nearly the end of the interview to state what is truly missing from public
discourse, and that is the understanding that a person's moral compass, a party's moral
compass, a nation's moral compass, depends upon something higher than themselves, for some it
is God, for others it is themselves, in the form of the State. Therein lies the conflict -
between absolute truth and relative truth, between eternal morals and situation ethics,
between thankfulness and entitlement, between forgiveness and condemnation, between love of
country and betrayal. And right now that conflict in the USA is reflected on the political
battlefield between Republicans and Democrats.
The one thing you never hear from the left today, is the idea of personal responsibility
for your own actions and behaviors, which is the cornerstone of freedom. I recently saw a
video of a drug store, where two men came into the store and shoplifted from the store, the
store manager called the Police. The Police had the shoplifters give back what they'd stolen
and were not arrested for their actions. Afterwords a woman got out her phone to record and
began to badger the store manager for his actions. She said to him that he was endangering
the lives of black men because they could have died at the hands of the Police that day.
Never once did she acknowledge that they shouldn't have shop lifted and it was their actions
that should be in question, not the store manager. She got downright nasty with the manager
and later people protested in front of the drug store for the injustice of calling the Police
on shoplifters. Think about that for a second, we've swung completely upside down as a
society with this type of thinking. Recently a Policeman shot and killed a crazed man as he
came charging out a front door wielding a knife over his head running at the officer to kill
him with the knife, the officer ran away but eventually had no choice but to turn and shoot
this man, and people came out in large numbers and protested the officers actions. I guess he
was supposed to sacrifice his life to the black lives matter movement. So in the vocal black
community there is absolutely no need for personal responsibility anymore, no matter what
someone does it's always everyone else's fault, or our racist societies fault, but never
their own due to their own behavior. Now that's some scary shit.
13 minutes "Systemic Racism" Let me start by saying I'm self educated, my observations my
own, I follow no one, and I have no followers :) People are misunderstanding the reasons for
their economic problems (meaning poverty), and inability to ever improve conditions, and
describing it as Systemic Racism. Truth is we all have limited horizons. Parochial, whether
by geography or class, or both. Where I live I see a mix of all race/ethnic- mostly caucasian
(white) Americans, impoverished , homeless, miserable, who tried and failed so much they have
given up. Black people see the same thing but it's mostly black people where they chose to
live. Same with Asians, South Americans, Somalians (Ilhan Omar :( and so forth. Whats stuck
everyone in the mud is called NAIRU (natural anti inflation rate of unemployment), a rule
adopted by all the central banks around the world including the USA and Australia in the last
half of the 1970"s. Search & find dozens of varying descriptions of what NAIRU is about.
That was when or first homeless appeared (generally "overpaid" union American farm workers at
first) It means permanent high unemployment, adjusted by the central banks, leaving workers
in surplus, in order to keep wages flat or slightly declining. In the USA add to that mass
runaway immigration of low skilled workers accustomed to minimal wage. Think of it as a game
of musical chairs. The number of chairs (jobs) is slowly increasing, but the number of people
looking for chairs increases faster. Thus our large and seemingly permanent population living
in alleys and street sidewalks, never able to find employment, and given in to despair. Trump
has turned off NAIRU at our central bank, and greatly slowed the excessive and illegal
immigration, and until the Pandemic shutdowns, turning everything around. A tighter labor
market had employers rehabilitating older homeless workers and employing them, plus raising
wages to attract workers
16:48 Fascism- characterized by
dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and
of the economy. Anarchism - is a political philosophy and movement which is skeptical of
authority and rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. Communism - a
socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production
and the absence of social classes, money and the state. It looks like the congressman is
putting negative words together without understanding they are opposites of each other. He's
become a politician.
Yes! FINALLY someone is contradicting the false claim of "both sides are doing it" with
censorship and cancel culture. Now, if only people would talk specifically about how CRT
fuels the insanity, we would have a chance to pull our country out of this spiral of
destruction. A sane person in Portland needs a little help here!
For 40 years I paid a large chunk of my Paycheck into Social Security. How can Dan call
this an Entitlement. I guess the paycheck that I worked for is an Entitlement too. When did
the labor that I provide become an entitlement. Entitlements are when something of value is
given to those that did nothing to earn it, like welfare checks.
Interesting analysis! Systemic racism is everywhere,🙄 is in the institutions?,
**but it's in you 😳and you don't know it?** So you have to change the institutions
and make the UNEQUAL👹? in order to create
equality🥴😂🤣😂😆😂😂 Isn't Radical Left =
Socialism?
The defunding of the police is to set the way for a national police as proposed by
President Obama in 2009 governed by DC. In its place temporarily, the strong arm of this
movement are Antifa and BLM. I equate these groups to the Brown Shirts of the Nazi party in
the 1930s. Once the German police were pacified and converted to the ideals of the party an
SS was created along with a Ghestappo which made the Brown Shirts an irrelevant and dangerous
group. It was destroyed in The Night of the Long Knives. Now you truly have the recipe for
central control and the tendency towards repression of those that will not conform.
Crenshaw spoke disingenuously about "the debt crisis, " blaming it on seniors. Surely he
realizes we have a fiat money system -- the bankers and other mega-corporate interests seized
TRILLIONS recently in two massive "Covid" heists." Bankers got trillions in October in a REPO
rescue, which was barely reported. Add their 2008 bailout, costing $21 trillion. And don't
forget defense industry payouts PLUS an even larger stealth siphoning revealed in the
delinquent Pentagon audit -- it exposed more TRILLIONS missing! And #Unappropriated by
Congress ! Their excuse: oops, "clerical" Why doesn't Rep Crenshaw complain about trillions
disappeared by the military? Or going to rich bankers? Yeah. Blame it on Boomers living on
Social Security... and who had FICA taxes removed from their paychecks for decades.
Social security is not an entitlement but money that the working class had taken out of
their paychecks for the time they worked for me 35 plus years but maybe your too young to
know about that...do your home work
The globalist technological revolution that we are in the midst of has pulled the economic
and cultural rug out from under the vast majority of citizens of western capitalist
democracies. Many people feel as though they no longer have anything of value to provide
others in a society based on the free and voluntary exchange of goods and services, or if
they do, that someone in China will provide it for far less. This reality has set the stage
for the attractiveness of Marxist ideology. We have made the average person in the West
obsolete or superfluous.
John Anderson
101K subscribers
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Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on
contemporary politics for the National Review and The Washington Times and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson
Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He and John analyse the current culture war and the effect it is
having on our geopolitical strategy especially in relation to China, in light of the current pandemic. If you value this
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As someone who wasted his youth on a worthless law degree, I can tell you that the US has way too many lawyers, and way too
many law schools. The job market for lawyer collapsed about 10 years ago, and law schools responded by pushing social justice
activism as a recruitment tool. They're training movie lawyers, instead of real ones, and jacking up tuition to ridiculous
levels. The graduates come out financially ruined, propagandized, and barely employable. I repaid my loans by leaving the
field and working construction, and I wish I'd never wasted my time on it. They send me alumni donation request forms,
trumpeting their new social justice initiatives.
Interesting conversation. Regarding "racism" it is an empty charge against America today from those of African descent. Like
America has always been racist and AS IF their ancestors came from a place that was not. I have visited several countries in
Africa and read much of history. What is called "racism" hardly compares to the brutal "tribalism" that is in Africa. Often
one tribe wiping out other tribes. Of course, we are aware many tribes sold "other tribes" into slavery. Now this follows all
of history and other places in the world. There is no nation and no tribe on earth that hasn't been guilty of
racism/tribalism/nationalism, etc. Why do we let organizations like BLM distort history? What history is taught in the USA
schools? Seesm we horrible suffer much from superficial schooling regarding the history of racism/tribalism/nationalism/religionism/slavery/abolitionism
and so on. Seems it will never change until we realize there is none righteous, not one. So - let us all confess past sins and
be determine to improve from where we are now as much as humanly possible. Equality and fairness is a forever quest worth
pursuing.
Marxists will stimulate and inflame and exaggerate any potential group resentment or conflict or difference within society -
race, gender, sexuality - in order to bring about as much confusion and chaos as possible in the hopes that "capitalist"
societies - and families and individuals - will fall apart from within so that they can then step up and "save the day" with
their brilliant Marxist framework - the same Marxist framework that has worked so brilliantly in the past in the Soviet Union,
East Europe, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Ho's Vietnam, etc., - gulags, walls, repression, stagnation and well over 100
million dead through starvation, worked to death in labour camps and mass executions, but, hey, don't let that stop you.
The
individual counts for nothing and the collective within the brilliant framework counts for everything. Human life counts for
nothing and the ideology counts for everything. Evidence counts for nothing because, hey, you know, if anything ever went
wrong, it was "not real Marxism". "So let us try again and next time we'll get the gulags and walls and executions right."
Behind all this is the spirit of resentment and vengeance, a spiritual war that will not allow for anything that transcends
their limitations, anything that transcends materialism and bureaucracy, like creativity, innovation or free enterprise. Free
spirits must be shot down. Individual responsibility must not be allowed.
Everything must be collectivised. You are not an individual, you are a soulless member of a collective according to your race,
gender, sexuality and nothing more. You are a locked-in member of a bureaucratic category and nothing more! There is no "you"
apart from the category we place you in. So give up all hope, all striving and all spiritual and aesthetic and intellectual
growth, and just accept your impotent, inevitable, irrefutable future as a zombi worker slave to the Central Committee that
will make all decisions for you. History has a plot and you are just a meaningless iota in the grand sweep of history.
And
if you don't go along with this narrative, we will work on your guilt feelings, your sense of fairness, your fear of losing
your livelihood, by calling you a "racist", "sexist", "fascist", "something-phobe", "anti-something" and bureaucratically
moving you out of your position. The soulless, heartless, godless bureaucracy is everything and you are nothing. Until there -
literally - is nothing.
Their end goal is not something like power, prestige, money; their end goal is nihilism, nothingness, the lights go out, the
pain stops, the "unfairness" stops. "If I can't have it, then you can't have it either." And their vengeance against life,
spirit, God, glory, joy, beauty, is complete Th- th- th- That's all folks!
All really interesting. The linking of what is happening in the States with the French Revolution is astounding. One thing
that stands out is the godlessness of the French during the Revolution, they publicly, through the National Assembly declared
themselves atheist and set up the Cult of Reason using a dancing girl as their object of worship and worshipped her in Notre
Dame. The anarchy in the States from the left is just as godless and is seeking the same. Problem is is that it led to the
Reign of Terror. If anyone is interested, read the chapter on the French Revolution in the book 'The Great Controversy' by
E.G. White. Then read the the 24th chapter of the Book of Matthew. We are in for extremely interesting and worrying times.
1:15
"Decolonization of post war British Empire"? People! What is the predominant accent you hear in our media today? It is
British. We are still their colony. We're like children being patted on the head by our guardians. Our enemies: Our
government at all levels; Britain; Israel. We are being attacked from within. When that happens we must divide or be
conquered. Emigration is today's Trojan horse. The antidote to globalization is secession. The solution: Iterative
secession. We are not homogeneous and shouldn't desire to be. The solution to neighbors who don't get along is not to force
them to live in the same house. We need many more spaces. Just look around. Who do you want to be equal to? Who do you
think is your equal?
This country was being destroyed from within by losing the skills of the people in the manufacturing sector. Go into stores an
find nothing produced in USA. Even simple things like clothes hangers. My dry cleaners asked me if I could bring any I had to
them because of supply disruption from China. Thank God we have a strong agricultural sector. That is our strength. China's
weakness. A billion more mouths to feed. China has to look outside there country to feed there people. Our weakness was energy
Independence. Trump changed that along with new technology like fracking. He allowed the horses to run by removing excess
regulation. Now we have new LNG plants an pipelines an opening new areas to drilling. We need to work with Taiwan an Japan to
help neutralize China in the East. An Germany needs to stay on board with USA to check Russia expansion. Putin wants to
restore the old Soviet Union. We need to support countries like Ukraine an Poland. We have many strengths. USA is not racist.
That was proven when we elected an African American candidate with blacks representing less than 15% of population. Americans
need to stand up for there country an not be labeled by a radical group like BLM or Antifa. Stop the destruction of our
culture an monuments. Enjoy VDH talks.
Actually s/he complained about the 'misuse' of the phrase 'white supremacy', a phrase
which can be very easily defined by the apparently bizarre and abnormal activity of
'looking up the phrase in a dictionary'. It literally has no 'hidden' or 'non-standard'
definition.
The motte definition of "white supremacy" is Mirriam-Webster: "the belief that the white
race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over
people of other races".
The observation that white supremacy, under this definition, has been influential in
American history, is not controversial. (Controversial: claiming that the American revolution
was fought to protect slavery, as claimed by the 1619 Project, before the, ah,
clarification was issued.)
This outlook is influential; it, or something much like it, is part of the training of all
New York school employees, as
George Packer notes:
De Blasio's schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity
initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them "silence" him. As part
of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the
school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled "White Supremacy
Culture." It included "Perfectionism," "Individualism," "Objectivity," and "Worship of the
Written Word" among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of
exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.
The meaning of the words has expanded, too. Ten years ago, white supremacy frequently
described the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, the neo-Nazi politician from
Louisiana. Now it cuts a swath through the culture, describing an array of subjects: the
mortgage lending policies of banks; a university's reliance on SAT scores as a factor for
admissions decisions; programs that teach poor people better nutrition; and a police
department's enforcement policies.
So Mirriam-Webster is behind the times on the evolving and ever-expanding meaning of
"white supremacy"; an update is anticipated.
"... It is the great con game. The super rich use the blacks especially, but also most of the browns, as excuses, weapons, and tools to batter the white middle class and white working class into utter submission. Tyranny of the worst sort seems to be end game. ..."
There is no agenda to "work together" with people who are trying to steal our freedom by
replacing our heritage as the world's first secular republic with a Christian theocracy. When
Christians took over the demoralized remnant of the Roman Empire they ushered in a thousand
years of repression and intellectual stagnation. We will not allow them to repeat this crime
in our land.
While we are selectively quoting the mendacious propaganda of the Federalist articles, let
us recall that in Federalist No. 10, Virginia aristocrat James Madison argued that
democracies were "spectacles of turbulence incompatible with the rights of property
[owners]." He was especially frightened of the mass of landless Americans, who, not unlike
his own slaves, "labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal
distribution of its blessings."
In Federalist No. 35, the future first US secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton,
wrote, "The idea of an actual representation of all classes of people by persons of each
class is altogether visionary." Anticipating the infamous line in Orwell's "Animal Farm", he
continued, the "weight and superior acquirements of the merchants render them more equal"
than men of ordinary means.
The usual account of anti-federalism tells of the activism of wealthy men who feared a
strong central government would encroach on their local power and privilege. All but
forgotten is the opposition of rank-and-file Continental Army veterans who gathered in
protest at a number of locations nationwide to burn copies of the new constitution. They
declared it was a betrayal of what they thought they had fought for. Captain Daniel Shays, a
leader of the western Massachusetts militiamen's abortive uprising the previous year, spoke
for all American patriots when he said "we did not overthrow a wise king to be ruled by
shopkeepers" but their voices have long been silenced in conventional histories of those
turbulent times.
Recall also that in the first election of 1788-9, only 43,782 men were able to cast votes
for Presidential electors, out of a total American population of nearly four million.
And Hamilton is now lionized as being the great hero for blacks and browns.
It is the great con game. The super rich use the blacks especially, but also most of
the browns, as excuses, weapons, and tools to batter the white middle class and white working
class into utter submission. Tyranny of the worst sort seems to be end game.
You're like some Guelph who flopped out of a time machine yelling about the bucket and
everybody's like, What the fuck is he talking about?
Do you really want to piss away the rapidly dwindling rest of your life fixating on some
bullshit stereotyped melodrama? It's three words of one article of one clause of one of the
nine core human rights instruments. (You don't know what I'm talking about but bear with me.)
Both parties are in perfect agreement about screwing you out of every other human right you
got.
Nobody gives a rat's ass about Jay. Your founding fathers are Allen Dulles and Frank
Wisner. The conflicts you're trained to emote about are wholly synthetic. Apparatchiks of
both parties concur on impunity. That's all your country is. The United States of
Impunity.
Trump and his backers have been accused of mass murder.
And during the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter- and antifa-fueled riots, looting,
arson and assaults on cops went on for weeks, destroying billions of dollars in property
and ending with demands to "defund the police."
Scores of statues have been toppled and destroyed -- statues of explorers, missionaries,
Founding Fathers of the republic and presidents on Mount Rushmore.
Now, not only are we fractured over ideology, religion, race, culture and morality, but
also our country's history has become a cause of irreconcilable conflict.
Leftism, no matter what you call it, has always been dysgenic and always will be. It is a
"philosophy" embraced by those unable to surrender their dream for an impossible to achieve
perfect world for an imperfect and achievable good one.
Recall also that in the first election of 1788-9, only 43,782 men were able to cast
votes for Presidential electors, out of a total American population of nearly four
million.
Fewer than that. Almost all the states had their legislatures choose the electors back
then.
Regarding your last observation, Observator, the fact that the right to vote has become
nearly universal for all adults, has made the country's dire situation and short and
long-term outlook much worse. Too bad we can't go back to the days when only well-educated
male property owners could vote and hold office. Too much democracy contains within it the
seeds of its own destruction, which we are witnessing in spades today.
@The
Alarmist extreme left have been a disaster for Europe, at least since 1990. They have
destroyed the high standard of living Europe built up after the war and they have destroyed
Europe's competitiveness. Same for the USA. And the left has done much more warmongering than
the right the last 30 years. Neo-Cons (Republicans) are former leftists, mostly Jewish, that
promote war for Israel's security and strength. When Europe's right wing parties gain power
then Europe can begin its turnaround and perhaps become competitive again. They also want
good relations with Russia. That will benefit everyone. Hopefully this happens before the
left makes Europe a shithole no one wants to live in.
We have, for instance, Lieven focusing on the current top two, great interlocking
challenges: climate change and the fact that "350 years of Western and 250 years of
Anglo-American predominance are coming to an end."
I was under the impression this was about serious topics, not liberal claptrap. My
mistake.
Every problem [neo]liberal cockroaches claim is a calamity -- discrimination against
"transgender women of color", police brutality, systemic racism, COVID-19, the Chinese
crackdown on Uyghur militants and the Hong Kong chapter of Antifa, and, of course, "climate
change" -- is imaginary, inconsequential, or an actual positive.
Everything liberals claim to be a positive or dismiss as inconsequential -- "diversity",
mass Third World immigration, Moslem barbarity, BLM and Antifa riots, rigged elections, the
normalization of sodomy, feminism, sexual liberation -- is a calamity.
Judging from comment ZH audience does not like Critical Race theory one bit :-). Does this
mean Trump 2020-2024?
It is also clear that the tide of white public opinion that's to BLM and Critical Race Theory
turned against the blacks and turned drastically. In a way founders of BLM did a very bad service
to community. It proved to be extremely divisive for the country.
Schools that teach " white privilege " as fact are breaking
the law , the equalities
minister has told MPs.
MP Kemi Badenoch said the underpinning ideology of critical race theory "sees my blackness
as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression."
"This government stands unequivocally against critical race theory," she
told MPs during a debate on Oct. 20 in which Labour MP Dawn Butler had called for the
curriculum to be "decolonised."
https://www.youtube.com/embed/KtXshJDqJOw
Badenoch, MP for Saffron Waldon and also minister for equalities, said the rise of
critical race theory was a "dangerous trend in race relations."
"We do not want to see teachers teaching their white pupils about white privilege and
inherited racial guilt," she said.
"Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory or which promotes
partisan political views such as defunding the police, without offering a balanced
treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law."
The defunding of police has been a demand of many key members and supporters of Black
Lives Matter.
"Some schools have
decided to openly support the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group, often fully aware
that they have a statutory duty to be politically impartial," said Badenoch. "Black lives
do matter -- of course they do. But we know that the Black Lives Matter movement, capital
B, L, M, is political."
Some Black Lives Matter leaders and groups, including the UKBLM group, are explicitly anti-capitalist.
"What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are
accepted facts," said Badendoch.
"We don't do this with communism. We don't do this with socialism. We don't do it with
capitalism."
'Not America'
Badendoch also warned against importing the rhetoric on race from America.
" Our history of race is not America's history of race. Most black British people who
have come to our shores were not brought here in chains, but came voluntarily due to their
connections to the UK and in search of a better life. I should know. I am one of them.
"We have our own joys and stories to tell. From the Windrush generation to the Somali
diaspora, it is a story that is uniquely ours."
During the debate on education and race, MP Dawn Butler had earlier called for the
curriculum to be "decolonised," saying that "history is taught to make one group of people
feel inferior and another group of people feel superior."
Former Windrush passengers and members of the RAF Donald Clarke, George Mason, Sam King
MBE, and Allan Wilmot in the Imperial War Museum in London on June 12, 2008. (Cate
Gillon/Getty Images)
But Badenoch said the curriculum did not need decolonising for "the simple reason that it
is not colonised," adding, "We should not apologise for the fact that British children
primarily study the history of these islands."
In the United States, the Trump administration recently
banned agencies or contractors from "conducting training that promotes race stereotyping,
for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth."
"This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an
irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race
or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our
common status as human beings and Americans," Trump wrote, later calling the ideology
"divisive."
The UK government last month issued guidance
which says schools should not use resources "produced by organisations that take extreme
political stances on matters."
Examples of unacceptable stances include "a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow
democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections," as well as opposition to free
speech or the use of racist or anti-Semitic language. Materials "promoting divisive or victim
narratives that are harmful to British society," were also included as an example.
Lt. Frank Drebin , 1 hour ago
A rare example in these surreal times. I salute you ma'am.
Nothing , 36 minutes ago
Not that rare. Ive heard numbers of blacks and latinos speak out like this. But these
voices are systematically suppressed by Google, by Facebook, and also by the blocking of
peaceable assemblages and by simple conversation with strangers without being muzzled with
the excuse given of coronaphobia.....
Dickweed Wang , 1 hour ago
If all races are so equal why is it that when Europeans first went to the African
continent the people there were not using the wheel?
Yippie21 , 1 hour ago
Now do American Indians; same
CriswellSpeaks , 1 hour ago
If whites are superior to blacks then why didn't the white race completely supplant the
black race in Africa? Short answer, same reason the black race never built any great cities
in Africa, tropical diseases. Geography is destiny and being located at the equator,
tropical diseases have prevented black Africans from creating any great civilizations until
the present era. When the whites of S. Africa attempted to migrate north much past Rhodesia
they were stopped dead in their tracks(literally) by tropical diseases. Imagine what a
society would look like if it got hammered by the Black Death every century and you have
black Africa.
DeathMerchant , 1 hour ago
********! There was no enviromental incentive to progress in equatorial regions. No need
for warmth, food or advanced tools to progress beyond ability to provide basic necessities
which were available to them year round. Compare that to the northern climes which had
minimal seasonal opportunities to provide those things and the development of capability to
cope with such.
CriswellSpeaks , 1 hour ago
Critical Race Theory is a form of back handed racism directed at minorities. According
to CRT, as a white person I possess this magical power to oppress all black people that I
was born with. No matter what black people do, they are powerless is the face of my absence
of skin pigmentation. Seriously, if you do a little digging into the founders of CRT you
will probably find the law firms/lawyers/political lobbyists who were responsible in the
1960's for opposing the abolition of Jim Crow laws. After they lost to color blindness and
integration, they infiltrated the Communists, claimed racial harmony was preventing a
Marxist revolution and had to be reversed for it to happen. CRT would drag race relations
back to the post civil war era.
PCShibai , 32 minutes ago
Ask yourself this, " if ' white privilege ' is the real reason
why blacks cannot get ahead in the US, then why aren't blacks successful in all the other
black-lead nations on the planet?" I mean...... there's ZERO history of ' white privilege '
keeping down Uganda, or the Congo, or ANY other black-lead nation...... and yet they are
all failing their people miserably and have ALWAYS failed their people miserably!
WHAT DO ALL THOSE BLACK NATIONS BLAME " THEIR " CONTINUOUS FAILURE ON? The
Samoans???
" White
privilege " is the CRUTCH that is used by the black race for their own failures.
Failure to maintain a family that raises children properly, failure to insist that their
children are properly educated, failure to integrate into the successes of the surrounding
culture, failure to accept the fundamentals that make people economically successful.
Until they eliminate the CRUTCH and accept their responsibility for their own success
& their own failures, they will continue to be the one failed culture throughout the
entire world!
cvp , 9 minutes ago
I do not disagree with the point your making; I would like to add, the people who
migrate from the African continent to the United States are some of the happiest people
I've met and worked with in my life. They are not interested in what BLM is selling! Jus
say'n...
5onIt , 40 minutes ago
None of the black people in this country were brought here in chains either. They are
free to leave whenever they damn well please.
greatdisconformity , 30 minutes ago
The institution of slavery gave black lives a value they did not otherwise have in
Africa.
Africans simply sold the losers of tribal wars, or their own slaves, to the coastal
markets.
It was either the auction block, or the killing fields.
I do not feel any guilt at all.
Without slavery, these people would not exist in any form; here or with descendants in
Africa.
They owe their existence in its most fundamental form to slavery.
They should be glad.
Whitey is being played. Big time.
Spetzco , 19 minutes ago
Especially as most of the major slave traders in Africa were BLACK themselves.
greatdisconformity , 35 minutes ago
The language of Critical Race Theory is the language of Genocide.
Historically, when an ethnic group is singled out for a savage take-down like Critical
Race Theory, it has been a prelude and pretext for mass killings.
Of course, this time things will be different.
Shifter_X , 14 minutes ago
It's the same playbook the Boshies Nazis and Maoists used. Yes, genocide and wiping out
history, that's their specialty.
St. TwinkleToes , 1 hour ago
When you're a race hustler filled with the dripping hatred of Whitey, and all you have
going in life are endless victim grievance bs regurgitated to get a head in life, it all
makes sense. It's not enough that Blacks have their own BET, endless Black This & Black
That Awards, staring roles in most all feature films, Two term POTUS, no, they want it all.
They want Whitey to live in imaginary Black World Wakanda as indentured Servants as
reparations for slavery 150 years ago. They want to drag us in chains down roads of endless
Persecution until we are no more.
Phuc Critical Race Theory, and Phuc Black Lives Matter.
SunsteintheSodomite , 58 minutes ago
Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa showed the world that you can build a complete
NATION with infrastructure, economic supply routes, trade deals, agriculture, technology,
EVERYTHING...
...then drop off the keys and an instruction manual...
...and within 5-10 years it will be beyond repair.
Throughout their history, blacks have had only one route to civilization:
Follow WHITEY.
Rest Easy , 23 minutes ago
And van jones has the nerve to say white people have a virus. Maybe so van. We are too
nice.
Is there a US city and unfortunate surrounding suburbs that has a large percentage of
black persons not causing havoc? Ruin. Just generally weird stupid bs. Morning noon and
night. Tip toeing through the daisies trying to keep the young black kids fun down to a
dull roar. If you are "lucky". Get a little uppity and the klan with a tan comes a
knocking. Sometimes just being white around black Nazis is more than sufficient.
At least teach students about what happened in Rwanda.
play_arrow
Misean , 4 minutes ago
Or Rhodesia, the bread basket of Africa.
After changing it's name to Zimbabwe, the black rulers have reduced the nation to abject
poverty. From feeding much of sub Saharan Africa, the nation now depends on massive food
imports, most of which is given by western nations at great expense.
The population of productive whites and blacks have either left or been killed by roving
bands of bandits. The bandits "reclaimed" commercial farms at gun point, took girls as
slaves killed all makes, and raped then murdered the women.
Having no clue how commercial farming works, but assured by their leaders that
traditional African farming was superior, they sold the farm equipment to smarter thugs,
for dimes on the dollar (the buyers exported the equipment to better run countries, for
sizable profits, this depleting the country of the farm capital necessary to turn things
around).
The farm bandits, with stone age farming techniques, destroyed the soil quickly. Most of
the fertile top soil has washed away, what's left is exhausted.
nsurf9 , 1 hour ago
The only "privileged" our country is suffering under - is not already ending the
Affirmative Action Act of 1986. It had it place 25 years ago. Now, it is nothing more than
a prima facie Government sanctioned systematic discrimination against Caucasians - that's
now well past being justified by any stretch of a "compelling state interest" argument.
If you are being wrongfully discriminated, you have the Equal Protection Clause of the
14th Amendment and State law to pursue your claim - like the rest of us.
SmokingArgus , 25 minutes ago
If you have a "Minister of Equalities" you've already lost.
Shifter_X , 1 hour ago
"" Our history of race is not America's history of race. Most black British people who
have come to our shores were not brought here in chains, but came voluntarily due to their
connections to the UK and in search of a better life. I should know. I am one of them"
What a steaming pile of ********.
The settlers who came to America in 1560 (not 1619 as the fictitious farcical revised
"history" claims) and thereafter brought their slaves WITH THEM FROM THE UK
The UK was happy to pass the slave trade on to the colonies.
But make no mistake, the UK was up to its *** in slavery well before the colonies were
even formed.
DieSocialJusticeWankers , 1 hour ago
A Biden win and there will be affirmative action and CRTheory on steroids. The USA will
die for young white people. Vote Trump white people, or you're fkkkkked!
1. As recently as June of 2019, Biden praised the "civility" of the segregationist
senators he worked with in Congress to pass anti-busing legislation.
2. Biden praised the notorious segregationist politician George Wallace, boasted about
how Wallace once honored him with an award in 1973, and told a Southern audience in 1987
that "we [Delawareans] were on the South's side in the Civil War."
3. Biden opposed busing in the 1970s and expressed fears that it would lead to a "racial
jungle."
4. Biden voted to protect the tax-exempt status of private segregated schools.
5. Biden told black radio host Charlamagne tha God, "If you have a problem figuring out
whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black."
6. Biden told the Asian and Latino Coalition of Des Moines that "poor kids are just as
bright and just as talented as white kids."
7. While delivering remarks before a black audience in Delaware, Biden launched into a
meandering story about a gang leader named Corn Pop and claimed that he "learned about
roaches" while working at a community pool in a black neighborhood.
8. In 2008, Biden referred to then presidential candidate Barack Obama as "the first
sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean."
9. In 2006, Biden told C-SPAN, "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless
you have a slight Indian accent."
10. Biden falsely claimed to have "marched" in the civil rights movement.
Still waiting on Trump's racist comments, been like 6 years.
Brits had slave's just as almost every other country in the world has, in the past even
white slaves (Irish). Brits have no higher ground to stand on than anyone else looking at
their indiscretions in India and China and elsewhere. Such as the opium wars in China.
Silly British. They should realize it has NOTHING to do with race. It's all about
COMMUNISM, they are just as in danger from the cancer of communism as anyone else.
rmogabe , 27 minutes ago
She said it is a political movement.
artytom , 1 hour ago
Thank Goodness. Very surprised to see this coming out of the UK government - but...
Is the tide turning.
Have the World Bank run out of bribes?
Have we passed the tipping point and they have taken off the pressure because they know
there is no going back?
Are they satisfied that the economies are in free fall and won't bounce back?
Are they simply covering their asses (the most likely of all).
DeathMerchant , 1 hour ago
In 1959, AAMD set the IQ threshold for mental retardation at < 85. The civil rights
movement of the next decade forced psychologists to rethink this boundary, because half the
African American population fell below it. In 1973, responding to this concern, AAMD (by
then AAMR) changed the threshold for retardation from IQ < 85 to IQ < 70. The
boundary moved south by one standard deviation! The proportion of blacks below the
threshold instantly dropped from about 50 percent to 12 percent. Subsequent refinements
made it still more difficult to meet the criteria for retardation.
When Binet in 1905 produced the first IQ test, it promised to revolutionize the diagnosis
and treatment of mental retardation. A half century later it came under attack for reasons
Binet could not have imagined. Could any of the pioneer psychometricians have foreseen
Larry P. v. Riles (1979), a California class-action suit that focused on IQ testing of
young black children? The court held that IQ tests were not valid for African Americans. It
banned California from using the tests for placing black students in classes for the
"educable mentally retarded" or equivalent categories on the grounds that the tests were
biased. After a series of appeals, the district court ruled that no special education
related purposes exist for which IQ tests could be administered to black pupils. Though
only a California ruling, the case began a political assault on standardized testing that
has spread beyond the IQ test to college entrance exams, promotional exams and more.
A Case History of Government Intervention
In 1996, The Office for Civil Rights placed 16 school districts nationwide under review for
potential discrimination. The districts were charged with violating the civil rights of
minorities, especially African Americans, because blacks were found to be overrepresented
in special education programs, especially those for the mentally retarded. Five of the 16
districts were in Maryland. Ironically, Maryland is a very liberal state very much in tune
with the goals of the Civil Rights Office. Maryland is also almost 30 percent black. The
offending districts included Baltimore, Howard, Harford, Montgomery and Prince Georges
counties. OCR detectives uncovered "discrimination" by looking at school records. The
offending data appear in Table 1. The irritant is in the last column. Black children were
classified as retarded at 1.5 to 2.2 times the rate of whites. OCR ordered the counties to
find a "remedy."
Fortunately teaching Critical Race Theory or any other invented marxist propaganda is
going to get a lot of people killed.
They'll find they deployed the subversion before gaining a sufficient majority, or
sufficient technological control among a highly educated peasantry.
And by the end of all that killing, there will be a brighter future for European
descendants, darkness relegated to its corner of the Earth.
By that time, all the people who would otherwise wish they'd never uttered a word of
critical race theory will simply be no longer.
Fight back.
You have the moral law on your side and you will win.
GreatUncle , 18 minutes ago
UK Government ... ROFL.
The UK government last month issued guidance
which says schools should not use resources "produced by organisations that take extreme
political stances on matters."
Because see we the UK government do that ... ain't you noticed? So as we do it then it
is all legal like mass immigration to destroy the indigenous population...
MadameDeficit , 1 hour ago
Oh boy, can't wait for the hypocrites to tell her why she's wrong.
Maghreb2 , 1 hour ago
She's right but she should shut her mouth either ways because she's a tory sell out
bitch and we know that because we know the Tories and the
Freud-Murdoch run P.R firms they get their polices from . Real racial theory would have
David Lammy lynched by everyone but the Chinese. Starting teaching the little white boys
about
Jimmy Savile in Leeds infirmary and we'll have them ready to suicide bomb Buckingham
Palace and go after the nearest member of "the people who will n
ot be blamed for nothing " minority .
Tell them that is what Mi5 are for.
To protect White Privileges and the weaker ones will kill themselves when they see what
they have planned for them in the future. By the Divine right of the Windsors suicide isn't
even legal and just remember that is why he was in the infirmaries. She should remember how
similar the white monkeys are to the black monkeys in their natural habitat .
The west is past imported racial talking points. Blood for the money will be new mantra
after the war starts but we wouldn't expect the people in parliament to have ever
understood that in way because they can't see the real world. Rivers of Blood Libel these
days. Play them this song and we'll see which music turns them into hardened killers over
night. Tell them Guy Burgesses and Rothschild used to go to the
Gargoyle club and the stories about Dolphin Square .
Victim ideology as broadcast by media, politicians and schools is the true divider and
oppressor that reinforces the odious legacy of slavery. The only way people move beyond
what was unacceptable in the past is to release and bury it. Those who are vested in
maintaining the old ugly status quo are the ones who won't let it go. that's the cabal and
all their minions. Enough.
GeezerGeek , 1 hour ago
How many black slaves were needed on Britain's cotton plantations? Duh...
How many black slaves were brought to Britain's colonies in America (not just on the
continent) before it became an independent (at least that's the story) nation? Duh...
As an aside, isn't one particular candidate for VP this year the descendant of a slave
owner in a former British colony?
Compare slaves brought to British colonies against slaves brought into the USA after
independence. Which number is greater and which process lasted longer?
For fun, we can then consider black slaves brought to other places in the Americas, both
North and South, plus the nearby islands.
At least she had the courage to attack CRT, which strikes me as another example of the
soft bigotry of low expectations. How long do you think it will be before she finds herself
looking for a new job?
What is never mentioned is that poor whites suffered from slavery. Depressed wages.
Being forced to man "slave patrols" or risk jail time. That system robbed everyone
Faustus B. , 2 hours ago
The left got so worked up about intelligent design being taught in the classroom, but
apparently it was just political. We must never forget that they'll ram racial
pseudo-science down kid's throats the minute they get the chance.
Christina Jordan is a Malaysian-born British politician. She served as a Brexit Party
Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South West England from 2019 to 2020.
A Lib Dem parliamentarian's bill to legalise race-based candidate lists is undemocratic,
patronising & will undo the decades of progress Britain has made.
I was so irked by an elected public servant's recent declaration, that paraphrasing a great
man's quotation was the only response I felt could touch my exasperation.
My comments will not attract much attention in the crowded Twitterverse, but I felt that if
there was even half a chance that a few might notice, then I should use the opportunity to do
so.
In 1954, while trying to explain what it was to be a parliamentarian, Winston Churchill
defined it as, "The first duty of a Member of Parliament is to do what he or she thinks in
his or her faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and
safety of Great Britain. Their second duty is to their constituents, of whom they are the
representative but not the delegate."
Instead of understanding the primal importance for representative democracy exemplified by
those words, on October 14, an elected Member, the Lib Dem Wera Hobhouse, proudly affirmed that
she would present a bill that went against that very goal. She wants to make it legal to select
politicians based solely on the colour of their skin. Ludicrously, she claims that the bill is
necessary to beat racial injustice.
Her attempt to allow non-white only shortlists will do the exact opposite. Bringing forward
a bill which makes it legal to discriminate against candidates just because they are white is
undemocratic and downright patronising. It implies that non-whites are incapable of being
selected on merit unless Caucasians are sidelined. It is 'one insignificant step for national
unity, one giant leap for racial division and disharmony'. Any candidate selected on this basis
will be open to justified ridicule.
It is extraordinary that in our democratic country, in the mother of parliaments, a place
less happy parts of the world can only eye enviously, we have elected politicians seeking to
legalise racial discrimination.
Quotas do not work. Short lists that favour colour over merit do not work. Parliamentarians
who push these divisive agendas should not work for us. Far from eradicating or helping racial
injustice, this bill would only serve to stoke the flames of resentment. Our country should,
and must, demand that only the best are sent to Westminster. We want candidates to prove to the
electorate that they deserve their place and have been chosen on merit, not on a nod and a
wink. The message must be that discrimination is always wrong, whatever the skin colour.
I fear that some politicians are taking our country on a destructive path in their crusade
to right historical wrongs. In trying to put their new world order into practice, they risk
tearing the very fabric of our peaceful and cohesive society. They are saying to our citizens
that they are not to be trusted when it comes to fairness and justice for all. Diversity,
equality and anti-racism does not mean we divide people of different races, beliefs,
backgrounds, religions and ancestry into two groups, i.e. white and non-white.
I write as a person of colour, an immigrant, a democrat and a believer in fair play. I am a
staunch and loyal citizen of this great country. One who believes that the majority wants to
see us move forward together. But how can we when we have politicians telling us that we cannot
be relied on to look out for, and after, each other? It is bad enough that some, through
all-women shortlists believe that we should be politically divided by sex. Now they claim only
non-whites can better represent non-whites. What message does that send to our friends, peers,
children and visitors to our shores?
When I stood for election in 2019 for the European Parliament, I naively believed that I had
faced optimal vitriol and abuse. Nothing would ever match the overflowing vat of bilious hate
my colleagues and I faced. I had not appreciated however, that in pushing back against our
country's navel-gazing, knee-bending, finger-pointing, supine acceptance that white people are
privileged racists and black/brown/mixed/Asian/none of the above-skinned people are victims in
dire need of saving, I have leapt into a den of hate and scorn.
I do not parade the following messages to elicit sympathy. I just want to expose the fact
that, as a woman of colour who rejects victimhood labels, I receive pretty vile abuse from both
the white and non-white contingent of the virtue brigade. In the last few days alone, some of
these have included:
You've sold your soul because you're so desperate to be accepted by the Right yet no matter
what you say your skin colour will always be the major factor.
So desperate to be liked by the flag waving mob that she'll happily throw her self-respect
and morals out the window.
Christina is just a hypocrite and a sell out to get the flag waving bigots on her side.
How can such a dark face have such a white name?
This "christina" seems to be of Asian descent and claims to be an immigrant, not sure how
she ended up with an English name
Pulling up the ladder after her to prevent immigrants from entering the country.
Impressing her bully boy, flag shagging fash mates.
Off you pop good immigrant, probably have some bootlicking that's overdue to show how
grateful you are to be here.
These, and other comments, only make me more determined to stand up for our country against
the monotonous, wearisome and never-ending bashing she undeservedly receives. Creating division
is not the answer. Most of us live outside the political, institutional and media bubble and we
get along just fine, thank you.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
In Greek mythology, men used to fear the stony gaze of the snake-haired Gorgon. Today, men
once again feel such fear – but, ironically, no campaign has done more to impair women's
opportunities either.
A seven-foot statue of Medusa holding a man's severed head was
unveiled in New York this week. For six months, this sculpture, made by the
Argentinian-Italian artist Luciano Garbati, will be situated facing the Manhattan Supreme
Court, where Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted and
convicted of sex crimes against actresses and female film-production staff.
The statue is being used in this position as a symbol of justice enacted against male
rapists. However, it more accurately – and unintentionally – symbolises the
difference between the public triumphalism of the #MeToo movement and its negative
repercussions for women in the United States.
The most famous painting of Medusa – a female character from Greek mythology who had a
hair of snakes and could turn men to stone if they met her gaze directly – was painted by
Caravaggio in
1596. He was inspired by Vasari's account of a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It has been
a common subject for artists since. Garbati's statue was made in 2008 and adopted by the #MeToo
movement subsequently. From moral outrage to financial advantage
The #MeToo movement hit prominence in 2017 and was initially primarily concerned with
incidents, and allegations, of sexual abuse in Hollywood. It quickly grew to include cases of
sexual impropriety in many fields, mainly in the US. However, as it expanded, it encompassed
rape, sexual abuse, inappropriate sexual contact, unwanted advances, and transactional sex.
By refusing to draw distinctions between actual crimes, ethical/professional infractions,
and consensual (but regretted) sex, the movement became diffusely broad. Allegations of sexual
abuse led to the accused losing contracts, jobs, and marriages; in some cases, it contributed
to suicide. In the ensuing storm of moral panic, actual rape was conflated with Ben Affleck's
groping of an actress
in a video interview , a woman complaining
about a date with Aziz Ansari and Louis CK
exposing himself to colleagues (with their consent).
By failing to distinguish between levels of seriousness, the movement lost what moral
credibility it had and became a means of gaining revenge and exacting extortion. If crimes have
been committed, then they should be reported to the police, not aired in a public forum. The
accused need anonymity just as the victims do, until justice can be served.
Sexual accusations have long been weaponized in American pop culture. It has already
been proven that a whisper network of female comic-book professionals has targeted male
colleagues with – alongside actual crimes – unfounded accusations, in order to
provide more opportunities for female creators. This is not a male/female problem; using deceit
and exaggeration to advance oneself is as old as language itself.
In American television and film production, #MeToo gained control of productions via Time's
Up, enforcing quotas of women and extracting payments. It became a grab to secure lucrative
work for women, relying on goodwill from the public and the fear of executives. The Time's Up
movement is co-led by Katie McGrath, who runs production company Bad Robot Productions with her
husband J.J. Abrams. Bad Robot has a history of presenting itself as a pro-social-justice
company. This summer, at a time when rioters were burning shops and destroying historic
monuments, Bad Robot made an
infamous announcement that there had been " Enough polite conversation. Enough white
comfort. "
By presenting a company as an ethical, socially conscious body, that company is an ideal
position to benefit from major firms being pressured into making decisions not based on
competence but politics. Individuals and companies have seen how they can manipulate public
sympathy about sexual abuse to their own advantage. But firms are now realizing this
danger.
No event has done more to impair women's opportunities in the workplace than the
#MeToo/Time's Up movement. Production companies – even those led by women – now see
female colleagues as a source of potential extortion and compensation claims. As a result, they
now
avoid hiring women in order to avert the possibility of costly legal claims and
reputation-impairing social-media campaigns. Following decades-long attempts to persuade
male-dominated industries that hiring women brought advantages and an expansion of the talent
pool, the moral panic of #MeToo has served only to reveal the disadvantages of employing
women.
When male executives see women today, they fear them, just as heroes in Greek mythology
feared the gaze of Medusa. Ironically, rather than celebrating female power, Garbati's statue
is instead a fitting symbol of the way a campaign that began well has, once again, made men
mistrust women.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Alexander Adams
is an artist, art critic and author. His book 'Iconoclasm, Identity Politics
and the Erasure of History' is published by Societas. Follow him on Twitter @AdamsArtist
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
I'll join the chorus calling New York Times columnist Bret Stephens "brave" for last week's
takedown of his
newspaper's "1619 Project." But I'd also like to ask him: What took you so long?
The 100-page collection of 18 articles that infamously claimed America's "true founding"
date is not 1776, but 1619 – the year enslaved Africans were first brought to these
shores – has received withering criticism since it was published
in August 2019 .
Ten months ago some of the nation's leading historians – including Pulitzer
Prize winners Gordon Wood and James McPherson –
wrote the Times to challenge a wide array of its claims, which the newspaper and its
partner, The Pulitzer Center, were disseminating free of charge
in the nation's classrooms . The historians were especially troubled by its assertion that
the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and the project's near total erasure of
the contributions of whites to dismantling slavery and working for freedom. Their letter
described these failings as "a displacement of historical understanding by ideology."
Their criticisms were
echoed and extended by others including
Leslie M. Harris, an African American professor of history at Northwestern University, who said
she "vigorously disputed" some central claims of the project when she helped fact-check it
before publication. "Despite my advice," she
wrote in Politico seven months ago , "the Times published the incorrect statement about the
American Revolution anyway."
Stephens' sharply written broadside breaks no new ground. What it does provide is a skillful
synthesis and endorsement of these voluminous critiques in the Times – by a Timesman.
That is significant. But his decision to write the essay so long after the project's mistruths
have been laid bare – and months after it was honored with a George Polk Award and a
Pulitzer Prize – suggests more rot at the Gray Lady and in American journalism.
As Stephens (pictured) himself suggests, the precipitating event was Phillip W. Magness'
Sept. 19 article in
Quillette , which revealed that the Times has "taken to quietly altering the published text
of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism." Most significant,
the paper had scrubbed the claim that 1619 was "our true founding" from the online text without
acknowledgment.
This is not mere editing, but stealthy expurgation intended to cover up the paper's
journalistic malpractice.
This sketchy conduct, presumably approved by New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein
and others, warrants far more than a column. It demands a published response from the paper's
executive editor, Dean Baquet, that acknowledges the misdeed and states whether Baquet knew of
and/or approved the secret changes. Baquet must also detail the paper's response and explain
why the Times still stands by the project, given the need for such major corrections.
In this context, a column by someone with no authority at the Times beyond his opinion seems
part of a strategy to acknowledge a problem without fixing it. For all his bravery in writing
this piece, Stephens is the perfect foil for the Times, one that creates an escape hatch for
1619 acolytes.
It is relevant that Stephens – a conservative who came to the Times after a Pulitzer
Prize-winning stint at the Wall Street Journal – is the columnist whom so many liberal
Times subscribers love to hate. One of the few scribes at the paper who does not incessantly
preach to its woke choir, he has generated strong pushback from colleagues and readers for his
opinions on
climate change and the
Middle East . This may explain why the
New York Times Guild initially felt comfortable sending a now deleted Tweet criticizing the
editors for running Stephens' 1619 piece, which, it said, "reeks."
Stephens' standing makes it easier for many Times readers to dismiss or ignore his
devastating critique. Imagine the impact a similar piece might have had if it been written by
David Brooks or Nicholas Kristof.
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger appears to be unconcerned by the allegations. The man who
forced editorial page editor James Bennet to resign because he ran a
controversial op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton , issued a brief statement
Sunday that ignored the journalistic and factual issues raised by Stephens and others, and
instead insisted that the 1619 Project was "a journalistic triumph" whose publication is "the
proudest accomplishment of my tenure as publisher."
[ Baquet echoed Sulzberger's
comments in a note to his staff on Oct. 13, when this column was posted. Without directly
addressing the ethical and factual issues raised, he asserted that "the project fell fully
within our standards as a news organization" and that it "fill(s) me with pride."]
The deeper issue raised by Stephens' column is that the 1619 Project is just one example of
the degree to which the Times and other mainstream news outlets have displaced traditional
journalistic practice with ideology. Informed by the tenets of social justice and
critical race theory that have long dominated the humanities departments at leading
universities, journalists have abandoned a commitment to the elusive ideal of objectivity for a
naked embrace of results-oriented activism masquerading as reportage. In this regard,
journalism is a symptom, rather than cause, of the deep-seated cultural relativism that
pervades American culture.
The essence of the 1619 Project is the idea that America is a permanently racist nation
whose founding ideals were lies. This is the capital T truth it seeks to advance. It dismisses
facts that undermine that narrative, distorting the historical record because they are seen as
roadblocks in the arc that bends toward justice. This approach relies on one of the most
dangerous engines of dishonesty in human history: the notion that the means justify the
ends.
That the Pulitzer board would bestow its prize for commentary to the lead writer of the 1619
Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite damning scholarly critiques, suggests how deeply this
activist approach has infected journalism.
This impulse now drives much of the coverage in the Times, the Washington Post, the New
Yorker, NPR, and other prestigious news organizations. The clearest example is reporting on
Donald Trump, whom the left sees as an existential threat. This is the capital T truth they
advance through stories that insistently eschew nuance to portray the president as a
monster.
From climate change to identity politics, examples of their tendentious coverage are legion.
But none is more thoroughgoing and dishonest than the years-long coverage claiming Trump
colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
My RealClearInvestigations colleagues are among those
who followed the leads and dug up the facts mainstream outlets refused to and, so, got the
story right. Tom Kuntz, a former Times editor who leads RCI,
detailed how the Times and the Post relied on untrustworthy anonymous sources, unfair
innuendo and cherry-picked facts to advance this narrative in a series of stories that won both
papers a Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
This effort to distort the truth continues unbowed and unabated. Last week,
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins wrote that Christopher Steele's dossier – opposition
research paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that claimed the Russians had been
cultivating Trump as an asset for decades – "has been neither proved nor
disproved."
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In fact, much of it has been debunked and the key parts of it that haven't been probably
never will because you can't prove a negative – one can't ever prove that there is no
videotape showing Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a Moscow hotel bed the Obamas had
slept in.
Shane Harris of the Washington Post encapsulated the ongoing dishonesty in an article last
week acknowledging, after a fashion, damning new intelligence tying the Clinton campaign to
Russiagate. In a single paragraph he both denied overwhelming evidence that the Clinton
campaign helped generate that now debunked scandal while also insisting that the conspiracy
theory was legitimate. Harris wrote:
"Trump allies have seized on the intelligence as evidence that Clinton was in some way
involved in ginning up an investigation of Trump to tie his campaign to Russia. The president
has consistently denied the charge as a 'hoax,' even though multiple investigations have
documented numerous instances in which his campaign sought Russian assistance in damaging
Clinton."
There is hardly any evidence that the Trump campaign "sought" such assistance. The most that
can be said is that it was receptive to offers of dirt on Clinton at the infamous
June 2016 Trump Tower meeting . Her campaign, by contrast, used people like Steele to
actively seek compromising material on Trump, which appears to have included Russian
disinformation.
Such reporting is so brazen that it suggests a far deeper problem than any one story.
Indeed, the deeply misleading Trump/Russia coverage and the 1619 Project are not deviations
from the norm. They are the new standard at prestigious outlets that are committed to pursuing
their notion of the capital T truth – inconvenient facts be damned.
The problem with the venture capital industry, a sub-sector of private equity in which
deep-pocketed investors bankroll cash-hungry startups, is the lack of black representation
– or
so says venture capitalist Frederik Groce, who co-founded BLCK VC in 2018 to increase black
representation in the sector.
Surfing the wave of 2020's diversity-mania, Groce launched the Black Venture Institute on
Tuesday with two other big-name venture capital firms and the University of California at
Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Odinsson ariadnatheo 1 day ago Insulted by it? Hardly.
Blacks don't want equal treatment; they DEMAND special treatment! ScottMc3 1 day ago Not enough
woman in jail, should try and arrest enough so 50% of prisoners are female, obviously prejudice
against men.. TWOFilms 15 hours ago There's not enough Black Eskimos. I think they're
anti-Eskimo. Reply ariadnatheo TWOFilms 10 hours ago nor black swimming champions. I think the
water is racist Odinsson 1 day ago I can just see the Democrats' solution to this problem now.
They will give out $13 trillion dollars and distribute it equally among the 13% of America's
population that is black. The solution won't work, of course, for the money will be spent on
partying and luxury goods and at the end of a year most blacks will once again be living on
social welfare. Reply 3 fozbotz Odinsson 1 day ago Actually the demos will appropriate the 13
trillion dollars say they are lending it out to black entrepreneurs launder the money and put
it in their back pockets just like they do with foreign aid. Karl_Benz 1 day ago what about
more diversity in the NBA ? we need more diversity in the 100 m Olympics, its all blacks
running. we should put more whites & asians in there . it can't be dominated by one race -
thats not fair. sammy11 23 hours ago If you haven't had the pleasure of a affirmative action
boss, it's an experience ColdFacts 19 hours ago there are 40 million blacks in usa, those
diversity fanatics will only be happy when there are 400 million black venture capitalists out
of this number
Podcaster Dave Rubin has the custom of going "off the grid" for a month each summer, to gain
some perspective on changes. As a scientist who has been retired from the lab for more than ten
years, I feel in a similar position vis-à-vis the state of academic science. To this
campus Rip-van-Winkle, things now look very different.
I didn't notice much until the current anti-racism crisis, when I found that academe, as a
place for free exchange of ideas, had become almost unrecognizable . Higher education has begun
a transformation along the same lines as the 1966 Maoist "Cultural Revolution" in China. Like
the cultural revolution, the energized identity-politics movement presents itself as a
cleansing force. Pure Maoism was being corrupted by covert capitalist sympathizers. They had to
be rooted out.
In U.S. academe, the problem was similar. The "party faithful" took for granted the
permanence of "White privilege" and "systemic racism" which, for many, was also their
livelihood. But then, in the decades following the civil rights acts, things got better.
Measurable indices of racism seemed to be improving: People of color were well represented on
city councils, police forces, and state and national legislatures; Black faces were on many
magazine covers and in ads for prestigious products; interracial marriages increased; Black
entertainers and even opinion leaders were beloved. A Black president was elected and
re-elected. A survey showed a steady decline in
objective measures of racism up until 2014. What's not to like?
Plenty, as it turned out. The "woke" party saw its anti-racist cause going down to
anti-racism! They have fought back, with some success. A survey published
in 2017 showed that from 2014 onward people increasingly agreed that "more needs to be
done" to achieve racial equality. This tendency was exaggerated in academe. From being
relatively content with the state of race relations, administration, faculty, and students have
become
increasingly doctrinaire in their stance against racism. Unable to point to objective
measures of increasing racism, they have turned their attention to something much harder to
refute: systemic (aka institutional, structural) racism.
Systemic racism in higher
education, a petition
One bit of evidence for this is a currently circulating petition/op-ed that, Science (one of
the two leading general-science journals) has apparently agreed to publish about combating
systemic racism in STEM. You can read
Systemic Racism in Higher Education here but I will just discuss a few of its key
assumptions.
Quoting from the petition:
Everyone in academia must acknowledge the role that universities -- faculty, staff, and
students -- play in perpetuating structural racism by subjecting students of color to
unwelcoming academic cultures The misuse of standardized tests, like the GRE, excludes
students who could have otherwise succeeded. [emphases added]
Structural (aka systemic, institutional) racism is not defined. The words could be replaced
by evil spirits without loss of meaning. The idea seems like a way
of deflecting attention from identifiable causes of racial disparities. Careful examination of
a specific context (such as police brutality )
can usually point to measurable causes with no need to invoke an abstraction. Nevertheless, we
all must acknowledge that the GRE, like any predictive test, is not perfect: it fails some good
people and passes a small number of weak ones. But the study cited in the petition seems to
fault the STEM-related GRE more because women and minorities do worse on it than men than
because it is an imperfect predictor of success in graduate school.
What does the petition mean by "unwelcoming academic cultures"? There are two obvious
possibilities: racism, pure and simple, and a problem with the type and level of academic
discussion compared with the environment to which some students are accustomed.
The evidence for any kind of overt racism in academe is negligible and if it emerged would
surely lead to strong correctives. What remains is just that the disciplines of STEM are
difficult, possibly too difficult for students who have been admitted with weaker-than-average
qualifications. Human beings are not equally good at everything. Mathematics, particularly,
separates the wheat from the chaff in dramatic fashion. Some people (your humble correspondent,
for example) just can't handle
tough math . If this is the "unwelcoming academic culture" some students will either drop
out or - and this is the pressure now - will clamor for a simpler curriculum. If such changes
are made, the results will likely be disastrous for the quality of science education.
Reducing structural racism in higher education will require evidence-based,
institution-wide approaches that focus on achieving equity in student learning. If we abandon
the perception of "fixed" student ability, more BIPOC students will succeed.
The petition assumes that essentially any student is capable of succeeding. But at what? Not
at everything. People are not equal; not everyone can master quaternions. The petition assumes
that ineradicable individual differences -- "fixed" student ability -- do not exist, which is
simply false. By all means, give the best education you can. But do not expect to educate
everybody, especially in tough STEM subjects. People are not all equally able. An educational
system aimed at this kind of "equity" is likely instead to end in mediocrity.
[These changes] will require making tenure dependent not only on excellence in research,
teaching, and service, but also meaningful contributions to promote equity and inclusion .
Every scientist should commit to reporting unfair practices All faculty should examine their
courses for performance disparities based on ethnicity and gender
Ready to submit? It is apparently not sufficient to teach well and do excellent research,
faculty must also commit to eliminating disparities, disparities which are as likely to be the
result of differences in interest and talent as inadequate teaching. Faculty are to scrutinize
their grade distributions to see that BIPOC do not fall behind. What if they do? The temptation
to adjust evaluation so as to eliminate disparities will be strong -- will teachers act racist,
but in a good way! They may be "reported" if they don't! This is totalitarianism. not science.
There's more, but you get the idea.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
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If these efforts to eliminate disparities in everything, to match racial proportions in STEM
to those in society, if they succeed, it will be a cultural
revolution indeed. Science is already in trouble; a successful effort to make it conform to
political ends will destroy academic freedom and wreck the nation's science base.
* * *
John Staddon is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience
RobbieSmith , 3 hours ago
The persistent so-called "achievement gap" reveals the same racial IQ hierarchy on
standardized academic exams. The SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores
on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and
like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching,
or practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small -- on average,
no more than about 20 points per section.
Even after decades of focused attention to the achievement gap, it has remained
unchanged.
Vanderbilt University researchers tracked the educational and occupational
accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search and
determined that scores on the SAT correlate so highly with IQ that they are described as a
"thinly disguised" intelligence test.
The persistent so-called "achievement gap" reveals the same racial IQ hierarchy on
standardized academic exams. The SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores
on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and
like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching,
or practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small -- on average,
no more than about 20 points per section.
Even after decades of focused attention to the achievement gap, it has remained
unchanged.
Vanderbilt University researchers tracked the educational and occupational
accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search and
determined that scores on the SAT correlate so highly with IQ that they are described as a
"thinly disguised" intelligence test.
Year White Black Gap
1985 1038 839 199
1990 1031 849 185
1996 1052 857 195
2000 1060 859 201
2005 1061 863 197
2010 1063 855 208
2015 1047 846 201
The new SAT introduced in 2017 was "designed to inspire and increase access to college"
by creating "a more equitable exam". The new SAT cannot be compared to previous
results:
Year White Black Gap
2017 1118 941 177
2018 1123 946 177
The 2017 "college readiness" scores (ability to earn a C or higher in an entry-level
course) showed the stark racial achievement gap; Asians scored 70% college readiness,
Whites 59%, and Blacks only 20%.
SAT scores are highly correlated to intelligence test scores. The SAT correlates with an
IQ test at 0.86, almost the same as an IQ test correlates with itself. For this reason, we
can very reliably take SAT scores and convert them to IQ scores.
Results of psycho-metric IQ and scholastic tests are highly correlated. Rindermann &
Thompson (2013, p. 822)
In the 20 year period from 1994-2014 the Black-White difference increased on both the
verbal and math SATs despite targeted efforts to close the race gap. On the reading test,
it rose from .91 to .96 standard deviations. On the math test, it rose from .95 to 1.03
standard deviations.
In fact, the truncated nature of the SAT math score distribution suggests that these
race gaps would be even larger given a harder exam with a bigger score variance. Note, for
example, how the Black score distribution is cut off at the bottom while the Asian score
distribution is cut off at the top. That suggests that a redesigned exam might feature even
more pronounced race gaps.
Percent by Race Reaching the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark:
15% = Black
24% = Non-White Hispanic
35% = Native American
53% = White
56% = Asian
Source: The College Board, 2014
RobbieSmith , 3 hours ago
Blacks and Whites with Equal Educational Attainment Differ in Cognitive Ability
Black and White Americans with the same formal level of education differ significantly
in their cognitive abilities. Specifically, within any given level of formal education
Whites consistently outperform Blacks. Moreover, this effect is so strong that Blacks often
underperform Whites who have lower levels of formal education than they do.
Consider the following data from the General Social Survey. This public data is
frequently used in social science research and contains a test of verbal intelligence as
well as measurements of participant's self-identified race and highest educational degree
obtained. Verbal intelligence tests correlate at around .75 with full-scale IQ and so this
data can also be taken as a fair measure of intelligence in general (Lynn, 1998). If we set
the White mean score on this test to 100 and the standard deviation to 15, we can come up
with an "IQ" style scale.
As can be seen, using this method Blacks with a graduate degree have a level of verbal
intelligence indistinguishable from that of Whites with a junior college degree. Blacks
with a four-year degree are roughly on par with Whites who never went to college at
all.
IQ BY RACE AND HIGHEST DEGREE EARNED (1972 - 2014):
Highest Degree White IQ Black IQ Gap
High School Drop-out: 89 82 7
High School Diploma 98 90 8
Junior College Degree 102 95 7
Bachelor's Degree 108 100 8
Graduate Degree 113 102 11
This data is consistent with evidence from the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS)
which administered tests of cognitive ability to 26,000 US adults in 1992. These tests were
designed to measure how well people could take information and use it in a way which would
help them function in modern society.
Blacks are such poor academic achievers that the National Achievement Scholarship
Program was created with lower standards for Black candidates only, instead of the National
Merit Scholarship Program which is open to everyone else.
THE SMARTEST STUDENTS: The National Merit Scholarship Program was founded to identify
and honor scholastically talented American youth and to encourage them to develop their
abilities to the fullest.
BLACK STUDENTS ONLY: The National Achievement Scholarship Program was initiated
specifically to identify academically promising Black American youth and encourage their
pursuit of higher education.
They are both measured on the PSAT.
Minimum score for National Merit: 220
Minimum score for National Achievement: 190
Roughly, PSAT x 10 = SAT (out of 2400)
The U.S. government's PACE examination, given to 100,000 university graduates who are
prospective professional or administrative civil-service employees each year, is passed
with a score of 70 or above by 58% of the Whites who take it but by only 12% of the Blacks.
Among top scorers the difference between Black and White performance is even more striking;
16% of the White applicants make scores of 90 or above, while only one-fifth of one percent
of a Black applicants score as high as 90 -- a White-Black success ratio of 80/1. IQ
differences become more pronounced with greater g-loading.
Blacks score so poorly on academic exams that colleges give them 230 "race bonus" SAT
points to help them qualify for admission:
"Personal scores" are the new subterfuge for artificially assisting Blacks gain
admission to universities. Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal
score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white
applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top
six deciles. Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top
seven deciles, and Blacks receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight
deciles.
An otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian male identity with a 25 percent chance
of admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were White, a 77 percent
chance of admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were
Black.
typeatme , 3 hours ago
Clearly this guy comes from one of those "Fact" based Universities....
Where "Science" and "Statistics" are used to make "Rational" decisions.....
Imagine the gall....
RAT005 , 2 hours ago
Robbie, there was another ACT (and/or maybe SAT) score translation change before the
recent one you list. It was around year 2000 that the test resulted in higher scores such
that you can't compare a 1980 score to say year 2000 score.
Just a guess from your listed results that it was done around 1995.
It wasn't an SJW type change, it was just a calibration change and a weighting
difference to increase the verbal section to an equal 50% of the scoring.
RobbieSmith , 2 hours ago
Yes, it's in the first post-
"The new SAT introduced in 2017 was "designed to inspire and increase access to college"
by creating "a more equitable exam". The new SAT cannot be compared to previous
results."
RAT005 , 2 hours ago
I found the info for you. Like I said, there was a score inflation adjustment done
before the one you listed. I actually didn't know about the recent one. I only knew about
the mid '90s score inflation adjustment.
RobbieSmith , 2 hours ago
My guess is they will eventually eliminate all standardized testing because the racial
IQ hierarchy is too obvious.
August , 3 hours ago
Hard to believe that the average IQ among whites with a graduate degree is only 113.
They must be including those with degrees in Education, Economics and Journalism.
RobbieSmith , 3 hours ago
IQ 113 is the 80.6 percentile.
Umh , 2 hours ago
Of what? Sorry to be dense.
neopolyidus , 2 hours ago
Sorry, you have to have an IQ of greater than 100 to 'get' bell curve math.
Excellent post. In the real world- the working world- "adjusted success" will go over
like a lead balloon. Square peg + round hole = failure, no matter how creatively you
attempt to cheat the system.
TheTrumanShow , 2 hours ago
"... adjusted success" will go over like a lead balloon."
For now, yes. But given the current BLM bsh*t conformity, for how long?
One possible bright spot might be that the currently BLM bsh*t conforming
companies/institutions will end up being outperformed and overtaken by new, no-nonsense
startups.
eternal_sarcasm , 43 minutes ago
When you combine this data with FBI crime statistics it doesn't paint a rosy
picture.
acetrumchura , 3 hours ago
Yeah, but this is why they attack the actual tests as being culturally bias. ALL THEY DO
IS MOVE THE GOAL POSTS.
Yagyu Jubei , 3 hours ago
This is why leftists believe that facts are racist.
factoryworker , 2 hours ago
Don't forget about jimmies.
I just got a birthday cake with jimmies. I should have tossed it on the floor in disgust
but blew out the candles and begrudgingly ate my piece in silence.
I'm so ashamed.
Trident5000 , 3 hours ago
If I see you got your degree from a "woke" campus with racial quotas, I simply won't
hire you.
J S Bach , 2 hours ago
I DEMAND that we eliminate disparities in all sports, to match racial proportions in BBF
(Basketball, Baseball, Football). There are far too few whites in these sports with regards
to their actual numbers in our society. If we demand quotas with STEM, then we must have
the same quotas for professional and college BBF as well.
fishpoem , 2 hours ago
Furthermore, it shall be mandated that the final scores in all athletic contests shall
be exactly equal...even if that means that one team has to sit on the bench throughout most
of the game.
NO WINNING IS ALLOWED IN A LAND OF LOSERS.
Hapa , 1 hour ago
to be totally fair, we need to include women as a percentage
HopeToLearn , 3 hours ago
As soon as the MLB, NFL and NBA adopt racially-proportionate hiring practices, we can
talk about fact-based SCIENCE.....
oellinas , 2 hours ago
50% of trash collectors must be women = no trash collected.
RAT005 , 2 hours ago
I think an entirely automated playing field with 1,000s of linked sensors to move the
"goal posts" instantaneously on an infinitely wide range. When a guy less than 6ft shoots,
the basket lowers......when a 7ft goes to stuff, the basket goes up :-)
Yagyu Jubei , 3 hours ago
If it's so cool and woke to lower the bar to create equal outcomes in academics it
should be equally as cool to:
1. Have basketball hoops at different heights for those that are shorter or less adept
at jumping
2. Require quotas of unattractive people for acting and modeling jobs
3. Require quotas of stupid people for jobs in the media.....oh never mind they already
do that
ChrisPatriot , 3 hours ago
LOL, you're about 4 or 5 decades late buddy. They only solution now is burn it all down
and recreate it.
typeatme , 3 hours ago
So....who do you want building your bridges, your airplanes, your vaccines, your
economy??
How about the most qualified.....???
Wild Idea, I understand...but...it has been proven to work better....
I KNOW! Strive to be better, instead of whining about not being good enough!!!
YEA! WILD THOUGHTS....
August , 3 hours ago
You're brim full of hate... and privilege!
marx , 3 hours ago
women hate STEM. they go in and hate it.
minorities are in the Bell Curve
quanttech , 3 hours ago
so basically just hire asian men and be done with it, seeing as how they're on the
higher end of the bell curve, right?
RobbieSmith , 2 hours ago
"so basically just hire asian men and be done with it, seeing as how they're on the
higher end of the bell curve, right?"
Asian IQ scores cluster around the mean; thus, the greater cognitive variation among
Whites produces more geniuses, but also more morons.
Umh , 2 hours ago
I have noticed the same relationship between men and women. There seem to be more bright
men and more male dummies too.
RobbieSmith , 1 hour ago
Mans' accomplishments have been documented according to the number of times they were
cited by others. Over 97% of the most important scientists and 74% of the most important
artists and authors were White, almost all males, and most from only four countries, Great
Britain, Germany, France, and Italy; the remainder were mostly Asian, and none were
Black.
RobbieSmith , 2 hours ago
Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis.
Lynn, Richard (2006)
ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that race differences in intelligence exist, but no consensus has
emerged on whether these have any genetic basis. The present book is the first fully
comprehensive review that has ever been made of the evidence on race differences in
intelligence worldwide. It reviews these for ten races rather than the three major races
(Africans, Caucasians, and East Asians) analyzed by Rushton (2000). The races analyzed here
are the Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, Bushmen, South Asians and North Africans,
Southeast Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic Peoples,
and Native American Indians. (PsycINFO Database Record, 2016 APA)
****'s hard and you to sacrifice to make it. Women are better off making babies unless
they have an undeniable natural talent. Having been part of various physics departments for
20 years, this does happen, but it's rare.
fightapathy , 2 hours ago
School girls hate it too. I was reviewing coding progress for 5-8 graders today: all
boys were exceeding expectations, all girls were lapsing. Well, a few boys were screw-ups
and failing hard. But that's to be expected.
GeezerGeek , 3 hours ago
The goal seems to be equality of outcome, regardless of talent. They sometimes blame
K-12 schools as being at the root of the problem, because K-12 schools are segregated by
class to some extent. Rich folks can send their kids to private schools, regardless of
color of skin. Just ask the previous president.
But of course these Maoists/Bolsheviks don't really want equality, they just want to
tear down what had been an incredibly successful system. If they really wanted to match
racial proportions in occupations, etc., to those in the general population regardless of
talent they would insist that sports teams be balanced like they want STEM to be balanced.
And speaking of balance, anyone else here notice the proliferation of blacks in commercials
these last few months? Or the increase in the number of multi-racial couples?
These are parts of an all-out attack on America, Western Civilization, and at its root
on Christianity. Its no wonder so many American Christians want to be raptured out before
SHTF. (Not that I think it will work out that way.) Who, after all, wants to make hard
choices?
August , 3 hours ago
The nearly-all-black TeeVee commercials have certainly proliferated over the last
half-year or so.
I actually watched TeeVee a few days ago, and there were at least six consecutive
commercials featuring African-Americans, with the only non-blacks shown being attractive
young White or Asian females.
Nothing to see here!
Promethus , 2 hours ago
I've noticed the increase in AAs in commercials, interracial couples and same sex
couples. This is to make them the new norm and traditional white Christian families racist
freaks.
Delving Eye , 56 minutes ago
Commercials with Blacks flooded the networks the second Obama was elected in 2008. I
watched the returns and noticed the shift immediately. I was amazed that there was
virtually NO commentary about it.
Didymus , 3 hours ago
it's really an attack on white people, more than america, the west, or christ.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 2 hours ago
Ding ding ding. Look at how they took out the white people in South Africa.
awesomepic4u , 3 hours ago
They took over long ago, now they're mobilizing.
"Structural (aka systemic, institutional) racism is not defined. The words could be
replaced by evil spirits without loss of meaning.
Lack of a definition is only part of the problem. I have noticed that---without
exception---claims of systemic racism, especially coming from POC students, never provide
any examples. Never.
The Dean of the University of Massachusetts School of Nursing was summarily fired for
publicly stating the Hippocratic Oath on Twitter.
She was fired for stating that all human lives matter.
That Oath is required of all members of the medical profession.
Except that all human lives no longer matter. That is now official dogma in elite US
institutions.
Just like in 1930s Germany. History does not rhyme. It is a replay.
Get ready if you have a clue. The lives that do not matter may be those of you and your
family.
It was a long crawl through the attic to retrieve and sight-in the SKS.
If someone tries to take your gun away, you have a solemn Duty to perform.
I will do mine. With regret, but I will do it regardless of the consequences.
America began July 4, 1776. A lot of people died. It had nothing to do with Blacks, but
with Tyranny.
Never forget that. Teach your kids. The Bible is not a bad book.
Dying-Of-The-Light , 2 hours ago
We are already seeing more and more completely stupid white and black people with PhDs
and Professorships. If the Cancel Culture goons get their way then dumb cluck whites won't
be getting doctorates but more and more blacks who can barely count will. The West will end
up being run by the victim, hate culture we see in the worst white and black citizens right
now but it will become black only. Already more and more truly nasty and un intelligent
blacks and asians are beginning to infest Western politics. The ones who are Left Wing are
in every instance anti white and anti Western culture, despite the fact that many come from
parents who fled to the West to escape the brutality of their own shXt hole nations. They
are the true racists, hating all whites without any true justification.
rodguy911 , 2 hours ago
Don't look now but its already happening.
greatdisconformity , 2 hours ago
The language of BLM and Critical Race Theory is the language of genocide.
Substitute the word of any other ethnic group for the word 'white' in their manifestos,
and you are in 1930s Germany.
Sadly, most college educated young Americans have no clue what was going in 1930s
Germany.
But they can talk your ear off about normative Gender praxis post-modern
colonialism.
That is by Design folks.
That is by Design.
In N Korea, young people get brainwashed for free. Here, we pay for the privilege.
Captain Phoebus , 3 hours ago
The Great Leap Forward, American style.
GeezerGeek , 3 hours ago
Right off the edge of a cliff...
JD Rock , 3 hours ago
"Systemic racism"🙄
RattieNomNom , 3 hours ago
wankerfistings
Kreator , 3 hours ago
Yeah, they did....
in 1968.
acetrumchura , 3 hours ago
Thanks for already commenting with my answer.
acetrumchura , 3 hours ago
Conservative colleges are growing. Not sure many companies show up to their job fairs
though :/
Lather Rinse Repeat , 3 hours ago
Total BS - these soros paid marxiturds are being videoed and will be erased when the
time is right.
Didymus , 3 hours ago
people have expecting a reaction since 1946.
Make_Mine_A_Double , 2 hours ago
Rotten poisoned fruit of Affirmative Ape-tion.
Let these yard munkays on campus where they are too stupid to learn anything and with
nothing to do they start agitating to lower standards and close down debate least their
obvious inferiorty become blatantly obvious and the Big Lie be revealed.
30 years of this nonsense and now our higher ed institutions are completely gutted.
My kids are done thank god, but if you have them in their teens I would seriously look
at Russia or Eastern Europe - maybe Colombia or Uraguay. But it would abuse to send them to
US campus until all this is destroyed.
Didymus , 3 hours ago
Read Revilo P. Oliver's "The Education of a Conservative" or Henry Ford's "the
international ___" and you'll see that this has been going on for a hundred years.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 2 hours ago
It is also in the "Hope of the Wicked" by Ted Flynn published in 2000. Dewey was a
commie.
chubbar , 3 hours ago
Why is it we can only select the most qualified if it is a sport but not if it's a
critical job like a doctor or scientist? Why is it important to me, the consumer, that the
person I hire to make me well has a specific skin color or gender?
None of this **** works and the morons pushing it know it doesn't. When less than the
required number of race "X" applies that are qualified, the standards have to be lowered to
bring in the balance. Why is that a good thing?
If there exists equal quality of applicants then the racial equality of outcome would be
assured, but that isn't reality and these idiots driving this narrative know it.
There is no reason to continue to point out that all races have different genetic
differences in IQ, but it's fact. It's also fact that IQ is a significant predictor of
success in many endeavors, STEM being one of those. So without significant concessions in
order to accommodate those of lessor IQ's, you are never going to have equality of outcome.
You can have equality of opportunity, but that doesn't appear to be the goal of these
people.
My suggestion has always been to scrub every application of race & gender and take
every possible step to ensure that information isn't revealed during the application
process. Then pick those candidates MOST qualified, period. I don't give a **** if the
whole class is south pacific islander, just quit with this nonsense about racism being the
reason for STEM classes being mostly X or Y race/gender.
Promethus , 2 hours ago
I would be happier watching a sporting event with white Affirmative Action players than
being treated by a minority AA doctor.
Cabreado , 3 hours ago
This is the rise of the Self-Absorbed -- the Narcissist and Sociopath -- to a critical
mass of places of influence and control.
The only! antidote is a vigorous protection of a righteous rule of law.
The People are failing from every direction.
BGen. Jack Ripper , 3 hours ago
After a few years of starvation they'll be humming a new tune.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 2 hours ago
The US should have never given out food stamps. They should have given out seeds,
shovels, and access to plots of land.
oellinas , 2 hours ago
nah not really... take a look at zimbabwe... starvation is the new normal
ZENDOG , 3 hours ago
Burn the Witches.
emptybeercan , 2 hours ago
Maybe it's time to just defund higher ed. We're defunding things and cancelling them
these days, so, let's say goodbye to the land of $1,500/credit hour 'tuition' and tweed
jackets with leather elbow pads and people that speak in tongues to avoid being understood
by the lumpen proletariat.
Online is the Great Equalizer. The computer does NOT care what you look like, how much
money you have, who you are related to, gender, religion, political affiliation,
nationality, age, whatever. Either you can use the equipment and access and make sense of
the stored information and perform computations and measurements and analysis and such not
and so on, or you cannot. Either you have the mental capacity to learn and experiement and
study, or you do not. There is no 'equal opportunity', there is only opportunity, and
information.
College, university, is an opportunity to study the higher subjects. Advanced
mathematics, the sciences, art, music, languages, and other than in the context of a
political science class, politics really has no place in it.
I think all colleges and universities should have their own independent admissions
testing standards, and develop their own in-house tests. Either you make the grade, or you
go and study somewhere else, with no respect to any of the items listed above. Go shake
your fist someplace else, come back when you are ready to be a serious student. If you want
to get drunk and spend 4 years screwing off at a party school, that option is also open.
But reserve higher education for those who have earned the privilege of going. Some people
are stupid. And you can't study your way out of that. Or legislate it. Period.
Bastiat , 2 hours ago
The are Marxists--it's their religion. Many of them are fanatics.
greatdisconformity , 2 hours ago
Defund so-called 'Social Science'.
Defund it and evict it from State supported campuses.
This thing will unravel in less than a decade.
We feed this thing that seeks to destroy us.
Templar X , 2 hours ago
Some people are just better at certain things than others. This has always been the
case, and it will always be the case.
You can't force a square peg into a round hole.
Pigs will never fly.
Monkeys will never do calculus.
Arnold Schwarzenegger will never become a ballerina.
Well, you get the picture, or you should anyway.
littlewing , 3 hours ago
One college in Texas had 100 professors on China's payroll.
China bought everyone, which is why they are bankrupt now.
JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 3 hours ago
I can see why colleges had so many active shooters in the past. Insanity havens for
brainwashing dems. You learn nothing, get nothing besides an exchange for some worthless
paper. Its not even worth it, for anybody. Corporations, students. It distorts the labor
market and time of people who really don't need to go. I hav edone a calcution: The added
costs for labor for corporations is $100,000,000,000,000 for a bunch of idiots who do not
even know what they are doing.
Blondefire , 2 hours ago
I'm a conservative professor at a small private college. Occasionally I get strange
looks from my colleagues but they have not persecuted me for anything yet. Fingers crossed.
Still teaching students how to think rather than what to think. The air is tense here but
still breathable.
fightapathy , 2 hours ago
Higher education? What about lower education? Da Home Dogs don't want to become
teachers, so white-*** states like CT and VT are giving out BIG scholarships and preferred
places for blacks who want a free ride but look like they're working. Hell, its downright
embarrassing in all these democrat ****holes that all the teachers are white and all the
dropouts are black. Will black teachers make for more successful black students? Maybe. Or
else they will be properly positioned to radicalize the students for mass strike actions
even before college.
HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 2 hours ago
Higher education has begun a transformation along the same lines as the 1966 Maoist
"Cultural Revolution" in China. Like the cultural revolution, the energized
identity-politics movement presents itself as a cleansing force. Pure Maoism was being
corrupted by covert capitalist sympathizers. They had to be rooted out.
Through the sweeping and indiscriminate indictment of oppression that it makes against the
American republic, wokeism poses the first serious challenge to our constitutional democracy
since communism.
Wokeism aims to remake American constitutionalism root and branch, to transform economics,
politics, education, and other institutions and practices. The free and equal individual under
the rule of law will be replaced with monolithic voices, united by perceived oppression, who
demand a mutating law and politics that reward their grievances with punishments against
alleged oppressors and redistributed resources for supposed "victims."
The first thesis of wokeism is that persons are reducible to their affiliated identity:
above all, race or gender. In this view, we understand ourselves solely through these prisms
and we apply that understanding to others and to institutions.
The second thesis is that no person, no idea, and no historical account can be understood
by independent human reason unfiltered by race, gender, and stories of interlocking
oppression , or, as the case may be, by the acts of oppression one has shared in as a member
of the dominant group. Everything comes to us and is either understood or projected by us
through our racial or gender identity.
The third thesis is that those who have identities that can be grouped under "persons of
color" or LGBTQ possess greater authority to speak -- owing to the various oppressions they
have experienced and the cosmic redress required for justice and liberation -- than oppressor
groups in almost every sphere.
America's national DNA, according to the New York Times' 1619 Project -- wokeism's
anti-American document par excellence -- has been encoded with slavery and anti-black racism.
Indeed, America left the British Empire for the purposes of retaining the slavery regime, the
project's lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones proclaims (against historical evidence). White males
stand as the grand artificer of this oppression, which has been transmitted throughout American
history, informing our constitutional documents, politics, and social structures.
The 1619 Project leaves no space or opportunity for redemption, for forgiveness, or for the
statesmanship of someone like Abraham Lincoln. It cannot acknowledge that American
constitutionalism is a contested space. The 1619 Project cannot understand the succession of
witnesses like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr., who call
upon Americans to understand in full the principles of our Constitution and Union. Consider
that, while American soldiers were still fighting the Civil War, and much of the Democratic
Party was arguing against the abolition of slavery, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was
passed by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, later ratified by the requisite number of states in
December 1865. Its central premise stands on the equality language in the Declaration of
Independence, the same principles that outlawed slavery in the lands regulated by the Northwest
Ordinance of 1788. This is part of our heritage, too.
Our political institutions and our Constitution stand or fall ultimately by their
willingness to uphold us as free people pursuing the broad purposes of human existence.
Contrast this with the regime that wokeism would build. It would reject any notion of
individual integrity or distinctive notion of personhood. Intellectual freedom would be
nonexistent. Speech would be filtered through a relentless and constantly evolving set of
censors, who would punish or bless our words according to ideological criteria. Consequently,
our thinking and speaking would revolve around an endless loop of testimonies to oppression --
either committed against us or by people with whom we share tribal traits. In the latter sense,
we would confess our shared guilt and accept whatever punishment is deemed necessary.
Steve Nash, the recently named head coach of the New Jersey Nets, confessed that he had been
given the job unfairly because of his white privilege. He wanted to work for "change," he said.
Many will make similar pronouncements under more stringent conditions or risk becoming
untouchables. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling "How to Be an Antiracist," asserts
that the point of being an anti-racist is not to refrain from discrimination but to know whom
to discriminate against -- largely whites and Asians, if the woke polity is to become a
reality.
Under wokeism, the function of political institutions would not be to facilitate individual
flourishing but to enforce individual sameness, subsuming us all in an egalitarian stew of
grievance, redistribution, and retribution. The traits that define a decent community, such as
forgiveness, humility and compromise, will not be possible, and those suggesting them will be
accused of racism. Wokeism's social-justice constitution would fuel a federal government built
for one purpose: the evisceration of the freedoms that Americans have always known.
If the progressive notion of a "living Constitution" threw the law in doubt, woke
constitutionalism will destroy all fixed or limited notions of law. How could it be otherwise,
when the operative principle is the elimination of all forms of oppression, as measured by an
endlessly moving set of ideological markers? Man can organize the world without sufficient
notions of virtue, justice, and freedom, to say nothing of the biblical God, but as theologian
Henri de Lubac noted, when man does this he organizes the world against himself. One Nation
Under Woke would make this vision a reality.
* * *
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Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor of Law & Liberty, host of "Liberty Law Talk," and
co-author of "A Constitution in Full." He and over 1,000 similarly concerned scholars and
citizens recently made common cause in an open letter published at
RealClearPolitics. This article is part of an ongoing " Liberty and
Justice for All " series. Kat , 2 hours ago
I'm originally from the USSR. This is just Socialism and Communism under a different
banner. Where we were fed a constant stream of anti-capitalist and anti-bourgoisie BS, now
it's anti-capitalist and racist BS. But it's all the same thing and they can kiss my behind.
All this does is fan the flames of xenophobia and racism.
Kat , 2 hours ago
I just wrote it in my comments. I'm originally from Moscow, back when it was in the USSR.
This is exactly the same ****e.
chubbar , 2 hours ago
White privilege is being used as an excuse for losers who can't cut the mustard of life
and need someone or something to blame to make them feel better about themselves. It isn't
going to work, we all know they are losers and we aren't giving them our **** just because
they suck at life. Sorry, better luck next time.
Fox News
Fox News
5.73M subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
White employees were informed that their so-called 'white' qualities were offensive and unacceptable.
#FoxNews
#Tucker
If one needed any further evidence of Twitter's far-left corporate culture, look no further
than former CEO Dick Costolo - who went full Bolshevik in a Thursday Twitter rant warning that
"me-first capitalists" who don't agree with injecting political activism into the workplace
will be "the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution," adding "I'll
happily provide video commentary."
Costolo, a partner at
Index Ventures and who sits on the board of Patreon (which got
spanked in court for deplatforming conservatives), ran Twitter from 2010 to 2015.
As Reclaim The Net
writes, "Costolo was replying to a tweet related to how Coinbase's CEO has decided to separate
business from political activism and offer an exit package for those employees who feel they
can't work in a company that doesn't want to be hindered by politics and activism, as so many
other companies have been distracted by in recent times."
Over the next 4 years, Trump promises to lower the cost of healthcare, and "bring better and
tailored healthcare to address historic disparities" for the black community. The president
will also ensure that black churches can compete for federal resources, and "defend religious
freedom exemptions to respect religious believers and always protect life."
The president also seeks to further criminal justice reform, with his plan saying that he
will "commit to working on a Second Step Act." He will also work towards "safe urban
neighborhoods with highest policing standards," the plan states.
Other aspects of the plan includes making Juneteenth a National Holiday, prosecuting the
KKK, designating Antifa a terrorist organization, and making lynching a national hate
crime.
Trump's move to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization came after FBI Director
Christopher Wray told Congress that those who engaged in recent violent protests are targets
of serious FBI investigations.
"We have seen Antifa adherence coalescing and working together in what I would describe as
small groups and nodes," Wray has said. Wray added that the bureau is conducting multiple
investigations "into some anarchist violent extremists, some of whom operate through these
nodes."
Before that, Attorney General William Barr in August said Antifa is a "revolutionary
group" that is bent on establishing communism or socialism in the United States.
"They are a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism.
They're essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic," Barr said in an interview with
Fox News on Aug. 9.
At a "Black Voices for Trump" campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia, Trump characterized his
Platinum Plan as a "black empowerment plan," and warned black voters against supporting his
opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
"Though black Americans have traditionally been shut out of opportunities to grow our own
businesses and create generational wealth, President Trump is working hard to give us access
to the American Dream," K. Carl Smith, Black Voices for Trump advisory board member, said in
a
statement .
"President Trump is a businessman and understands that pride, community, and dedication
are built through entrepreneurship."
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President Donald Trump elbow bumps with Herschel Walker during a campaign rally in Atlanta,
Georgia, on Sept. 25, 2020. (John Bazemore/AP Photo)
"No one in Washington politics today has done more to hurt black Americans than Joe
Biden," Trump told supporters on Friday. "For half a century, Joe's personally advocated or
enacted virtually every policy that has caused pain and suffering in the black community. You
know that."
In a statement prior to Trump's rally in Georgia, Biden said, "As president, I will work to
advance racial equity across the American economy and build back better I promise to fight for
black working families and direct real investments to advance racial equity as part of our
nation's economic recovery."
play_arrow
Stormtrooper , 6 hours ago
Hey Donald, don't forget about us non-privileged, unemployed white folk. We could use
a few greenbacks too.
risitasse , 6 hours ago
Trump likes everybody but whites.
YesWeKahn , 6 hours ago
This is insanity, while everyone is suffering, only black people get special
treatment, only because of their skin color. In this country, we can see: only black
lives matter.
risitasse , 6 hours ago
So, KKK is terrorist but not BLM ?
Hilarious.
farflungstar , 6 hours ago
90% of interracial crime is black on white.
Bribing them even more won't fix that.
Cornbred , 6 hours ago
"Prosecuting the kkk" for what exactly? They've been irrelevant for 30 +/- years and I
can't remember a crime committed by that organization that made National news.
echoes , 7 hours ago
Trump's all in on BLM lmao
The fraudster-in-chief.
farflungstar , 7 hours ago
Wait BLM not a terrorist organization? Yes Antifa is but the KKK? Isn't that an
irrelevant Boomer organization filled with feds?
Lol BLM will be relieved to hear that so they can carry on harassing people and
rioting every time one of their criminal good boys gets shot by the police.
Xena fobe , 7 hours ago
BLM is a front for billionaires. Antifa is easier to pick on.
pods , 7 hours ago
13% of population. High % cannot vote due to felony conviction. Turnout %?
And on a good republican year they get 10% of that? Most monolithic voting block there
ever was. 500 billion (promised lol) for another 5% of that? Might better court the
beaners. They are the up and comers anyways.
Deep Snorkeler , 3 hours ago
WOW! I wish I was black.
I could enjoy immense privileges and free money.
Poor white Trumpkins, suckers.
Locker up , 3 hours ago
Platinum plan for black votes but Dog-Poop Plan for whitey.
Taffer , 4 hours ago
So, as a heterosexual white man that makes up the majority of Trump's base....why
should I be voting for him again? I mean, where's my "Platinum Plan?"
Making Juneteenth a National Holiday alone might actually be enough to just make me
skip the election this year. I mean crap, if the Republicans new brilliant plan is just
to go ahead and become Democrats to win votes for people who will never vote for them,
I'm done.
risitasse , 3 hours ago
No matter who wins the election, (((Goldman Sachs))) wins.
Hope we get some real conservatives next election.
outsider88 , 6 hours ago
pandering for votes. donald biden or joe trump?
outsider88 , 6 hours ago
pandering for votes. donald biden or joe trump?
Manthong , 6 hours ago
So now maybe we will get the Gold Plan for Hispanic Americans, the Silver Plan for
Asian Americans, the Red Plan for Native Americans and then finally the Brown Plan for
White Americans who will incrementally become more brown over time because of government
"policy"..
This is not racist, it is physics and biology.
Chuck Walla , 6 hours ago
Amen! When a culture fosters violence and killing as the first option in any conflict,
civilization will be hard to acquire and retain. Avoid them until they can reform their
child rearing skills.
R Crumb , 6 hours ago
LBJ did it to us with his "Great Society".
He should have had his head blown off, not JFK.
yojimbo , 5 hours ago
What about the Nation of Islam, that works against all that? And if you have issues -
why is Christianity failing the black community?!
flajim7 , 4 hours ago
They are trying to protect themselves, when the time comes they are outed and the
ropes are strung. They feel empowered knowing their hangman committed a national hate
crime.
teutonicate , 3 hours ago
Trump Unveils "Platinum Plan" For Black Americans, Designates Antifa, KKK As
"Terrorist Organizations"
Just as an aside, as far as I am concerned, blacks have been on the platinum plan
since the sixties - and it hasn't helped them one bit.
I am agnostic regarding the KKK, but to truly understand the origins of this
organization you need to do some historical research - and understand that it was
literally the only law and order in the south during the reconstruction period after the
civil war. Also, as you evaluate the KKK in its historical context, please remember that
five presidents were members of the KKK - so please don't pretend that it had no rational
justified political support, at least at one time in our history.
Categorizing the KKK as a terrorist organization, given the fact that to the best of
cosmic knowledge there is no recent evidence of "terrorist behavior" exercised by the
KKK, in stark contrast to the actual behavior of Antifa, dilutes the categorization of
Antifa as a terrorist organization. This is a political move, but at this point if I can
find any politician willing to identify Antifa (and don't forget BLM) as terrorist, I am
willing to accept political sops like parallel identification of the KKK as such - if
that happens to placate the current political zeitgeist.
WTF, I'm white and I don't even get a "platinum plan". Not fair.
metaforge , 33 minutes ago
It's carefully targeted to "areas" that are typically largely black, not direct
reparations just because of skin color. And it's an investment in business, not just the
usual Dem dole. Clever.
FolloDaMoney , 46 seconds ago
(((They))) gave you a "platinum plan" and you do not realize it .
(((Their))) plan to genocide your White race into oblivion is succeeding beyond all
expectations and has acquired record breaking platinum status .
Trump's Five Hundred BILLION USD reparations plan for "black empowerment" is on top of
the more than two TRILLION USD federal spending on blacks , since ww2 , and on top of the
650,000 White lives expended by the federal government to win the US Civil War which was
fought to prevent the Southern Confederate secession that was instigated by northern
abolitionists of southern enslavements of African kneegroes whom are now called American
Blacks .
That 500 BILLION USD will be underwritten by the politicly anemic and largest ethnic
culture , which is White Christian sheepill , in the USA .
The fanaticly loyal White Trumppians are completely delusional about Trump being their
God-ordained savior .
The vast majority of Whites are Christian sheepill and they simply do not have the
political intelligence ( not IQ ) to end their racial suicide which is also known as
nothing less than a technical genocide against Whites that ends in a very real extinction
.
vovishka.2018 , 5 hours ago
socialism is here
US has socialism for the corporations, MIC, the bankers and the 1% where earning are
privatize & losses and debt are socialized. The rest is pretend socialism (:
The plan is a desperate vote buying scheme. Why Trump didn't announce this 2-3 months
after he took office but waits until about 1 month before the election?
Because Trump knows the proposal will not get through Congress. It is a mere plan, a
declaration of intent. Congress will eventually trash it, but the plan will survive long
enough to get Trump past the election, or at least through first debate.
The election lies are flying thick and fast like always , neither prospect will be a
good choice as the whole thing is just a farce.
ineluctable , 3 hours ago
Tax dollars ... yeah right... Everything is bought with DEBT. It will be your grand
kids who pay up. Enjoy living large on their backs.
Blackcubic , 7 hours ago
Fvck off with your MAGA. It was a lie and scam by Trump
GlobeTrekker , 6 hours ago
You can support MAGA (Trump) and not like this move.
It's just more pandering to blacks, and designating the KKK a terrorist organization
is ridiculous, because it has been toothless for 50 years, and blacks kill more blacks in
one year than the blacks lynched by the KKK in 100 years.
y_arrow
Leroy Whitby , 7 hours ago
Most likely Trump will deregulate massively in a way that helps blacks form
businesses, get jobs, compete for EXISTING state funds by black churches etc. I don't see
how you could read Trump's proposal negatively.
Mineshaft Gap , 6 hours ago
You must realize it's a game.
Trump has literally no allies in Congress who will fund Platinumania. The GOP would
always rather fight a nice profitable war somewhere. The Dems won't let him help their
urban vassals one iota.
It's all empty promises for votes. . .which may just work! Peter Kirsanow runs the
numbers authoritatively: Dems are right at the tipping point where black support for
Trump could cost them fatally.
hal0bender , 7 hours ago
So what's he gonna do for White americans, the founding stock of this country? Why are
these people treated like sacred cows? Have we not had 50+ years of ******** welfare,
affirmative action, etc?
GlobeTrekker , 6 hours ago
That also!
Whites, and especially white men, are treated like sheeot nowadays, and occupy a lower
status than every other race (except maybe Asians) in college admissions, college
scholarships, loans, and jobs. You cannot create or continue a top-shelf society by
continually lifting up the less capable, less hard-working, less intelligent, at the
expense of the best.
I'm sick of the mindless pandering to minorities and women (yes, it is true) at the
expense of white men (and Asians many times as well). This is why Atlas shruggs.
Shadow1275 , 7 hours ago
And we have officially become South Africa. Witness how in two single generations,
White Europeans have undone the work of thousands of past generations of their ancestors.
All that spilt blood, all those tears, war after bloody war to gain land and
prosperity.
Supreme Dudeness , 3 hours ago
What is privilege???
1) Privilege is wearing $200 sneakers when you've never had a job.
2) Privilege is wearing $300 Beats headphones while living on public assistance.
3) Privilege is having a Smartphone with a Data plan, which you receive no bill
for.
4) Privilege is living in public subsidized housing where you don't have a utility or
phone bill and where rising property taxes, rents and energy costs have absolutely no
effect on the amount of food you can put on your table, which is largely covered by
Government Food Stamps.
5) Privilege is having free health insurance for you and your family that's paid for
by working taxpayers who often can't afford proper health coverage for their own
families.
6) Privilege is having multiple national organizations promoting and protecting just
your race alone -- that are subsidized by federal tax dollars.
7) Privilege is having access to a national college fund that supports only one
race.
8) Privilege is having a television network that supports only one race.
9) Privilege is having most of the media news networks refuse to cover incidents
wherein one race (one-eighth of the population) commits 50% of the crimes.
10) Privilege is the ability to go march against, and protest against anything that
triggers you, without worrying about calling off from work and the consequences that
accompany such.
11) Privilege is having as many children as you want, regardless of your employment
status, and be able to send them off to daycare or pre-school you don't pay for.
12) Privilege is being able to vote in many states without showing a driver's license,
voter ID card or other credentials -- just because your race claims they should be exempt
from such requirements.
13) Privilege is being able to riot, loot, commit arson and tear down historic
monuments without consequences -- just because you don't like folks such as Columbus, U.
S. Grant or even Lincoln.
14) Privilege is being able to get into almost any college of your choosing based on
your race, not your grades or merit.
15) Privilege is having most of your life paid for by the working men and women who DO
HAVE TO DEAL WITH RISING TAXES AND COSTS! you know, those you now call
"PRIVILEGED."
_arrow
Son of Loki , 5 hours ago
Biden calls it a "Reparation Tax"
Trump calls it a "Platinum Plan"
In any case, the middle class whitey gets screwed and needs to work harder.
Blankone , 3 hours ago
You could give the black community $5 trillion and they would not produce new wealth,
but would simply ask for more.
For example, look at every once White dominated country in Africa where the blacks
have taken over. Every single time the productive country turns to subsistence level
existence.
Look at the great farms taken from the Whites in Africa, they all decayed to nothing
due to the blacks.
No motivation, no ability.
Psst - look at every once productive city in the USA once the blacks become 50% of the
occupants.
play_arrow 1
Billy the Poet , 7 hours ago
Looks like maybe Trump is trying to buy the black vote with big government programs.
He has a good chance of success. But do we really need more socialism?
Trump has committed himself to deregulation. Perhaps he could focus on eliminating
taxes and regulations that weigh heaviest on poor and minority neighborhoods rather than
by making even more expensive promises about forty acres and a mule.
GlobeTrekker , 6 hours ago
Love Trump, but calling the KKK a terrorist organization smacks of Clinton-era
"domestic right-wing terrorism" BS, and mindless pandering to blacks. The KKK has been
toothless for 40 years, and even if they weren't, as Bob Woodson (civil rights leader,
and not your typical black race pimp) has said many times blacks kill more blacks in ONE
YEAR than the KKK did in lynching blacks over a period of 100 years.
Alot of the rest seems like more gibs for blacks.
Liesel , 7 hours ago
Some people figured out that by backing white Americans in a corner by using the race
card against them, they could change the very fabric of our nation. That's where we are
right now. No politician has enough gonads to call BLM the terrorist organization that
they are. This is one of the most concerning events I have ever seen in my lifetime.
inorganic , 6 hours ago
As much as I like the idea of "blacks" (whatever that actually means) living and
enjoying better and more prosperous lives ... I very much dislike adopting inherently
racist approaches.
Seriously. Why have a separate plan for blacks? And another for hispanics? And another
for asians? And another for females? And another for gays and lesbians? And another for
transgenders? And another for multigenders? And another for the poor? And 50 more for
every other real and fictional category one can conceive?
Seriously!
How about you just stop the rich and elites and connected and hyper-rich and
globalists from having special artificial advantages over everyone else? Ever think of
that? Ever think of the fact that if ALL the artificial special advantages were removed,
then everyone down below (at ALL levels below) would have a VASTLY easier time to improve
their own lives ... WITH NO SPECIAL PLANS OR HANDOUTS OR PROGRAMS REQUIRED .
-----
This creating special programs for every freaking real and fictional distinction that
any warped mind can conceive of does what? It tells people to think of others NOT as
human beings LIKE THEMSELVES ... but as member of other groups that have special programs
to aid them. So now EVERYONE has to compete with everyone else to get more and better
special handouts and programs and treatment than all the other groups. Which means
everyone is encouraged to think of all others as fundamentally NOT LIKE THEMSELVES and in
fact INHERENTLY AGAINST THEM as in INHERENTLY THEIR ENEMY .
-----
Seriously. Do I want to see blacks have better and more enjoyable lives? Yes! Damn
straight! Do I want everyone else to have better and more enjoyable lives? Yes! Damn
straight! Do I want the rich, privileged, connected and hyper-rich live worse and less
enjoyable lives? Well, YES --- to the 99.9% of them who did not earn their wealth
honestly without taking advantage of any special setups. To the other 0.1% --- more power
to you, and enjoy your wonderful lives. And that 99.9% who didn't earn what they have?
Even with a massively reduced wealth and privilege they'll live a vastly better life than
the other 99.9% ... so I'm not gonna cry for them, that's for sure!
Why set everyone against everyone else?
That is NOT necessary. I'm betting that 99.999% of blacks and all those other bogus
"groups" understand very clearly that a tiny percentage of rich and connected have a VAST
and mostly ARTIFICIAL advantage over everyone else --- AND they understand that if all
those artificial advantages were removed, THEY would do vastly better. And most
important, they would have a vastly better chance and easier time moving up the success
and wealth ladder.
Trump should stop falling into the Marxist trap by adopting the Marxist approach. I
agree that disadvantaged should be helped ... but they can be helped without creating
more artificial injustices. Where does the current Marxist approach end? With everyone
against everyone ... and a tiny elite at the top who are hyper-doodle-dandy rich and
powerful, with everyone else an abject slave.
-----
PS: Another problem with these endless special programs is ... the already rich and
connected always get richer and more connected by "administering" and "executing" these
special programs.
Maghreb2 , 6 hours ago
I agree with what your saying but your a ****** because its not a free market and
those rules haven't applied anywhere on the planet since 1970. It was dangerous idea to
think that way in the 19th century because the rich inherit and the middle class invent
jobs to fleece the tax payer. Now they do both plus they print money and give it to the
stock market all the time. Black areas can't afford to exist because they are caught
between tens of millions of Hispanic migrants, hundreds of millions of factory workers
Artificial intelligence automation and trillions of dollars pumped into the system to
gentrify. Its a fools errand.
If the whites stopped playing pretend for ten seconds they would realize 90% of jobs
can be automated with robotics and AI and/or done cheaper somewhere else. You have to be
Godlike to be relevant and funnily enough the Sportsman and Musicians occasionally are.
They don't make billions on Wall Street and can't retire if they don't make enough
money.
I predicted a plane crash 2 days ago it was actually a bombing. Its not a meritocracy
its a war. Humans have to fight for survival now and the fight will just get tougher. I
know the people who run the show its amusing for them .
inorganic , 6 hours ago
Every now and then I ask myself whether my desire for everyone to have a more fair
chance to rise to better situations is delusional ... if not wrong.
Well, I'm a long way from saying it is wrong, but the question of whether it is
delusional is always a difficult call for me. But I must say, as time passes, I have to
admit I am monotonically getting closer to saying it is. Which would be to agree with
you.
Part of the reason is ... there has always been (since I was 4 years old) such a huge
intellectual and existential gulf between my thoughts and actions versus the thoughts and
actions of others. The following are a few, just for context. Some are actually kind of
funny, but all were relevant.
age 4 : Based on hearing utterly contradictory statements from different adults, I
decided that I could not believe what adults tell me (meaning TRUST NO ONE ). Implicit in
this is the fact that I valued understanding reality infinitely more than getting treated
well (by repeating whatever adults told me).
age 4 : I taught myself to read (at least "well enough for now"). I still remember how
huge a struggle this was, and how much persistence was required. And got hooked on
astronomy. So I started reading lots of science books.
age 4 : I decided god does not exist. I won't go into the details of my reasoning, but
I literally thought I was the only human who believed this, because I never heard of of
anyone who also came to this conclusion.
age 5 : I decided to pretend I was an alien from another planet. This was a purposeful
intellectual device that I came up with to help me feel comfortable with not believing
what humans believe, and not feel pressure to conform (and thereby accept fiction and
nonsense). I decided I would operate as if I was an alien from somewhere far, far away
... and my job was simply to observe what these strange creatures do and believe.
age 5 : I figured out that "authority" was a bogus concept (later I would say
"fictional" concept). I distinguished "trade" from "authority".
age 5 : The very first thing at the start of the very first day of first grade, the
teacher made all the kids stand up, solemnly place their hand over their heart, and
repeat the "pledge of allegiance". I stood up, and I crossed both arms across my chest to
slightly simulate the whole reverence action, but did not say a word. I just listened.
And I thought about what was said. I recognized exactly what was being said, right from
the start. They wanted me to pledge to obey (in effect, to be a slave). But that wasn't
bad enough, I was supposed to be a slave to an inanimate object (a flag). That somehow
represents a "republic" (whatever that is, which I didn't know at the time). Then some
absurd filler. Then the payoff! The "with liberty and justice for all". I don't know why
I was different than the rest of the kids, but I recognized what I would later learn is a
concept called "bookends". This "pledge" was explicitly saying that "what constitutes
liberty and justice is ... being a slave!!! ". Holy crap! Until that moment I had not
realized how infinitely nefarious and diabolical human beings could be! But that set me
straight. Furthermore, at recess I tried to have conversations with other kids about what
happened first thing that morning. Not a single one of them noticed a thing. Some just
ran away laughing. Obviously the most evil and atrocious thing I had ever witnessed meant
nothing to them.
age 5 : Later that day (first day of school) the teacher pointed at the big A above
the blackboard and told the class "repeat after me". Then she said the word "A". The
class repeated. Then she did the same with "B" and "C" and "D". At first, I thought
something very sophisticated and "beyond my pea brain" was going on. What are they doing?
After a while, I figured it out ... the other kids can't read! They don't even know the
freaking alphabet. What am I doing here? :-o
age 5 : Based on the previous item I mentioned, I decided to ignore teachers. I would
spend all day reading my science books while the teachers were doing ... whatever they
were doing.
The rest of my life is just as "different" and "wacko" as the above. Even more so,
actually. But one constant was ... I diligently worked to observe and understand reality
based on my own observations (including with telescopes, which I taught myself to build).
And though I did play physical sports outside with other kids, almost all my time was
spent working on my own studies and projects.
In fact, after I got out of high school, the rest of my life I lived on an average of
36 to 48 hour days ... 12 hours of sleep and 24 to 36 hours of observe, study, work. And
mow lawns, shovel snow and babysit for neighbors for money to do my projects.
The bottom line is ... can I expect other humans to be or think even REMOTELY like me
after living such a different life? I think you are saying NO WAY . And I am getting
closer to agreement.
John Grady , 6 hours ago
BLM took that **** off their website saying that part of their plan was to destroy the
nuclear family a few days ago so I guess now they're wholesome. It's a LGBTQ outfit ran
by Marxist lesbians. Compared to them the KKK looks like the 4H Club.
Arch_Stanton , 4 hours ago
If antifa is a terrorist organization, then the Feds should go after their funding
sources immediately. It's publicly known who many of them are.
Not happening. Ever.
As for the KKK, you'd be arresting a lot of FBI agents working undercover in what is
essentially a honey pot.
"... If your category is "white," bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy ("Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness"), which naturally means "a positive white identity is an impossible goal." ..."
"... DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except "strive to be less white." To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo's lecturing – what she describes as "leaving the stress-inducing situation" – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the "ordeal by water" (if you float, you're a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia. ..."
"... White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. ..."
"... It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one's intended point, but this isn't uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina. ..."
"... Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself "antiracism" – I think it deserves that name a lot less than "pro-lifers" deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors. ..."
"... This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of "progress" institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won't hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars. ..."
"... For corporate America the calculation is simple. What's easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There's a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the "antiracism" prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc. ..."
"... Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction. ..."
"... If you're wondering what that might look like, here's DiAngelo explaining how she handled the fallout from making a bad joke while she was "facilitating antiracism training" at the office of one of her clients. ..."
"... DiAngelo doesn't grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, "I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics." ..."
"... After DiAngelo confesses her feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt to the enlightened white cross-racial dynamics expert (everyone should have such a person on speed-dial), she approaches the offended web developer. She asks, "Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?" At which point the web developer agrees, leading to a conversation establishing the parameters of problematic joke resolution. ..."
"... This dialogue straight out of South Park – "Is it okay if I touch your penis? No, you may not touch my penis at this time!" – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation, law firm, university, newsroom, etc. ..."
"... One of the central tenets of DiAngelo's book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, "lifelong" vigilance, much like the battle with addiction . A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts -- in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever. ..."
"... Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that "anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer's Union of Canada for the crime of "cultural appropriation," and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki "doesn't see the humanity of indigenous peoples." Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous. ..."
"... People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of "anti-black racism" to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other's careers before they've even finished growing? ..."
This is part of a larger piece that will be made available to subscribers later this
week:
A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since
the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process
are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like
former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility (Amazon's #1
seller !) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to
racial power contests.
It's been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it
surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today
cheered , "American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary
escapism." When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon
gushed , "I know everyone wants to talk to you right now!" White Fragility has been
pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of
George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except
this isn't a straightforward book about examining one's own prejudices. Have the people hyping
this impressively crazy book actually read it?
DiAngelo isn't the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual
horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race
theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal
human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but
only by our racial category.
If your category is "white," bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in
white supremacy ("Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities Whiteness has always
been predicated on blackness"), which naturally means "a positive white identity is an
impossible goal."
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except "strive to be less white." To
deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo's
lecturing – what she describes as "leaving the stress-inducing situation" – is to
affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the "ordeal by water"
(if you float, you're a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
DiAngelo's writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of
this type is built around the same principles as Orwell's Newspeak : it banishes
ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like
racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform , center and
silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices . Ironically,
Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like " AMAZING !" and "
SAD !" that are
simultaneously more childish and livelier.
Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly
verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a
world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. "To be
less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort
of white people," or "Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness,
describes whiteness as multidimensional "
DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. "When
there is disequilibrium in the habitus -- when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they
challenge our capital -- we use strategies to regain our balance," she says ("People taken out
of their comfort zones find ways to deal," according to Google Translate). Ideas that go
through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key
part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream," speech:
One line of King's speech in particular -- that one day he might be judged by the content
of his character and not the color of his skin -- was seized upon by the white public because
the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that
we don't see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for
racism, with white people insisting that they didn't see race or, if they did, that it had no
meaning to them.
That this speech was held up as the framework for American race relations for more than half
a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult
and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course.
White Fragility is
based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of
their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving
one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage
because rejection of King's "dream" of racial harmony -- not even as a description of the
obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future -- has become a
central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to
embrace.
The book's most amazing passage concerns the story of Jackie Robinson:
The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by
rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often
celebrated as the first African American to break the color line
While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as
racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson
finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong
enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this:
"Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball."
There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin
DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he
"finally had what it took to play with whites." Everyone familiar with this story understands
that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the
racist institution known as Major League Baseball.
His story has always been understood as a
complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as "the first black man whites allowed to
play major league baseball" is grotesque and profoundly belittling.
Robinson's story moreover did not render "whites, white privilege, and racist institutions
invisible." It did the opposite. Robinson uncovered a generation of job inflation for mediocre
white ballplayers in a dramatic example of "privilege" that was keenly understood by baseball
fans of all races fifty years before White Fragility. Baseball statistics nerds have
long been arguing about whether to put asterisks next to
the records of white stars who never had to pitch to Josh Gibson, or hit against prime Satchel
Paige or Webster McDonald. Robinson's story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth
about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered "invisible."
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the
mathematical opposite of one's intended point, but this isn't uncommon in White
Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal
read like Anna Karenina.
Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself "antiracism"
– I think it deserves that name a lot less than "pro-lifers" deserve theirs and am amazed
journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race
relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed
groups, allies, and white oppressors.
Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by
birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the
program of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a "less white
identity," but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one
another as impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.
This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy,
is the vision of "progress" institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why?
Maybe because it fits. It won't hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades
now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts
since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.
Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this
performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders.
Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall
Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating,
defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in
kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on
privilege even as they reassure donors they'll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried
interest tax break.
For corporate America the calculation is simple. What's easier, giving up business models
based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There's a deal to
be made here, greased by the fact that the "antiracism" prophets promoted in books like
White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual
rights, freedom of speech, etc.
Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be
addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute
codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.
If you're wondering what that might look like, here's DiAngelo explaining how she handled
the fallout from making a bad joke while she was "facilitating antiracism training" at the
office of one of her clients.
When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have
been put off by one of her Black female team members: "The white people," she says, "were
scared by Deborah's hair." (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be
more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction
worker).
DiAngelo doesn't grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her
web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, "I seek out a friend who is white
and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics."
After DiAngelo confesses her feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt to the enlightened
white cross-racial dynamics expert (everyone should have such a person on speed-dial), she
approaches the offended web developer. She asks, "Would you be willing to grant me the
opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?" At which point the
web developer agrees, leading to a conversation establishing the parameters of problematic joke
resolution.
This dialogue straight
out ofSouth
Park – "Is it okay if I touch your penis? No, you may not touch my penis at this
time!" – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation, law
firm, university, newsroom, etc.
Of course the upside such consultants can offer is an important one. Under pressure from
people like this, companies might address long-overdue inequities in boardroom diversity.
The downside, which we're already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace
powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the
central tenets of DiAngelo's book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and
can only be managed through constant, "lifelong" vigilance, much like the
battle with addiction . A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced
toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts -- in the
fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.
Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar
to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three
years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was
denounced for expressing the opinion that "anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to
imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the
Writer's Union of Canada for the crime of "cultural appropriation," and denounced as a racist
by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki "doesn't see the
humanity of indigenous peoples." Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing
to provide proof that she was Indigenous.
Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was
forced to
resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D'Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine
– but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired
after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a
"white power" sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the
Washington Post
decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two years ago in
blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn Kelly)? She
was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person's life necessary?
People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and
colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a
salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of
"anti-black racism" to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to
start submarining each other's careers before they've even finished growing?
"People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don't want people
like that to keep getting jobs," one 16 year-old said. "Someone rly started a Google doc of
racists and their info for us to ruin their lives I love twitter," wrote a different person,
adding cheery emojis.
A bizarre echo of North Korea's "
three generations of punishment " doctrine could be seen in the
boycotts of Holy Land grocery , a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks
it's been abandoned by clients and seen
its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO's 14 year-old daughter eight
years ago.
Parents calling out their kids is also in vogue. In Slate, "Making a Mountain Out of
a Molehill" wrote to advice columnist Michelle Herman in a letter headlined, " I
think I've screwed up the way my kids think about race ." The problem, the aggrieved parent
noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their "closest friends are still
a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids," which to them was natural. The parent worried when
one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed
annoyance at having to specify race, because "I don't care about race."
Clearly, a situation needing fixing! The parent asked if someone who didn't care about race
was "just as racist as someone who only has white friends" and asked if it was "too late" to do
anything. No fear, Herman wrote: it's never too late for kids like yours to educate themselves.
To help, she linked to a program of materials designed for just that purpose, a " Lesson
Plan for Being An Ally ," that included a month of readings of White Fragility.
Hopefully that kid with the Black and Hispanic friends can be cured!
This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White
Fragility , could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can't Breathe, I met
civil rights activists who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard
stories of lawyers who were physically threatened for years in places like rural Arkansas just
for trying to end explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow.
Last week, an Oregon County casually exempted "people of color
who have heightened concerns about racial profiling" from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who
thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has
it ever?
At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise
and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it's extremely suspicious
that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants
alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our
identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both
beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for
containing the "N-word ." ( White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It's
almost like someone thinks there's a benefit to keeping people divided.
The CEO of Wells Fargo
offered a groveling apology for his "unconscious bias" and promised more diversity at one of
the largest US banks, after a quote from an internal memo caused outrage; even some members of
Congress joined in.
"I apologize for making an insensitive comment reflecting my own unconscious bias,"
Charlie Scharf said in a
statement released on Wednesday. "There are many talented diverse individuals working at
Wells Fargo and throughout the financial services industry and I never meant to imply
otherwise."
The San Francisco-based Wells Fargo is now "requiring diverse candidate slates for key
roles with compensation of more than $100,000 and increasing business with diverse
suppliers," the statement said. Moreover, year-end bonuses for executives will be tied to
"progress in improving diverse representation and inclusion in their area of
responsibility."
Scharf's apology and Wells Fargo's newly reasserted commitment to diversity follows a storm
of criticism, including from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) after a remark
in an internal memo was quoted by Reuters.
"While it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very
limited pool of black talent to recruit from," Scharf had written in a memo dated June 18,
which pledged more diversity at the bank, the largest in the US by the number of employees.
Initially, the CEO tried to say his comment had been "misinterpreted," adding that
the financial industry doesn't "reflect the diversity of our population" and that Wells
Fargo was committed to changing that. The explanation was not accepted by the online outrage
mob.
It is unclear whether such a course would fall afoul of the executive order issued by
President Donald Trump on Tuesday, which prohibits federal agencies and the military from
funding ideologies that "promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating," including
among contractors who wish to do business with the government.
In the
executive order , titled "Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping," Trump
wrote that many people are pushing an ideology that is a "different vision of America that is
grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the
inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual."
"This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an
irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or
sex, are oppressors ; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our
common status as human beings and Americans," Trump wrote, later calling the ideology
"divisive."
The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which
included a seminar recently held by the Treasury Department that promoted the message that
"virtually all White people, regardless of how 'woke' they are, contribute to racism." The same
seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea
that Americans should be "more color-blind" or "let people's skills and personalities be what
differentiates them."
In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity,
was found to have stated in training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on
"rationality over emotionality" was a characteristic of "white male[s]." The training materials
also asked the trainees to "acknowledge" their "privilege" to each other.
The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy,
was found to have stated in its training materials that racism "is interwoven into every fabric
of America." It also characterized statements like "color blindness" and "meritocracy" as
"action of bias."
The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where
one of the museum's graphics asserted that concepts such as "objective, rational linear
thinking," "hard work" being "the key to success," the "nuclear family," and belief in a single
god are "aspects and assumptions of whiteness" and not values that would unite Americans. The
museum also stated that "[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt,
sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear," according to the order.
Macho Latte , 6 hours ago
After 30+ years of brain washing, the students of our public schools and Ivy League
universities are now the leaders of corporate America and populate all branches of federal,
state and local government. They actually believe all the racist propaganda they have been
taught, which is one of the reasons they give money to outfits like BLM. It is their belief
system now. They are automatons living in a science fiction world where they are triggered to
act and react in a per-programmed manner. It has nothing to do with intelligence. They cannot
help themselves.
And to what end? Are those privileged white corporate giants and mega rich blacks anxious
to sacrifice their life, their job or their wealth for some nameless, faceless black person?
NO way Jose! It's YOUR job and YOUR life they intend to destroy as an unintended consequence
of cleansing the earth of white, heterosexual male racists and all non-believers.
Insane? Absolutely. And they will fight tooth and nail to maintain their belief system.
It's happening now and is going to get worse. Normal people are going to have to figure a way
to deal with them and it won't be pretty. There is no choice. Fight fire with fire.
Black Lies Matter
toady , 6 hours ago
This is the kind of thing that drives the demonrats nuts.
They continually INSIST that Trump is racist, but can never provide any proof, just
innuendo and sniveling.
Now Trump comes out and provides proof that THEY are racist AND sexist, and are actively
pushing this agenda using their official capacity.
onemorething , 6 hours ago
facts don't matter
High Vigilante , 5 hours ago
It's the old Mao style cultural revolution shoved through Americans throats. Here is the 2
minutes video, same middle class shaming, statue destroying, history rewriting:
"" President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to
stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical race theory training
sessions."
YES!! "Silence is complicity" as leftarded sheep often bleat, and silence in the face of
this ultra-racist bullsh!t has gone on far too long. Never should've been allowed to begin
with.
Son of Loki , 6 hours ago
Obama and his pet Wookie encouraged it.
Nunyadambizness , 4 hours ago
His pet Wookie Biden?
Oh, wait... you meant Michael. Never mind...
Gold Banit , 6 hours ago
This is the end for the lying racist corrupt DemoRat Scum party!
In 2016 Trump won big with only 8% of the black support and 29% of the Hispanic
support.
The DemoRat Party CNN and the Fake News are in a panic and are very desperate cause their
internal polling is showing that 60% of blacks will be voting for Trump and 70% of Hispanics
will be voting for Trump and Trump will win in a landslide 50 states on Nov. 2020...
And when and if the guns come out and the shootings starts the DemoRat cowards will put
their tails between their legs and run away and never to bee seen again...
bobert , 5 hours ago
Black Lies Matter (BLM) and I'm getting tired of this charade.
Good for President Trump. One brave guy!
Isn't it clear by now that POTUS just does what is right?
What has he done or said in three and a half years to deserve the animosity directed
toward him?
Trump haters need to listen to what he says and look at what he does and then form their
opinion of him rather than forming their opinion based on what somebody else says.
Geeeezzzzz..........
Nunyadambizness , 4 hours ago
Trump haters and never Trumpers CANNOT form their opinion outside of the media. They don't
have the critical thinking ability to do so, so they listen to the bullshiite prattled by the
media (of all channels), and form their opinions around it.
Look, Trump was not my guy in the primaries of 2016 and I didn't think he would amount to
much if elected. However, when he became the nominee against the most corrupt and evil
candidate ever for President from any party, my choice was clear. Since becoming President he
has accomplished much--even with Congress initially failing to support him, and then 1/2 of
Congress actively working against him. He has won me over, but not just me--millions of
others who doubted him, and I am hopeful he will continue to do the right things.
Xev Bellringer , 6 hours ago
Great! Now get rid of affirmative action and all the other racist / sexist programs.
TBT or not TBT , 6 hours ago
California has it on the ballot to allow racial discrimination, in the California
Constitution.
Awesome, not politically correct but truly correct!
Good start...
palmereldritch , 5 hours ago
They are anti-family, anti-human, anti-human rights operating under the guise of equity
when they instead seek the opposite, to sow division and inequity so that they can then loot
and conquer from the resulting carnage.
They are the Satanic Death Cult called Communism and are funded and spawned by
International Banksters.
CosmoJoe , 5 hours ago
Thats right. Trump stomping his foot right on the nutsack of these lunatics and grinding
his foot back and forth.
Walking Turtle , 6 hours ago
Well GOOD!
Don't stop, Sir! This **** is being pulled all up and down the line. Our city halls are
swarming now with thirty-something University degree-holders who take no little delight in
subjugating the vulnerable townsfolk they draw into their sphere with their destructive
regulations and Bolshevistic protocols of governance with that very crap and its derivative
power plays. Our sweet nation's corporate boards are infested; the Critical Attitude
Adjustment policies, when adhered-to, out-and-out violate all fiduciary responsibility
previously enforced. "Get Woke Go Broke" is NOT why we buy shares in these "persons",
Sir!
Not for the sake of the mere color of any mere bag of living human skin. Rather for the
sake of the content of the wearer's character . Once we return to that long-subverted and
original ML King standard, we shall recover from this war's ravages just dandy.
Oh but how did we get this way tbw, Sir...? Well, it was your foes and mine, the Crooked
Fibbies, who shot the Good Man who set the standard (enunciated above) down like a dog. Then
various [DS] cadres stepped into the Moral Vacuum and the abject creeping degradation has
been on our backs ever since.
Kindly DO carry on with this WONDERFUL prohibition, Sir! It is imvho long overdue . Oh,
and please see that the FDA/CDC/etc FINALLY speak the TRUTH about what the consumption of
fluoridated drinking water does to human intelligence levels - those poor saps out there
being usefully destructive idiots for Uncle George could do far better without it.
All the Rest of Us too, for that matter. And that is all. 0{:-)o[
RedNeckMother , 4 hours ago
Company I work at is 90% snowflakes, academic types. They've had a series of black
awareness programs ever since the corporate apologies started. Latest one is to watch some
black victim documentary and then zoom in for a discussion. What the ****. Whatever happened
to just working for a paycheck?
snatchpounder , 6 hours ago
CRT to AmeriKa is like Nelson Mandela to S.Africa . In the former it'll lead to violence against Caucasians
because of their skin color. In the latter it lead to blacks killing Caucasians and stealing
their farms. Soros and like minded psychopaths are funding all of this and they're the ones
who need to be dealt with. You take away the funding and these vermin in the streets will
fade away.
WorkingClassMan , 6 hours ago
Barr-none is right on it!
alia2526 , 6 hours ago
Racist and sectarian comment.
snatchpounder , 6 hours ago
CRT is racist you idiot.
NewDarwin , 6 hours ago
Make America Fair Again!
ebworthen , 6 hours ago
Black Lives Matter but White Privilege?
Isn't valuing people by race one way or another discrimination and bias?
What do you do with a mulatto, or half-Asian half-Latino?
Oh wait...I know...value an individual by the content of their character?
Let me guess..."Dat's rayciss!".
Petrodollar System Beneficiary , 4 hours ago
Sad that this country requires an executive order to combat this kind of problem. Cultural
mistakes usually garner quick feedback, what is amazing is how so many deer in headlights
allow these programs to even begin. Logic and reason is unbiased. Being fearful of truth is
unreasonable and illogical. This country is weak minded for allowing to occur in the first
place
Angular Momentum , 4 hours ago
Trouble is these pod people have infiltrated business management. Now it isn't enough to
do good work, you have to agree with the ideology. Another problem is all it takes to get
sued is one marginalized employee to whine about a hostile work environment. Businesses
protect themselves from liability by having a record of combatting discrimination through
worker training. The more lawyers in on this scam, the more lawyers are needed.
In the early 1980s, students of color at Harvard Law School organized protests in various
forms to problematize the lack of racial diversity in the curriculum, as well as among students
and faculty. These students supported Professor Derrick Bell, who left Harvard Law in 1980 to
become the dean at University of Oregon School of Law. During his time at Harvard, Bell had
developed new courses which studied American law through a racial lens that students of color
wanted faculty of color to teach in his absence. However, the university, ignoring student
requests, hired two white civil rights attorneys instead. In response, numerous students,
including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda, boycotted and organized to develop an
"Alternative Course" using Bell's Race, Racism, and American Law (1973, 1st edition) as a core
text and included guest speakers Richard Delgado and Neil Gotanda.[11][12]
The theory itself is a kind of Lysenkoism in this particular area. Read voodoo science. This pseudoscience includes
several themes (Wikipedia)
Critique of liberalism: CRT scholars favor a more aggressive approach to social
transformation, as opposed to liberalism's more cautious approach; a race-conscious approach
to transformation rejecting liberal embrace of affirmative action, color blindness, role
modeling, or the merit principle; and an approach that relies more on political organizing,
in contrast to liberalism's reliance on rights-based remedies.
Storytelling, counter-storytelling, and "naming one's own reality": The use of narrative to illuminate and explore
experiences of racial oppression. B
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress: Criticism
of civil-rights scholarship and anti-discrimination law, such as Brown v. Board of Education.
Derrick Bell, one of CRT's founders, argued that civil rights advances for blacks coincided
with the self-interest of white elitists. Likewise, Mary L. Dudziak performed extensive
archival research in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice, including the
correspondence by U.S. ambassadors abroad, and found that U.S. civil rights legislation was
not passed because people of color were discriminated against. Rather, it was enacted in
order to improve the image of the United States in the eyes of third-world countries that the
US needed as allies during the Cold War.
Applying insights from social science writing on race and racism to legal problems.
Intersectional theory: The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and
sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings, e.g., how the
needs of a Latina female are different from those of a black male and whose needs are the
ones promoted.
Essentialism: Reducing the experience of a category (gender or race) to the
experience of one sub-group (white women or African-Americans). In essence, all oppressed
people share the commonality of oppression. However, such oppression varies by gender, class,
race, etc., and therefore, the aims and strategies will differ for each of these groups.
Non-white cultural nationalism and separatism (incl. Black nationalism): The
exploration of more radical views that argue for separation and reparations as a form of
foreign aid.
Legal institutions, critical pedagogy , and minority
lawyers in the bar.
Structural determinism : Exploration of how "the
structure of legal thought or culture influences its content," whereby a particular mode of
thought or widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually occurring
without conscious knowledge. As such, theorists posit that our system cannot redress certain
kinds of wrongs.
White
privilege : Belief in the notion of a myriad of social advantages, benefits, and
courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race (i.e. white people). A clerk
not following you around in a store or not having people cross the street at night to avoid
you, are two examples of white privilege.
Microaggression : Belief in the
notion that sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions have the power to mar the everyday
of oppressed individuals. These include small acts of racism consciously or unconsciously
perpetrated, whereby an analogy could be that of water dripping on a rock wearing away at it
slowly. Microaggressions are based on the assumptions about racial matters that are absorbed
from cultural
heritage .
Empathetic fallacy : Believing that one can change a narrative by offering an
alternative narrative in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take
over. Empathy is not enough to change racism as most people are not exposed to many people
different from themselves and people mostly seek out information about their own culture and
group.
Critique
Any rational legal scholar should reject CRT as voood science. But somehow it crioped in many federal againces.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical
race theory training sessions.
“The President signed an Executive Order to end training sessions based on race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating in
the Federal workforce, the Uniformed Services, and among Federal contractors,” the White House said in an announcement.
“This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting training that promotes race stereotyping,
for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth.”
The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which included a seminar recently held by
the Treasury Department that promoted the message that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are,
contribute to racism.” The same seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea that
Americans should be “more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”
In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity, was found to have stated in
training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white
male[s].” The training materials also asked the trainees to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.
The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy, was found to have stated in its
training materials that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.” It also characterized statements like “color
blindness” and “meritocracy” as “action of bias.”
The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where one of the museum’s graphics
asserted that concepts such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work” being “the key to success,” the “nuclear
family,” and belief in a single god are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and not values that would unite Americans. The
museum also stated that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness,
or fear,” according to the order.
Many rational legal scholars have criticized CRT as pseudoscience and voodoo: CRT scholars'
reliance on narrative and storytelling, or CRT's critique of objectivity.
Judge Richard
Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has "labeled critical race theorists and
postmodernists the 'lunatic core' of 'radical legal egalitarianism.'" He wrote:
What is most arresting about critical race theory is that it turns its back on the Western
tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal
logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories – fictional,
science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal – designed to expose
the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned
argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of
nonwhites.
Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that critical race theorists
have constructed a philosophy which makes a valid exchange of ideas between the various
disciplines unattainable:
The radical multiculturalists' views raise insuperable barriers to mutual understanding.
Consider the "Space Traders" story. How does one have a meaningful dialogue with Derrick
Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable, one quickly reaches a dead end after either
accepting or rejecting his assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to
the aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who
risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is
Bell's insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl who perished in
the Holocaust – as close to a saint as Jews have. A Jewish professor who invoked the
name of Rosa Parks so derisively would be bitterly condemned – and rightly so.
Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry have argued that critical race theory, along with critical
feminism and critical legal studies, has anti-Semitic and anti-Asian implications, has worked
to undermine notions of democratic community, and has impeded dialogue.
Jeffrey J. Pyle wrote in the Boston College Law Review:[40]
Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the [classical] liberal legal
order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral
principles of constitutional law. These liberal values, they allege, have no enduring basis
in principle, but are mere social constructs calculated to legitimate white supremacy. The
rule of law, according to critical race theorists, is a false promise of principled
government, and they have lost patience with false promises.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, considers CRT a "grievance
ideology" and an "absurdity". He sees the central tenet of "white racism in the American legal
system" to be shown false because of items such as the 14th Amendment, the Voting Rights Acts,
and Brown v. Board of Education.[41] Critics including George Will saw resonances between
critical race theory's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses challenges to
objective judgments in the US and the acquittal of O. J. Simpson.[42][43]
In September 2020, the White House Office of Management and Budget took steps to cancel
funding for training in critical race theory among federal agencies on the basis that it
constituted "divisive, un-American propaganda".[
Controversies Critical race theory has stirred controversy since the 1980s over such issues
as its:
deviation from the ideal of color blindness; promotion of the use of narrative in legal
studies;
advocacy of "legal instrumentalism" as opposed to ideal-driven uses of the law;
analysis of the U.S. Constitution and existing law as constructed according to and
perpetuating racial power;
and encouragement of legal scholars to be partial on the side of promoting racial
equity.[43]
In 2010, the Mexican American Studies Department Programs in Tucson, Arizona were
effectively banned due to their connection to CRT, which was seen to be in violation of a
recently-passed state law that "prohibits schools from offering courses that 'advocate ethnic
solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals'."[46] The ban included the
confiscation of books, in some cases in front of students, by the Tucson Unified School
District.
Matt de la Peña's young-adult novel Mexican WhiteBoy was banned for containing CRT,
However, this ban was later deemed unconstitutional on the grounds that the state showed
discriminatory intent. "Both enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus,"
federal Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in the ruling.
Derrick Bell as the founder of
critical rase thory and black racism
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) became the first tenured
African-American professor of law at Harvard Law School, and he is often credited as one of the
originators of critical race theory along with Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda,
and Patricia Williams. He promoted quota systems for racial groups in faculty which is a racist
stance in itself.
He was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law[3] from 1991 until his
death. For five years he was also a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.
He was hired by Harvard Law School In the 1970s, with the help of protests from black
Harvard Law School students for a minority faculty member. At Harvard, Bell established a new
course in civil rights law, published a book, Race, Racism and American Law, and produced
several law review articles.
In 1980, he started a five-year tenure as dean of the University of Oregon School of Law,
interrupted by his resignation after the university refused to hire an Asian-American woman he
had chosen to join the faculty.
Returning to Harvard in 1986, after a year-long stint at Stanford University, Bell staged a
five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to two professors
on staff, both of whose work promoted critical race theory. The sit-in was widely supported by
students, but divided the faculty, as Harvard administrators claimed the professors were denied
tenure for substandard scholarship and teaching.[8]
In 1990, Harvard Law School had 60 tenured professors. Three of these were black men, and
five of them were women, but there were no African-American women among them -- a dearth Bell
decided to protest with an unpaid leave of absence.[8][11] Students supported the move which
critics found "counterproductive," while Harvard administrators cited a lack of qualified
candidates, defending that they had taken great strides in the previous decade to bring women
and black people onto the faculty.[8] The story of his protest is detailed in his book
Confronting Authority.
Bell's protest at Harvard stirred angry criticism by opposing Harvard Law faculty who
called him "a media manipulator who unfairly attacked the school," noting that other people had
accused him of "depriv[ing] students of an education while he makes money on the lecture
circuit."[12]
Bell took his leave of absence and accepted a visiting professorship at NYU Law, starting in
1991. After two years, Harvard had still not hired any minority women, and Bell requested an
extension of his leave, which the school refused, thereby ending his tenure.
Later in 1998, Harvard Law hired civil rights attorney and U.S. assistant attorney general
nominee Lani Guinier, who became the law school's first black female tenured
professor.[1][13]
In March 2012, five months after his death, Bell became the target of conservative media,
including Breitbart and Sean Hannity, in an exposé of President Barack Obama. The
controversy focused on a 1990 video of Obama praising Bell at a protest by Harvard Law School
students over the perceived lack of diversity in the school's faculty. Bell's widow stated that
Bell and Obama had "very little contact" after Obama's law school graduation. She said that as
far as she remembered, "He never had contact with the president as president."[14] An
examination of Senior Lecturer Obama's syllabus for his course on race and law at the
University of Chicago revealed significant differences between Obama's perspective and that of
Derrick Bell, even as Obama drew on major writings of critical race theory.[15]
NYU School of Law Bell's visiting professorship at New York University began in 1991. After
his two-year leave of absence, his position at Harvard ended and he remained at NYU where he
continued to write and lecture on issues of race and civil rights.
Bell and other legal scholars began using the phrase "critical race theory" (CRT) in the
1970s as a takeoff on "critical legal theory", a branch of legal scholarship that challenges
the validity of concepts such as rationality, objective truth, and judicial neutrality.
Critical legal theory was itself a takeoff on critical theory, a philosophical framework with
roots in Marxist thought.
Bell continued writing about critical race theory after accepting a teaching position at
Harvard University. He worked alongside lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the
country. Much of his legal scholarship was influenced by his experience both as a black man and
as a civil rights attorney. Writing in a narrative style, Bell contributed to the intellectual
discussions on race. According to Bell, his purpose in writing was to examine the racial issues
within the context of their economic and social and political dimensions from a legal
standpoint. Bell's critical race theory was eventually branched into more theories describing
the hardships of other races as well, such as AsianCrit (Asian), FemCrit (Women), LatCrit
(Latino), TribalCrit (American Indian), and WhiteCrit (White).[21] His theories were based on
the following propositions:
First, racism is ordinary, not aberrational.[22] Second, white-over-color ascendancy serves
important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group.[22] Third, "social
construction" thesis holds that race and races are products of social thought and
relations.[22] Fourth, how a dominant society racializes different minority groups at different
times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market.[22] Fifth, intersectionality and
anti-essentialism is the idea that each race has its own origins and ever-evolving history.[22]
Sixth, voice-of-color thesis holds that because of different histories and experiences to white
counterparts', matters that the whites are unlikely to know can be conveyed.[22] CRT has also
led to the study of microaggressions, Paradigmatic kinship, the historical origins and shifting
paradigmatic vision of CRT, and how in depth legal studies show law serves the interests of the
powerful groups in society. Microaggressions are subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or
visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously.[23]
For instance, in The Constitutional Contradiction, Bell argued that the framers of the
Constitution chose the rewards of property over justice. With regard to the interest
convergence, he maintains that "whites will promote racial advances for blacks only when they
also promote white self-interest." Finally, in The Price of Racial Remedies, Bell argues that
whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status. Similar
themes can be found in another well-known piece entitled, "Who's Afraid of Critical Race
Theory?" from 1995.[24]
His 2002 book, Ethical Ambition, encourages a life of ethical behavior, including "a good
job well done, giving credit to others, standing up for what you believe in, voluntarily
returning lost valuables, choosing what feels right over what might feel good right
now".[25]
Over the past few months, most Americans have begun to hear the terms "Critical Theory" or "Critical Race Theory".
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the better moniker, as the theory is about "race, racism and power", and so I will
use CRT throughout this article. Though the roots of CRT go back to at least the 1970s, the theory has come from
beyond the halls of academia to becoming a profound influence on modern society.
The problem comes with the
general misunderstanding of CRT as being solely about helping fight racism. CRT goes well beyond fighting racism.
It not only demands a reordering of American society, but acts as a replacement for the Christian worldview in
America. Let me explain.
First, I have previously written about the ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and Gramsci relates directly
to CRT. Gramsci wrote about the need to overturn the alleged "cultural hegemony" of a society with an alternative
narrative as a necessary precursor to Communist Revolution. Gramsci's ideas generated what has become known as
"Cultural Marxism", which infiltrated American academia starting as early as the 1940s. CRT was developed at the
time many American socialist and/or Marxist academics were adapting Gramscian theory to American society. It was
a way to help flip the alleged cultural hegemony through the rhetoric of racism, and yet going well beyond
individual racism. It was developed with a Marxist, therefore Materialist and atheist worldview, and focuses on
power relationships over actual racism.
Richard Delgado's & Jean Stefancic's book,
Critical
Race Theory: An Introduction
provides the following insights: "The critical race theory (CRT) movement is
a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying
and transforming
the
relationship among race, racism, and power It not only tries to understand our social situation,
but
to change it
; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and
hierarchies, but to transform it for the better (pp. 2-3; emphasis added)." Delgado and Stefancic write that CRT
holds "racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society ..the individual racist need not
exist (in order for) institutional racism [to be] pervasive in the dominant culture." In other words, even if
whites, as an alleged dominant group, are not individually racist, racism still exists and will exists due to
whites being a dominant culture. The only seeming way to end racism is ending the alleged cultural hegemony,
though CRT seems to hold whites as irredeemably racist without means of redemption.
UCLAs School of Public Affairs provides perhaps the iconic statement of CRT. The statement is rooted in Marxist
understanding of materialism, power relationship, and atheist worldview. According to the school of public
affairs CRT is justified "based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of
people of color". Non-Whites are alleged to be systematically oppressed by cultural hegemonic structures.
Regardless of whether or not whites are racist, and whether the system allows legal equal opportunity, white
privilege and white supremacy is assumed to exist. CRT doesn't seek to fix individual acts of racism, but is
committed to transforming the hegemony. Ironically, whites can "never" question the basis of CRT: If you question
it, you are proving your racism. Additionally, CRT holds that those in the alleged dominant group cannot know
about racism, but those in the non-dominant group always understand racism. If one from the dominant group denies
something had a racist intent, the non-dominant group is the final judge and only one to understand what is
actually racism.
As nationally recognized theologian, pastor, and Christian author John F. MacArthur has noted about the threat of
CRT to Christianity: "CRT (along with every other Marxist ideology) cannot be reconciled with what the Bible
teaches about sin and salvation. First, to view all relationships in terms of power dynamics requires that people
be seen in terms of the powerful (privileged, oppressors) and the powerless (marginalized, oppressed). Apart from
striking out against God-ordained hierarchies and authority structures (by evaluating them as oppressive power
structures), this way of viewing the world fails to evaluate people in their primary relationship, which is as
creatures made in the image of their Creator. He who defines the problem gets to define the solution. If the main
problem for "people of color" is that they are inevitably oppressed by structures that are inherently oppressive,
then the only solution is to tear down those structures in the pursuit of justice. This way of thinking at the
very least clouds the fact revealed in the Bible that every person's fundamental problem is that they have sinned
against the holy God who created them. This is true for people in any and every category -- whether oppressed or
oppressor, victim or victimizer, marginalized or privileged. The fundamental need, therefore, of every person is
to be reconciled to God. This is exactly what has been provided through the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus. In other words, mankind's greatest need is met in the gospel."
The Christian worldview has been the American worldview from the founding. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America
a half century after it's founding: "There is no country on Earth in which the Christian religion holds great sway
over the souls of men than in America". Part of that worldview is the acceptance of the equal sin condition of
every man, regardless of race, and the equal need for forgiveness and redemption through Jesus Christ. It is not a
worldview of group power struggles and materialism, as with atheistic communism. As the Bible asserts about the
focus on the importance of individual redemption and unity in Christ: Galatians 3:27-28, "For as many of you as
were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,
there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." CRT is diametrically opposed to the Christian
worldview. Marx held that "religion is the opiate of the people" and that his principal aim in life was "to
dethrone God and destroy capitalism.
CRT has all the characteristics of a religion and acts as a competitor religion to Christianity in America. Even
the special and almost mystical knowledge of racism by non-dominant groups that dominant groups cannot know.
Unlike Christianity, CRT holds the alleged cultural hegemony (founded on the Christian worldview) is the root of
all problems and must be overturned. The Christian focus on individual recognition of sin, regardless of place in
any alleged power structure, and the need for redemption through Christ is anathema to CRT. With this, CRT follows
the Gramscian alternative narrative holds that American history that of an evil oppression of minority groups by a
cultural hegemony that must be undermined and flipped. Next step is a Communist Revolution in following Gramsci to
the end.
America is at a crossroad. Our future is in question. We can continue with the America envisioned by our founders
and enjoy the greatest nation on Earth, or we can follow ideas like CRT to see the end of the American
experiment. The choice is ours.
Bill Connor, an Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the
Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he
received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the
U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book
Articles
from War
.
President Donald Trump
signed an executive order on Tuesday to stop funding to federal government contractors who hold
critical race
theory training sessions.
"The President signed an Executive Order to end training sessions based on race and sex
stereotyping and scapegoating in the Federal workforce, the Uniformed Services, and among
Federal contractors," the White House said in an
announcement .
"This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting
training that promotes race stereotyping, for example, by portraying certain races as
oppressors by virtue of their birth."
In the
executive order , titled "Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping," Trump
wrote that many people are pushing an ideology that is a "different vision of America that is
grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the
inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual."
"This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an
irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or
sex, are oppressors ; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our
common status as human beings and Americans," Trump wrote, later calling the ideology
"divisive."
The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which
included a seminar recently held by the Treasury Department that promoted the message that
"virtually all White people, regardless of how 'woke' they are, contribute to racism." The same
seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea
that Americans should be "more color-blind" or "let people's skills and personalities be what
differentiates them."
In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity,
was found to have stated in training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on
"rationality over emotionality" was a characteristic of "white male[s]." The training materials
also asked the trainees to "acknowledge" their "privilege" to each other.
The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy,
was found to have stated in its training materials that racism "is interwoven into every fabric
of America." It also characterized statements like "color blindness" and "meritocracy" as
"action of bias."
The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where
one of the museum's graphics asserted that concepts such as "objective, rational linear
thinking," "hard work" being "the key to success," the "nuclear family," and belief in a single
god are "aspects and assumptions of whiteness" and not values that would unite Americans. The
museum also stated that "[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt,
sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear," according to the order.
"All of this is contrary to the fundamental premises underpinning our Republic: that all
individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to
pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit," Trump wrote in the order.
Trump said in the order that such trainings "[perpetuate] racial stereotypes and division
and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint."
"Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and
activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars," the president wrote. "Research also
suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities
for minorities."
Trump's latest action comes after the White House
announced an order earlier this month to stop taxpayer-funded critical race theory training
sessions to government workers in various U.S. executive branch agencies.
In a statement on Twitter, the president announced late Tuesday: "A few weeks ago, I BANNED
efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based
ideologies.
"Today, I've expanded that ban to people and companies that do business with our Country,
the United States Military, Government Contractors, and Grantees. Americans should be taught
to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don't, there's nothing in it for you!"
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said on Twitter: "This is
another important step that builds off his directive to agencies to stop trainings that push a
radical anti-American agenda."
"In the face of lies meant to divide us, demoralize us, and diminish us, we will show that
the story of America unites us, inspires us, includes us all, and makes everyone free," Trump
said in a
statement .
"" President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to
stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical race theory training
sessions."
YES!! "Silence is complicity" as leftarded sheep often bleat, and silence in the face of
this ultra-racist bullsh!t has gone on far too long. Never should've been allowed to begin
with.
Antifa and BLM are just shows with stunts designed to distract people from the level they are
fleeced by MIC and financial oligarchy. As well as restore the legitimacy of Clinton wing of
neoliberal oligarchy which was badly shaken during 2016 election, when their candidate was send
packing.
Nicholas Kristof is member of "Clinton gang of neoliberals" and a part of this effort to
distract people. The number of people who pay attention to Nicholas Kristof bloviations is
astounding. Few understand that we do not know the facts and the real issue if the tight grip of
MIC and financial oligarchy on the society. What is interesting is that s in California, there
are 8.5 million residents born outside the country and about 150,000 homeless. "The melting pot
burned over. It is now a ... salad.
For example, if money spend on wars were used to manage thoseforests with difficult terrain
and perioc drauts, would the outcome be different?
Can those fires and destruction be viewed as God punishment for war the USA unleashed? As
Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
BTW, the number of commenters with Russian paranoia symptom is frightening. Of course NYT
attracts specific audience, but still. In this sense NYT columnists including Nickolas Kristof
are just warmongering bottom feeders of MIC crumps. It is pathetic how he tries to hide the lack
of money for forest management and mismanagement if this issue by Oregon Dem politician under the
broad banner of "climate change" Existence of climate change does not mean that fire should burn
uncontrollably.
MIC steals half trillion dollars and then financial oligarchy steals probably another half,
if not more. What is left is not enough for proper maintenance of land, water and environment in
general. Stupid situation, but this is neoliberalism my friend, where "greed is good". And people
chose this mousetrap themselves in 1970th by electing first Carter and then Reagan and then
Clinton , allowing financial oligarchy to dismantle New Deal Capitalism. Clinton presidency was
especially destructive, In a way he should be views as the top villain in this story, a real
criminal boss.
Below I selected only more or less sane comment (which constitute probably less 1% of the
total)
Notable quotes:
"... How about a judicious Forrest management? ..."
"... So much for our useless 750 Billion dollar military budget. ..."
"... Amazing how ,close minded people become when, for them, everything is political. ..."
Wouldn't the conspiracy theories and concerns about antifa be lessened if progresses were as
vitriolic about violence committed in the name of equity, diversity and inclusion as they are
about violence committed in support of MAGA? Would the right have anything to crow about if
the NYT was as critical of physical altercations caused by social justice warriors as they
are of white supremacists? Wouldn't we all have more trust in MSM if they investigated the
facts before accusing Nick Sandman of racism or claiming a garbage pull was a noose? One
sided reporting and editorials like these fan the flames rather than squelch them.
It's amazing. You can write a column in the NY Times full of conspiracy theories -- all fully
believed by the left -- and accuse the right of being prone to believing conspiracy theories.
From Russia - collusion to rubes in the red states --a majority of dems share a set of
beliefs that are as delusional as anything a small group on the right might believe. But,
that's Kristof and the Ny Times for you.
People seemed to have lost a sense of what is plausible. While few of us know the news first
hand, we have to both trust and evaluate what is reported. Nothing is absolute. Jurors are
asked to decide cases beyond a reasonable doubt. That is how I feel taking in the news. But
within that sliver of doubt, within the fact that nothing is absolute is where conspiracy
theories begin to fester. It is where some have found solace to confirm what they want to
choose to believe despite how much there might be to question that. Events like this create
an opportunism to demonize those you hate and in doing so the essence of what we should be
debating is lost. How to prevent these fires in the first place? We will probably continue to
debate it despite the evidence on climate change, whether there is a deep state trying to
discredit Trump, whether the seriousness of covid is a hoax. Yes there is no absolute
certainty but there is taking an educated guess as opposed to an emotional response. I'll go
with the educated guess. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, I
will say it is a duck and accept that sliver of possibility I might be wrong.
Why do people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories?" It's actually quite simple. Take
QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with
any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while
offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential
elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever
you believe will be "validated." "Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories,
merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where
truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. Why the rapid spread? To paraphrase
Bill Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability =
Profit That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will
produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a
means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the
Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media,
created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their
own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition"
becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of
their ilk, they will be cut off.
The antifa movement has grown since the 2016 United States presidential election. As of
August 2017, approximately 200 groups existed, of varying sizes and levels of activity.[73]
It is particularly present in the Pacific Northwest.[74] Wikipedia
In an age when the US Justice Department is anything but just, more closely resembling
something akin to "just us," I call to mind Thomas Jefferson, in a somewhat different
context: "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
We spend hundred of billions of dollars every year on the types of weapons that won WWII,
while the real threat to our Republic and yes, our civilization, is ,,, It's funny and
tragic, simultaneously.
Antifa has done a lot of things. They have chosen to step into the arena. Whether they did it
or not, this is accusation is a result of wading into the fight. If Antifa doesnt like to be
accused of things and cant handle it, then Antifa should step off. Or does Antifa only want
praise? Because that isnt going to happen. Many people dont like Antifa nor trust Antifa. And
rightfully so. Ask any career criminal how many times they've been wrongfully accused of
something. If an individual or group doesnt want to be accused of things, then dont get
involved from the start.
Except that about a dozen people have been arrested and charged with starting the forest
fires. Shouting "without evidence!" doesn't make it so. Facts matter.
@JQGALT There are always people who are setting fires whether accidentally or intentionally.
Do you have any proof that these arsonists were politically motivated I any way ?
Yet the Almeda fire in Oregon that destroyed more than 2,300 homes was, according to NYT
reporting, caused by human activity and is subject of a "criminal investigation." Perhaps it
would be wise to reserve total judgment until that investigation is completed.
Who needs rumors? The organization showed what it is made of when it created its free zone in
downtown Seattle and had the highest crime and murder rate per capita in its short life in
the country.
Rational people know that Antifa is not staring forest fires. However, burning and looting
and using fireworks as weapons in the recent riots make even the dumbest claims of Trump
supporters more believable.
Leftwing activists have literally been arrested for starting some of these fires. There is
video of arsonists being caught, yet the media ignores this, and actively denies it. Gee, why
could that be?
@LV Do you have any proof that these people were were left wing activist or just the kind of
people who are always starting fires ad they have in the past ?
The [neoliberal] left spends 24/7 preaching to their choir about Trump fascists dictatorship,
an illegal government installed by a foreign power, destroying the constitution while
preparing to seize power and ignore coming election results. There is a zero factual evidence
for it, such as a refusal to follow judicial injunctions for example, but their well educated
audiences are buying it whole day long. So what is so baffling that a rural audience after
watching night after night Portland burning by arson and accompanied by "peaceful protest"
graphics on TV would buy into arson speculations and rumors and ignore your disclaimers?
Facebook needs to be regulated since it has effectively organ-harvested the critical thinking
skills of a significant portion of the population. It'd be better if thinking people simply
deleted Facebook and let Facebook shrink and become the right-wing agit-prop tool that it
truly is. Mark Zuckerberg is happy to to destabilize society with his little toy invention.
You'd think with all that money, he could afford a conscience. What a wrecking ball Facebook
is.
"All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." Ya think?
@California Scientist Amen. We are more like an international terminal at this point. A bunch
of people gathered by happenstance, heading in different directions, and often with very
little in common.
@California Scientist: It is even worse than when Adlai Stevenson noted that there aren't
enough educated people to elect a liberal government in the US.
@LV - The point is that "urbanites" aren't able to boss anyone around. It's the low
population rural areas that have outsize political power thanks to the unfortunate design of
our government. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population, and that also
factors into the allocation of Electoral College votes, so that an EC vote from WY is worth 4
times as much as an EC vote from CA, for example. In 2016, Senate Democrats got 20 million
more votes than Senate Republicans, yet Republicans kept control. In 2018, Senate Democrats
got "only" 11.5 million more votes, and consequently lost seats. We're being governed by a
minority in may areas of the country, and nationally, yet the "rural rubes" or whatever you
want to call them, insist that they don't have nearly enough power.
Strange that anyone living in or just knowing the west would NOT know that arsonists could
not burn down huge chunks of forest if they where not so very dry.
Augury Unhappy Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt
Sept. 20
The ugly truth of Oregon's political past is asserting itself...we aren't in "Portlandia"
anymore Nick.
Ominous! There are two information ecosystems in this country and Americans increasingly live
in different realities. Much of the media is in the business of massaging the egos of their
readers by feeding them stories that confirm their biases and make them feel clever. There is
less and less fact based news and more and more propaganda. A lot of people aren't really
interested in facts. They just want to be told how right they are and how stupid and evil the
people who disagree with them are. Media corporations are providing the market with what it
desires, and what it desires is poisonous.
There is a reptilian brain need to believe this nonsense and to propagate it- because the
believers are so terrified of the facts of the truth (and the lack of knowing what might be
done to address those facts). The people who are true believers are pointless to discuss.
They are too frightened. They need to believe this stuff. It is hopeless to address them.
Dark times, indeed.
With the natural buildup of combustible matter, combined with houses everywhere now and
little land management, these fires will happen and will cause problems. Lots of things can
start them and they will.
You left out "a century of zero-tolerance policies toward wildland fires (creating
precariously dense underbrush), and resistance to traditional controlled burning at the
human/wilderness interface". It's not the whole story, but neither is climate change which,
due to global technological leveling, is evermore the responsibility of China and India than
Western civilization. Signed, a moderate progressive endlessly frustrated with breathless
liberalism
If only there were no arsonists. Here is a video of a woman who found a man on her property
with matches in his hand (and no cigarettes, which was his excuse for having matches in his
hand). She made a citizen's arrest. This happened in peaceful Oregon. Don't listen if you
can't handle harsh language by a woman who is trying to save her property. Arson is real, and
it is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW_M4pBCnY
A man was arrested for arson in Southern Oregon. His fire damaged or destroyed numerous
homes.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-charged-arson-connection-almeda-fire-southern-oregon/story?id=72960208
Rumors of antifa notwithstanding, people in Oregon were looking for arsonists because there
are arsonists.
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
" All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." You betcha.
(Palin doesn't look half bad compared to the current batch.) It's a simple formula: social
media driven disinformation + extreme capitalism which leaves us with no real will to address
it + legitimate grievances like racism and financial insecurity = craziness on all sides,
fanned by a president whose personal agenda takes precedence over absolutely everything. All
societies are constantly dealing with potentially destabilizing threats. Their institutions,
media, leadership, and understanding of a common good are their immune system. Ours is
compromised, we are destabilized.
How about a judicious Forrest management? We live in a period of global warming
because of our planet axis precision, aggravated by the presence of an unprecedented
population explosion needing more water, more food, the production of which needs more arable
land, cutting trees, displacing wild animals, exhausting the aquifer. Cutting trees increases
the CO2 in the atmosphere. More people in India, more cattle emitting methane, more old
fashioned way of cooking food and producing more CO2 ... Permanent frost melting also sends
more methane in the atmosphere ... The climate is extremely complex to permit exact modeling,
but it is clear that if we want to stay healthy, it is vital to regularly clear our western
forests of dead wood in order to prevent today's disaster of millions of people, particularly
children with asthma and old people breathing the heavily polluted air. It is time to move to
solar, wind power, electric trucks, cars etc. The technology is here. Let's hope that Biden
will support clean air as means to better health. If all these years instead of using
abstract terms like global warming or climate change, we have been appealing to people to
keep the air clean in order to have better health, perhaps they would have stopped buying the
behemoths cars, producing so much pollution?
As Nicholas and many readers on this page already know, this commentary is more evidence of
how needlessly and recklessly polarized our country has become. When tribal instincts push
people to look for anything - fact, fiction or fantasy - on social media or "rage commentary"
that supports and validates their identities they will glom onto it faster than maggots on
dead flesh. It is a sad state of affairs when so many people of all political persuasions
will not take the time - even a few minutes - to question and investigate the latest "truth"
being promoted. The new culture of low information consumers seems to be spreading as fast as
a pandemic despite the heroic efforts of honest journalism. I wonder if low information
consumption was so endemic to the citizens of Ancient Rome and Greece - long before Twitter,
Facebook and Rage TV? People, please take a moment to "click" one step further to see if the
latest conspiracy story is true. Why help propagate lies? It will only come back to haunt
you, or your children.
Antifa or not, at least some of the big fires have been started by arsonists. Of this fact we
have video proof. By downplaying or even denying it, the media are just as bad as the
conspiracy theorists in promoting disinformation.
This reminds me of a time when people saw "Reds" behind anything that was going wrong in the
country. Nothing new, but just as pathetically paranoid. I wonder how many people, or their
parents, fit into both groups?
Here's another urban myth. Ok, more a lefty myth. That we can just keep adding people to this
country (urban, suburban, rural, big city, anywhere and everywhere) and it won't have any
effect. With the corollary that it's just a matter of "green new deal" or everybody getting a
Prius or the dummies in the sticks realizing climate change is real and then we can just go
on like this forever. We can't. Not only is our much hated lifestyle, which from what I can
see, nobody really wants to give up, killing us, but believing 330 million Americans that add
2-3 million more a year is not a problem at all. Our entire way of life: endless population
and economic growth is unsustainable. We don't need to wait until 2050 to see it. Just step
outside.
It is very difficult to teach people that "research," doesn't mean you go to some TV show or
website you like and root around for stuff that tells you what you want to hear. One prob
seems to be really simple: it takes actual work to do it right. Another is that research,
done well, has an ugly habit of forcing you to think at least a little about whether your own
ideas make any sense. And a third is that people really, really don't like it when their
political views start getting contradicted by reality. It seems to be easier to change
reality than to change views, even a little. Oh, and another prob? Too few Americans really
read anything worth reading. I'm all for funsies (and I've probably read more crummy science
fiction than all y'all put together) but one of the joys of walking around in Paris is seeing
that the kiosks and bookstores still sell a ton of stuff on philosophy, lit, economics, and
that everywhere, people actually read them. Books teach thought. Newsmax don't.
@Beer Can Boyd: As a native-born American, I think the US fell down when the Congress put
"under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, ostensibly to preclude anyone thinking
about Godless communism, and gave itself a stroke.
The melting pot burned over. It is now a word salad. But appears there is a method to the
madness. It is hard for the world to tell the madness from the method
@Carolyn then there are the lies and the demonization of China and Russia by both parties to
top it off. How can voters believe anything and decide before they vote?
Supporting this atmosphere of potential violence are some of my republican friends. They are
mostly educated and not stupid. Yet they continue to support a man whom I think holds the
responsibility for most of the violence if it comes. Now I want to get down to my point about
these supporters. I believe they have succumbed to a cult-like dynamic. I say this because no
rational person could possibly support Trump. Religious cults create this same addiction and
irrationality. When my friends disagree with me, they try to put our friendship hostage to no
further discussion of politics. They are unwilling to even be confronted with objections to
their support of Trump. I have decided that I can always make new friends. What I do not want
to do is take on the task of building a new country because I stayed silent.
@Harcourt "They are mostly educated and not stupid." In my opinion, educated persons who
behave as you describe never benefited from their education. Even worse, to me it seems like
persons who behave like that are of the opinion that what they learnt in school is only for
the purpose of writing the exams they needed to pass to get out of school. It was all just
noise to them.
You nailed it. There is no longer "a shared reality" in America. So we have wildly different
views of who Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. And how serious climate change is. And whether
it's important to wear a mask. And if left-wing anarchists set forest fires. Thank you,
Internet. Thank you, social media barons who refuse to ban Russian propaganda and manipulated
videos. Thank you FCC that does not rein in Fox News and their promotion of lies. Who will
step in and stop this madness?
@CA I agree with you completely except for the refusal to stop Russian interference. We
can't. We can't unless we stop US interference in the process. The problem is that US
interference, and rumor mongering, are the business model of these platforms which happen to
be some of our largest companies. Extreme capitalism is preventing us from addressing any and
all issues propagated by these companies. Russia is just a speck.
Antifa adherents and wildfires ? Seems pretty far-fetched. Even ridiculous. But setting fire
to occupied apartment buildings in Portland ? Oh yes, definitely. It happened, and more is on
the menu, as well as municipal and federal buildings. Don't believe it ? Read the news
releases for yourself, on the Portland Police Bureau's website.
An excellent discussion of the perils of social media. Although newspapers, TV, radio,
magazines have a historical principal of "generally" telling the truth, social media has
opened up the world to every single Tom, Dick and Harry who with to spread their message. I
believe that how we, as a nation, as a species, handle social media will define what happens
over the next decade.
The state of this country is absolutely terrifying. While the shift to ever more
conservative, insular, xenophobic, coroporate-controlled government has been going on for
years, with the faux election of trump democracy is what has become fake, while common sense,
empathy, and both fiscal and environmental responsibility have virtually disappeared. The US
has gone off the deep end...
Years ago I read a science fiction short story that is unsettling in its analogy to this
situation. I starts with aliens visiting the Earth and accidently leaving behind a device
that can allow metal to be manipulated by softening it, then hardening it. The device gets
copied and mass produced. When they returned a year later, they come back and cannot fathom
how their device could have resulted in anarchy. THAT is the internet. 5 Recommend Share
Let me ask you all a question. If your neighbor told you the fire in a nearby Oregon town was
started by antifa, how would you disprove it? Since you cannot provide evidence for a
negative statement, it's difficult. There is actually some evidence that antifa did start the
fire: a voice said it on the radio, and tv showed them lighting fireworks in Portland. This
isn't very good evidence, but it is evidence, and you can't produce any evidence that antifa
did not do it (because there can't be any.) So you are in the position of asking your
neighbor to look at the quality of the evidence. This is something very few outside the legal
and scientific world are capable of. But that is all you have. Ultimately, it really does go
back to belief. How many of us could independently prove that the earth turns around the sun?
Those of us who aren't astronomers choose to accept this belief based on what we've been
told, and that's how it is with antifa starting the fires.
Kristof is afraid that fires in the West represent the new normal. The evidence suggests that
this fear is well-founded. He is concerned about the government's paralysis. That is partly
due to Trump, who stands a good chance of being reelected on November 3. He is worried about
ordinary citizens seeking oversimplified answers and finding them in the conspiracy theories
presenting the fire as the work of antifa. I am more worried about the breakdown in
credibility of news sources like the NY Times, which finds itself in competition with Fox
News and a host of online sources. Indeed, you-tube and facebook will select news stories for
you, confirming whatever bias you bring to your reading of the news. There is no guarantee
that democracy will survive. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the realization
that not only the right, but the left, is subject to oversimplified presentations of global
warming. Global warming is a consequence of too much population growth. But as we argue over
freedoms for LGBTQ minorities liberals have neglected the importance of freedom of speech.
And voices which have warned about population growth have been simply ignored by the left. It
isn't enough to shift from Fords using gasoline to Teslas running on electricity. We also
need to control population growth. The population of earth will double again by 2072 if
current rates continue. Population growth threatens to overwhelm the attempts to move to
clean energy. 2 Recommend
The scientific consensus will also conclude that not allowing wildfires to burn compounds the
problem. While what I am about to type is not science, continued development in fire prone
areas amplifies and compounds every aspect of the problem. From my perspective the system has
evolved to socializing cost and privatizing cost in every way. I don't see it getting better,
until such time as individuals are held accountable this should be considered normal.
@secular socialist dem PG&E just paid billions in fines and PLEADED GUILTY in starting
last year's Paradise fire. They also have already admitted fault in several fires started by
their faulty, untended grid. "Individuals" don't need to be held accountable unless there are
rules in place for them to follow regarding wildfire. There already are. Most already do. Why
do folks act so proud about their 'anti-science' opinion? It's not like this conversation
isn't ongoing; nobody argues that development in fire prone areas' carries risks. So does
rebuilding in Oklahoma, Florida and Louisiana..... You're right (although confused) about
socializing RISK and privatizing PROFIT. See PG&E above.
Unsure how people lighting fires directly indicates climate change is corroborated. The
fellow who was arrested in Tacoma, WA: https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-activist-charged-for-fire-set-in-washington
Looking to past wildfires, like the one's in Montana & Idaho in 2008, 5.5 million acres
were burned and certain interest groups advocated for them to burn out because it's apart of
the natural cycle. Federal government shouldn't send assistance unless it's possibly to
communities in threat of burning, who are humans to say we ought to stop mother nature? It's
natural to let these fires burn, if you try to hinder it's course you are stopping the cycle.
Doug Terry Maryland, Washington DC metro
Sept. 20 Times Pick
Why do people believe wild stupid things more than actual facts? Partly it is because they
like the wild stupid thing more, it gives them some weird comfort. It is also because people
are busying with their lives and don't have time to gather enough information to counter the
wild rumor that flies around faster than the speed of sound. The most important aspect of
successful conspiracy theories is they impart to the person holding them the idea that they
are smarter than other people and have "cracked the code" that explains everything or a lot
of big things that people don't understand. Reading, thinking, considering and re-considering
can seem like hard work, particularly if it is foreign to one's experience and life training.
Why not just lock on to a cool idea that comes around, even if it is weird? .
This story highlights for me an equally growing problem, the "selective framing" by media
outlets on the left and right (NYT and Fox as just two examples). To read Mr Kristof's
version, you may believe that arsonists are wild figments of the unhinged radical right
imagination. To read the same story on Fox, Antifa arsonists are working their way up your
street.
"...the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." And
yet reality still exist. Normally, if someone starts to exhibit the kind of behavior that
these "vigilantes" are - screaming about boogeymen, thinking people are out to get them,
engaging in aggressive behavior based on paranoid fantasies, creating self-reinforcing
delusions, becoming obsessed with baseless conspiracy theories - we would rightly diagnose
them as being mentally ill, and to the extent that they represent a danger to others, confine
them. I don't think we can afford to see this as just a time of extreme differences of
opinion. Facts, truth and reality are still actual, tangible things. And those who have
become so disassociated from them that they are stopping vehicles and hunting down their
fellow citizen need to be dealt with appropriately.
We have been witnessing the start of the Second Civil War in America. If we accept the
definition of a civil war as a conflict between factions of citizens for either secession or
control of the government--including organizations within the existing government--then we
are in the beginning stages of a Second Civil War. The question is what the level of violence
will be (not will there be violence, but how much violence). We are beginning to see
indications of that level. When naturally or accidentally caused wildfires are attributed to
one faction as a way to stoke the fires of civil violence, then physical violence between
factions is a heartbeat away simply because of the falsity and extremity of the accusations.
The era of peaceful protest has passed because of the intensity of feelings on both sides;
the anger produced when a government begins denying civil rights, e.g., Freedom of Speech and
the Right to Assemble, through legal actions where protest organizers could be charged with
sedition (see Barr's comments, 9/16/2020, NYT), which then suggests that all protests become
illegal, the fires of violence are stoked. With a heavily-armed populace on both sides,
gunfire is a hair-trigger pull away. If Trump and the Republican's intention was to remake
America in their image (I leave it to you to supply that image), they are succeeding. If
Putin's intention was to bring down America, he is succeeding. If Xi's intention was to
dominate the world, he is on that path. Vote 33 Recommend Share
... There's an old saying "Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad." I have come
to the conclusion that America has gone qute a long way down that road.
And yet, Mr. Kristoff, you never make mention of the real threat that groups like Antifa and
other radical left rioters pose to this country (forgetting about attacks on federal
buildings in Portland? Attempts to firebomb courthouses? Violence against law enforcement
officers?). No, instead it's always Trump, or Trump supporters who are your focus. I do not
know whether Antifa has been involved in any of these recent fires, but I do know that these
violent elements on the left pose a massive danger to our democracy. You are correct about
one thing, though: We should brace ourselves. It's just "what" we need to brace for that is
off mark in your article...
It's heartbreaking to watch these three West Coast states burned. For days, the sky was red
and the air was unbreathable. But the saddest part was the feeling of helplessness.
40 years ago, I hitchhiked around the Pacific Northwest during the summer after Mt. St.
Helens blew up. Mt. Rainier was ash-coated, as were the wild blueberries I often ate. Epic
and Biblical are words inadequate to describe that destruction near Mt. St. Helens, with
millions of huge, old trees blown down, piles of mud, and rivers diverted. Yet I and others
knew that eventually, that land would regrow, and it did.
I see a lot of egotism and self-love on both sides. The so-called progressives in our
community are breeding at baby boom levels, driving SUVs, and, before the pandemic, you'd see
a dozen school buses idling outside every school. Development is out of control as people
flee from the city, and people flee from here, or downsize, and breed and breed and breed.
Two years ago, we had a flash flood and our street was under water, and there was a lot of
damage all over town. Hurricane Irene in 2011 left many with over a foot of water in their
basements. And let's not even start on Sandy. My friend lives in Pensacola; their downtown
area is under three or four feet of water from Hurricane Sally. It's not just fire, it's
floods, and it's not just the GOP which is the problem...
I don't blame anyone for guarding their roads if they think arsonists are about. The
Tillamook Burn was larger and more devastating than these fires but are we to blame climate
change ? Environmentalists and Liberals who do not even live out West, who did not rely upon
Logging, placed their concerns about the Spotted Owl and Virgin Forests about the danger of
Forest Fires and the livelihood of Loggers and the Towns and Peoples who depended upon
Logging. Managed Logging of Forests is not an inherently evil act. Clearing the bush and dead
trees is not bad in and of itself. Let Logging companies responsibly manage sections of the
Forrests, let Towns clear fire breaks around their perimeters. Place large Water towers in
strategic points throughout the Forests, huge mounds of dirt/sand/gravel next to them so that
the Firefighters have what they need to fight the fires. Force developers to build houses 50
feet apart. Require fireproof roofs, require thinning of trees in housing developments.
Require volunteer Fire Departments in every neighborhood so that if they do nothing else,
they can cut a fire break, water down the grasses around their neighborhoods, chase and
extinguish embers, something/anything versus fleeing their homes without putting up a fight.
"... dry conditions exacerbated by climate change coupled with an unusual windstorm ..." May
I add that a couple of other things have also contributed to making the fires worse or making
them harder to manage? For a century or so, in California, Oregon and Washington we have not
been letting the normal, periodic fires burn. Consequently, a great deal of fuel has built up
on the forest floor. Second, folks have increasingly been building homes or even
neighborhoods in places which have historically seen such normal, periodic fires.
@Robert Yes. But now controlled burns are a bit problematic, given the droughts, the heat,
the massive fuel loads from all the dead trees. It's just so easy for the controlled burns to
get out of control.
Hi, I am from Clackamas County metro. Every time a FaceBook "Friend" (and I personally know
all of mine) posted a rumor, I tried to find the footage from any of our 4 local news
stations to depute their post but they just shared another one. One said she didn't trust KGW
8 the local NBC station and when I told her the same story was on KPTV 12, the local Fox
station. She said, "I'm just stressed"
@David Biesecker Remember that half the people are of below average intelligence. That may
answer the existence of the small percentage of conspiracy theorists. One problem is social
media provides free and outsized loudspeaker systems that enables them to find each other.
@M.i. Estner First, let me identify myself as a liberal Democrat who has a masters degree. I
find it more than disheartening when half of the country, or half of rural or not formally
educated folks are said to have low intelligent quotas, critical thinking skills or
analytical abilities. You better believe that when a highly trained Eastern Oregon
firefighter is assessing how to save peoples lives, homes and land, has to quickly act with
their many faceted skill set and are calling on abilities you or I would not be able to
fathom. Same with farmers of large pieces of complicated crops and land. Same with city
managers, librarians, and social workers for the elderly--all having low city budgets. What
about the veterinarians, doctors and nurses in rural areas? This is exactly the same as
calling Black or Hispanics people of lower intelligence. And, there are different types of
intelligence. I know a literary critic, a liberal Democrat, who doesn't have the critical
thinking skills to run her own home or raise her children. If you look, you can see these
same differences in any group. It has to do with the way people are raised, what they are
using their skill sets for, what information they are used to consuming, money, ideology,
etc...And it has to do with being devalued for growing your food, producing your meat,
chicken and eggs. I'm not excusing the violence, guns, racism and hatred. These divides have
been with us for ages. Please don't stoke the fires.
If we have a selfish federal government, then we will have selfish states and people.
Everyone is for himself or herself. No one will think about other people or public good. It
all started from the top
In 2017, 2018, and 2019 northern California's new phenomenon of forceful 40 to 60 miles per
hour winds - in Fall, no less - caused old and aging electrical equipment to malfunction. As
a consequence, too much of Santa Rosa burnt to the ground, and the entire town of Paradise
ceased to exist. This year during the heat of a hotter than usual summer following yet
another dry winter, we had dry lightning strikes from Sonoma County to Santa Clara County and
beyond.
Yes, the science is clear and you fail to mention it. The forest fires reach critical mass
and spread because of the surplus of dead or dying trees. They are there because the federal
government essentially no longer allows logging on its vast landholdings and also fails to
allow controlled burns to clean out the tinderbox. I won't bother attaching a link because
any Google search proves the point. Why focus on hysteria and rumermongering among the
Deplorables? Come on, Mr. Kristof, you were a Deplorable once (when you were a kid growing up
in the countryside) as was I. Please defend them sometimes, particularly when the actual
causes are so well documented.
@Stuck on a mountain Western States are working to clear the brush from forests where, due to
our previous incomplete understanding of forest ecology, fires were suppressed for a century.
However, the cost is astronomical and there are millions of acres left to clear. Spending
their entire forest management budgets fighting current wildfires doesn't help. We've been
doing controlled burns for decades but in many areas, they're now too dangerous. Dry forests
and a dense understory can quickly turn a "controlled burn" into a conflagration. Many
ranchers and timber companies who profit from our state and national forests seem unwilling
to pay to keep those forests healthy. People who live in or near forests mostly have incomes
too low to pay for forest management. The National Forest Service, Department of the Interior
and USDA have made some progress, but the problem is huge. Saying we can prevent forest fires
by allowing larger timber harvests is an oversimplification. No solution to this complex
issue will be simple, perfect or cheap.
Wacky conspiracy theories to explain seemingly bizarre and unusual occurrences have been
around since the dawn of human cognition. But in an electronic/social media age, these get
spread even faster than a wind-blown fire climbs a canyon hillside. Previously, they were
spread one set of ears at a time; now millions of eyes can read them every second. And that
is a major part of the problem.
As a grad student in sociology, having lived through the 60s and participated in the
counterculture, I was deeply intrigued by the social construction of reality - how we come to
share a taken-for-granted world. This is a long-standing concern within sociological social
psychology. We examined how language, interpersonal communications, media and social
structure shaped ones perception of one's self, what is real, what's important. At the time,
however, this was considered theoretical and academic. 40 years later, understanding how
Americans' realities have come to diverge is no longer armchair social science. It's urgent
and in our faces, as is the question of how can we heal this terrible fracturing of our
world?
@DeHypnotist Yes. When studying for the degree in and then teaching sociology in my early
years, I learned that, too. But, I have to admit, it's actually taken all the decades of life
since then, and now the obvious confirmation of it by this current 'reality' to actually
realize, deep down in my guts, that we 'make up' our so-called 'social reality' simply to
serve the most basic of biological requirements: the need to dominate in the deadly
completion with the other 'tribes' of our species just to survive. We are, after all, animals
like all the others, no matter how much we blab about how much 'smarter' we are.
@Alex B The primal driver, deep in the core of our brain, is usefully thought of as
"reptilian." Cold-blooded. Egoistic. Hedonistic. And, in extreme cases, narcissistic, and,
heaven forbid when all three are present...
I lived for a few years in Brazil when it was a dictatorship. The similarities between Brazil
and what is happening in the US is startling. The police were being used to quell peaceful
protesters and the justice system co-opted by authorities, fear mongering were present, just
as now in the US....
I didn't live in the US from 1977-1999, only visiting on short trips. That enabled me to see
changes in society that were slow and not seen by those residing here. And when I came back
permanently I could feel immediately a deep change....
Perhaps an apt metaphor for the "danger sign ahead" is the approach of a Category three
hurricane and it's increasing in intensity. One of the stark disconnects is between the
message in an article like this and the politicians and citizens who are little concerned
about tempering rhetoric and elevating the importance of eschewing misinformation. We are in
the Misinformation Age and the victims of a cyber war, evolving into a civil war.
@ML What is happening here? These are the beginnings of what happened in Germany in the 30s.
Over there the reason was the loss of WWI. Here, is the obvious decline of the American
lifestyle and we have not seen anything yet. The range of the economic decline is covered by
7 trillion dollars in phony money. I fervently hope and pray that is not too late to stop the
process. All men and women of goodwill have to rally to restore a sane, and one, country .
Stay safe! It is going to get worse before it gets better.
@FunkyIrishman Right on. Water is an enormous issue waiting to happen here -- and Wisconsin
is estimated to have between 10 and 20 percent of the world's fresh water (depending on how
it's calculated and whether that includes some of Lakes Michigan and Superior. A Dept. of
Climate, Weather and Water would be a logical cabinet department.
@FunkyIrishman And polluting the potable water continues sometimes by the most resolvable
modern approaches: sewers and water treatment plants. Reagan ended federal funding for sewers
leaving septic systems (and now ancient sewers) where sewers would lead to protected fresh
water. All the medicines, chemicals, and toxins seep unseen but very real into fresh and also
salt water. We are not a modern nation any more.
Augury Unhappy Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt
Sept. 20
Oregon's racial demographics White alone, percent 86.7% Black or African American alone,
percent 2.2% Alabama's racial demographics White alone, percent 69.1% Black or African American
alone, percent26.8%
Is the US really a land
teeming with 'white supremacists', or are malicious forces working to crowbar the racial divide
for their own ulterior motives? Whatever the case, America needs to get a handle on the issue,
and fast.
Watching the video of George Floyd dying on the street under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a
white police officer, forced many people to ask themselves: is this yet another case of police
brutality that has become so prevalent on the streets of America, or is it symptomatic of
something even worse? Without any debate, the mainstream media had a ready-made answer for mass
consumption: America is racist to the core and deserves whatever it gets. It was a simplistic,
knee-jerk response at a time when America was already suffering under a lockdown due to a
pandemic.
Before continuing, it is necessary to ask: does America really suffer from 'systemic
racism', also known as institutional racism? As a white American who grew up in a multiethnic
neighborhood and was later employed at several racially diverse workplaces, I would have to
disagree. While the proverbial 'melting pot' still has some cooking to do, relations between
black and white people have been stable for many years.
While the nation will never remove the scar of slavery, the creation of a welfare state,
together with numerous government programs such as Affirmative Action, was designed to end the
discrimination of minorities. And as every American will say, the United States is a 'nation of
immigrants', an idea reinforced by the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
for example, which opened the door to millions of people of non-European descent. Those sorts
of initiatives indicate that Americans are not the hooded pack of white supremacists that many
now say they are. This does not mean, of course, that the scourge of racism has been stamped
out; there is no shortage of racists and bigots in the US, but to call the problem 'systemic'
seems overblown.
At the same time, however, it cannot be denied that we are now living in radical 'woke'
times, an entirely new animal. Thus, instead of responding to the outbreaks of violence in the
wake of police killings with a unifying message of calm and civility, many politicians, in an
effort to appease the angry social justice warriors that keep them in office, are stoking the
fires of racial dissent with their rhetoric. You don't have to read between the lines to
understand their message – just listen to Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for the
vice presidency.
" Everyone beware, " Harris remarked in a recent interview with Stephen
Colbert. " They [the protesters] are not going to stop before election day in November, and
they're not going to stop after election day They're not going to let up, and they should not,
and we should not. "
It would be difficult to cite a more irresponsible comment from any individual, and
especially one who has a high chance of becoming – considering Joe Biden's advanced age
– the first female president of the United States. This strange new willingness for
Democratic leaders to court the mob reared its ugly head again this week, when Portland Mayor
Ted Wheeler banned police from using tear gas to quell riots that have plagued the city for
more than three months. Mind you, this is the very same mayor who was forced to vacate his
condominium last week after rioters set fire to the building.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a number of influential individuals have declared their
support for Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Few would be surprised to know that the financier
George Soros, for example, donated almost a quarter of a billion dollars to several racial
justice groups, including BLM. He was motivated by " systemic discrimination against blacks
that can be traced back to slavery. "
On the other end of the spectrum, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, owned by the global Unilever
Company, announced
it was launching a podcast that prompts listeners to " dismantle systemic racism " and
white supremacy. Shouldn't Americans be entitled to a national conversation on the question of
'systemic racism' first, before an ice cream company (ice cream!) practically declares it a
full-blown fascist regime? After all, the 'race problem' could be a symptom of the deplorable
state of the police forces, which are, arguably, both overworked and undertrained to handle
their assigned tasks. The theory at least deserves much greater attention, but that would
deprive the left of an opportunity to appear holier-than-thou in the most consequential
presidential election in many decades.
In any case, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if these protest groups
– which, incidentally, have a large number of misguided white
youths among their ranks – believe they can act with impunity, while also receiving
massive injections of cash and ideological support, things are going to spiral out of control
real fast.
Just this week, BLM protesters descended upon my hometown of Pittsburgh, where they harassed
a group of diners enjoying the afternoon on a café patio. One of the female activists
somehow thought it would be a great idea to gulp down one of the beverages on a table where an
elderly couple was seated. Earlier, across the country in Portland, Oregon, BLM showed up in
the middle of the night to inform 'privileged' suburban residents – not all of them
white, by the way – that they were living on "occupied" land. If BLM really wants
sympathy for its cause, those methods are certainly not the way to get it. In fact, they could
trigger an ugly backlash, igniting the very racism that the group declares itself to be
fighting in the first place.
On that note, more white citizens are coming around to the conclusion that they are the ones
being subjected to a 'reverse' form of racism – or, at the very least, are not permitted
to defend themselves from physical harm. That appeared to be the lesson for many after Mark and
Patricia McCloskey, two lawyers from an upscale neighborhood in St. Louis,
brandished firearms after protesters smashed through a gate and trespassed onto their
property. Guess who was charged with a crime? Not the protesters. St. Louis Circuit Attorney
Kim Gardner, who received funds for her campaign from none other than Mr. Soros, filed a felony
count against the McCloskeys for unlawful use of a weapon.
Overnight, it appears that Americans have awakened to a nightmare world turned upside down,
where all of the old rules of law and order have been thrown out the window. It's a place where
political leaders no longer allow the police to perform their duties; citizens are condemned as
criminals for protecting themselves, and all the while, "fiery yet mostly peaceful protests"
are permitted to rage. Before the situation hits the point of no return, America really needs
to have a calm discussion about 'systemic racism' to determine if it even exists in the first
place. In the meantime, find a way to maintain law and order on the streets and, most
importantly, trust the police; the majority are not bad apples. America's future peace and
prosperity depends on it.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The level of political correctness demonstrated by Vampire squid actually exceed the level
achieved by CPSU in the USSR, which probably contributed to the USSR dissolution as everybody was
tired of this level of primitive hypocrisy and enforced speech standard; including the CPSU
leadership.
Woke racism is a new form of financial oligarchy division and control of prols...
Notable quotes:
"... In Engineering, our colleagues [have] collaborated with others in the financial services industry to address racially insensitive terminology in computer security terms. This work included eliminating the use of "blacklist" and "whitelist," as well as of "master" and "slave," when describing the relationship between hardware components. ..."
In Engineering, our colleagues [have] collaborated with others in the financial
services industry to address racially insensitive terminology in computer security terms.
This work included eliminating the use of "blacklist"
and "whitelist," as well as of "master" and "slave," when describing the relationship
between hardware components.
Another example of a phrase that can have harmful impact is "All Lives Matter." The death
of George Floyd, and, as recently as this week, the shooting of
Jacob Blake multiple times in the back, demonstrate that until the deadly violent acts
against unarmed Black people subside, all lives will not matter until Black Lives Matter.
You didn't think we were going to get through this without a reference to the Holy Blessed
Martyr Floyd, did you?
Although I'll give a smidgen of credit here to Goldman Sachs: They merely wrote "the death of
George Floyd." It's routine in Mainstream media outlets now to see "
the killing of George Floyd ," or even "the murder of George
Floyd." The Economist , for example, has used both in straight reportage. It has of
course not yet been established to any good evidentiary standard that Floyd was killed, let alone
murdered.
It's not accurate to refer to someone's "sexual preference," which would imply a choice
that can be changed, instead we refer to an individual's "sexual orientation."
That's a bit hair-splitty, isn't it? A bit dubious, actually. An orientation may be voluntary,
mayn't it? I can orient myself to the north, south, east, or west, according to my
preference.
Goldman Sachs doesn't just rely on
memos to keep its workforce up-to-date on the Party line. Conversations! -- gotta have
conversations . To give employees the right idea, the firm records the kind of
conversations it wants them to have and puts them on YouTube so they can watch at home.
I'm not sure what the rule is for watching in office hours, but I'd guess it's OK ah, heck,
probably compulsory.
If the US keeps this up, the Chinese are going to eat us for lunch. It's all fun and games,
who gets to teach at Dutchess County Community College, but these morons are starting to spread
their religion to all aspects of life. Will not end well.
Mind-boggling. Diversity zealots have infiltrated practically every elite institution in
America. How long before the counter-revolution? At least Trump got the ball rolling by
exposing Critical Race Theory to the light of day. Maybe some more philosophical types might
have a go at "deconstructing" Cultural Relativism, the Big Mama of all this poisonous
nonsense.
The greatest goyim fought for all of this. As good goyim spawn, you should celebrate the
defeat of the Axis everyday in the name of anal (((democracy))).
In short black people are used as pawns in the political struggle between two neoliberal
clans fighting for power, using students without perspectives of gaining meaningful employment as
a ram. We saw this picture before in a different country. And riots do reverse gains achieved in
civil right struggle since 1960th, so they are also net losers. Racial tensions in the USA
definitely increased dramatically.
Notable quotes:
"... Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies. ..."
"... This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated. ..."
"... The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes in fear ..."
"... There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it alone. ..."
"... Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the leaders ..."
Here's your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project",
and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning tell us about what's going on in America
today?
They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people They
suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws They
alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race
war They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are inciting
racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to office in 2016
and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into
a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive
outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned,
insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide
riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. "Critical
Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning are as
much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling
of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of "ideology", and all three are being used
to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as "Americans".
The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history,
their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed
by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important
than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative "Reset"
that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds
of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive
element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda
saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don't expect the strategy will
ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging
and unapologetic.
Let's look more carefully at what is going on.
On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that
"White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States". According to an
article in Politico:
" all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white
supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S. , listed above the
immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups . John Cohen, who oversaw DHS's
counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts' conclusion isn't
surprising.
"This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS,
the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related
threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white
supremac y and other far-right ideological causes," he said .
"Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social,
ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United
States," the draft reads. "Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists
will pose the most persistent and lethal threat."..(" DHS
draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat " Politico)
This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that
designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities
for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of
small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their
employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds
the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined.
So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they
chosen to prioritize white supremacists as "the most persistent and lethal threat" when it is
clearly not true?
There's only one answer: Politics.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are
invoking the race card ("white supremacists") to divert attention from their sinister
destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street
friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class "America First" nationalists who
handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by
installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out
their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That's what's really going on.
DHS's announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who
gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the
white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose
no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose
beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who
must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was
abolished more than 150 years ago.
The 1619 Project" is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the
American people. The objective of the "Project" is to convince readers that America was founded
by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the
World Socialist Web Site:
"The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of
American history is rooted in race hatred -- specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of
"black people" by "white people." Hannah-Jones writes in the series' introduction:
"Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. "
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the
genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development . Hannah-Jones's reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive
racial antagonisms from innate biological processes .where does this racism come from? It
is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American "white people." Thus, it
must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions .
. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting
race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear
responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided
arguments." ("The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history", World Socialist Web
Site)
Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation
to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution.
The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating
widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of "social justice."
As Hannah-Jones says, "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country", which is to
say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white
patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing
government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning
non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil
unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to
replace America's Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious
Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones treatise does nothing to improve
conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream
of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla.
Then there is "Critical Race Theory" which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The
theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate
workers. White employees are being subjected to "reeducation" programs that require their
participation as a precondition for further employment . The first rebellion against critical
race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs
America's nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo:
"Senator @HawleyMO and
@SecBrouillette have
launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated
their purge against conservatives."
Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory,
race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees -- and all
dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative
employees will be purged." (" There is a civil war erupting
at @SandiaLabs ." Christopher F Rufo)
It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here's more info on how this toxic indoctrination program
works:
"Treasury Department
The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that "virtually all
White people contribute to racism" and demanding that white staff members "struggle to own
their racism" and accept their "unconscious bias, White privilege, and White
fragility."
The National Credit Union Administration
The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was "founded on
racism" and "built on the blacks of people who were enslaved. " Twitter thread here and
original source documents
here .
Sandia National Laboratories
Last year, Sandia National Labs -- which produces our nuclear arsenal -- held a
three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their
"white male culture" and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of
color . Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now
endangering our national security. Twitter thread here and original source
documents
here .
Argonne National Laboratories
Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they
"benefit from racism" and atone for the "pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people. "
Twitter thread here .
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on "microaggressions,
microinequities, and microassaults" where white employees were told that they had been
"socialized into oppressor roles. " Twitter thread here and original source
documents here
." (" Summary of
Critical Race Theory Investigations" , Christopher F Rufo)
On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration "would prohibit federal
agencies from subjecting government employees to "critical race theory" or "white privilege"
seminar. ..
"It has come to the President's attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent
millions of taxpayer dollars to date 'training' government workers to believe divisive,
anti-American propaganda ," read a Friday memo
from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. "These types of 'trainings'
not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its
inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce The
President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using
taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions."
The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see
whether the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project was being used in school curricula
and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding.
Conservative pundits applauded Trump's action as a step forward in the "culture wars", but it's
really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who
continue look for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to
grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled
by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. Alot of thought and effort
went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That's no
small achievement.
Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White
Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is
based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the
country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work
together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals
the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that
was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working
class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform
the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO
allies.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer
that must be eradicated.
A good article, but no mention of who exactly these oligarchs are. Or why so many of them
are Jewish.
Or why so many Zionist organisations support BLM and other such groups.
Mike, not mentioning these things will not save you. You will still be cancelled by
Progressive Inc.
This seems like a good explanation of what is happening. I wonder whether too many people
will fall for the propaganda, though. It is the classic effort to get the turkeys to support
thanksgiving.
The deserved progress and concessions achieved by the civil rights struggles for the Black
community is in danger of deteriorating because Black leadership will not stand up and
vehemently condemn the rioting and destruction and killing, and declare that the BLM movement
does not represent the majority of the Black American culture and that the overexaggerated
accusations of "racism" do not necessitate the eradication and revision of history, nor does
it require European Americans to feel guilt or shame. There is no need for a cultural
revolution. The ideology and actions of BLM are offensive and inconsistent with American
values, and Black leaders should be saying this every day, and should be admonishing about
the consequences. They should also use foresight to see how this is going to end, because the
BLM and their supporters are being used to fight a war that they can never win. And when it's
over, what perception will the rest of America have of Black people?
@sonofman g to TPTB. Better to have an amorphous slogan to donate money to than an actual
organization with humans, goals and ideas which can be held up to the light and critically
examined.
The whole sudden race thing is a fraud to eliminate the electoral support Trump had
amassed among blacks before Corona and Fentanyl Floyd. In line with what Whitney says, the
globalists need to take down Trump. And the race card has always been the first tool in the
DNC's toolkit. When all else fails, go nuclear with undefined claims of racism.
Almost every big magazine has a black person on the cover this month. Probably will in
October too. Coincidence? Sure it is.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I'm shocked that they're trying to sell this Q-tier bullshit about Trump fighting the deep
state.
The reality about Trump is that he is the release valve, the red herring designed to keep
whitey pacified while massive repossessions and foreclosures take place, permanently
impoverishing a large part of the white population, and shutting down the Talmudic
service-based economy, which is all that is really left. It is Trump's DHS that declared a
large part of his white trashionalist base to be terrorists.
The populist majority never had anyone to vote for. This system will never give them one.
They aren't bright enough to make it happen.
Agree. Barack Obama in particular will go down in history a real disgrace to the legacy of
the US presidency. He is violating the sacred trust that the people of the United States
invested in him. What a fraud!
Good post Mr. Whitney especially about "white supremacy" garbage .which has only been
going on since the 90s! You know, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elohim City and Okie City, militias,
"patriot groups," etc. This really is nothing new. And, since so many remember the "white
supremacy" crapola was crapola back in the 90s, I'd say everyone pretty much regardless of
race over the age of 40 knows there is, as it says in Ecclesiastes in the Bible, "there is
nothing new under the sun." And, if you home schooled your kids back then, then you kids know
it as well. Fact is this: the DHS as with every other govt. agency is forced to blame "white
supremacy" for every problem in this country because who the heck else can they blame? Jews?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahh when pigs fly After all, Noahide just might be around the
corner ..
Sheriffs have a lot of legal power. Ultimately, the battle is privatized money power
vs Joe Citizen/Sheriffs.
This sheriff is working a Constitutional angle that says: Local Posse (meaning you.. Joe
citizen) working with the Sheriff department to protect your local community. Richard Mack is
teaching other Sheriffs and (some Police) what their Constitutional power is, and that power
doesn't include doing bidding of Oligarchs.
Sheriffs are elected, and their revenue stream is outside of Oligarchy:
So Donald Trump suddenly discovers that racial Bolshevism is the official policy of
his own executive branch – a mere 3 years and 8 months after assuming the
position
... Looks like the same old flim-flam they pull every four years. No matter who wins, the
Davos folks continue to run the circus and fleece the suckers dry.
Because it is. Substitute "the ethnic Russian middle class are class enemies" for
"Anglo-American are all racists" and there you have it. Permission for a small organized
minority to eliminate a whole class on ideological grounds...
I live in a former communist country in Eastern Europe with corrupt politicians, oligarchs
and organized crime.
America was a country with a minor corruption and in which the oligarchs, although
influential, were not united in a small group with decisive force. Now America is slowly
slipping into the situation of a second-hand shit-hole country.
Is that I can see the situation more clearly than an American citizen who still has the
American perception of his contry the way it was 30 years ago.
Essential thing:
1) The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and
the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes
in fear .
2) There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and
a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a
larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it
alone.
3) Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the
leaders
4) BLM are exactly the brown shirts of the new Hitler.
Soon we will se the new Hitler/Stalin/ in plain light.
Thirty black children murdered recently; zero by police / BLM & 'the media' say
nothing: https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-volume-7-the-lives-of-innocent-black-kids-do-not-matter/
BTW:
– Last year, the nationwide total for all US police forces was 47 killings of unarmed
criminals by police during arrest procedures.
– 8 were black, 19 were white.
Though blacks, relative to their numbers, committed a vastly higher number of crimes, hence
their immensely greater arrest rate.
@Justvisiting urally, it is nonsense -- nasty, power-hungry, censorious nonsense.
It is the opposite of scientific or empirical thought -- science can not accept theories
which are not capable of falsification. (Take astrology -- actually, don't ! -- what ever
conclusion it comes to can never be wrong : Dick or Jane didn't find love ? Well, one
of Saturn's moons was retrograde & Mercury declensed Venus (I don't know what it means
either) . or Dick went on a bender & Jane had a whole bad hair week.
Frankly, to play these pre-modern tricks on us is just grotesquely insulting. That some are
falling for it is grotesquely depressing.
Another ringer from Mike Whitney! Keep 'em comin', brother.
We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem.
We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad
logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an
extremely impressive ideological campaign.
Yup. TPTB have been grooming BLM/Antifa for this moment for at least 3-4 years now, if not
longer. Here's a former BLMer who quit speaking out three years ago about the organization's
role in the present 'race war':
It is very clever politics and (war) propaganda. You break down and demoralise your
enemies at the same time as assuring your own side of it's own righteous use of violence.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows.
Nailing it.
4. They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right.
If we believe this – we need to act like it. These are "enemies, foreign and
domestic ". This isn't ordinary politics, it arguably transcends politics.
What hope is there without organization?
And whatever is done – don't give them ammunition. The resistance must not be an
ethno-resistance.
But he is either naive or a bad manager, as his hires are deadly to his aims. And the
management criticism is big, because as a leader that is mostly what he does.
That he gets information to affect US policy for good, from outside of his circle of
trusted personnel, is a sad state of affairs.
@Robert Dolan ds that it would have ended on day one were it not officially sanctioned
and the rioters protected from prosecution. Why hasn't the Janet Rosenberg/Thousand
Currents/Tides Foundation connection with the BLM/DNC/MSM cabal, as well as with Antifa and
social media, been the major investigation on Fox News? Why haven't Zuckerberg, Zucker, et al
been arrested for incitement to commit federal crimes, including capital treason to overthrow
the duly elected president? (Just a few rhetorical questions for the hell of it.) What's so
galling is that the cops and federal agents are being used as just so many patsies who are
deployed, not to protect, but deployed to look like fools and be held up for mockery as
pathetic exemplars of white disempowerment.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding.
Agree, but where is President Trump? He was supposed to appoint undersecretaries and
assistant secretaries and deputy undersecretaries and Schedule C whippersnappers on whose
desks such outrages are supposed to die.
I've thought from the beginning that this lack of attention to "personnel as policy" --
with Trump overestimating the ability of the ostensible CEO to overcome such intransigence --
was one of his major failures. I am sympathetic, as there are not many people he could trust
to be loyal to his agenda, much less to him, but this is a disaster in every agency
Few years ago I watch a clip secretly recorded in Ukrainian synagogue where Rabi said
"first we have to fight Catholics and with Muslims it will be an easy job" ...
Thanks to Mr Whitney for being able to cut through the fog and see what's going on behind
it. The term "white supremacist" wasn't much in public use at all until the day Trump was
elected then suddenly it was all over the place. It's like one of those massive ad campaigns
whose jingle is everywhere as if some group decided on it as a theme to be pushed. They're
really afraid that the white working class population will wake up and see how the country is
being sold out from underneath their feet hence the need to keep it divided and intimidated.
Like all the other color revolutions everywhere else they strike at the weak links within the
country to create conflict, in the US case it's so-called diversity. There's billions
available to be spent in this project so plenty of traitors can be found, unwitting or
otherwise, to carry out their assignments. The billionaire class own most of the media and
much else and see the US as their farm. They have no loyalty whatsoever and outsource
everything to China or anywhere else they can squeeze everything out of the workers. They
want a global dictatorship and admire the Chinese government for the way it can order its
citizens around.
You are exactly right. Trump is doing his part (knowingly or unknowingly, but probably
knowingly) to accomplish the NWO objectives. He was not elected in 2016 in spite of NWO
desires, as most Trump supporters think, but rather precisely BECAUSE of NWO desires.
The NWO probably also wants him to win again this year, and if so then he will win. The
reason the NWO wanted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
@Trinity While I tend to agree with you that it looks like a race war, the question is
why is it happening now? If it were just a race war promoted by radicals in BLM and Antifa,
it does not explain the nationwide coordination (let's face it the faces of BLM and Antifa
are not that smart or connected), the support and censorship of the violence by the MSM and
the support of Marxist BLM by corporations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is a color revolution in the making and may come to a peak after Nov. 3rd. Whitney is on
to something, there is much more going on behind the "smoke and mirrors" and AG Barr (if he's
not part of it) should be investigating it.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I keep reading such nonsense in the comments above. the so-called populist majority does
not get it, Trump is not placed here to stop the Globalist agenda, that is an electioneering
stunt. Look at what he has actually and really done.
How has he stopped the Globalist move forward?? By the Covid plandemic being
allowed to circle the globe and shut down the US economy and social norm? By moving our high
tech companies to Israel? Giving Israel and their Wall Street allies what is left of US
credit wealth? Draining the swamp with even more Zio-Neocon Swamp creatures in the govt than
ever? Moving the embassy to Jerusalem and all requests per Netanyahu's wish list? A real
anti-Globalist stand? Looting the Federal Reserve for the Wall Street high fliers, who
garnered more wealth during the crash test run of March-April and are sure to make out with
even more for the coming big crash?
Phoney stunts of stopping immigration or bashing China. Really? China is still rising
propelled by Wall Street and Banker funds. I have not seen any jobs coming home, lost more
than ever in US history this year. Only lost homes for the working and middle classes.
How is Populist America standing up for their constitutional rights which is being
shredded a little more each day? Standing up for their Real Interests, which are eroded and
stolen on an almost daily basis by Trump's NY Mafia and Wall Street Oligarchs. Jobs gone for
good and government assistance to the needy disappearing, as that is against the phoney
Republic individualism, that you must make it on your own. Right just like the big goverment
assistance always going to the big money players and banks, remember as they are too big
to let fail!
Dreaming that Trump is going to save White America from the Gobalists is just
bull corn . From whom BLM? Proven street theatre that will disappear on command. I
actually have come to learn that some Black leaders are speaking out intelligently for street
calm and distancing themselves from BLM.
Problem with the USA is the general population is so very dumbed down by 60 years of MSM
– TV s and Hollywood mind control programming that the public prefers professional
actors like Reagan and Trump over real politicians, and surely never chose a Statesman or
real Patriotic leader. the public political narrative is still set by Fox , CNN and
MSNBC .
The deep state is so infiltrated and overwhelmed with Zio and Globalist agents, that it is
now almost hopeless to fix. Sorry to point out but Trump is best described as the Dummy
sitting on his Ventriloquist's lap (Jared Kushner).
Situation is near hopeless as even here on Ron Unz Review the comments are so
disappointing, almost 80% are focused on the Race as the prime issue and supportive of Trump
fakery (not that I support Biden and Zio slut Kamil Harris either).
In sum, beyond putting their MAGA hats on, White America is more focused more on
playing Cowboy with their toy guns, AR's and all than really getting involved politically to
sort things out to get American onto a better track. Of course, this is not taken seriously
as it might call for reaching out to other American communities that are even more
disenfranchised: African- Americans and Latinos.
@David Erickson nted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
Covid and BLM/ANTIFA are just window dressing for the financial turmoil. "Look over here
whitey, there's a pandemic" and "look over here whitey, there's a riot" is much preferred to
whitey shooting the sheriff who comes to take his stuff.
Wave the flag and bible while spreading love for the cops, and the repossessions and
evictions should go off without a hitch. Yes, Trump is a knowing participant.
"My impression is that BLM, Antifa and other protestors are well aware of this"
Like all good Maoists the cult white kids of antifa rigidly adhere to the mission statement
and stick the inconvenient truth in the back of their mushy minds. BLM ... is a mercenary.
Can you imagine any other groups rioting and destroying American cities for over 3 months?
Imagine if the Hells Angels or some other White biker gang was doing what Antifa and BLM are
doing? Hell, imagine if it were a bunch of Hare Krishnas pulling this shit off? Hell, I think
the local mayors, police, and other law enforcement employees wouldn't even take this much shit
even if the rioters were Girl Scouts. We are talking 3-4 months of lawlessness, assaults,
rapes, murders ( cold blooded premeditated murders at that) and still the people in charge let
this shit go on night and day. IF the POTUS doesn't have the authority or the power to stop
shit like this from going on then what the hell do we even vote for anyhow? Granted, I see the
reason for not being ruled by a dictatorship, but who in the hell can justify letting these
riots go on? One can only assume that both the republicants and the demsheviks are fine with
these riots because no one seems in a hurry to shut them down or arrest the hombres funding
these riots. Who is housing and feeding the rioters? Who is paying their travel expenses? I'm
sure most everyone in Washington knows who the people are behind these riots but don't expect
any action anytime soon.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond
the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that
must be eradicated.
That's true to a large degree, but
It is indeed an attempt to liquidate the working and lower middle class. Most of the
American working and lower middle class, obviously not all, is White. So predictably we have
these calls for White Genocide. Agreed and good to see the tie-in with the Coronavirus Hoax
lock downs, too, which also spread the devastation into minority communities under the guise of
public safety.
The one question that remains unanswered is why the major cities were targeted for
destruction. Obviously these are the playgrounds of the oligarchs and have been decimated. We
will learn soon enough.
The Reverend William Barber is the only genuine black leader I am aware of.
And he makes a pointn of not speaking only for blacks, but for all disadvantaged communities,
including poor whites. IMO he is the real deal, and I very much hope he takes the lead in
articulating genuine community values of respect and equality for all, including basics such as
decent health care and food access.
The pressure exerted on someone like Barber by the BLM forces in the media and other
institutions is enormous.
I wish Ron Unz would invite him to write something for the UR.
After ample media jaw-jawing over whether the Democratic presidential nominee would loudly
and proudly repudiate some of the present violent protesting in America's streets, Joe Biden
(if briefly) denounced the hard Left on Monday. "Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not
protesting. Setting fires is not protesting," the former vice president said in Pittsburgh, in
a rare day trip from Delaware; he has rarely traveled since the dawn of COVID-19 in the United
States. "None of this is protesting -- it's lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it,
should be prosecuted."
"Violence will not bring change," Biden continued. "It will only bring destruction. It's
wrong in every way. It divides, instead of unites. It destroys businesses -- only hurts the
working families that serve the community. It makes things worse across the board, not better."
And, in the signature line of the speech, Joe Biden summed up a lifetime of political appeal:
"You know me. You know my heart. You know my story. Ask yourself, do I look like a radical
socialist with a soft spot for rioters?"
It was effective. Still, Biden's address Monday hardly tied up all loose ends.
After his speech, fresh polling implied additional trouble for his campaign.
Emerson College , respected in the field, released research that found President Trump down
only two percent in the contest, with a double digit performance with African-Americans and
support among Hispanics nearing forty percent, both surprising. It's one poll, but it's
startling stuff. Since Biden declared his candidacy in 2019, his duel with Donald Trump has
been one-sided.
Despite press incentives to couch the race as anybody's game, Trump vs. Biden so far had had
all the makings of a rout, and without a traditional campaign, even a boring one at that (a
shocking statement on anything that involved Donald Trump). From the president's termination of
internal pollsters last year that showed him to the ex-veep losing badly, to Biden's astonishing,
intimidating comeback in the primary to the Democratic nominee's record of utter political
dominance since crisis opened up in America, it had not been a pretty picture for the White
House.
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But that's now plainly shifted. Some partisans in early summer made the case that
relative administration restraint on violent protests in America's cities (including the
capital of Washington, D.C.) would lay bare the nature of certain left-wing tactics.
Politically, at least, it's beginning to look prescient. While overdone analogies to the mayhem
of 1968 abound -- the Nixon-Humphrey race occurred in a time closer to World War I than the
current year -- it's clear, now, that some devotees of the Democrats are, in fact, undermining
the cause.
Americans are fleeing the
city. Bad news for the donkey: some might argue that's a tacit rejection of liberal
politics. And it's certainly a reality Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien is licking his chops
to exploit. Urban America is almost monolithically controlled by the Democratic Party. And, in
a stunning reversal after decades of urban triumph, the city has become a political albatross.
Biden notoriously made his bones in his early political life as a sensitive ear on the
anxieties, reasonable or not, of white suburbanites. Speculation about senility aside, he would
seem to know what's up.
That's why Biden made a tactical error, in later veering off-message -- after the initial
upbraiding of his own side. He repudiated violence, but then engaged in both-siderism. He
implied the canard that anti-fascist chaos has been met with equal, odious might by the far
Right. It hasn't. The most recent, known victim of political violence was a
Trump-supporting man in Portland, Oregon. Whatever you think of his politics, he was
apparently essentially executed in the streets of a major American city.
Images of burned-out ruins in Kenosha, Wisconsin permeate cyberspace. Add in, for instance,
insane reports (if true) of laser attacks on law enforcement, and it's not hard to see how this
gets dicey in a hurry for the Democrats. The party's monofocus on police killings of
African-Americans, an essential issue, falls flat with the public when there is a failure to
also address the larger toxic brew that is the country's problems right now. So, true to form,
Biden strayed further from his initial path by talking, at bizarre length, about Russian
President Vladimir Putin and the dubious
Russian bounties story, where plenty of regional experts say the dust is far from settled.
"Donald Trump is determined to instill fear in America," Biden closed. "That's what his entire
campaign for the presidency has come down to: fear."
The former vice president then declined to take questions, failing to allay fears that he
only speaks when he absolutely has to.
Senator Harris did not say "riots'. To claim that she did is to promote a clear falsehood.
She said "protests". No American should have a problem with protests.
I don't really like either candidate and was all set to write in another name as a protest
(Andrew Basevich). Here is what changed my mind:
https://cwbchicago.com/2020... Click on the embedded video. This attack was folllowed up
by another vicious attack on a senior a couple of days later:
https://cwbchicago.com/2020...
I am not expecting any miracles in a second Trump term but I am one of many voters who
think Biden is a mere placeholder for the more radical Harris.
Trump's best hope for re-election are a) more examples of urban unrest/local politicians
failing to keep order and b) Biden continuing to show he is losing his marbles, particularly
in a debate. He will probably get both, but he would help himself out by hesitating just a
bit every time he feels like shooting off his mouth, which turns of a lot of people,
particularly wavering voters.
It's clear that the Dems anticipate resistance to their plan by the contemptible way
they have branded struggling workers as "white nationalists" and "racists".
Divide and conquer is as old as civilization itself and just as effective as the first
time it was used. Some baby's never learn.
"... "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate." ..."
"... "chose not to" ..."
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George Orwell's novel
'1984' depicts life within Oceania, a totalitarian society strictly controlled by an omnipresent Party whose three simple yet
contradictory slogans are: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Citizens of Oceania were forced to accept
that two plus two may equal five if the Party deemed it so.
Akin to the Snake
game
found
on old Nokia mobile phones, woke movements become increasingly illogical and harder to control before eventually tying
themselves in knots or crashing into the walls of logic, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Modern feminist movements
are having the wind taken out of their sails by other woke factions who argue that children should be taught boys can have
periods
,
so as not to distress transgender students, or that
terms
like
mother and father should be replaced with parent 1 and parent 2. Even the main UK doctors' union sent an internal memo
advising its staff to use the term 'pregnant people' rather than 'expectant
mothers'
to
avoid causing offense.
One could argue that
campaigns designed to remove the concept of male and female is a threat to women and their historical struggles. By
eliminating the 'existence' of women, it not only airbrushes out women's vast contribution to history but also removes the
whole notion of feminism – if womanhood does not exist, then the whole idea of misogyny becomes irrelevant. Perhaps one day
someone will decide that race is simply a construct and can be changed at will, thus making all debates about racism and
oppression irrelevant. Thus future woke cultists might argue themselves into a corner in which racism and thus 'white
privilege' does not exist.
In the West you are free
to choose any gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are not supposed to
question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Likewise, the much lauded concept of human rights and democracy – one of
the key pillars on which Western 'cultural superiority' rests and from which it sneers at 'undemocratic' and 'uncivilised'
countries – is used to justify the destruction, occupation and economic enslavement of other peoples.
Whether it is Libya, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen or Palestine we see that non-white lives do not matter when there are no political points to score.
Indeed, condemning the slaughter of Palestinians could be enough to get you labeled an anti-Semite by those who remain
suspiciously silent when real anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.
For example, far right and
neo-nazi militias in Ukraine,
some
of
whom take their symbols and ideology from the 1930-1940s
,
have
operated with relative impunity and perpetuated human rights abuses upon the people of the Donbass region. These groups were
part of the Maidan movement, visited by Western politicians and praised by liberals, that violently overthrew elected
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Some of the leaders of this movement included far right elements who had no qualms
being amidst white power logos and neo-nazi flags, or had in the past claimed that a
"Moscow-Jewish
mafia"
controls
Ukraine.
Neither
Western nor Israeli politicians seemed too interested in such developments, despite Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
reporting
that weapons sent by Israel to Ukraine were ending up in the hands of far right militias, such as the Azov battalion.
Paradoxically, copious effort and resources were allocated to make people believe that the UK Labour Party, led by left wing
leader Jeremy Corbyn, had a serious problem with anti-Semitism.
As soon as a party leader
like Jeremy Corbyn began to offer something outside the narrowly defined political bandwidth and stood up for the rights of
Palestinians, he was demonized by politicians as well as their media allies and big business handlers. A study conducted by
the London School of Economics and Political Science examined UK newspaper coverage of Corbyn in the months following his
election as Labour Party leader and found evidence of media
bias
such
that
"Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became
a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate."
It is welcome that recent
events in the US have highlighted racism faced by African Americans. Yet frequent murders of African Americans by a
militarized police force did not suddenly appear when Trump came to power. Many Democratic Party politicians who nowadays make
sure everyone knows they unquestioningly support the Black Lives Matter movement had few issues with the status quo before the
killing of George Floyd, and will probably regain their apathy if Biden wins the election.
Furthermore, little is
said about the role the Obama administration played only a few years ago in the destruction of Libya, formerly one of Africa's
richest and most stable nations, and its relinquishment to warlords and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Some of these groups were
quick to imprison and murder
citizens
from
sub-Saharan Africa who had migrated to Libya in search of a better life.
Slave
markets
selling sub-Saharan Africans now exist in the new post-Gaddafi Libya.
The UK Conservative Party, traditionally not fans of refugees or migrants, were responsible for the
Windrush
scandal
which saw Caribbean immigrants who had arrived in the UK decades earlier being threatened with deportation despite
having lived, worked, and paid taxes in this country for many years. The same party is now thinking of allowing nearly three
million Hong Kong citizens the opportunity to reside in the UK and later apply for
citizenship
.
When it comes to sticking two fingers up to China, we hear no talk about how the NHS and welfare system cannot afford to
absorb refugees and migrants.
These days many people,
especially celebrities, politicians and media figures, are falling over themselves to condemn racism and make sure everyone is
aware of their anti-racist credentials. The only remaining forms of racism deemed acceptable in the West include Russophobia
and Sinophobia. The media devotes endless hours hyping up the threat from Russia and China and in doing so surreptitiously
promotes animosity toward these nations and their peoples. The shadowy hand of the Russian government is deemed to be behind
every calamity or undesired election result. We are frequently reminded that a vague and poorly defined threat from Russia and
China looms large, though hard evidence is often sketchy, open to interpretation or questionable. At the same time NATO troops
encroach upon Russia's borders, yet the latter is deemed the aggressor, whilst the US sails warships through contested seas
near China's
borders
.
Whereas the UK seeks to provoke Russia for no logical reason, the US is determined to pick a fight with China and claims it
"chose
not to"
stop coronavirus from spreading beyond its borders.
The waning US empire and
its allies within the disintegrating EU prefer to attack their rivals Russia and China to deflect their own populations'
attention away from domestic problems with some good old-fashioned xenophobia. The UK, in particular, would do well to try and
improve its relationships with Russia and China as it is on track to have a lonely time post Brexit.
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Portland Oregon BLM requested that whites step aside in the George Floyd murder protests.
I seriously wonder how it is that the approximately 95% whit Portland population finds that
the only thing worthy of protesting in America, or white people in other cities. I have been
to my share of protests and none of them ever accomplished anything so I do not recommend
protests as a way to change policy from my own experience. People often infiltrate protests
for nefarious reasons and often to incite violence to seize the narrative back, because if
the protesters are viewed as violent radicals they will not have sympathy and will not get
their message through. They rarely work, particularly with the militarized police state, I
could not in good faith urge people to risk their lives. The days of the original Boston Tea
Party are long gone.
Just raising hell without a clear direction or path forward is not a good idea. Is the
governmemt corrupt? Yes. Will protesters convince the government or police to change for the
better? I do not think so. In fact, the government has used protests as a reason to illegally
revoke rights over the past 100 years. So especially for that reason, I do not encourgae
people to go to protests after seeing that and never gaining anything else from the protests.
Not because oppose protesting but because I oppose wasting my time.
If wokeness is going to survive, the scourge of actors portraying characters that are in any
way different from themselves must end now.
I consider myself a devout crusader for the Church of Wokeness, a brave Knight of the Woke
Table if you will.
... The newest and most heinous of injustices that I unearthed occurred the other day, and
was so horrifying it literally left me shaking.
... The injustice of which I speak is that Netflix just announced that on its hit show
The Crown , Princess Diana – the most iconic of British Royals, will be played
by Elizabeth Debicki who is gasp Australian!
...
I wish there was a woke time machine so we could see who Octavia Spencer would cast instead
of Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Oscar-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio
in What's Eating Gilbert Grape .
Those able-bodied bastards are acting abominations. Their crimes are almost as bad as
cis-gendered actors playing trans characters.
... Of course, even if an actor is the same race or ethnicity as a character, they aren't
safe from the righteous sword of wokeness. ... To avoid this woke backlash and the cancel
culture mob, white actresses Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell quit their roles voicing black
characters on cartoons.
... we could be one step closer to eradicating the art of acting and finally living in the
glorious utopia of talentlessness we woke are obviously so desperate to manifest.
Rudi Rat 48 minutes ago
What ... the new Diana actress is not black? That is pretty unwoke!
Smythe_Mogg 7 minutes ago
A very amusing piece. Of course, in many of the examples offered nobody but the 'woke' would
consider watching finished films based on 'trans' nonsense and militant lesbianism. Thus
'woke' speaks unto 'woke' and everyone else just gets on with life.
rnsglobal 1 hour ago
Writers like you who subscribe to the idea of "woke" are destroying our society. We don't
want or need opinions like yours that only serve to destroy careers, reputations, or the
normals of society. You are not doing the world a favor, rather you and your woke mobs are
trying to destroy history and re-write it the way you see fit instead of keeping our history
and learning from it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Vargus_A_MS rnsglobal 43 minutes ago
Do you understand sarcasm? Or is this sarcasm for sarcasm.
InnocentJekyll 1 hour ago
I am like seriously literally actually offended on behalf of all people of color and
minorities right now. #NotMyArticle
Hollywood, despite its
reputation as a liberal bastion, has long been a hothouse of vicious reactionary sentiments.
For example, the
anti-communist mania of the late 1940s and '50s was a particularly shameful time in Hollywood's history. It was during this
Red Scare that Hollywood studios created a blacklist where any person thought to be a communist or associated with communists,
regardless of their ability, was barred from working in the industry.
Joseph McCarthy and the
House Un-American Activities Committee used the threat of the Hollywood blacklist to force many artists to become informers on
their colleagues in order to maintain their livelihoods.
Not surprisingly, as the
Black Lives Matter panic now rages, Hollywood is once again succumbing to the hideous siren's call of dehumanization and
discrimination. Except this time the accusation isn't about communism, but rather,
"Are
you now, or have you ever been, a white man?"
The Red Scare is now the White Male Scare. In Hollywood's current climate of rabid, politically correct, social-justice
hysteria, the message is clear: group identity trumps individual talent, skill and artistry, always and every time.
The black die has been
cast, and the end result of adhering to this devout dogma of diversity is that white men need not apply. Any white men who
raise issues with this mandate are racist and will, along with anyone who openly associates with them, be canceled.
A recent
example
of
this was when black filmmaker Ri-Karlo Handy put out a call on a Facebook group of film professionals for
"black
union editors."
When white editors took offense at this rank racialization, they were called racist, and
one
even
lost his job over it.
Black filmmaker Ava
DuVernay responded by
tweeting
"to
the white men if you don't get that job you were up for, kindly remember bias can go both ways. This is 2020 speaking."
This is reminiscent of
black filmmaker Jordan Peele
saying
,
"I
don't see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie."
Imagine if someone said either of those things about
black or Jewish people instead of
"white men."
Apparently, DuVernay and
Peele feel the best way to fight past racism is with more racism. How ethically and morally repugnant of them.
Who are the real racists? The woke mob tries to redefine racism to hide their own bigotry
Micah Curtis
is a game and tech
journalist from the US. Aside from writing for RT, he hosts the podcast Micah and The Hatman, and is an independent
comic book writer. Follow Micah at
@MindofMicahC
Racism is an evil thing.
People who are branded with that title are given a massive scarlet letter, and are generally cast out of civil society.
Rightfully so, as no one wants to interact with someone who is so malicious towards someone else's skin color. Individuals
like Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer are not tolerated (unless they're
commentating
for
CNN I suppose).
One of the above words
needs to be stressed: it's 'malicious'. As it has been understood for as far as I can remember, racism requires malice. This
is why the term 'hate group' was first coined. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, or other white
nationalists or white supremacists are considered 'hateful' because that is their modus operandi. They outright despise anyone
who isn't like they are.
However, racism isn't
something that is understood to be exclusive to a skin color either. Well, unless you're 'woke'. If you're America's Got
Talent host Nick Cannon, you can call white people and Jews
"
closer
to animals
"
and somehow you're not a racist. You can throw a
"
mute
white people
"
button on your platform and you're somehow totally cool. Bill De Blasio can tell Jewish
people
and
other religious groups that they can't assemble, but a BLM mural is serious business. And, of course, you can be a sitting
senator and brand all Trump supporters
"
white
supremacists
"
with no pushback.
The woke mob doesn't like
the current definition of racism because they fit it to a T. Most people that they are trying to say are racists are more
offended by pineapple on their pizza than anyone's melanin. Meanwhile, BLM supporters like Nick Cannon can spout something
that sounds like it would appear in Der Sturmer and he's fine. You're also going to have to explain to me how the Goya Foods
CEO, a Trump supporter, is a white supremacist when he's a Latino.
Why follow the rules or
adhere to definitions, when you can weaponize the debate to change the rules and definitions to suit your needs?
This is exactly how dopey
the conversation has become. The CDC had over a thousand employees asking the organization to
"declare
racism a public health
crisis
."
So
in the midst of an epidemic, your priority is declaring an irrational emotional response to melanin content in one's skin a
health crisis?! That's not even the CDC's job! Not to mention, acting as if America has anything close to the problems we had
in the 1960s and before is just revisionist. But then again, that's the problem with redefining a term that needs a strong
definition. Everything is becoming racist to the point that the term is becoming worthless.
We're at a point where no one knows who the racists are any more, because we can't even agree on the term. Certain groups are
excluded because they're 'the oppressed groups', as if that has anything to do with evil behavior. Racism is evil. Truly evil.
Evil is not relegated to a specific group or social class. Evil is simply evil. If we redefine something evil as the opposite
at any point, we open the door for tragedy. Many groups of people have been the victim of this behavior at one point in
history or another. If the woke mob gets its way, history will repeat itself.
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of RT.
During the discussion with
former Public Enemy member Richard Griffin (who left the group after saying the
"Jews
are wicked"
in a 1989 interview), Cannon, who hosts the 'Masked Singer,' claimed it is impossible for him to be
antisemitic.
"It's never hate speech, you can't be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people,"
he
said.
"When we are the same people who they want to be. That's our birthright."
He
later insisted again that he is not promoting
"hate speech."
Cannon and Griffin also
spoke about various conspiracy theories regarding Jewish power in the global banking industry and there was even praise for
Louis Farrakhan, a political activist and preacher with a long history of statements deemed anti-Semitic.
Raising even more eyebrows
on social media were Cannon's words about white people.
A clip from the interview
shows Cannon discussing how white people are
"a little less"
and
"closer
to animals"
due to the pigment of their skin.
"When you have a person that has the lack of pigment, the lack of melanin, they know
that they will be annihilated, so therefore, however they got the power, they have the lack of compassion,"
he said,
going on to theorize that
"melanin"
-- which is the dark pigmentation of skin, hair,
or even eyes -- gives non-white people more
"compassion"
and
"soul."
"The people that don't have [melanin] are -- I'm going to say this carefully -- a little
less,"
he continued.
White people, according to
Cannon, do not have the
"power of the sun"
and are acting out of a
"deficiency"
in
their
"fear"
of black people.
Cannon has earned plenty
of critics thanks to the resurfaced interview -- which was originally released last summer, but reposted to Cannon's YouTube
page on June 30 -- with him being blasted online as a
"black supremacist."
Cannon responded to the
outrage in an interview with Fast Company, claiming he wants to be
"corrected"
if
he is wrong, but he refuses to apologize.
"You can say sorry in as many different languages as you want to, and it means nothing,"
he
said.
As for his praise of
Farrakhan, Cannon says he refuses to be held responsible for everything the religious leader said and can only take
responsibility for his own words.
"I can't be responsible for however long Minister Farrakhan has been ministering and
things that he said,"
the rapper said.
"That is his voice and his fight. I can only
be held accountable for what I've seen and what I've heard."
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Can there ever be a true revolt that is led by the spoiled Children of the
Élite? If so, what would such a 'revolt' mean in America? Well, 25-years ago, a
prescient American cultural historian, Christopher Lasch, foresaw just such a revolution. He
wrote a book – Revolt of the Élite – to describe how, already in
1994, he perceived what lay ahead: A social revolution that would be pushed forward by radical
children of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders would have almost nothing to say about poverty or
unemployment. Their demands would be centred on utopian ideals: diversity and racial justice
– ideals pursued with the fervour of an abstract, millenarian ideology.
And their radicalism would be resisted, Lasch predicted, not by the upper reaches of
society, or the leaders of Big Philanthropy or the Corporate Billionaires. These latter,
rather, would be its facilitators and financiers. Yet the revolt would be resisted. Resisted,
paradoxically, by 'the masses' and by traditional upholders of America's 'golden age' virtues:
"It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution," Lasch wrote, but "their
political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of these self-appointed
spokesmen, and would-be liberators".
Lasch was undoubtedly prescient; but in fact, we have seen this before – in Russia of
the 1860s, where a type of reductive, abstract ideological obsession developed which was
fundamentally divorced from shared physical and political realities, as well as the emotive
qualities which drive humans towards empathy and compassion. Those early Russian
revolutionaries sought action, for
action's sake . And they practiced not just 'action', but also 'destruction' for its own
sake, too.
It is in this context that the emerging generation of 19 th Century Russian
radicals popularised the notion of the complete renunciation of all, and everything, standing
as 'Russia', and its flawed past.
One of Lasch's key insights was how future young American Marxisants would substitute
culture war for class war: "The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are
best understood as a form of class warfare", he wrote, in which an enlightened élite (as
it thinks of itself), do not deign to persuade the majority (Middle America) by means of
rational public debate – but nonetheless, maintains the conceit of it bearing the torch
for human redemption.
It is essentially then, a revolt not against any powerful, socially élite,
classes, but one targeted against American 'deplorables' and 'reactionary' conservatives: "The
new elites are in revolt against 'Middle America,' as they imagine it: A nation technologically
backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its
tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy", Lasch wrote. They share a belief that humanity is
on a Grand March toward Progress. It is the splendid march on the road to ending institutional
injustices: It goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding.
The woke attribution of bigotry and backwardness to their non-college educated compatriots
has inculcated in today's radical college graduates a snobbism and contempt (as also happened
in Russia in the 1800s) that forecloses on empathy for, or any iota of co-compatriotism with
fellow American 'reactionaries and dullards': see here for an example, as one bare-breasted, 'bourgeois
socialist' leader sneers and screams at the police for their lack of a college education, their
lack of bookishness, and yells at the back policemen "Traitors".
Lasch suggests that once, it was perceived that it was a 'revolt by the masses' which
threatened the social order, but today, the threat comes from 'the top of the social
hierarchy', and not from the masses. "It is the élites however, those who control the
international flow of money and information, that preside over philanthropic foundations and
institutions of higher learning that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of
the West".
Lasch was prescient too, in predicting that the main threat would come from those who
preside over big institutions – and foreseeing the latter's potential symbiosis with the
woke generation. For these CEOs and college presidents collectively, of course, are their
parents; they are the hedonist Woodstock radicals of the 60s, made good, who now sit at the
apex of the institutional world, and Big Business. No surprise then that Big Philanthropy
shares aspirations and funds todays radicals. Big Philanthropy activities today bear no
relation to what most Americans suppose. The 'revolution' has already taken them. Rather, the
commanding heights of American philanthropy today are occupied by massive, well-heeled
institutions that have nothing but contempt for that traditional idea of philanthropy. Schambra
and Hartmann
write :
"[Foundations in America] have seen the need to shift away from merely coping with the
symptoms of problems -- which is all one could expect from local amateurs inspired by
retrograde morality and religious superstition
"Instead, this philanthropic ideal is manifested in an effort to bring about deep
structural change within society, challenging what are seen to be the fundamental institutional
injustices of the economic and political orders. In the words of Darren Walker, president of
the Ford Foundation -- one of the most towering pillars of liberal establishment philanthropy
in the United States -- it's time to move "from generosity to justice".
This means shifting power once again, away from the detached professional class of
managerial elites prized by the first stage of the philanthropic revolution. Since these elites
were so often white and male, they were, and are, part of society's structural injustice -- so
the story goes. They are now dismissed as "white saviours" in need of "decolonization."
Current thinking therefore, calls for putting foundation wealth directly into the hands
of those who have been systematically victimized. Edgar Villanueva, the progressive author
ofDecolonizing Wealth, recently released astatementsaying "philanthropy must take accountable action and release an
unprecedented amount of unrestricted funds to fuel long-term Black-led movements for racial
justice. This moment requires absolutely nothing less, if we profess to be dedicated to justice
".
Since Villanueva's book was released in October 2018, there's scarcely been a
professional meeting or training in the world of foundations that hasn't featured his
message".
This important ideological shift needs to be absorbed: Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big
CEOs are with
the 'woke' and BLM militants , and are ready to release Big Funding (some of these
foundations have resources that eclipse those of states). Big Philanthropy
gives BLM $100m (including $40m
from Ford Foundation for capacity building). And with big funding – inevitably
– comes 'guidance' (apolitical 'naturally'). There is a multiplier effect here too, as
Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big Biotechnology act as an interconnected network system. They
foresee a (dehumanised) tech and AI-led future, led by a multicultural aristocracy (i.e.
'them').
Fairly obviously, the deplorables and traditional Christian conservatives don't exactly fit
with this vision.
Lasch wrote: "Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate
on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in
fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture Multiculturalism "suits them to
perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines,
exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savoured indiscriminately,
with no questions asked and no commitments required they illustrate how the western
élite has burned the candle at both ends – welcoming migration that transforms
society from below, even as the upper class floats up – into a post-national utopia,
which remains an undiscovered [and frightening prospect] for the people left behind".
Let's unpack this a little further: "floating up into a post-national utopia" – isn't
this just the WEF 'Davos'
Great Global Reset' project ? Doesn't this fit exactly with the objective of floating up
into a post-national, climate, bio-health and financial, global governance? A world of fast
moving, money, glamour, and celebrity, as Lasch saw it.
Who was Lasch? By training, Lasch was a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century
American culture. He came from a left-wing intellectual family and married into another. He was
thoroughly on the Left during the 1960s. Indeed, he later moved further in that direction .
Roger Kimball has written of Lasch's
searing retrospective on the Woodstock generation, entitled The Culture of Narcissism :
"What one witnessed in its pages, was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed
man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had
turned out to be almost entirely bogus".
Kimball writes, Lasch "understood that consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s was
mostly a blind for moralistic self-indulgence. Promises of liberation and transcendence, he
saw, often concealed new forms of tyranny and irresponsibility". It was nonetheless exactly
this radicalism of the preceding Woodstock generation, combined with the commitment to
'Progress', that would lead to extremism and division in the succeeding gilded generation, he
believed.
Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the
major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If
there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful
trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious
self-righteousness?
And so it has come to pass.
So, what can we make of all this? The US has suddenly exploded into, on the one hand,
culture cancelation, and on the other, into silent seething at the lawlessness, and at all the
statues toppled. It is a nation
becoming angrier , and edging towards violence.
One segment of the country believes that America is inherently and institutionally racist,
and incapable of self-correcting its flawed founding principles – absent the required
chemotherapy to kill-off the deadly mutated cells of its past history, traditions and
customs.
Another, affirms those principles that underlay America's 'golden age'; which made America
great; and which, in their view, are precisely those qualities which can make it great
again.
A third – more cynically – swims with this woke tide, offering to 'take the
knee', hoping to shape and mould the woke uprising, in ways that serve the end of toppling
Trump, and paving the way to a tech and AI vision of the future.
The woke 20+ and 30+ year-old revolutionaries however, have already invaded and culturally
captured virtually all the principal institutions of Big Media, Big Money and Big Philanthropy.
And even
West Point Military Academy too, it seems. Or, perhaps we should say, the old 'Woodstock
ethos' of sympathy for corporate organisation has (reciprocally) captured them too.
The Culture War has long since been lost at the legal level. Even conservative parents have
had little choice, but to sacrifice their children to the altars of top-tier colleges and
universities. It is just not possible to chart a path into the rarefied world of 'Big Anything'
if you are not part of the élite sorting structures. Smart parents know this. They see
it every day; but nevertheless these colleges and institutions precisely are a part of the
industrial manufactory of woke. And Big Tech has played its part: It has seen to it that young
imaginations are
filtered through Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat – all dominated by the fully
woke.
The US lies in the flood plain of a cultural tsunami – and the question is whether
there is anything on the horizon that will provide a stopper, or a levée that will hold?
Will an appeal to Law and Order traditionalists, or to a newly-formulated nationalist culture,
succeed in stemming the 'Demographic ring' from snapping-shut on white conservatives in
November? (That constituency has been a minority for some years, already).
Once the nature of the woke cultural war is understood, the problems become obvious. Any
defence of traditional sources of American identity will be construed by the woke ideologues as
racially offensive. Traditional American nationalism, in the woke view, is white
nationalism . But the woke coalition (Big Media, Big institutions) will not accept to fight
on a 'nationalism' terrain. They simply will insist that traditional American beliefs amount to
race hatred. How can you have 'cultural nationalism' when the forces of woke believe that the
nation itself is irredeemably racist and bigoted?
Nothing is certain for November: there are too many unknowns. What we might conclude
however, is that today the US is 'rhyming' with (if not repeating) history – 1860 Italy
to be precise. An ambitious rising 'class' intends to displace an old aristocracy, and install
itself in its palaces. Then, it was a rising, increasingly prosperous, middle class that was
intent on becoming the new aristocrats, in place of old aristocracy. Today, however, it is the
old 'Anglo' imperial aristocracy that is being targeted by the cosmopolitan 'thinking
aristocracy' of Silicon Valley, of Wall Street, Big Pharma and Big Philanthropy. The woke
troops are simply their chaff.
America's 'Golden Era' nostalgia may be the strongest player on the board, for now. But to
all other players, the latter is viewed now as so toxic, that the aspirant new 'aristocrats' of
the 'Grand March toward Progress', may push aside old rivalries very quickly, to combine for
the defeat of the 'old'. The old aristocracy ultimately may opt for peace at any price, in
which case the political 'ring' – along with the demographic – will snap shut. It
did in 1860. It was over.
"America's financial and political establishment has always been most terrified of an
inclusive underclass movement. So it evangelizes a bizarre transgressive politics that tells
white conservatives to fuck themselves and embraces a leftist sub-theology that preaches
class as a racist canard." - Matt Taibbi
Frank, according to Taibbi , not only predicted the current culture war we currently find
ourselves in - he's hit the nail on the head once again when it comes to the left's inability
to learn from their mistakes - after the party abandoned blue-collar America for condescending,
coastal intellectuals.
Frank published What's the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W.
Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party
was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found
puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they'd conquered the electoral failure problem in the
nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton's Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a
middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare "
as we know it ") appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican "Southern strategy."
Yet Clinton's chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party's latest Kennedy wannabe, John
Kerry, did worse , and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant,
despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into
the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: "Why do they vote against
their own interests?" -Matt Taibbi
And instead of trying to actually figure out what motivates voters from poor swaths of
America, the left has chalked it up to ' racial animus and Christian superstition. '
Taibbi further notes: "The Kansas title alone spoke to one of Frank's central observations:
while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a
broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension ."
That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside
the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string
of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was
very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese,
Bible-thumping dolts who couldn't navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of
reading.
Republicans may have controlled government at the time, but when they turned on TV sets or
looked up at movie screens, their voters felt accused of something just for living in little
towns, raising kids, and visiting church on Sundays . What's the matter , they were asking,
with that ? -Matt Taibbi
And since the 2016 US election, instead of introspection over why Trump resonates with
blue-collar America, the left has learned nothing.
After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was –
without exception now – a crazed, racist monster. As detailed here multiple times,
ruminations on Republican voter behaviors became not merely uninteresting to pundits after
November 2016, but actively taboo. By 2020, the official answer to What's the Matter with
Kansas? was Kansas is a White Supremacist Project and Can Go Fuck Itself. -Matt Taibbi
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"Yesterday, there was a Tzar and there were slaves. Today, there is no Tzar, but the slaves
are still here. We have gone through the epoch when the masses were oppressed. We are now going
through the epoch when the individual is to be oppressed in the name of the masses." ―
Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic
Legendary British comedian John Cleese has hit out at permanently offended woke people,
insisting that they have no sense of humour and are contributing to the death of comedy.
In an appearance on the Daily Beast's The Last Laugh Podcast, Cleese noted that woke people
simply do not understand the intricacies of comedy.
"There's plenty of people who are PC now who have absolutely zero sense of humour. I would
love to debate, in a friendly way, a couple of 'woke' people in front of an audience. And I
think the first thing I would say is, please tell me a good 'woke' joke," Cleese urged.
"What they don't understand is that there's two types of teasing," Cleese continued, noting
that "There's really nasty teasing, which is horrible, and we shouldn't do it, full stop. But
the other type of teasing is affectionate. You can tease people hugely affectionately and it's
a bonding mechanism."
"All humour is critical. You cannot get laughs out of perfect human beings," Cleese
continued, adding that "If you've got someone up on the screen who is perfect, intelligent and
kind and flexible and a good person, there's nothing funny about that. So we only laugh at
people's frailties, but that's not cruel. You can laugh at people's frailties in very funny and
generous ways."
Cleese was recently at the centre of a 'woke' storm when his
Fawlty Towers show, made some 40 years ago was temporarily canceled after complaints that it
featured a 'racist' character.
Cleese called the BBC "cowardly and gutless" for removing an episode of the show, pointing
out that the racist character in question was the target of ridicule in the show.
Cleese has previously warned that political correctness will lead to the death of comedy,
noting that "If you start to say we mustn't, we mustn't criticize or offend them then humor is
gone. With humor goes a sense of proportion. And then as far as I'm concerned you're living in
1984."
After daring to question the diversity overlords, Cleese also recently found himself being
labeled a 'racist'
Nunyadambizness , 3 hours ago
Cleese is absolutely spot on.
The vast majority of "woke" people have fallen subject to the Cultural Marxism that is
political correctness, and frankly have the intellectual capacity of my shoe. Disagree?
You're a racist/sexist/homophobe/islamophobe/ etc., etc., etc. One cannot debate ideas
because if your idea is different then theirs, they cannot accept the fact that you have a
different idea than the "woke" theology--same as Islam demands submission to their
theology.
WorkingClassMan , 2 hours ago
The man IS a comedic genius. Even when he made fun of 'The Germans," he did it in such a
unique and awesome way it even had this German-American laughing. He can get away with a
Hitler skit--he's THAT good.
EvlTheCat , 2 hours ago
"Woke" in itself is a joke and a oxymoron, which if you know the definition makes it
ironic also. Touches all bases John.
seryanhoj , 2 hours ago
Also a grammatical error. The chosen ones who may not be questioned, are awakened.
Clese is right . The " woke " have less sense of humour than the state dept. or the
Pentagon or the NRA.
Anyone who tskes himself seriously is a threat. Fortunately even he will soon be dead and
forgotten.
EvlTheCat , 1 hour ago
Mr. Fawlty will never be forgotten.
Simple past participle.
Bay Area Guy , 2 hours ago
I wonder what George Carlin would have to say about the situation today. I think he would
say a lot of things similar to what Cleese has said. Carlin was most definitely a staunch
liberal, but he also stood up for true free speech. I recall a skit he did that skewered
feminists. Undoubtedly, they would try to silence him today.
I'm not sure a true wokester could ever tell a joke. They'd be deathly afraid of someone
in their crowd taking it the wrong way and getting canceled. Besides, the concept of humor is
totally foreign to them. When you spend your entire waking life (and probably your dream
state as well) constantly finding things to be offended at and be outraged by, humor is going
to go completely over their heads. My guess is the best joke in the world would be met with
glassy eyes and the need to explain the joke which, of course, totally negates the value of
the joke.
ZenoOfCitium , 2 hours ago
Here is a good woke joke for you: Woke people care about only their woke-selves,
period!
Being "Woke" is being selfish. Being only interested in oneself. Being woke is believing
only minorities can succeed without one's woke self interference.
Being woke is about protesting fascism, while demanding authoritarian and dictatorial
power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of
the economy.
El Chapo Read , 2 hours ago
The BBC executive staff transitioned into a chosenite-dominated lineup over the last 20
years.
They ruin everything.
gcjohns1971 , 2 hours ago
I love Cleese's work.
He demonstrated a particular talent for shredding the self-important imbeciles of the
1970s... but somehow became both self important and unwilling to shred crowds with whom he
sympathized in the 1990's, 2000's and today.
Mores the pity. His work could have saved a generation. It is a tragedy.
The wokesters are like the terminator...but with sensitive ears that cannot withstand the
slightest disagreement, much less criticism. Their motto is the reverse of the one we learned
as children, "Words and verbs destroy my world, but sticks can never hurt me".
Cleese, there, could have been a weapon of mass comedy.
You can't really grow up until you can laugh at yourself. But the wokesters are
coffee-shop commando's simmering in malevolent pike while eating soy and sipping coffee...but
only of the poshest and most stylish blend.
GeezerGeek , 1 hour ago
Cleese is a little late to the party; plenty of others have already announced the death of
comedy, particularly on campus. Comedy clubs still exist, but the PC crowd has limited the
subjects about which one can tell jokes.
I wonder how the wokesters would treat Carlin if he was still alive. I doubt he'd be very
kind to them.
simulkra , 3 hours ago
I read a book years ago, the thesis of which was that humour was closely related to
inventiveness. It argued that both involved making connections between the apparently
unrelated.
Ideologues, of the useful idiot variety, often do not have the capacity for humour, as
they do not have the cognitive ability to think in the abstract and make these connections.
Their inferiority drives them to attempt to reduce others to their level, by elevating the
slogan's they have managed to learn by rote, to absolute importance. They are the sheep in
Animal Farm.
Do not grace them with the moniker of 'woke', as they are sleepwalkers in someone else's
dream. What we are seeing here is the media promotion of the idiot horde.
High Vigilante , 3 hours ago
Humour requires intelligence.
Doom88 , 3 hours ago
For the woke crowd comedy is no laughing matter.
Cognitive Dissonance , 2 hours ago
Humour requires intelligence.
Or at the very least perspective and self awareness, something categorically lacking in
the so-called 'woke' crowd.
john doeberg , 3 hours ago
People with mental disorders ... can't be funny.
Their brains are fried.
Saddam Miser , 3 hours ago
Woke people have zero sense of anything because they're all closet schizos. Try talking to
one. You would think you're talking to a completely psychopathic schizo.
Paolo Roberto, 50, a native of Sweden (his father was an Italian), had made a name for
himself: a well-known boxer, he had his own TV show, he appeared in many programmes; Swedish
girls loved to dance with him in Dancing with the Stars ; he also had a profitable
business: he imported Italian olive oil and gastronomic products sold in the large Swedish
supermarket chain CO-OP. All that glory vanished in a moment. Swedish police trapped him as he
visited a girl of dubious character and then paid her for her services. It was a honey-trap.
The policemen appeared from their hiding places and whisked Roberto off to the local precinct
where he was booked and the nation alerted. He didn't deny a thing; he expressed extreme
remorse.
In Sweden, it is perfectly legal to be engaged in prostitution. Today no one in Sweden can
tell a woman what to do with her own body, be it abortion, sex change or prostitution. Yet it
is a crime for a man to pay a woman for sex.
It is not sane; it is as though selling crack were legal while buying crack is the only
crime. Usually it is other way around, a casual user goes free while the pusher is arrested.
But it does not matter; Sweden is not the only country in the world with such a strange law on
her books.
Roberto was charged for this crime. It could be worse: Sweden has some extraordinary crimes
in its law book, one of them is Rape by Misadventure or Careless Rape which is
committed by a man who has sex with a woman who ostensibly agrees to or even solicits sex but
inwardly she is not willing. She may be doing it for money, or boredom, but not for pleasure,
and the man carelessly overlooked her conflicting emotions. It is Swedish Rape. Pity they never
apply the same logic to working people; we often do even less pleasant things for money, to buy
food or pay rent, but the landlord is not punished for raping his tenants.
This new definition of rape deserves Victor Hugo's pen. It is Swedish Rape to have sex
without a condom. It is Swedish Rape if the next day, or a few days later, the woman feels she
may have been raped. Or cheated, or underpaid, or mistreated. For this ill-defined offence,
Julian Assange has already spent ten years in various detention halls. If he would have killed
the girl he would be free by now. Note that you may be guilty of Swedish Rape if you claim to
be infertile and your partner becomes pregnant. Are you guilty of rape if you claim to be a Jew
but aren't? This is an Israeli contribution to the concept of rape. But I digress.
Paolo Roberto is charged with paying a woman for sex, the crime Judah, son of Jacob,
committed with Tamar (Genesis 38). The 25-year-old girl consented, but that does not matter.
She came from a rather poor South European country, so probably her consent doesn't mean much.
Or perhaps she consented just in order to entrap the guy and this is how Swedish justice works.
Swedish prisons would be empty if police weren't allowed to entice and entrap Swedes.
The consequences for Paolo were terrible: he hasn't been tried yet; he hasn't been found
guilty; his likely punishment is little more than a fine; but he was dropped like a hot potato
by Swedish TV, by Swedish sports, by the Swedish chain that marketed his olive oil. His company
was bankrupted overnight. The man was crushed like a bug. It was not Swedish law that crushed
him. In the eyes of Swedish law he is still innocent until proven guilty. Swedish law did not
force the supermarkets to remove his olive oil (actually, a very good one, I used to buy it)
from its shelves. Paolo was lynched by the New Puritan spirit that is part and parcel of the
New Normal.
Once upon a time, Sweden was an extremely liberal and free country. Swedes were known, or
even notorious for free sexual mores. Independent and brave Swedish girls weren't shy, and they
were comfortable with very unorthodox 'family' unions. But, while the US has always espoused
its own brand of politically-correct Puritanism, the global media is now dragging along the
other Western states in its wake. France and even Sweden participated in their own renditions
of the American BLM protests, called for #MeToo, and seem eager to trade in their own cultures
for the New Puritanism.
This rising Puritanism is a contrarian response to the personal freedom we enjoyed since the
1960's, and a jaded weariness with the excessive commercial sexuality of the mass media. The
media sells everything with a lot of sex. You cannot turn a TV on, daytime or night, without
seeing an implied or explicit act of copulation. They sell cars, snacks and sneakers by
displaying naked bodies. This flood of pornography is turning the public mood against sex. Who
should we blame for this blatant exploitation of sex? Men.
The Old Puritanism was hard on women; the witches were burned, and the whores were evicted
from their homes. The New Puritanism is hard on men. Men are being taught that hanky-panky can
have serious consequences. On the site of one of their destroyed statues of Jefferson, the
Americans should erect a statue of Andrea Dworkin, the obese lying feminist who famously
said that every intercourse is rape, and Penetration is Violation . She is an icon
of New Puritan America.
They could not outlaw sex per se, so they invent sordid stories of incestuous sex, of
paedophilia, of abusing priests, each storyteller trying to outdo the last. The vast majority
of these stories are sheer inventions, like the witchcraft stories of the 17 th
century in Old Puritan New England. We are in the midst of a global media campaign, and men are
the targets. The Patriarchy will be diminished by the systematic demonization of boys and
men.
In the current media frenzy I cannot trust any story, any accusation of a man involved in a
sordid sexual crime: these media campaigns are too often employed to unseat a commercial
competitor or destroy the popularity of a political rival. Often the man is not even accused of
any crime, but only of frivolous behaviour: a touch, or an immodest proposal; natural acts
celebrated in the days of my youth. Yes, my young readers, in the 1970's you could touch a
woman's knee and suggest she accompany you on a passionate weekend at a seaside resort, and she
would often agree. This libertine era is over completely. Even to me, it now seems mythical,
like Atlantis. It is gone.
The US is the media's inspirational model of the New Puritanism. Remember the women who
lined up to claim that the future Supreme Court
judge tried to kiss or even rape them when they were kids in college? The most credible of
them would not even allege he behaved criminally; just immorally according to New Puritan
standards. Now every relationship must be re-evaluated in the light of the New Puritanical
historical revisionism. Women who pose for a picture with a presidential candidate now have a
certain amount of power over him. During a media campaign the allegations come fast and
furious, but upon investigation they turn out to be spurious and motivated by self-interest or
politics.
It is good to see that sometimes, quite rarely, a man can still escape a close encounter
with his life intact. Former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond had been accused of all
the usual sexual sins and was fully cleared by the court . No less than
ten women were recruited (apparently with the knowledge of Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond's
successor); they came forward and claimed that they were sexually attacked by Salmond. They
were rather sloppy with their proofs, and it turns out that they claimed they were attacked at
times and places where Salmond could not have been present. The case was dismissed and Salmond
was found not guilty . Scottish prosecutors had spent years of labour trying to condemn
Salmond, and it spectacularly failed.
You might ask, why have these perjurers (who are well-connected women close to the centre of
power of the ruling SNP party) not been prosecuted for their attempt to frame the man? Well,
the very idea of these trials is that the accusing woman can't lose. If she wins, she can
collect millions, and if she loses, even her name remains secret. These ten perjurers are
exempt from legal consequence; nor are they required pay expenses and damages. The women are
protected. Who pays? Our colleague, the excellent writer and former HM Ambassador Craig Murray , that's who. Murray was
reporting on the trial of Alex Salmond for the public's benefit, published onto his own blog,
when he was charged with disclosing the identities of some of the perjuring women. A
conscientious man, Craig wasn't guilty of naming names, but even his vague description of "an
SNP politician, a party worker and several current and former Scottish government civil
servants and officials" was considered by the court to be a monstrous breach of
confidentiality.
The public was well prepared for this onslaught on mankind by the poisonous #MeToo culture,
a massive wave of carefully coordinated media hysteria. Women in communes and nunneries are
known to menstruate at the same time when living in close proximity. #MeToo was a similar mass
event. It was designed to push women's buttons. They even offered up an appropriately grotesque
scapegoat: Harvey Weinstein, a movie producer with 386 Hollywood production credits under his belt.
The actresses that accused Weinstein (over eighty women) would still be unknowns if he had
not given them parts in his movies. And they repaid him with such cruel ingratitude. Actresses
have a certain psychological setup that makes them extremely untrustworthy. They have many
other qualities to offset this deficiency, but you can't just accept the words of a lady who
plays today Lady Macbeth and tomorrow Madam Butterfly as solid truth. They are acting, in life
as well as in their line of work.
Consider the beautiful Angelina Jolie. She is mad as a hatter. Even her own father said that
she had "serious mental problems." Her long history of violent self-abuse culminated with her
choice to cut off her breasts because of a DNA test that indicated risk for breast cancer. She
has had a long line of boyfriends and husbands, and a lot of kids adopted out of Africa, taken
away from their natural parents. Is she a reliable witness? She would say anything that is
fashionable. The woman wants to be adored as the model of an excellent person; this is a
honourable goal, but she is extremely unsuitable for it.
Weinstein's eighty accusers collected millions; the great producer went to a life-long jail
sentence. The public, the great American public was eager to lynch the man who gave them
True Romance and Pulp Fiction . Was he guilty as charged? Even the charges were a
travesty of justice. Men of his generation (and of mine, too) routinely propositioned women. We
are all guilty, though not many of us racked up Weinstein's numbers. Yet every woman was free
to refuse. No
police reports against Weinstein appeared until the #MeToo media campaign was in full
swing. Did he harass them? You and me are harassed daily by offers to take another credit card
or bank loan; we are free to refuse this definitely harassing offer. Every unsolicited proposal
is harassment; and we receive daily hundreds of proposals of various nature. What is so
different about a sexual proposal to a woman? Weinstein may or may not have committed a crime,
but in the poisonous air of #MeToo there is no need to prove any accusation, and the man was
lynched.
Perhaps now I am going to lose your tentative sympathy, but I do not believe the allegations
against Jeffrey Epstein and Ms Ghislaine Maxwell, either. And the attack on Prince Andrew is
similarly unbelievable. Chapeau for Mr Trump who dared to express sympathy to Ms Maxwell. This
was an act of incredible bravery, to step out of line and to say a few kind words to her and
about her. The cowardly Clinton and Obama, who were close friends with Epstein and Maxwell,
were mum. Trump who was not particularly close to the couple, spoke up for them. He really
deserves being re-elected, despite his many faults. Such a man is a master of his own mind, and
this is a very rare quality.
I may mull over a proposal to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, but how possibly can one believe the
stories of the disturbed woman who claims that she had to be forced to have sex with fabulously
wealthy Mr Epstein or to meet glamorous Prince Andrew, let alone that she suffered "extreme
distress, humiliation, fear, psychological trauma, loss of dignity and self esteem and invasion
of her privacy" on his island retreat? The complete absence of evidence and the complete lack
of objectivity could only prevail in the midst of a media campaign. It is believable what Ms
Maxwell said in a deposition, that Ms Giuffre was "totally lying." Indeed all these gold
diggers are totally lying.
Like this one : An
anonymous accuser says she'll testify that 'evil' Ghislaine Maxwell raped her '20-30 times'
starting from when she was 14 and claims she was forced to abort Jeffrey Epstein's baby. Honest
and reputable men like Prince Andrew are forced into the demeaning and impossible position of
having to argue and justify themselves against wild accusations. There are no reasonably
believable accusations of crime against these people. A woman had a photo of her taken with
Prince Andrew. She was at least 17; at this age girls in England are perfectly entitled to have
an affair with a man. Other girls in other photos were apparently of age, too. Young, yes, but
not criminally young. Furthermore, a posed photo does not always indicate a sexual
relationship. Some women claim they were babies and they were raped, but there are no proofs of
anything except their greed.
Mike Robeson who investigated the claims came to conclusion that they were often initiated
by big business to rip off rich Jews. New Puritanism is the Joker card that can trump the
antisemitism ace. He wrote:
I've read Whitney Webb's investigative articles on Epstein, which are often cited by the
alternative and leftist crowd as evidence of his Mossad connections and blackmailing
activities. But Webb's articles are actually full of unsubstantiated rumors, possible immoral
or illegal activities between high level people based on coincidental social or business
connections and potentially damning rumors corroborated mainly by her previous articles and
posts. She has done some fine reporting on other issues. But on the Epstein case, she is part
of what Israel rightly refers to as the New Puritanism.
Supposed evidence of Frau Maxwell's salacious involvement is the famous photo of Prince
Andrew below. This is all the New Puritans need to justify believing the rumors and drawing
their "I told ya' so!" conclusions. But hobnobbing has long been a sport played by the
wannabes with the tacit collusion of the rich and/or famous.
Take a look at the fun couple under Prince Andrew and his alleged squeeze. You may
recognize Rosalynn Carter, then First Lady of the US. Standing next to her is none other than
William Gacy , a
few months before he was arrested as a serial killer and cannibal of those he'd butchered.
Are we to draw certain conclusions from this photo?
Below Rosalynn Carter is another photo, this one showing then President George Bush being
hobnobbed by political has-been George Wallace and by young political wannabe Bill Clinton.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? Was George already then grooming Billy Boy for
higher things in life? Or is it merely more photographic evidence of how wannabes crawl up
the ladder of personal and career advancement? For it is clear that the rich and/or famous,
like Rosalynn Carter and Prince Andrew, have to put up with photo ops, sometimes to their
later discredit.
Very little about the Epstein case makes sense – not his social and financial
connections and especially not his alleged links with the Mossad. Every rich Jew in the US is
sayanim, but that doesn't mean they are running blackmail ops. And the pedo accusations are
ridiculous. His 'victims', none of whom were less than 16 (legal to marry in most European
countries and many American states) were willing, well paid and well taken care of gals who
got lucky to catch a good-looking sugar daddy. Whatever he knew about his rich and famous
clients that may have gotten him killed may have had something to do with what he knew about
them, sure. He probably shared his largesse with his friends and possible donors and
contributors. But if he had been sexually blackmailing them over the years, why did they keep
going back to him?
The blackmail angle doesn't make sense. It makes more sense that a lot of famous people
may have preferred him dead to testifying about his activities. Who, famous or not famous,
would want to get dragged through the mud by the overzealous New Puritan prosecution teams
that had already destroyed the lives of innocent defendants of sexual accusations like Jerry
Sandusky and Larry Nasser, as well as hundreds of others in the past decades of America's
sexual abuse/devil worship hysteria. The Pizzagate fiasco is a demonstration of how mobs can
be raised, aimed and defused by an orchestrated media campaign.
From what I see of Epstein's photos, he was an intelligent, good lucking, confident, fun
loving guy. If he was nailing more hot chicks than I ever did, more power to him.
Another motivation for the liquidation of Epstein's empire is the collaboration between
the media and the unknown figures behind the scenes who are likely to walk away with
Epstein's millions. Are you familiar with the story of Howard Hughes and the destruction of
his Las Vegas empire? It happened to him. Something similar has happened in the past few
years to other wealthy Jews like Donald Sterling , who was first falsely
accused of being a racist and then forced to relinquish his ownership of an NBA team. Other
examples? Richard Fuld of Lehmann Bros. and Bernie Madoff were taken down by their Wall
Street rivals and then used as scapegoats to expiate the sins of corporate raiders. Harvey
Weinstein was the sacrificial schwein to absolve the sick Hollywood culture. Now that
Weinstein has been destroyed, Hollywood can go back to business as usual.
But what about the intimidation faced by hundreds of girls victimized on Epstein's private
island? Why do they claim to be afraid of retribution even after his death? The girls were
treated well. They admit that they cooperated in finding more girls who would massage
Epstein, even supposedly knowing that they too would be 'horribly abused' by the 'monster'.
The reporters and the interviewed women are perfect examples of New Puritans. I feel dirty
after watching them perform. None of their emotional anecdotes reach evidentiary standards
and any court would dismiss their cases out of hand.
As for the source of Epstein's fortune, here is a plausible
investigation . It is interesting that no one can really agree on the amount nor the
source of his millions.
Justice, or what is passing under that name, gets screwed whenever the law is used to
empower a person with a personal grudge, either on his own behalf or to benefit a media
consortium. Emotional appeals could never been considered in the better world of Jefferson,
Lincoln and Washington. Perhaps they had slaves, but they would not have condemned a man, free
or slave, on the basis of empty accusations. Physical evidence is still required in the legal
courts. Only on TV can people be destroyed by edited testimony.
I am very tolerant of anti-Jewish rhetoric. So tolerant that I am often accused of it
myself. Still, the accusations against Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and let's not forget
poor Mr Harvey Weinstein, are often marked by cliché characters such as the crass
foul-mouthed Jew and the innocent girl he despoils. Meanwhile, the facts of each case are
monotonously repeated: one man's career is destroyed while dozens of girls become famous;
millions of dollars are suddenly difficult to track and soon begin to evaporate; the man is
demonized and the women are sainted.
Can the New Puritanism overturn the Jews and their unstoppable juggernaut cry of
antisemitism? Leo Frank was lynched by the mob and the ADL was formed to make sure it never
happened again, no matter what the crime. Is New Puritanism the new mob violence? Perhaps mob
violence is the only way our rulers can overwhelm the paralyzing effects of being called
antisemitic. Perhaps the New Puritanism is an opening salvo in a larger war between shadow
forces.
But I could never believe that Maxwell and Epstein were connected with the Israeli
Intelligence agency, the Mossad. With all my sympathy to our esteemed colleagues Philip
Giraldi and Whitney
Webb , there is not a single shred of evidence for such connection. Conjecture, yes;
evidence, no. Even the father of Ghislaine, the late Mr Maxwell, who was not a saintly person
by any means, might be with better evidence accused of collaborating with Soviet Intelligence,
the KGB, than with the Israelis. A person of his standing probably connected with Israelis,
too, but he was no Mossad agent.
I can understand my American friends. There never was a time worse for American men, when
the statues and memorials of their great ancestors have been uprooted, when their wives and
daughters are queuing to press their pink lips upon the boots of black ghetto dwellers, when
their manhood is defined as "toxic" and their sons are dreaming of a same-sex union with a
glorious black buck. If the US were occupied by the Communists as Amerika envisaged, it wouldn't be as bad as what
you've got now. You have been humiliated thoroughly. I understand that in such a situation you
might jump at the chance to break the bones of rich Liberal Jews like Epstein and Weinstein. I
wouldn't refuse you this comfort. They are anyway already lynched.
However, if you want ever to walk free, you'd better deal with the New Puritan takeover.
Women are wonderful creatures, but often they can be manipulated and do what they are asked to
do. They are also excellent actors and are not troubled by honour. Men are more independent and
solitary by nature; that is why our Masters want to suppress masculinity. It is easier to
shepherd a flock of cows than so many bulls. Women love to be the victims, to blame men for
their failings; add social distance and fear of viral infection; add the mask (the New Western
Burka); add lockdown, and the problem of how to send the children to school might just solve
itself. No
children. The New Puritans are currently purging Hollywood of the most relentlessly
heterosexual men, but when they run out of rich Jews, they just might come after you.
The New Normal is the New Puritan. The pandemic fit into it tight as a glove. Under millions
of cameras and tracing applications, privacy shrinks and disappears. New Puritanism erases the
gap between public and private realms. In the world we knew, there was a difference between the
twain. A man having an affair with a woman (or with another man) was in a private realm. Do
whatever you wish in privacy of your home; just don't frighten the horses, Victorians once
said. Now there can be no privacy. Sex is already more of a political opinion than a physical
act. You might be lionized as a homosexual or despised as a breeder, your choice. Any affair,
or even the attempt to start an affair could be deadly in the post #MeToo world. In an era of
socialized medicine, sex is seen as a dangerous weakness that might endanger lives and imperil
the global healthcare system.
Much of the severity of New Puritanism can be sourced directly to American culture. America
was founded by the Old Puritans of Mayflower in 1620 and has periodically been subject
to hysterical outbursts, from witches to Red scares. Nowhere has the use of sex for advertising
and commerce been so widely spread as in the US. As the US has become the model for the world,
an epidemic of American hysteria is starting to infect countries all around the world. #MeToo
reached even Russia, but it is still only a minor phenomenon, mainly to be found among only the
most woke of hipsters.
Orwell imagined a future of "state-enforced repression and celibacy" while Huxley predicted
"deliberate, narcotising promiscuity". The New Puritans have chosen Orwell's world. I grew up
in something more akin to Huxley's, and I can tell you which one is better. Communist Russia
was very permissive in the private sphere. People had a lot of sex, with their girl/boy
friends, with spouses, with neighbours, with wives of their friends, with their colleagues,
with their teachers and students. The Soviets had none of the restrictions we have now against
sexual relations in the University between teachers and students; in fact, no restrictions
against sex with coworkers, something that now we would call abusive and then call the police.
As religion had little influence in Soviet society, adultery was frequent, and unless connected
with a public scandal, had no consequences.
Russians as well as the French could not understand why Clinton's affair with Monica
Lewinsky made waves in the US that blew into an impeachment trial and ended with the
bombardment of Belgrade. Bill was unfaithful to Hillary? That's not nice, but it is their
private affair. President Clinton lied? Well, he was not in the confession booth. Traditional
religions, be it Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, are quite tolerant of venial sin. Puritanism,
the Old as well as its New offspring are deadly serious in everything, and are unafraid of
killing or bullying a sinner to death. They may have begun with witches, but they are ending up
targeting ordinary folk.
Currently their targets have a lot of wampum, for it is no fun to bully a person for no
material gain. Us, impecunious men, we have nothing to be afraid of yet. But it might be wise
to save society before the New Puritans bring down disaster onto all of us. In my opinion,
America's influence on the world should be reversed, or at least limited. Let America get
influenced by Europe for a change. Mercifully, Europe is suffering from a very light case of
New Puritanism that may be entirely cured with a healthy dose of Anti-Americanism. I hear the
vaccine is under development.
Picture two is not proof, it's illustration. In fact Cord Meyer recruited Clinton as a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford, feathered his wife's nest with a ridiculous bonanza of commodity
trading top-ticks, then appointed Bill to run the CIA covert ops slush fund at Mena airfield.
That picture is junior secret agent Bill Clinton at the office picnic with his big boss the
DCI.
As for picture number one, I'll be forever grateful for the heartwarming thought that
Rosalyn also puts on a clown costume, handcuffs boys, buttfucks them, strangles them, and
buries them in the crawlspace.
Virtually all you wrote is true but with "Very little about the Epstein case makes sense
– not his social and financial connections and especially not his alleged links with
the Mossad" you seem to have quite deliberately blown your cover as another lying judaizer to
those who think Jews are normally incapable of true conversion and that your role in creation
is to show what bad is compared to good.
Indeed, it appears so: a very incisive first half of the article, describing a real
phenomenon (used to manipulate public opinion and society) seems designed to drop the Epstein
turd into.
Epstein is no Puritan witch hunt: Robert Maxwell gets something akin to a state funeral in
Israel, his daughter pimps for guy who uses lavish Wexner money for beehives of celebrities
into which a steady supply of young female flesh is injected and this guy is telling us we
just need to relax a bit.
" then First Lady of the US. Standing next to her is none other than William Gacy, a few
months before he was arrested as a serial killer and cannibal of those he'd butchered. Are
we to draw certain conclusions from this photo?"
Thanks, Israel. Well reasoned and well presented. Although some or many may not agree with
you, it's refreshing to read a straight forward exposition. At least you're laying it out
there for others to take a crack at it.
"Women are wonderful creatures, but often they can be manipulated and do what they are
asked to do. They are also excellent actors and are not troubled by honour. "
I've never met a woman who wasn't a bald-faced liar about anything that concerned her
personally. (And no, I'm not an Incel. Far from it)
"Much of the severity of New Puritanism can be sourced directly to American culture.
America was founded by the Old Puritans of Mayflower in 1620 and has periodically been
subject to hysterical outbursts, from witches to Red scares."
So true. The country was settled by all manner of religious zealots, each and every one of
them forming some sort of utopian colony here–almost all of which went down in
flames.
The Old Puritanism was hard on women; the witches were burned, and the whores were
evicted from their homes. The New Puritanism is hard on men.
Well, it is particularly hard on "beta" men. Their idea is basically to let "alphas" have
harems but all other men to become incels or worse. Just look at this guy, punished for
visiting a whore (in their view anyone who pays for sex is by definition not an alpha, so it
makes sense to punish johns but allow or even celebrate whores)
Yes, Feminism is a kind of inverted puritanism. But being hard on sluts and whore makes
sense if you want to preserve society's order and families. Feminist rules against men only
help to destroy society.
So there's a very big difference between the Old Puritanism and the New Puritanism.
From what I see of Epstein's photos, he was an intelligent, good lucking, confident, fun
loving guy. If he was nailing more hot chicks than I ever did, more power to him.
Come on. No one knows how this guy made money. For all purposes he was a nobody. Yet he
was seen with Elon Musk, Woody Allen, Trump, Clinton, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, anyone who
was "someone" dined with him and maybe one of his girls. There's something very fishy about
this. I don't know, maybe he and Maxwell were just the preferred pimp of the elites, or maybe
there's something else. Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad) was an Israeli spy and a media
magnate, just that is very suspicious.
I mean, of course I don't trust the little whore Giuffre (whoever trusts whores or
actresses, but I repeat myself, is an idiot). But there is something very strange and rotten
about Epstein and the fact that he met with almost everybody in the so-called elite.
Much of this article makes sense, though I can't buy the defense of Epstein and Maxwell.
It's absurd to call him a "pedophile" as many journalists do. He was a pimp for the Deep
State's extortion racket.
Thanks for this. I have been criticized by many for observing holes in the narrative and
objecting to trial by media.
I have, since the start of the last Epstein narrative questioned the "intelligence"
connection. Not because it wasn't possible, rather that Virginia Roberts narrative about
escaping was implausible. If Epstein was doing his alleged blackmail routine for Mossad or
any other intelligence service, Roberts would have been suicided long ago. Loose ends like
that are a danger to the operation.
That doesn't mean that Epstein wasn't diddling underage girls nor does it mean that Maxwell
wasn't recruiting girls to massage Epstein. In Maxwell's case, she may, or may not have known
Epstein was diddling them as alleged. I have yet to see a reasonable explanation of how these
underage girls got passports without parental consent, and if they did, who was the
guarantor? Apparently, all of these accusers had parents who were uninterested in their
underage daughters traveling with a male more than twice their age, on his private jet.
As for Weinstein, Shirley Temple's mother complained people in the studio were trying to get
into her daughter's pants and she had to be vigilant. Marilyn Monroe, on marrying Joe
DiMaggio, is reported to have said that she`d never have to suck another cock. The casting
couch stories have been rampant for as long as I have been alive, yet I am supposed to
believe that none of Weinstein`s accusers knew that it was the price of admission. That does
not mean I approve of taking advantage of women, that has always been done in many ways. Post
war turned millions of German and Italian women into prostitutes, for occupying soldiers, in
order to feed themselves and their families. Apparently that was ok, but young actresses
being turned into millionaires is not.
Not true at all, the majority of people who settled the USA were regular Anglos,
especially in the South.
And Anglo DNA is something like 25% of the USA. This country is full of immigrants from
other stocks, and you know what? They are far more likely to be Democrat-voting liberals,
while the Anglo Americans are more likely to be rural Republicans who think things like MeToo
and BLM are crazy.
What a total crock of shit. I have long maintained that Shamir is Mossad and a pretend
convert to Christianity. This is the guy who argued with passion that those who say that
Muslims did not do 9/11 are depriving them of credit for their rare success. It's
nevertheless surprising to see him cashing in his chips in such a stupid and lazy way. It's
in fact so stupid that it brings to mind Gordon Duff, himself an intelligence figure,
alerting me to the hugely disparate quality of Shamir emissions with the explanation that the
persona "Israel Shamir" is the work of a committee. It looks like desperate times for the big
Jews. The big satanic game -- implicating the Rothschilds, the British royals, and a whole
gaggle of Jews and crypto-Jews including Trump and Bill Gates, and all their attendant goys
such as the Clintons -- could all fall apart.
Israel Adam pretend-Christian Shamir, who is Moloch and why was there a temple to him on
Epstein's island?
Anyone who finds Shamir's protestations of Jewish innocence plausible need look no farther
than Maria Farmer's interview with Whitney Webb. Maria doesn't mention Moloch, but she keeps
wondering what happened to all those girls. Thousands seem to have just disappeared.
innocent defendants of sexual accusations like Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser,
I agree with most of the article, but do you have any proof that Jerry Sandusky and Larry
Nasser are innocent?
Prince Andrew fooling around with a consenting 17 year old does not compare with what
Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser were accused and convicted of doing.
How much have you seen, first hand, of America? The East Coast and Midwest is littered
with former religious communes. Okay, I may have indulged in a little hyperbole, but
nevertheless, there were a lot of them. And I don't know what you're going on about
Democrats, Anglos and such. Seems off topic to me.
I have long maintained that Shamir is Mossad and a pretend convert to Christianity. This
is the guy who argued with passion that those who say that Muslims did not do 9/11 are
depriving them of credit for their rare success. It's nevertheless surprising to see him
cashing in his chips in such a stupid and lazy way.
It's hard to imagine an authentic Christian would defend the deep state and Zionist Hebrew
pedophile operative Epstein. Hebrew-supremacist blood is thicker than any ideology, I guess.
His big Hebrew ego just can't let go of it's delusions of being forged by sacred, primeval
forces. I'm sure a rat would have a huge ego if it could speak, too.
Yes, the anti-Semitic trope of the Jew despoiling the innocent. The only stereotype I can
read here is that of the eternal victim. So Madoff didn't steal millions from elderly
pensioners. And Epstein wasn't linked to the former head of Israeli intelligence or invest in
security companies run by former Unit 8200 types. And Wexner (of Mega Group) didn't gift him
a multimillion dollar surveillance lair. And Maxwell was trolling the parking lot of Groton
School and Philips Andover after the kiddies got released from their chemistry AP test, not
preying on broken girls from broken homes. F#ck you Shamir.
He had murdered the girl, don't forget, and had been convicted by the courts,
despite a protracted and lavishly financed Jewish effort to pin the crime on a Black man who
had not committed it. The mob dragged Frank out of prison and lynched him only after his
death sentence had been commuted by the Governor of Georgia.
All of us regulars at Unz Review know fully well that speaking of Leo Frank being lynched
by the mob as the main story just won't do. Whoever is handling the Israel Shamir persona at
Herzliya these days doesn't have all that much interest in what Ron and others here have been
discussing.
Here is additional support for Shamir's take on Epstein's primary accuser –
"Virginia Roberts . claimed to have met him when she was fifteen and to have been forced to
work as his sex slave. In reality, she was seventeen, which is still below the age of consent
in Florida, but does materially alter her claim that she had sex with Prince Andrew when she
was under age because the age of consent in England is sixteen, something of which she was
almost certainly unaware .
Edward J.Epstein, a long time investigative journalist including on the JFK assassination,
recently published his own angle on the sources of Jeffrey Epstein's riches, and they have
nothing to do with sexual blackmail –
"An extremely savvy financier and philanthropist told me after Epstein's death about a
proposition Epstein had once made him: that he could save more than $40 million in US taxes
if he gave him $100 million to manage.
Epstein claimed the money would be concealed in a maze of offshore non-profits he
controlled so that part of the profits would be transferred to the financier's own
philanthropic foundation, with the balance retained offshore and out of the reach of the
taxman.
When the financier told him that the scheme amounted to illicit tax evasion, Epstein said
it was highly unlikely the Internal Revenue Service would unravel it, and, if it did, he
would protect the financier from any criminal exposure.
The financier asked him how? Epstein said the financier would have to sign over the funds
to him, thus giving him total discretion over where and how the money was invested. This
piece of paper, he said, would provide an alibi to the US tax authorities.
The financier turned down Epstein's proposition, but others – Arab princes, Russian
oligarchs and those interested in hiding some part of their wealth – might have
accepted it.
Indeed, shortly before his arrest last year, Epstein told an associate that he was going
into the business of hiding funds for billionaires who were contemplating divorcing their
wives – for a hefty commission, of course.
He also claimed to be in the final stages of buying a property in Morocco, one of four
countries in the world not to have an extradition treaty with the US.
So perhaps the mystery of Epstein's fortune is not how he made his millions, but to whom
the money ultimately belongs.
Many very powerful people may have had cause to rue Epstein's incarceration on sex charges
– and, given the fact that they were hiding their assets from the authorities, it's
highly unlikely they will ever publicly come forward to try to recover their
investments."
The column seems intended to discomfit and/or discredit as many different people around
here as possible. (I just checked Wikipedia to see how Mr. Multiname is being curated these
days, and noticed that the first of the "RELATED ARTICLES" is Gilad Atzmon.) The oddest yet
from this website's oddest writer.
" Even the father of Ghislaine, the late Mr Maxwell, might be with better evidence accused
of collaborating with Soviet Intelligence, the KGB, than with the Israelis. "
Of course. This makes perfect sense. It explains why the Israeli's gave him a state
funeral attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog,
and "no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence" .. because, after
all, he was KGB Right.
@Anonymous in the Nasser
case, a number of public figures have come forward in Sandusky's defence. The most active is
John Ziegler who maintains a website full of articles showing that the case against Sandusky
and Penn State was and is a sham and money grab. ( http://johnziegler.com/ )
There is also the well known author Mark Pendergrast who wrote a book on the case. Here are
links to two video interviews of both –
@Anonymous likely that
Nassar was sacrificed to atone for all the sex abuse that happens in kids sports. Now that he
is destroyed then child sporting can go back to business as usual because the monster was
vanquished. Note that the Nassar story could have been spun to criticize the families who
hand their children over to strangers, or to attack child sports in general. But it wasn't.
It was aimed directly at one man, and when he was gone the story was gone. That makes him the
sacrificial lamb.
On the other hand, the Sandusky story was immediately expanded into the Pedo Rings story,
indicating it was part of this long term project.
This use of "Puritan" as a swear-word looks simplistic, beyond simplistic, to me. Like
brain-washed Americans using "Socialist" as a swear-word in just the same way.
They might have been bible-fundamentalists, they might have been creationists, they might
have thought the world was flat, but was every witch ever burned in Germany burned by
Puritans? Was witchcraft a solely Puritan fantasy? The first ever mention of a witch was by
them?
But thanks for reminding me of the mad hatter. I'll get a copy of Alice In Wonderland and
compare it with what you write.
PS PC has a very different origin, a different so-called religion.
And this excuses Prince Andrew for fucking teenagers how? A man born into royalty with
every advantage but apparently unable to handle actual mature women. So that makes it cool
for him to partake of sleazy Jeff's procured girls?
No decent guy thinks of doing stuff like that. If that's what having money does to men,
I'll happily remain relatively poor.
Thanks Mr Shamir. What you wrote sounds about right. I do not like the fact that rich and
powerful men got their way with young girls. But this has been the way of the world since
time immemorial. It was all done in the open, and for decades, right under the noses of the
NYT. But neither they nor the New Puritans thought it fit to investigate, since their focus
was elsewhere, namely to tame the Catholic Church through grinding it in the pedophile mill
over alleged crimes largely committed in the 70s. Only now that the Pavlovian Dog known as
Public Opinion can't get any further stimulus from allegations concerning the Papists, they
have turned to Epstein and the Jews with a Royal thrown in instead. But at the end of it, it
would make no difference to the men, women and children trafficked for sex, since the New
Puritans would have turned their focus elsewhere. And for what it is worth I don't think this
a Mossad operation either. I mean how good are these guys? And is it not the responsibility
of politicians holding or aspiring to high office to keep themselves clear of such people and
places?
You're right, you lost my sympathy with this robust defense of Jeffrey Epstein. I
appreciate that it's good to be skeptical of what is reported as well as of the mob mentality
but there is no real defense of this guy based on what I've seen and heard over the past two
years.
All of his residences with surveillance cameras covering every room.
The source of his money being very murky.
His willingness to share his paid-for harem with the most powerful and connected. Out of
the goodness of his heart? No.
The 100% implausible jail suicide.
Isn't that enough red flags?
Even swine like Bret Kavanaugh deserve to not be lynched but Jeffrey Epstein and
Ghislaineare in a whole other rarefied class of scum. Why bother to make excuses for them? Do
you really believe that Trump wished Maxwell well out of magnanimity? More like he's hoping
that none of their dirt on him will see daylight.
Xymphora is also having none of it. (It's an indication of Ron Unz's good editorial
judgment that Shamir's article is not listed on the main page.)
Xymphora (from the website) :
"The New Puritans" (Shamir). Besides being completely clueless about #metoo – it's
about power relationships, not flirting – he has a list of completely innocent
people: Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser, Donald Sterling, Richard Fuld, Bernie Madoff and, of
course, Harvey Weinstein, goyim. Then he tell us that the Mossad has nothing to do with
Epstein-Maxwell. I'm starting to think Shamir's history of being an 'anti-Semite' was just
producing credibility for this important career-defining moment when the operations of the
Mossad and the MEGA Group required protection.
As clear and intelligent as ever. "It is easier to shepherd a flock of cows than so many
bulls".
I suspect the Epstein ring may be linked to Mossad. It is clearly some sort of Jewish
influencing network so seems like an Israeli soft power operation. Having said that Shamir is
spot on about all the pearl-clutching even by sensible alt-right figures.
President Clinton lied? Well, he was not in the confession booth.
Clinton lied under oath in a deposition submitted in a judicial proceeding. He also
coached other witnesses to support his story. These were crimes more serious than any that
could have been charged against Nixon, who was hounded out of office. Clinton took serious
charges and spun them into a story of a harmless peccadillo. Utter brilliance. And while the
Judge in the case tried to sweep these actual crimes under the rug as immaterial to the case,
it nevertheless cost the President his law licence.
How a society views sexuality has a tremendous influence on it's long-term structure and
stability.
I do not agree that the Epstein/MOSSAD-blackmail angle makes no sense, but I think that
Mr. Shamir makes some good points. Excessively strict public morals is a ripe breeding ground
for sanctimonious hypocrisy, and hidden rot, and can have frigthening consequences, and it
would not surprise me to learn that the damnable Jesuit Order has a hidden yet decisive
influence on this "New Puritanism" that the article traces the tentative outlines of.
On the other hand, too loose sexual morals fosters dissipation – as seen in the
lives of highly promiscuous people, or on a larger scale, societies such as Soviet Russia, or
various empires after they lost their moral vigour – such as much of contemporary
America. Some amount of discipline and self-restraint is needed – this seems to be a
moral law of nature.
These waters call for good personal judgment, fairness and balance, and wisdom.
Today, more of the same in Daily Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/30/former-tory-mp-charlie-elphicke-guilty-sexually-assaulting-two/
The woman complained that Elphicke sexually assaulted her after inviting her for a drink at
his London home in 2007.
She was in her early 30s and said Elphicke – who had recently become a father for the
second time – proceeded to kiss her, grope her breast and then chase her round his
house trying to slap her bottom, chanting: "I'm a naughty Tory".
The woman came close to selling her story to The Mirror newspaper for £30,000 around a
decade later, but instead went to police.
She broke down as she gave evidence to the court. She cannot be identified for legal reasons.
END QUOTE.
Is not it typical. The guy had a try 14 years ago. Why didn't she report it to police same
day? Why wait for so long? Act now, or forget. She tried to make money of this allegation.
Still she can't be identified for legal reasons. So she can try it again, with another victim
who made a pass at her some time or another during last thirty years. This is incredible!
I haven't read the entire article yet, so this comment applies only to its initial
part.
Shamir is not very persuasive. He has the merit of explaining the situation clearly, but,
by doing so, he makes his criticism of Swedish law somewhat misdirected. As he explains it,
the legal punishment is very mild. The biggest punishment, he tells us, comes from private
entities. But doesn't that imply that, even if that law did not exist, things would happen
almost exactly as they did?
So, the problem, if it exists, is one of societal codes of moral. I, for one, think that
Sweden is autonomous to decide which codes of moral are best to itself. It's not society
which reflects the law, but the other way around. It is the law which reflects the wish of
the majority of Swedes, which is normal in a healthy democracy.
I don't find Shamir persuasive either. He has a point, women are not particularly more
moral or ethical than men, they need to be watched just like anybody, but OTOH regular
witch-hunts for politicians and plutocrats of both genders who cannot resist exploiting their
positions financially or keep their hands off the staff could be a good thing, overall.
He comes across as somebody with skin in the game here too.
This is stated in the quote from Mike Robeson, so it is better he will respond to the
items mentioned in his quote (signposted on the webpage). I have too little knowledge about
these details.
Sure, but Americans especially American Presidents are exempted from international laws
governing war crimes and crimes against humanity. It's why they can sanction entire
populations with impunity.
The irony of America bombing an aspirin factory in another country, however, is that much
of America's asprin needs are met with imports.
I commented on Xymphora: Regarding the New Puritans: " Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser,
Donald Sterling, Richard Fuld, Bernie Madoff and, of course, Harvey Weinstein, goyim."
– these are words of Mike Robeson I quote. It is even signposted as the quote. I hardly
know these names (excepting Weinstein). So I think you may correct your post.
Yes. I'm not sure how it is puritanical to not want middle aged rich men to buy the
services of even one minor girl for any sexual purposes. I thought that was just a civilized
notion of protecting the young.
Perhaps now I am going to lose your tentative sympathy, but I do not believe the
allegations against Jeffrey Epstein and Ms Ghislaine Maxwell, either. And the attack on
Prince Andrew is similarly unbelievable. Chapeau for Mr Trump who dared to express sympathy
to Ms Maxwell.
Trump's "sympathy" to Maxmossad was political noncommitment. Being a gentleman.
"It's not society which reflects the law, but the other way around. It is the law which
reflects the wish of the majority of Swedes, which is normal in a healthy democracy.
"
One of us is an idiot.
@Jefferson Temple Unless
you have inside information, his apparent inability to handle actual mature women is
conjecture, and open ended. Some women are mature at 20, others are not mature at 50.
Jeff's procured girls, beyond them having been employed by him, are unproven allegations.
Curious the parents were seemingly disinterested in their daughters traveling with a male
more than twice the age of their daughter.
That does not mean girls were not procured for illicit purposes or that Andrew may be
morally bankrupt, regardless of whatever happened between him and Giuffre.
@Chris Moore That said, I
disagree with the two main points of the article. One, this is not a "new puritanism", it's
something else, the comparison is patently false. How "puritan" is modern society if there's
porn everywhere?
Two, there's no way to defend Epstein and say that he was just a "normal, rich,
intelligent guy". The guy was, at best, a pervert and a well-connected pimp for politicians
(but how did he get there?). At worst , well, there are many theories and I won't dwell into
that. No way to defend that Jewish scum (sorry, but, he was Jewish, and he was scum).
If the US were occupied by the Communists as Amerika envisaged, it wouldn't be as bad
as what you've got now.
And that's the horrifying truth. For non-rich white Americans, Stalinism, as evil as it
was, would not have been as bad as what we now have under Anglo-Zionist Capitalist
Globalism.
In my Catholic family, putting your hands on a female relatives' body in any unwanted way,
would result in a visit from one of her brothers or cousins and a serious beating. It's also
interesting to see that my old parish priests were right when they spoke about the immorality
of the godless communists in that apparently adultery was common and accepted in the Soviet
Union.
The older I get, the more respect I gain for the moral teachings of the Christian Faith,
adhering to it will keep any young man out of the trouble Mr Shamir writes about.
Using Mick Jagger as a yardstick for acceptable behavior? Is that really what you
meant?
I'm thinking that at least some of those girls actually were responsible for their choices
but under the law, I don't think they can be held responsible. No character flaw or selfish
motive changes the fact that they were minors. A full grown man and woman is a different
story. They get the full advantages that society affords to adults as well as the
accountability. I don't care who rich guys want to fuck. If they target my daughter, they're
going to need an ambulance.
You quoted a big passage from Mike Robeson without reservation. So what if it's signposted
as a quote? One assumes from the context that you are endorsing his views. It does make you
look ridiculous, and I can understand your subsequent eagerness to dissociate yourself from
the quote. But there it is.
I don't think you quite understand Catholics if you think we have a healthy and casual
outlook on sex
("We" in my case is cultural and geographic history. I haven't been actually practicing
nor even much of a believer for a long time. But the culture tends to stick with you for
life, no matter what you do)
For one thing, we are probably only second to Jews when it comes to being guilt-ridden
from birth about sex (among most other things). The jury is still out whether this drives
more of us toward sin than away from it. Catholics are infamously indiscriminately
promiscuous (Zappa wrote a song about it) and somewhat less good at learning from their
mistakes as many others
The incidence of priestly abuse may be exaggerated for Puritanical effect, but it's by no
means an unfounded myth; we were joking about altar boys at least as far back as the 70s when
I took First Communion. BTW we had a Father Chester and, whatever the truth was, his nickname
rhymed
@anon a, Arkansas to run
drugs into the USA. Must of have had some local pull.
An early image of William Jefferson Clinton seated next to George Herbert Walker Bush may
shed light on the Intelligence connections of Bill, besides the two spook schools Yale and
Oxford.
Then there is Hillary's lesbianism. Why would a supposed hetero male marry a lesbian? Bill
did not need her political connections, nor her family connections. Chelsea looks like Bill,
not. Possible that Bill's taste was never a Monica, nor a Hillary, nor a 16 year old Lolita.
Bill and Hill, a match made in Langley.
Israel Shamir: "Currently their targets have a lot of wampum, for it is no fun to bully a
person for no material gain. Us, impecunious men, we have nothing to be afraid of yet."
This isn't true at all, at least in America, and I suspect it's the same elsewhere. Here,
so-called sexual harassment has been a cause of action since at least the 1980s. As someone
who was metooed way back then, before it became a thing, I can tell you that poverty is no
guarantee you won't be targeted. People are scum and really get a kick out of victimizing
each other. They'll do it just for the fun of it. Financial incentives aren't the cause of
this; it's just the icing on the cake for the so-called victim. Also, there is an absurd
culture of chivalry toward women in the matriarchal West that has lingered long past its
expiration date, such that a certain type of man enjoys "white knighting" for women who make
such claims. For such men, and they are very numerous, all a woman has to do is turn on the
water works, start crying and acting hysterical, and she'll be believed. Often it won't even
take that. From my point of view, when I see guys at the top, like Weinstein and Epstein,
having now to deal with it too, I have to confess to a certain degree of shadenfreude. During
my own tribulations with this, they were the ones getting away with it, and often even the
enforcers and enablers of it.
I see it as yet another unintended side effect of two fundamental, revolutionary
technological changes. These changes were first thought by almost everyone concerned to be
wonderful, a sign of Progress at last, but nobody was looking down the road far enough.
First, due to the advent and widespread use of scientific birth control and abortion, women
were given for the first time in history complete control over their own fertility. This led
directly to sexual liberation and modern feminism, both of which would be impossible without
this development. Second, a change in the political technology, namely the extension of the
vote to women. Why, you might ask, did an all-male government ever pass such laws, or in
America, empower its enforcement arm, the EEOC? Because of the woman's vote, of course. No
politician today can hope to succeed without it.
But I could never believe that Maxwell and Epstein were connected with the Israeli
Intelligence agency, the Mossad. With all my sympathy to our esteemed colleagues Philip
Giraldi and Whitney Webb, there is not a single shred of evidence for such connection.
Is this one of C.J. Hopkins "I'm a Russian Asset" parodies? Are you serious?
How many Mossad heads attended "Robert Maxwell's" funeral, Shamir?
Weinstein did nothing wrong?
What do they have on you, Izzy? Blink three times fast in your next video appearance to
let us know they got to you.
No one with their head north of their colon believes anything you just said here. So
that's a plus.
Thanks. I didn't take it personally. But it seems that Kavanaugh is dirty, and so is
Trump. Makes me wonder about the operations to take them down. Russia gate for Trump and
Blasey Ford gate for Kavanaugh. Both so ridiculous that it is almost as if their foes
couldn't use the real dirt without self-incriminating.
@Sollipsist l, impossible
for little children to doubt what the big person says, whether Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy,
Easter Rabbit, anything. So easy to indoctrinate. And it's continued to the present day, the
only denomination that has it's own elementary schools everywhere. Everywhere. All about
capturing the children.
But going back to "Puritan", Wikipedia on Savonarola, in 1494 "he instituted an extreme
puritanical campaign "
So, Ha! Ha!, Roman "Catholic" Puritans of the Fifteenth Century! Didn't molest
children back then, but have ever since!
Feel free to check out how these egalitarian English men have in 10 min permanently banned
my 6 year old Wikipedia account over a comment I made three years ago – proclaiming
that marriage is between a man and a woman is considered homophobic now. (It's a self-plug,
but it's also Christian psychology in real-time, you might appreciate it.)
Does this homosexual psychosis stem from technology, too? The most industrialized nations
on the planet are not sodomitic at all. It all seems to me like an American cultural
thing.
Adûnâi: "Are you not confusing the cause and effect?"
Certainly there is an interplay between the two factors I mentioned that magnifies their
societal effects. They strengthen and support each other.
Adûnâi: "But why did women get the vote to begin with? You don't explain.
From what I know, they were first employed in WW1, and it was a "symbol of gratitude"?
Sounds quite cucked and Christian."
Technology develops according to its own internal logic, often with unpredictable and
sometimes even catastrophic effects on human societies. It is deeply hostile to natural
distinctions of race, sex, and culture that impede its efficient operation. Technological
change drives cultural change, and war stimulates technological change.
Adûnâi: "Why then have the Eastern countries not faced it? Neither the USSR nor
modern China?"
I'd say they have, in their own way. There are, for example, plenty of female
professionals in both countries, who function in their jobs as the equivalent of men. This
would be impossible if they were constantly pregnant and caring for children. Then too, there
is the low birth rate, which is only possible with scientific birth control. They also
participate equally with men in politics, AFAIK, and have equal rights as citizens. N.b. too
that in China, at least, this happened without Christianity -- although, as has been said by
Spengler and others, Marxism can itself be regarded as a form of Christianity.
Adûnâi: "Does this homosexual psychosis stem from technology, too?"
Efficiency is the god of technology, and that is unquestionably true all over the world.
To the extent that cultural factors impede the efficient operation of technology, they have
to change, or all that results is inferior technology. Man's increasing dependence on
technology is why a kind of global culture is emerging now, instead of earlier in history.
Cultural distinctions are being destroyed at an accelerating pace, and also races are being
mixed as an unintended and unforeseen consequence of this dependence.
Because of this, I suspect the decadence you notice today in the West will eventually show
up in the East as well. It's just that because they were relative late comers to technology
and industrialization, it may take a little longer, that's all. There's a certain cultural
inertia that needs to be overcome.
Russian method
In a far away Russian village, gals have heard of the Western way to deal with men, and they
brought their rape complaints to local police. Police checked the claims, found them without
merit, and both ladies were fined 5000 ruble ($80) each. How neat! https://pervo.info/v-achite-eshhyo-odno-lozhnoe-iznasilovanie/
Even without technology, give humans enough time, and one race will emerge triumphant.
Whereas the high tide of Islam failed to conquer Anatolia, the Seljuks came to the Aegean,
and the Ottomans reached Vienna. Failures are weeded out, and those remain who are strong,
not who can make money most efficiently.
@Israel Shamir
And yet, the rural folk of Russia is dying out. Natural change (2018): -3 per 1000 rural
vs -1 per 1000 urban.
Adûnâi: "Everything indeed will be shown in due time. What else are we doing
here but trying to predict the future?"
Yes, I agree with most of what you wrote in this comment. All I'm doing is pointing to the
trend, the way the technological system tends to grind away cultural differences. Of course,
some cultural differences may not affect the efficiency of the system, and those might
remain. Western "decadence" might or might not be one of those things. Ted Kaczynski says
something relevant about this in ISAIF:
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his
real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in
rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into
high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools;
the way of life of the black "underclass" they regard as a social disgrace. They want to
integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist
just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they
want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve
African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture
consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to
black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque.
In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects
more leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white,
middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a
scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good
as white. They want to make black fathers "responsible." they want black gangs to become
nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The
system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears
or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job,
climbs the status ladder, is a "responsible" parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect,
however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into
the system and make him adopt its values.
A corollary of this would seem to be that only trivial differences will remain between
cultures as different cultures fully adapt themselves to the global technological system. The
urging of "oversocialized leftists" isn't actually necessary, as the system itself contains
its own rewards for compliance and punishments for failure to comply. There's also nothing
particularly tied to naturally-occurring races in that system of values; at least, not
obviously so. The system is hostile to natural race distinctions precisely because it is
necessarily race-neutral. Might it create its own artificial race of genetically engineered
humans in order to maximize efficiency? That could be. Certainly, genetic changes to man have
been a side effect of civilization itself. E.g., human beings are much less violent than they
used to be. Obedience, non-violence (at least on a personal level), and conformity has been
bred into us modern humans.
Adûnâi: "Are you of the view that collapse is imminent, even without Unabombers?
And if it is, there will be no going back to high technology?"
It's probably a mistake to underestimate the resilience of the system. Anyone interested
in trying to preserve the status quo as to race will have to act fast to bring the system
down, or it will be too late. Whether high tech can be rebuilt after a global collapse would
depend on a lot of factors impossible to know without knowing at least the method used to
cause the collapse, as that would have an effect on how long any ensuing "Dark Age" would
last.
Yes its kind of strange. Kavanaugh is not an ideological conservative in the mould of
Scalia or Thomas. Makes one wonder what the fuss was all about. I must revisit what you wrote
about earlier on his earlier judgements.
I'm not disagreeing, but don't forget it was 19th Century "Great Awakening" Protestants
who were responsible for creating the public school system in the US. Can we question their
motives?
In England, a struggle to dismiss a parliamentarian because of a vague complaint
Chief whip Mark Spencer today stood by his decision not to suspend the senior Tory MP
arrested on suspicion of rape.
The party is under mounting pressure, including from the alleged victim, to strip the
ex-minister of the Conservative whip.
But Mr Spencer said it was right to allow the police to conclude their investigation before
taking any action, while also stressing the need to protect the identity of the accuser.
The former parliamentary researcher in her 20s has alleged she was assaulted and forced to
have sex.
What does "forced to have sex" means?
@Dr.
Robert Morgan , it's "a triumph of the Natural, Racial Order" that confuses the plans of
the globo. The very globohomo is contingent upon the qualities of the Nordic race. It has
evolved to seek efficiency, and now – under the guidance of Christianity – it is
employing it in its own self-destruction. But as they near the end, their efforts become
discordant, muffled, inefficient.
> "Ted Kaczynski"
By the way, why do you prefer calling him his real name instead of "the Unabomber"? "Ted"
is so much more boring, and the in "Kaczynski" is mispronounced as by Americans while it
should be in Polish. The Unabomber has a ring to it.
Shamir now confesses to be a Mossad Psyop who pretended to be a hero of the Goyim. The
choosen ones raping and pimping gentile children and women is nothing to him. Criticism is
New Puretanism. A surrogate for the word Antisemitism as Derschowitz uses it for his accuser?
Calling Robert Maxell a KGB Agent i and other are struggling to understand if you are
trolling or trutly a Mossad apologet. The worst is you are friends with Gilad Atzmon
hopefully he is as bluffed by your (new?) behaviour and views as we are.
Anyway, just noticed more ammo lying on the ground right here at UR. Andy Flick-Chick, his
2020-02-13 article, The Philippines Are Choosing New Allies: Pres. Duterte, hugely
popular there, "sexually molested by a priest when he was a child, he holds a grudge against
Christianity."
@Dr.
Robert Morgan he principle of the pursuit of individual happiness trumps any search for
the efficiency of the collective.
I would concede that the history of technological intelligent life on this planet has been
aimed at the discovery of the correct proportion between efficiency and race. But not more.
Simply put, what I am observing to-day is the death of race-denialists in the Occident and
the triumph of racists in the Orient. The latter are more efficient, too.
A little video celebrating the unity of the Man and the Machine. Those visions are not
Checharian and not bucolic.
Adûnâi: "If it were indeed calculating the most efficient society, it would
probably try to mix and match, and as homosexualism is not exactly important, it would be
discounted as a Western obstacle." I would say, if there is no reason ruling the system, it
turns into idiocracy."
You have to keep in mind that the focus of technique when evaluating efficiency is
necessarily quite narrow. For instance, having a horse is more efficient (in some ways) than
walking, while having an automobile is still more efficient than having a horse. So an
evaluation of efficiency is both relative and contextual. Someone might object, for example,
that automobiles aren't really more efficient than walking, because by using automobiles, you
have to accept that tens of thousands of people are going to die annually in car accidents.
That's true, but still, the judgement of society (i.e., the "group mind" that I've referred
to) has been that using automobiles is worth it, i.e., more "efficient". And there can be
little doubt that, overall, a society that has the technology necessary to produce and use
automobiles would defeat a society at a more primitive technological level in the contest of
survival between them.
But generally, one cannot determine in advance "the most efficient society" any more than
one can determine in advance "the fittest animal". Whatever form of social organization is
most efficient must emerge gradually, as man does his dance of death with technology.
Humanity is like a blind man groping his way down a corridor. Nobody knows where
technological development will lead, and its development cannot be steered. Attempts to allow
ideology to steer technology only result in inferior technology.
As for "homosexualism", thinking about it some more, I'd say it's just another side effect
of female empowerment. Due to the development of scientific birth control methods women are
now participating in work and politics on equal footing with men, and there are social
consequences that weren't foreseen: e.g., more men are raised without a father in the home;
more men who, in their work life, will necessarily have a woman as their "boss"; decoupling
sex from its natural function of reproduction leads to regarding sexuality as a matter of
"lifestyle choice". Given basic human psychology, I'd say these trends favor an increase in
"homosexualism". Certainly they are quite destructive of patriarchy.
Adûnâi: "A lack of will is a lack of life. I emphasise the role of the
individual in history. If the system is so smart, why does it allow the vector to turn
towards disorder* for a period?"
Individual will has nothing to do with technique. It can't control it. Just to stick with
the example of birth control technologies, you cannot "will" away the fact that they empower
women, and at the same time disempower men. To use the technique at all, you just have to
accept this, just as with the use of automobiles, a society accepts that the cost is tens of
thousands of lives every year.
Disorder arises, and empires fall, precisely because all the consequences of a given
technological configuration aren't foreseen; in fact, they're not even foreseeable. Shit
happens, as the saying goes.
Adûnâi: "By the way, why do you prefer calling him his real name instead of "the
Unabomber"? "
Because it's his ideas that are important, not his relatively ineffectual bombs.
Adûnâi: "Simply put, what I am observing to-day is the death of race-denialists
in the Occident and the triumph of racists in the Orient. The latter are more efficient,
too."
This is the question to be decided in the future, by the result. I agree that the West,
precisely because of its Christian worldview, tends to confuse what it regards as moral
superiority with technological superiority. But then, if the prize is survival itself, morals
can change. Also, there's a time honored Christian tradition of hypocrisy that must be taken
into account. Only the event of the matter will show which form of technological organization
is more efficient.
Kinda sad that people are so often especially motivated by childhood trauma; the
simplicity, irrationality and disproportionate responses that are understandable in the
childish mind are unnaturally preserved throughout adulthood. A little girl gets abused by a
pervert uncle, and years later her supposed reason and free will convinces her that men are
evil, old men especially, traditional families and patriarchal society are the enemy, and she
was "born" a lesbian. So pretty much everybody in her sphere of influence ends up paying for
the act of one degenerate.
Up to this article, I took him to be honest, regardless of how muddy his background was.
Maybe he's testing his audience, but this is laughable.
Of course, if you're opposed to a superficially feminized, #metoo, gotcha culture, you may
sympathize at first.
But he's covering up for a zio-criminal entity that hasn't yet been unraveled. He's
actually trying the line that Epstein was some cavalier 70s Don Juan simply born a bit too
late.
Whores will be whores. Don't care about them, as they squirmed around Weinstein and
Epstein. Pretending Epstein is all about whores however, just turned Israel Shamir into a
whore in his own right. Pat yourself on the back, but we still don't know shit about Epstein,
the intelligence angle that is.
Maybe Israel can get his friend Assange on the ball?
"... Like George Carlin once said "political correctness is fascism disguised as politeness" ..."
"... "Almost nobody has any idea what they are talking about." That's the problem with this internet age giving every moron a voice. ..."
"... Social Justice Warriors = political correctness on steroids. ..."
"... "It starts off as a halfway decent idea and then it goes completely wrong" Sums up all this stupidity in the wake of the BLM protests. What started out as legitimate anger about the murder of an unarmed black man by a police officer has denigrated to people trying to cancel comedy shows from 20 years ago and bitching about "inappropriate language" and just ..."
"... Take any ethical position to its extreme and if it holds together it's good. - Kant. Liberalism taken to an extreme fails. Get a clue. ..."
"... I love how Cleese puts it. Fundamentalism does not just have to do with religion, or the far right. It is taking anything to an extreme. The same goes with political correctness. ..."
"... John Cleese outclasses Bill Maher by an absolutely massive margin ..."
"... Political correctness is another way of stating: " I want to make rules of tolerance that only apply to everyone else in society. But only don't apply to everyone on the same side as the group I'm with" ..."
"... Political correctness and Social Justice isn't about protecting minorities, or protecting the LGTBQ community etc, its about control and censoring through bullying. its about telling you how to think, and what you can say. Our Great Grandparents died to protect our right to think and speak freely, and to tell me how to think and speak, you are literally pissing on the graves of the people who died to protect that right, and THAT offends me. ..."
Cleese's huge laugh at the "religion of peace -- a piece of you here, a piece of you there" was wonderful -- he laughed so
hard -- almost as though he'd never heard that before -- and perhaps he hadn't -- but he sure seemed to enjoy it, as did I!
"Almost nobody has any idea what they are talking about." That's the problem with this internet age giving every moron a voice.
Used to be that you had to have some kind of intelligence or talent to get recognition.
"It starts off as a halfway decent idea and then it goes completely wrong" Sums up all this stupidity in the wake of the
BLM protests. What started out as legitimate anger about the murder of an unarmed black man by a police officer has denigrated
to people trying to cancel comedy shows from 20 years ago and bitching about "inappropriate language" and just
I love these guys, the whole "political correctness" is an absurd illusion. In my country we love to make jokes about western
countries and specifically our neighbors, but you will most certainly get arrested if you make joke about other nationalities,
origin or "that" religion.
For John Cleese Fans.. If you've never seen an old 80,s film of his called "Clockwise" Please check it out. Small budget film
By Handmade Fims which was in part George Harrison's company.. and very very funny FYI
"...Stupidity, I've heard you're against it "!!!!! "Australians are so well balanced, because they've a chip on each shoulder"!!!!!!
3:30 "religion of piece - there's a piece of
you over there, there's a piece of you over there, ..."!!!!
Understand the following like you have understood nothing else before: (Maher and Cleese obviously had not at the time of this
interview.)
'Political Correctness' is now a construct utilised almost exclusively to trivialise and dismiss anything that seeks
to redress injustice, unfairness and the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege.
Whatever the issue it will be dismissed
as being only 'political correctness' and even common decency of courtesy are disparaged as 'political correctness gone mad' .
It has also become at the same time a 'weasel' term used by cowards and bullies to avoid having to openly state that the have
no care for the rights, concerns, feelings and well-being of others.
Look for how and by whom 'political correctness' is currently
used and you will see what Maher, Cleese and posters commenting on this clip hve not and be less likely to be misled and duped.
I love how Cleese puts it. Fundamentalism does not just have to do with religion, or the far right. It is taking anything to
an extreme. The same goes with political correctness.
"Political incorrectness... Could we just bitch about that?"... And here I sense feminist hysteria storm coming Bill Maher's
way. I definately prefer the British style. John Cleese was one of those people I looked up to and thought "I want to be like
him when I grow up".
John Cleese outclasses Bill Maher by an absolutely massive margin and Bill Maher is so full of himself he always thinks he's
the smartest, most important person on the show. Bill Maher is embarassing to watch.
Despite loving Mr. Cleese, I want to point out that when you joke about oppressed group it becomes part of oppression. That's
why joking about Mexicans in USA or Britain it is different than joking about Mexicans in Mexico by Mexicans. Context is everything
Cleese's logic here is irrefutable; and really shines a light on the incredible double standards that are prevalent in contemporary
society. It's rewarding to know; watching this when he speaks about Jesus that there are religious academics, and representatives
that see the wise satirical insight of; Life of Brian. If only we had a movie now that lampooned radical Isalm. Oh wait there
is; its called; Four Lions.
Political correctness is another way of stating: "I not only want my piece of the cake to eat for myself, but I also want the
whole cake to eat for myself too." Political correctness is another way of stating: " I want to make rules of tolerance that only
apply to everyone else in society. But only don't apply to everyone on the same side as the group I'm with"
Cleese is so spot-on about the madness of political correctness. Goebbels would have loved it, except this fascism is of the
left, in the heads of "open-minded" liberals (so-called.)
Political correctness and Social Justice isn't about protecting minorities, or protecting the LGTBQ community etc, its about
control and censoring through bullying. its about telling you how to think, and what you can say. Our Great Grandparents died
to protect our right to think and speak freely, and to tell me how to think and speak, you are literally pissing on the graves
of the people who died to protect that right, and THAT offends me.
So annoying watching bill maher. He's so arrogant and conceited. He's always cutting in awkwardly to say some middle-of-the-road
boring hum-drum to get an obligatory clap from his audience. Can't we just listen to the fantastic john cleese and not the wannabe
political spokes-person?
It seems to me thar racial tensions in particular or worse now than they Were before they shoved this whole political correctness
thing down our gullets. And that statement goes back to before the Minneapolis police killed a man for using a counterfeit $20
bill(being black). Forcing political correctness on people doesn't work. You're not changing peoples ideas you're just suppressing
them. When you suppress a persons ideas those ideas fester. When suppressed ideas fester they build up pressure and eventually
explode. Instead of telling people what they can't say or do, we need to re-educate our people to except those that are different.
Humor is a very good way of getting people to see how ignorant their ideas are.
''Political correctness'' is for people who have achieved nothing, done nothing, and ARE nothing. It is their way of pretending
to have power over REAL people. That's why celebrities and Hollywood actors love being PC so much.
Radicals have never had a sense of humor. They are unbalanced. "In jest, there is truth". --
Roman proverb. Radicals has problems with truth. Therefore, they don't like humor.
"... Monty Python was the pinnacle of contemporary comedy precisely because it drew attention to the absurdity of modern society and it pompous hypocrisy ..."
big female BLM supporter wearing a nappy mask that says "i can't breathe" on it
soccer mom says "well take the stupid mask off"
MartinG , 3 hours ago
How many Wokesters does it take to change a light bulb?
One to complain that the light bulb is white.
One to complain that the light is white.
One to blame boomers for wearing out the old bulb.
One who doesn't know how.
And one Wokester who says there must be change as he changes the bulb.
tardpill , 3 hours ago
the only one that can possibly change the bulb with it out being a racist privilege is not
available because they are too busy burning **** down
DaBard51 , 2 hours ago
You forgot:
--One who complains that there isn't enough diversity in light bulbs.
--One who says "Bulb Lives Matter!"
--One who complains that screwing the bulb is sexist.
--One who can't decide whether the bulb is DC or AC.
When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.
<edit> whoever up-voted, my thanks. Shadow-banned, I am not, now, I see...
Roger Casement , 3 hours ago
They are the joke.
philipat , 2 hours ago
Yes, and that is why humor is so important, especially at the margin. Politicians,
especially Democrat politicians, don't like comedy because it draws attention to the
absurdity of most of what they do.
Monty Python was the pinnacle of contemporary comedy precisely because it drew attention
to the absurdity of modern society and it pompous hypocrisy. It gave me more laughs more
consistently than anything I have come across since. 'God speed John, you stay with what you
believe and ***k the humorless wokesters who need to get a life and lighten up for their own
sake and for that of all the rest of us!
45North1 , 2 hours ago
An Antifa member, a BLM'er and a Proud Boy go into a Bar.....
EvlTheCat , 2 hours ago
"Woke" in itself is a joke and a oxymoron, which if you know the definition makes it
ironic also. Touches all bases John.
@valleyshrew He never says that having enemies makes you an extremist. He said being an extremist gives you
justification to make enemies and to blame them for everything.
"... White Fragility is the kind of book that can be written in two months, read in two days, and forgotten in two hours, but Robin DiAngelo's text is also a deeply pernicious piece of work, utterly contemptuous of the "normie" ..."
"... Whites it aims to convert to a more radical form of racial self-abnegation than they currently demonstrate. In fact, the work is so hostile and ideologically loaded that it can't help but present a kind of dialectic, wherein certain truths are revealed in spite of itself. As such, I have to confess that I learned something from White Fragility , even if it isn't what DiAngelo had in mind. ..."
"... In short, White Fragility is a horrifying call for Whites not simply to be paralyzed by White guilt, but to become active participants in their decline, and willing accomplices in their political and demographic destruction. ..."
"... I think this is a beautiful indictment of the demonstrative and showy nature of White anti-racists who simply love to engage in social theatrics in search of kudos, approval, and incentives without really understanding the deeper destructive meaning of anything they're doing. ..."
"... DiAngelo has contempt for people like this because they place all their energies into grandstanding instead of helping in the transfer of real power and wealth. I have contempt for them because they place all their energies into grandstanding for short-term personal benefits while stabbing their ancestors, contemporaries, and progeny in the back. ..."
"... It's important to bear in mind that we're still in the same totalitarian state that whacked JFK ..."
"... The purpose of removing Confederate symbols is to hide the commanding Zionist involvement in the slave trade business. This is the equivalent of using the Russian Collusion to hide the Zionist influence on the Trump election. ..."
"... Why is Critical Race Theory presented as The Absolute Truth? Not only is it not the truth, it isn't even a theory. ..."
Robin DiAngelo White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Beacon
Press, 2018.
I first encountered Robin DiAngelo three years ago, during my
investigation of the Jewish origins and intellectual currents of Whiteness Studies.
DiAngelo was then just another relatively minor speaker and academic on the
university/consulting network in Whiteness Studies, and I was undecided then, and remain
undecided, as to whether DiAngelo is wholly, in part, or not at all Jewish. She didn't feature
in my essay at all, and, when I looked over my old notes a few days ago, she appeared only as a
name scribbled in the margins. As it happens, her ancestry is relatively inconsequential in
light of the fact that White Fragility , published in 2018 but reaching bestseller
status in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, is heavily and transparently influenced by
Jewish thought and by Jewish pioneers in the field she now finds so conducive to fame and
fortune. I don't make a habit of buying the texts of the opposition, but when certain of them
reach a significant level of academic or popular attention (look for it in your child's school
curriculum), it's probably necessary for someone among us to carry out some form of
intellectual reconnaissance, and to bring back for wider consideration the most essential of
the gathered information. This was
my approach to Jean-Paul Sartre's widely-read and overly-praised Anti-Semite and Jew
, and so, when I heard DiAngelo had managed to make herself a bestselling author, I headed to
my local bookstore, where dozens of copies had been helpfully stacked on a table devoted to
"in-demand" literature on race and racism.
My first action on picking up a copy of White Fragility was to turn to the
bibliography. I knew what I'd see, and it was a gratifying and familiar feeling to see so many
names from my research on Whiteness Studies. They were almost all there, protruding from the
page like shunned relatives at a family reunion -- Noel Ignatiev, George Lipsitz, Ruth
Frankenberg (described in White Fragility as "a premier white scholar in the field of
whiteness studies"), Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, along with helpful co-ethnics like Thomas
Shapiro, David Wellman, Sander Gilman, Larry Adelman, and Jay Kaufman.
These are DiAngelo's
mentors and intellectual forbears, and I could tell, scanning through this list of names and
works, that White Fragility was sure to boast very many references to "fellow Whites,"
and streams of inducements to abandon White ethnic interests.
These expectations weren't
disappointed. White Fragility is the kind of book that can be written in two months,
read in two days, and forgotten in two hours, but Robin DiAngelo's text is also a deeply
pernicious piece of work, utterly contemptuous of the "normie"
Whites it aims to convert to a
more radical form of racial self-abnegation than they currently demonstrate. In fact, the work
is so hostile and ideologically loaded that it can't help but present a kind of dialectic,
wherein certain truths are revealed in spite of itself. As such, I have to confess that I
learned something from White Fragility , even if it isn't what DiAngelo had in mind.
What is White Fragility?
"White Fragility," as a theory, is confirmation of my belief that inducing guilt in Whites
was never the end goal in itself. It's never simply been about making us feel bad about
ourselves or our ancestors. White Fragility, White guilt, and indeed Whiteness Studies as a
whole, is fundamentally about power. Those of you familiar with the New Testament will recall
the verse from John's third chapter, wherein John the Baptist declares that Christ "must
increase, but I must diminish." Power and influence never simply disappear, but rather
transfer. John (and it is entirely inconsequential whether you regard him as historical or
fictional) was aware that as a popular local mystic or holy man, his mere continued presence
was an obstacle to the local growth in power of Christ, and so he made a conscious decision to
diminish himself. Likewise, we are living in an age where Whites continue to have some social,
political, and economic power, but where large and growing numbers of non-Whites are seeking to
obtain what remains of this power. For them to "increase," it has been declared that we must
diminish. Whiteness Studies is fundamentally about making us willing and enthusiastic
participants in our own decline. When Blacks or Jews demand a reduction of, or end to, White
power or wealth, it means that they want that power or wealth. Despite all sloganeering, there
can be no equality in power among races. Not now, not ever; only ruthless and unceasing
competition.
White guilt, in itself, is certainly an act of psychological diminishment, but the message
of DiAngelo's text is fundamentally that this psychological diminishment has not led to a
desired correlation in material or structural diminishment. Whites merely feeling sorry for
themselves isn't enough for their competitors, if it isn't accompanied by a wholesale transfer
of power, land, and other resources. In this context, "White Fragility" is an indictment and
insult levelled at White progressives merely frozen by fear of racism accusations and White
guilt. In short, White Fragility is a horrifying call for Whites not simply to be
paralyzed by White guilt, but to become active participants in their decline, and willing
accomplices in their political and demographic destruction.
DiAngelo's introduction begins with accusation. America "began with the attempted genocide
of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of
kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants." So far, so familiar. But the book very
quickly moves to an outline of the theory of White Fragility. I actually found this, and some
other chapters on the same theme, extremely interesting, because DiAngelo, and presumably other
Whiteness Studies activists, are keenly aware that Whites are peculiarly concerned with
morality and with appearing to be good people (all of which is very much in keeping with
the
arguments and research of Kevin MacDonald ). For example, DiAngelo writes on the fear White
progressives have of being perceived as racist: "We consider a challenge to our racial
worldview as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any
attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offence. One of
the greatest social fears for a white person is being told that we have said or done something
racially problematic."
Of course, the groundwork for the connections among White ethnocentrism
= Racism = Morally Bad were laid by Jewish academics over many decades. The problem for Jewish
activists and incentivized Whiteness Studies traitors is that this moral terror has resulted in
what they perceive to be paralysis and inaction.
Actual "racists" aren't really discussed in White Fragility , and where they are,
it's clear that they aren't the target of the title of the book. In fact, DiAngelo points out:
"Of course, some whites explicitly avow racism. We might consider these whites actually more
aware of, and honest about, their biases."
In other words, even if we're moral monsters in DiAngelo's eyes, we aren't "fragile." Again, because of the extremes of the some of the
dialectics here, certain truths emerge. DiAngelo remarks early in the book that "race matters,"
something that many of our readers would agree with, even if it's from a slightly different
angle than the author intends. She also argues that:
All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. People who claim not to be prejudiced are
demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the
power of socialization -- we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family
members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Everyone has
prejudice, and everyone discriminates.
I couldn't agree more: Whites have been uniquely affected by mass propaganda designed to
brainwash them into viewing as morally evil something that is natural and instinctive to all
humans.
The real targets of this book are White progressives who profess anti-racism, and because I
also possess many frustrations in relation to this demographic, I couldn't help but agree with
some of DiAngelo's characterizations. Take, for example, this gem:
I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define
a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less
racist, or in the "choir," or already "gets it." White progressives can be the most difficult
for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our
energy into making sure that others see us having arrived. [emphasis added]
I think this is a beautiful indictment of the demonstrative and showy nature of White
anti-racists who simply love to engage in social theatrics in search of kudos, approval, and
incentives without really understanding the deeper destructive meaning of anything they're
doing.
DiAngelo has contempt for people like this because they place all their energies into
grandstanding instead of helping in the transfer of real power and wealth. I have contempt for
them because they place all their energies into grandstanding for short-term personal benefits
while stabbing their ancestors, contemporaries, and progeny in the back.
The book's first chapter, "The Challenges of Talking to White People About Race," is devoted
to convincing White progressives that they are in fact racist, and that they need to become
better allies in their own racial destruction. The message here is quasi-spiritual; Whites are
told that their quest for racial redemption will be lifelong, lasting until the day they die.
Their existence is an ontological problem, the only solution to which is an endless quest to
compensate for simply existing:
Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces
conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be
finished.
I really wish more White moral grandstanders would understand that, ultimately, they will
never be given a "pass" by our enemies once they've accrued enough kudos, or groveled enough,
or displayed enough platform sympathy with Blacks, or any other ethnicity that happens to be
Victim of the Month. They will only ever be temporary tools, held in contempt as much for their
weakness as their whiteness.
Another interesting feature of the chapter is its attack on White individualism, presented
here as a myth that prevents Whites from taking collective responsibility for alleged
historical wrongs. For DiAngelo,
Individualism is a story line that creates, communicates, reproduces, and reinforces the
concept that each of us is a unique individual and that our group memberships, such as race,
class, or gender, are irrelevant.
DiAngelo's problem with White individualism is that it's a barrier to White guilt, and also
a barrier to Whites perceiving alleged advantages in employment and social advancement in a
society in which they enjoy a demographic majority. Again, due to the dialectic at play, I
happen to agree that individualism among Whites is a problem in certain contexts. It's just
that in my perspective it's a barrier to the explicit assertion of White ethnic interests and
collective action in pursuit of those interests. In fact, without widespread awareness of an
ethnic threat, it seems almost impossible to convince Whites to see themselves as a group and
to act as one. A further obstacle to White ethnocentrism is decades of social conditioning in
which Jewish propaganda is dominant. Even DiAngelo concedes that "reflecting on our racial
frames is particularly challenging for white people, because we are taught that to have a
racial viewpoint is to be biased." Unfortunately, DiAngelo doesn't ask who did the "teaching"
in this regard, and she certainly doesn't consider the broader implications of what she's
saying.
In the second chapter, "Racism and White Supremacy," DiAngelo trots out the "race is a
social construct" trope, with footnotes for her claims leading invariably to a section of
bibliography that reads like a Bar Mitzvah invitation list. Black academic Ibram Kendi is
quoted as arguing that "if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in
condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination." I agree, but I think the problem
isn't systemic discrimination but the belief that all humans are equal. Eliminate that belief
and disparity in condition is neither surprising nor subject matter for conspiratorial
conjecture. But alternative theories and beliefs like mine don't feature in DiAngelo's book,
which has the air of a religious text, and issues utterances with an authority that demands
faith rather than reason. There is an interesting section in the chapter denying that there can
be an anti-White racism, with DiAngelo remarking:
People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they
lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination
into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.
Let's set aside that horrific last statement, and focus for a moment on the unstated premise
underlying the first. Isn't it more or less the stated goal of "Whiteness studies," White
guilt, the theory of "White Fragility," Black Lives Matter, and the massive power of
multicultural propaganda to lead to the further diminishment of White social and institutional
power? As stated at the outset of this review, this power is destined for the hands of ethnic
interlopers. We know full well which of these ethnic groups will take the lion's share of that
power, because they have their hands on most of it already. The question is therefore: why
should Whites hand what remains of their social and institutional power to hostile groups that
will unquestionably ensure that their prejudice is enacted on Whites in a way that is far from
"temporary and contextual"? What possible incentive could adequately convince Whites to sign up
to such a Devil's pact? Isn't the entirety of White guilt built on a psychotic and
media-induced fantasy -- the idea that if Whites would just give up all remaining power in
their hands the world would enter an age of racial peace and harmony? DiAngelo doesn't even
touch on areas like this, preferring instead to subject the reader to a steady stream of
meaningless gibberish, such as a lengthy rumination on the theories of Ruth Frankenberg who, we
are told, gave birth to such dazzling notions as "whiteness is multidimensional." DiAngelo then
caps the chapter by treating us to the heights of Jamaican philosophy, where one Charles W.
Mills advances a conspiracy theory titled "the racial contract" which involves:
A tacit and sometimes explicit agreement among members of the peoples of Europe to assert,
promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the
world. It is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is
today.
And there you have it -- this Jamaican genius has discovered the Protocols of the Elders
of Europa .
Charles W. Mills: A Caribbean Socrates
The same themes are repeated in the third chapter, "Racism After the Civil Rights Movement."
DiAngelo again attacks "fragile" Whites who claim to be color-blind, pointing out that they
merely believe that it's racist to acknowledge race and therefore flee into a denial of
reality. The only real novelty in the chapter, and one I found highly entertaining, was
DiAngelo's list of racist behaviors exhibited by fragile Whites. These include "acting nice"
and "being careful not to use racial terms or labels." But such phrasing is all the rage now,
as in the New York Times podcast series " Nice White
Parents " which explores hypocrisy among progressive Whites expressing all manner of
liberal pieties -- but moving heaven and earth to avoid sending their children to schools with
large numbers of POC.
The next chapter, "How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?," is probably the
strangest of the book because, if DiAngelo is indeed White (and not someone with some Jewish
ancestry), then it represents a very disturbing and irrational detachment from reality and
common sense. For s start, DiAngelo seems to view even the mundane aspects of White ethnic
homogeneity as pathological. She writes:
As I move through my daily life, my race is unremarkable. I belong when I turn on the TV,
read best-selling novels, and watch blockbuster movies. I belong when I walk past the
magazine racks at the grocery store or drive past billboards. I belong when I see the
overwhelming number of white people on lists of the "Most Beautiful." I belong when I look at
my teachers, counsellors, and classmates. I belong when I learn about the history of my
country throughout the year and when I am shown its heroes and heroines -- George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, John
Glenn, Sally Ride, and Louisa May Alcott
All of this is presented as negative and sinister, to which one can only ask: what is the
alternative? To hand over one's nation and territory to others, so that you can cease to
belong? What then? DiAngelo comments:
It is rare for me to experience a sense of not belonging racially, and these are usually
very temporary, easily avoidable situations. Indeed, throughout my life, I have been warned
that I should avoid situations in which I might be a racial minority. These situations are
often presented as scary, dangerous, or "sketchy."
I can't image why. What I do suggest is that in order to help clarify her theoretical
framework, Robin DiAngelo should, with all reasonable haste, relocate to an area in which she
is most certainly not going to belong racially. Since she views "un-belonging" with great
enthusiasm, while confessing she has no real experience on which to base this view, she should
find the Blackest of Black areas and spend some quality time there -- time that isn't
"temporary, easily avoidable." I think, in the course of such an experiment, she will truly,
honestly, encounter some helpful folks that will be only too glad to show her how fragile she
can be.
By far the most entertaining chapter of the book comes within the last 50 pages. Titled
"White Women's Tears," it's an indictment of that infamous sight -- bawling, wailing, and
normally overweight White women clutching themselves in feverish grief over the death of some
poor Black gangbanger who just happened to get shot while rushing a police officer. DiAngelo is
probably correct in asserting that this is a self-indulgent demonstrative act designed to
heighten status ("I'm moral, good, and empathetic") and get attention from men of all races
("I'm vulnerable right now, and need attention and resources"). Some of the anecdotes in this
regard, from DiAngelo's "Whiteness" seminars are priceless, normally involving some weak-minded
woman breaking down at the revelation she's "racist," and they went some way to compensating me
for the purchase price and hideous ideology of the book. Above all, they confirmed to be that
what we see unfold before us is both tragedy and farce, and that our situation is no less
dangerous for that:
A black man struggling to express a point referred to himself as stupid. My
co-facilitator, a black woman, gently countered that he was not stupid but that society would
have him believe that he was. As she was explaining the power of internalized racism, a white
woman interrupted with, "I think what he was trying to say was " When my co-facilitator
pointed out that the white woman had reinforced the racist idea that she could best speak for
a black man, the woman erupted in tears. The training came to a complete halt as most of the
room rushed to comfort her and angrily accused the black facilitator of unfairness.
Meanwhile, the black man she had spoken for was left alone to watch her receive comfort.
Conclusion
DiAngelo scathingly remarks on incidents like this that "when we are mired in guilt, we are
narcissistic and ineffective." Essentially, the new direction of Whiteness Studies and its
intellectual corollaries will be to wean Whites away from demonstrative habits of virtue
signaling and into active participation in racial decline. We can expect to see in the near
future (and we already to some extent have with the Black Lives Matter riots) a greater
emphasis on Whites becoming active "anti-racists." It will become increasingly difficult for
Whites to appear simply as "not racist." Active, enthusiastic activity on behalf of the ethnic
power-grab will be demanded, and anything less will be portrayed with disdain as "fragility."
DiAngelo concludes her book with the blunt assertion that "a positive white identity is an
impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the
system of white supremacy." White identity is therefore to be destroyed wholesale, and White
ethnic interests crushed alongside it. DiAngelo proclaims with all the vigor of the subversive
or the brainwashed that she will "strive for a less white identity, for my own liberation and
sense of justice."
Liberation and justice. These words were uttered a long time ago in France. The beheadings
started soon after.
It's important to bear in mind that we're still in the same totalitarian state that
whacked JFK and then published shitloads of wistful essays on what that says about "us," by bignosed perv John Updike, by fudge-packing toff Mick Jagger, after all, "it was you and me,"
and everybody in between. The pressure to take the blame for state predation is a constant of
state-imposed American culture. Fuck that shit.
So of course some apple-polishing Jew or wop academic is going to tell us that it's not
cops and prosecutors and prisons fucking jigs over, it's you and me. The proper response to
this is Go fuck yourself. It's not me shooting jigs, strangling them, torturing them, framing
them, and locking them up to work for ten cents a day. It's this state that fucks them over,
not me. All I'm ever gonna do for blacks is destroy and shitcan this kleptocratic police
state, which fucks me over too, just somewhat less.
The purpose of removing Confederate symbols is to hide the commanding Zionist involvement
in the slave trade business. This is the equivalent of using the Russian Collusion to hide the Zionist influence on the
Trump election.
"I don't make a habit of buying the texts of the opposition, but when certain of them
reach a significant level of academic or popular attention (look for it in your child's
school curriculum), it's probably necessary for someone among us to carry out some form of
intellectual reconnaissance, and to bring back for wider consideration the most essential of
the gathered information."
Thank you for doing so. I myself have occasionally struggled with this same issue, i.e.,
the need to finance such people in order to access their material in full for the purpose of
a crafting a more fully informed critique of their ideas.
Robin DiAngelo has obviously rehearsed in her mind and put in book form the black
ass-kissing she'd launch into if she somehow found herself, say, getting on the wrong subway
in NY and having to get off in Harlem where the blacks mind-read her hatred and smell her
fear. It's her version of Monsters From the Id , or about overcoming–not white
European relations with their fellow black Americans–but her psychotic Jewish paranoia
over blacks one day recognizing how they've been played for fools by Jews like her and, with
eyes darting left and right a mile a minute, wheedling her way out of being given the South
African ritual by a gang of blacks with machetes. What a pathetic and paranoid little woman.
But for the Jewish MSM and publishing monopoly she'd have no more public existence than the
imaginary black boogeymen tormenting her psyche. Oy vey, the book's so clever and shmart that
she and her promoters didn't imagine blacks are intelligent enough to see this outrageous
insult of them not as a reflection on their relations with white Europeans, but as just more
condescending manipulation by the Jews.
My first action on picking up a copy of White Fragility was to turn to the bibliography.
I knew what I'd see, and it was a gratifying and familiar feeling to see so many names from
my research on Whiteness Studies. They were almost all there, protruding from the page like
shunned relatives at a family reunion -- Noel Ignatiev
.. heavily and transparently influenced by Jewish thought and by Jewish pioneers in the
field she now finds so conducive to fame and fortune.
These are DiAngelo's mentors and intellectual forbears ..
The abolitionists of the 19th c. were passionate, energetic people whose relentless
agitation was a huge annoyance to political elites including Lincoln. The abolitionists were
nearly exclusively white, Enlightenment progressives, Christian or post-Christian. They bore
costs and took risks to set up and run the underground railroad. They are the pioneers, and
their efforts had a far more significant bearing on the future of USA race relations than the
1960's and later black and Jewish activists.
The author knows this, and omits it, thereby commiting a vile act of revisionism.
I you have a problem giving money to these people – and I certainly do myself and
wish to discourage others from doing so too – you can simply get the book from a
library, either public, or online via Library Genesis (which should cover most popular new
book needs and more besides – certainly I've found all the recently recommended
anti-white propaganda texts there).
I keep telling you people that White Chad Envy drives this effort to discredit America's
founders, especially the ones who owned slaves. It took a high-testosterone badass to enslave
Negroes and make them productive on his farm, and the white men who pulled this off had no
trouble finding white women who wanted to marry them and bear their children. Young single
and widowed white women in the British Isles and mainland European countries would even cross
the Atlantic on their own initiative to find these men to marry, sight unseen, despite the
notion that women in the era before female emancipation faced restrictions on their agency.
And despite the modern nonsense that white women show "empathy" with the "oppressed," when
they side with and select sexually the ones doing the "oppressing."
Those white men put today's soft, fear-ridden, risk-averse, often women-repelling white
American men to shame. Nothing about their record suggests "fragility" in the least.
Do black women cry as much as white women do? I was thinking about this in regards to the
quote about a white woman being comforted for crying, and I realized that I cannot recall
ever hearing black men complain about how much women cry.
Many of the abolitionists wanted to end slavery as a necessary first step in removing
Negroes from the country. They didn't necessarily want free Negroes hanging around after
their emancipation.
@Anonymous
Thanks for the link, I'd have missed it.
Delighted that this termite died in pain:
What killed Ignatiev, an intestinal blockage, is perfect justice and proves that God
does indeed have a sense of humor.
Interesting coincidence that he worked steel, at least in part, the same time I did. Not
in the same place, but my guess is he found blowing hot air at the Ivy League a lot more
profitable.
Connections! Fellow fragiles, we got to work on that. No way a mere white guy could have
pulled that off, not then, not ever.
Why buy a text and – through this voluntary act – sponsor the author and
his/her (almost certainly) jewish agent and publisher?
If you have the urge to read the poison of the enemy (I don't, since everything they write
is so predictable and thus boring, and new depths of depravity and dishonesty can easily be
noticed, if you are half-aware on sites like these), obtain it through other means.
I have read several good summaries/criticisms of White Fragility lately. Even
though current events led me down a path of exploring some pretty racist ideas, it all just
seems like a taboo more than anything. One of the last taboos in our culture the power to
really rile people up (mostly young white women who seem to be terrified of black men but
don't like to admit it). I am old enough to remember when being "gay" was still a taboo,
where people wouldn't just come out and admit they were gay. And then I have witnessed to
complete transformation of that taboo into a socially accepted, celebrated part of life. I am
also old enough to remember when someone having a black boyfriend would have been hilarious
and weird.
With race, there are a lot of intellectual tricks being played on people. For one thing, I
grew up when almost everyone in America was white. Since almost everyone was white, and
advertising was designed to appeal to people in demographically correct ways, I was subjected
to millions and millions of repetitions of white people in Ads buying things, to the point of
naturally coming to see white people as occupying certain positions in the capitalist
framework. Whiteness wasn't the primary aim of that repetitive advertising but the
expectation to see a white person in a certain way emerged naturally because I am white and
the ads were targeted to influence me. So now when I see ads where everyone is
demographically switched around, where, for example, a black woman is a car mechanic and
white guy is a mom, etc etc it's jarring. It's intentionally jarring. It's like they don't
want me to see the product or service being advertised but rather they want me to have an
experience of cognitive dissonance. But then I realize I am not the target of that ad at
all.
Which brings me to my point
Minimize your engagement with media and you will find that almost all of these topics
evaporate into thin air. News shows especially. With America's demographics changing,
everyone in the media and politics is scrambling to create content that is relevant to new
demographics, i.e. not you. So it all seems weird and jarring. If you just turn it off,
because it's not relevant to you anyway, you will find that you actually couldn't care less
if the hiring committee of some college a thousand miles away is trying to recruit a
wheel-chair bound Hispanic transgendered person for diversity and stuff like that.
We are also seeing the last gasp of these super conservative geezers who used to dominate
America as businessmen and local government Elks Club types where they would never hire a
long-haired guy with tattoos to do any kind of job, let alone a black person. These
last-gaspers still have a lot of money and influence in conservative media because they are
basically just sitting at home watching daytime tv or listening to Sirius XM all day.
So, racism is a taboo. Fine. I enjoy that taboo sometimes. Who really cares? Practically
no one outside of media, where people are hyping up this issue to get clicks and capture
attention. In real life almost no one I know really cares about any of this stuff.
The internet has birthed this ghoul and now it has a life in your mind. Just tune out. You
give it power by continuing to feed the frenzy online.
Yes, Richard B, D'Angelo's manipulation technique is closely related to the "Verbal Judo"
method taught to asshole cops: while coercing a citizen, obtrude random verbal chaff implying
options or choice to make the citizen internalize submission. Asshole cops take these methods
home to abuse their battered wives and fucked-up kids.
And yes, exactly, just like our asshole police awfisser, soon our asshole police state is
going to go home and take some stolen percocets and eat a gun. Good. Fuck the USA. Its
predation on blacks (and browns and whites) has got nothing to do with me.
Her point is well taken that "white supremacy" is not simply about white vs black but "it
is also the small number of rich whites over the much larger number of poor and working class
whites. In return for a guarantee that the latter group of whites will suffer the many
calamities of life afflicting working people in a capitalist society less intensely and less
frequently than do black people and people of color, the poor and working class whites will
not challenge the rule of the rich."
"White Fragility," as a theory, is confirmation of my belief that inducing guilt in
Whites was never the end goal in itself. It's never simply been about making us feel bad
about ourselves or our ancestors. White Fragility, White guilt, and indeed Whiteness
Studies as a whole, is fundamentally about power.
This quote is the heart of yet another great essay from Andrew Joyce.
Regarding The PQ – Power Question, not only does Jewish Supremacy Inc. (JSI) and its
Proxies demand to be,
but they have the power to effectuate those insane demands.
Thereby invalidating their claims about White power.
Worse, since Whites as a race have never once made those same demands, JSI also
invalidates their claims that the exercise of White power has been unjust.
DiAngelo's book isn't a courageous, honest, and intelligent search for the truth.
It's a cowardly, dishonest and unintelligent demand for power.
It's just another deposit of The Slave Revolt In Moralty.
JSI is simply too Hoax Dependent and Scapegoat-Driven to ever be able to exercise the
power they demand, and for the most part have, in a way that demonstrates a responsible
commitment to reality.
In other words, JSI represents the greatest danger, not just to Whites, but to humanity
itself.
That's why they're now declaring self-defense to be an act of terrorism.
For this reason and many others
Treason Against Jewish Supremacy Is Loyalty To Humanity
@advancedatheist
narrowly escaped lynching on Boston Common. For all the noise their leaders made,
Abolitionism was never more than a politically impotent lunatic fringe movement. But its
isolated firebrands provided a convenient imaginary enemy, like today's "terrorists", to
suppress dissent and command obedience in a white southern population that was growing
increasingly restive under the aristocratic rule of the slaveholding elite. It's one of the
great ironies of our history that the radicals so masterfully capitalized on the patriotic
rage that followed the insurgent attack on Old Glory at Sumter to push their agenda through
Congress and into law.
@anon
mention of the grim statistics of Black-on-Black violence. It doesn't fit The Narrative, you
see.
The government exists to truly make everyone equal. Does this man have only one leg? Then
we'll cut the leg off the man who has two. If we can't give a leg to the one-legged man, at
least then both men are equal. Silly, yes. But isn't this, in a nutshell, the ideology of the
current elite? Are some people too stupid to pass various types of qualification tests? Why,
then we'll just lower the bar until anybody, even a snake, can step over it! Or better yet,
just abolish the pretense of objective standards entirely and be done with it.
Andrew Joyce pens another penetrating article. Overrated and privileged snowflakes like
Robin DiAngelo deserve to be downgraded. Odious skunks such as Noel Ignatiev deserve to be
repudiated and disgraced. This article gets us moving in the proper direction. Thank you,
Andrew Joyce!
I learned from countless "I'm OK, You're OK" boomers that there's a wonderful feeling of
liberation and release from acknowledging and accepting your feelings and exorcising the
guilt for being who you are.
And you know, they were right. Countless white folks right now are at the point where they
can (at least privately) say "well, OK, so I am racist" and discover that they are still
perfectly good people. Or even make them realize that being regarded as a "bad person" frees
them to consider a lot of previously forbidden possibilities to reclaim their self-worth and
agency.
Books like this will actually help some people see the choice that is being forced on
them, and choose an alternative to the proffered solution.
After all, we made it through years of Prohibition only to realize that alcohol need not
be either illegal or immoral, if you're not. And drinking is far less natural to humans than
racism.
I would like to explain to Professor West a few things about this dread supremacy:
We have White Supremacy, Professor, because for 2500 years we, whites, have produced the
best minds on the planet, the greatest flourishing of the arts and sciences ever seen, the
most complex and organized societies. We have White Supremacy, whatever exactly it may be,
because we have been the earth's most successful race. No other has come close. Deal with
it.
We put probes on Mars and invented the thousands of technologies needed to do it. We
developed the symphony orchestra, the highest form of musical expression. We invented the
airplane, the computer, the internet, and tennis shoes. Putting it compactly, we invented the
modern world. A degree of privilege, however you may conceive it, goes with the
territory.
Blacks may not have the background to grasp the extent of our achievements. Still, permit
me a brief and very incomplete list of things white people have done or invented:
Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry.
Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical
chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle.
The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque
architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever
written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth
root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The
purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio.
Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening.
Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The
integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The
Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber.
Nylon. Roads. Buildings. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that's nerve gas, and
maybe we didn't really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like
clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key
cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera.
As a race, Cornel, we are happy for you, for anyone, to enjoy the benefits of our
civilization, but that is exactly what it is–our civilization. It has become a global
civilization because others among the competent–again, Chinese, Japanese, Indians,
Koreans–have found it to be in technical matters superior. It came from us. They, I
note, do not complain of White Supremacy or White Privilege. They are too busy making
computers and money.
Now, Cornel, I have often heard blacks demanding reparations for slavery. All right. I
agree. It is only fair. I will pay a half-million dollars to each of my slaves, and free them
immediately. I am not sure how many I have, but will try to give you an estimate in even
dozens. Further, I believe that all blacks are entitled to a similar amount for every year in
which they were slaves.
However, I think you owe us royalties for the use of our civilization, which can be
regarded as a sort of software. There should be a licensing fee. After all, every time you
use a computer, or a door knob, you are using something invented by us. Every time you
sharpen a pencil, or use one, or read or write, you infringe our copyright, so to speak. We
have spent millennia coming up with things–literacy, soap, counting–and it is
only fair that we receive recompense.
@Anon
of blackest cities in the Western World, so your theory is wrong.
But I agree you are submitting to peer pressure to adopt a certain point of view that you
call "anti-racist". Like how people used to go to Church and meet their their girlfriends,
it's pure lip service to the ideology. People conform outwardly and rebel inwardly. That's
always true of totalitarian systems of thought. The idea that everyone is going to keep
putting up with indulging these boring conversations about black people is absurd. Eventually
people get tired of playing along.
Thank you for reminding me to ignore Anon comments.
Amusing to see that the leftists understand it backwards. The poor whites unionise and try
to wrest better conditions from the rich whereas the blacks, the hispanics and other
immigrants sabotage them by accepting to work for worse conditions. Their refusal to join the
white unions or to create their own racialised unions and cooperating with white unions harms
the working class enormously.
I found highly entertaining, was DiAngelo's list of racist behaviors exhibited by
fragile Whites. These include "acting nice" and "being careful not to use racial terms or
labels."
According to the endarkened academic not using racial terms and acting nice is a symptom
of racism. But acting nasty towards coloured people and using slurs is also a symptom of
racism. So whites have no means of not being racist. What can they do then ? Logically they
should embrace the inner racist and establish a form of apartheid
The propaganda spewed by the endarkened academic is nothing new. 15 years ago some French
feminist journalist stated that men who fuck women of a different race are racist because
they assert their domination over that race through the bodies of the women. A few lines
further she stated that men who fuck white women only are racist because they remain closed
to the richness of experience brought by coloured women. Amen. Embrace the inner racist that
the woke believe lurks in you.
"... It is racist to characterize protests as violent or non-violent. It is racist to minimize black pain by trying to make people think about electoral effects. It is racist to be white and try to talk about the issue of black centered protests. It is racist to force black people to go through the emotional labor of trying to be non violent in these circumstances. It is racist to blame black people for the violence. It is racist to think that black people are being violent ..."
"... We should analyze this like we do rape culture: not only by the completed cancelations, but by the culture of protecting and encouraging the bad actors. ..."
Similarly with the Shor case, there doesn't seem to be very many people here willing to
wrestle with the fact that a bunch of people argued that Shor was racist for tweeting out
research about the efficacy of violent vs. non violent protests in the US, and that who got
blamed for starting violence ends up shaping public opinion.
Why did so many people think that was racist? You won't wrestle with that so I have to and
I'm almost certainly going to get yelled at for strawmanning. But the arguments (probably not
all held by the same people at the same time) I've actually seen are along these lines:
It is racist to characterize protests as violent or non-violent.
It is racist to minimize black pain by trying to make people think about electoral
effects.
It is racist to be white and try to talk about the issue of black centered protests.
It is racist to force black people to go through the emotional labor of trying to be non
violent in these circumstances.
It is racist to blame black people for the violence.
It is racist to think that black people are being violent .
So there appears to be a culture in which these arguments are considered coherent/valid
responses to someone pointing to social science literature on the question of the efficacy of
violence and non violence and on the importance of who gets seen as starting the violence.
And that culture appears to be strong enough that an employer will be worried about racism by
association on that basis.
This has essentially all of the tropes identified by Natalie Wynn. We have the quick
presumption of guilt. We have multiple levels of abstraction to get to 'racism'. We have
essentialism about Shor's whiteness (and depending on the argument about other people's
whiteness), we have pseudo-moralism about the timing of the comments, we have the lack of
forgiveness when he tried to apologize (which on some level is the most amazing, because he
went through the ritual apology after doing no real wrong and still got slammed repeatedly),
there is the transitive property of cancelation (with people suggesting his racism tainted
his employer), and a heavy dose of dualism.
We should analyze this like we do rape culture: not only by the completed
cancelations, but by the culture of protecting and encouraging the bad actors.
there is a difference between Prudent speech and Free speech.
When punishment for voicing dissenting opinion includes physical assault it doesn't much
matter how rare the actual instances of physical violence are
Notable quotes:
"... Of course, it is not (yet) possible to determine the exact racism quotient of each individual, so exemplary cancellations are the means of influencing individuals to modify their behaviour. I appreciate that "racism quotient" and "exemplary cancellation" make me sound like one of those right-wing Orwell cosplayers, but I can't think of a better way of putting it. ..."
Cancel culture, I suggest, matters most when our ability to access diverse opinion is
curtailed as a result of speech policing, either by algorithms or individuals, especially in
the run-up to an election. Self-censorship in universities is equally important. When Chomsky
signed the Harper's letter, he reported he receive a great many letters of support from
academics terrified of being cancelled.
We're coming out of a certain kind of (neo-)liberal consensus in which politics was viewed
as a mostly technocratic business of setting laws in the abstract. That perspective was
sufficient to get some things right: many blatantly discriminatory laws have been repealed
across the Western world over the last 70 years. But it turns out that racism and sexism
don't require explicitly racist or sexist laws on the books: they can subvert neutral-seeming
laws to their purposes, and can bias the behaviour of individuals and networks of individuals
to the extent that widespread discrimination can continue...
The other strand focuses on the moral reform of white people. It proceeds from the
assumption that the law has only a limited role in moral conduct, and that the evidence of
the last 50 years is that removing explicitly racist legislation, and even legislating
anti-racism (e.g. affirmative action) isn't enough to secure good outcomes. If your
individual acts have the practical outcome of furthering or defending racist interests, then
you are part of the problem. The demands here are much harder to define. Rather than focusing
all attention on a specific reform that can be enacted in a single moment by an executive or
legislature, attention is cast broadly across all actions occurring at all times by all
people. Of course, it is not (yet) possible to determine the exact racism quotient of
each individual, so exemplary cancellations are the means of influencing individuals to
modify their behaviour. I appreciate that "racism quotient" and "exemplary cancellation" make
me sound like one of those right-wing Orwell cosplayers, but I can't think of a better way of
putting it.
All of this intersects with the modern reality of social media: things that "normal"
people might be able to say in a bar or a cafe discussion with friends or colleagues are now
part of the permanent public record, searchable and viewable by millions. Social media
provides excellent tools both for taking things out of context and re-contextualising them.
Secondly, "brands" or organisations are now direct participants, and can be subject to public
pressure in much more visible ways than previously.
I'm a big fan of biological metaphors; they keep one humble about the inevitability of
unintended consequences. The metaphor gets strained when it moves from external viral spread
to internal immune response, though; in the former, we're assuming a team of informed medical
professionals, seeing things from the "outside" with the authority implied by specialized and
objective knowledge. I'm not sure who these people correspond to in the world we inhabit,
where even the real doctors have trouble getting traction.
The internal immune response feels like a closer match, as surface protein markers are
proxies for identity, microbes display "false flags" to avoid detection, and auto-immune and
inflammatory responses often do more damage than the threats they're reacting to.
On both levels of metaphor, it seems clear that the structure of social media is explicitly
designed to create and exploit "virality"; we need to rethink what this means for us.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/29/social-distancing-social-media-facebook-misinformation
" No one seems to reflect here that silencing people because of their politics is
historically and usually the preserve of those with the power to silence – that is,
conservatives. Be careful what you wish for."
And here we have the cancel culture "problem" in a nutshell. The complaint isn't that
Musgrave lost a job or is literally forbidden to speak or even lacks reasonable ways to be
heard. The complaint is that blog found him distasteful and doesn't want him commenting
there. This isn't a right to speak issue, it's a demand to be heard issue.
Far worse things are done to BLM protesters. Being denied a blog posting? Try being denied
the right to even assemble, and shot with tear gas and rubber bullets. That didn't stop me
from protesting. Being denied a blog post and hearing some harsh criticism is nothing.
I broadly agree with the points about free speech in the post, and Waldron's arguments,
but I don't think it's right to equate the debate about "cancel culture" with these
issues.
John's understanding of it is even more dismissive (and imo off-target).
being cancelled means having to read rude things said about you by lots of unimportant
people on Twitter, as opposed to engaging in caustic, but civilised, debate with your peers
in the pages of little magazines
It seems to me cancel culture is both an ethos and a tactic. The ethos involves a zero
tolerance approach to certain ethical transgressions (eg overt expressions of racism) and an
absolute devaluation of people who commit them. The tactic is based around achieving cultural
change by exerting collective pressure as consumers on managers of corporations (or
corporation-like entities, like universities) to terminate transgressors, as a way of
incentivising other emplpoyees to fall into line. It seems to me to be heavily shaped by and
dependent on American neoliberalism as the ethos is both punitive and consumerist and the
tactic is dependent on at-will employment and managers' deference to customer sentiment, and
while most of its current "successes" have been broadly of the Left there's no reason to
assume that will be the case in future. I think it does represent a weakening of liberal
norms of freedom of discussion and I think Chomsky's right to be concerned.
There's nothing new about speech codes. Puritans and others refused to employ the Book of
Common prayer demanded by the Act of Uniformity of 1662. Scolds and speech police can be
found among agnostics, people of faith, and across the political spectrum. Nor is the common
sense exercise of good judgement regarding when, or if, to suggest to a friend he, she, or
they might like to lose a little weight, or to refrain from pointing out the questionable
personal grooming habits of a colleague, client, superior, or family member.
Do I need to declare my beliefs and opinions on every topic freely in every forum. In my
own case, no. And there's a big difference between being shunned and being imprisoned, or
executed, for mocking the wrong text or monarch.
As I courtesy, I might well avoid broaching topics I'm aware may distress another. But
that's a far cry from what's happening in modern old media. Bari Weiss evidently had her
privileges to write and edit others freely severely curtailed. And, yes, I'm aware that she
had cancellation issues of her own. But forcing James Bennett to resign, who put Ta-Nehisi
Coates on the cover of the Atlantic, for permitting a US senator to publish an op-ed in the
NYT?
We need a diverse set of values and beliefs, argues Henry, J. S. Mill, and others. The
head of Google is just now trying to explain why "Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze,
Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent,
Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews" somehow disappeared from the Google search
engine.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/29/google-ceo-dodges-question-on-blacklisting-of-conservative-websites/
Cancel culture, I suggest, matters most when our ability to access diverse opinion is
curtailed as a result of speech policing, either by algorithms or individuals, especially in
the run-up to an election. Self-censorship in universities is equally important. When Chomsky
signed the Harper's letter, he reported he receive a great many letters of support from
academics terrified of being cancelled.
When punishment for voicing dissenting opinion includes physical assault it doesn't much
matter how rare the actual instances of physical violence are. I spoke with an American
colleague employed this week who stated that any dating which is going on among staff and
adults of one kind or another on campus is done in secrecy, if at all. Do Democrats feel that
they're better off having thrown Al Franken under the bus?
Adhering to speech codes and surrendering to a tiny, highly vocal mob seems a very bad
idea to me, and I suspect, many, many others. We don't quite know what to do with the
screaming adolescents of varying ages, but we wish they'd stop yelling.
The good news is that we live in societies, for the most part, which permit the upset to
act out freely. I wonder whether the folks currently trying to burn down the US federal
courthouse in Portland believe their rights to privacy must be respected? The
double-standards on display roil what should be reasonable debate. It should be possible to
disagree civilly with anyone.
Trying to get someone fired, or shunned, for any reason, is about the saddest waste of
energy and time I can imagine – I mean, talk about a poverty of imagination. It's
happened to me here on occasion. When the pitchforks come out, I know my opponents 'got
nothing.' That's small solace, however, when watching those I'd prefer to respect do their
best to stifle debate.
Relative to other nations, we enjoy liberties others can only dream of. These liberties
are worth protecting. I'm not sure we're doing such a good job.
With all due respect, you – like the great majority of people – fail to
understand the dynamics involved. 'Cultural Marxism' isn't political Marxism. It is a method
– a tool if you wish – used by the oligarchs who wield true power to 'divide and
rule' (not least by deflecting attention from the yawning gulf that lies between their own
excesses and monstrous wealth on the one hand, and the increasing indigence of the great mass
of people on the other). It is called 'Cultural Marxism' purely because it uses Marx's
technique of dividing society into a small clique of 'oppressors' and 'the masses' who are
'oppressed'. Marx, of course, had the capitalists in mind when he wrote of the oppressors,
and the proletariat naturally were the oppressed.
Today, the last thing the oligarchs desire is a unified and organised proletariat with
'agency': that would constitute a serious threat to their existence. Instead, they divide the
sacred role of 'the oppressed' into a multitude of more or less fissiparous groups, whom we
are all aware of, but of which those comprising 'BAME' are perhaps the most useful. Others
include feminists (more or less all young women in today's world), homos, those suffering
from sexual dysphoria (that's 'trannies' in today's 'Newspeak') and the disabled.
These groups will never discover any common ground between themselves, and thus will fight
among themselves for the scraps thrown from the oligarchs' table. No danger there, and that's
just how they planned it. As for the 'oppressors', there are no prizes for guessing that they
are White, heterosexual (i.e. normal) males.
So much for your fear of actual Marxism. As for 'the government', it is important to
understand that no government in today's West is invested with any meaningful power. Not only
are they not 'sovereign' but they are little more than puppets, dancing to their masters'
dismal tunes.
Who are these oligarchs – these Masters of the Universe? That's a story for another
day. But you won't go far wrong if you place the word 'oligarchs' in triple parentheses
An important problem is the conflation of public opprobrium actual sanctions like being
fired. This is mainly a problem in the US because of employment at will
No. The cancel culture is just a new incarnation of the old idea of religious and
pseudo-religious (aka Marxist or Maoist) "purges". A new flavor of inquisition so to speak.
The key idea here is the elimination of opposition for a particular Messianic movement, and
securing all the positions that can influence public opinion. As well as protection of own
(often dominant) position in the structure of political power (this was the idea behind Mao
"cultural revolution")
You probably can benefit from studying the mechanic of Stalin purges. Mechanisms are the
pretty similar ("History repeats ", etc) .
If opposition to the new brand of Messianism is suppressed under the smoke screen of
political correctness, the question arise how this is different from Stalinist ideas of
"Intensification of the class struggle under socialism" and Mao Red Guards excesses (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensification_of_the_class_struggle_under_socialism
)
You can probably start with "Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the
Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes)"
A new book which waits for its author can be similarly titled "Policing US neoliberalism :
Repression and Social Order in the USA 1980-2020") ;-)
Here is one thought-provoking comment from the Web:
GeeBee, August 1, 2020 at 7:42 am GMT
The government will eventually be Marxist
With all due respect, you – like the great majority of people – fail to
understand the dynamics involved. 'Cultural Marxism' isn't political Marxism. It is a method
– a tool if you wish – used by the oligarchs who wield true power to 'divide and
rule' (not least by deflecting attention from the yawning gulf that lies between their own
excesses and monstrous wealth on the one hand, and the increasing indigence of the great mass
of people on the other).
It is called 'Cultural Marxism' purely because it uses Marx's technique of dividing
society into a small clique of 'oppressors' and 'the masses' who are 'oppressed'. Marx, of
course, had the capitalists in mind when he wrote of the oppressors, and the proletariat
naturally were the oppressed.
Today, the last thing the oligarchs desire is a unified and organised proletariat with
'agency': that would constitute a serious threat to their existence. Instead, they divide the
sacred role of 'the oppressed' into a multitude of more or less fissiparous groups, whom we
are all aware of, but of which those comprising 'BAME' are perhaps the most useful. Others
include feminists (more or less all young women in today's world), homos, those suffering
from sexual dysphoria (that's 'trannies' in today's 'Newspeak') and the disabled.
These groups will never discover any common ground between themselves, and thus will fight
among themselves for the scraps thrown from the oligarchs' table. No danger there, and that's
just how they planned it. As for the 'oppressors', there are no prizes for guessing that they
are White, heterosexual (i.e. normal) males.
So much for your fear of actual Marxism. As for 'the government', it is important to
understand that no government in today's West is invested with any meaningful power.
Not only are they not 'sovereign' but they are little more than puppets, dancing to their
masters' dismal tunes.
Who are these oligarchs – these Masters of the Universe? That's a story for another
day. But you won't go far wrong if you place the word 'oligarchs' in triple parentheses
PS likbez@46 reminded me of a line from the movie Reds. Warren Beatty's John Reed spoke of
people who "though Karl Marx wrote a good antitrust law." This was not a favorable comment.
The confusion of socialism and what might be called populism is quite, quite old. Jack
London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War that the
normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the middle class
paradise of equal competition. It wasn't conspiracies.
likbez 07.29.20 at 3:30 pm
@steven t johnson 07.29.20 at 3:14 pm (51)
Jack London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War
that the normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the
middle class paradise of equal competition.
I think the size of the USA military budget by itself means the doom for the middle class,
even without referring to famous Jack London book (The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell 's
biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four.).
Wall Street and MIC (especially intelligence agencies ; Allen Dulles was a Wall Street
lawyer) are joined at the hip. And they both fully control MSM. As Jack London aptly said:
"The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist
class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it
serves it." ― Jack London, The Iron Heel
Financial capitalism is bloodthirstily by definition as it needs new markets. It fuels wars.
In a sense, Bolton is the symbol of financial capitalism foreign policy.
It is important to understand that finance capitalism creates positive feedback loop in the
economy increasing instability of the system. So bubbles are immanent feature of finance
capitalism, not some exception or the result of excessive greed.
"... Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, "democracy" NGOs and other groups since the 1980's. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US Constitutional order. ..."
"... Alicia Garza of BLM is also a board member or executive of five different Freedom Road front groups including 2011 Board chair of Right to the City Alliance, Board member of School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), Forward Together and Special Projects director of National Domestic Workers Alliance. ..."
"... The Right to the City Alliance got $6.5 million between 2011 and 2014 from a number of very established tax-exempt foundations including the Ford Foundation ($1.9 million), from both of George Soros's major tax-exempts–Open Society Foundations, and the Foundation to Promote Open Society for $1.3 million. Also the cornflake-tied Kellogg Foundation $250,000, and curiously , Ben & Jerry's Foundation (ice cream) for $30,000. ..."
"... That front since 2009 received $1.3 million from the Ford Foundation, as well as $600,000 from the Soros foundations and again, Ben & Jerry's ($50,000). ..."
"... And Garza's SOUL, which claimed to have trained 712 "organizers" in 2014, when she co-founded Black Lives Matter, got $210,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and another $255,000 from the Heinz Foundation (ketchup and John Kerry family) among others. ..."
"... Nigeria-born BLM co-founder Opal Tometi likewise comes from the network of FRSO. Tometi headed the FRSO's Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Curiously with a "staff" of two it got money from major foundations including the Kellogg Foundation for $75,000 and Soros foundations for $100,000, and, again, Ben & Jerry's ($10,000). Tometi got $60,000 in 2014 to direct the group . ..."
"... The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations. They described their role: "The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America." ..."
"... Notably, when we click on the website of M4BL, under their donate button we learn that the donations will go to something called ActBlue Charities. ActBlue facilitates donations to "democrats and progressives." As of May 21, ActBlue had given $119 million to the campaign of Joe Biden. ..."
"... What is clear from only this account of the crucial role of big money foundations behind protest groups such as Black lives Matter is that there is a far more complex agenda driving the protests now destabilizing cities across America. ..."
"... The role of tax-exempt foundations tied to the fortunes of the greatest industrial and financial companies such as Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg, Hewlett and Soros says that there is a far deeper and far more sinister agenda to current disturbances than spontaneous outrage would suggest. ..."
Color Revolution is the term used to describe a series of remarkably effective CIA-led
regime change operations using techniques developed by the RAND Corporation, "democracy" NGOs
and other groups since the 1980's. They were used in crude form to bring down the Polish
communist regime in the late 1980s. From there the techniques were refined and used, along with
heavy bribes, to topple the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union. For anyone who has studied
those models closely, it is clear that the protests against police violence led by amorphous
organizations with names like Black Lives Matter or Antifa are more than purely spontaneous
moral outrage. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are being used as a battering ram to
not only topple a US President, but in the process, the very structures of the US
Constitutional order.
If we step back from the immediate issue of videos showing a white Minneapolis policeman
pressing his knee on the neck of a black man, George Floyd , and look at what has taken place
across the nation since then, it is clear that certain organizations or groups were
well-prepared to instrumentalize the horrific event for their own agenda.
The protests since May 25 have often begun peacefully only to be taken over by well-trained
violent actors. Two organizations have appeared regularly in connection with the violent
protests -- Black Lives Matter and Antifa (USA). Videos show well-equipped protesters dressed
uniformly in black and masked (not for coronavirus to be sure), vandalizing police cars,
burning police stations, smashing store windows with pipes or baseball bats. Use of Twitter and
other social media to coordinate "hit-and-run" swarming strikes of protest mobs is evident.
What has unfolded since the Minneapolis trigger event has been compared to the wave of
primarily black ghetto protest riots in 1968. I lived through those events in 1968 and what is
unfolding today is far different. It is better likened to the Yugoslav color revolution that
toppled Milosevic in 2000.
Gene Sharp: Template for Regime Overthrow
In the year 2000 the US State Department, aided by its National Endowment for Democracy
(NED) and select CIA operatives, began secretly training a group of Belgrade university
students led by a student group that was called Otpor! (Resistance!). The NED and its various
offshoots was created in the 1980's by CIA head Bill Casey as a covert CIA tool to overthrow
specific regimes around the world under the cover of a human rights NGO. In fact, they get
their money from Congress and from USAID.
In the Serb Otpor! destabilization of 2000, the NED and US Ambassador Richard Miles in
Belgrade selected and trained a group of several dozen students, led by Srđa Popović,
using the handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, translated to Serbian, of
the late Gene Sharp and his Albert Einstein Institution. In a post mortem on the Serb events,
the Washington Post wrote, "US-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in
virtually every facet of the anti-drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of
opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. US
taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint
used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milošević graffiti on walls across
Serbia."
Trained squads of activists were deployed in protests to take over city blocks with the aid
of 'intelligence helmet' video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their
environment. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell
phones, would then overwhelm police. The US government spent some $41 million on the operation.
Student groups were secretly trained in the Sharp handbook techniques of staging protests that
mocked the authority of the ruling police, showing them to be clumsy and impotent against the
youthful protesters. Professionals from the CIA and US State Department guided them behind the
scenes.
The Color Revolution Otpor! model was refined and deployed in 2004 as the Ukraine Orange
Revolution with logo and color theme scarves, and in 2003 in Georgia as the Rose Revolution.
Later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the template to launch the Arab Spring. In all
cases the NED was involved
with other NGOs including the Soros Foundations.
After defeating Milosevic, Popovic went on to establish a global color revolution training
center, CANVAS, a kind of for-profit business consultancy for revolution, and was personally
present in New York working reportedly with Antifa during the Occupy Wall Street where also
Soros money was reported.
Antifa and BLM
The protests, riots, violent and non-violent actions sweeping across the United States since
May 25, including an assault on the gates of the White House, begin to make sense when we
understand the CIA's Color Revolution playbook.
The impact of the protests would not be possible were it not for a network of local and
state political officials inside the Democratic Party lending support to the protesters, even
to the point the Democrat Mayor of Seattle ordered police to abandon several blocks in the
heart of downtown to occupation by protesters.
In recent years major portions of the Democratic Party across the US have been quietly taken
over by what one could call radical left candidates. Often they win with active backing of
organizations such as Democratic Socialists of America or Freedom Road Socialist Organizations.
In the US House of Representatives the vocal quarter of new representatives around Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib and Minneapolis Representative Ilhan Omar are
all members or close to Democratic Socialists of America. Clearly without sympathetic
Democrat local officials in key cities, the street protests of organizations such as Black
Lives Matter and Antifa would not have such a dramatic impact.
To get a better grasp how serious the present protest movement is we should look at who has
been pouring millions into BLM. The Antifa is more difficult owing to its explicit anonymous
organization form. However, their online Handbook openly recommends that local Antifa "cells"
join up with BLM chapters.
FRSO: Follow the Money
BLM began in 2013 when three activist friends created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to
protest the allegations of shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin by a white
Hispanic block watchman, George Zimmermann. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi
were all were connected with and financed by front groups tied to something called Freedom Road
Socialist Organization, one of the four largest radical left organizations in the United States
formed out of something called New Communist Movement that dissolved in the 1980s.
On June 12, 2020 the Freedom Road Socialist Organization webpage states, "The time is now to
join a revolutionary organization! Join Freedom Road Socialist Organization If you have been
out in the streets this past few weeks, the odds are good that you've been thinking about the
difference between the kind of change this system has to offer, and the kind of change this
country needs. Capitalism is a failed system that thrives on exploitation, inequality and
oppression. The reactionary and racist Trump administration has made the pandemic worse. The
unfolding economic crisis we are experiencing is the worst since the 1930s. Monopoly capitalism
is a dying system and we need to help finish it off. And that is exactly what Freedom Road
Socialist Organization is
working for ."
In short the protests over the alleged police killing of a black man in Minnesota are now
being used to call for a revolution against capitalism. FRSO is an umbrella for dozens of
amorphous groups including Black Lives Matter or BLM. What is interesting about the
self-described Marxist-Leninist roots of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is not
so much their left politics as much as their very establishment funding by a group of
well-endowed tax-exempt foundations.
Alicia Garza of BLM is also a board member or executive of five different Freedom Road front
groups including 2011 Board chair of Right to the City Alliance, Board member of School of
Unity and Liberation (SOUL), of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), Forward
Together and Special Projects director of National Domestic Workers Alliance.
The Right to the City Alliance got $6.5 million between 2011 and 2014 from a number of very
established tax-exempt foundations including the Ford Foundation ($1.9 million), from both of
George Soros's major tax-exempts–Open Society Foundations, and the Foundation to Promote
Open Society for $1.3 million. Also the cornflake-tied Kellogg Foundation $250,000, and
curiously , Ben
& Jerry's Foundation (ice cream) for $30,000.
Garza also got major foundation money as Executive Director of the FRSO front, POWER, where
Obama former "green jobs czar" Van Jones, a self-described "communist" and "rowdy black
nationalist," now with CNN, was on the board. Alicia Garza also chaired the Right to the City
Alliance, a network of activist groups opposing urban gentrification. That front since 2009
received $1.3 million from the Ford Foundation, as well as $600,000 from the Soros foundations
and again, Ben & Jerry's ($50,000).
And Garza's SOUL, which claimed to have trained 712
"organizers" in 2014, when she co-founded Black Lives Matter, got $210,000 from the Rockefeller
Foundation and another $255,000 from the Heinz Foundation (ketchup and John Kerry family) among
others. With the Forward Together of FRSO, Garza sat on the board of a "multi-racial
organization that works with community leaders and organizations to transform culture and
policy to catalyze social change." It officially got $4 million in 2014 revenues and from 2012
and 2014, the organization received a total of $2.9 million from Ford Foundation ($655,000) and
other major
foundations .
Nigeria-born BLM co-founder Opal Tometi likewise comes from the network of FRSO. Tometi
headed the FRSO's Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Curiously with a "staff" of two it got
money from major foundations including the Kellogg Foundation for $75,000 and Soros foundations
for $100,000, and, again, Ben & Jerry's ($10,000). Tometi got $60,000 in 2014 to direct the group .
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization that is now openly calling for a revolution against
capitalism in the wake of the Floyd George killing has another arm, The Advancement Project,
which describes itself as "a next generation, multi-racial civil rights organization." Its
board includes a former Obama US Department of Education Director of Community Outreach and a
former Bill Clinton Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. The FRSO Advancement Project
in 2013 got millions from major US tax-exempt foundations including Ford
($8.5 million), Kellogg ($3 million), Hewlett Foundation of HP defense industry founder ($2.5
million), Rockefeller Foundation ($2.5 million), and Soros foundations ($8.6 million).
Major Money and ActBlue
By 2016, the presidential election year where Hillary Clinton was challenging Donald Trump,
Black Lives Matter had established itself as a well-organized network. That year the Ford
Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund
(BLMF), "a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for
Black Lives coalition" in which BLM was a central part. By then Soros foundations had already
given some $33 million in
grants to the Black Lives Matter movement . This was serious foundation money.
The BLMF identified itself as being created by top foundations including in addition to the
Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations. They described
their role: "The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to
organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and
immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national
conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America."
The Movement for Black Lives Coalition (M4BL) which includes Black Lives Matter, already in
2016 called for "defunding police departments, race-based reparations, voting rights for
illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a
universal basic income, and
free college for blacks ."
Notably, when we click on the website of M4BL, under their donate button we learn that the
donations will go to something called ActBlue Charities. ActBlue facilitates donations to
"democrats and progressives." As of May 21, ActBlue had given $119 million to the campaign
of Joe Biden.
That was before the May 25 BLM worldwide protests. Now major corporations such as Apple,
Disney, Nike and hundreds others may be pouring untold and unaccounted millions into ActBlue
under the name of Black Lives Matter, funds that in fact can go to fund the election of a
Democrat President Biden. Perhaps this is the real reason the Biden campaign has been so
confident of support from black voters.
What is clear from only this account of the crucial
role of big money foundations behind protest groups such as Black lives Matter is that there is
a far more complex agenda driving the protests now destabilizing cities across America.
The
role of tax-exempt foundations tied to the fortunes of the greatest industrial and financial
companies such as Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg, Hewlett and Soros says that there is a far deeper
and far more sinister agenda to current disturbances than spontaneous outrage would
suggest.
***
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in
politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics,
exclusively for the online magazine "New
Eastern Outlook" where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of
the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Home / Articles / Culture
/ How LGBT Nonprofits And Their Billionaire Patrons Are Reshaping The World CULTUREHow LGBT
Nonprofits And Their Billionaire Patrons Are Reshaping The World
Transgender ideology is being pushed on us by corporate interests through their
philanthropic arms. (By
Ink Drop/Shutterstock)
In an August 2018
New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, "Are today's donor classes solving problems or
creating new ones?" Kolbert describes a form of charity that aims to not just help people but
to improve them. This "improvement" aligns with the giver's particular vision of what
constitutes improvement, of course. And the people who need to be improved are treated as
children -- for whom the donor, naturally, gets to decide what is best.
Kolbert describes how this form of giving becomes exploitation. We might add: not just
exploitation, but elite-driven, highly self-interested social engineering. We see these
characteristics on brilliant display in the philanthropy behind the modern LGBT movement.
The gay-rights movements and organizations that emerged during America's sexual revolution
in the 1960s bear little resemblance to the behemoth LGBT NGO juggernauts operating today. What
started out as grassroots support for the legal and social acceptance of same-sex relations has
turned into an effort at full-blown social transformation, with the addition of a fetish of
adult men, known as transsexualism, to the LGB human-rights rainbow banner. Along with the
rebranding of transsexualism as transgenderism, this movement has also successfully normalized
disorders of sexual development, otherwise known as intersex conditions. We have come a long
way from Stonewall.
Perhaps the most insidious idea to be advanced under the LGBT banner today is the amorphous
concept of "gender identity." Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves with
respect to socially constructed sex-role stereotypes. But is not just a descriptive
term; it is also prescriptive -- one has the right, according to advocates, to force
others to recognize one's chosen identity. And one has the right to change one's body medically
so that it better maps on to one's gender identity. Given that the pharmaceutical lobby is the
largest in Congress, and given that some of the most important philanthropists behind the
modern LGBT movement have close ties to Big Pharma, this medical component is important to
note.
"Gender identity" and "transgender" ideology emerged on the Western cultural landscape not
more than a decade ago, but they have spread across the globe with the speed and ferocity of
the SARS COVID pandemic -- and they have created nearly as much havoc. Yet the massive
concomitant changes we have already seen in language, law, medical and crime statistics,
women's safety
zones , sports
, accomplishments and
educational
opportunities , the medicalization of healthy children's bodies ,
and K–12
curricula have not been driven by grassroots enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. They have been
driven by the philanthropic funding provided by billionaires who are themselves invested in
this radical ideology's greatest beneficiaries: Big Pharma. Many of the most important
philanthropists behind the transgender and gender-identity movements stand to make huge profits
from body dissociation and the commoditization of human sex into medical identities.
Take
Martine Rothblatt , a self-described transsexual and transhumanist who was the first
individual to create a legal document supporting the idea that feelings of dissociation from
our sexed bodies is normal. This legal document, later to become the International Gender Bill of
Rights , legally normalizes body dissociation. Rothblatt later went on to become the top
earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry, using his money and influence to promote the
ideology and normalization of transgenderism. He believes that sexual dimorphism is morally
equivalent to South African apartheid and must be dismantled.
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Jennifer Pritzker, along with his family, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has
poured huge sums of money into American institutions in order to advance the concept of body
dissociation under the euphemism of "gender identity." The Pritzker family has
made vast investments in the medical industrial complex.
In 2000, another billionaire, Jon Stryker, heir to a multi-billion-dollar medical
corporation, created another mammoth LGBT NGO, the Arcus Foundation. Stryker created such a
global goliath of philanthropic funding with the stocks from his medical corporation that he
had to create another organization to keep track of it all. In 2006 Arcus funded the creation
of MAP
, or Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that had
already developed as a way of insinuating gender identity and transgender ideology into the
culture.
Translation: A medical corporation with a vested interest in encouraging people to identify
as transgender is directly funneling money and assets to its philanthropic foundation so that
the foundation will do that encouraging on its behalf, thereby bringing more money and more
clients (for life) to that corporation.
Arcus has funneled millions into other philanthropy organizations, such as
Tides ,
Proteus and
Borealis . There is no way to track whether these organizations are using Arcus money for
the purpose of normalizing transgenderism, but one might surmise that the cause so dear to
Arcus's heart is not entirely ignored.
In 2015, together with the Novo Foundation, a philanthropic NGO run by Peter Buffet (son of
Warren, who helped launch the project with a
$90 million gift), Arcus
earmarked $20 million for transgender causes specifically. In 2018 Arcus funded the
Council For Global Equality , a
coalition of 30 U.S. groups advocating for inclusion of LGBT issues in foreign affairs and
development policies.
Whew. This is no small operation! And every Arcus grant is contingent upon the recipient's
affirmation of "diversity and inclusion policies" -- policies that, of course, very much
include the affirmation of gender-identity ideology and transgenderism.
Many more philanthropic actors are working to prop up the transgender and gender-identity
movements, including Tim Gill and his Gill Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society
Foundation. Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily
invested in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand
to benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the
fruit of their philanthropic activity.
It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the
American
Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional organization
representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is funded by
Arcus philanthropy. In 2005 the APA created INET, to help member psychological organizations
improve the well-being of sexual orientation and "gender diverse people." Prior to the addition
of gender identity and the arrival of Arcus money, the APA INET was solely focused on
LGB issues. In 2008 the
APA created the Task Force On
Gender Identity and Gender Variance , and in 2015 it developed guidelines to assist
psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and
trans-affirmative psychological practice with "transgender" and "gender non-conforming" people.
Psychologists were "encouraged" to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range
of variation viewed as healthy and normative.
Can democracy withstand such philanthropy-driven "encouragement"? Can there be genuine
democracy when, via the taxpayer-subsidized fig leaf of philanthropy, billionaires can so
quickly and easily dismantle the reality of biological sex by suborning charities, politicians,
researchers, and professional associations? We are in the midst of finding out.
Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, artist, and concerned citizen. She has
been following the money behind the transgender agenda for six years. She blogs atthe 11th Hour.
The Sex Reassignment Surgery market is worth USD $316.1 Million worldwide each year.
Stryker makes most of their money in cardiovascular, spines, orthotics etc. Arcus has donated
a lot of money to support a small market they are not a major play in.
But if we dig a little deeper, we find out that Stryker is *GASP* gay. Perhaps he gives
money to the LGBT community because it is his community?
My first thought was how much profit are we talking about. If the total world market is as
you say, then the profits are diminimus. The article then falls apart from a profit motive.
And we get back to the age old arguement based on personal animus.
My understanding of intersex anomalies is that it is in fact biologically based. Not
psychology based. But there are a lot of articles which challenge that understanding. So we
should still be open to finding out the underlying etimology. Because there is no question
that enough children are asserting that they are transgenders that those affected need
scientifically based answers.
And it is important to continue the search for the science involved. However to condem
everyone is not helpful. And it exacerbates the the divide between the us.
One other point. Other ancient cultures had members who would today be considered part of
the LGBTQ community. Native americans had a special term for someone who identified as a
different sex from their genitalia. A few of these cultures honored these individuals placing
them in high regard.
This is not a new phenomenon. And this community exists. Best we try to show some sympathy
and understanding. If there is wide spread abuse then parents and their children, should have
available all the fact based information and help that is possible.
Is the author contending that these foundations are spreading disinformation? If so that
should be the target of her investigation. It is clear from this and other articles that she
has disgust for the LGBTQ community. And thus is not an honest broker. This article appears
to be an answer in search for a question.
"Because there is no question that enough children are asserting that they are
transgenders that those affected need scientifically based answers."
Children asserting that they are transgenders before they have even experienced puberty
only means they have been influenced by others. Keep in mind that sexual urges are not even
experienced until puberty. So how would they even know? Steering a child towards
transgenderism is child abuse.
Let me get personal. My father who is now 102 is as right wing as one can get. And all his
life. When his nephew transgendered to a women he was surprisingly empathetic. In talking to
him he told me the account of a family in his small town when he was young.
The family had two boys, twins. They both at a very young age exhibited great interest in
dressing up with their sister's clothes. And other displays that were feminine in nature.
The father was directed by his minister , the school principal, and local neighbors to
correct this terrible set of circumstances. The boys were of course bullied. Being unable
himself to make strides, one night he put a bullet in the boys' heads , the sister's head,
the mother's head and finally his head. This was something that stayed with my father for 80
years or more.
So when he saw his nephew dressed as a girl he was very kind to her. And both the twins
and his nephew began to exhibit the traits at a very young age.
I likewise in my profession I represented many men who transitioned to women. One question
came up. Why do men have nipples?The answer is interesting.
So personally I have seen very young children with this issue. I do agree that parents
should seek guidance from reliable experts. It is for sure you are not one of those
experts.
I would never be disrespectful to any gay or transgender. But there are many pre-puberty
boys that play with dolls who are normal and are not gay. They will know one way or the other
once they go through puberty. I believe people are either born gay or there is something that
occurs physiologically after birth that causes them to be gay. People who want to transition
to the other sex are gay or bi-sexual. People who are not gay or bi-sexual would not want to
transition to the other sex. To heterosexuals, the very thought sexual relations with someone
of their sex is repulsive. Its the very definition of heterosexual. The very thought of
transitioning to the other sex and then having sex relations with those of their current sex
would also be repulsive.
People who try to steer children to transition to the other sex are child abusers. Let the
children grow up and decide for themselves.
Ohhh stop. Entirely false. Those who manage to navigate their psycho-emotional issues to a
normal status just don't get the press. Like any intrapersonal struggle -- it's hard work and
then after that it is hard work.
The real issue here is that the state has no business interfering in the rearing of
children. Parents decide the nature of child rearing. And that includes the peculiar notion
of children who think they are cat when in fact they are dogs.
Look what one chooses for a life as an adult is their choice. But until then -- as long as
mom and dad are footing the bill --- minus some abuse and i reject the caterwauling that
therapy to challenge some aberrant behavior is abusive -- ten parents manage their families
as they desire said family to be.
Then no doubt you can document many hundreds of stories of children and teens who were
entirely comfortable in their birth gender and yet were forced by their parents to
transition.
if under ideological influences that do not emulate the child's 'best interests'
if ethically unsound for the medical team to participate in
if there are financial conflicts of interest
SO, be sharp about all this. AC - if they want to harp on this issue - needs to research
and publish a guide to
understanding coercion (including developmental issues of childhood that inform how they
can be SO EASILY coerced); understanding 'best interests' (for the child) of importance to
social services, court proceedings, etc; understanding health professional codes of ethics
and hospital/health system codes; understanding how to assess possible COI.
AC should GET SERIOUS about this - in these specific ways - or stop harping and harping
and harping on it!
Jeepers honey poo poo! Get serious and stop being stupid.
That's not true. There are many heterosexual men who are aroused by thinking of themselves
as *pubescent" girls. There are entire genres of porn and Subreddits devoted to it. They want
women (and girls) to validate them as women. We see evidence of this every day. In fact, a
group of gender critical feminists keep track of this at "itsafetish" on said.it
. They had several thousand examples on the Reddit group, but that was banned because talking
about autogynephilia in an attempt to defend little girls from you-know-who's tampon advice
in the bathroom was considered "hate speech." Apparently, taking your photo in the women's
bathroom and talking to 12-year-old girls about tampon use is just fine, but reporting it is
bigoted.
The question I have is, why is the mind or will supreme here? Why is the body deemed to be
of so little importance that it can be sliced up and chemically altered? Aside from a very
small number of people whose bodies are truly ambiguous, why is the body held to be of less
value than the mind? We all know that the human mind can get pretty messed up, for a variety
of reasons.
Well, when the go through puberty, whatever they were thinking before will becomes
irrelevant. If they turn out to be gay, they may want to transition to the opposite sex. If
they are not gay, they will not want to do that unless they become brainwashed.
Blanchard's work is far from universally accepted, and in any case you might not want to
make him a hero figure for the anti-trans movement. He is on record as supporting
reassignment surgery as a treatment option, and publicly funding it.
Yeah.
When I was seven, I wanted to be Godzilla.
I LOVED Godzilla.
I used to make little buildings out of cardboard boxes, and smash 'em up while trying to
imitate the Godzilla roar.
But I think I'd be kinda pissed if someone had surgically attached Godzilla spines to my back
and grafted a tail to my coccyx and sharpened my teeth.
Childhood imagination never justifies surgical mutilation.
Transgender is an adjective, not a noun. Gender dysphoria is not contagious and not
subject to the influence of others. Moreover, sexual attractions are irrelevant to the issue
of gender.
Gender identity is formed by about age two. When gender and natal sex are incongruent
children will insist that they are their gender. It affects about 2% of all children. It will
resolve in 75% of that 2%. Only the most acute cases will ever transition (those who are in
severe distress).
Other than aggressive pediatric cancers, there is no condition that is more life
threatening for a child than acute gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is most definitely subject to the influence of others. That's what Lisa
Littman's work on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is about. Hundreds of transactivists sent her
rape and death threats to try to silence her.
More "life threatening for a child?" Go to Transgender Trend, which debunks the weak,
highly flawed study that made this claim. I see children being made infertile for the rest of
their lives and being mutilated a la Jazz Jennings so a bunch of adult heterosexual males
with autogynephilia can get their paraphilia affirmed.
This is the most dangerous movement in my lifetime.
Littman's study resulted in the publisher, PLOS-ONE, issuing a formal correction, an
apology and a revised article (which they felt would be more effective than a retraction).
All of the links are here:
https://croak.us/301phQy
The reason this was done is because Littman did not study any transgender kids. Her
subjects were anonymous parents culled from equally anti-trans websites.
Furthermore, the quality of life of transitioned youth with non-transitioned youth have
been studied at great length. The leading researcher is Kristina Olson at U/Washington. In
2018 she won the NIH's Waterman Prize and received a substantial MacArthur "genius"
grant.
It's the same sort of junk science trotted out a few years ago which purported to "prove"
that same sex marriage was bad for kids and which was also used to make six day creationism
look like a scientific controversy.
If you suspect any child abuse report it! Simple! It is not a political issue if possible
abuse is in front of you. If you think a licensed medical provider or hospital is practicing
abuse file complaints with the licensing board of the provider and against the hospital's
accreditation. Stop whining about it: make complaints if you believe what you say you
believe.
Intersex conditions are - generally - genetically impelled: genetic information translated
through physiological building of the person's anatomy. Everyone has different anatomy. E.g a
doctor told me that 'i have unusual ear canals'. You might have a very different nose (in
appearance, and in actual anatomy. And as any man - or many women - knows all penises look
different: long, short, fat, thin, veiny, smooth, hairy up the shaft, or not, etc. And
similar labia features, clitoris features, breast features are different, etc.
All women are 'this way' and all men are 'this way' is bogus BS. No two penises are alike
(unless you are identical twins, and then maybe not, too). Etc.
Similarly, genetic information is translated in many different ways into the building of
the anatomy and intersex persons are anomalies that fit in the clinical category 'intersex'.
There are, obviously, psychological, social, emotional sequelae of having 'un-unusual'
anatomy: fear, loathing, shock, disgust, etc. But any doctor, or any parent, who makes their
child feel or experience fear, loathing, shock and disgust for their bodies is not decent
parent! And any priest, pastor, preacher, imam, etc who makes any person feel fear, loathing,
shock, disgust, with their body is no one who should have such a spiritually important role
in the community. Similarly no one should be made to feel or experience fear, loathing,
shock, disgust, etc if they express that they may be gay or lesbian or bisexual. Of course a
parent - or priest, pastor, preacher, imam, etc - can - AND SHOULD say what the family or
faith community values and beliefs are about that. But then let the child decide that they
believe.
What about a child who is intersex who is pressured to decide about something (typically a
surgical procedure to 'clarify' anatomy)? What about a child who may or may not be gay or
lesbian or transgender but are 'told' that they are by adults who may or may not be well
informed or who may or may not be overly influenced by some ideology? There could be 'child
abuse': if you believe that a parent, of religious leader, or doctor, or hospital is coercing
a child to make a choice that they don't want to make, or are developmentally poorly able to
make - too young, emotionally disturbed, adversely influenced by others, etc - make
complaints, file complaints with social services, with the doctor's licensing board, against
the hospital's accreditations.
For the record, gender confirmation surgery is difficult to obtain in the US. To qualify
an individual requires two behavior health referrals; one from a regular therapist and
another from a therapist not previously seen by the surgical candidate.
The individual must have at least one year of Real Life Experience, living as their
gender. Both the hospital and the surgeon must approve the procedure as well. I am reliably
informed that some hospitals require an interview before a decision board.
Then, of course, the cost is prohibitive for most transgender people who might otherwise
qualify unless they work for a large company that includes gender-affirmation in their health
insurance.
There are only a couple of states that make funds available through Medicaid.
The market value of these surgeries is irrelevant.
"It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the
American Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional
organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is
funded by Arcus philanthropy."
Coming in a lose second, millions of wealthy whites sitting siting in therapists offices
search for meaning and solution for the psychological and intellectual struggle that plague
us all ------ it ever amazes how the right to avoid being beaten up by police, equal access
to housing, employment, financial system, etc. ha taken a back set to the people.
973 APA Conference a day that should live in infamy.
America needs an examination and reformation of tax-exempt organizations across the board.
Too often these groups are simply attempting to force their views on the unwilling. While
individuals are losing their rights to all manner of activities once taken for granted in any
free society, these billionaire-funded boondoggles exist to coerce, brainwash and usurp the
power of individuals, including parenting and forcing individuals to pay for that which
violates their creed.
If these people want to "help" society so much, why the lynch pin of tax exemption? Huh?
True charity does not stop to consider the tax advantages, but chalk that up to my cynicism
towards these power mad, narcissistic perverts parading as humans. Pay up or shut up.
"America needs an examination and reformation of tax-exempt organizations across the
board. Too often these groups are simply attempting to force their views on the
unwilling."
Churches being foremost among them. I wouldn't be opposed to removing or reducing their
tax exemptions.
I'm more interested in the angle that big money is behind this than the angle that somehow
there's a profit motive behind it. If they were trying to push trans to make money, that
would be cynical but understandable. I don't think that's it, though.
Stryker at least is a son and grandson of enormous privilege with no achievements of his
own and who is intrinsically disordered sexually, He needs to do something, in his mind, that
counts as a achievement. Unfortunately, he chose poorly.
God have mercy on him. I couldn't have handled that kind of money and pressure to live up
either.
"Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily invested
in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand to
benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the fruit
of their philanthropic activity."
Yeah. All of the big money people are scrambling and scheming to get in on the medical
market for a condition which affects 0.6% of the population.
It affects a much larger percentage of the population now, and once you start mutilating
and drugging teenagers, you've got patients for life.
Lisa Littman, MD, found that the rate of "transition" was 70 TIMES HIGHER than chance
among girls whose friend groups had members who were identifying as transgender. This is
accounting for changes that would occur because it's now acceptable--she controlled for that
variable and found a rate that high.
And these girls start on drugs that may cause permanent infertility and get on wait lists
to have their breasts removed. You should read the stories of "detransitioners" from 4th Wave
Now. These poor young adults have so much regret, and then of course they're shunned and
harassed by the transgender cult--and silenced.
If this is not an argument for wealth distribution, I do not know what is. Here are people
with too much money and the right to spend it as they wish. Welcome to the Libertarian
paradise.
afer reading this article, I am not at all sure it matters at all. Seems the writer has a
thing about the'big bad' lgtb+ whatever community. The same arguments could be applied to
sports teams or churches, so who cares?
You don't care about men who get moved to women's prisons and then assault them? Go to
"Women are Human" for the latest tally of men abusing women in shelters, prisons, and yes,
bathrooms--HUNDREDS of stories in local media that the mainstream won't pick up because
they're afraid of being mobbed by transactivists.
Guess what? The parts AREN'T removed? Did you not know that? Holy crap.
These days you can have a beard and penis and be a heterosexual guy, and you can put on
some makeup (or not) and dress (or not) and call yourself a "trans woman." And make rape and
death threats to any woman (they don't care about the men) who challenges you. There are
THOUSANDS of examples of this. Do you really think women just go around making this up?
Somebody put together a compendium of just a day or so of rape threats against JK Rowling.
Sure, these are just nice gay men who want to present as women and want to be left
alone.....NO. That's the point. These are heterosexual predatory men who have hijacked the
language of civil rights, grossly insulting the sacrifice of millions of Americans who
actually fought and died for real civil rights, to enable their paraphilia. Full stop.
See above. Also go to "Women are Human," "Feminist Current," and "Transgender Trend," the
latter of which enlists scientists and clinicians in debunking many false claims of the
transactivist movement.
A few years ago on Rod Dreher's blog someone made this same point (that FTM is now
predominant) and I expressed skepticism. The person replied with links showing that they were
correct. My apologies that I don't have these to give you now.
Blanchard's argument was that transsexualism among men is based on the target of their
sexual attraction. Transsexualism among females was rare until the advent of Rapid Onset
Gender Dysphoria (see Dr. Lisa Littman's work, out of Brown University). Now it's rampant,
due to social contagion. Fortunately, there's been an upsurge in "detransitioning" because
teen girls have been staying at home and aren't as susceptible to the social contagion at
schools.
"... This book is like a bad date where the other person is accusing you of all of your failures, and when you try to make up, to do better, to understand more, to be fully engaged as an ally, you are continually pushed away. ..."
"... 99% of the problem is created by 1% of whites who other whites don't see. ..."
"... The same would be true for misogyny. 99% of rapes are caused by 1% of perps, and the 99% of innocent men don't see it because the perps aren't harassing them. ..."
"... This book is riddled with historical inaccuracies, such as black women being denied the vote until 1964, poor arguments, and a lack of any decent citations. This book did inspire me though. If something this bad can be published, anyone can write a book. ..."
"... According to this author, those that are identified as white (not necessarily those who identify AS white) are guilty of racism and must be prepared to be tongue-lashed by her. It is curious that somehow denigrating a person by their skin color is not racist when done by a person of the same appearance. It is a popular book for those that need more of a reason to feel bad about themselves. ..."
"... If you're seeking insight on how to understand and fight against escalating exploitation and oppression by the US ruling class, look elsewhere. This book is a polemic, a work of guilt-tripping ideology, given to sweeping and unsubstantiated statements about "white supremacy" and "racism". If this book were to use the religious language of the Puritans, "whiteness" would be the "original sin". ..."
"... DiAngelo, like Tim Wise, Cheryl Matias and others, is a professional race-baiting huckster. She makes a living traveling the country telling white people how awful they are, how morally superior she is, and how if white people pay ridiculously expensive fees to attend her lectures, they too can be a "good" white person like her. ..."
I am very reluctant to give
a negative review, especially when the author is trying to be helpful. In places the author has correctly diagnosed a number of
genuine problems.
Merely being non-racist isn't good enough, because you end up as a bystander when a bully is beating up on a victim; both covering
your eyes and ears and refusing to acknowledge what the victim (of racism) is telling you is happening to them.
If you haven't been a victim you cannot fully understand being a victim. If you haven't experienced the pervasiveness and constancy
of negative bias both coming from other groups and even influencing your own view of yourself – then you will never completely
comprehend. So in one respect a white person cannot truly say, "I get it."
Neither can you ever do enough to win a gold star and say you've done "enough" as long as racism exists.
It's like the Talmudic maxim: "you will never finish perfecting the world, but you are never free to stop trying."
If the book stopped there, it would be fine. Perhaps even excellent.
But I give this book one star because it makes the problem worse.
This book is like a bad date where the other person is accusing you of all of your failures, and when you try to make up, to
do better, to understand more, to be fully engaged as an ally, you are continually pushed away.
And then you are told to "breathe" and calm down. Surely you are getting upset and proving the thesis!
Except that's not what's happening.
Yes, whites don't see racism because they aren't a target of it. If you aren't a racist, then you don't hang around racists.
And if you aren't black then you don't have it hurled in your face. 99% of the problem is created by 1% of whites who other whites
don't see.
The same would be true for misogyny. 99% of rapes are caused by 1% of perps, and the 99% of innocent men don't see it because
the perps aren't harassing them.
So men need to listen without being defensive. Whites need to listen without being defensive. It's wrong to say, "But I'm not
doing it" as if that will make it go away.
But it's also wrong to say that the non-harassing men or the non-harassing whites are guilty BECAUSE of their innocence.
No, they aren't being bad. They are being clueless. And instead of being accused they need to be engaged.
Especially when they WANT to listen and be helpful.
In short, if someone wants to be your friend – let them.
This book doesn't invite engagement and doesn't let the non-involved to become involved in affirmatively fighting racism. It
turns a lot of would be allies away.
Ultimately, it's self defeating.
We need more people aware of racism. We need more people fighting racism. We need the majority engaged in helping the minority,
rather than being turned away.
I'd give this book five stars if it were half as long. But it's the flawed existentialism that makes this book a hindrance
to people who should be friends, and would be friends, if they were allowed to be. >
This book is riddled with historical inaccuracies, such as black women being denied the vote until 1964, poor arguments,
and a lack of any decent citations. This book did inspire me though. If something this bad can be published, anyone can write
a book.
According to this author, those that are identified as white (not necessarily those who identify AS white)
are guilty of racism and must be prepared to be tongue-lashed by her. It is curious that somehow denigrating a person by their
skin color is not racist when done by a person of the same appearance. It is a popular book for those that need more of a reason
to feel bad about themselves.
Ironically, the subject is timely and through reading other sources of information on institutionalized racism, I have noticed
many examples of this. The articles were well written and effective in that I was not made to feel that anything I did or said
was automatically suspect and therefore invalid. A state of paralysis is not one from which change can occur.
If you're seeking insight on how to understand and fight against escalating exploitation and oppression
by the US ruling class, look elsewhere. This book is a polemic, a work of guilt-tripping ideology, given to sweeping and unsubstantiated
statements about "white supremacy" and "racism". If this book were to use the religious language of the Puritans, "whiteness"
would be the "original sin".
As a Unitarian-Universalist I am appalled by such ideology because I am dedicated to our first principle -"the inherent worth
and dignity of every person", regardless of social status or category. This includes not just "people of color" but the legions
of "whites" who have suffered terribly despite the supposed safety net of "whiteness". Unfortunately, ruling class whites are
often condescending toward working class whites, and this book is no exception. When they are not ignored or treated rudely (DiAngelo)
they may be called names like "deplorables" (Hillary Clinton) or even then unbelievably insulting "white trash" (the title of
a book by Nancy Isenberg). And just think of all the derogatory names that are used for the homeless, who again are mostly white.
Here's an example of DiAngelo's rude disrespect: An Italian American explained "that once Italians were once considered black
and discriminated against, so didn't I think white people experience racism too?" (p. 12). Instead of acknowledging and honoring
the truth he spoke from his own lived experience, she changes the topic, accusing him of "refusing to examine his own whiteness
today". This is typical of the mental gymnastics that DiAngelo employs to evade the truths she hears that are "inconvenient" for
her ideology of "whiteness". In an earlier era Irish Americans could have said the same thing, and this has always been a felt-in-the-gut
truth for poor whites.
Although DiAngelo has an academic background, she unapologetically violates the canons of good scholarship, See, for example,
the third essay of Todd Eklof in "The Gadfly Papers", or the work of Johnathan Church, such as his article in Areo magazine on
how "white-fragility-theory-mistakes-correlation-for-causation". Instead she conveys an attitude of self-assured superiority,
a provocateur who declares herself to be proud of her "identity politics", dismissing criticism from "whites" as a product of
their "white supremacy" or "racism" and labeling it "white fragility". Brain-washed by such ideology, she is oblivious to how
insulting terms the like "white supremacy" fuel the cultural wars, hence political gridlock, hence giving a free reign to predatory
capitalism and escalating inequality.
DiAngelo never acknowledges how her ideology "whiteness" serves two unsavory political purposes. The most obvious one is to
divert attention from the color-blind nature of today's predatory capitalism – how vulnerable whites are targeted far more than
blacks simply because the whites have so much more to lose. The second becomes obvious once we reflect on the time-tested strategy
of ruling classes to stay in power by "divide and conquer" tactics aimed at the populace. In the US, "racism" itself was born
as such a construct in the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, serving to divide white and black workers and turning the latter
into dehumanized slaves. Today the cultural wars comprise a similar divide and conquer strategy, but this time dividing the white
ruling class from its working class to create political gridlock. Here I use the term "ruling class" in its broadest sense, as
roughly the top 10% to 20% of the population in income or wealth who have a college education, while using the rough definition
of "working class" as those without a college degree, or about 2/3 of the population. As we learned in 2016, the political consequences
can be dire indeed when progressives abandon their fundamental principles and the working class to embrace the self-serving strategies
of the ruling class. >
DiAngelo, like Tim Wise, Cheryl Matias and others, is a professional race-baiting huckster. She makes a living traveling the country
telling white people how awful they are, how morally superior she is, and how if white people pay ridiculously expensive fees
to attend her lectures, they too can be a "good" white person like her.
Why is it so hard to talk about race? Because any discussion where you are cast immediately as the villain likely isn't going
to be a very productive conversation.
What is white fragility? White fragility is standing up for yourself against unsubstantiated charges of racism. If a black
or brown person makes an ignorant statement regarding you, your family, your life's experiences or whatever, and you defend yourself
as any normal person would....well, that's white fragility. What you should be doing is to just take it. Admit you are born evil
as a member of a race of pale face demons and accept the charges that are being leveled against you. That's being woke!
You see, anti-racism activism used to be directed towards people who were......you know, racist? However, that changed over
the last couple decades as more virulent strains of post-modernism and cultural Marxism infected the movement. Now, the idea of
all white people being racist is championed and supported within the annals of academia. You don't have to nurse a hatred of black
or brown people to be racist. All you have to be is white. You have a plethora of extremely vague terms regarding supposed "systems"
and "structures" that are poorly defined and not nearly as well illustrated as intended. Indeed, the definition of racism was
surreptitiously changed to a "correct" redefinition of a whites-only enterprise of power plus privilege while other ideologies
such as feminism curiously maintained their original dictionary description.
Critical race theorists have insisted that white privilege, whiteness studies, etc. are not meant to foster a sense of a guilt
and shame amongst white people. It's blatantly clear when you peel back the layers that that is precisely the end goal. They tell
you that you - the individual white person - are part of the problem. You have to admit your original sin, and then you'll come
into the light. They don't do a very good job hiding their true intentions.
And what's up with so-called "allyship"? Allies are supposed to be members of a mutual pact, not a one-sided arrangement of
praise and apologies.
On the subject of fragility, I find it very amusing and ironic when you consider that if DiAngelo or Wise were to speak at
a college campus or university, they won't have to worry about a horde of angry white students disrupting their lectures, storming
the lecture halls, pulling fire alarms, drowning out the speakers with chants, etc. Fragility is rife on campus life these days.
Safe spaces, protests over racist incidents that turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the "victims", and so on. Who are the real
fragile ones here?
At the end of the day, DiAngelo's end goal won't be realized. Sure, coastal white liberals who are down with the cause might
think that people like her are creating change, but it's simply not working. Far too many white people whose lives aren't full
of ease and privilege will not take kindly to such dumb bigotry wrapped up in fancy academic terms. Critical race theory, like
so many related "isms" in the social justice lexicon, is simply building up its own funeral pyre. >
1.0 out of 5 stars
mostly worthless Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018 Awful. The author deludes herself, thinking her white and
black readers have no idea how to relate, live on different planets, and, that DiAngelo is required to be their guide. She acts
like African-Americans speak a different language. She doesn't understand the concept of individuality very well, either, gneralizing
about everyone. "African-Americans are sensitive about their hair." IF this book represents "progress," we're in bad shape. 839
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Nonsense Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2018 This book is for guilty feeling white folks and blacks who need
to gravitate to oppression. There is no white fragility. What leads people out of the left is commercial trash like this. There
is no fear in white or anyone else about anything. There is no open forum and there is no out let for an open discussion anyway.
The generalization is what allows whites to leave the left. There should be a book about racial healing and not foster disorder
by identity politics. >
1.0 out of 5 stars
Counterproductive to overcoming racism Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2019 The author of this book inadvertently
does a great job of showing the inherent racism, absence of logic and fact, insanity, self-righteousness, arrogance, and hypocrisy
of the viewpoint she is trying to sell.
First, I will give praise where it is due. I found the author's call to hear people out when they talk about how it feels to
be a minority in our country helpful and necessary. I also think her advice to really examine each of our own hearts when we are
confronted with another person offering criticism where our personal behavior toward people of color is insensitive, or revealing
of a feeling of superiority was very good.
The rest of the book, however, was bewildering. The author opens with an attack on all white people. She redefines racism as
something only white people can do. Whites are racist, not because of their thoughts or actions, but because of their very existence.
She says whites ordered their civilization primarily to place themselves in positions of power for the purpose of keeping people
of color down all over the globe. The author hates the two core beliefs that western civilization is built on – individualism
(the inherent value of the individual), and meritocracy (the idea that people should succeed based on talent and effort). She
says we will never be free of racism as she defined it, until we abolish these two core beliefs.
Naturally, not everyone is going to agree with a blanket application of guilt to all whites, or the author's view of history
(which is scantly substantiated), or view of western civilization (which many would view as having offered at least some good
things to the world). But if you disagree with any of this, you are said to be displaying your "white fragility."
The author lists many arguments that people have posed to her to demonstrate that they aren't racist, but are not acceptable
in her view. One of these is "I'm not racist because I'm married to a person of color." Unfortunately, the author says, that even
if you chose a person of color to be your life partner and have brought forth children of color into the world with them, you
are still a racist. As a white mother in a blended family, I would argue that many people view interracial marriage as one of
the best evidences of an integrated society that has got over its racism. The accusation that by my existence, I oppress my husband
and children is completely bizarre and hurtful. This is perhaps the most self-righteous, dictatorial, contradictory, blind, and
illogical thing in this book.
The author also talks a lot about how whites treat blacks like children who can't think for themselves. She references portrayal
of black characters in movies and TV as evidence. There is some justification for this, especially decades ago, but sensitivity
on this issue has improved a whole lot. Given her disdain for whites treating blacks like they can't think for themselves, I was
shocked when she chose to criticize Martin Luther King's famous quote: "I have a dream that my children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character." She said that the vision
of that great black leader is actually not the correct view. She explains that it only reinforces the core beliefs of western
society of individualism and meritocracy, which it turn keeps blacks down, and whites in power. It is absolutely arrogant and
hypocritical for this white author to say that Martin Luther King, who gave his life fighting for his vision, didn't really mean
what he said.
There are many other things in this book that are problematic, but those were the worst for me. I can only hope that most people
who read this book will see the hatred, racism, and self-righteousness that echo through every page. From the author's account
of her mission to share the message of collective white guilt and hatred of western society with others, it's not being well received.
And that's very, very encouraging. 516 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Shallow, repetitive and condescending Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2019
Verified Purchase DiAngelo spends much of this book re-defining both racist and white supremacist in broader non-standard
ways, then arguing that we live in a thoroughly racist and white supremacist world based on her definitions. She defines White
Fragility as anything short of enthusiastic agreement with all of her arguments, as if her understanding of things is objectively
true. She makes many assertions repeatedly, but she doesn't back them up with detailed supporting arguments. Question her, remain
silent, or leave the conversation and you're exhibiting your white fragility It's a neat rhetorical trick. Check out How to Be
an Anti-Racist by Ibrham Kendi for a much more thoughtful treatment of race issues. >
1.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect for the avarage whiny college liberal Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2019
Verified Purchase Probably has some important message, but I couldn't bear reading more than 70 pages, which, to be fair,
is more than half the book, but that's all I needed for my college class. Maybe more people would be interested in reading it
if the author used another title, and realized that insulting the people she was trying to help probably isn't the best course
of action. 283 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Nauseating Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2019 If you love looking at everything in the world through the lens of
race and racism, if you find race and racism endlessly fascinating, then you'll love this book. If you're one of the many who've
realized that there are more healthy ways of looking at life and more constructive ways to talk about how to get along, you'll
likely find this one of the most nauseating books ever written.
Robin DiAngelo is drunk on her own power as a "diversity trainer," and she won't rest until every last white person has admitted
their guilt and submitted to her authority. If you resist, if you show signs that you think her whole obsession is unseemly or
downright disgusting, it will only confirm that she is right about you and that your only hope is to admit your own hopelessness
and follow her down, down, down. For there is no uplift in this religion she and her fellow fanatics have created, there is only
an ever-growing awareness of guilt, and how our "white fragility" in the face of this guilt is our deepest sin.
Just take a look at some quotes from the book's first pages:
"(W)hiteness is at once the means of dominance, the end to which dominance points, and the point of dominance, too, which,
in its purest form, in its greatest fantasy, never ends" (ix).
Is this true? Well, you'll just have to take her word for it, she's the expert, unless your "white fragility" still won't let
you.
"(A)ny gains we have made so far have come through identity politics" (xiii).
Really? Tell that to Martin Luther King Jr, who spoke the language of common humanity and united decent people across the country
to demand equal rights for black people in America, well before the language of "identity politics" (which is purely group-based)
came into vogue.
Ironically, as an example of how great "identity politics" has been, she writes, "a key issue in the 2016 presidential election
was the white working class" (xiv), without noting that the left's promotion of "identity politics" is what caused these "white
working class" Americans, most of whom voted for Obama, twice, to finally start identifying with their own "white identity" and
vote for Trump.
She speaks of "white identity" and "the white voice" as if these are factual things that unite all "white" people, but, to
promote herself and the dire need of her book, says her own white voice is "one of the many voices needed to solve the overall
puzzle" (xv), because "racism is deeply complex and nuanced, and given this, we can never consider our learning to be complete
or finished" (xv) -- lucky for those like her who make a career out of promoting these toxic ideas, eh?
If you can still stomach it, I'll leave you with a few more choice nuggets from the Introduction, but I recommend you imagine
her reading them at you accompanied by a laugh track, which can actually make it kind of fun:
Ours is "a society in which racial categories have profound meaning" (xvi); North America is "deeply separate and unequal by
race" (1); "Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority, that we [white people] either are unaware of or can never
admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race," resulting in "behaviors such as argumentation, silence,
and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation" (2); "If, however, I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized,
I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth .Such moments can
be experienced as something valuable, even if temporarily painful, only after we accept that racism is unavoidable and that it
is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic racial assumptions and behaviors" (5); "I believe that white progressives
cause the most daily damage to people of color" because "our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain
to us how we do so" (5); "This book does not attempt to provide the solution to racism .My goal is to make visible how one aspect
of white sensibility continues to hold racism in place: white fragility" (5).
I think she takes the easy way out by telling stories of white people pounding their fist or getting upset when talking about
racism. I don't know if that happened but you can't take one individuals reaction and make it seem like it is how white people
react if the mention of racism comes up.
I can understand that she needs to sell books. I was just hoping for something different. 210 people found this helpful
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Pseudo intellectual book that is obviously flawed.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pseudo intellectual book that is obviously flawed. Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2020
Verified Purchase It only takes a few pages in this book to recognize that Ms. DiAngelo does not really understand what she
is talking about. I took detailed notes as I read about her logical fallacies, misunderstandings, etc. and every page is littered
with notes. This book is shockingly poorly reasoned and it is terrifying that enough Americans think this is a good book to move
it to the NYT best seller list. I wish I hadn't purchased the book as I hate to give credibility to the authors incompetence.
The author starts by demonstrating that she has no idea what the concept of "individualism" is. She argues that individualism
means thinking that racial groups and other groups do not matter. However, individualism is quite the opposite. Individualism
arose due to discrimination against people based on their religion, race, etc. and was the idea that we should not discriminate
against people based on their group category. Ms. Diangelo shockingly completely misunderstands this. Thus, every time she talks
about "individualism" I cannot help but facepalm because she sounds so foolish.
She also does not understand the fallacy of equivocation. She often throws out the word "racism" or "racist." However, the
power of the word "racism" comes from the definition where we define it as someone who dislikes another race. We rightfully judge
someone who dislikes another race to be evil. Ms. Diangelo seems to want to pull the power from this definition and then redefine
racism to be merely existing as a white person in our society. But, this does not work. In fact, her equivocation is in fact racist
(aka evil). She is trying to imply that merely existing as a white person means you are racist and thereby demean white people.
I could go page by page explaining her logical missteps, but that would take a whole book. Instead, I would suggest if you
do decide to read this book, turn on your critical thinking skills and really analyze what she is saying. You will be shocked
by how poorly reasoned this book is. 188 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
The worst book on race relations ever written. Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2018 When I read about how Blacks
oppress their own people and it benefits Whites, my stomach turned. Excuse me, as a White woman it is not to my benefit, to societies
benefit, and I'm not responsibility for the decisions of others. The book would have people believe Blacks are oppressed and it
is the fault of Whites. We have many successful Blacks in this country. A Black man was POTUS and the entire family is successful,
they are not alone. This book is inflammatory towards race relations. 308 people found this helpful
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It's repetitive and redundant, repetitive and redundant
1.0 out of 5 stars
It's repetitive and redundant, repetitive and redundant Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2019
Verified Purchase I'm going to forge on and try to finish this book. I'm in the second chapter and it is very repetitive and
redundant. Like another reviewer said, she paints a picture of damned if you do and damned if you don't. It's hard for me to keep
going because of her repetitiveness. 219 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Is there even a conversation? Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2020
Verified Purchase This book comes off as being enlightened, and I will admit that it draws attention to important matters
regarding race. My issue is that the author comes off as incredibly arrogant and the book sounds very self-congratulatory. For
example, she states "Because I am seen as somewhat more racially aware from other whites...." this comes off as both arrogant
and presumptuous. Even though she acknowledges her whiteness, it seems somewhat ironic that a white woman is writing an authoritative
text on race- talk about the white savior! I am interested in race studies, and I have encountered many texts that address the
issue of race and racism, which is an undeniably difficult topic, but those sources did not come off as arrogant and pedantic
as this. 183 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Oh look, more division Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2019 Probably shouldn't insult those you wish to share common
ground. Racism is wrong. Period. But the idea of insulting whites as "fragile" I get that's a spicy title to raise eyebrows but
in 2019, in a country where people of any race or ethnicity or sex can do basically anything in this country, why push this narrative
further?! We need to all unite. My dad did when he married a Hispanic immigrant and made me. Is my dad fragile? He's white. Is
he racist by default? The preconceived stereotypes here are egregious and inforgiveable. More click bait social media sensical,
identity political, trash. 261 people found this helpful
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How come she is a consultant and trainer on racial issues???
1.0 out of 5 stars
How come she is a consultant and trainer on racial issues??? Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2020
Verified Purchase As an Asian immigrant who grew up in Europe and who have recently relocated to the USA, I find the racial
division of "white" and "people of color" ridiculous and discriminatory. This kind of division invalidates people's personal experiences.
I find it WRONG to be put in the same category as African Americans, Asian Americans or Latin Americans who were born and raised
in the US!
Mrs. Robin DiAngelo and her points of view only consolidate this wrong categorization. At the beginning of the book, she states
that "white" people get their "white supremacist" ideas from mainstream media. And then, in the end, she advises them to seek
out information on the racial topic "from books, websites, films, and other available sources."
Moreover, she continuously proved herself as an ignorant, racist person. How come she is a consultant and trainer on racial issues???
173 people found this helpful
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Cult indoctrination for those unwilling think forbidden thoughts
1.0 out of 5 stars
Cult indoctrination for those unwilling think forbidden thoughts Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2018 The racial
gap narrative takes a new low. The ever evolving progressive conspiracy theory to explain the black v. white attainment gap changes
again. It's no longer lack of access, it's no longer basic prejudice, instead it is now a cultural milieu that you can't ever
escape. Beg for forgiveness and flog yourself at the new church without salvation. A nation that benefits it's founding stocks'
values, the idea behind most all nation states, is now castigated. Well, who is this nation supposed to serve? The traditional
gate keepers don't hold weight anymore, the forbidden secrets why the world is the way it is are out there and these silly narratives
aren't going to last much longer. 274 people found this helpful
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The topic is one that we must be willing to explore, to engage in conversation about and to strive to be better, but what does
better mean? Diangelo argues that we as human beings all have prejudices, which is unavoidable. Also, that their effect on how
we consume and process information is also unavoidable. So then is better simply about outward behavior and our ability to actually
change how we think limited?
There are important points in this book that should be contemplated and drive understanding and awareness. Most notably, if
you grew up as part of the group that was in power (race, gender, religion, etc.) then you were conditioned to think of your group
as the norm and every other group as the exception. It is just like when you think everyone else has an accent, but you do not.
Likewise, those messages were reinforced in literature, art, movies, television and advertising. If you grew up not a member of
the group in power, those messages were relentless that you were not the norm or not the ideal. Think about what that does to
your psyche on either side of the equation.
The definition used in this book are that prejudice is at the individual level in the mind of a single person, which may or
may not be accompanied by an outward act driven by that prejudiced mindset called discrimination. Racism is when those prejudiced
thoughts, decisions and acts are committed overtly or tacitly by the racial group holding the power and form a systemic set of
challenges to anyone not in that group. This is all fine and a very logical definition set to explore the topic.
The shortcoming in the analysis of Diangelo is that she fails to articulate that by her own premise that everyone has inescapable
prejudiced thoughts by virtue of being a human being, that any racial group who happens to be in a position of power is therefore
inescapably going to be racist. She says that any group other than whites cannot be racist because they do not have the power.
However, in doing so she disregards the work of Pierre Bourdieu's, which she leverages in chapter 7 as he asserts that "field",
the social context including who has power and who does not, is not a universal homogenous force, but rather has macro and micro
fields in which different groups have the power in different settings. Therefore, by her own definitions, there would be macro
and micro fields of racism benefitting whichever race is in power in that field setting.
By failing to hold true to her own premises, she relegates racism to a white problem rather than to human problem. In doing
so her writing style is often accusatory, argumentative, pandering and self-fulfilling in that if you want to explore her assumptions,
premises and context, then you are labeled a racist. This is very much in the style of the cable news network echo chamber where
a real dialogue cannot exist because you are shouted down at the slightest sign of anything less than 100% agreement. Further,
rather than exploring deeper into these topics, Diangelo stretches about 20 pages of content into 154 pages through exponential
repetition of the same few points and lists of examples of racism, results of racism and assumptions underlying racism, which
are also bloated with repetitive remarks.
The issue isn't white fragility, it is human fragility in that we as humans are predisposed to attribute success to our own
efforts and failures to outside forces and likewise the failures of others to their efforts, yet their successes to outside forces.
Anything that challenges this way of thinking strikes at human fragility regardless of your race. 163 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth reading Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2019
Verified Purchase This book was poorly reasoned, without any references or factual backup for what are essentially her personal
opinions. 188 people found this helpful
The Washington Post has settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit filed by Covington
Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann for an undisclosed amount, after the teen claimed
the left-leaning news outlet 'led the hate campaign' against him following a racially charged
January, 2019 incident at the March for Life Rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
Sandmann was viciously attacked by left-leaning news outlets over a deceptively edited video
clip from the incident, in which the teenager, seen wearing a MAGA hat, appeared to be mocking
a Native American man beating a drum (a known political grifter who
lied about the incident , and
stole valor ).
The following day, a longer version of the video revealed that Sandmann did absolutely
nothing wrong - as the Native American, Nathan Phillips, aggressively approached Sandmann and
beat a drum in his face.
In a tweet on his 18th birthday, Sandmann wrote "On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation
lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit."
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
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Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
Sandmann is also suing ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC Universal.
The kid needs to add NPR to his hit list. Their reporting of it made me permanently
stop listening to that channel (in a vain attempt to hear both sides of the narrative,
you know give the MSM a chance to be honest etc). Good on him for suing and winning
because that's the only way we'll be able to get rid of the drivel that calls itself news
these days.
ay_arrow
VideoEng_NC , 9 minutes ago
Every one of these news sources is screwed, it's going to be euphoric knowing each
judgment means their accounting dept has to cut a fat check. Nick, don't forget the
individuals on the list like Sen Warren & Ellen. Redistribute their wealth to your
account young man, tell em' it's for a cause they should be supporting.
y_arrow
Mzhen , 22 minutes ago
A Washington Post reporter was retweeting the viral video clip by 8:00 a.m. the next
morning. The first Washington Post story was being published online that day (Saturday)
at the same time a group of about 60 Indians was descending on the Bascilica of the
National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with the intention of disrupting the mass
and reading their list of "demands," which included college educations being denied to
Nick and his classmates.
The Post really played up the anti-Catholic angle in ensuing stories. So if there was
email coordination between the Indian march organizers and the Post , they couldn't
afford to have it come out in discovery.
play_arrow
nsurf9 , 30 minutes ago
His lawyers should have required WaPo publish an apology and name those on its staff
that were responsible for their intentional libel - in bold, headline font - right on its
figging FRONT PAGE - FOR A SOLID MONTH !
I am not Black, and I have never been a professional sports fan. I did enjoy high school
sports when I was in high school. It wasn't tainted by money, just home-town pride. I can still
feel the pride I felt when my home-town team took a state baskeball chanpionship my senior yar.
We had no star players. We had a group of boys who were good friends of us and of their
teammates. We could honelstly say we won that chanpionship becaue of TEAMWORK. No player was
paid or recruited. They were just good friends of each other. No one tried to be the star
player.
As for the taking the knee to the national anthem, I'm going to blame that on school
districs all across the country. I was teaching when it became the norm for public schools
either to stop asking students to stand and say the "Pledge of Allegiance" or to allow those
who did not want to stand and say it to remain seated.
I can't tell you how much that angered me. I always stood and said it and stared at each one
who did not stand and say it--looking at each one of them one at a time.
I am the proud grandchild of Germans from Russia immigrants. They were called "Dirty
Russians" and were often paid less than the law required for their stoop work thinning beets in
the fields becaue they could not read English to learn how much they were supposed to be paid.
They had escaped the Bolsheviks who stole their farms for the failed communist experiements in
factory farming and communal farming. They endured the prejudice with dignity and with a
determination that they would work hard so their children and grandchildren could enjoy the
freedoms of the USA. I have the photos of my grandparents on my mom's and my dad's side as they
obtained their citizenshp.
I know my ethnic group or racial heritage did not come out of slavery, but neither did my
families' ethnic groups have many thousands of white young men fighting and dying to abolish
slavery and thus allow expslaves and their descendants to obtain citizenship.
I know that the Blacks did have to fight hard to grasp those freedoms. But I also know that
many caucasian people fought alongside them to do that.
Why aren't the Blacks in the cities like Chicago and Milwauki and New York, for example,
working hard to get rid of the leadership in those cities that do nothing really to improve
conditions for the Black minorities in those cities. And why aren't their Black leaders giving
them examples or setting up good systems for them to do that rather than just encouraging them
as they riot and complain?
I do know it's not a simple thing to acieve, but I have seen little progress since the
powerful "I have a Dream" speech except, perhaps, in reagard to many Black families who have
taken the leap to leave the cities and move to smaller towns and cities and beccome part of the
middle class.
I worked once in Indianapolis as a humane educator for the city's Humane Society. The state
had mandated that every child in public schools in that state had to have one lesson in humane
education each year. We were always at some public school giving one of oour prepared programs.
What surprised me were the many Black children in the majority Black schools who would scream
with fright when I brought our mascot bassett hound to a program. He was the least frightening
example of a dangerous dog one could find. I learned from the teachers it was because the Black
parents kept alive in their children the stories of Black runaway slaves being shased down by
whites with tracking dogs.
This was in the mid-seventies and in Indianapolis. I don't know what that experience says in
regard to today's topic. But maybe it's part of the lesson that at some time, people of all
colors need to leave the past in the past.
Off topic: LJ, I watched Pulp Fiction when it came out in our local theater surrouned by
some evil looking bikers. I had been the designated mother to take three teenaged boys to that
movie who were not quite old enough to be let in without an adult. Those boys did not want to
be embarrassed by having a mommie there, so the sent me back to a row further back in the
theater. Some late coming bikers came in and sat all around me. It was quite an experience.
They were taking it very seriously, not seeing the dark "humor" I was seeing.
Corporations that provide generous donations and free propaganda to keep all the social
justice warriors in business have one goal in mind---keeping the supply of cheap foreign labor
freely available to them whether those foreign workers are in China or are here in the USA
legally or illegally.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A
most dangerous book
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2019
Verified Purchase
I'm on a school board and recently two fifth grade African-American students caused an
uproar in their classroom when they claimed that, because they were black, they could not be racist. Only the white kids could
be, and in fact were, racist. Suffice to say that the other students (White, Brown, and Asian) in the class were a bit
confrontational to these statements from these two students. Fast forward to their parents demanding a meeting with board
members, the Executive Director of the schools, the principal, the teacher, etc. This book was the source of their information.
As outlandish as such a claim could be, sure enough, page 20 spells this out. "When a racial group's collective prejudice is
backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism." I am a Latinx and never have
seen such a dangerous statement of propaganda to Western society. For this, I cannot recommend this book because it gives a get
out of jail free card concerning racism for all non-whites in Western societies.
Secondly, it pretends to be a scholarly document but is in fact, a short treatise, full of jargon, and out right plain gibberish.
Essentially, this book is pseudo social science. I'll provide a single sentence, as an example, from page 22; "Racism differs
from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power
and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects."
I believe this white female author means well, but the book is truly full of dangerous ideas. Please do not purchase this book
and, more importantly, please do not read such awful propaganda.
One of the premises of the book is that minorities can't be racist; only whites.
>
2.0 out of 5 stars
Semi-Marxist
drivel
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2019
Verified Purchase
This author is consumed with Marxist doctrine and packages it in a racist cloak. Best
example I can give is the assertion that there two fundamental racist flaws in Western civilization, those being the principles
of individualism and meritocracy. One is supposed to treasure group-think and total equality of reward, regardless of achievement
or innovation. I bought this to discover the source of left-leanings of my Millenial grandson and his girlfriend. I feel sorry
that they could swallow such an egregious false logic diatribe. I've suggested they spend a year in Syria, Venezuela, or Turkey
to find out about the real world. Sadly, they won't, but will continue to regurgitate this vomitous stuff.
>
A
Landmark Book. Yes, a shipwreck can be an important landmark.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A
Landmark Book. Yes, a shipwreck can be an important landmark.
Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2019
If you want to understand the zeitgeist behind the assertions that you, as a white person,
are single handedly responsible for correcting all of the race related ills in America, you should read this book. If you're not
into extreme self flagellation, you may need to prepare yourself, first.
The book is a collection of anecdotes concerning the authors experience teaching others of her kind how to sit down and shut up
and take responsitbity for all of the race-based transgressions committed by society past, present, and future; regardless of how
little relation, control, or personal responsibility you as an individual may have had related to those transgressions. Racism,
in the authors view, has nothing to do with individual intentions and actions. It's baked into the system, and you are a key part
of that.
To advance her thesis without clutter, the author neatly defines racism as something only a white person can exhibit. And
something white people engage in as a matter of their very existence - regardless of their actions or intentions. If you are
white and breathing, you are racist. In case I'm not making myself clear: All white peoples are by-definition racist, and only
white people are capable of racism. An African American cannot, by the authors definition, be racist - no matter what they do or
say. Even if they engage in the exact same behavior as a racist white person. This makes it much easier to to clearly assign
blame, and the book is thankfully short, as a result.
There are factual errors, as one would expect from a book based primarily on recollection and secondhand sources not carefully
vetted. One that comes to mind is around p92 where the author asserts that affirmative action programs are misunderstood by the
general public, that no one has ever been hired preferentially even though they were not qualified, and that these programs only
applied to government positions. Having mentored new hires who were brought on 1-2 levels above me in a technical private sector
job until they were capable of doing what I had yet to be promoted to do, I know her facts to be in error on that score. Maybe
that doesn't happen now, but it did happen in the past. No doubt, there are other errors in areas for which I don't have ground
truth and total recall. The reader should do their homework if they don't want to internalize innacurate data as axiomatic.
I give this book two stars because I think it is important. This book is important because, as a NYT Bestseller, it clearly
illustrates the rabbit-hole we as a society are speeding down into full throttle. If you want to better understand how we ended
up with the government we currently have, and what the inevitable crash will be like at the end of this bizarre exercise in
deconstructing a successful society, it should be a useful read.
>
This book is written as if by an abusive, gaslighting partner - you are just wrong, she knows you better than you know yourself,
and you're a liar if you disagree with her. You are automatically delusional and lecherous and subtly hateful simply because of
the color of your skin. At best, you are unenlightened. Either way, because you have a specific skin color, she argues, again and
again, you are (morally) inferior in this country. And that is literally the definition of racism.
She redefines the term early on, but her definition is way too convenient - and not what the word actually means. Unfortunately,
in this book she becomes everything she's writing against.
We need to understand one another. White people like me want to better understand the racial dynamic in this country so we can
avoid or change the inherent prejudices that we know exist in our culture and in ourselves. Sharing the black experience with us
helps. Pretending to be an expert on how white people think ... is just a misguided, horrible idea - and as offensive (for being
so wrong) as it is when white people pretend to understand the black experience.
But books like this are like signs at a rally - written in hard strokes with a clenched fist - and this one has about the same
subtlety and precision. I give it two stars because it has the quality - like one of those signs - of stirring up emotions and
conversations, which is valuable.
Perhaps the author wouldn't have to use the term "fragile" if she were better at taking to and about white people as if they were
... actually people, and not white devils. How could any result but defensiveness be possible with such an approach?
When people are deaf, I understand that you have to shout. But you don't have to shout insults. That really just makes things
worse.
>
2.0 out of 5 stars
Exploiting
the White Liberal Guilt Complex
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2020
Verified Purchase
In "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism," Robin Diangelo
claims that we whites do not want to talk about our racism because we do not want to admit that we are racists. Robin Diangelo
expects whites to be forever saying the secular equivalent of "Forgive me Father for I have sinned." The civil rights legislation
that we passed and the anti poverty programs designed specifically to help blacks that we finance with our tax money were not
nearly enough to absolve us of our guilt. The fact that blacks still tend to be less prosperous than we are is proof of our
sinful nature. Black problems are my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Robin Diangelo is a professional diversity consultant. She earns a good living telling groups of whites how racist they are.
In her Introduction Robin Diangelo writes, "I am a white woman. I am standing beside a black woman. We are facing a group of
white people in front of us. We are in their workplace and have been hired by their employer to lead them in a dialogue about
race." When she discovers that many of them are angry at her she responds with hurt innocence, saying, "I have after all, only
articulated a definition of racism."
I suspect they were angry because their employer required them to sit through the scolding of two well paid Social Justice
Warriors, and they knew that it would be dangerous for them to discuss their opinions. In an environment like this, blacks are
encouraged to talk about how whites have hurt their feelings. This is not the dialogue on race the United States needs to have.
This is totalitarian re education. In a real dialogue, whites will be able to safely talk about how we feel about blacks and why.
Without endangering their careers geneticists will be able to discuss their discoveries of genes that determine intelligence and
influence criminal and sexual behavior, and how these genes are found in different proportions among the races.
When a white school teacher makes a comment about her experience with a black person that Robin Diangelo condemns as "racially
problematic," she tells the school teacher, "I am going to ask you to consider not telling that story in that way again I am only
asking you to try to listen with openness." After making it clear that she will not listen to the white school teacher, Robin
Diangelo expects the white school teacher to listen to her. This is a monologue on race that she is forcing white employees to
endure in order to safeguard their jobs.
When she dismisses the right of whites who participated in civil rights demonstrations to claim to be innocent of racism, Robin
Diangelo asks, "Might many [white civil rights activists] have dominated discussions, not listen to others, and assumed to know
what was best?" She has described herself.
Robin Deangelo writes, we "see stereotypical depictions of black people in the media we live in a culture that circulates
relentless messages of white superiority."
What culture is she writing about? The message we currently get from Hollywood movies and television programs is that blacks
perform and behave at least as well as whites. If a white person kills a black man, even in self defense, that is reported
nationally. The media takes the side of the black man, even when, as is nearly always the case, he was breaking a law. When a
black man kills a white person to rob him or her, the local newspaper frequently does not report the event, or refuses to report
the race of the criminal.
In the "Shaft" movie, the protagonist John Shaft is described as "a sex machine with all the chicks" (rather than as a
responsible husband and father, which John Shaft definitely is not). This description is presented as a complement.
Robin Deangelo writes, "Today we depict blacks as dangerous, a portrayal that perverts the true direction of violence between
whites and blacks since the founding of this country." She does not seem to realize it, but times have changed. In the America
that has resulted from the civil rights movement, whites are far more likely to be victims of black violence than the other way
around.
She claims, "Affirmative action is a tool to ensure that qualified minority applicants are given the same employment
opportunities as white people." Again she lives in a world of her imagination. Affirmative action discriminates against whites
and Orientals, lowers standards for blacks, and advances many blacks to positions where they are unable to perform adequately.
She writes, "A 2015 study by the American Sociological Foundation found that the the highest level of segregation is between
blacks and whites, the lowest is between [East] Asians and whites, and the level between Latinx and whites occupies an
intermediate position."
I feel almost embarrassed to have to explain why this is true: East Asians have a crime rate that is slightly lower than the
white crime rate; Hispanics have a crime rate that is somewhat higher than the white crime rate; blacks have a crime rate that is
eight times the white crime rate.
Robin Diangelo writes, "George Zimmerman would not have stopped me as I walked through a gated suburban neighborhood." That is
because middle aged white women have an incomparably lower crime rate than young black men. If George Zimmerman had followed a
young white man, the young white man would probably have walked over to George Zimmerman, keeping his hands in sight, and
apologized for creating suspicion. Then he would have explained who he was and why he was there. That is what I did in a similar
situation. It is the way civilized people behave.
Robin Diangelo claims that the worst racists are the whites who deny that they are racist. She dislikes the line in Martin Luther
King's "I have a dream" speech, where he says, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
She writes, "Anti-blackness is rooted in misinformation, fables, perversions, projections and lies." What misinformation? What
lies? What she writes is true of the anti racism Robin Diangelo expresses in White Fragility. Again and again in this book she
makes statements that are either misleading, or not true. She is used to getting away with this because she is used to speaking
before captive audiences of white employees who have been ordered to attend her scolding lectures, with the understanding that if
they express their opinions they will be risking their jobs.
When I am told that I am a racist, I do not say that I have had black friends, although I have. I do not say that I have a high
opinion of East Asians, although I do. I ask two questions: "What did I say that is not true? How do you define racism?"
I do not use the n word. I do not tell racist jokes. I readily acknowledge that there are some blacks who perform and behave
better than most whites. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. The fear of being called a "racist" interferes with the
dialogue on race people like Robin Diangelo claim to be leading, while doing everything they can to suppress.
>
Important
topic, absolutely wrong conceptually and factually
2.0 out of 5 stars
Important
topic, absolutely wrong conceptually and factually
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2019
Verified Purchase
White racism, and racism in general, is an important issue and the author is
well-intentioned. However, she also ignores almost all of the empirical research evidence on racism/ethnocentrism in the US, and
consequently creates a highly inaccurate racial binary in which white people are always racist and clueless, and black people are
always virtuous and aware. In her scheme, other racial and ethnic groups apparently don't exist, or don't matter (although she
does mention others occasionally and vaguely). This odd concept of white fragility ignores the overwhelming evidence that racist
whites--whether overt or covert racists--are not fragile, but quite solid in their sense of racial superiority. They do not react
defensively because they feel insecure, but because they will not tolerate (in their minds) an uppity whatever kind of non-white
person to challenge white hegemony. While she is correct that white racism has more institutional power than other forms of
discrimination, her own concept of "fragility" undermines her larger argument that white racism is encoded in the dominant
culture and institutions that reinforces white racism. Which one is it? Whites are insecure and fragile, or socially dominant and
in charge? Her answer seems to be both (see for example her discussion on page 90 and following the paperback version). The
reality is that not all white people are racist, not all black people are virtuous, and the intersection of race, class, gender,
sexuality, age, religion, and many other social groups opens the door to all kinds of discrimination in a society based on power
and domination in general. Consequently, racism and ethnocentrism occur more or less equally across all demographic groups,
although the target varies. For example, almost all groups in the US hold strongly negative ethnocentric attitudes toward
Muslims, and many American-born Latinix condemn impoverished refugees fleeing oppression and war in Central America when they
look for sanctuary in the US. DiAngelo treats race and ethnicity as the same thing, which perhaps explains why she can't see
cultural discrimination. Instead, I recommend Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality
in America by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (a book that DiAngelo cites inaccurately).
>
There's
a Difference Between 'Many Preconceived Notions' and 'Racism' that the Author...
2.0 out of 5 stars
There's
a Difference Between 'Many Preconceived Notions' and 'Racism' that the Author...
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2020
Verified Purchase
It's one thing to have Pre-Conceived Notions but be willing to change one's mind based on
new info, and people who are 'Racist' and won't budge on their views for anything. The author doesn't distinguish between this,
which is sad. That says it all there, about this book. Good points are made, but one has to wade through the repeated assertion
that we are all 'racist' to get to them. No, we all have Pre-Conceived Notions (at a minimum.) I really feel we need some
different terms to describe the differing degrees of what's going on.
I spent 15 years living in a very mixed neighborhood in Tampa, where no ethnic group was larger than 45% (not 'White'. They were
never more than 30%, tops,) and I don't think I heard one racist joke while I was there. When a person knows 3 people who belong
to any group having the joke told about them, those 'jokes' lose all relevancy. I really feel Integration would do worlds of good
for coming to see everyone for the human being that they are, and would single-handedly do away with a lot of the problems that
revolve around ethnicity.
I did hear ethnic references, but they were almost on a level of everyday Cultural Anthropology, not prejudice. "...She's from
Puerto Rico, so 'x' mannerism means..." Things like that. It's just a default until we know better, and know for sure.
Yes, we do need to talk about race. Different mannerisms and statistics ~do~ apply to different groups. If we're ever going to
address it, then we need to talk about it. Otherwise, it gets suppressed and simply festers, leading to no progress, and even
things getting worse.
I don't miss the poverty of that neighborhood, but I do miss the way people tended to default to seeing each other as people, and
bothered to get to know one another first. I had a lot of good experiences, learning to overcome my own Pre-Conceived Notions
there, and more. Now, in a much higher income bracket, I feel the walls going up again as a lot of people (but not all,) in
'minority' groups look at me and assume, "Oh, she's White. She can't possibly empathize." Well, yes and no. Hopefully I'm at
least somewhat aware, and always trying to be more aware, though I can never live in someone else's shoes.
1.0 out of 5 stars
A
new false religion of white guilt
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2020
Verified Purchase
Robin DiAngelo asserts that there has been no racial progress in the US since
the 1960s. Indeed, racism might even be worse now since white people less readily admit to being racist. In that one
respect, self-described white nationalists are more progressive than white liberals -- at least the former admit
their racism! But if that's the true, then why should we hope that this new crusade against racism is likely to be
any more successful than the last one? Oddly, she suggests some people want to return to the past, and she means this
as a criticism. But if there's been no genuine progress, then why shouldn't we return to the past? This is one of
many examples of the inconsistencies that plague this absurd book.
Her account is simplistic and essentializing in the extreme. She explicitly says that it's impossible for a non-white
person in the U.S. to be a racist. So if a black person goes into a mostly white church and shoots it up out of
hatred for white people nothing even a little bit racist has occurred, according to DiAngelo. Since only white people
occupy positions of power, only they can be racist. She presents this as a sophisticated account of racism, though it
is in fact a redefinition. A redefinition, however, that is only rhetorically effective if we continue to associate
racism with things like lynching and forced segregation. This becomes clear when we consider what rhetorical impact
the book would have had if DiAngelo had just used a completely different term.
She also seems committed to the view that all white people in the US are racists, though she doesn't say that
explicitly, as far as I recall. But if only some white people were racists, then she should believe people's denials.
The whole point of the book is to say that any denial, an especially an indignant denial, of white racism is itself a
tool in the service of white supremacy. Your denial is further evidence of your guilt. So confess and be a good ally
and... then what? Can we ever get beyond racism, personally and collectively? It's hard to see how DiAngelo's picture
leaves any room for this. DiAngelo envisions nothing beyond identity politics. She thinks there never has been
anything but identity politics, and that there never will be. Oddly, that empowers the very white racists she
opposes, who can now say "See, everyone else is engaging in racial politics, so why can't we?"
Although DiAngelo says racism is structural, it's quite clear that she thinks all white people including herself are
guilty since they are all to varying degrees complicit -- note the moral significance of the word -- with that
structure. It's like original sin in Christianity except that there is no savior, no hope for ultimate redemption and
only some people have original sin. DiAngelo is correct that no one is completely unbiased, but she uses this
psychological fact about human foibles exclusively as a weapon with which to silence anyone who reacts negatively to
the religion of white guilt she is promoting. DiAngelo considers her own racism, in fairness, but she doesn't ever
say anything to suggest that she has the slightest doubts about the sweeping and simplistic framework through which
she interprets essentially all human interactions. She also doesn't tell us how much money she is making on the
corporate anti-racism gravy train, but as a member of the Diversity Industrial Complex she is assuredly well
compensated for her labors.
At one point, she describes a woman who is so disturbed by being confronted with the supposedly racist impact of her
words, that her friends worry she is having a heart attack. DiAngelo takes this to show the lengths white people will
go to in order to avoid confronting their racism. At no point does she show any compassion for that woman, say she
might need to reconsider the impact of her own words, or even tell us whether she was ok. Clearly DiAngelo doesn't
care and doesn't want her readers to care.
That this book is being taken so seriously by so many people should be deeply alarming. It's sloppy argued and
appears to be motivated by a kind of pathological guilt bordering on masochism.
112 people found this helpful
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Warning:
This book was written by a racist who hates you for your skin color. Let that sink in.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Warning:
This book was written by a racist who hates you for your skin color. Let that sink in.
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2020
Verified Purchase
I can't believe how powerful subversion can be. We had all but eradicated racism
in our country, only for it to come back in full force by the very people who wanted to eradicate it in the first
place. Since the 1990s to now, we've gone from teaching our kids that 'skin color doesn't matter' to 'skin color is
all that matters'. That's why we're seeing books like this. We're living in scary times, folks. If you leave a 5-star
reviews for propaganda like this, you're part of the problem. You don't solve racism with more racism. Don't give
money to people who hate you.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Subversive,
Race-Baiting Garbage
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2020
There are so many historical and factual inaccuracies in this book it should be
considered embarrassing to the author. However, when you are writing a White Guilt propaganda manual, I suppose facts
don't matter much.
The title of the book alone makes a racist, presumptuous case that White people are "fragile" because of their skin
color. Would this author dare to discuss Black Fragility? Asian Fragility? Jewish Fragility? How about the high rate
of Black criminality per capita, or the number of fatherless homes that lead to Black crime and incarceration? How
about the growing trend of liberal academic race-blaming that has led to street attacks in the USA and throughout the
West? She could even have looked at the amount of money spent by mostly Democrat politicians in the US to combat
poverty... trillions of dollars that never seems to make a dent in Black and Hispanic communities or help with
community cohesion? She could have written about any of those things to help offer solutions of racism and "feelings
of inequality". But no, White Fragility it is. Because Whiteness, the existence of White people, is the greatest
problem in the highly indoctrinated minds of the "well-meaning" liberal academics. THAT is what is holding Brown
folks down in her view.
She Wouldn't Dare criticize any other group the way she does with "fragile Whites", because she knows full well that
the outrage mob would come for her and burn her at the stake. This book isn't about having an honest conversation
about issues propping up racial conflict in Western countries. It isn't about easing Black misgivings toward Whites,
and it certainly isn't about helping White people in any fashion.
It is about pinning blame on a group she deems guilty by default.
The text makes the argument that Whites should make special concessions for people outside their own ingroup
interests, telling them to put aside their own life experiences as less valuable than people of other race's
experiences. This is allegedly to so Whites can have "better conversations about race", and better "understand" (aka
give priority consideration to) other groups who openly blame them for their own unhappiness, grievances, failures,
and insecurities.
She presumes to know where all White people are coming from in terms of understanding, perception and outlook, and
she has ZERO basis for that. Her "academic" assumption is in itself racist. But hey, White people, you should still
give up your "fragile world view" to lend a compassionate ear (aka, you must accept some one else's view of you, your
less important experiences, and your race as the gospel), because the current trending belief is that only your group
can be a racist...you know, because of the "power and privilege" you receive from having lesser melanin.
In other words, she wants you to understand that the people calling you racist for not "listening" to them have a
problem with YOUR skin color. But that's entirely your fault.
The fact is, just like other races, White people vary culturally, religiously, and socio-economically. Whites are not
autonomous. They don't all think the same and should never be taught to believe their experiences are lesser, or
invalid, because someone else says so, or because their experience is more important.
Skin color is NOT the cause of world's problems. You can lay the grand majority of the world's social problems right
now squarely on the shoulders of deeply disingenuous, fact-denying academics who are trying to use a shame and blame
strategy to shape the world into their utopian view of what it should be. White Fragility indeed. The author might as
well take the Van Jones or Obama eugenics approach and say Whites are racist because of their DNA.
Books like this are utter subversive garbage that do nothing but dredge up hostility between groups that would
otherwise get along with each other f people like the author didn't constantly make it a point to tell one group that
the other group owes them something because of the color of their skin.
Authors like this aren't out to solve issues of racism, their goal is ultimately to indoctrinate gullible people into
believing that Whites deserve to "answer" to other groups. It is using the unquantifiable rhetoric of White Fragility
to foster White Guilt in people who really do want to ease tensions between the races.
Books like this do more harm than good. White Fragility isn't why its so hard for people to talk about racism. Lies
from left-leaning academics with an agenda to push are why honest conversations about race cannot and do not take
place in our society today.
127 people found this helpful
>
White privilege exists and white people benefit from it from birth whether they want to or intend to.
Had she only stopped after these points were made, this book (with a different title) could have been so helpful.
These are good and necessary points and open discussion regarding same would have been a great starting place; however, Ms.
DiAngelo closes the door to any open discussion about racism, and does so in a way that seems self-hating of her own
whiteness.
Take the name of the book "White Fragility" and think of one example where you could call someone fragile and not have it be
an insult. There isn't one. So before the cover is opened she's given you a hint of how she will proceed, i.e., "you're bad
(weak and fragile) and there's nothing you can do about it." She then goes on to generalize that ALL white people suffer from
fragility and that ANY reaction to her narrative - including not responding to it at all - is evidence and proof of you being
a fragile person and unable to handle racism. She has now closed any door to discussing racism because white people are not
allowed to respond to her discussion, other than to meekly say "yes ma'am, I'm bad because I exist".
Having made her point that all white people are bad, fragile, and racist, (even if they don't mean to be - at least she gives
them that), Ms. DiAngelo devolves into following the Jane Elliott prescription of attempting to fix this racism by belittling
white people rather than by restoring equality to people of color. She states that the racial status quo is hostile and that
to interrupt the hostility (a hostility she's further stirring), white people should have to discuss their inner feelings in
her workshops WITHOUT their being trust established first. She then goes further to explain that the need for white people to
build trust prior to sharing confirms how fragile they (white people) are. Basically, she has created her own type of
"conversion therapy" where she attempts to trigger white people on purpose so she can belittle them so they'll know how it
feels to be discriminated against (again, an exact replica of Jane Elliott's methods). I found that sort of psychology to be
at best unhelpful, and at worst, to have the danger of creating a hostility where none existed.
This book had such an opportunity to be a light in the dark at a time when the country most needs it, but instead it turned
out to be a self-hating "white" woman belittling ALL people (a racial generalization) who look like her, and slamming the door
on any hope of real and much needed discussion of racial inequality.
>
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not
helpful
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2020
Verified Purchase
Honestly this book is not helpful. If you want white people to acknowledge their
privilege or their biases in a constructive manor to move people forward, then starting with the notion that all white people
are racists is at best alienating and At worst it does the job for alt right groups for them.. This book if anything make
white supremacy more mainstream by telling most well meaning but ignorant white people that instead of working toward a future
or a more justice and equal society they most accept that they have to acknowledge they are white supremacist.
Additionally, this book is guilty of what it preaches against. One of the sin it preaches is white media presentation of
people of color. The book rails against the movie the blind side. The author critized that the movie glorified that only white
people could life the black man out of poverty and this was feeding into a racist trope. However, her whole book premise is
that only white people have the power to fix racism due to them having the power, which completely negates the role people of
color can play in moving society forward.
>
1.0 out of 5 stars
Errors
from page one
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2019
It's hard to take an author seriously when there are assertions on the first page that
are highly debatable if not outright wrong. In the "Author's Note", we read:
"American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped African slaves and their descendants."
This sentence jumped out at me for several reasons. First, a minority of Americans owned slaves. On Quora, I found an answer
from Mary Mac Ogden, a 2011 history PhD with an emphasis on the American south. She estimates that 1.4% of the overall US
population owned slaves in 1860, and 4.8% of the southern US population owned slaves, roughly 25% of southern households --
even in the slave states, most people did not own slaves. Second, there has been debate about exactly how profitable slavery
was. A 2014 Economist article "Did slavery make economic sense?" quotes several experts on the subject. Some propose that
slavery was profitable for large plantations but not for the south generally; others say that slavery initially gave the south
an economic edge, which they gradually lost as the north developed more advanced technology that the south was slower to
adapt. Third, it's very well established that most inherited wealth is squandered, so even if a certain family did profit from
slavery there's a low likelihood of that wealth passing down more than one or two generations (see "70% of Rich Families Lose
Their Wealth by the Second Generation" on CNN dot com.) So clearly, it's highly debatable that "American wealth" generally
stems from slavery.
I flipped to the back of the book to see if DiAngelo had some evidence to support her claim that American wealth stems from
slavery. Maybe I was wrong. But there were no citations or notes for the author's introduction. So: she made a bold, sweeping
claim that does not stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny and for which she offers not a whit of evidence.
Why should I read the rest of the book when the author blew her credibility in the first paragraph?
>
1.0 out of 5 stars
Errors
from page one
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2019
It's hard to take an author seriously when there are assertions on the first page that
are highly debatable if not outright wrong. In the "Author's Note", we read:
"American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped African slaves and their descendants."
This sentence jumped out at me for several reasons. First, a minority of Americans owned slaves. On Quora, I found an answer
from Mary Mac Ogden, a 2011 history PhD with an emphasis on the American south. She estimates that 1.4% of the overall US
population owned slaves in 1860, and 4.8% of the southern US population owned slaves, roughly 25% of southern households --
even in the slave states, most people did not own slaves. Second, there has been debate about exactly how profitable slavery
was. A 2014 Economist article "Did slavery make economic sense?" quotes several experts on the subject. Some propose that
slavery was profitable for large plantations but not for the south generally; others say that slavery initially gave the south
an economic edge, which they gradually lost as the north developed more advanced technology that the south was slower to
adapt. Third, it's very well established that most inherited wealth is squandered, so even if a certain family did profit from
slavery there's a low likelihood of that wealth passing down more than one or two generations (see "70% of Rich Families Lose
Their Wealth by the Second Generation" on CNN dot com.) So clearly, it's highly debatable that "American wealth" generally
stems from slavery.
I flipped to the back of the book to see if DiAngelo had some evidence to support her claim that American wealth stems from
slavery. Maybe I was wrong. But there were no citations or notes for the author's introduction. So: she made a bold, sweeping
claim that does not stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny and for which she offers not a whit of evidence.
Why should I read the rest of the book when the author blew her credibility in the first paragraph?
>
Most people have a gut orientation around their views on race that are difficult to articulate, but they generally fall into
one of two camps. Coleman Hughes lays out the elements of both of the camps clearly in a Youtube video titled "Coleman Hughes
@ Lafayette, "Anti Racism and Humanism, Two Competing Visions"". Published 3/9/2019 IT IS A MUST WATCH if you want to
understand this issue more fully.
It is obvious that Robin Diangelo's book is strictly about JUST ONE of the two possible "competing visions" described by
Coleman Hughes.
Ms. Diangelo presents an unbalanced viewpoint, glossing over and discounting the vision and messaging of Martin Luther King
Jr.. By looking at the situation ONLY from her side, despite the fact that there is more reasoned alternate opinion, she
broadly dismisses white people disagreeing with her wrongheaded opinions as being defensive, argumentative, or simply
exhibiting "white fragility."
It is an understatement to say the Ms. Diangelo is overconfident in her opinions.
There are other major problems in the book. She cavalierly redefines the hot button words "racist", "racism", and "white
supremacy" in ways that are not the commonly held definitions in the general population. However, she then asserts that all of
those terms be applied in one degree or another to all white people and only white people because "whites hold social and
institutional power over people of color." People of color CANNOT be racist with her "new definitions", but all white people
ARE in fact either racist or contribute to racism.
She writes "I believe white progressives cause the most deadly damage to people of color."
and "I define white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist...."
How this book gets 4.5 stars is beyond me. She must be preaching to some choir that is in dire need of taking a more balanced
look at the issue of race. Her formula for addressing race, and placing such ongoing emphasis on the racial group you are in,
will surely not ever allow us to get to a "post racial society" where one is judged by the content of their character rather
than the color of their skin.
Please watch the following YOUTUBE video for a much better presentation on the issue of race: "Coleman Hughes @ Lafayette,
"Anti Racism and Humanism, Two Competing Visions""
>
Fails
to Address Systemic Racism and Dangerously Mischaracterizes Social Interactions
1.0 out of 5 stars
Fails
to Address Systemic Racism and Dangerously Mischaracterizes Social Interactions
Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2020
Erving Goffman spoke a great deal about the masks that we put on each day - and how each
day is a performance on stage - what identity do we choose to select during different parts of our day, our workplace, our
lives, etc. But even more than that he spoke about the challenges of navigating identity and our place in the world as human
beings, our necessity to be present in relationships with others, and in 'Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled
Identity,' the challenge of maintaining our selves in the face of the judgments of others.
Robin here is plying her own misconceptions in a way to promulgate conspicuous consumption of ignorance. The systemic
injustices created by racial division and the identities, the masks-if you will-that those with more melanin than a 'white
person' as she describes them-have to wear on a daily basis to navigate this world are not in any way dependent upon 'white
fragility,' or the 'moral condition of white people's soul.' This isn't about 'white supremacy,' 'white fragility,' 'whiteness
studies,' or 'white rage,' and its never been about that. It's about the lived African-American experience and how they
navigate this world and their identities in spite of being discriminated against in the past and currently.
The 'other' in majority societies, whether black or brown in majority white or a korean in majority Japanese, or an
African-American in rural China, has to navigate the world and change their performance based upon the majority culture of
experience they live in. Gaijin, foreigner, immigrant, 'those people,' poor people, gang members - these are all terms used by
majority societies to describe the 'other.'
By jumping on the neologism 'White Fragility' to sell a book and continuing to misuse this term as a blanket application all
across America, the author dangerously mischaracterizes the lived experiences of whites and blacks in America and promulgates
a chilling expression of ignorance and hatred during a time when we must come together and bridge divides. The performances we
each undertake during our daily lives to navigate the complexities of majority societies are not dependent upon monolithic,
unchanging fiats of social interactions that are subsumed under the term 'White Fragility' as the author claims.
Goffman, Malcolm X, and other authors are more appropriate to read here and will give you a better picture of how to
characterize these interactions-they are not predicated on this denial of the self of white individuals and the blanket
assumption of original sin for all white people. By promoting the culture of 'J'Accuse!' of the French Revolution and sending
all white people off to the guillotine before there is a chance to object, to actively work to address racism and stand
together with their fellow Americans who may be African-American or other minorities, the author is being intellectually
dishonest and terribly insults the intelligence of her readers.
This is neither the time, nor the place to promote these juvenile neologisms to sell books. Thorstein Veblen highlighted this
impulse and Ms. Diangelo is happy to jump on the bandwagon.
>
This
book is about closing your mind because you have all the answers. It's autobiographical.
1.0 out of 5 stars
This
book is about closing your mind because you have all the answers. It's autobiographical.
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020
Verified Purchase
White Fragility - a newly discovered white people's universal mental illness.
Robin, It's hard for you to talk to white people about racism because you start by accusing them of being perpetrators of
systemic racism, and you refuse to open your mind to their objections. Here's what you should do. Take over the government,
set up re-education camps like they do in enlightened countries, and preach to a captive audience. Good luck with that.
The Definition of Racism in short is the idea, that one race is superior to another. This is a kind of nationalism applied to
rase instead of nationality.
Amazon Customer
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The Definition of Racism in short is the idea, that one race is
better than another for one reason or another. I am married, A US Navy Veteran, and a Florida Officer. I have been the victim of
racial discrimination, I was once told I don't like your kind of people in my class. I was the only White person in the room. I
called this person out for having made this statement and was told she can't be racist, She's black. The reason we have issues
today is nobody really listened to Dr. King when he stated," I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
The keywords of this statement are "NOT JUDGED BY THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN." Until we quit using race and or sex as a defining
part of applications, for loan grants or anything, and simply write our names. We will never realise Dr. Kings Dream!
yggdcvhjniuhjmkmnb
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Thank you for this comment. I, as a white female, has been in
this same situation. I don't think people realize the one sidedness to what they say.
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Heather Lyons
6
days ago
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To say that a white person hasn't experienced racism is
incorrect. I have been around people of color my whole life. I have been the victim of several unprovoked attacks both
physical and verbal from black people and even Hispanics. A black person once started choking me for no reason. I wasn't even
talking to him. I wasn't speaking at all! I mind my own business and don't start confrontations with these people. I believe
they target me because I am white. If you don't believe that blacks and Hispanics can be racist toward whites, maybe you
haven't been around them very much.
>
2.0 out of 5 stars
Worth
Reading But Profoundly Illogical
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
I read this book, along with "White Guilt" by by Shelby Steele (https://www.amazon.com/White-Guilt-Together-Destroyed-Promise/dp/0060578637/),
to see "both sides" of this important issues. Steele's book is by far a better book, but I expected them to be in contradiction.
They are not. Steele, for example, argues that "White Guilt" and the white identity have morphed from overt oppression into a New
Paternalism. Blacks can't "save themselves," goes the idea because of "systemic racism." Thus they need "white allies" to help
them. Steele's thesis is that the New Racism is White Guilt and White Paternalism. Ironically, that idea is the essence of "White
Fragility." "White guilt" as defined by Mr. Steele lurks on every page of "White Fragility." Ending racial oppression against
black people is a white person problem; that's the core idea of "White Fragility." Think about what that means. Because black
people are allegedly enmeshed in oppression, they must have white "rescuers." They can't "save themselves" because the "systems
of oppression" are too powerful. Really? As Steele points out, we have had a black President. We have had black Senators and
still do. We have incredible and well-deserved black success in the media, in entertainment, and in sports. In those areas, no
one tells black people that "systemic racism" holds them back. And black people succeed. Black people prove again and again that
they are very capable of success. Look at sports. Look at entertainment. Look at politics. That's point No 1 about the illogic
and unsubstantiated allegations in "White Fragility." There are clear and falsifiable examples of where black people succeed.
Point #2 is the illogic of the argument on a personal level. If you love the book, you're "racist" because you are acknowledging
your participation in the racist system. If you hate the book, you're "racist," too, because you are "in denial." So heads you're
a racist, tails you're a racist, and your only course of action is to take courses in overcoming your "racism," from highly paid
consultants and others in the "racism" industry. Follow the money. This book is the #1 book on Amazon as I write this and it (and
books, protests, speeches, nonprofits, etc.) enrich an entire industry that is heavily, heavily invested in "white guilt." That's
problem #2. As for problem #3, evidence. Where is the statistical, proven evidence of not only the outcomes of "racism" but the
"causes?" Scant evidence is provided, and where it is it is anecdotal. Yes, of course, there are racial oppressions in the USA.
Yes, of course, the terrible weight of history and the United States' terrible "original sin" of racism weighs on black people.
The historical legacy of racism definitely has denied black people of the kind of accumulated capital that helps many white
people. But where is a discussion of the collapse of the black family? Of the attitudes towards work? Of the collapse of
education in our inner cities? Of individual responsibility? Of comparisons between native-born and immigrant black communities?
Of statistics and not just self-confirming anecdotes? (And this is allegedly a "social science" book?) Nowhere to be found.
That's too "hot" of a topic to really be addressed. And, finally, the fourth problem. What is to be done? What specifically
should we do as a society and as individuals? Beyond just wallowing in our "white guilt," we are not given any specific courses
of action. "Defund the police," for example, is a nice slogan, but what specifically is our new vision of policing? How are we
specifically going to improve the black family and out-of-wedlock births, given that the highest correlation to poverty is not
the color of one's skin but the lack of a father in the home? No specifics are given. Most importantly, how are black people
supposed to help themselves after us white folk finally (and thankfully) get out of their way? And that's the whole point. Sell
more books. Make more white people feel guilty. Virtue-signal ad infinitum and, at the end of the day, do next to nothing to
really help our society be colorblind, next to nothing to help our society allow black people to rise to their full potential.
"White Fragility," at its core, is a fraud. It is but the illusion of an argument, the illusion of evidence and nothing, nothing
to its argument except a money-making machine that sells you on your "white guilt" with no agenda and no actionable to-dos.
>
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ultimately
Divisive
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
I believe passionately about this subject, but I did not like this book. I don't
agree that we live in a society that is institutionally established to support the white race and for whites to
implicitly benefit from white privilege. I also don't like the author's broadened definitions of "white supremacy" and
"racist" - I find these divisive. I don't think our issues today are as much about "race" as they are about a denial of
the trauma we have caused different minority groups, and specifically African
-Americans, and work we need to do as a country, across our institutions, to support and create opportunities to bridge
the gaps we have created with our trauma. We've seen how change can evolve with the leaps we've had in women's rights
over the past generation, which didn't involve asking all men to identify as chauvinists and denounce our
establishments, but involved progressive policy, support mechanisms within our institutions, and mentorship programs.
I do agree with DiAngelo's statement that "nothing in mainstream US culture gives us the information we need to have the
nuanced understanding of arguably the most complex and enduring social dynamic of the last several hundred years". I
have recently read several books, Ron Chernow's Grant, Isabel Wilkerson's Warmth of Other Suns, and Thomas Jefferson:
The Art of Power by Jon Meacham. Each of these books exposed a legacy of trauma, both nuanced and explicit - violence,
sexual assault, separation of families, murder, terrorism, theft, false imprisonment, oppression of Constitutional
rights - that African Americans endured for which we are responsible for the fall out. While I learned about slavery,
Jim Crowe, and the civil rights in school and in mainstream culture, I had no idea how deep and broad our wrongs were,
especially post-slavery. As a country, the South lost the Civil War, and yet we refused to hold their continued
rebellion to account and allowed "slavery" to continue for another 100+ plus years without the label.
This was not many generations ago and it is no wonder that many still struggle with this legacy. It is also not
unrelated to disproportionate levels of poverty, addiction, domestic violence, desperation, and petty crime we see in
certain neighborhoods which furthers a cycle of false and destructive stereotypes and police brutality that current
generations are unable to escape. We need to pour support, policy change, and resources into these communities, but I
believe that we should look beyond labels and focus more broadly about righting a long-standing wrong.
I will continue to respectfully ponder ideas put forward in this book, but as a whole, I feel that it misses the
well-spring of positive change that so many Americans today want to be part of, and puts forward a fatalistic ethos that
holds us back from a more perfect union.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Freudian
account of racism
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020
Verified Purchase
Wow, Freud would love this book. Racism reduced to a fragility complex, like Sex
being reduced to an Oedipus complex. Not agreeing with it becomes proof of it. It's all about understanding our white
racist unconscious repressions. There is no proof of whites having white fragility. More like I'm correct because I'm
not not correct. But, you know, get on the gravy train. Make money while you can.
If the author wasn't so sincere about her efforts to help people I would think she was just being mean to people who are
fragile to begin with.
'White Fragility: Why It's
So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism' has recently ensconced itself in the global zeitgeist. Despite being written in
2018, its popularity has soared this year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and global Black Lives Matter
protests-cum-riots. It is currently on both the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists, no doubt making its author, Robin
DiAngelo, a very wealthy woman.
I didn't want to read this
book; Scandinavian detective novels are more my bag to be honest, but given the prominence of it, I thought it best to see
what all the fuss was about. Thus I subjected myself to thisexhausting, boring read, so you don't have to put yourself through
it – or further line the pockets of Professor DiAngelo.
The book's argument is
simple: if you are white, you are a racist. There is no way out of this fact as DiAngelo says that white people denying they
are racist is simply further proof that they are racist. This, she argues, is the eponymous 'white fragility' which is a
product of white people growing up in a society which is steeped in 'white supremacy'.
You may well have thought
that white supremacy was confined to meetings of skinheads with swastika tattoos and rallies full of hooded lunatics setting
fire to crosses. However, DiAngelo argues that Western society is built on white supremacy and as a result it pervades
everything. Again, denying that our society is inherently racist only serves to compound and protect that white supremacy on
which it is built.
Even if people of colour
gain positions of power in society, such as Barack Obama, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, this does nothing to make the
system less racist as they
"support the status quo."
DiAngelo's claims are
completely unfalsifiable and effectively make racism in the West something akin to 'The Force' in Star Wars.
Perplexingly, along with
being unfalsifiable, they are also contradictory. For example, DiAngelo argues that white people don't see themselves in
racial terms, while simultaneously arguing that their actions preserve "white solidarity." How can a group that doesn't see
themselves as a group express solidarity? It is also argued that white people should both not avoid talking about race and not
expect black people to "educate" them about it. This again makes no sense.
However, while white
people can never not be racist – DiAngelo herself says she is still racist – they can do "work" to make themselves more aware.
Coincidentally, this "work" happens to be DiAngelo, who along with being a professor in "multicultural education" specialising
in "whiteness studies" is also a diversity "facilitator." This means that
for
a fee of between $30,000-$40,000
she will lecture you for around 90 minutes, at the end of which, if you listen very
closely, you will still be racist, but more aware of it. That doesn't exactly seem like money well spent.
The purpose of these
lectures is not only to make whites aware that they are inherently racist, but also to build up their "racial stamina." You
see, racial stamina is the way to combat white fragility and, from the sounds of it, building up this stamina is a deeply
unpleasant process. The book is littered with anecdotes from these lectures and seminars, all of which appear to end with
someone either in tears or storming out in a rage. Although this is obviously no indication of the lectures themselves being
bad or insulting, just indicative of white fragility.
The crying is a particular
problem for Professor DiAngelo, particularly white women crying in front of black people. Indeed, she considers this so much
of a problem that there is an entire chapter of the book titled 'White Women's Tears'. Her reasoning behind this is that there
is a history of black men being tortured and murdered because of white women's distress. As a white woman herself, she
writes,
"our tears trigger the terrorism of this history,"
before citing the case
of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly flirting with a white woman.
This example is a perfect
illustration of how DiAngelo's warped view of the world manages to simultaneously be insulting to both white and black people.
She argues not only that black men will immediately think of lynching when they see a white woman cry, but also that if they
comfort the woman they are doing so not out of sympathy or concern, but because they have been conditioned by sexism and the
patriarchy.
Her argument constantly
seems to rob people of colour of their own agency, while impugning the motive of racism into any action by a white person. If
a white person is nice to a black person, it is racist. If they are nasty to a black person, that is also racist. Saying that
you were taught to treat everyone equally is not only racist but also ignorant as it shows you are unaware of your socialised
racism.
To illustrate this
socialised racism, the book is peppered with anecdotes designed to show that all white people are racist, but really just
display DiAngelo's own prejudices. She argues that white people come away from the story of Jackie Robinson believing he was
the first black baseball player good enough to play with whites rather than the first who was allowed to. But no one with even
a passing interest in the sport believes that he was simply the first black man capable of competing with whites, making her
argument a total fallacy.
Elsewhere she says that
white people use coded language such as "sketchy," "urban," or "bad neighbourhood" when what they really mean is a lot of
black people live there. To demonstrate this, DiAngelo writes about a conversation she was having with a white friend who was
telling her about a white couple she knew that had moved to New Orleans for $25,000. Her friend then told her that the couple
had also bought a gun, at which point DiAngelo says, "I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighbourhood."
DiAngelo will presumably assert that all white people would make that assumption, but she cannot be sure of that. This
statement is indicative her own prejudices, not a universal one.
DiAngelo's argument is a
perfect circular one, you are racist because you are white, only white people can be racist, so being racist makes you white.
It is then impossible to argue against because denial is simply further proof of your racism. You can't even argue that you
just treat people as individuals because that ignores their experience as a member of a group in an inescapable intersectional
power structure. Ironically, she shares the exact same view of race as the white nationalists she presumably despises.
The best example of the
unfalsifiability of her argument comes when DiAngelo lists a series of phrases used by white people to claim they are not
racist. This includes phrases like: "I know people of colour," "I marched in the sixties," "the real oppression is class,"
"you don't know me," but the most telling one of all is, "I disagree."
In Robin DiAngelo's view,
disagreeing with her is just proof that you are a racist. There is no room for nuance or debate, no shades of grey – to
Professor DiAngelo the world is, in every sense of the phrase, black and white.
Think your friends would be
interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Melanin comes with compassion. Melanin comes with soul. We call it soul, we soul brothers
and sisters. That's the melanin that connects us. So the people that don't have it are, and
I'm going to say this carefully [laughs], are a little less, and where the term comes from,
and bringing it all the way back around to Minister Farrakhan, to where they may not have the
compassion . . . . So therefore, the only way they can act is evil . [emphasis added]
They have to rob, steal, rape, kill and fight in order to survive. So these people who didn't
have what we had, and when I say we I speak of the melanated people, they had to be savages.
They had to be barbaric. . . . so they're acting as animals. So they're the ones that are
closer to animals.
Mr. Cannon also
claimed blacks are "descendants from God himself," and discussed "the idea of having to
define myself as a god." He bragged about the power of melanin. I must lack soul, or, since I'm
closer to an animal, I don't have the intelligence to understand melanated wisdom. Still, Mr.
Cannon's claims are implicit in the way media talk about race. The very phrase "people of
color" implies that whites lack something.
LINK
BOOKMARK Media sometimes call white advocates or race realists
"white supremacists," "Nazis," or something close to terrorists
. Still, I've never met a white advocate who believes his skin color gives him magic powers.
I've never even heard of any anyone who believes white people are "gods" or who thinks blacks
only do evil.
When it comes to who robs, rapes, kills, and fights, the evidence shows blacks do these things more
often than whites. They are doing it especially
enthusiastically right now because Black Lives Matter undermines police.
Though whites are often
victims , the melanin "soul" connection is certainly not strong enough to prevent black
viciousness towards other blacks.
Mr. Cannon said that whites are "closer to animals" because of our race. If a white person
said this about blacks, his podcast would be banned and he would be deplatformed.
This hasn't happened. You can still find Mr. Cannon's podcast on Spotify . Mr. Cannon did pay a price
-- CBS dropped him and his talk show was put on hold -- though not because he said bad things
about whites. It's because of what he said about Jews.
"The Semitic people are black people," he said, arguing that blacks could therefore not be
anti-Semitic without being self-hating. He said this while discussing the music industry with
Richard "Professor Griff" Griffin, who left the rap group Public Enemy after he criticized
Jews. The two discussed whether Jews control the music industry and whether some are "scared of
the truth." There was nothing about their being closer to animals or always doing evil. And
yet, almost all the media coverage about Mr. Cannon's interview was about his "anti-Semitic"
comments.
This must have helped, but Mr. Cannon hasn't been "canceled." He didn't apologize to whites,
nor was there pressure for him to do so. Fox is
keeping him on the television program "Masked Singer." His upcoming daytime program hasn't
been canceled, just delayed .
Sean "Diddy" Combs offered him a job. "
Charlamagne Tha God "
defended him and spoke frankly about collective racial interests.
No one should be surprised by this. Fifty percent of black voters have
a favorable opinion of Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are a black
racial vanguard for their people. Blacks appreciate this. The mainstream media doesn't, but
mostly because Mr. Farrakhan keeps insulting Jews.
If he didn't, he would probably get the same welcome Al Sharpton does today. Mr. Sharpton began
his career with crazed rants about "Greek homos" stealing the secrets of "astrology" from
blacks, and defending
a notorious hate-crime hoax . Now, he
stands next to Bill de Blasio painting "Black Lives Matter" on the street outside Trump
Tower.
It's OK to hate whites. Anyone can insult us and get away with it. That is because most
whites are not racially
conscious and do not defend those who speak for them . At the
same time, whites suffer far greater penalties if they speak in defense of their race,
sometimes
especially at the hands of conservatives.
White advocates face unprecedented deplatforming, legal persecution, and even physical
attack. The mask is off. Whatever his successes or failures, President Donald Trump frightened oligarchs and
journalists into showing their true colors. It's far harder now to pretend that America is a
free country.
What holds whites back is our collective fear. Our opponents' power seems great, but it's
brittle. Censorship, economic blackmail, and force are their last remaining weapons. We have
the truth, and if we survive these conditions, we will win.
(Republished from American
Renaissance by permission of author or representative)
I don't think we are held back per se. The "intersectionality" agenda says we are at the top
of the mountain socially and politically and everyone else is bearing the burden of our
existence, so they have the freedom to attack whereas we have the obligation to not respond in
kind to those attacks. So it's a weird kind of supremacy that we have that has to be manifested
in virtue as kindness and being long-suffering and being willing to let them voice their
(uninformed, offensive) opinions. Ultimately what Nick Cannon said is a lot like how an
unattractive, overweight girl who did not get picked for the cheer leading team might talk
about the girls on the team who are dating the coolest jocks in high school. That he is talking
that way is evidence that he is trying to mask his feelings of inferiority. I was raised to
tell a fat girl she looks cute in jeans just to make her feel good about herself. Putting up
with Nick Cannon calling white people animals when we have obviously been the products of and
participated in the development of the most awesome civilization ever is basically just a way
of telling him he looks cute in those jeans even though we all know he is a complete moron. Who
derives their self-esteem from insulting others? Crazy.
So let it slide Gregory. They are just trying to trigger you into making bad decisions.
Don't fall for it.
Er, only (genetically defective) pure albinos lack melanin. Only a coddled Black celebrity
would make a fuss about this pigment without understanding that.
Unfortunately, most Blacks these days are frauds. The "Black Fraud" is more than a "Cottage
Industry" in America. It's actually part of the college and university "Afrocentrism" degrees
and programs. With fake Anthropology, Archaeology, History and variety of other domains they
steal and appropriate for themselves the best of everyone else's worth. They believe the
Egyptians, King Tut, and Pharaohs were black. It doesn't matter that DNA studies have shown
that their wrong. If you read carefully the BLM agenda is against all science, truth, and
objectivism.
Just read some of their forums and you will realize just how crazy these idiots are. You
thought they only wanted to steal your television ..no .they want everything that you made
because they can't build modern civilizations.
The enemies of White people enjoy distinct privileges. This grievance-driven transformation
has been trending for years. Take speech. There are simply no words which, apparently, can
offend Whites. It's all a big laugh! (Right, gringo ?)
That goes for you rednecks, gwai, crackers, haole, hillbillies, neo-Nazis, and goyim. These
words might be offensive to some 'deplorables', but they're certainly not hate speech, which is
very serious. So the rules are this: Whites must accept race-oriented, verbal abuse–but
never dish it out. That's when it becomes hate !
The beneficiaries of these uneven rules of discourse include all POC as well as all Jews.
Why the different standards? Well, it's complicated.
America's new, post-George-Floyd normal now revolves around the most egregious
social offense: the 'slur'–which has come to mean a disparaging word or sentence that
emanates from an entitled White person and is directed towards an oppressed out-group. This
transgression can carry very serious penalties. So watch your step! Never utter the N-word, you
Nazi!
Remember: one N-word is hurtful, while the other N-word helpful.
The moral difference between these two terms depends on one thing: what group is giving the
offense, and what group is receiving it.
The claim that melanin imbues blacks with special powers and qualities is just afrocentrism
101 and isn't new. Blacks are so desperate to find something to boost their fragile self esteem
and assuage their racial inferiority complex that they have to invent wacky stuff.
But if one subjects the melanin claim to a little "white supremacist" objective analysis
you'll see that blacks are some of the most violent and cruel people in America if not the
entire world. Blacks kill and terrorize each other like no other people. Melanin is no match
for systemic racism which is alleged to be the cause of all black character defects.
The fact that Nick Cannon's mea culpa was directed at Jews while he seemingly could care
less about apologizing to whites just proves once again who wields the power in America. Just
ask (or axe) whom am I not permitted to criticize?
And so, Mr. Cannon met with a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal center, and did what was
required.
"First and foremost I extend my deepest and most sincere apologies to my Jewish sisters
and brothers for the hurtful and divisive words that came out of my mouth during my interview
with Richard Griffin
"They reinforced the worst stereotypes of a proud and magnificent people and I feel
ashamed of the uninformed and naïve place that these words came from. The video of this
interview has since been removed
"While the Jewish experience encompasses more than 5,000 years and there is so much I have
yet to learn, I have had at least a minor history lesson over the past few days and to say
that it is eye-opening would be a vast understatement."
-- Nick Cannon (@NickCannon) July 16, 2020
Seriously, do Blacks really talk like that?
Imagine what transpired as Nick met the rabbi:
"Nick, we've got a statement here for you to read."
This is the difference all right -- but it's not a "moral" difference. It's pure political
correctness, otherwise known as Cultural Marxism. This asymmetry is intrinsic to Marxism. Lenin
described it as "Who?Whom?"
I find Cannon's views highly amusing as it struck me that this is just one more example of
what I call typical negro "logic." And, to people of color, how about referring to us wypipo as
People of Light. Thanks.
The USA and GB actually implement caste system. That's what job quota means.
Notable quotes:
"... It might seem divisive to compare different groups, but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we're to help the worst off, we have to know who they are. We should help everyone who needs it -- but it is vital to be able to compare groups to know who's falling behind, relative to their peers. In the UK, Bangladeshi-Brits earn 20 percent less than whites on average, for instance, but those with Indian heritage are likely to earn 12 percent more. Black Britons on average earn 9 percent less, but Chinese earn 30 percent more. What these differences tell us is that employers aren't systematically discriminating between people on the basis of their skin color, and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality. ..."
"... Poor Chinese girls (that is to say, those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white children. ..."
"... But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma, every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle class and 57 percent are female. The least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys. Just 13 percent of them go on to higher education, less than any black or Asian group. ..."
"... Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate based at Princeton University, came up with the phrase 'deaths of despair' when he looked at the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism, depression and drug abuse. Suicides among whites, he found, was soaring and those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low-educated. His recently-published book on the subject ( Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , co-written with Anne Case) tells the devastating story of what he calls 'the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century'. ..."
You can argue about the merits of pulling down statues, but it's hard to make the case that mass protests serve no useful purpose.
At the very least, they provoke debate and draw attention to uncomfortable topics that it might otherwise be easier to ignore. The
recent protests have forced everyone to have difficult discussions about race, class, poverty and attainment. Any serious examination
of the statistics shows that we're pretty far from equal, but what the figures also show is that it's wrong-headed and damaging to
lump very different groups together.
In these discussions politicians often lazily assume that all BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) people are the same, and
that all white groups are equally privileged. But a proper look at the data shows not just that there are striking difference within
BAME groups, but that the very worst-performing group of all are white working-class boys -- the forgotten demographic .
It might seem divisive to compare different groups, but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we're to help
the worst off, we have to know who they are. We should help everyone who needs it -- but it is vital to be able to compare groups
to know who's falling behind, relative to their peers. In the UK, Bangladeshi-Brits earn 20 percent less than whites on average,
for instance, but those with Indian heritage are likely to earn 12 percent more. Black Britons on average earn 9 percent less, but
Chinese earn 30 percent more. What these differences tell us is that employers aren't systematically discriminating between people
on the basis of their skin color, and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality.
Ucas, the British university admissions service, can provide unique insight into these issues: it is the only outfit in the
world to gather detailed information on all university applicants, including their age, gender, neighborhood and school type. This
is collected along with data on who applied for which courses and who was accepted, and it is renewed in huge detail every year.
Much of the data shows predictable results: there is a gap between rich and poor, as you might expect in a UK state system where
the best schools tend to be located in the most expensive areas. But there are surprising discoveries too: nearly half the children
eligible for free school meals in inner London go on to higher education, but in the country outside London as a whole it is just
26 percent.
Black African British children outperform white children, whereas black Caribbean children tend to do worse. Poor Chinese
girls (that is to say, those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white children.
But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma,
every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle
class and 57 percent are female. The least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys. Just 13 percent of them
go on to higher education, less than any black or Asian group.
This is a trend that can also be seen in the GCSE data; only 17 percent of white British pupils eligible for free school meals
achieve a strong pass in English and maths. Students categorized as Bangladeshi, Black African and Indian are more than twice as
likely to do so. In 2007, the state sector saw 23 percent of black students go on to higher education; this was true for 22 percent
of whites. So about the same. But at the last count, in 2018, the gap had widened to 11 points (41 percent for black students, 30
percent for whites). The children of the white working class are falling away from their peers, in danger of becoming lost.
Going to university is not the golden ticket it once was, but it requires stupefying naivety to believe that seven out of eight
poor white boys take a sober look at the economics of higher education and choose to set up their own businesses instead. The trail
of hard evidence runs cold once they leave school, but the prospects for those who can barely read and write are dreadful and we
can get some idea of the consequences by looking at the 'left behind' areas where unemployment, crime and 'deaths of despair' are
significantly higher than the national average.
Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate based at Princeton University, came up with the phrase 'deaths of despair' when he looked at
the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism, depression and drug abuse. Suicides among whites, he found, was soaring and
those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low-educated. His recently-published book on the subject (
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , co-written
with Anne Case) tells the devastating story of what he calls 'the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century'.
Yet while white working-class males are the largest disadvantaged minority, their cause is the least fashionable. In the intersectional
pyramid of victimhood, white males are at the bottom, tarnished by ideas of 'toxic masculinity' and 'white privilege' despite the
fact that in Britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true privilege. It's worrying, then, that any who attempt
'positive action' on behalf of poor white boys face a hostile reaction. Last year, Dulwich and Winchester colleges turned down a
bequest of more than £1 million ($1.25 million) because the donor, Sir Bryan Thwaites, wanted the money ring-fenced for scholarships
for white working-class boys. Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility,
described Thwaites's offer as 'obnoxious'.
When Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield, tried to ask an 'Equalities' question about working-class white boys in parliament
earlier this year, he was turned down by the Table Office because they do not have any 'protected characteristics'. The concept of
'protected characteristics' was wheeled into UK law by Harriet Harman's Equality Act, 10 years ago, and the Tories, then in opposition,
took the rare step of voting for it. The nine protected characteristics include 'race', 'sex' and 'sexual orientation', but the Table
Office is not alone in interpreting these as 'non-white', 'female' and 'gay'.
Under the Equality Act, 'positive discrimination' remains technically unlawful, but the barely indistinguishable concept of 'positive
action' is explicitly legal. Firms cannot have quotas, but they can set targets. Employers cannot refuse to look at job applications
from people who lack protected characteristics, but by stating that 'applications are particularly welcome' from BAME, female or
LBGTQ+ candidates they send a message that some need not apply.
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In 2016 the BBC pledged that half its workforce and leadership would be female by 2020 despite less than 40 percent of Britain's
full-time workers being women. It also set an 8 percent target for LGBT employees, although only around 2 percent of the population
identify as LGBT. This target has been comfortably exceeded, as has been the target of having 15 percent of employees from a BAME
background. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests last month, the corporation raised this target to 20 per cent.
The BBC admits that people from 'low and intermediate income households' are hugely underrepresented in its workforce. But what
does it do about it? Earlier this month Oxford University proudly reported that it was making 'steady progress' in its efforts to
make its campuses 'representative of wider society'. Of its most recent intake of British students, only 14 percent came from the
poorest 40 percent of households.
This fits a pattern: at a push, we can hear acknowledgement of the 'poor white male' problem. But that's as far as it ever goes.
The underperformance of white boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving. When figures come out showing the stunning
attainment gaps between boys and girls, the interest lasts for about a day. 'It always got a few headlines,' says Mary Curnock Cook,
the former head of Ucas. 'Where it never got any traction at all was in policy-making in government. I began to think that the subject
of white boys is just too difficult for them, given the politicization of feminism and women's equality.'
When I asked a teacher why white working-class boys have fallen so far behind, he gave me a short answer: girls are better behaved
and immigrant parents are stricter. This is a generalization but nonetheless interesting: if it is the case that parenting is the
problem, then it's not clear how much the UK government can do. Perhaps the reluctance to discuss the subject stems from fear that
such a discussion would lead to difficult territory about family structure, quality of parenting and -- in short -- culture. Perhaps
politicians think it better to let the problem fester, and the children suffer, than to risk discussing it.
Last month, the British government announced that its commission on racial inequality would include an examination into the underperformance
of working-class white boys at schools. Will it look deep into the causes? It might look at recent studies that suggest poor reading
levels in schools is a huge part of the problem. And it might ask whether 'positive action' in the name of diversity has left white
working-class boys behind.
"... By David Kerans , historian of Russia and financial analyst. He has held appointments at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities, as well as at Wall Street investment houses. ..."
"... "It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn't that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it . It's that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy ..."
"... "This view of the world certainly has "moral clarity." What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric." ..."
"... " the banks frankly own the place." ..."
"... "wall of propaganda" ..."
"... "racial capitalism" ..."
"... "cancel culture" ..."
"... "all lives matter" ..."
"... "silence is violence" ..."
"... "Putin apologist." ..."
"... " a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate in favor of ideological conformity" ..."
"... "a vogue for public shaming and ostracism", a "tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty" ..."
"... "calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought." ..."
"... "resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion," ..."
"... "We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists, who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
By
David
Kerans
, historian of Russia and financial analyst. He has held appointments at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale
Universities, as well as at Wall Street investment houses.
Should the issue of racism really trump all of America's other flaws, such as runaway wealth inequality, out of control
military spending, a corrupt finance system, an oligarchic mass media, and a throttled democracy?
Headcounters inform us
that 15 to 25 million people have turned up in the past six weeks for demonstrations related to Black Lives Matter (BLM),
making this one of the biggest waves of civic engagement in American history. A few reforms to policing are under discussion,
and we see some shifts in political leanings – polls indicate enthusiasm for Trump ebbing, pessimism about the direction of
the country rising, and support for reduced funding of police departments. But surely something broader is afoot?
It isn't difficult to see
that the BLM movement is making a real mark in two ways. In the conceptual realm, many BLM-supporting scholars are promoting
an unabashedly narrow understanding of the driving forces of American history and power structures, ardently centered on
racial
oppression
.
On the ground, meanwhile, a strong current of left illiberalism has taken shape, wherein a minority of strident activists are
imposing their orthodoxy on race-related matters with a fervor approaching Red Scare McCarthyism.
Andrew Sullivan
, writing in The Intelligencer, has aptly characterized BLM's analytical approach:
"It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact,
that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were
always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn't
that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it . It's that the liberal system is itself a
form of white supremacy
"This view of the world certainly has "moral clarity." What it lacks is moral
complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more
complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric."
Allow yourself a moment to
survey the country's primary problems. Your list might include:
Runaway global warming,
plausibly a threat to all forms of life on earth within the foreseeable future.
A finance system that
fuels corruption and capital flight from all over the world to
"offshore"
banking
havens
–
meaning primarily UK dependencies and the US – thereby hollowing out their tax bases, and ours. The amounts are staggering, in
the tens of trillions of
dollars
.
Runaway wealth inequality,
which correlates
persuasively
to
every measurable human pathology, across every geography, across all wealth groups. The biological consequences of the
stresses accompanying inequality are heavy, and even punish the
rich
,
as Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett elaborate throughout their book The Spirit Level.
About 150 million
Americans
live
with chronic disease, attributable partly to pollution from pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc, and, likely also to
the stress effects of wealth inequality.
The Pentagon's colossal
budget –
unauditable
and
thus unaccountable to Congress – sucking out ever increasing resources, and inclining the US to stoke international tensions
so as to justify the river of money.
A higher-education constellation steered more to producing profit than mature citizens, with a consequent erosion of America's
human
capital
on
various planes.
A throttled democracy,
where the trivial controls over campaign fundraising allow big-money donors and corporations to influence politicians. Senator
Dick
Durbin
(D-Illinois) expressed his despair about crafting meaningful banking regulations back in 2009:
" the
banks frankly own the place."
And so the stimulus package gives hundreds of billions to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin with
virtually no
controls
and
with corrupt
outcomes
,
but without public uproar.
An oligarchic mass media
that erects a
"wall of propaganda"
(political commentator Cenk Uygur's phrasing)
against anything smelling like social democracy – and, I would add, any gesture of rapprochement with Russia, among other
taboo subjects, including climate change, and military
intervention
.
Are any of these issues
dependent on the legacy of American slavery? America has myriad challenges to face, the vestiges of slavery and racism among
them, not above them. Contorting analytical approaches to prioritize the perspective of racial oppression obscures more than
it illuminates. America needs citizens better informed on all of the crises listed above.
The trajectory of the
George Floyd demonstrations seems to illustrate the risk of BLM becoming myopic.
BLM
architects
in the academy insist that the goal is to end
"racial capitalism"
via a
color-conscious
version
of
social democracy, but the race-grievance dimension – once presented as all-eclipsing – drowns out all other messages. And so
the mass media has easily channeled the demonstrations into very narrow terrain: demands to reduce police budgets and ensure
accountability for rogue cops. (Not so long ago, be it noted, BLM leadership cozied up to numerous corporate donors, and has
looked decidedly not revolutionary to keen critics such as social commentator
Paul
Street
.)
Meanwhile, BLM's
self-righteous repudiation of America has found potent application in its culture wars. An armada of aggressive online
social-justice warriors has honed a seemingly unbridled
"cancel culture"
–
including iconoclasm (toppling statues, for example), conformity control (condemning the phrase
"all
lives matter"
, or anything
else
that
might somehow
dilute
anti-racist
messaging), demanding participatory anti-racism on their terms (
"silence is violence"
,
for
instance
), denunciations (branding any level of skepticism racist, and often insisting that beliefs straying from their
line threaten the physical safety of black
people
),
and punishment. Plenty of people accused of racism – or simply racial insensitivity, or
less
–
have been fired, some even after making self-abasing confessions to their perceived sins, because their employer fears the
wrath of the woke mob.
BLM did not invent any
dimension of cancel culture, ie, the exclusion of tainted persons, groups or institutions from communication venues or
respectful attention. Recall, for instance, the McCarthyist anti-communist witch hunts, or the establishment's branding of
anyone doubting the Russiagate narrative as a
"Putin apologist."
But BLM's
stridency and moral certitude has fomented cancel culture.
Cancel culture is not
risk-free to progressive causes. In 2017, its #metoo emanation claimed the career of Senator Al Franken, one of the most
progressive senators – an outcome many of his colleagues
regret
.
And this is not an epiphenomenon. On July 7, Harper's Magazine published an
open
letter
from more than 150 cultural luminaries, including left-wing icons Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem, expressing grave
alarm over
" a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken
our norms of open debate in favor of ideological conformity"
,
"a vogue for public
shaming and ostracism", a "tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty"
, and
"calls
for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought."
They warn that
"resistance
must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion,"
and lament the cowardly obedience of corporate
and university leaders in bowing to digital woke-mob demands.
"We are already paying the
price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists, who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the
consensus or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of
our time."
Let's hope that message
gets through.
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interested? Share this story!
"... "Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color," is not a message one might expect to find on the website of a Smithsonian Institution museum. Yet there it is, part of the topic titled 'Whiteness' in a series called 'Talking About Race', second from the top of the home page of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC). ..."
"... There is no way to tell how long it has been up on the site, but it was brought to the public eye on Tuesday by Claremont Institute president Ryan P. Williams, who described it as "divisive propaganda." ..."
"... "common characteristics of most US White people," ..."
"... "committed to equity." ..."
"... It's bad enough that this kind of racialist propaganda is being pushed by the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian, but it gets worse. The Trump administration is literally paying race hucksters to brainwash its own employees, right now. Defense Secretary Mark Esper virtue-signaled on Twitter on Wednesday about the first meeting of the DOD Board on Diversity and Inclusion, which will do such vitally important work as reviewing "hairstyle and grooming policies for racial bias." ..."
"... Leaked documents published by researcher Christopher Rufo show diversity training along the lines above currently being carried out at the Treasury Department. The contractor who is doing this billed the federal government millions for various "diversity" schemes over the past 15 years. ..."
"... People like that are part of an entire cottage industry of "anti-racism" consultants that charge big money for "educating" captive audiences of corporate and government employees, forced to attend their "sensitivity training" and "unconscious bias" workshops for years. The best part – for them, not for the country – is that the way they define racism, it can never be overcome or resolved, requiring their grift to continue indefinitely. ..."
"... This is "racism masquerading as antiracism" as Rufo puts it, calling for the Trump administration to immediately ban the teaching of "toxic principles of critical race theory, race essentialism, and neo-segregationism." ..."
"Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward
people of color," is not a message one might expect to find on the website of a Smithsonian Institution museum. Yet there
it is, part of the
topic
titled
'Whiteness' in a series called 'Talking About Race', second from the top of the home
page
of
the National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
There is no way to tell
how long it has been up on the site, but it was brought to the public eye on Tuesday by Claremont Institute president Ryan P.
Williams, who described it as
"divisive propaganda."
Others weren't so
restrained.
"This is seriously the most racist document I've ever seen in mainstream
circulation,"
said columnist
Inez
Stepman
, while radio show host
Seth
Leibsohn
described it as
"out and out bigotry"
and called to
"Defund
the Smithsonian now."
You see, NMAAHC is the
newest addition to the Smithsonian family of museums – opened in 2016 to great fanfare, with then-President Barack Obama in
attendance – and therefore funded by US taxpayers.
The most controversial
portion of the 'Whiteness' presentation is an infographic about
"common characteristics
of most US White people,"
based on a slide by corporate consultant Judith H Katz and spruced up by NMAAHC designers.
There we find out that self-reliance, nuclear family, the scientific method, 'Judeo-Christian tradition', delaying
gratification, competitiveness and justice based on protecting property and English common law are all
"white"
things.
What's particularly
disturbing is that Katz wrote that back in 1990. According to her
bio
on
the website of Kaleel Jamison Consulting, a New York-based outfit, she actually wrote a Handbook for Anti-Racism Training in
1978. Now her ideas have been dusted off and sandwiched between 'White Fragility' author and corporate grifter Robin DiAngelo,
and radical feminist and social justice activist bell hooks. Capping off the 'Whiteness' section are suggested readings and
videos from liberal media outlets such as the Guardian, Vox and the Atlantic, along with questions designed for teachers.
And then it hits you: it's
a lesson plan. Sure enough, the first of the three categories the museum pitches its 'Talking about race' series to are
"educators,"
followed
by parents and finally persons
"committed to equity."
Which doesn't mean ownership
of assets with debts or liabilities, but "equality of outcomes," in the new language of intersectional social justice.
But wait, there's more!
The current featured topic in the series is '
Being
Antiracist
' – a celebration of race-based policies and outcomes as defined by social justice activist Ibram X. Kendi and
others. Just wait till you get to '
Social
Identities and Systems of Oppression
'...
It's bad enough that this
kind of racialist propaganda is being pushed by the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian, but it gets worse. The Trump administration
is literally paying race hucksters to brainwash its own employees, right now. Defense Secretary Mark Esper
virtue-signaled
on
Twitter on Wednesday about the first meeting of the DOD Board on Diversity and Inclusion, which will do such vitally important
work as reviewing
"hairstyle and grooming policies for racial bias."
Just last week, the US
Army emailed out a graphic describing President Donald Trump's campaign slogan 'Make America Great Again' as an example of
"covert
white supremacy,"
only to say it was done
"in error"
when caught.
Leaked documents published
by researcher Christopher Rufo show diversity training along the lines above currently being carried out at the Treasury
Department. The contractor who is doing this billed the federal government millions for various "diversity"
schemes
over the past 15 years.
People like that are part
of an entire cottage industry of
"anti-racism"
consultants that charge big money
for
"educating"
captive audiences of corporate and government employees, forced to
attend their
"sensitivity training"
and
"unconscious
bias"
workshops for years. The best part – for them, not for the country – is that the way they define racism, it can
never be overcome or resolved, requiring their grift to continue indefinitely.
By the logic of these
anti-racist
"educators,"
when the Rev. Martin Luther King Junior dreamed a dream in
1963 that his children
"will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content
of their character,"
he was in fact racist. Segregation is not an evil to be condemned, but a good that brings about
"equity."
Now
bend the knee and fork over your money, sinners!
This is "racism masquerading as antiracism" as Rufo
puts
it,
calling for the Trump administration to immediately ban the teaching of "toxic principles of critical race theory, race
essentialism, and neo-segregationism."
There is ample evidence
these teachings underpinned last month's race riots across America. If left unchecked, it isn't too hard to see that there
will be war. There is still time to step back from the brink and for people to see reason. Ah, but I forget, that's a
"white
people thing."
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interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
"... In their quest to change Western culture, Black Lives Matter and 'Woke Twitter' are redefining racism to weaponize the charge against anyone they choose. It's a dishonest tactic that lets them get away with their own bigotry. ..."
Micah Curtis is a game and tech
journalist from the US. Aside from writing for RT, he hosts the podcast Micah and The Hatman, and is an independent
comic book writer. Follow Micah at
@MindofMicahC
In their quest to change Western culture, Black Lives Matter and 'Woke Twitter' are redefining racism to weaponize the charge
against anyone they choose. It's a dishonest tactic that lets them get away with their own bigotry.
Racism is an evil thing.
People who are branded with that title are given a massive scarlet letter, and are generally cast out of civil society.
Rightfully so, as no one wants to interact with someone who is so malicious towards someone else's skin color. Individuals
like Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer are not tolerated (unless they're
commentating
for
CNN I suppose).
One of the above words
needs to be stressed: it's 'malicious'. As it has been understood for as far as I can remember, racism requires malice. This
is why the term 'hate group' was first coined. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Brotherhood, or other white
nationalists or white supremacists are considered 'hateful' because that is their modus operandi. They outright despise anyone
who isn't like they are.
However, racism isn't
something that is understood to be exclusive to a skin color either. Well, unless you're 'woke'. If you're America's Got
Talent host Nick Cannon, you can call white people and Jews
"
closer
to animals
"
and somehow you're not a racist. You can throw a
"
mute
white people
"
button on your platform and you're somehow totally cool. Bill De Blasio can tell Jewish
people
and
other religious groups that they can't assemble, but a BLM mural is serious business. And, of course, you can be a sitting
senator and brand all Trump supporters
"
white
supremacists
"
with no pushback.
The woke mob doesn't like
the current definition of racism because they fit it to a T. Most people that they are trying to say are racists are more
offended by pineapple on their pizza than anyone's melanin. Meanwhile, BLM supporters like Nick Cannon can spout something
that sounds like it would appear in Der Sturmer and he's fine. You're also going to have to explain to me how the Goya Foods
CEO, a Trump supporter, is a white supremacist when he's a Latino.
Why follow the rules or
adhere to definitions, when you can weaponize the debate to change the rules and definitions to suit your needs?
This is exactly how dopey
the conversation has become. The CDC had over a thousand employees asking the organization to
"declare
racism a public health
crisis
."
So
in the midst of an epidemic, your priority is declaring an irrational emotional response to melanin content in one's skin a
health crisis?! That's not even the CDC's job! Not to mention, acting as if America has anything close to the problems we had
in the 1960s and before is just revisionist. But then again, that's the problem with redefining a term that needs a strong
definition. Everything is becoming racist to the point that the term is becoming worthless.
We're at a point where no one knows who the racists are any more, because we can't even agree on the term. Certain groups are
excluded because they're 'the oppressed groups', as if that has anything to do with evil behavior. Racism is evil. Truly evil.
Evil is not relegated to a specific group or social class. Evil is simply evil. If we redefine something evil as the opposite
at any point, we open the door for tragedy. Many groups of people have been the victim of this behavior at one point in
history or another. If the woke mob gets its way, history will repeat itself.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
As with the Weather Underground, America's privileged are now lashing out at their own
self-loathing. Protesters demonstrate in front of Lafayette Square near the White House in
Washington, DC on June 20, 2020. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
June 24, 2020
|
12:01 am
Matt
Purple Depicting revolutionary France, Dickens wrote, "Six tumbrils roll along the streets.
Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be
seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of
flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father's house but dens of thieves, the huts of
millions of starving peasants!"
Today America's tumbrils are clattering about, carrying toppled statues, ruined careers,
unwoke brands. Over their sides peer those deemed racist by left-wing identitarians and
sentenced to cancelation, even as the evidentiary standard for that crime falls through the
floor. Rioters over the weekend
destroyed a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who finished off the Confederacy.
Falsehoods and innuendoes outpace the truth: in Oakland, a panic arose over what were
supposedly nooses in a public park; turns out they were just exercise equipment that had
been there for months. But no matter. America's Jacobins are in no mood to reason. As in
Dickens' France, genuine social problems have mushroomed into a national orgy of self-harm.
But who are these cultural revolutionaries? The conventional wisdom goes that this is the
inner-cities erupting, economically disadvantaged victims of racism enraged over the murder of
George Floyd. The reality is something more bourgeoisie. As Kevin
Williamson observed last week, "These are the idiot children of the American ruling class,
toy radicals and Champagne Bolsheviks playing Jacobin for a while until they go back to
graduate school." Most of the culling is taking place not in the streets, but in the faculty
lounge, the corporate boardroom, the upstart real estate firm with a socially conscious Twitter
footprint and a penchant for Mean Girls GIFs. The most high-profile casualty so far
isn't even a person but a maple syrup, Aunt Jemima, whose threat to world peace seems rather
manageable.
Such superficial victories are a clear sign of the bourgeoisie's soft hand. Meaningful
police legislation, the kind that might prevent future George Floyds, currently being worked on
by serious reformers, is a difficult push. Whereas reducing policymaking to maximalist slogans
is easy; spray-painting a statue is even easier; whining about a visage on a syrup bottle is
easier still. And ease is the currency of these weekend warriors, these erstwhile stoppers of
Kony. Who is the face of their revolution? It's tempting to name Melissa
Click, the white (check) communications professor (check) who at a 2015 protest over racial
issues (check) exhorted others (check) to beat up a student journalist. (Click was later fired
for her misconduct by the University of Missouri, only to be scooped
up by Gonzaga. The culling, it seems, only ever goes in one direction.)
But there's another figure who I think is even more representative than Click -- not from
the French Revolution or our present Tantrum of the Tenured, but the 1960s.
In early 1970, a townhouse in Greenwich Village exploded, leaving a charred hole in the
facade on West 11th Street. Police later concluded that the cause was a short-circuited bomb,
which young radicals had been building in the basement. This was the work of the Weather
Underground, the left-wing terrorist group, which was planning to plant the explosive at an
officers' ball at Fort Dix. Among those killed in the blast was a young woman named Diana
Oughton, who may have been holding the bomb when it accidentally went off.
It will not surprise you to learn that Oughton did not have a difficult childhood. Her
father, James Oughton, was one of the wealthiest men in the state of Illinois thanks to his
vast agricultural holdings. Diana grew up in a small town, Dwight, but amid immense privilege,
and when she arrived right on time at Bryn Mawr, she was a paint-by-numbers Republican who
supported abolishing Social Security. Her transformation over the intervening decade is one of
the most instructive and fascinating cases of radicalization ever documented, one that's
inspired both Hollywood (the movie Katherine is loosely based on her life) and the news
media (a four-part UPI
profile of Oughton by journalists Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers won a Pulitzer). Somehow
Oughton went from a lively and caring rich girl to very nearly one of America's worst mass
murderers.
How did this happen? Some of it had to do with her volunteer work at a far-flung village in
Guatemala, which opened her eyes to poverty, inequality, and the corruption of American foreign
aid. Some of it had to do with her beau, leftist lowlife Bill Ayers, who later became one of
the Weather Underground's leaders. But a good deal more had to do with her gilded upbringing,
which drew the contempt of her fellow radicals and seemed to turn her hatred inwards. It will
also not surprise you to learn that the Weathermen were white. What drove them to madness was a
cloying need to repudiate their privilege and prove themselves worthy comrades of the African
Americans then fighting for liberation. (It didn't work: the Black Panthers ultimately
denounced them as "chauvinistic" and "scatterbrains.")
Oughton, Franks and Powers note, came to detest "everything that she was." They conclude,
"She regarded the world she saw around her as the implacable enemy of everything she believed
in. Like the rest of the Weathermen, the privileged children of that world, in the end Diana
had only one ambition: to be its executioner."
The Diana Oughtons of today aren't about to start blowing up federal buildings, as did the
Weather Underground. But they do share that mentality: in deploring their privilege, they've
come to reject everything that bestowed it upon them, their history, their nationality, their
traditions, their culture, most of the past and some of the present as well. As recently as a
decade ago, President Barack Obama portrayed America as an imperfect but worthy project,
applying its ideals of opportunity and equality to those still left behind. Today such
incrementalism is a dirty word. The waypoints of societal change are intolerable. All
must measure up to the uniform yet constantly changing woke yardstick. Thus did a CNN
contributor
casually suggest that the Washington Monument might be demolished because George Washington
was a slaveowner. Anyone suspected of harboring racism -- even a founding father who, however
imperfect himself, helped codify principles that ended slavery -- must be brought to his
knees.
It's worth repeating that this isn't a working class production. It's driven by a new
generation of bratty Bolsheviks, those spoiled enough to think they can set a single standard
and then tear down the world for not living up to it. In lashing out at the society that
coddled them, they swing first at themselves. Once our tumbrils were police vans and pickup
trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers; now they're vehicles for upper-class solipsism
and masochism.
Just the high rates of violent crime. For some reason only the men seem to outperform, one
would think lead intake would not be gender specific. Lead doesn't help, but i suspect it is
more than that. I suspect it is cultural. If people are raised in a. Violent culture, they
resort to violence. Wife beaters are often the children of wife beaters.
Men have always been arrested and incarcerated more than women, worldwide. If we're talking
about comparisons between racial groups, then differing levels of lead exposure should be,
and have been, examined as a factor. It seems to be highly significant.
Instead of trying to improve failing NYC schools it is easier to claim racism. Some people just do not want to study. The
number of people who barely can read in the is really staggering and can't be explained by racism, which typically just mobilize the
oppressed minority to strive in education. That's probably why children of first generation emigrants (which parent having
poor English and discriminated at jobs) usually do very well educationally.
Although further progress is desirable, the level of racism and xenophobia in the USA is much less than in many countries.
People vote their resentments as much as their wallets. Dems are fighting to create voting
block that will lead them to the victory. In the past (and in some countries who updated the
applicable definitions, still), the most relevant additional class was the petty bourgeoisie; in
the modern US, however, the concept of the professional-managerial class is the most useful frame
of reference as for the base of neoliberal Democrats.
People who think the Democratic Party is responsive to the concerns or interests of the poor
and working classes are delusional, full stop. The Democrats are neoliberal sellouts to the
financial oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats are resolved to set the agenda by deciding what issues "will and will not" be covered over the course of the campaign. And -- since race is an issue on which they feel they can energize their base by propping-up outdated stereotypes of conservatives as ignorant bigots incapable of rational thought -- the Dems are using their media clout to make race the main topic of debate. ..."
"... Let's be clear, the Democrats do not support Black Lives Matter nor have they made any attempt to insert their demands into their list of police reforms. BLM merely fits into the Dems overall campaign strategy which is to use race to deflect attention from the gross imbalance of wealth that is the unavoidable consequence of the Dems neoliberal policies including outsourcing, off-shoring, de-industrialization, free trade and trickle down economics. These policies were aggressively promoted by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as they will be by Joe Biden if he is elected. They are the policies that have gutted the country, shrunk the middle class, and transformed the American dream into a dystopian nightmare. ..."
"... They are also the policies that have given rise to, what the pundits call, "right wing populism" which refers to the growing number of marginalized working people who despise Washington and career politicians, feel anxious about falling wages and dramatic demographic changes, and resent the prevailing liberal culture that scorns their religion and patriotism. ..."
"... This is Trump's mainly-white base, the working people the Democrats threw under the bus 30 years ago and now want to annihilate completely by deepening political polarization, fueling social unrest, pitting one group against another, and viciously vilifying them in the media as ignorant racists whose traditions, culture, customs and even history must be obliterated to make room for the new diversity world order. ..."
"... "Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities." ..."
The answer is "not always" due to existence of "What's the matter with Kansas" effect.
People can and do vote against their economic interests, although this is more common for
lower strata of population than for the elite.
This is the essence of the current play by the Neoliberal Democrats. Mike Whitney pointed
out that their support of black population is just a tactical trick:
The protests are largely a diversion aimed at shifting the public's attention to a
racialized narrative that obfuscates the widening inequality chasm (created by the
Democrats biggest donors, the Giant Corporations and Wall Street) to historic antagonisms
that have clearly diminished over time. (Racism ain't what it used to be.)
The Democrats are resolved to set the agenda by deciding what issues "will and will
not" be covered over the course of the campaign. And -- since race is an issue on which
they feel they can energize their base by propping-up outdated stereotypes of conservatives
as ignorant bigots incapable of rational thought -- the Dems are using their media clout to
make race the main topic of debate.
In short, the Democrats have settled on a strategy for quashing the emerging populist
revolt that swept Trump into the White House in 2016 and derailed Hillary's ambitious grab
for presidential power.
The plan, however, does have its shortcomings
Let's be clear, the Democrats do not support Black Lives Matter nor have they made
any attempt to insert their demands into their list of police reforms. BLM merely fits into
the Dems overall campaign strategy which is to use race to deflect attention from the gross
imbalance of wealth that is the unavoidable consequence of the Dems neoliberal policies
including outsourcing, off-shoring, de-industrialization, free trade and trickle down
economics. These policies were aggressively promoted by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
as they will be by Joe Biden if he is elected. They are the policies that have gutted the
country, shrunk the middle class, and transformed the American dream into a dystopian
nightmare.
They are also the policies that have given rise to, what the pundits call, "right
wing populism" which refers to the growing number of marginalized working people who
despise Washington and career politicians, feel anxious about falling wages and dramatic
demographic changes, and resent the prevailing liberal culture that scorns their religion
and patriotism.
This is Trump's mainly-white base, the working people the Democrats threw under the
bus 30 years ago and now want to annihilate completely by deepening political polarization,
fueling social unrest, pitting one group against another, and viciously vilifying them in
the media as ignorant racists whose traditions, culture, customs and even history must be
obliterated to make room for the new diversity world order. Trump touched on this
theme in a speech he delivered in Tulsa. He said:
"Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our
heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear
down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of
violent crime in our cities."
He than went off the rail, but still the part of his analysis reproduced above looks
pretty prescient.
The CHOP/CHAZ occupants reportedly established a reverse hierarchical social structure where
whites self-flagellated by performing quasi-religious rituals of atonement for the sins of
slavery. There was also a diversity quota of "centering" certain individuals based on their
ethnic background, gender and sexual orientation to cede leadership roles at the co-op, with
white participants coerced into overcoming their "fragility" (or sensitivity in discussing
racism). Concurrent with the protests, corporate consultant and University of Washington
professor Robin DiAngelo's intellectually fraudulent book White
Fragility shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and is a perfect
example of how such identity politics fails in dealing with social issues.
Collective punishment is never a suitable guiding principle in addressing social problems,
nor is using a conception akin to the religious idea of original sin where "white privilege" is
the root cause of racism. There were even mini-reparations demanded of repenting white
protesters reminiscent of the collection plate passed around by worshippers in a church. This
sort of bizarre and self-indulgent identity politics is much like what was widely mocked in a
viral video of a
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention collapsing into infighting last year.
What began as protests against police brutality were not only derailed into efforts to
set-up communes in major cities but a nationwide debate on statues, after the wave of
demonstrations and rioting across the country led to the Taliban-style destruction of
historical monuments perceived as glorifying racism. As a result, the toxic political
atmosphere which surrounded the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 was reignited.
While the calls for the removal of Confederate statues erected during the Reconstruction era is
long overdue, more debatable is the removal of those honoring slave-owning Founding Fathers
such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson which were toppled in Portland, Oregon. This was
followed by a statue of Union General Ulysses S. Grant being knocked over in San Francisco and
calls to remove the Lincoln Memorial in D.C., two men who victoriously led the North in the
Civil War. Regrettably, the prioritization of such iconoclastic gestures has not only defanged
the protests but diverted them from bringing real change to social inequities in the immediate
future.
This is not the first time we have witnessed this phenomena. Last year, a more troublesome
example were the calls to
remove a historic mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco that were
capitulated to by the city school board. The thirteen panel mural, Life of Washington ,
painted in 1936 by Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned as part of the
Federal Art Project, a New Deal program funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which
employed visual artists to create public works during the Great Depression. One controversial
panel depicts George Washington pointing to a group of armed colonizers standing over the
corpse of a Native American, while another fresco portrays two colonizers surveying land as
slaves toil in a field. It would seem obvious to anyone that the mural is not only explicitly
anti -racist but representative of an important period in U.S. history where art was a
force for social change and progressive politics was at the center of American life. Arnautoff
was a Russian immigrant who was an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, while the WPA
and its art program were dominated by communists such as the two men. Still, no matter the
context or intent -- the unflinching depiction of American history was deemed
"offensive to certain communities" because students were "triggered" by the harsh realities
illustrated.
This might seem unrelated, but the same illogic is behind the vigilantism of the statue
removals. While the Arnautoff mural is clearly anti-racist and certain monuments may glorify
slavery, the distinction is indecipherable to the social justice sect which needs its "safe
space" from the uncomfortable truths of American history. The differentiation between a
left-wing WPA mural opposing racism and colonial statue commending it is illegible to them. The
entire purpose behind the Arnautoff mural is to make one uncomfortable because its
subject matter is something no one should ever be at ease with. Yet its undeniable educational
and artistic value did not prevent the San Francisco school board from voting to paint over it,
while articles were published in The New York Times and even The Nation magazine
applauding their decision. What on earth is happening to the left when it is censoring
anti-racist art in the name of fighting racism?
The whole point of education at a high school is to teach students to analyze and interpret
subjects like art and history, not just emotionally react to them. When the very fabric of
culture and society like a historic mural or statue can be torn down simply because people are
upset by them, the next plausible step is book burning. San Francisco High School completely
failed to educate its students when they decided upon the most backwards way of interpreting
the mural, just as the protesters tearing down these statues did not use their faculties to
understand them in a historical context. Genocide and slavery are indeed the foundations of the
U.S., but we should learn from our tragic history to grasp the equivalent injustices happening
today. Simply eradicating murals and statues that remind us of it, whether they oppose or
elevate them, is totally ineffectual.
While some activists have expressed concern that the protests have deviated from their
original purpose, the right has fixated on the presence among the marches of "Antifa" which
Trump wants to designate as a "terrorist organization", a reckless idea given the completely
decentralized nature of the group. The original Antifa movement in the 1930s had been part of
the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in its effort to form a popular front against fascism, but
the dilettantes in the modern incarnation are closely associated with black bloc anarchism and
other amateurish orientations. Two decades ago, Seattle had been the site of the 1999 protests
against the World Trade Organization (WTO), often referred to as the 'Battle of Seattle', which
saw 40,000 march against globalization. Some may recall this was where the black bloc first
became notorious for injecting vandalism and senseless violence into peaceful demonstrations
and were widely thought to have been
infiltrated by law enforcement . In 2016, the current embodiment of Antifa first came to
attention during protests on college campuses against speaking appearances by far right media
personalities during the U.S. presidential election, including at the University of California
at Berkeley which had ironically been the site of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.
Following Trump's election, the stage was set in Charlottesville during the Unite the Right
rally and counter-protests over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in August 2017 for
'Antifa' to be crowned as heroes shadowboxing the historical ghost of fascism. When the likes
of The New York Times is suddenly
promoting the black bloc , that's your first clue something else is afoot. In order to
prevent the emergence of a truly progressive movement in the wake of Hillary Clinton's defeat,
a false narrative was concocted by the political establishment about the significance of
Trump's victory, which we were told was the result of alleged Russian meddling and the racism
of "deplorable" Trump voters. Instantly, any critique of the system which produced Trump
disappeared and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party was able to neutralize the
Bernie Sanders-led opposition in its ranks.
As a result, the vast majority of the left became convinced by the interpretation that
Trump's election was purely the outcome of a resurgence of "fascism", thus making Trump the
singular, most immediate danger -- while U.S. imperialism and endless war continue unopposed,
including the support for actual fascists in Ukraine. It should be understood that what Trump
and the wave of pro-Zionist, Islamophobic right-wing populists in the EU represent is something
qualitatively different. Still, anyone on the left who dares oppose U.S. imperialism today is
risking being branded a 'red-brown' collaborator. The Democratic Party, which spearheaded the
Orwellian idea of "humanitarian interventionism" used to justify the wholesale destruction of
uncooperative nations by the American war machine in recent decades, has since tricked the
majority of the left into unwittingly backing U.S. imperialism to unseat "dictators." Even when
the left today ostensibly opposes war, it is often forced to qualify its objections by
repeating the same talking points about countries attacked by Washington used to justify
it.
The U.S. foray in the Syrian war is a perfect example. Trump's idea to designate Antifa as a
terrorist group would be especially ironic considering that many American leftists who
self-identify using the "Antifa" black and red standard have thrown their support behind the
creation of another infamous "autonomous zone" in Northeast Syria established by mostly-Kurdish
militias known as Rojava -- with the help of none other than the U.S. military. There is even a
self-proclaimed International Freedom Battalion of American and European volunteers fighting to
defend the enclave that purports to be in the tradition of the International Brigades which
defended the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. These "Antifa" conscripts fight
alongside the YPG (People's Protection Units), a Kurdish-majority militia which has been
rebranded by the Pentagon as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). These leftists are apparently
in serious need of a history lesson, considering it was the Soviet Union alone which intervened
to defend the Spanish Republic from fascism, not the United States. From Washington's
perspective, CHOP/CHAZ should be considered blowback from this policy.
The U.S. creation of the SDF has not been without controversy, as the YPG is widely regarded
as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey which Washington's NATO
ally regards as a terrorist organization . While the Kurds and
their Western volunteers may believe they are creating an anarchist utopia, in reality they are
infantryman for the Zionist plan to balkanize Syria and
prevent Damascus from accessing it own resources . So it makes perfect sense that they
would try to replicate what they learned in Afrin in an American city using Rojava as a model.
When Trump tried to follow through on his anti-interventionist pledges as a candidate and pull
U.S. troops out of Syria, it sparked outrage from the pro-war "left" which glorifies Rojava as
a 'libertarian socialist' and 'direct democracy' experiment, even though non-Kurds such as
Arabs and Assyrian Christians face ethnic cleansing at hands of Kurdish nationalists in their
efforts to create an ethno-state.
Taibbi said in a Hill.TV this past week there is an "extraordinary irony" in white Americans
elevating a white corporate consultant to the top of bestseller lists in the wake of George
Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis.
In the book, which has seen a resurgence in popularity amid the nationwide reckoning on race
relations, DiAngelo lays out her theory on white Americans' defensiveness when it comes to
addressing racism.
"This is how they want to reinterpret their racial issues," he said. "This is the racism
problem as seen through the lens of somebody who makes thousands of dollars an hour, being
hired by companies."
Taibbi said that rather than confronting how they contribute to systematic racism, companies
tend to force their employees into trainings with outside academics like DiAngelo.
"This is how corporate America views the race problem, it views it as an individual issue
that where racism is is sort of inexorably stuck in all of us and the only way that we can
combat it is through relentlessly listening to corporate consultants," Taibbi said.
Twitter's engineering team will systematically purge a list of offensive terms from its
source code and internal documents in the name of political correctness. Terms like "master"
and "slave" will go, as will gendered pronouns.
"We're starting with a set of words we want to move away from using in favor of more
inclusive language," Twitter Engineering announced on Wednesday.
Among the terms to be terminated are "whitelist" and "blacklist,""master" and "slave,"
which will be replaced with "allowlist" and "denylist," and "leader" and "follower"
respectively. Gendered pronouns such as "guys" will be swapped for gender-neutral terms like
"folks" and "y'all," while the terms "man hours" and "grandfathered" will have their
patriarchal connotations expunged, and will be replaced with "person hours" and "legacy
status." Even "dummy value" was deemed offensive.
All the more reason Twitter can go fuck itself. I have a Twitter account, but almost never
use it, and only created it so I could respond to things that really make me mad. Since then
almost everyone I strongly dislike has banned me anyway, so if they want to go to Ze and Zir
and Zippity Fuckin' Doo Da, it's no bother for me. But if they are really serious in their
busybody political correctness, they are embarking on a path which will eventually make the
English language almost unrecognizable. "Master" is a useful and common verb – I hope
one day to master the knots used in rigging – as well as an adjective: he is a master
of the instrument.
Sort of unsurprising for the country that claims to be the last word in free speech,
though. One wonderful day the only words allowed to be used in any questionnaire sent around
by your employer will be "I approve", and anything you say will be changed to that by
software.
I think you must mean Susan Rice – Obama's former National Security Advisor. A known
Russophobe and neo-liberal Democrat warhawk. I believe Biden promised, in one of his lucid
moments, to choose 'a woman of color' for his VP. This is what it has come to in the fight to
capture votes; it's not enough to spend – literally – billions in campaign funds,
but you also have to court as many communities as possible instead of just picking the best
person for the job. I'm not suggesting it is impossible a black or brown woman could be the
best person for the job, but in that case there would be no need to announce it in advance,
thereby eliminating all whites and males from competition. You can blame the voters for that
as much as the politicians – screwing up the job of leadership has become so
commonplace that a perception has arisen that the choice should be made on the basis of
'whose turn it is'.
Susan Rice could be baited into war with Russia at the drop of a hat – she is not a
diplomat, has a filthy temper and is totally committed to the ideal of the United States as a
benevolent tyrant which is not afraid to make the tough decisions because it knows what's
best. When it says 'do', you do. Or else. I think it is pretty plain now that the Democratic
strategy is to either use Biden – if elected – as a talking head for the Clinton
Machine if he is able to remain reasonably convincing, or to relieve him for health reasons
if he becomes visibly incompetent. Either way, rule in that administration will not be
Biden's decisions.
It is so much easier to get along when both can be right and wrong in the same exchange. I
do not have to run to my room to bury my face in my pillow and scream, like I do when I'm
wrong. Well, that's The Hill, so it's a solid recommendation and not one of those throwaway
"Hey, she'd make a great president!" endorsements like the papers make whenever some new
mouthpiece appears briefly on the radar (remember 'Joe the plumber'?) But Condi has been out
of politics an eternity, in political time, and would have to rebuild alliances and get
quickly up to speed. I frankly doubt Biden is considering her.
She would be a marginal improvement on Susan Rice, though, for the faults I have already
cited.
During Obama's presidency, the US ambassador to the UN was a wonderfully talented brown
woman. Can't remember her name now, but she liked taking names.
No, no, this was during the first couple of years of Donald Trump's Presidency: the
woman's name was Nikki Haley, originally born Nimrata Randhawa and of Sikh Indian background.
She liked keeping a long shit list of people and countries to nurture dreams of punishment
against.
Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are getting most of the
buzz, but former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is also been getting a lot
of attention in Joe Biden's campaign as he considers who to pick as his running mate, sources
say
####
I say, is that a cheeky cooking pun squeezed in to the headline? It gets a clap from me if
it is intentional!
"... "I'ma stab you, and while you're struggling and bleeding out, I'ma show you my paper cut and say, 'My cut matters too,'" she declared in the TikTok clip. ..."
"... Holding back tears, Janover said she'd "worked really hard" to receive a position at the company, and complained that her contract had been terminated even though Deloitte claims to "stand against systemic racism." ..."
A Harvard graduate has reportedly lost her job after posting a now-viral TikTok video in
which she vowed to assault anyone who didn't support the Black Lives Matter (BLM)
movement.
...
Claira Janover became an overnight sensation after several news outlets caught wind
of a video in which she threatened to attack anyone "entitled" enough to believe
that "all lives matter."
"I'ma stab you, and while you're struggling and bleeding out, I'ma show you my paper
cut and say, 'My cut matters too,'" she declared in the TikTok clip.
...Holding back tears, Janover said she'd "worked really hard" to receive a
position at the company, and complained that her contract had been terminated even though
Deloitte claims to "stand against systemic racism."
..."File under Schadenfreude or Karma," noted conservative firebrand
Michelle Malkin.
...Janover's firing is unusual as it marks a rare case of 'reverse' cancel culture.
Social-justice activists have typically been the ones using social media to attack anyone who
is suspected of holding politically incorrect views.
or about a month now, America's major cities have treated to nightly orgies of
old-fashioned, rope-and-torch iconoclasm. Statues of variously "problematic" historical figures
(including both Robert E. Lee and, for some reason, Ulysses S. Grant) are defaced, torn from
their rivets, and set on fire.
As cooler minds have always known, it was only a matter of time before these iconoclasts
moved out of the public sphere and into the private. But that day came much sooner than many of
us anticipated.
Enter Shaun King, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter and a doyen of the cultural
elite. Last Monday, Mr. King issued
gave his followers a rather disturbing order:
Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down.
They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus
wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down.
Yes. All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and
their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form white supremacy. Created as
tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.
The Christian Post
identifies King as a "retired pastor," which is a pretty big stretch. In 2008, at the age
of 29, Mr. King founded a church in Atlanta called "Courageous Church" -- only to step down
four years later, aged 33, because his congregation didn't really like him. "I think in some
ways I moved people too quickly for their comfort and it just didn't work," he explained. "Some
people really loved the changes and transitions that I was proposing, but it didn't work." I
guess so. In fairness, destroying statues of Jesus and the saints went out of vogue with
Protestants a good four hundred years ago.
Every people are allowed to imaging Jesus in their own way.
So what's the issue exactly? That's right there is no issue. King simply wants to deprive
white people of their own self respect while elevating his. He's a Satanic figure.
Cue bono? Not black people (actually she is an Indian, which until recently was a caste
society). Is she a victim of "affirmative action" policy and occupies a position for which there
are more worthy academically candidates. University is not sinecure, at least it should not
be.
How good is she as an academic? Is she mentally stable?
The decision of Cambridge University to promote her after such an idiotic tweet creates
several additional questions.
Petition against Prof Priyamvada Gopal now off line. Additionally I noticed earlier today
that the comments given on the site voicing why they were signing had all been removed, but not
on other petitions. As of yesterday evening these comments were peaceful, and not personal,
just things like 'because it is racist' and 'do I even need to give a reason'?
The petition had nearly 25,000 signed supporters earlier today, and new signings were
flooding in at over 1/sec when I checked.
In addition in an affront to common decency the University/College promoted her whilst
they had stated earlier they were aware of the controversial nature of her tweets.
Her original tweet was deleted by Twitter as a breach of community guidelines. She also
reports that, in spite of senselessly provoking people at a delicate time with racist tweets,
that the extremely racist responses she got from some far right people was being looked at by
the Police.
All in all this establishes a systematic problem. Being deliberately vague means you cannot
use context as a defence, and the context of all her tweets shows some extreme patterns of
thinking against certain groups that casts very considerable doubts on the validity of such a
defense. Moreover, context hasn't been a defence when others have been prosecuted for far less.
Nobody, including Cambridge academics, should be above the law.
To those people that think that what she said was justified because she was trying to
defend BLM from supposed alternative movements, all she in fact did do was to achieve the
opposite of that.
If one wishes to convey complex ideas a teacher of English in her position *must know* that
this requires a long form medium to provide argumentation, and that Twitter is no such place to
do it due to its character count. But taking in all the other comments she has made, its very
clear the double standards and overall bias that really does amount to overt prejudice.
At the very least she is so contradictory, immature and incompetent as to make a mockery
of her college and for that reason at minimum, she should lose her job. I'm sorry to say that
as well.
But something about this whole episode feels like a jumping the shark moment. I don't think
this is going away all that easily.
Wikipedia: (born 1968) is a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of
Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Churchill College. Her main teaching and research interests
are in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical
race studies.
"She's racist. I think we need to stop this dumbass spiel that minorities cannot be racist
because they absolutely can. She is racist and is getting away with because she's not white.
That's just the fact of the matter."
"please recognize that this is completely unacceptable and indefensible? How are her students
supposed to feel safe?"
More racist tweets by Cambridge University Professor Priyamvada Gopal have been unearthed,
including one in which she spoke about her urge to "kneecap white men."
Gopal caused controversy last week when she tweeted "white lives don't matter," prompting a
petition demanding she be fired. However, Cambridge University responded by promoting her to a
full professorship, despite the fact that the tweet was censored by Twitter for hate
speech.
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The media's reaction was to portray Gopal as the victim of bullying while feigning
infinitely greater outrage over a "white lives matter" banner that was flown over a soccer
match in Manchester.
More hateful tweets have now been discovered, including one discussion where Gopal states,
"I resist urges to kneecap white men every day. So, no **I** am the hero."
"Can @Cambridge_Uni please recognise that this is completely unacceptable and indefensible?
How are her students supposed to feel safe?" asked Emma Webb.
"She's racist. I think we need to stop this dumbass spiel that minorities cannot be racist
because they absolutely can. She is racist and is getting away with because she's not white.
That's just the fact of the matter," remarked Dominique Samuels.
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Maybe these messages will lead to another petition demanding Gopal's removal. The first one
was deleted by Change.org after receiving over 20,000 signatures.
Cambridge University has stood by Gopal despite previously dismissing Noah Carl after 500
academics signed a letter challenging Carl's research on race and intelligence.
The institution also previously rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan
Peterson after a woke mob complained about his stance on political correctness and after he
appeared in a photograph with a man wearing a t-shirt that said "I'm a proud Islamophobe."
* * *
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A few thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism...
A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since
the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process
are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like
former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility (Amazon's #1 seller !)
reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power
contests.
It's been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged
past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today
cheered , "American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary
escapism." When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon
gushed , "I know everyone wants to talk to you right now!" White Fragility has been pitched
as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George
Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this
isn't a straightforward book about examining one's own prejudices. Have the people hyping this
impressively crazy book actually read it?
DiAngelo isn't the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual
horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race
theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human
experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only
by our racial category.
If your category is "white," bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in
white supremacy ("Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities Whiteness has always
been predicated on blackness"), which naturally means "a positive white identity is an
impossible goal."
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except "strive to be less white." To
deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo's
lecturing – what she describes as "leaving the stress-inducing situation" – is to
affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the "ordeal by water"
(if you float, you're a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
DiAngelo's writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of
this type is built around the same principles as Orwell's Newspeak : it banishes ambiguity,
nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and
antiracist, platform and deplatform , center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series
of binary choices . Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like "
AMAZING !" and "
SAD !" that are
simultaneously more childish and livelier.
Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly
verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where
only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. "To be less white is
to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white
people," or "Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes
whiteness as multidimensional "
DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. "When
there is disequilibrium in the habitus -- when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they
challenge our capital -- we use strategies to regain our balance," she says ("People taken out
of their comfort zones find ways to deal," according to Google Translate). Ideas that go
through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key
part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream," speech:
One line of King's speech in particular -- that one day he might be judged by the content
of his character and not the color of his skin -- was seized upon by the white public because
the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend
that we don't see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy
for racism, with white people insisting that they didn't see race or, if they did, that it
had no meaning to them.
That this speech was held up as the framework for American race relations for more than half
a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult
and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based
upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their
character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one
another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because
rejection of King's "dream" of racial harmony -- not even as a description of the obviously
flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future -- has become a central tenet
of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.
The book's most amazing passage concerns the story of Jackie Robinson:
The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by
rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often
celebrated as the first African American to break the color line
While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as
racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson
finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong
enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this:
"Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball."
There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin
DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he
"finally had what it took to play with whites." Everyone familiar with this story understands
that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the
racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a
complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For
DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as "the first black man whites allowed to
play major league baseball" is grotesque and profoundly belittling.
Robinson's story moreover did not render "whites, white privilege, and racist institutions
invisible." It did the opposite. Robinson uncovered a generation of job inflation for mediocre
white ballplayers in a dramatic example of "privilege" that was keenly understood by baseball
fans of all races fifty years before White Fragility. Baseball statistics nerds have long been
arguing about whether to put asterisks next to
the records of white stars who never had to pitch to Josh Gibson, or hit against prime Satchel
Paige or Webster McDonald. Robinson's story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth
about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered "invisible."
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the
mathematical opposite of one's intended point, but this isn't uncommon in White Fragility,
which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna
Karenina.
Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself "antiracism"
– I think it deserves that name a lot less than "pro-lifers" deserve theirs and am amazed
journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race
relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed
groups, allies, and white oppressors.
Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by
birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the program
of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a "less white identity,"
but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one another as
impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.
This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy,
is the vision of "progress" institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why?
Maybe because it fits. It won't hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades
now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts
since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.
Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this
performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders.
Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall
Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating,
defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in
kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on
privilege even as they reassure donors they'll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried
interest tax break.
For corporate America the calculation is simple. What's easier, giving up business models
based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There's a deal to
be made here, greased by the fact that the "antiracism" prophets promoted in books like White
Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom
of speech, etc.
Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be
addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute
codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.
If you're wondering what that might look like, here's DiAngelo explaining how she handled
the fallout from making a bad joke while she was "facilitating antiracism training" at the
office of one of her clients.
When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have
been put off by one of her Black female team members: "The white people," she says, "were
scared by Deborah's hair." (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be
more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction
worker).
DiAngelo doesn't grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her
web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, "I seek out a friend who is white
and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics."
After DiAngelo confesses her feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt to the enlightened
white cross-racial dynamics expert (everyone should have such a person on speed-dial), she
approaches the offended web developer. She asks, "Would you be willing to grant me the
opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?" At which point
the web developer agrees, leading to a conversation establishing the parameters of
problematic joke resolution.
This dialogue straight
out of South Park – "Is it okay if I touch your penis? No, you may not touch my penis
at this time!" – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation,
law firm, university, newsroom, etc.
Of course the upside such consultants can offer is an important one. Under pressure from
people like this, companies might address long-overdue inequities in boardroom diversity.
The downside, which we're already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace
powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the
central tenets of DiAngelo's book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and
can only be managed through constant, "lifelong" vigilance, much like the
battle with addiction . A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced
toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts -- in the
fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.
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Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar
to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three
years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was
denounced for expressing the opinion that "anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to
imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the
Writer's Union of Canada for the crime of "cultural appropriation," and denounced as a racist
by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki "doesn't see the
humanity of indigenous peoples." Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing
to provide proof that she was Indigenous.
Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was
forced to
resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D'Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine
– but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired
after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a
"white power" sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the
Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two
years ago in blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn
Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person's life
necessary?
People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and
colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a
salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of
"anti-black racism" to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to
start submarining each other's careers before they've even finished growing?
"People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don't want people
like that to keep getting jobs," one 16 year-old said.
"Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives I
love twitter," wrote a different
person, adding cheery emojis.
A bizarre echo of North Korea's "
three generations of punishment " doctrine could be seen in the
boycotts of Holy Land grocery , a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks
it's been abandoned by clients and seen
its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO's 14 year-old daughter eight
years ago.
Parents calling out their kids is also in vogue. In Slate, "Making a Mountain Out of a
Molehill" wrote to advice columnist Michelle Herman in a letter headlined, " I
think I've screwed up the way my kids think about race ." The problem, the aggrieved parent
noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their "closest friends are still
a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids," which to them was natural. The parent worried when
one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed
annoyance at having to specify race, because "I don't care about race."
Clearly, a situation needing fixing! The parent asked if someone who didn't care about race
was "just as racist as someone who only has white friends" and asked if it was "too late" to do
anything. No fear, Herman wrote: it's never too late for kids like yours to educate themselves.
To help, she linked to a program of materials designed for just that purpose, a " Lesson
Plan for Being An Ally ," that included a month of readings of White Fragility. Hopefully
that kid with the Black and Hispanic friends can be cured!
This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility
, could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can't Breathe, I met civil rights activists
who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard stories of lawyers who
were physically threatened for years in places like rural Arkansas just for trying to end
explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow. Last week, an Oregon
County casually exempted "people of color
who have heightened concerns about racial profiling" from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who
thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has
it ever?
At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise
and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it's extremely suspicious
that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants
alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our
identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences.
Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are
both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for
containing the "N-word ." ( White Fragility contains it too, by the way).
It's almost like someone thinks there's a benefit to keeping people divided.
Saying that Lincoln is the "symbol of white supremacy" has about as much foundation as
saying Harvey Milk is the symbol of militant heterosexuality. Both were great leaders who were
killed at the height of campaigns for equality. As I discuss below, there are aspects of
Lincoln's legacy that are worthy of condemnation but even John Wilkes Booth would dispute the
claim of Lincoln as the embodiment of white supremacy.
In a brilliant New York
Times op-ed from 2017 , Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote that identity politics
ironically enough gives whiteness a near-mystical power to mold and control the course of the
world in such a way that "those deemed white remain this nation's primary actors." White people
act, black people are acted upon. This is the way it's been and, if you ask the likes of
Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is the way it's going to remain for a long, long time. It was
unfortunate that Jones fell into the same fatalistic way of thinking.
But what felt like an argumentative misstep then is now the law of the land on the left, by
which activists like the indignant white woman from the Twitter video above reveal their actual
racism. It's the same sentiment informing those horrid Facebook posts by your friends.
What will be left to the wayside as a result is any meaningful attempt to tackle the issues
of overly aggressive policing, unemployment, low growth, dwindling incomes, existential
despair, and the
skyrocketing homicide rate that's been haunting our cities since the recent riots and the
subsequent retreat of police forces. Black lives are getting lost at staggering rates, and no
one who holds the public microphone seems to care.
...things have degenerated toward ahistorical acts of iconoclasm against the
author of the Declaration of Independence or the
Union general and later president who brought the rebellion to its knees and then crushed
the KKK. The target in all this is not so much some perceived historical injustice that
occurred in the distant past but the belief that "whiteness" has wiggled its way through time,
swallowing and destroying all that has stood in its way. It's the stony memorials to this
mythic, all-pervasive whiteness that therefore need to be toppled first before
anything else can change . And voila, we're way past addressing the real problems affecting
our country.
(Perhaps, it's the advance guard of Joe Biden's presidency. After all,
didn't he promise a room full of megarich donors that under his administration "nothing
would fundamentally change"?)
...a compassionate plea to black Americans -- really, to all Americans -- not to feel like
the deck is forever stacked against them. True change requires us to engage in meaningful civic
activity in order to regain a sense of agency that our corporate-sponsored anti-racist
figureheads insist remains confined to the hearts of entitled white progressives.
Otherwise, "we'll be back here in ten years having the same conversation."
Gregor Baszak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a
writer. His articles have appeared in The American Conservative, Los Angeles Review of Books,
Platypus Review, Public Books, Spectator USA, Spiked, and elsewhere. Follow Gregor on Twitter
at @gregorbas1.
The Clinton Crime bill was not a mistake. Anyone who's ever spent any amount of time on
the darker side of a major American city knows that "superpredators" are all too real. The
supreme irony over all this revisionist angst is that the mass incarceration of black
criminals is a massive boon to black communities, given that crime perpetrated by black men
overwhelmingly harms black people.
Superpredator? Sounds like a SciFi movie title. A swaggering, mean-talking street tough
who'll steal anything not nailed down or red hot doesn't qualify as Son of Godzilla.
No, "superpredator" was a term used by Hillary Clinton in 1993 to describe the hardcore
violent criminals who seemed so common at the time. Violent crime in America peaked in
1990. It was a major campaign issue beginning in 1968 and continuing through 1992, after
which crime decreased rapidly.
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I went to school in Mexico for a while and I loved it. I think that we need to invade Mexico and take the land that they are
selfishly trying to keep for themselves.
John
Wayne was a figment of America's imagination. He served in the imaginary military ( not in the real military) and countless
imaginary battles from the Alamo to Viet Nam. He was nothing but a propagandist for the military and right wing conservatives.
His name shouldn't be on anything but his tombstone.
I still like John Wayne's movies but I never listened to his personal speak. He tried to be political but he should have
stayed out of it. He was an actor. Yes, he sounds like a racist and white supremists
Follow RT on
All the riots, toppled statues and attacks on American history will not end in the Year Zero the
protesters want. It's going to achieve precisely the opposite, as the silent majority of Americans
will show in November.
The silent majority is one of the biggest X factors in American politics. Possibly even the biggest.
Not all Americans are the type to shout everything from the high heavens, even though we have a
reputation for being brash and loud. Many of us would rather let our actions do the talking than our
words.
With the presidential election less than 150 days away, the left needs to reconsider where
it's going and what it's enabling. And whether it wants the nation to dump Trump, as its supporters
say they're passionate about achieving.
The poll numbers are hardly surprising. Biden tends to range anywhere from 42 to 56, whereas Trump
is anywhere from 37 to 48 percent,
according to Five Thirty Eight
.This is no different to how it was in 2016, when the
polls
showed Hillary Clinton routinely holding double-digit leads over Trump.
After he won (albeit with a smaller number of votes than Clinton secured), there was a lot of
pondering about how exactly the polls got it wrong, and it all came down to the same conclusion: the
silent majority. That large swath of Americans who weren't vocal about who they were going to vote
for, but weren't pleased with how the country was going and let their actions speak for themselves.
During the course of the past four years, the political left in America has learnt zero lessons
from their loss in 2016. If anything, they've become even less. CNN personality Don Lemon
has even gone to bat for Antifa
.
There are constant statements in the liberal press that there's some sort of deep-seated racism
that's inherent to the United States. So much so that the Pulitzer Prize honoring journalism and the
arts went to The 1619 Project,
a historically inaccurate
and easily debunked piece about the history of slavery in the United
States. Then came the death of George Floyd.
Since that moment, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been working to enact a sort of Year
Zero, targeting monuments across the country to deface or destroy them. This, of course, comes after
the mass riots agitated by Antifa that saw many cities in flames. And then there's the creation of the
CHAZ/CHOP autonomous area in Seattle, which is
reportedly
about to be shut down by the mayor.
Where is the condemnation from the Joe Biden camp? Where is the condemnation from the left in
general? Where is their support for the police? Why aren't any of them calling for BLM – an avowedly
Marxist group, the aims of which include the overthrowing of capitalism – to stop encouraging this or
for Antifa to be declared a terrorist group, or declaring how bad an idea an autonomous, police-free
zone is? The answer? They're nowhere. In fact, Nancy Pelosi tried to place the murder of George Floyd
at the feet of Republicans
.
Here is what the left does not understand. Its unwillingness to call out these Marxist groups and
their actions doesn't go unnoticed. There's a reason Trump rallies sell out the way they do. There's a
reason why he won in 2016 and could just as easily have a poll-defying victory again. That reason is
simple: Americans take notice of what's around them and realize who's in charge and who's failing.
It's been speculated that the 2016 election was an indictment of HIllary Clinton, but I'm not sure
I agree. I think it was an indictment of the left in general. During the Barack Obama presidency,
"flyover country" was constantly demeaned as being racist and backwards. With Hillary Clinton, it was
no different, and people were sick of it. Now, it's gone far beyond that. Not only are there groups
that actually believe America is a deeply racist and oppressive nation (the opposite of reality), but
they want to destroy it and create something new. If you look at CHAZ/CHOP, it's rather obvious that
they can't even plant a crop, let alone run a country.
The United States does not want a Year Zero. Ours is a nation with a heritage most Americans are
proud of, and we're proud of the oppression we've defeated over the years. Erasing that history only
means we'd be doomed to repeat it.
As such, the polls are likely going to remain the same until the election. At that point, the
silence will be deafening. Americans will pull the cord for Republicans, and we'll have another 2016
on our hands. All because the left would not stand up to the radicals who want to destroy the nation.
Can leftists and conservatives of our modern era peacefully coexist within the same
society?
If someone asked me this question only ten years ago I would have said "Sure, it's
possible".
Today, the answer is a resounding "No way".
The political divide has become so vast that there is simply no chance for the two sides to
reconcile or come to reasonable terms, and make no mistake, this is not a two-sided disaster;
the majority of the damage is being done by one side of this equation.
Back in 2016 I wrote numerous articles discussing the issues and dangers of the political
divide that was developing within the US, and many of these articles focused on who actually
benefits. In my article
'Order Out Of Chaos: The Defeat Of The Left Comes With A Cost' I stated:
" When I mentioned in my last article the crippling of social justice, I did not mention
that this could have some negative reverberations. With Trump and conservatives taking
near-total power after the Left had assumed they would never lose again, their reaction has
been to transform. They are stepping away from the normal activities and mindset of cultural
Marxism and evolving into full blown communists. Instead of admitting that their ideology is
a failure in every respect, they are doubling down.
When this evolution is complete, the Left WILL resort to direct violent action on a larger
scale, and they will do so with a clear conscience because, in their minds, they are fighting
fascism. Ironically, it will be this behavior by leftists that may actually push
conservatives towards a fascist model. Conservatives might decide to fight crazy with more
crazy."
The transformation I described in 2016 is now happening in 2020. The left is going full
communist, with a little help of course. Currently, the Cultural Marxists are seeking to clean
house within their own ranks. They are terrorizing long time Democrats and "allies" of the
movement into subscribing to ALL the tenets of the new social justice religion. No deviation is
allowed; all progressives must declare fealty and signal their virtue and submission or they
are systematically targeted and destroyed. It is essentially coercion by cancel culture.
After this phase is over and they have organized the political left into an army of mindless
drones, they will fully turn their attention to conservatives.
To be clear, social justice movements are not the primary threat, they are merely a symptom
of the disease - A cancer called "globalism". These people are being used as a weapon of
expediency, nothing more. There is an open and admitted organized effort on the part of a tiny
minority of power brokers and money elites in our society that seek to manipulate the public
into accepting the notion of total centralization and the end of personal liberty and national
sovereignty in the name of an arbitrary "greater good". This is not "conspiracy theory", this
is conspiracy fact.
As Richard N. Gardner, former deputy assistant Secretary of State for International
Organizations under Kennedy and Johnson, and a member of the Trilateral Commission,
wrote in the April, 1974 issue of the Council on Foreign Relation's (CFR) journal Foreign
Affairs (pg. 558) in an article titled 'Hard Road To World Order':
" In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather
than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use
William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty,
eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal
assault."
It is my view, according to the evidence, that the social justice left is a cultivated
threat, a product of the gatekeepers of Cultural Marxism that has been gestated over decades
to the stage we now see today – a mass movement of useful idiots, insane narcissists
and sociopaths obsessed with identity politics and the destruction of the "old world".
It was globalist institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation that
funded different elements of the feminist movement and "gender studies" movements from the
late 1960's onward. This included the Rockefeller Foundation's large donations to 'The
Feminist Press' and the Ford Foundation's programs to indoctrinate teachers into injecting
social justice talking points into their curriculum. This is openly admitted in Alison R.
Bernstein's book
'Funding The Future: Philanthropy's Influence On America's Higher Education' . Bernstein
is the vice president of Education at the Ford Foundation and the former Associate Dean of
Faculty at Princeton.
That's right folks, social justice activism was paid for and encouraged by the so-called
"patriarchy". This is the reality, and it never stopped. Even today SJW groups are funded by
globalists.
For example, as the mainstream media often tries to dismiss or ignore, Black Lives Matter
was initially funded by the
Ford Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation . BLM coffers were
flooded with over $100 million from uber rich white elites. Again, this is a FACT that even
the dishonest spin doctors at Snopes were not able to deny. Instead, they attempt to use
strawman arguments and sophistry to distract from the implication of extreme-left mobs
receiving seed money from elitist billionaires.
As noted, the political left is being weaponized, but to what end? To understand the end
game we have to understand the concept of the Hegelian Dialectic and "problem - reaction -
solution".
If there is one behavior that stands out above all others as a defining trait of the social
justice left, in my opinion it is their obsession with exploiting tragedy and crisis for their
own personal and political gain. The George Floyd incident, a terrible event to be sure, should
have been held up as a prime example of police abuse, yet it was immediately twisted by BLM
into an issue of "systemic racism". There is no proof of systemic racism. There's not even any
proof that George Floyd was killed because he was black.
Police abuse is something which concerns every American equally, not just black Americans.
But the BLM has obscured the real issue of police accountability and made it about the delusion
of "white supremacy" and an attack on basically every element of American heritage and
tradition. This will alienate millions of Americans who would have otherwise agreed to certain
points and arguments. The narrative was hijacked by the political left and they reveled in the
death of George Floyd as a means to push numerous unrelated agendas forward as quickly as
possible.
These agendas include a vast array of censorship in social media and the firestorm of cancel
culture, threatening anyone who does not agree with the prevailing leftist narrative. People
are losing their platforms, their jobs, and their reputations are being dragged through the
mud, and the mainstream media is helping to make this happen.
Now, as a true conservative, I respect the boundaries of private property, and to be sure, a
website is indeed private property. A social media company has the right to remove people and
content they don't like, just as any person has the right to remove someone they don't like
from their home. That said, there are some exceptions to this.
For example, when a company has a monopoly over a certain means of communication, then
censorship becomes a legal and moral problem and that company must be either limited or broken
up. Monopolies are not natural functions of a free market, they are attempts by elites to
subvert free markets. Corporations in general receive their charters from government, along
with the protections of limited liability and corporate personhood. They are not a natural part
of the economy, they are aberrations created by government. They are children of socialism, not
"capitalism".
If we are to solve the current problem in the long term, corporations must either be
regulated or abolished and replaced with classical limited partnerships. Joint stock companies,
as corporation used to be called, were never intended to become permanent power structures
within free market societies, and now we are witnessing why.
That said, the danger of monopolies does not only extend to corporations. There can also be
such a thing as a political or ideological monopoly as well. When a particular minority of
ideologues take over a vast majority of mass communication outlets and actively seeks to
squeeze out any dissenting voices so that only one point of view is presented to the public,
what else do we call this but a monopoly?
I see where the cancel culture is going and it is quickly going to a very ugly place. While
google's removal of ad revenue from conservative websites like Zero Hedge is a legal grey area,
the attacks will eventually go far beyond monetization. One day soon, I predict there will be
an attempt to influence website host providers to remove "offending" sites altogether. One
might argue that handing government the power to nationalize the internet would help to protect
free speech, but I doubt that. Government is run by the same ghouls that are funding the social
justice cult. Why should we trust them to police the web fairly?
The political left is not only asserting control over speech on the web, but also pushing
restrictions in major population centers (to be fair, Trump and his cabinet of elites including
Anthony Fauci are also culpable in encouraging medical tyranny). If you lived in a major US
city during the first pandemic lockdowns, then you have seen the extreme lengths politicians,
mostly on the left, will go to to assert dominance.
Why are Americans in these cities being admonished from even going outside? You do know that
viruses are far less communicable in open areas than indoors, right? No one catches a virus
from jogging through a park or walking on a beach. Such rules seem like they stem from a severe
ignorance of how viruses survive and function, but it's not ignorance; it's deliberate. These
draconian rules are not about saving lives, they are about control, and many conservatives are
fed up with it.
Add to this the fact that city governments like Seattle are actively encouraging civil
unrest and rioting by Antifa and BLM, and something has to give.
The insanity of the left is triggering a balkanization of the US, but I'm not so sure this
is a bad thing.
It is clear that SJWs cannot live with or get along with anyone who respects liberty or
logic. They are a destructive force in society and they have no comprehension of the
non-aggression principle. They believe that they have the right to enforce their ideology and
beliefs on others. They infest every aspect of our culture with the sole intent of destroying
what we have previously built so that our history can be erased and replaced. It is only
natural that reasonable and free-thinking people would want to get as far away from them as
possible.
There has been much talk in the mainstream lately about the
growing exodus from major cities into suburban and rural areas is due to the pandemic. I
disagree. In my own state of Montana, there has been a surge of new residents buying
properties, and the word is the majority of them are conservatives trying to find like-minded
people. They are trying to escape from the madness of the political left, they are not only
concerned about the pandemic.
A great migration is coming, and it will be from leftist stronghold states like California,
New York, Illinois, etc., as well as from major cities. People are going to seek out and move
to places where their ideals and principles are respected or protected. There has not been a
division like this in the US since perhaps the Civil War.
I'm not sure it's avoidable, and even if it was I'm not sure it should be avoided. There is
something to be said for conservatives and leftists balancing each other out in a community,
but when one side becomes aggressive while also being protected, we have limited options.
Conservatives are the primary pillar of support propping up these otherwise broken states and
communities. Perhaps it's time for producers and liberty advocates to seek out greener pastures
and go where they are appreciated? And maybe it's time for progressives and socialists in
America to finally stand on their own and be allowed to fail.
The global elites have a different scenario in mind, I think. They certainly want a civil
war, but one that they can mold and control on both sides. They are using the left to strike
fear into the minds of conservatives and they want us to demand government action as the
solution. They want us to push the button on the Insurrection Act and to demand martial law. If
we separate and establish conservative strongholds then the temptation to beg for government
help will be diminished.
There will be numerous arguments made against this strategy - They will say the cities and
high population states are economically essential and leaving will be financially disastrous
for individuals. But, if producers are leaving in droves, then they can build an economy
anywhere they please. It's the leftists that need conservatives to feed off of their labor and
production; conservatives don't need leftists for anything. There will be others that claim
that when we leave blue states and counties we are abandoning the fight and leaving those
places to be completely taken over. I disagree with this mentality. By leaving and forming
conservative communities and economies and businesses we are changing the landscape of the
conflict. Instead of constantly contending with political obstruction we will be free to
actually build something lasting.
This is what the establishment is afraid of; they do not want conservatives to become
proactive. They want us to hide in our homes in fear and apathy waiting for someone else to
save the day.
I realize that there is such a thing as the false left/right paradigm, but this paradigm
applies to politicians and government. Politicians are only loyal to the establishment power
structure, and that structure desires tyranny. Common people have differing social and
political viewpoints, and this is natural. One would hope that ALL Americans regardless of
their beliefs would still have a respect for the fundamentals of the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution. But when one side or the other becomes openly hostile to those principles and
values of freedom, then they become my enemy and the enemy of any liberty minded person. We
cannot live together, so, we must live apart. Otherwise, we will have to go to war until one
side is removed from the equation.
* * *
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"Dear White People, Please Read 'White Fragility'," instructs
The Washington Post. In case you don't get the message, The New York Times, helpfully
reminds its
stupid white readers, "Dear White People: Being an Ally Isn't Always What You Think." Fortune – a magazine that usually deals
with the affairs of big business – also piles in with its words of wisdom: "Dear White People, The Work Takes Time."
Not to be outdone, the usually frivolous Glamour Magazine assumes the grave persona of a Sunday School Preacher and
warns : "White people, here's how
we can try to be better allies and proactively anti-racist." And just to show that new-fangled American theology has also absorbed
the condescending "Dear White People" mantra, Evangelicals for Social Action are ready to
remind
the world: "Dear White People: Being an Ally Is More Than a Performance."
As you would expect, the banal rhetoric of "Dear White People" is now institutionalised in higher education. The website
of the prestigious Imperial College of London, has a
page called "How To Be A White
Ally." Its main message to dear white people is "Acknowledge your Privilege." That's another way of saying confess your
sin, which is symbolised by your skin tone.
The University of Nevada leaves little to chance. It offers dear white people a 10-point plan that will help "white allies"
to redeem themselves. Most of the guidance is devoted to explaining that dear white people should know their place, which is
at the bottom of a newly constructed racial hierarchy. To realise this objective, it
embraces a version of a Maoist self-critical
struggle ritual and states "When Criticized or Called Out, Allies Listen, Apologize, Act Accountability, and Act Differently."
Most of the guidance directed at dear white people is ostensibly directed at turning individuals possessing "privilege"
into allies. Historically, the struggle against racism demanded solidarity from people of all races. Sadly, things have changed and
the language of solidarity has been replaced by a quasi-religious rhetoric of acknowledging your guilt.
Dear White People are not invited to work as equal participants in the struggle against racism. They are instructed to know their
place. "Our anger isn't yours. It doesn't belong to you," notes a memo to would-be allies. One
toolkit , titled "Guidelines for Being
Strong White Allies" insists, "Support the leadership of people of color."
Without a hint of irony, a manual
that instructs dear white people how to behave on demonstrations is titled, "Proper Protest Etiquette for Allies." And
as you would expect, its rule number one is, "Know Your Place." It explains:
"Before you show up to your first protest, it's important to know and recognize your place. You are going into someone else's
home, so it's vital that you check your privilege at the door before barreling up the stairs."
The exhortation to know your place is usually combined with the call to "Listen To Black Leaders" and to behave as you
are told. Anyone familiar with 19th century Victorian manuals produced for servants will be struck with its similarity in tone with
contemporary dear white people literature.
The Dear White People narrative assumes that its audience are composed of infantilised and disoriented adults who are clearly
morally inferior to its authors. The use of the term Dear, that prefixes white people expresses the attitude of barely disguised
irritation and contempt. Its scolding air signals the expectation that allies are expected to crawl abjectly on the ground with their
faces downwards.
It is worth noting that a lot of the Dear White People communiques are written by white people rather than black authors. In numerous
schools and universities, white race entrepreneurs insist that studying the book White Fragility is more or less mandatory. This
cohort of "super allies" have assumed that they have the moral authority to impose their views on their moral inferiors.
Unfortunately, whatever their intention, these race entrepreneurs are complicit in racializing everything. Their programme of
race humiliation will do nothing to undermine real racism. Worse still, by attempting to re-create a "fairer" form of racial
hierarchy they undermine the possibility of genuine solidarity.
Frank Furedi's Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn The Art of Drawing Borders is published by Routledge on 13 July.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
The anti-rascist identity of the recent protests rests on a much larger base of class warfare waged over the past 40 years
against the entire population led by a determined oligarchy and enforced by their political, media and militarized police retainers.
This same oligarchy, with a despicable zeal and revolting media-orchestrated campaign–co-branding the movement with it's usual
corporate perpetrators– distorts escalating carceral and economic violence solely through a lens of racial conflict and their
time-tested toothless reforms. A few unlucky "peace officers" may have to TOFTT until the furor recedes, can't be helped.
Crowding out debt relief, single payer health, living wages, affordable housing and actual justice reform from the debate that
would benefit African Americans more than any other demographic is the goal.
The handful of Emperors far prefer kabuki theater and random ritual Seppuku than facing the rage of millions of staring down
the barrel of zero income, debt, bankruptcy, evictions and dispossession. The Praetorians will follow the money as always.
I suppose we'll get some boulevards re-named and a paid Juneteenth holiday to compensate for the destruction 100+ years of
labor rights struggle, so there's that..
divideand conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful,
so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment.
In its most
general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that
members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different
things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal,
but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's
radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into
identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting
through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes
harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism,
which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and
marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for
a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies.
As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that
some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they
then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies
of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals
claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better
than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan
for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in
Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi
government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy
but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups.
On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand
human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers
largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening
China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal
through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political
system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump
had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members,
who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so
of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with
Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the
"soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable
to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups,
such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals,
etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and
can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal
ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
"Earlier
today, police officers from the 75th Precinct responded to a call of a male shot in front of
334 Milford Street. When they arrived, they discovered a 35-year-old male with a gunshot wound
to the neck," the NYPD's Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison tweeted , along with
video of the disturbing incident.
Earlier today, police officers from the 75th Precinct responded to a call of a male shot
in front of 334 Milford Street. When they arrived, they discovered a 35-year-old male with a
gunshot wound to the neck. pic.twitter.com/wkkzIiAdzu
-- Chief Rodney Harrison
(@NYPDDetectives) June 20,
2020
The footage shows a man wiping down the tire of his car when a passerby stops and fires a
shot into the back of his neck. The man washing his car falls, and the shooter proceeds to
continue his walk down the street. There is no known motive for the crime, and the killer is at
large.
It's not the only violent video coming out of the city to have received serious attention
online, as a clip of a seemingly random attack on an elderly woman has also gone viral.
The clip shows a young black man passing an older woman on the street when he turns and
pushes her. Her head narrowly misses a fire hydrant as she falls, and the attacker simply
continues his stroll down Third Avenue.
Rashid Brimmage, a 31-year-old sex offender, was identified by police as the man
in the video and was apprehended. He has been arrested over 100 times in the past.
The crimes are part of a larger trend in New York City, which has seen an increase in the
most violent crimes.
The crimes are part of a larger trend in New York City, which has seen an increase
in the most violent crimes.
Homicides for the month of May were up by a
whopping 79.1 percent from the same time last year. Shootings, meanwhile, increased over 60
percent. Auto theft and burglaries also went up.
People who post of Twitter are stupid by definition, but people who fire employees for
posting on Twitter are trying to replicate excesses of Stalinism (and, in way, McCarthysm) on a
farce level. As in Marx "history repeats: first as tragedy, the second as farce"
By classifying the (somewhat incorrect; Obama was elected not only because he was half black,
but also because he was half--CIA ;-) Twit below as the cry "fire" in crowded theater, we really
try to replay the atmosphere of Stalinist Russia on a new level.
Notable quotes:
"... Austin Symphony Trombonist Fired Over Racist Comments , The Violin Channel, June 1, 2020 ..."
Have you checked out the 1/2 black president swine flu H1N1, and EBOLA?
What has your 1/2 black president done for you??
The ONLY REASON he was elected was because he is 1/2 black.
People voted on racist principles, not on the real issues . The BLACKS are looting and
destroying their environment. They deserve what
they get. Playing the RACE CARD IS RACIST.
Symphony orchestra spokes-critter Anthony Corroa [ Email him
]announced the firing of Ms. Salas in the dreary schoolmarmish jargon of corporate wokeness:
This language is not reflective of who we are as an organization." And "there is no
place for hate within our organization."
The ruling class only needs one tactic: divide and rule.
But how do I try to explain that to a black 16 year old math student who has recently
started looking at me with murder in his eyes? Everything i can think of just sounds like a
cliche.
Also... the media deserve no pity, they made their allegiances clear (for the
millionth time) with Assange.
"... Just look at all the productive work now being done by the rioters. They have a vision for America. It is easier to rebuild when whole areas are turned to rubble than it is to clear them with heavy equipment. ..."
@Katrinka Katrinka, you dont understand. Diversity and multiculturalism is our strength !
I mean in which other country in the entire world can you go into a coffee shop at 10 am on a
workday and hear 40 different languages being bawled into $1500 cell phones.
Also, Just look at all the productive work now being done by the rioters. They have a
vision for America. It is easier to rebuild when whole areas are turned to rubble than it is
to clear them with heavy equipment.
Look on the bright side. A new slum area, oops I meant a new high end area will arise from
the ashes, a shining example of a brand new Utopia for all the world to see !
For anyone running for office in modern
America, accusations of sexual assault are par for the course. But when it comes to weighing up these accusations, the US’
mainstream paper of record applies some very uneven standards.
Take Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. If doubts weren’t already raised by his fondness for
sniffing women,
the emergence last month of a sexual assault allegation against the former vice president could have caused a major headache for
his campaign.
Yet amid the coronavirus pandemic, and given the political leanings of most media outlets, the scandal barely registered.
The
Intercept ran a story in March on how Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, claimed that in 1993 Biden pushed her against a
wall, groped her, and penetrated her with his fingers. Reade had spoken up about the alleged incident a year earlier, but was
met with accusations that she was doing Russia’s bidding. The US media was still doing ‘Russiagate’ back then, remember?
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the
progressive agenda.
George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are
living it right now.
Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member
of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its "resistance" is undermining
an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the
proper president would be elected -- the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology.
Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy-
or girlfriend, or co-workers.
But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the
strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett
Kavanaugh.
In Orwell's world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry,
rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven
guilty. Instead, regimented ideology -- the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of
one's life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality -- warps everything from the use of
language to private life.
Oceania's Rules
Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long
sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his
nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when
Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the
so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the
Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election
year.
Rejecting Kavanaugh proved a hard task given that he had a long record of judicial opinions
and writings -- and there was nothing much in them that would indicate anything but a sharp
mind, much less any ideological, racial, or sexual intolerance. His personal life was
impeccable, his family admirable.
Kavanaugh was no combative Robert Bork, but congenial, and he patiently answered all the
questions asked of him, despite constant demonstrations and pre-planned street-theater
interruptions from the Senate gallery and often obnoxious grandstanding by "I am Spartacus"
Democratic senators.
So Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed unless a bombshell revelation derailed the vote. And
so we got a bombshell.
Weeks earlier, Senator Diane Feinstein had received a written allegation against Kavanaugh
of sexual battery by an accuser who wished to remain anonymous. Feinstein sat on it for nearly
two months, probably because she thought the charges were either spurious or unprovable. Until
a few days ago, she mysteriously refused to release the
full text of the redacted complaint , and she has said she does not know whether the very
accusations that she purveyed are believable. Was she reluctant to memorialize the accusations
by formally submitting them to the Senate Judiciary Committee, because doing so makes Ford
subject to possible criminal liability if the charges prove demonstrably untrue?
The gambit was clearly to use the charges as a last-chance effort to stop the nomination --
but only if Kavanaugh survived the cross examinations during the confirmation hearing. Then, in
extremis , Feinstein finally referenced the charge, hoping to keep it anonymous, but, at the
same time, to hint of its serious nature and thereby to force a delay in the confirmation.
Think something McCarthesque, like "I have here in my hand the name . . ."
Delay would mean that the confirmation vote could be put off until after the midterm
election, and a few jeopardized Democratic senators in Trump states would not have to go on
record voting no on Kavanaugh. Or the insidious innuendos, rumor, and gossip about Kavanaugh
would help to bleed him to death by a thousand leaks and, by association, tank Republican
chances at retaining the House. (Republicans may or may not lose the House over the
confirmation circus, but they most surely will lose their base and, with it, the Congress if
they do not confirm Kavanaugh.)
Feinstein's anonymous trick did not work. So pressure mounted to reveal or leak Ford's
identity and thereby force an Anita-Hill–like inquest that might at least show old white
men Republican senators as insensitive to a vulnerable and victimized woman.
The problem, of course, was that, under traditional notions of jurisprudence, Ford's
allegations simply were not provable. But America soon discovered that civic and government
norms no longer follow the Western legal tradition. In Orwellian terms, Kavanaugh was now at
the mercy of the state. He was tagged with sexual battery at first by an anonymous accuser, and
then upon revelation of her identity, by a left-wing, political activist psychology professor
and her more left-wing, more politically active lawyer.
Newspeak and Doublethink
Statue of limitations? It does not exist. An incident 36 years ago apparently is as fresh
today as it was when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford 15.
Presumption of Innocence? Not at all. Kavanaugh is accused and thereby guilty. The accuser
faces no doubt. In Orwellian America, the accused must first present his defense, even though
he does not quite know what he is being charged with. Then the accuser and her legal team pour
over his testimony to prepare her accusation.
Evidence? That too is a fossilized concept. Ford could name neither the location of the
alleged assault nor the date or time. She had no idea how she arrived or left the scene of the
alleged crime. There is no physical evidence of an attack. And such lacunae in her memory
mattered no longer at all.
Details? Again, such notions are counterrevolutionary. Ford said to her therapist 6 years
ago (30 years after the alleged incident) that there were four would-be attackers, at least as
recorded in the therapist's notes.
But now she has claimed that there were only two assaulters: Kavanaugh and a friend. In
truth, all four people -- now including a female -- named in her accusations as either
assaulters or witnesses have insisted that they have no knowledge of the event, much less of
wrongdoing wherever and whenever Ford claims the act took place. That they deny knowledge is at
times used as proof by Ford's lawyers that the event 36 years was traumatic.
An incident at 15 is so seared into her lifelong memory that at 52 Ford has no memory of any
of the events or details surrounding that unnamed day, except that she is positive that
17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, along with four? three? two? others, was harassing her. She has no
idea where or when she was assaulted but still assures that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge
were drunk, but that she and the others (?) merely had only the proverbial teenage "one beer."
Most people are more likely to know where they were at a party than the exact number of
alcoholic beverages they consumed -- but not so much about either after 36 years.
Testimony? No longer relevant. It doesn't matter that Kavanaugh and the other alleged
suspect both deny the allegations and have no memory of being in the same locale with Ford 36
years ago. In sum, all the supposed partiers, both male and female, now swear, under penalty of
felony, that they have no memory of any of the incidents that Ford claims occurred so long ago.
That Ford cannot produce a single witness to confirm her narrative or refute theirs is likewise
of no concern. So far, she has singularly not submitted a formal affidavit or given a
deposition that would be subject to legal exposure if untrue.
Again, the ideological trumps the empirical. "All women must be believed" is the testament,
and individuals bow to the collective. Except, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, there are
ideological exceptions -- such as Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, Sherrod Brown, and Joe Biden.
The slogan of Ford's psychodrama is "All women must be believed, but some women are more
believable than others." That an assertion becomes fact due to the prevailing ideology and
gender of the accuser marks the destruction of our entire system of justice.
Rights of the accused? They too do not exist. In the American version of 1984 , the accuser,
a.k.a. the more ideologically correct party, dictates to authorities the circumstances under
which she will be investigated and cross-examined: She will demand all sorts of special
considerations of privacy and exemptions; Kavanaugh will be forced to return and face cameras
and the public to prove that he was not then, and has never been since, a sexual assaulter.
In our 1984 world, the accused is considered guilty if merely charged, and the accuser is a
victim who can ruin a life but must not under any circumstance be made uncomfortable in proving
her charges.
Doublespeak abounds. "Victim" solely refers to the accuser, not the accused, who one day was
Brett Kavanaugh, a brilliant jurist and model citizen, and the next morning woke up transformed
into some sort of Kafkaesque cockroach. The media and political operatives went in a nanosecond
from charging that she was groped and "assaulted" to the claim that she was "raped."
In our 1984, the phrase "must be believed" is doublespeak for "must never face
cross-examination."
Ford should be believed or not believed on the basis of evidence , not her position, gender,
or politics. I certainly did not believe Joe Biden, simply because he was a U.S. senator, when,
as Neal Kinnock's doppelganger, he claimed that he came from a long line of coal miners -- any
more than I believed that Senator Corey Booker really had a gang-banger Socratic confidant
named "T-Bone," or that would-be senator Richard Blumenthal was an anguished Vietnam combat vet
or that Senator Elizabeth Warren was a Native American. (Do we need a 25th Amendment for
unhinged senators?) Wanting to believe something from someone who is ideologically correct does
not translate into confirmation of truth.
Ford supposedly in her originally anonymous accusation had insisted that she had sought
"medical treatment" for her assault. The natural assumption is that such a term would mean
that, soon after the attack, the victim sought a doctor's or emergency room's help to address
either her physical or mental injuries -- records might therefore be a powerful refutation of
Kavanaugh's denials.
But "medical treatment" now means that 30 years after the alleged assault, Ford sought
counseling for some sort of "relationship" or "companion" therapy, or what might legitimately
be termed "marriage counseling." And in the course of her discussions with her therapist about
her marriage, she first spoke of her alleged assault three decades earlier. She did not then
name Kavanaugh to her therapist, whose notes are at odds with Ford's current
version.
Memory Holes
Then we come to Orwell's idea of "memory holes," or mechanisms to wipe clean inconvenient
facts that disrupt official ideological narratives.
Shortly after Ford was named, suddenly her prior well-publicized and self-referential
social-media revelations vanished, as if she'd never held her minor-league but confident
pro-Sanders, anti-Trump opinions . And much of her media and social-media accounts were erased
as well.
Similarly, one moment the New York Times -- just coming off an embarrassing lie in reporting
that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had ordered new $50,000 office drapes on the government dime
-- reported that Kavanaugh's alleged accomplice, Mark Judge, had confirmed Ford's allegation.
Indeed, in a sensational scoop, according to the Times , Judge told the Judiciary Committee
that he does remember the episode and has nothing more to say. In fact, Judge told the
committee the very opposite: that he does not remember the episode . Forty minutes later, the
Times embarrassing narrative vanished down the memory hole.
The online versions of some of the yearbooks of Ford's high school from the early 1980s
vanished as well. At times, they had seemed to take a perverse pride in the reputation of the
all-girls school for underage drinking, carousing, and, on rarer occasions, "passing out" at
parties. Such activities were supposed to be the monopoly and condemnatory landscape of the
"frat boy" and spoiled-white-kid Kavanaugh -- and certainly not the environment in which the
noble Ford navigated. Seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh was to play the role of a falling-down
drunk; Ford, with impressive powers of memory of an event 36 years past, assures us that as a
circumspect 15-year-old, she had only "one beer."
A former teenage friend of Ford's sent out a flurry of social-media postings, allegedly
confirming that Ford's ordeal was well known to her friends in 1982 and so her assault
narrative must therefore be confirmed. Then, when challenged on some of her incoherent details
(schools are not in session during summertime, and Ford is on record as not telling anyone of
the incident for 30 years), she mysteriously claimed that she no longer could stand by her
earlier assertions, which likewise soon vanished from her social-media account. Apparently, she
had assumed that in 2018 Oceania ideologically correct citizens merely needed to lodge an
accusation and it would be believed, without any obligation on her part to substantiate her
charges.
When a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, followed Ford seven days later to allege another
sexual incident with the teenage Kavanaugh, at Yale 35 years ago, it was no surprise that she
followed the now normal Orwellian boilerplate : None of those whom she named as witnesses could
either confirm her charges or even remember the alleged event. She had altered her narrative
after consultations with lawyers and handlers. She too confesses to underage drinking during
the alleged event. She too is currently a social and progressive political activist. The only
difference from Ford's narrative is that Ramirez's accusation was deemed not credible enough to
be reported even by the New York Times , which recently retracted false stories about witness
Mark Judge in the Ford case, and which falsely reported that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had
charged the government for $50,000 office drapes.
As in 1984 , "truths" in these sorts of allegations do not exist unless they align with the
larger "Truth" of the progressive project. In our case, the overarching Truth mandates that, in
a supposedly misogynist society, women must always be believed in all their accusations and
should be exempt from all counter-examinations.
Little "truths" -- such as the right of the accused, the need to produce evidence,
insistence on cross-examination, and due process -- are counterrevolutionary constructs and the
refuge of reactionary hold-outs who are enemies of the people. Or in the words of Hawaii
senator Mazie Hirono:
Guess who's perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It's the men in this country. And
I just want to say to the men in this country, "Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing,
for a change."
The View 's Joy Behar was more honest about the larger Truth: "These white men, old by the
way, are not protecting women," Behar exclaimed. "They're protecting a man who is probably
guilty." We thank Behar for the concession "probably."
According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now guilty
of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17. And that reality reminds us that we are no
longer in America . We are already living well into the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell
warned us about long ago.
All Comments 30
NiggaPleeze , 10 seconds ago
National Review? Really? Does it get more evil than them?
Debt Slave , 16 seconds ago
According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now
guilty of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17.
Well half the country are idiots but the important thing to remember in our democracy is
that the idiots have the right to vote. And here we are today.
No wonder the founders believed that democracy was a stupid idea. But we know better than
they did, right?
Jkweb007 , 37 seconds ago
It is hard for me to believe 50% when in America you are presumed innocent till proven
guilty. Is this the spanish inquizition or salem witch trials. If he floats he was innocent.
I am shocked that people in congress would make statements, she must be believed, I believe
he is guilty. These are people who represent and stand for the constitution that many died in
the defense of life liberty and the persuit of happiness. It may be time for that mlilitia
that our founding fathers endorsed. If Kavanaugh is rebuked for these accusation our freedom,
free speech may be next.
One more confirmation that the so called "social justice warriors" -like last night's
goons' who shamefully interrupted Senator Cruz's night out with his wife at a private
restaurant- are Orwell's projected fascists!
opport.knocks , 20 minutes ago
Bush 2 was in the big chair when he and his cabinet started the USA down the full
Orwellian path (Patriot Act, post 911). Kavanaugh and his wife were both members of that
government team.
If there is any reason to dismiss him, that would be it, not this post-pubescent sex
crap.
If I was a cynical person, I would say this whole exercise is to deflect attention away
from that part of his "swampy" past.
Aubiekong , 23 minutes ago
We lost the republic when we allowed the liberals to staff the ministry of
education...
CheapBastard , 15 minutes ago
My neighbor is a high school teacher. I asked her if she was giving students time off to
protest this and she looked at me and said, "Just the opposite. I have given them a 10 page
seminar paper to write on the meaning of Due Process."
So there IS hope.
my new username , 23 minutes ago
This is criminal contempt for the due lawful process of the Congress.
These are unlawful attempts and conspiracies to subvert justice.
So we need to start arresting, trying, convicting and punishing the criminals.
BlackChicken , 23 minutes ago
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of
the progressive agenda.
This needs to end, not later, NOW.
Be careful what you wish for leftists, I'll dedicate my remaining years to torture you
with it.
Jus7tme , 22 minutes ago
>>the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell warned us about long ago.
I think Orwell was in 1949 was warning about a fascist totalitarian hell, not a socialist
one, but nice try rewriting history.
Duc888 , 29 minutes ago
WTF ever happened to "innocent until PROVEN guilty"?
CheapBastard , 19 minutes ago
Schumer said before the confirmation hearings even began he would not let Kavanaugh become
SC justice no matter what.
Dems are so tolerant, open minded and respectful of due process, aren't they.
"... Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner, or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted. "It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said. ..."
"... Bloomberg dubbed the phenomenon the 'Pence Effect' after the US vice president who previously admitted that he would never dine alone with any woman other than his wife. ..."
"... All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say. ..."
"... hiring a woman on Wall Street has become an "unknown risk," according to one wealth advisor, who said there is always a concern that a woman might take something said to her in the wrong way. ..."
"... The unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement on Wall Street could be the stifling of women's progress and a sanitization of the workplace to the point of not even being able to have a private meeting with the door closed. ..."
"... Another irony is that while men may think they are avoiding one type of scandal, could find themselves facing another: Discrimination complaints. ..."
"... "A Wall Street rule for the #MeToo era: Avoid women at all cost." https://t.co/TCGk9UzT4R "Secular sharia" has arrived, as I predicted here: https://t.co/TTrWY6ML34 pic.twitter.com/YpEz78iamJ ..."
"... "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison told Bloomberg. ..."
Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be
afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner,
or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted.
"It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said.
Bloomberg dubbed the phenomenon the 'Pence Effect' after the US vice president who previously admitted that he would never
dine alone with any woman other than his wife. British actor Taron Egerton recently also said he now
avoided being alone with women for fear
of finding himself in #MeToo's crosshairs.
I remember when a woman I was friendly/kind with perceived me as someone who wanted "more." She wrote me a message about how
she was uncomfortable. I'm gay. https://t.co/7z0X7Dwzkp
All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind
of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say.
Hurting women's progress?
The most ironic outcome of a movement that was supposed to be about women's empowerment is that now, even hiring a woman on
Wall Street has become an "unknown risk," according to one wealth advisor, who said there is always a concern that a woman might
take something said to her in the wrong way.
With men occupying the most senior positions on Wall Street, women need male mentors who can teach them the ropes and help them
advance their careers, but what happens when men are afraid to play that role with their younger female colleagues? The unintended
consequence of the #MeToo movement on Wall Street could be the stifling of women's progress and a sanitization of the workplace to
the point of not even being able to have a private meeting with the door closed.
Another irony is that while men may think they are avoiding one type of scandal, could find themselves facing another: Discrimination
complaints.
"If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,
those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," Stephen Zweig, an
employment attorney with FordHarrison told Bloomberg.
Not all men are responding to the #MeToo movement by fearfully cutting themselves off from women, however. "Just try not to be
an asshole," one said, while another added: "It's really not that hard."
It might not be that simple, however. It seems there is no escape from the grip of the #MeToo movement. One of the movements most
recent victims of the viral hashtag movement is not a man, but a song -- the time-honored classic 'Baby It's Cold Outside' -- which
is being banished from American radio
stations because it has a "rapey" vibe.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
. @DanaPerino I'm not quite sure why
you're telling FOX viewers that Elizabeth Warren is the last female candidate in the Dem
primary. Is it because you believe a fake indigenous woman of color is "real" and the real
indigenous woman of color in this race is fake? pic.twitter.com/VKCxy2JzFe
Looks like DNC run a pretty sophisticated smear campaign against Sanders ...
Notable quotes:
"... It really isn't about who the candidates are – hurtful as that may sound to some in our identity-saturated times. It is about what the candidate might try to do once in office. In truth, the very fact that nowadays we are allowed to focus on identity to our heart's content should be warning enough that the establishment is only too keen for us to exhaust our energies in promoting divisions based on those identities ..."
"... The Republican and Democratic leaderships are there to ensure that, before a candidate gets selected to compete in the parties' name, he or she has proven they are power-friendly. Two candidates, each vetted for obedience to power. ..."
The Democratic presidential nomination race is a fascinating case study in how power works
– not least, because the Democratic party leaders are visibly contriving to impose one
candidate, Joe Biden, as the party's nominee, even as it becomes clear that he is no longer
mentally equipped to run a local table tennis club let alone the world's most powerful
nation.
Biden's campaign is a reminder that power is indivisible. Donald Trump or Joe Biden for
president – it doesn't matter to the power-establishment. An egomaniacal man-child
(Trump), representing the billionaires, or an elder suffering rapid neurological degeneration
(Biden), representing the billionaires, are equally useful to power. A woman will do too, or a
person of colour. The establishment is no longer worried about who stands on stage
– so long as that person is not a Bernie Sanders in the US, or a Jeremy Corbyn in the
UK.
It really isn't about who the candidates are – hurtful as that may sound to some in
our identity-saturated times. It is about what the candidate might try to do once in office. In
truth, the very fact that nowadays we are allowed to focus on identity to our heart's content
should be warning enough that the establishment is only too keen for us to exhaust our energies
in promoting divisions based on those identities. What concerns it far more is that we might
overcome those divisions and unify against it, withdrawing our consent from an establishment
committed to endless asset-stripping of our societies and the planet.
Neither Biden nor Trump will obstruct the establishment, because they are at its very heart.
The Republican and Democratic leaderships are there to ensure that, before a candidate gets
selected to compete in the parties' name, he or she has proven they are power-friendly. Two
candidates, each vetted for obedience to power.
Although a pretty face or a way with words are desirable, incapacity and incompetence are no
barrier to qualifying, as the two white men groomed by their respective parties demonstrate.
Both have proved they will favour the establishment, both will pursue near-enough the
same policies , both are committed to the status quo, both have demonstrated their
indifference to the future of life on Earth. What separates the candidates is not real
substance, but presentation styles – the creation of the appearance of difference, of
choice.
Policing the debate
The subtle dynamics of how the Democratic nomination race is being rigged are interesting.
Especially revealing are the ways the Democratic leadership protects establishment power by
policing the terms of debate: what can be said, and what can be thought; who gets to speak and
whose voices are misrepresented or demonised. Manipulation of language is key.
As I pointed out in my previous post , the
establishment's power derives from its invisibility. Scrutiny is kryptonite to
power.
The only way we can interrogate power is through language, and the only way we can
communicate our conclusions to others is through words – as I am doing right now. And
therefore our strength – our ability to awaken ourselves from the trance of power –
must be subverted by the establishment, transformed into our Achilles' heel, a weakness.
The treatment of Bernie Sanders and his supporters by the Democratic establishment –
and those who eagerly repeat its talking points – neatly illustrates how this can be done
in manifold ways.
Remember this all started back in 2016, when Sanders committed the unforgivable sin of
challenging the Democratic leadership's right simply to anoint Hillary Clinton as the party's
presidential candidate. In those days, the fault line was obvious and neat: Bernie was a man,
Clinton a woman. She would be the first woman president. The only party members who might wish
to deny her that historic moment, and back Sanders instead, had to be misogynist men. They were
supposedly venting their anti-women grudge against Clinton, who in turn was presented to women
as a symbol of their oppression by men.
And so was born a meme: the "Bernie Bros". It rapidly became shorthand for suggesting
– contrary to all evidence
– that Sanders' candidacy appealed chiefly to angry, entitled white men. In fact, as
Sanders' 2020 run has amply demonstrated, support for him has been more diverse than for the
many other Democratic candidates who sought the nomination.
So important what @ewarren is saying to @maddow about the
dangerous, threatening, ugly faction among the Bernie supporters. Sanders either cannot or
will not control them. pic.twitter.com/LYDXlLJ7bi
How contrived the 2016 identity-fuelled contest was should have been clear, had anyone been
allowed to point that fact out. This wasn't really about the Democratic leadership respecting
Clinton's identity as a woman. It was about them paying lip service to her identity as a
woman, while actually promoting her because she was a reliable warmonger
and
Wall Street functionary . She was useful to power.
If the debate had really been driven by identity politics, Sanders had a winning card too:
he is Jewish. That meant he could be the United States' first Jewish president. In a fair
identity fight, it would have been a draw between the two. The decision about who should
represent the Democratic party would then have had to be decided based on policies, not
identity. But party leaders did not want Clinton's actual policies, or her political history,
being put under the microscope for very obvious reasons.
Weaponisation of identity
The weaponisation of identity politics is even more transparent in 2020. Sanders is still
Jewish, but his main opponent, Joe Biden, really is simply a privileged white man. Were the
Clinton format to be followed again by Democratic officials, Sanders would enjoy an identity
politics trump card. And yet Sanders is still being presented as just another white male
candidate , no different from Biden.
(We could take this argument even further and note that the other candidate who no one,
least of all the Democratic leadership, ever mentions as still in the race is Tulsi
Gabbard, a woman of colour. The Democratic party has worked hard to make her as
invisible as possible in the primaries because, of all the candidates, she is the most
vocal and articulate opponent of foreign wars. That has deprived her of the chance to raise
funds and win delegates.)
. @DanaPerino I'm not quite sure why
you're telling FOX viewers that Elizabeth Warren is the last female candidate in the Dem
primary. Is it because you believe a fake indigenous woman of color is "real" and the real
indigenous woman of color in this race is fake? pic.twitter.com/VKCxy2JzFe
Sanders' Jewish identity isn't celebrated because he isn't useful to the
power-establishment. What's far more important to them – and should be to us too –
are his policies, which might limit their power to wage war, exploit workers and trash the
planet.
But it is not just that Democratic Party leaders are ignoring Sanders' Jewish identity. They
are also again actively using identity politics against him, and in many different
ways.
The 'black' establishment?
Bernie Sanders' supporters have been complaining for some time – based on mounting
evidence – that the Democratic leadership is far from neutral between Sanders and Biden.
Because it has a vested interest in the outcome, and because it is the part of the
power-establishment, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is exercising its influence in
favour of Biden. And because power prefers darkness, the DNC is doing its best to exercise that
power behind the scenes, out of sight – at least, unseen by those who still rely on the
"mainstream" corporate media, which is also part of the power-establishment. As should be clear
to anyone watching, the nomination proceedings are being controlled to give Biden every
advantage and to obstruct Sanders.
But the Democratic leadership is not only dismissing out of hand these very justified
complaints from Bernie Sanders' supporters but also turning these complaints against them, as
further evidence of their – and his – illegitimacy. A new way of doing this emerged
in the immediate wake of Biden winning South Carolina on the back of strong support from older
black voters – Biden's first state win and a launchpad for his Super Tuesday bid a few
days later.
It was given perfect expression from Symone Sanders, who despite her surname is actually a
senior adviser to Biden's campaign. She is also black. This is what she wrote: "People who keep
referring to Black voters as 'the establishment' are tone deaf and have obviously learned
nothing."
People who keep referring to Black voters as "the establishment" are tone deaf and have
obviously learned nothing.
-- Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) March 3,
2020
Her reference to generic "people" was understood precisely by both sides of the debate as
code for those "Bernie Bros". Now, it seems, Bernie Sanders' supporters are not simply
misogynists, they are potential recruits to the Ku Klux Klan.
The tweet went viral, even though in the fiercely contested back-and-forth below her tweet
no one could produce a single example of anyone actually saying anything like the sentiment
ascribed by Symone Sanders to "Bernie Bros". But then, tackling bigotry was not her real goal.
This wasn't meant to be a reflection on a real-world talking-point by Bernie supporters. It was
high-level gaslighting by a senior Democratic party official of the party's own voters.
Survival of the fittest smear
What Symone Sanders was really trying to do was conceal power – the fact that the DNC
is seeking to impose its chosen candidate on party members. As occurred during the confected
women-men, Clinton vs "Bernie Bros" confrontation, Symone Sanders was field-testing a similar
narrative management tool as part of the establishment's efforts to hone it for improved
effect. The establishment has learnt – through a kind of survival of the fittest smear
– that divide-and-rule identity politics is the perfect way to shield its influence as it
favours a status-quo candidate (Biden or Clinton) over a candidate seen as a threat to its
power (Sanders).
In her tweet, Symone Sanders showed exactly how the power elite seeks to obscure its toxic
role in our societies. She neatly conflated "the establishment" – of which she is a very
small, but well-paid component – with ordinary "black voters". Her message is this:
should you try to criticise the establishment (which has inordinate power to damage lives and
destroy the planet) we will demonise you, making it seem that you are really attacking black
people (who in the vast majority of cases – though Symone Sanders is a notable exception
– wield no power at all).
Symone Sanders has recruited her own blackness and South Carolina's "black voters" as a ring
of steel to protect the establishment. Cynically, she has turned poor black people, as well as
the tens of thousands of people (presumably black and white) who liked her tweet, into human
shields for the establishment.
It sounds a lot uglier put like that. But it has rapidly become a Biden talking-point, as we
can see here:
NEW: @JoeBiden responds to @berniesanders
saying the "establishment" is trying to defeat him.
"The establishment are all those hardworking, middle class people, those African Americans
they are the establishment!" @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/43Q2Nci5sS
The DNC's wider strategy is to confer on Biden exclusive rights to speak for black voters
(despite his
inglorious record on
civil rights issues) and, further, to strip Sanders and his senior black advisers of any
right to do so. When Sanders protests about this, or about racist behaviour from the Biden
camp, Biden's supporters come out in force and often abusively, though of course no one is
upbraiding them for their ugly, violent language. Here is the famous former tennis player
Martina Navratilova showing that maybe we should be talking about "Biden Bros":
Sanders is starting to really piss me off. Just shut this kind of crap down and debate the
issues. This is not it.
This kind of special pleading by the establishment for the establishment –
using those sections of it, such as Symone Sanders, that can tap into the identity politics
zeitgeist – is far more common than you might imagine. The approach is being
constantly refined, often using social media as the ultimate focus group. Symone Sanders'
successful conflation of the establishment with "black voters" follows earlier, clumsier
efforts by the establishment to protect its interests against Sanders that proved far less
effective.
Remember how last autumn the billionaire-owned corporate media tried to tell us that it was
unkind to
criticise billionaires – that they had feelings too and that speaking harshly about
them was "dehumanising". Again it was aimed at Sanders, who had just commented that in a
properly ordered world billionaires simply wouldn't exist. It was an obvious point: allowing a
handful of people to control almost all the planet's wealth was not only depriving the rest of
us of that wealth (and harming the planet) but it gave those few billionaires way too much
power. They could buy all the media, our channels of communication, and most of the politicians
to ringfence their financial interests, gradually eroding even the most minimal democratic
protections.
That campaign died a quick death because few of us are actually brainwashed enough to accept
the idea that a handful of billionaires share an identity that needs protecting – from
us! Most of us are still connected enough to the real world to understand that billionaires are
more than capable of looking out for their own interests, without our helping them by imposing
on ourselves a vow of silence.
But one cannot fault the power-establishment for being constantly inventive in the search
for new ways to stifle our criticisms of the way it unilaterally exercises its power. The
Democratic nomination race is testing such ingenuity to the limits. Here's a new rule against
"hateful conduct" on Twitter, where Biden's neurological deficit is being subjected to much
critical scrutiny through the sharing of dozens of
videos of embarrassing Biden "senior moments".
Twitter expanding its hateful conduct rules "to include language that dehumanizes on the
basis of age, disability or disease." https://t.co/KmWGaNAG9Z
Yes, disability and age are identities too. And so, on the pretext of protecting and
respecting those identities, social media can now be scrubbed of anything and anyone trying to
highlight the mental deficiencies of an old man who might soon be given the nuclear codes and
would be responsible for waging wars in the name of Americans. Twitter is full of comments
denouncing as "ableist" anyone who tries to highlight how the Democratic leadership is foisting
a cognitively challenged Biden on to the party.
Maybe the Dem insiders are all wrong, but it's true that they are saying it. Some are
saying it out loud, including Castro at the debate and Booker here: https://t.co/0lbi7RFRqG
None of this is to overlook the fact that another variation of identity politics has been
weaponised against Sanders: that of failing to be an "American" patriot. Again illustrating how
closely the Democratic and Republican leaderships' interests align, the question of who is a
patriot – and who is really working for the "Russians" – has been at the heart of
both parties' campaigns, though for different reasons.
Trump has been subjected to endless, evidence-free claims that he is a secret "Russian
agent" in a concerted effort to control his original isolationist foreign policy impulses that
might have stripped the establishment – and its military-industrial wing – of the
right to wage wars of aggression, and revive the Cold War, wherever it believes a profit can be
made under cover of "humanitarian intervention". Trump partly inoculated himself against these
criticisms, at least among supporters, with his "Make America Great Again" slogan, and partly
by learning – painfully for such an egotist – that his presidential role was to
rubber-stamp decisions made elsewhere about waging wars and projecting US power.
I'm just amazed by this tweet, which has been tweeted plenty. Did @_nalexander and all the people
liking this not know that Mueller laid out in the indictments of a number of Russians and in
his report their help on social media to Sanders and Trump. Help Sanders has acknowledged
https://t.co/vuc0lmvvKP
Bernie Sanders has faced similar smear
efforts by the establishment, including by the DNC's last failed presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton – in his case, painting him as a "Russian asset". ("Asset" is a way to
suggest collusion with the Kremlin based on even more flimsy evidence than is needed to accuse
someone of being an agent.) In fact, in a world where identity politics wasn't simply a tool to
be weaponised by the establishment, there would be real trepidation about engaging in this kind
of invective against a Jewish socialist.
One of the far-right's favourite antisemitic tropes – promoted ever since the
publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion more than 100 years ago – is that
Jewish "Bolsheviks" are involved in an
international conspiracy to subvert the countries they live in. We have reached the point
now that the corporate media are happy to recycle evidence-free claims,
cited by the Washington Post, from anonymous "US officials" and US intelligence agencies
reinventing a US version of the Protocols against Sanders. And these smears have elicited not a
word of criticism from the Democratic leadership nor from the usual antisemitism watchdogs that
are so ready to let rip over the slightest signs of what they claim to be antisemitism on the
left.
But the urgency of dealing with Sanders may be the reason normal conventions have been
discarded. Sanders isn't a loud-mouth egotist like Trump. A vote for Trump is a vote for the
establishment, if for one of its number who pretends to be against the establishment. Trump has
been largely tamed in time for a second term. By contrast, Sanders, like Corbyn in the UK, is
more dangerous because he may resist the efforts to domesticate him, and because if he is
allowed any significant measure of political success – such as becoming a candidate for
president – it may inspire others to follow in his footsteps. The system might start to
throw up more anomalies, more AOCs and more Ilhan Omars.
So Sanders is now being cast, like Trump, as a puppet of the Kremlin, not a true American.
And because he made the serious mistake of indulging the "Russiagate" smears when they were
used against Trump, Sanders now has little defence against their redeployment against him. And
given that, by the impoverished standards of US political culture, he is considered an extreme
leftist, it has been easy to conflate his democratic socialism with Communism, and then
conflate his supposed Communism with acting on behalf of the Kremlin (which, of course, ignores
the fact that Russia long ago abandoned Communism).
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Let me tell this to Putin -- the American people, whether
Republicans, Democrats, independents are sick and tired of seeing Russia and other countries
interfering in our elections." pic.twitter.com/ejcP7YVFlt
There is a final use of weaponised identity politics that the Democratic establishment would
dearly love to use against Sanders, if they need to and can get away with it. It is the most
toxic brand – and therefore the most effective – of the identity-based smears, and
it has been extensively field-tested in the
UK against Jeremy Corbyn to great success. The DNC would like to denounce Sanders as an
antisemite.
In fact, only one thing has held them back till now: the fact that Sanders is Jewish. That
may not prove an insuperable obstacle, but it does make it much harder to make the accusation
look credible. The other identity-based smears had been a second-best, a make-do until a way
could be found to unleash the antisemitism smear.
The establishment has been
testing the waters with implied accusations of antisemitism against Sanders for a while,
but their chances were given a fillip recently when Sanders refused to participate in the
annual jamboree of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent lobby group
whose primary mission is to ringfence Israel from criticism in the US. Both the Republican and
Democratic establishments turn out in force to the AIPAC conference, and in the past the event
has attracted keynote speeches from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But Sanders has refused to attend for decades and maintained that stance this month, even
though he is a candidate for the Democratic nomination. In the last primaries debate, Sanders
justified his decision by rightly
calling Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "racist" and by describing AIPAC as
providing a platform "for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights".
Trump's Vice-President, Mike Pence,
responded that Sanders supported "Israel's enemies" and, if elected, would be the "most
anti-Israel president in the history of this nation" – all coded suggestions that Sanders
is antisemitic.
But that's Mike Pence. More useful criticism came from billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who is
himself Jewish and was until last week posing as a Democrat to try to win the party's
nomination. Bloomberg accused Sanders of using dehumanising language against a bunch of
inclusive identities that, he improbably suggested, AIPAC represents. He
claimed :
"This is a gathering of 20,000 Israel supporters of every religious denomination,
ethnicity, faith, color, sexual identity and political party. Calling it a racist platform is
an attempt to discredit those voices, intimidate people from coming here, and weaken the
US-Israel relationship."
Where might this head? At the AIPAC conference last week we were given a foretaste. Ephraim
Mirvis, the chief rabbi of the UK and a friend to
Conservative government leader Boris Johnson, was warmly greeted by delegates, including
leading members of the Democratic establishment. He boasted that he and other Jewish leaders in
the UK had managed to damage Jeremy Corbyn's electoral chances by suggesting that he was an
antisemite over his support, like Sanders, for Palestinian rights.
His own treatment of Corbyn, he argued, offered a model for US Jewish organisations to
replicate against any leadership contender who might pose similar trouble for Israel, leaving
it for his audience to pick up the not-so-subtle hint about who needed to be subjected to
character assassination.
WATCH: "Today I issue a call to the Jews of America, please take a leaf out of our book
and please speak with one voice."
The Chief Rabbi speaking to the 18,000 delegates gathered at the @AIPAC General Session at their Policy
Conference in Washington DC pic.twitter.com/BOkan9RA2O
For anyone who isn't wilfully blind, the last few months have exposed the establishment
playbook: it will use identity politics to divide those who might otherwise find a united voice
and a common cause.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating one's identity, especially if it is under threat,
maligned or marginalised. But having an attachment to an identity is no excuse for allowing it
to be coopted by billionaires, by the powerful, by nuclear-armed states oppressing other
people, by political parties or by the corporate media, so that they can weaponise it to
prevent the weak, the poor, the marginalised from being represented.
It is time for us to wake up to the tricks, the deceptions, the manipulations of the strong
that exploit our weaknesses – and make us yet weaker still. It's time to stop being a
patsy for the establishment. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jonathan Cook
The Democrat establishment came together and crushed Bernie Sanders, AGAIN! Even the fact
that Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race was devastating to Bernie and allowed Sleepy Joe to
unthinkably win Massachusetts. It was a perfect storm, with many good states remaining for
Joe!
20 minutes later, Trump tweeted that it was " So selfish for Elizabeth Warren to stay in the
race ," as she has "Zero chance of even coming close to winning, but hurts Bernie badly."
"So much for their wonderful liberal friendship. Will he ever speak to her again? She cost him
Massachusetts (and came in third), he shouldn't!"
So selfish for Elizabeth Warren to stay in the race. She has Zero chance of even coming
close to winning, but hurts Bernie badly. So much for their wonderful liberal friendship. Will
he ever speak to her again? She cost him Massachusetts (and came in third), he shouldn't!
Three hours later, Trump tweeted: " Wow! If Elizabeth Warren wasn't in the race, Bernie
Sanders would have EASILY won Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas , not to mention various other
states. Our modern day Pocahontas won't go down in history as a winner, but she may very well go
down as the all time great SPOILER! "
Wow! If Elizabeth Warren wasn't in the race, Bernie Sanders would have EASILY won
Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas, not to mention various other states. Our modern day
Pocahontas won't go down in history as a winner, but she may very well go down as the all time
great SPOILER!
"... In communist parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests, instead of asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in 100-year-old books. ..."
"... Curiously, events in Malmö have been mirrored somewhat in broader Swedish Left politics ..."
"... British Left "have no vision for an alternative to rampant neoliberalism and a deindustrialised, finance-led, low wage economy, they calculate the best way to make this work is within the EU." He argues that the cosmopolitan leadership of the Labour Party in particular "think we are some kind of uncivilised tribe, painting our faces blue, and only able to vote in a right-wing government," a view he finds "not only deeply insulting, but also self-defeating and overly optimistic about the EU." On immigration, Galloway argues that there is "nothing left-wing about unlimited mass immigration. It decapitates the countries from which the immigrants leave, and drives down wages in those where they arrive. The wealthy benefit from it, as they can afford cheap labor for their companies, or cheap au-pairs, cheap baristas, cheap plumbers. But the working class suffers." ..."
"... In this text, and other articles on the party's website, including this very interesting speech denouncing transgender ideology as anti-materialist and anti-scientific, the argument is made that ..."
"... Biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing . It doesn't just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world. Sexual reproduction is a natural biological process that has persisted in nature due to the diversity it engenders; it is a phenomenon encountered in the natural world. And let's not forget how this debate impinged upon us. ..."
"... The endorsement and promotion of multiculturalism and its sex-politics corollaries never did make much sense within the framework of rational critiques of capitalism, and the tension between the nominal desire for working class solidarity and divisive pseudo-Marxian doctrines (e.g. Whiteness Studies) designed to mobilise imported ethnic factions against the largest section of the working class (blue-collar Whites) was always destined to bring about significant stress fractures when Leftist fortunes began to decline. ..."
"The life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one,
against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers
adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand."
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
Although Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher of choice for many on the Dissident Right,
I've always had a soft spot for Arthur Schopenhauer. His cantankerous philosophical pessimism
has always struck a chord with my own temperament, and for many years I've found his
quasi-Buddhist and highly compassionate conceptualisation of suffering to be strangely
comforting. That life is a struggle involving endless adversaries and competitors also forms an
aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and this continues to be significant in shaping my
political and philosophical outlook. Certainly, it goes without saying that adversaries have
never been in short supply for members of the Dissident Right. They are arrayed before us now,
emerging from all points of the political spectrum, and often even from within our own ranks.
Dissident right political philosophies, more than any other, appear destined to be mired in
continual conflict, and I often find it difficult to shake the dark impression that one day I
will die, metaphorical sword in hand, with every battle raging but far from won. For this
reason, I sometimes permit myself the relief of optimism (a form of cowardice to both
Schopenhauer and Spengler), and part of this is the attempt to find allies where formerly one
may have seen only foes. This brings me to the subject matter of this essay -- recent
developments on the Left which appear to suggest the emergence of an anti-globalist,
anti-immigration, and anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic politics.
Swedish Communists Wake Up
Just days ago, Sputnik
reported on the fact that almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö,
Sweden, are resigning. They plan to establish a new workers' party that no longer features
multiculturalism, LGBT interests, and climate change as key policy goals. Nils Littorin, one of
the defectors,
told a local newspaper that today's Left has become part of the elite and has come to
"dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic." Littorin suggested that the
Left "is going through a prolonged identity crisis" and that his group, instead, intends to
stick to the original values, such as class politics. Littorin adds "[The Left] don't
understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta
Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that
workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi sickness." In a
piece of simple insight previously rare on the Left, he argues that the rise in right-wing
votes for people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are in fact due to "widespread
dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to low-wage competition and the
ghettoisation of communities, a development that only benefits major companies." Rather than
being beneficial to working class Whites, Littorin condemns a "chaotic" immigration policy that
has led to "cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from
parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities."
Littorin continues to talk sense when it comes to the LGBT agenda. He explains that LGBT
issues and the climate movement are merely "state ideologies" that are "rammed down people's
throats". Littorin adds that phenomena like these happen at the expense of real issues, such as
poverty, homelessness, and income equality: "Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing
with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and
having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are
old."
As well as prioritising jobs and pensions over the flamboyant celebration of buggery,
Littorin and his colleagues have pledged to abandon the name and ethos of Communism, describing
it as a
word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In communist
parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain
avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests, instead of
asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never
been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in 100-year-old books.
Curiously, events in Malmö have been mirrored somewhat in broader Swedish Left
politics, with Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party, expressing
similar
thoughts in an op-ed titled "Socialists don't belong to the left," accusing the mainstream
left of completely abandoning
its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the
middle class."
British Socialists Reinvent Themselves
Almost simultaneously, an identical process is occurring in Britain with George Galloway 's announcement of a
new Workers
Party of Britain . At the time of its launch Galloway described the party as "hard Brexit
and hard labour," and added: "If you're a liberal who thinks it's Left if you're still pining
for the EU, if you think shouting "racist," "homophobic," "transphobic" at everybody who
doesn't agree with you is the way forward, we're probably not for you." Galloway's pro-Brexit
stance is rooted in his
belief that the modern British Left "have no vision for an alternative to rampant
neoliberalism and a deindustrialised, finance-led, low wage economy, they calculate the best
way to make this work is within the EU." He argues that the cosmopolitan leadership of the
Labour Party in particular "think we are some kind of uncivilised tribe, painting our faces
blue, and only able to vote in a right-wing government," a view he finds "not only deeply
insulting, but also self-defeating and overly optimistic about the EU." On immigration,
Galloway argues that there is "nothing left-wing about unlimited mass immigration. It
decapitates the countries from which the immigrants leave, and drives down wages in those where
they arrive. The wealthy benefit from it, as they can afford cheap labor for their companies,
or cheap au-pairs, cheap baristas, cheap plumbers. But the working class suffers."
Galloway has also stressed that his new party will strongly pursue anti-Israel politics, and
is fully committed to opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Galloway and the Workers Party of Britain have also taken a stand against the more extreme
forms of LGBT indoctrination, particularly the mass promotion of transgenderism. Galloway, who
has previously been attacked by a
self-styled "trans anarchist" while giving a speech, is here following the lead of the
pro-Brexit Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) which recently published
Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT ideology taking us and Why does
it matter?
In this text, and other articles on the party's website, including this
very interesting speech denouncing transgender ideology as anti-materialist and
anti-scientific, the argument is made that
Biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing . It doesn't
just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world. Sexual
reproduction is a natural biological process that has persisted in nature due to the
diversity it engenders; it is a phenomenon encountered in the natural world. And let's not
forget how this debate impinged upon us. We've been following this ideological trend, and
encountering identity politics (idpol) among supporters and candidates for membership of our
party, and amongst people we've been working with for at least four or five years. Because
idpol has become a fashion in that period. And it is a fashion; it is a trend. And it
suddenly -- from being very marginal to certain academic institutions in the 1970s -- became
mainstream globally worldwide; it was actively promoted. Not promoted by communists, not by
socialists, but picked up on and accepted by many of them, because they are led by, and they
blindly followed, bourgeoise society down this dead-end. There is a group of self-proclaimed
'socialists' who are not actually any longer fighting against our oppression, they're
fighting against reality!
The Left in Crisis?
None of these developments are entirely surprising and, in fact, the argument could be made
that they are the inevitable side effect of what Nils Littorin termed the Left's prolonged
"identity crisis." The endorsement and promotion of multiculturalism and its sex-politics
corollaries never did make much sense within the framework of rational critiques of capitalism,
and the tension between the nominal desire for working class solidarity and divisive
pseudo-Marxian doctrines (e.g. Whiteness Studies) designed to mobilise imported ethnic factions
against the largest section of the working class (blue-collar Whites) was always destined to
bring about significant stress fractures when Leftist fortunes began to decline.
And decline they have. Of course, we have to set aside rampant ideological and cultural
success. Figures and cliques operating under the banner of social equality and eternal progress
continue to hold the reins of power in government, academia, and the mass media. But the Left
is without question currently subject to a period of political decline. It's losing votes, and
more important, it's fast losing hearts and minds. I should also add that they aren't losing
them to right-wing ideas, but to the hollow shells of right-wing ideas (Free Enterprise! Build
the Wall!) and to the charismatic globalist play-actors who promote-these ideas like salesmen
selling used cars or aftershave. White working-class people are voting for free enterprise
without hesitation while Jewish
vulture capitalism operates with impunity under that very banner, destroying their towns,
exporting their jobs, and repossessing their homes. The same people vote for a wall they'll
never get -- and would never really solve the problems resulting from capitalism or ensure a
majority White future. And they do it not because of concern about identity or racial destiny,
but in the same way one might decide to install CCTV in a grocery store -- the ever-elusive
Wall will never be built so long as it represents nothing more than the aspiration to protect
mere inventory. The hollow men of the pseudo-Right-wing offer flimsy placebos, and yet the
political Left, supposedly the historical repository of hard materialism, can't seem to
compete.
There's been a scramble to blame the situation on
a lack of charismatic leaders , disunity, a lack of attractive policies, and even the idea
that the European Left made the
fatal mistake of trying to meet the Right on its own turf by "flirting with closed-border
nationalism or neoliberalism." But the real reason is surely the fact the Left has consistently
alienated and browbeat working class Whites, while slowly revealing itself to be an elite-run
clique of cosmopolitans, who are living the high life while waxing lyrical about oppressions
that are rarely real and often imaginary, and in any case never affect them personally. Added
to this is the fact Leftist ideology has become so convoluted and contorted, with the
square-peg doctrine of Marx endlessly forced into new and increasingly abstract circular and
triangular holes, resulting in Marxist interpretations of such ephemera as graffiti, pop music,
and drag queens, all of which strike the average blue-collar worker as a steaming pile of
effeminate middle-class navel-gazing. All this plays out as young yet dithering social justice
warriors, jobless and senseless, search for oppression like an old lady with dementia searches
for a purse she hasn't owned in 20 years. As the pundits split hairs, I look on, and it occurs
to me rather simply that right now the pseudo-Left-wing liars aren't quite as good as the
pseudo-Right-wing liars.
Are These Rebels Potential Allies?
When I was around 11 years old, my mother made a new friend, a Scottish woman in her 30s,
who always struck me as very strange. It was her eyes. I didn't know at first what
schizophrenia was, though I would soon find out. One day she arrived at our house and,
recognising her, I opened the door and welcomed her in. I called to my mother, who was
upstairs, and made small talk with the Scottish woman, who, standing still and staring right at
me, seemed perfectly cheerful and articulate. She asked about how I was doing at school, and we
talked a little bit about science, which she seemed to know a lot about. It was only after a
few minutes that I noticed the smell and deduced that the woman had fouled herself. By the time
my mother arrived, the Scottish woman had descended into a stream-of-consciousness gibberish
that culminated in her attempting unsuccessfully to retrieve a knife from the kitchen before
running from the property. She'd simply stopped taking her medication. We later discovered she
was found by police that night, dancing and weeping with bare, bloody feet in a nearby
graveyard, wearing nothing but a nightgown and proclaiming to the dead that she was God,
distraught at the death of the crucified son.
The episode has remained with me now for over two decades, shaping my perceptions of
reality, relationships, and trust. Here it suffices only to remark that the insane talk sense
at times, even as their psyche shatters. And if we dig deeply enough into the statements of
these moderately "awakened" Leftists, do we yet see signs of madness? A look again at the
statement from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), along with some reading
between the lines, suggests something decidedly off . Yes, "biological differentiation
between male and female is a real thing." Of course it is. But so is biological differentiation
between races, and yet here our erstwhile British hardcore materialists, currently led by a
full-blooded ethnic Indian named Harpal Brar , decide to fight against reality.
On that note, we should add that Brar's daughter, Joti Brar, has been announced as George
Galloway's deputy leader at the "hard Brexit and hard labour" Worker's Party of Britain.
Galloway, it's worth adding, has been married four times, with three marriages to non-Whites
(Palestinian Amineh Abu-Zayyad in 1994, Lebanese Rima Husseini in 2007, and ethnic Indonesian
Putri Gayatri Pertiwi in 2012). So for all his protestations of being against mass migration,
one gets the distinct impression that Galloway is a committed multiculturalist and that his
party will be internationalist in every meaningful sense of the term.
If there is any hope for some sanity in this camp of frustrated Leftists it is for the
simple reason that these small new pockets of reason are for the most part free of Jewish
influence and all the intellectual distortions such influence entails. In a 2018 essay titled "
On
"Leftist Anti-Semitism": Past and Present ," I considered the gradual shift of Jews away
from the hard Left due to growing anti-Zionism, and their growing confinement in centrist
neoliberalism:
Jewish blindness to their privileges, genuine or feigned, is of course one major cause for
the undeniable friction between Jews and the modern Left. It was perhaps inevitable that
foolish but earnest egalitarians on the Left would come to the slow realization that their
'comrades of the Jewish faith' were in fact not only elitists, but an elite of a very special
sort. The simultaneous preaching of open borders/common property and 'the land of the Jewish
people' was always going to strike a discordant note among the wearers of sweaty Che Guevara
t-shirts, especially when accompanied so very often by the cacophony of Israeli gunfire and
the screams of bloodied Palestinian children. Mass migration, that well-crafted toxin
coursing through the highways and rail lines of Europe, has proven just as difficult to
manage. Great waves of human detritus wash upon Western shores, bringing raw and passionate
grievances even from the frontiers of Israel. These are people whose eyes have seen behind
the veil, and who sit only with great discomfort alongside the kin of the IDF in league with
the Western political Left -- the only common ground being a shared desire to dispossess the
hated White man. For these reasons, the Left could well become a cold house for Jews without
becoming authentically, systematically, or traditionally anti-Semitic. One might therefore
expect Jews to regroup away from the radical left, occupying a political space best described
as staunchly centrist -- a centrism that leans left only to pursue multiculturalism and other
destructive 'egalitarian' social policies, and leans right only in order to obtain elite
protections and privileges [domestically for the Jewish community, internationally for
Israel]. A centrism based, in that old familiar formula, on 'what is best for Jews.'
As seen in the recent clash between Jews and the UK's Labour Party, the political relocation
of Jews to a kind of amorphous and opportunistic centrism will bring them into direct conflict
with those on the hard Left who not only pursue anti-Zionist politics but also object to
manifestations of raw Jewish power like the mass adoption of the IHRA definition of
anti-Semitism and the economic abuses of politically ambiguous (neither Left nor Right, but
Jewish) oligarchs like Paul Singer. As such, and together with their natural aversion to being
part of the Right, Jews will increasingly find it difficult to define themselves politically as
anything other than Jews, leading to the increased visibility of their activities and interests
-- something witnessed in the unprecedented step of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis openly calling
for British Jews to move against Jeremy Corbyn. This increased visibility can only be a good
thing for those concerned with Jewish influence, and who have been frustrated in previous
periods by Jewish influence masquerading in various political guises.
A potential opportunity, imperfect but perhaps feasible, may therefore be arising whereby
White interests could be subliminally or even publicly defended through savvy, nominally
hard-Left activism against mass migration (on economic rather than racial grounds), against
Israel and international Zionist influence, against some aspects of PC culture, and against the
capitalist excesses of the Jewish vulture funds. It goes without saying that Leftist activists
don't receive anywhere near the same level of social, professional, or legal punishment for
their activism as those on the Right, especially the dissident Right. I don't think I'm too
wide of the mark in suggesting that an anti-immigration agitator with "Workers Party of
Britain" plastered over his social media is less likely to lose his job than someone with
public National Front affiliations. It may therefore be worth serious consideration by young
activists as to whether they might want to cultivate a kind of "Leftist" mask to defend White
interests in much the same way as Jews in the past have adopted various convenient political
masks while concealing deeper ethnic interests. I am suggesting a combination of infiltration
and masquerade. What matters most is the private motivation and the potential benefits of the
ultimate goal -- White interests and objectives serving them.
There are, of course, also dangers in supporting such movements. I am not suggesting the
investment of serious time and money in these groups, since the risk is great that the majority
of their members are committed to a politics that is ultimately antagonistic and destructive to
our own ultimate goals. There is also huge potential for betrayal on many of the issues where
we might have common ground -- immigration, LGBT madness, PC culture -- and I find it difficult
to shake off the impression that these developments bear the mark of a temporary despair and
are designed to dupe blue-collar Whites into voting Left once more.
Still, 2020 may open up a new front in the war, and as the New Year approaches, I'll silence
my inner Schopenhauer and toast to that.
This stupid idea of "intersectionality" is just a fig leaf on dangerous government policy
Notable quotes:
"... Being labeled a conspiracist is actually not that bad, as probably 80% of major conspiracies (the term invented by CIA to discredit the opposition to Warren commission findings) proved to be the most adequate, albeit "politically incorrect" explanations of the events in question. They are just the explanations that undermine the establishment narrative. Right now most people (around 61% of voters and 71% of independents) believe that CIA operatives at senior levels played active role in JFK assassination. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/ ..."
"... the left, as a movement, is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class warfare. ..."
"... The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition" and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development that "only benefits major companies". ..."
"... Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state ideologies that are "rammed down people's throats". According to him, phenomena like LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and "other -isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality. ..."
"... "Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin explained. ..."
"... 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century ..."
"... similar thoughts in an opinion piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class". ..."
As I see it, intersectionality combines a recognition that people are oppressed both through the economic structures of capitalism
and as members of various subordinate groups with a rejection of both:
"essentialist" identity politics, based on the claim that some particular aspect of identity (gender, race, sexuality,
disability etc) should trump all others; and
"working class" politics, presented as a politics of universal liberation, but reduced by the failure of revolutionary
Marxism to another kind of identity politics (I took this formulation from
Don Arthur on Twitter. I had something
to say about class and Marxism
a while back)
likbez 01.02.20 at 1:11 am (no link)
Jake Gibson 01.01.20 at 3:49 pm @35
Here, I thought likbez was just a social reactionary, now I find he/she is also an infowars style conspiracist.
This is an ad hominem attack and as such is without merits.
Being labeled a conspiracist is actually not that bad, as probably 80% of major conspiracies (the term invented by CIA
to discredit the opposition to Warren commission findings) proved to be the most adequate, albeit "politically incorrect" explanations
of the events in question. They are just the explanations that undermine the establishment narrative. Right now most people (around
61% of voters and 71% of independents) believe that CIA operatives at senior levels played active role in JFK assassination.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/
So IMHO if a person views Russiagate as a color revolution against Trump run by intelligence agencies and Ukrainegate as attempt
to replicate 2018 success with Mueller witch hunt on a new level by neoliberal Democrats led by Pelosi and Schumer, this suggests
some attempt of independent thinking, and some level of resistance to neoliberal groupthink. Which may be a bridge too far, but
in general is not that bad, even if wrong.
The opposite camp that does not question the establishment narrative, especially as for Russiagate (and related false flag
operations such as DNC leak converted by Crowdstrike into Russian hack using CIA malware, probably from Vault 7 exposed by Wikileaks
and the creation of Gussifer 2.0 fake personality ) can be called a camp of neoliberal lemmings, or victims of neoliberal brainwashing,
your choice ;-)
Also for an Infowars adept I have friends in strange places -- a faction of Swedish communists -- which somehow managed to
replicate my views almost to a tee ;-)
Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are resigning. Instead, they plan establish a new workers' party
that doesn't put as much emphasis on things like multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the
staples and rallying calls of today's left.
Nils Littorin, one of the defectors, explained to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has
come to "dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic". Littorin suggested that the left, as a movement,
is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as
class warfare.
"They don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta Thunberg are something
fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been
infected by some Nazi sickness," he explained to Lokaltidningen.
The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of widespread dissatisfaction
with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition" and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development
that "only benefits major companies".
According to Littorin, one of the underlying problems is a "chaotic" immigration policy that has led to cultural clashes,
segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities.
Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state ideologies that are "rammed down
people's throats". According to him, phenomena like LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta
Thunberg and "other -isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality.
"Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily
about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin
explained.
The goal, according to Littorin is to enter Malmö City Council by 2022. The name of the party remains undetermined, but
Littorin stressed that the word "Communist" will no longer be present.
It's a word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In communist parties, there is this risk
of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own
best interests, instead of asking people what they want.
20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century
but has been stuck in 100-year-old books. But the principles that Marx formulated, they still apply to me," Littorin concluded.
Earlier this week, Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party expressed similar thoughts in an opinion
piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base , switching
from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class".
"... In my book, I identify two main factors that make the "soft totalitarianism" we're drifting into different from the hard totalitarianism of the communist years. One is the vastly greater capabilities of surveillance technology, and its penetration into daily life in this current stage of capitalism. The other is the pseudo-religion of Social Justice, the holy trinity of which is Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The mathematician James Lindsay last year wrote an insightful essay analyzing Social Justice ideology as a kind of postmodern religion ("faith system," he writes). Reading Slezkine on Bolshevism illuminates this with new depth. ..."
"... To be clear, Social Justice religion is not the same thing as Bolshevism, which conquered a nation and turned it into a charnel house. But the psychological dynamics are so similar that I can understand now why Soviet-bloc emigres feel in their bones that something wicked is coming, and coming fast. ..."
"... The Marxist faith system prophesied a worldwide conflagration -- Revolution -- that would see the saints (the Proletariat) cleanse the world of the wicked (the Bourgeoisie) and their false religion (Capitalism). The Revolution would establish Communism: a paradise in which the state would wither away, because the cause of man's alienation would have been dealt with. Marx despised religion, but he did not believe that his system was religious at all. It was, he taught, entirely scientific -- thus making Marxism entirely compatible with what Enlightenment-era elites believed was the prime source of authority. ..."
"... Here's an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most SJWs don't have a clearly envisioned utopia ..."
"... They don't know; all they know is that these things must come to pass, and will come to pass. We have to first destroy the old world and its corrupt structures. From the point of view of someone who stands to be smashed by these revolutionaries, it doesn't really matter whether or not they have a plan for what to do after you're overthrown. ..."
"... Here's another interesting difference, and an important one: SJWs may want to destroy the oppressive practices, but unlike the Bolsheviks, they don't want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer them . The religion of Social Justice has already conquered the university, as James Lindsay points out, and is moving quickly into other institutions: media (the NYT is its Pravda ), law, tech, entertainment, and corporate America. The Social Justice faith system can be easily adapted by the institutions of bourgeois capitalism -- a fact that conceals its radicalism. ..."
"... The people who have lived in societies suffused with this kind of ideology -- emigres from Soviet-bloc countries -- can see through the veil. With this new book I'm working on, I'm going to do my best to help readers see through their eyes. Meanwhile, if you are really interested in the Russian Revolution, I strongly urge you to read The House Of Government -- all 1,128 pages of it. Yuri Slezkine is a masterful storyteller. It reads like a novel. ..."
"... even evil men respect great writers sometimes. ..."
"... The main difference between the Bolsheviks and SJWs is gender and class. ..."
LGBT Pride poster in Soviet Style (
Design
Boom ) I'm reading one of the best books I've ever seen, historian Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution . It's a massive
-- over 1,000 pages -- history of the Bolshevik movement, focusing on the people who lived in a vast apartment building constructed
across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, for party elites. In the 1930s, during the purges, it was the most dangerous address in
the country. The secret police came for people there all the time.
The book has given me a breakthrough in understanding why so many people who grew up under communism are unnerved by what's going
on in the West today, even if they can't all articulate it beyond expressing intense but inchoate anxiety about political correctness.
Reading Slezkine , a UC-Berkeley historian, clarifies things
immensely. Let me explain as concisely as I can. All of this is going into the book I'm working on, by the way.
In my book, I identify two main factors that make the "soft totalitarianism" we're drifting into different from the hard totalitarianism
of the communist years. One is the vastly greater capabilities of surveillance technology, and its penetration into daily life in
this current stage of capitalism. The other is the pseudo-religion of Social Justice, the holy trinity of which is Equity, Diversity,
and Inclusion.
The mathematician James Lindsay last year wrote an insightful essay analyzing Social Justice ideology as a kind of postmodern religion
("faith system," he writes). Reading Slezkine on Bolshevism illuminates this with new depth.
To be clear, Social Justice religion is not the same thing as Bolshevism, which conquered a nation and turned it into a charnel
house. But the psychological dynamics are so similar that I can understand now why Soviet-bloc emigres feel in their bones that something
wicked is coming, and coming fast.
I'm going to give a brief overview of the ideas in this part of Slezkine's book. Slezkine describes the Bolsheviks as "millenarian
sectarians preparing for the apocalypse." He gives a short history of apocalyptic sects, which he said began in the
Axial Age , the period between the 8th and the 3rd centuries
BC that saw parallel developments in civilizations -- Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Greco-Roman -- that caused a fundamental shift
in human consciousness. The Axial Age introduced some concepts that are still with us today, including the idea that history is linear.
Religion and philosophical systems of the Axial Age developed a sense of separation from the Real (that is, what is material), and
the Ideal (what is transcendent). They also introduced the idea that time would culminate in a final battle between Good and Evil
that would result in the End of History and the everlasting reign of Justice. The rich will be conquered, and the poor will triumph.
Slezkine writes at some length about these themes in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), but points out that they also existed in
parallel in other religions of the era. The two Abrahamic religions that emerged from Axial Age Judaism -- Christianity and Islam
-- modified these same concepts for themselves. The Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible is the standard Western account of
the Apocalypse, but not the only one.
In the 16th century, the radical Protestant theologian
Thomas Müntzer , leader of an apocalyptic Reformation sect, led an armed revolt against the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and
feudal authority. He and his followers believed the Last Days were upon the world, and that revolutionary violence was necessary
to prepare for them.
These movements, says Slezkine, often depend on the virtuous mutually surveilling each other to keep everyone in line. Calvin's
Geneva was like this, and had laws prescribing the death penalty for relatively minor violations of its purity code. In the 17th
century, the English Puritan movement under Thomas Oliver [the mistake was mine --
RD] Cromwell (the "Puritan Moses") was in this same vein.
The Enlightenment birthed apocalyptic millenarianism without God. Slezkine doesn't mention him, but I want to put in a plug for
the book Black Mass by the English political philosopher John Gray,
which I wrote about here. Gray
is an atheist, but he cannot stand the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. In the
book, Gray writes about how the instinct for utopia, born out of religion, keeps surfacing in the West, even without God. Nothing
is more human, he writes, than to be prepared to kill and die to secure meaning in life. More Gray:
Those who demand that religion be exorcised from politics think this can be achieved by excluding traditional faiths from public
institutions; but secular creeds are formed from religious concepts, and suppressing religion does not mean it ceases to control
thinking and behaviour. Like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who
deny it.
Slezkine writes that this same apocalyptic millenarianism erupted in anti-Christian form in the French Revolution. The Jacobins
were Enlightenment apocalyptics, believing in the triumph of Reason, Science, and Virtue. And they were proto-Bolsheviks. Robespierre,
in a 1794 speech to the National Assembly, praised "virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is
impotent. The Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue."
In 19th century America, millenarianism took more gentle forms, but was still popular. Baptist preacher
William Miller prophesied the end of the world
in 1843, and reached a national audience with his forecast of doom. It didn't happen, but his work gave rise to the Adventist movements,
which are still with us today. Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints faith, was another millenarian -- a more successful
one.
Slezkine says that apocalyptic millenarianism in 19th century Europe often took the form of nationalism. Karl Marx advocated German
nationalism as the first step in the worldwide communist revolution. Following Hegel, History was Marx's god. Slezkine:
[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity ('progressive' means 'virtuous'
and 'change' means 'hope'). 'Totalitarianism' is not a mysterious mutation: it is a memory and a promise; an attempt to keep hope
alive.
By "totalitarianism," he means the system by which apocalyptic millenarians enforce the conditions they believe will constitute
the New Jerusalem -- the utopia in which their sect believes.
The Marxist faith system prophesied a worldwide conflagration -- Revolution -- that would see the saints (the Proletariat)
cleanse the world of the wicked (the Bourgeoisie) and their false religion (Capitalism). The Revolution would establish Communism:
a paradise in which the state would wither away, because the cause of man's alienation would have been dealt with. Marx despised
religion, but he did not believe that his system was religious at all. It was, he taught, entirely scientific -- thus making Marxism
entirely compatible with what Enlightenment-era elites believed was the prime source of authority.
In Russia of the late 19th century, there was a great deal of apocalyptic fervor, and, of course, a number of Marxist and other
left-wing revolutionary groups. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and disciplined of them all. Slezkine says it doesn't matter
whether the faith of the Bolsheviks was really a religion or not. The fact is, it functioned like one. If religion is a set of agreements
about sacred realities, though sacred realities believed to be objectively true, and the community organized around those beliefs,
then every state on earth is religious. The Bolshevik "faith" united people, focused them around what Slezkine calls "the ultimate
conditions of their existence," and told them what they had to do.
For the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, the priests and the prophets were their intellectuals, who were "religious about being secular."
Writes Slezkine: "A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong
learning."
The Bolshevik faith was initially spread among the intellectuals primarily through reading groups. Once you adopted the Marxist
faith, everything else in life became illuminated. The intellectuals went into the world to preach religion to the workers. These
missionaries, says Slezkine, appealed to and tried to intensify hatred in the hearts of their listeners. They spoke to the moral
sense within the common people, and gave them what, if taken in a strictly religious sense, would be called prophetic revelations.
The pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks denounced "Philistines" -- people who are sunk in their everydayness, and lack revolutionary
consciousness. It is chilling to read the lines of description they had for people like this. Slezkine calls the Philistines the
"stock antipode of the intelligent" -- that is, the kind of person that a member of the intelligentsia saw as his exact opposite.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the intelligentsia saw themselves as a kind of secular priesthood. The way they wrote about their enemies,
and the way they rhapsodized about revolution, was utterly fanatical and inhuman. Slezkine:
The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled like
the flood of the real day.
The "real day" is the day of Apocalypse, when the truth is fully made manifest, and all evil, injustice, and lies are cleansed
from the earth. It would come about through "sacred fury." Slezkine quotes Bolshevik memoirs recalling the revolutionary days of
1917-18. Pure ecstasy, like the day of Pentecost in the New Testament.
Slezkine draws this interesting distinction:
Marx and Engels were not utopians – they were prophets. They did not talk about what a perfect system of social order should
be and how and why it should be adopted or tested; they knew with absolute certainty that it was coming – right now, all by itself,
and thanks to their words and deeds.
The Bolsheviks, however, did have a complex plan for creating utopia. Reading Slezkine, you can't help but be impressed by the
power and discipline that Lenin and his lieutenants exercised. He was one of the most evil men who ever lived, Lenin -- Slezkine's
accounts of Bolshevik mass murder of class enemies on Lenin's orders make Robespierre's bloodthirstiness seem like amateur hour.
But he was a true revolutionary genius.
For young people in pre-revolutionary Russia, being part of these leftist groups "gave one a great sense of purpose, power, and
belonging." Note this: one reason for the advance of revolutionary consciousness is that parents, despite depending on the stability
of Tsarist autocracy, would not turn away from their radicalized children. Slezkine: "The 'students' were almost always abetted at
home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries."
Bolshevism in power tried to destroy the traditional family, seeing it as an incubator of capitalism. Slezkine writes about how
this form of Bolshevik radicalism had to give way to a more conservative ideology of the family, because it caused problems that
Soviet society could not deal with.
In power, Bolsheviks carried out apocalyptic destruction of the old order, including the mass murder of class enemies. I have
just now arrived at the point in Slezkine's narrative in which he describes the "Great Disappointment" -- a term (borrowed from the
Millerites) for the experience of the New Jerusalem not having arrived as promised. As I understand it, Slezkine will describe the
homicidal spasms of the 1930s, under Stalin, as the vengeful Bolshevik reaction to utopia's failure. Utopia can only have failed
because its proselytes were weak in faith -- and therefore deserve to be punished for their infidelity.
So, what does this have to do with our own Social Justice Warriors? There are clear parallels. Again, I encourage you to read
James Lindsay's
analysis of the postmodern faith system of Social Justice for more. I believe that this is what those who lived under communism
intuit from the Social Justice Warriors -- I mean, why it frightens them:
Like the early Bolsheviks, the SJWs are radically alienated from society. They regard ordinary people as the intelligents
regarded the so-called Philistines: with visceral contempt.
Justice depends on group identity. For Marxists, the line between Good and Evil ran between classes: the Proletariat and the Peasants
on one side, the Bourgeoisie on the other. Marxism sees justice as entirely a matter of taking power away from the Bourgeoisie, and
giving it to the revolutionary classes. Some in the bourgeoisie acquired revolutionary consciousness, and aided the Revolution.
Similarly, for the SJWs, the line also passes between groups, based on group identity. The Oppressors are whites, males, capitalists,
heterosexuals, and Christians. The Oppressed are ethnic minorities, women, anti-capitalists, LGBTs, atheists, and other "marginalized"
people. Justice is about taking power from the Oppressors and giving it to the Oppressed. Some among the Oppressors acquire revolutionary
consciousness and aid the revolution; they are called "allies," and practice "allyship."
Social Justice Warriors, like the early Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is
a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness.
This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can train those who will be
going out to work in society's institutions in
ideologized hatred.
SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. They are doing the old post-Enlightenment
utopian trick of making essentially religious claims, but claiming that they are objectively true. Quote from a Times story:
"We're all born nonbinary. We learn gender."
Our talk shifted again from the past to the future. Jacobs spoke about foreseeing a time when people passing each other on
the street wouldn't immediately, unconsciously sort one another into male or female, which even Jacobs reflexively does. "I don't
know what genders are going to look like four generations from now," they added, allowing that they might sound utopian, naïve.
"I think we're going to perceive each other as people. The classifications we live under will fall by the wayside."
Among the voices of the young, there are echoes and amplifications of Jacobs's optimism, along with the stories of private
struggle. "There are as many genders as there are people," Emmy Johnson, a nonbinary employee at Jan Tate's clinic, told me with
earnest authority. Johnson was about to sign up for a new dating app that caters to the genderqueer. "Sex is different as a nonbinary
person," they said. "You're free of gender roles, and the farther you can get from those scripts, the better sex is going to be."
Their tone was more triumphal: the better life is going to be. "The gender boxes are exploding," they declared.
In the case of transgender SJWs, parents can become the greatest advocates for their children, as in pre-revolutionary Russia
with the radical youth. A distressed parent of a female-to-male transgender told me that in her child's high school, the pressure
on parents from other parents to suppress all doubts about transgenderism was intense. Here, from that same NYT Magazine piece
I quote above, is another anecdote:
Kai grew up in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington; both his parents are economists. He came out to them as genderqueer
a year and a half ago, and they, as he put it, were willing "to step through the door" he held wide for them, the door into his
way of seeing himself. They read a piece of creative writing he gave them, a meditation using Dadaism to explicate the nonsense
of either-or. His mother asked if she could buy him new clothes. "Shopping for clothes was something we'd always done," he said.
"It was her way of saying, 'I want to keep being part of your life.' That was really stepping through the door. And then, all
the nerve-rackingness of shopping in the men's section of a department store and trying on pants and worrying about how people
are looking at you and reading your gender, it would have been really hard to do on my own. But my mother was there. Just like
when we'd shopped together before. And that made it normal."
Here's an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most SJWs don't have a clearly envisioned utopia. What will the world
look like when whiteness is once and for all defeated? When toxic masculinity has been fully vanquished? And so forth. They don't
know; all they know is that these things must come to pass, and will come to pass. We have to first destroy the old world and its
corrupt structures. From the point of view of someone who stands to be smashed by these revolutionaries, it doesn't really matter
whether or not they have a plan for what to do after you're overthrown.
Here's another interesting difference, and an important one: SJWs may want to destroy the oppressive practices, but unlike the
Bolsheviks, they don't want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer them . The religion
of Social Justice has already conquered the university, as James Lindsay points out, and is moving quickly into other institutions:
media (the NYT is its Pravda ), law, tech, entertainment, and corporate America. The Social Justice faith system can be easily
adapted by the institutions of bourgeois capitalism -- a fact that conceals its radicalism.
The people who have lived in societies suffused with this kind of ideology -- emigres from Soviet-bloc countries -- can see through
the veil. With this new book I'm working on, I'm going to do my best to help readers see through their eyes. Meanwhile, if you are
really interested in the Russian Revolution, I strongly urge you to read The House Of Government -- all 1,128 pages of it.
Yuri Slezkine is a masterful storyteller. It reads like a novel.
I cannot believe you, Rod. You cannot keep this up. You post twice as much as anyone else at AC, even more than the manic Trump-hating
machine (I mention NO names). Go to bed, please. The only reason I'm still up (just an hour ahead of LA) is...well...never
mind.
___
...but reading this (just getting started) reminds me that Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita was, allegedly,
protected by Stalin, even though Stalin knew he was writing it. Maybe your friend, Prufrock, mentioned that recently. Either
he or someone else I follow observed that even evil men respect great writers sometimes.
The main difference between the Bolsheviks and SJWs is gender and class.
The Bolsheviks may have been led by intellectuals, but they did have genuine support among much of the industrial working
class, especially the workers of Petrograd, the Latvian riflemen, as well as ethnic minorities in the Russian empire. The fact
that they were utterly hated by much of the peasantry for their grain collection and collectivization efforts should not obscure
that they did have a base of support within the proletariat.
The Bolsheviks were also an (almost) entirely male group. SJWs on the other hand are disproportionately female, sometimes
radically so. Both of these factors mean that the potential of SJWs for mass revolutionary violence is probably relatively
low. Of course, they can still harm society in other ways, but I doubt we will ever see an SJW version of Stalin or Che.
In some ways, the SJWs represent the hollowness of the modern left. There had always been vegans, sexual utopians, and organic
fruit drinkers on the left, but at least in the past this bohemian influence had been tempered by trade unions and fraternal
organizations of working class men. Now, it's bohemian hipster silliness all the way down.
While you may be correct about the potential for specifically revolutionary violence, that does not mean we cannot end up living
under a repressive regime. Writing the neo-Bolsheviks off as "silly" is to gravely underestimate the potential consequences
of their seizure of our civic institutions.
Yes, we may find them intellectually unserious. They probably are, after all. That doesn't mean that they themselves are
not deadly serious in their beliefs, however. Just because you don't share their irrational faith doesn't mean that you can't
be forced to live according to its dictates should they gain enough power.
I wouldn't refer to vegans as "bohemians". If anything the program strikes me as decidedly ascetic, and one of the few such
instances in modern culture.
I believe that any group, once its members become convinced that they are saving the world and that anyone in their way is
The Enemy to be Destroyed, can move into engaging in mass murder. Don't forget that the progressives of yesteryear not only
supported the Bolsheviks, but every other communist movement and not only being morally superior, but superior in every other
way, too.
Read back issues of Sojourners after the Vietnam War ended. Jim Wallis either denies that mass executions were taking place
or he hints that maybe those being executed deserved their fate. He also refused to condemn the murderous destruction of Cambodia
while it was going on. I believe that it is only one step that a lot of these people have to take before they descend into
the hell of mass killing.
Its Dostoevskys Demons that is the most insightful work from/about Russia on the psychology of political fanatics: Bolshevism,
SJW, etc are all illumined by his masterpiece more so than analogies between social-political systems with very different etiologies.
Could't agree more. The similarities of both branches of totalitarianism are staggering. Couple of points:
In Russia of the late 19th century, there was a great deal of apocalyptic fervor, and, of course, a number of Marxist and
other left-wing revolutionary groups. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and disciplined of them all. Slezkine says it
doesn't matter whether the faith of the Bolsheviks was really a religion or not. The fact is, it functioned like one.
1) Bolsheviks didn't exist in 19th century. Bolsheviks faction of RSDRP - Russian social-democratic party was formed in
1903. They were not the most ruthless either - there were many other vicious parties and groups, more violent and outright
crazy.
2) Revolutionaries in Russia acted like religious fanatics and did't hesitate to use Religious terminology either. Take
the infamous 1869 "The Catechism of a Revolutionary" by Sergey Nechayev:
The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the
bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all
its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order
to destroy them more speedily
Lenin adored the man.
Dostoevsky's "Demons" were inspired by Nechayev and his followers.
People on the liberal end of the spectrum regularly tell each other horror stories about how conservatives are just like fascists
and draw parallels and so forth. There's a theory about authoritarian mindsets. And if you hang around comment sections on
the political right you will see dehumanizing rhetoric about the left.
Probably everybody is right about the terribleness of the Other political tribes.
The problem with that is that conservatives want to actually conserve the institutions and sensibilities that have served as
the foundation of our civilization for centuries.
The Left wants to tear everything down because it feels good in the moment, damn the ultimate consequences, which more often
than not, are negative.
They did it in Russia a century ago, and their spiritual heirs are doing it again here.
There is a lot in Slezkine's book which is quite interesting, but a lot more which is merely tedious. Rod does us a big favor
with this Reader's Digest version.
The Year of Big Russian Books! Currently reading the newly translated Stalingrad by Grossman, to be followed by its
better-known sequel Life and Fate . Now this. Oy vey!
Seriously though, this looks amazing.
This is what I was getting at the other day when I said on another thread that SJW-ism is fundamentalist. It's not actually
Bolshie, because it stems too much from a godless version of Yankee Puritanism. But the parallels are definitely there.
I stumbled into the book because I had to make the 8-hour drive to Dallas, and was looking for a book on tape. Our local library
had it available through the streaming app Libby. I had meant to read it earlier in my research, but was intimidated by its
size. However, sitting in one spot for 16 hours over the course of a weekend, it's more approachable. On audiobook, it's 45
hours long! I ended up buying a paperback copy so I can continue. I'll be going to Russia next week, and might bring it with
me.
Fr Seraphim Rose was writing and warning 40-50 years ago about precisely this phenom coming to America -- obviously not with
prophetic specificity concerning the LGBT agenda, etc., -- the essentially religious aspect of secular millennialist movements,
tracing them to the Anabaptist uprisings, the French Revolution, etc. Have you read his slim book 'Nihilism'?
"they don't want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer them"
Yes, that is the brilliant insight of the SJW and the modern left: No need to abolish capitalism, just get all the jobs in
the HR department so you can indoctrinate all the employees.
Good insight about the apocalyptic style of the SJW. They indeed look for the progressive Son of Man from Heaven so to speak,
who will lay the ax to the old tree of white/Christian/hetero culture and cast the bad fruit into the fire. Escape this via
the Benedict Option? "Who said you could flee from the coming wrath?", their prophets will ask.
What an absurd claim. Fox News is much more akin to Pravda than the NYT ever would be. Fox literally runs non-stop propaganda
for the president and attempts to cover for his corruption. NYT has never had that kind of relationship with any president
that we know of. Hosts on Fox have massive conflicts of interest which they don't report (Hannity and his use of Cohen as his
private lawyer). That is what a Pravda looks like.
Look, I'm a paid subscriber to the Times. I have to read it for the same reason Kremlinologists had to read Pravda. It really
is Pravda for the Social Justice faith system.
That you are this myopic regarding the Times makes Rod's point about Pravda better than he did.
If you think the Times, or their writers and editors, has no conflict of interests, then there is no hope for you.
Seriously.
You're right. I changed it. What's so funny is that as I was up late last night writing that post, I was thinking about a book
Prof. Tighe sent me this year about Thomas Cromwell. I told myself to be sure not to make the mistake of putting Thomas's name
where Oliver's should be. And I made that very mistake!
I was going to point that out but figured someone else had beaten me to it.
The two Cromwells were akin (Thomas was a collateral ancestor to Oliver) but they were as different as could be. Thomas was
a political nihilist who did whatever Henry VIII wanted, until he failed to anticipate the mercurial monarch and lost his head.
Oliver was a bit of a fanatic, though with a few decent instincts (he stopped the looting of the royal tombs, and saved Westminster
Abbey from demolition).
Criticism of ideologies that embody millenarianism without God is all well and good. The problem is that the various politically
conservative ideologies that also nominally orient themselves around a Judeo-Christian worldview consistently turn a blind
eye to grave evils committed by members of the societal elites, in the name of whatever political and economic ideology they
support instead.
There is an absence of a courageously prophetic stand for truth and justice on the part of Christian elites and intellectuals.
It so happens that many of the parties making such critiques adhere to an ideology embodying secular messianism, and this is
then employed as a rationalization by Christian intellectuals to turn a blind eye to the evils in question in the service of
their own pet political ideology.
Here are ongoing examples right now, picked almost at random, where such a prophetic witness is lacking:
- The ongoing slaughter and mass starvation in Yemen being caused by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the United States
- The betrayal of the Kurds (if being true to the promises made to them must come at the expense of American geopolitical interests,
then this is what the Christian moral witness necessitates)
- The ongoing criminal violation of anti-trust laws by the medical industry involved in their refusal to make public the costs
of their services
- The homicidal criminality of the Boeing executives who knowingly put a death-trap airliner into global circulation
- The homicidal drug-dealing criminality of pharmaceutical company executives who knowingly caused the opoiod crisis by employing
a business model built on deliberately addicting people
Secular messianism would lose a lot of its appeal and raison d'etre if the Christian intelligentsia would take from the
secular messianists, and take upon themselves, the task of prophetically denouncing the criminality routinely engaged in by
their society's power elite.
No one is bearing prophetic witness to those things, to use your term. Only a few Cassandras here and there. It's not just
our Christian elites that fail here, it's all of them, left, right and center.
A picture is worth a thousand words. While it used to be that Communists were demeaned by associating with homosexuality, now
homosexuals are demeaned by association with communism.
He wasn't as crazy as, say, the Fifth Monarchy Men, but he did impose draconian moral regulations and he left his tolerance
at home when he went to Ireland.
Oliver Cromwell wasn't so tolerant if you were Catholic or Irish or worked in the theater; and he was less tolerant and liberal
than Charles I (who was executed) or Charles II, who thankfully ended the Puritan reign after Cromwell's death.
Well, he was more tolerant of Catholics than a lot of Catholics were of Protestants at the time (cf. massacres of Protestants
in Ulster--let along continental Europe--and Cromwell's actions with respect to Maryland), more tolerant than his predecessors
toward Jews, and more respectful of free conscience than most of his contemporaries. Anyway, my point is not that he was a
saint or some kind of liberal before his time; just that he doesn't deserve to be categorized with Bolsheviks and Jacobins.
A Soviet emigre myself, I would like to point out that there is a silver lining here. Totalitarian ideologists may very well
succeed at capturing power and inflict immeasurable harm on the societies they control. But the structures they erect will
ultimately fall apart due to the major flaw of totalitarian / mythological thought: its denial of reality. The Nazis attacked
the Soviet Union (whose totalitarianism was more beningn for its victim groups than the future envisaged by the Nazis for their
racial enemies, though) believing they would be invincible because of their racial superiority. The Soviet Union entered an
arms race with the United States believing its economy would be able to sustain it. If Post-Marxism succeeds at consolidating
its power, its eventual downfall is virtually assured, too. Let's hope, it won't take 70 years.
Here's another interesting difference, and an important one: SJWs may want to destroy the oppressive practices, but unlike
the Bolsheviks, they don't want to destroy the institutions of society. Rather, they want to conquer them and administer
them. The religion of Social Justice has already conquered the university, as James Lindsay points out, and is moving quickly
into other institutions: media (the NYT is its Pravda), law, tech, entertainment, and corporate America. The Social Justice
faith system can be easily adapted by the institutions of bourgeois capitalism -- a fact that conceals its radicalism.
Does id-pol's total congruence with massive multinational consumer capitalism "conceal its radicalism," or does it rather
point up the insane radicalism of global consumer capitalism? Western conservatives who embraced the free market out of fear
of communism embraced something that is, or at least has the potential to be, as radical as communism is.
Identity politics are *the* way to manage and administer global consumer capitalist organizations and societies, since they
function as a way of rendering populations legible to technocrats and unseen, unaccountable, untouchable administrators who
work on computers, with spreadsheets. People can now be databased, can be put into "relational databases" and characterized
with algorithm-friendly descriptors. People are rendered text-searchable; people are catalogued the same way a multinational
corporation catalogues its products and the different pieces/ingredients components of each product.
Identity politics are ideal for global consumer capitalism for a number of other reasons, too. For one thing, they disintegrate
ties of solidarity between members of families and between citizens of nations, and disintegrate historical communities as
well, and even social or economic classes, by prioritizing market segmentation into discrete categories based on *self-creation*
or self-satisfaction. For example, sexual identity -- sexual identity categories are aggressively emphasized because these
are categories based on individual desire and appetites, and a sort of self-idealization.* And the emphasis on migrants/immigrants
being superior or ideal members of a community because they *chose* to be where they are, they chose to move, rather than just
staying where they were born.** But even market segmentation based on tastes like "I enjoy comedies" or "I enjoy tearjerkers"
or "I like fantasy video games" vs. "I like first-person shooter games" is a form is categorization and disintegration based
on personal preference and tastes. The point is that unchosen bonds or ties, and relational bonds or ties or classes, are to
be disintegrated in favor of self-chosen self-actualizing categories.
(*Identity politics so loves and adores sexual identity "diversity" that it tolerates a particularly wide range of sexual
self-categorization, 88 genders and 256 orientations or whatever, because what it loses in algorithmic legibility it gains
in the sheer power of liberationist sexual self-identification to explode unchosen and strong affiliative bonds in favor of
a radically atomized and self-focused individual, a perfect foot soldier with absolutely no counter-loyalties to anything other
than the idpol regime/ideology.)
(**Note that both establishment Democrats AND establishment Republicans enthusiastically push and promote this idea that
the person born on the other side of the world who moves to America tomorrow is BETTER and MORE AMERICAN than somebody who
was born here, because of the active *choice* to come to the USA rather than just be some loser non-"dynamic" non-"innovative"
schmuck who happened to be born within the country's borders and thus deserves no credit or regard whatsoever.)
As identity politics disintegrates unchosen and God-given bonds and ties and relational categories, in favor of "self-directed"
"self-chosen" legible identity markers, it renders traditional left-wing goals and causes related to class solidarity and economic
equality toothless and impotent, riven to pieces by the progressive stack; the solidarity that can sustain a picket line is
shredded to pieces by the narcissistic self-created individual, who tells himself that he is BETTER than the picketers because
whereas they call the strike-breakers "scabs," he sees them as morally superior and he would never be so mean and cruel as
to dehumanize them in that way. Of course, the scabs are in actual truth meaningless to him except as symbols of his own superior
moral worth, and the picketers are equally meaningless to him because he has no class solidarity and never subordinates himself
willingly to the group on a class basis. He would far rather enjoy the narcissistic satisfaction of publishing a thinkpiece,
for pennies, about how dehumanizing the language of "scabs" is, with his name on it, with his sheer goodness visible to all,
than engage in the kind of class solidaristic activity that would mean subordination to a larger group of people some of whom
are probably hopelessly behind the times in their thinking.
Identity politics were deployed during Occupy Wall Street to neuter it and they have been utilized by both the Democratic
and Republican establishments to dissolve populations of problematic subjects into naked individuals atomized and self-actualized
into totally dependent subjects of the system. Kevin Williamson and National Review telling problematically non-libertarian
poor whites to sever ties with their communities and their homes, to "get a U-Haul" and go where the market wants them. Hillary
Clinton saying "if we break up the big banks, will that end sexism? Will that end racism? Will that end homophobia?" Both National
Review and Hillary Clinton want the atomized individual completely subject to money power, to the capitalists, to the financial
class; National Review tells *its* audience that true conservatism, morality, and Christianity all demand it; Hillary Clinton
tells her audience that true morality, progressivism, and liberality demand back-burnering systematic economic and political
change of the kind that is national in character and requires class solidarity-- in favor of instead focusing on deliberately
vague and endless efforts to stop "sexism" and "homophobia" and "racism" that of course will always have to be priorities forever
since these things can never end as the idpol advocates themselves admit and which will be attempted via the policing and targeting
and harrassment of ALL, including the poor, by ideological commissars and apparatchiks. The government/the demos/the state
is not to be trained on the billionaires, to tackle them or correct them, but on all of us--WE are the problem. A politics
of petty bureaucrats, snitches, informants, ideological policemen -- again, a politics that SEVERS ties and bonds between people
in favor of the atomized and legible individual, the row of Excel spreadsheet column signifiers on some technocrats' massive
file of humans rendered legible to the algorithm.
Identity politics is global consumer capitalism and the fact that neither establishment liberals nor conservatives can accept
this since it shows that each is actually a lie and the opposite of what it pretends to be is why the whole system is felt
to be both untouchably strong/unassailable and liable to full and total and sudden collapse. What does "The End of History"
mean if not that there aren't really contesting/opposing powers anymore, that there isn't actually any more real conflict?
On Day One in creative writing class you learn that there is no story, no narrative, at all, if there is no conflict.
Occupy did a pretty good job of neutering itself, rejecting any form of coherent leadership and spending its days in a drum-banging
pot smoking daze. Wayne and Garth do political protest.
Identity politics are *the* way to manage and administer global consumer capitalist organizations and societies, since they
function as a way of rendering populations legible to technocrats
You could expand this into a pretty good follow-up to James C. Scott's "Seeing like a state" (if you will, "Seeing like
a Social Justice Technocrat"), which presents the art of making unruly populations "legible" as the central concern of modern
statecraft. There's an interesting difference between your argument and his, though: where you argue that the current version
prefers people who are mobile and unattached to any particular location, Scott argues that "nomads and pastoralists (such as
Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always
been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial
state project". Basically, the only way to make populations legible was to make them stay put. I guess that changed.
This is an interesting point. I would say that consumer capitalism cares little about nomads, vagrants, homeless people, etc.,
because there's no money in them. Why should consumer capitalism care about them? It feels no loyalty to a specific community
and its people; it feels no loyalty to those who happen to exist somewhere in its proximity; it has no use for them. I mean,
Seeing Like A State is written from a Cold War perspective, when American cities had real, serious problems with criminal activity
from poor and marginal people, and it was affecting even the upper middle class and the rich. But the Cold War ended, and at
basically exactly the same time things started to improve in American cities (the ones that matter, anyway, like NYC and Washington
DC).
Maybe Seeing Like A State is more concerned with the way a more robustly national -- that is, not completely globalist --
elite or ruling class conducts itself, but here at The End of History, I'm not sure things are the same. If vagrants, homeless
people, itinerants, etc. are not terribly legible, nobody cares, because they aren't worth anything anyway. They don't buy
things, they can't be farmed for debt payments, and they probably can't even be used effectively as vote banks.
Conversely, the middle-class single man or woman whose job is everything to him or her and who conspicuously consumes --
*this* is where the money is. The single person whose entire lifestyle is about consumption -- the right foods, the right products,
travel, clothes, etc. -- and whose entire focus is on their career -- this is the ideal for the multinational corporation.
Any roots, or ties to specific places or communities, will interfere with this ideal specimen's total devotion to and capture
by consumerism.
I guess what I'm saying is there's "Seeing Like A State," and then there's Seeing Like a Multinational Corporation, or a
globalist organization. The former might want itinerants to plunk down somewhere. The latter knows that there's no real escape
*physically*, nowhere "out of reach" short of going into outer space, and that the more people get moved around the more shorn
they are of particularist, illegible-to-the-market bonds, ties, and obligations.
One can understand the appeal of Marxism, and to a greater degree socialism. The pseudo-spiritual parallel of "the last will
be first" akin to Christianity is perhaps the greatest attractor to the social justice minded individual. While I don't think
we will experience anything like revolutionary Russia in this country, I truly feel there are similarities to our present day.
Namely, the envy and vindictiveness which has become so commonplace in our daily lives. There is a general anxiety and anger
out there which is manifesting itself through economic realities such as the growing wealth gap. You combine this with the
growing aversion to institutions such as the family and religion which are purveyors of traditional hierarchy, and this is
laying the foundation for the far-left in this country to essentially weaponize their ideology on to a younger generation.
And just like the Bolsheviks, it is all centered in envy, vindictiveness, anger and bloodthirsty want of power in order to
bring about a utopia where the last will now be first. That was marxist communism, and as Rod continues to point out, these
components are slowly revealing themselves in a soft totalitarianism through which the invocation of "science" is being used
to chip away at civic virtue, decency and the greater public good. There are indeed parallels to revolutionary Russia.
Thanks for pointing this out. The "last shall be first" end-point is exactly the inverted hierarchy of the SJW.
So what are we saying? We're not supposed to take it literally? We don't really mean it? That the whole "Blessed are the
poor.".. ends with an Emily Littela "Never mind"? Or is it just that we want to get there on our own bus... With our own idea
of who is marginalized?
Everyone wants their own personal Jesus I guess.
BTW - by the way, I think one of the weakest components of Rod's thesis is the refusal to weigh the power of industrial,
finance and late-stage capitalism and it's corollary effects on culture. Unless one is willing to conflate Liberalism with
Capitalism there is no excuse for ignoring its overwhelming impact on culture and civic morality.
Show's what you know. I'm devoting an entire chapter to Woke Capitalism, and how so many conservatives are blind to the threat
from it because we are programmed by our past to think of the State as the only threat.
I'm chuckling here for a number of reasons. I am pleased and apprehensive at the same time.
I may be wrong but I was thinking this just before you responded. The reason you guys - conservatives and traditionalists
- lost was because while your side was investing in retrograde politicians, megachurches and tv evangelists; gold as a great
investment; guns and prepper equipment the secularists were investing in publishing, movies, film, literature, art, technology
and education, i.e, mass media.
It had nothing to do with ideology. It was that nihilistic value-engine, corporate America, commoditizing and monetizing
everything from Air Jordans to pornography to in vitro fertilization - all of it. Daniel Bell was talking about this back in
the 70's but you know this. It wasn't "woke" Capitalism that did this. It was just that good ole American capitalism chipping
away at the culture dollar by dollar - along with all those concomitant trends in marketing, industrialization, communications,
rural to urban and suburban migrations, etc.
You guys not only put your eggs in the wrong baskets but you gave them to the Republican Party, who cheered it on; "What's
good for GM is good for America". By the time FOX rolled around it was too late. That's why the party had to spend so much
time over the last couple decades on gerrymandering, voter suppression and r*tf&*$king election tactics.
"Woke" Capitalism is what happens when you pay attention to the wrong stuff and end up losing every battle before this one.
I'll be interested in what you have to say in the new book. Good luck with it.
The Bolsheviks only came to power because Russia had been ruled by incompetents for time out of mind, and things fell apart
badly during the debacle of WWI. Radicals of both Left and Right we shall always have with us. They will not be a threat as
long as our leaders are reasonably capable, government is somewhere within hailing distance of popular consensus, and no external
catastrophe sinks us.
Here's an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most SJWs don't have a clearly envisioned utopia. What will the
world look like when whiteness is once and for all defeated?
Many of us can thank God, then, that SJW's understand and accept the carcinogenic risks of tanning booths.
I understand the parallels, and you do a good job of explaining them. But it seems a little forced. Cutting to the basic difference
- the Bolsheviks were more than prepared to use violence, terror and intimidation to crush the old order, techniques used on
a scale rarely if ever seen before in human history, over decades. I just can't see SJWs (of which I have a couple of sympathizers
in my immediate family) getting to grips with the business end of an assault rifle or concentration camp. To me, they seem
just another group of middle class nags, wokier-than-though types who are more likely to irritate me to death than actually
kill me for believing the wrong things. Although the image of drag queen story hour with added Kalashnikovs and gallows does
have a certain dark, Pythonesque appeal.
Point of interest, do you have a vision of what it be like if whiteness is once and for defeated. You should have a vision
so that you can point out the ultimate horror of what they want to achieve. I never really bought into the SJW conspiracy but
reading more of your posts I am rethinking this issue. Still not convinced it is a movement with any staying power.
The difference is that there's no such thing as soft totalitarianism.
All totalitarianism is hard. What you call "soft totalitarianism" is simply a set of social ethics you don't like, that
make life uncomfortable for people with a very different set of social ethics. In other words, it's the price of living in
a non-totalitarian society where people get to accept the values they like and reject those they don't. Not a perfect society,
but definitely not a totalitarian one.
In the 60s, the various radicals, including the Weathermen and Black Power groups, were supported by white collar leftists,
no matter the violence of the era. Today, antifa is supported and aided by Democratic politicians and bureaucrats in its violence.
Much of the antifa are radicalized wealthy college kids LARPing as revolutionaries, but they are violent nonetheless.
Likewise, BLM engaged in considerable violence in various protests.
They are all proto Bolsheviks, sure of their own righteousness as they support violence against opponents ("punching Nazis",
throwing cement milkshakes, and the like).
People, more than a few, are losing their jobs and/or social standing because of this insanity, and their numbers increase
daily, as does the number of people who keep their mouths shut because of fear of job loss.
This issue is not to be met by shoulder shrugging and indifference.
now is the time for average people to begin speaking up and out whenever this nonsense rise to the surface.
Have you been paying attention to the "black shirts" that are terrorizing anyone who dares wear a MAGA hat, or attend a conservative
rally of any sort?
There's a growing trend among the SJW crowd to arm themselves, and organize for violence.
Don't underestimate the willingness of the left to commit violence on a grand scale.
In Europe, the alienated turn towards Islamic Radicalism or various forms of ethno-nationalism. In the North of Ireland, those
alienated turn towards either the IRA (if Irish and Catholic) or the UVF (if British or Protestant). How are the social justice
warriors in the United States any different than the various types of bourgeoise European ethno-nationalism, such as Catalan,
Scots, or Irish nationalism?
There is no significant difference between the status of a serf growing food for his feudal lord and someone living under a
Socialist system where the government runs everything. In both systems a person can't work for himself, nor does he own any
land. Socialism is a trap invented by the old feudal elite to fool people into surrendering all the advantages they got from
the advances of the last few centuries and going back to new form of Feudalism.
Yes, the ability to own property -- and especially to own income-producing property -- along with the rule of law to protect
that property are the keys to society-wide prosperity.
From the point of view of someone who stands to be smashed by these
revolutionaries, it doesn't really matter whether or not they have a
plan for what to do after you're overthrown.
That lack of a plan, that lack of realization that utopia is unattainable on this earth, means that sooner or later everyone
stands to be "smashed by the revolutionaries". While we've long congratulated ourselves on the uniqueness of the American Revolution,
an alternate view appears increasingly tenable, viz. that it is merely an imitation, per augmentationem , of
the same basic theme in the grand prolation canon of revolutions.
Nothing is more human, he writes, than to be prepared to kill and die to secure meaning in life.
Nothing is more human than to be prepared to kill and die to secure dominance and glory. Jesus expects his followers to
resist their natural inclinations resulting from The Fall.
So this is a problem with "secular millenarians" but not religious millenarians? Of course, reframing secular left politics
into an apocalyptic religious frame work requires it. But it doesn't necessarily make it so. It may accelerate it.
And "The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled
like the flood of the real day." could just as easily apply to Trump's base. The contempt and schadenfreude at Trump
rallies is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
In fact, many of those in the center and the Left frame the current moment in terms of Weimar and the rise of National Socialism.
The parallels have been noted by more than a few historians. You've noted them.
So why is this apocalypse more likely than the other? After all Trump and his minions have been co-opting American institutions
from the Court and Congress to law enforcement; intelligence; foreign policy, etc, etc, etc. The Left has the universities?
What happens when they fall next? If not to this Trump then the next one.
This really reminds me of the old Chinese Finger Trap puzzle. The harder each opposing side pulls the more entrapped they
become.
Bingo! And i fear this as well. We have the neo-Weimar neoliberal mostly fecklless hedonists of the left and the nascent growing
*something* that will oppose them, or react to them. It's different and strange, it's right-wing but not really, and fascist
but not really, and nationalist but not really. It's VERY dangerous though and growing.
Bingo! And i fear this as well. We have the neo-Weimar neoliberal mostly fecklless hedonists of the left and the nascent growing
*something* that will oppose them, or react to them. It's different and strange, it's right-wing but not really, and fascist
but not really, and nationalist but not really. It's VERY dangerous though and growing.
So i'm much more worried about the young men in the big black pick up trucks, back from multiple deployments, with the punisher
stickers, and think blue line flags.
The mopey woke gender studies grad in HR may not be the long term threat the guy with the simmering and growing anger, and
with the practical experience with long rifles, and with the peers who feel the same way, turn out to be.
What happens when instead of Trump, we get a Lenin or a Stalin, distinctly American, who can appeal to and organize these
angry young men?
Either way, I'll work to peacefully oppose both these extremes, trust in Christ, work on turning the other cheek, spread
the gospel, and focus on enduring to the end.
Here's an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most SJWs don't have a clearly envisioned utopia. What will the
world look like when whiteness is once and for all defeated? When toxic masculinity has been fully vanquished? And so forth.
They don't know;...
Which is why they are doomed to fail.
SJWs are trying to solve socio-economic problems with metaphysical, therapeutic solutions. Stigmatizing white skin and Western
culture isn't going to provide economic investment to impoverished minority communities. Delegitimizing law enforcement won't
reduce violent crime. Obliterating gender distinctions doesn't lead to equal pay for women or get more women and LGBT into
STEM professions.
Their worldview is built on the fallacy that a better world can simply be willed into existence. It's analogous to the Underpants
Gnome theory of profit.*
Emotion is not reality, and self-expression is no substitute for competence.
To round out the SJW religion, their Church Fathers are: Foucault, Butler, Derrida, Lacan, Said, etc. And like the worst
aspects of Abrahamic religions, SJW theologians (ie, Sociologists, Studies professors, etc.) are prone to an idiotic, if often
hilarious, textual fundamentalism.
Regarding the role of parents, Sailer recently posted about a Soviet "child saint" who snitched on his parents. A reminder
that Faith comes before family.
More and more has my mind been turning to my memories of the late fifties, when Russia was called the existential threat by
my influencers. I was ten years old. Only much later did I learn of the HUAC and backlash against the "Red Scare". Only even
later did I learn of men and ideas like Lincoln Steffens... in the 30's .."I have seen the future, and it works."
And now, the existential warnings are emanating from both sides of Political World. It's a Bizarro version of deja vu.
This is most interesting and insightfull once again. I will definitely buy your new book, once it arrives. One thing I would
like to add: The SJWs know how to appeal to ordinary people and install hatred in their hearts by adressing REAL injustices
and problems in society, just like the Bolsheviks did. Problems and injustices that those who reject and oppose SJW-religion
often ignore (to their own future peril). For instance, SJWs are hammering on extreme and ever growing inequality. A thing
ordinary people who need three McDonals-jobs to survive can relate to. Then there is Climate Disaster. A thing that will hit
those ordinary people, who are already struggling, hardest.
Simply put in general: When an intellectual stromtrooper-elite pushes a new faith in the mainstream, they need one or more
levers. If the old faith is willfully blind to the existance of these levers, it propably deserves to die.
Haven't read all of this but I don't really think there's much utopian thinking left in the West - and especially amongst segments
of the younger generation. If that's where you're going with this I think you're mistaken. Instead, we're living under the
tyranny of the now, or 'quarterly capitalism'.
Byung Han's got some great work on this..the burnout society: a society that can't imagine a future and that must be pumped
up on fictions, intoxicants, just to keep desire, and the system, going. Or, as G. Steiner acutely remarked: there are no new
beginnings. So, there isn't really an acceleration of time but a fragmentation of it ( since there is no direction to it..no
fulfilment of time).
I'm sure there's some 'revolutionary' zeal in some parts but I think fatigue, ennui, and a blasé attitude are equally if
not more common. Yeah, like, whatever ( I hear you say).
Also, with so many people in debt I doubt they buy the idea of progress. For all the whirl of change, the factory remains
( Chesterton said). In fact, the mania for superficial change is almost an admission that real change ( utopian thinking) cannot
come about.
My tuppence worth.
If you weren't making that point..profound apologies.
I agree with this. The point of identity politics is in fact *not* a revolutionary new regime or the establishment of a new
dispensation--identity politics is so atomizing and disintegrating that it is unappealing to people to even think/fantasize
of some shared new common destiny... identity politics is thoroughly bourgeois and capitalist, it is a rat race, it is climbing
the corporate ladder, it is the "self" -- note well, the *self* -- as brand. At most identity politics looks forward to a world
that resembles an international airport or the hotel and corporate convention center attached to such an airport-- not something
people really actually want to spend much time fantasizing about.
You should watch HBOs documentary of Theranos, because Silicon Valley is really the dominant force in the wokification of corporate
America, which is far more significant than most SJW trends. There's a specific part that's fascinating, an experiment done
by Dan Ariely where they design a payoff based on the outcome of a dice roll that is very easy to cheat. The twist: they had
a lie detector strapped on. When the payoff simply was given to themselves, lying was infrequent and detectable. When they
were told the money would be given to a charity of their choice, lying shot up and it was not detectable by the machine.
Conclusion: believing in a cause will make people physically believe their own lies. It's a huge reason why startup founders
have learned to bilk billions from credulous investors, and it's a huge reason why SJWs are now able to bilk liberals into
legitimizing their increasing mania. It's all basically strategic bullshit, just like Theranos' completely nonfunctional technology,
but for whatever reason it's worked for an entire decade.
This strategy has been enormously successful in the last decade, and corporate America is just bandwagoning. But they're
bandwagoning mania and dishonesty, and often running organizations that serve much more vital businesses than chat apps and
sales automation.
I did not realize anyone still believe that a lie detector can actually detect lies, but as long as it was done for the
good cause of scientific research, I guess it does no harm;-).
Anyway, if you enjoyed that movie, I highly recommend John Carreyrou's book about Theranos, which investigates the case
in much more detail than the movie (
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-... ).
A couple of other authors to consider, from an older generation (born before WWII), writing along similar lines. I'm sure Slezkine
refers to them:
Andrzej Walicki (Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom)
Martin Malia (The Soviet Tragedy and other works)
Walicki is a bit less well known than Malia, but very worth reading in the context of your book, for his assessment of how
certain ideas of what constitutes true freedom (as opposed to bourgeois liberalism) lead in practice to totalitarianism.
The people who have lived in societies suffused with this kind of
ideology -- emigres from Soviet-bloc countries -- can see through the
veil.
Right, as can many Americans who came of age before about 1990 (I believe a paradigm shift took place culturally after the
WWII generation a la George Bush and the Me generation a la Bill Clinton).
The West, and the East for that matter, has done fine without DQST for many, many centuries.
In a healthy society, people would feel no reason to conceive of or initiate such a thing in the first place, let alone try
to suppress it.
And I think you already knew that.
Not having a clearly delineated utopia was also an essential characteristic of Marxism. Del Noce explains it very well: to
the extent that Marx was expecting the revolution to engender a new, divinized man that would take back all the characteristic
he had alienated into God, the new society could not really be described in term of any what we know about the pre-revolutionary
world, just like, say, a Christian cannot describe paradise.
" The Social Justice faith system can be easily adapted by the institutions of bourgeois capitalism -- a fact that conceals
its radicalism."
Bingo!
Rod, I don't know about you but I feel I'm living from one week to the next. Do you really know anyone who's got this utopian
way of thinking or is it mainly an elite ("they've already taken the universities") kind of thing?
I think it's like the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia: the intellectuals will guide and instruct the masses, who don't
have to fully comprehend what they're doing to be effective.
And the voices of the intellectuals are radically magnified by social media and the entertainment industry, to a degree undreamt
of by the revolutionaries in Russia.
This was a dense post, and a single comment can't do justice to it.
Social justice advocates picked a bad target for their wicked. Whiteness in a country that is 72% white, maleness in a world
that is 50% male, and heteronormativity in a world that is at least 90% heterosexual.
It ensures that when they infiltrate an institution, they'll generate strife and enemies, and be outnumbered, even with
allies.
Social Justice moved through universities more easily because they started off liberal, and are more insulated from profit
constraints than other businesses. The rate of tuition increases indicates the market is inelastic. So there's so much demand
any costs social justice incurs its host institution is unimportant.
This is not the case with many other businesses. Which when colonized by social justice ideology find themselves stepping
on the toes of more than half of their consumers. Many of these consumers will go to competitors and starve the business of
profit. Even a small decline in the consumer base can be traumatic to the balance sheet, hence the aphorism "Get Woke, Go Broke".
It's not even true for all universities as University of Missouri and Evergreen college found out.
This means there are likely limits to the spread of social justice ideology. But I suspect this won't phase its adherents
because they likely derive meaning from the struggle, and lack of success is secondary.
One interesting parallel between the contemporary social justice crowd and their communist counterparts, as Slezkine presents
them, is that many intellectuals who converted to the revolutionary religion were driven by intense feelings of shame and guilt
"on account of [what they perceived as] their unearned privilege" (p24, 26); many were themselves children of intellectuals,
and felt "both chosen and damned" because of the leisure this afforded them (ibid). But such feelings were a rather intellectual
affair: their guilt did not stem from any interaction with the less privileged, but was largely "derived from books" (ibid).
This seems rather similar to the current crop, most of whom seem to feel immense guilt about things they have only read about.
Like the early Bolsheviks, the BenOps are radically alienated from society. They regard ordinary people as dangerous and morally
corrupt.
Justice depends on group identity. For the BenOp Trad, the line between Good and Evil runs between the Faithful on one side,
the Left on the other. BenOp sees justice as entirely a matter of taking power away from the Left, and giving it to the reactionary
classes.
BenOp Trads, like the early Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel
that depends on awakening and inspiring fear of SJWs in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into reactionary consciousness.
This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within churches, where they can train those who will
be going out to work in society's institutions in ideologized hatred.
BenOp Trads believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. They are doing the old pre-Enlightenment
utopian trick of making essentially religious claims, but claiming that they are objectively true. "It's Adam and Eve, not
Adam and Steve."
BenOp Trads are utopians who believe that their personal Safety requires smashing all the old forms for the sake of liberation.
Jurists seemed "unqualified" by the nonpartisan ABA are elevated to lifetime positions in the judiciary. Government corruption
at the highest level is acceptable, so long as the government protects the BenOp Trad.
Parents can become the greatest advocates for their children, as in pre-revolutionary Russia with the radical youth. Parents
are encouraged to home-school their children, to insulate them from mainstream ideas. Public libraries are to be avoided.
Here's an interesting difference: from what I can tell, most BenOp Trads don't have a clearly envisioned utopia. The movement
is not towards physical segregation in an isolated community, like millenarians past. They've given up hope of conquering the
culture or the government, and there's no clear way forward besides individual BenOp outposts.
The media is the driving force on this subject because it really is outrageous and sensational which gets people watching the
ads that pay the media's salaries and office spaces. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon for economic reasons also. I think people
who are against this trend are clueless about how to fight against it. Write the sponsors and tell them why you won't buy their
products. In advertising world mentality, every letter or email represents at least 500 or more people who agree, but don't
communicate their opinions. Complaining accomplishes nothing, and never has.
Thanks Rod -- a great piece. Just a couple of quibbles: SJW is of course, really just neo-Marxism or "Cultural Marxism". With
that in mind, another parallel with Bolshevism comes to mind, one highlighted by the characterization of dissenters as "Philistines".
A fascist cynic and satirist, Giovanni Papini, had this to say about Lenin in his book 'Gog' (a novel published in 1931 largely
consisting of fictional interviews with famous personalities of the time):
'I [the narrator's name is Gog] murmured a random compliment on the great work he [Lenin] had done in Russia. And then that
half-dead face became filled with spectral wrinkles that sought to be a sarcastic smile.
'"But everything was done," exclaimed Lenin with an unexpected and almost cruel brio, "everything was done before we arrived.
Foreigners and imbeciles assume that something new has been created here. Blind bourgeois error. The Bolsheviks have done nothing
but adopt, by developing it, the regime established by the tsars and which is the only one adapted to the Russian people. One
cannot govern a hundred million brutes without the baton, spies, secret police, terror, gallows, military tribunals, galleries
and torture. We have only changed the class that founded its hegemony over this system. There were sixty thousand nobles and
perhaps forty thousand grand bureaucrats; in total, one hundred thousand people. Today there are about two million proletarians
and communists. It is progress, great progress, because privileges are twenty times more numerous, but ninety-eight percent
of the population has not gained much on the other hand. Indeed, to be sure, it has gained nothing, and this is at the same
time what it wanted, what it sought, although on the other hand it was absolutely inevitable."
'..."Then," I muttered, "what about Marx, and progress, and the rest?"
'"To you, who are a powerful and foreign man," he added, "we can say it all. No one will believe it. But remember that Marx
himself has taught us the purely instrumental and fictitious value of theories. Given the state of Russia and Europe, I have
had to use communist ideology to achieve my true end. In other countries and at other times I would have chosen another manner.
Marx was nothing more than a Hebrew bourgeois clinging to English statistics and a secret admirer of industrialism. He lacked
a sense of barbarism, and for this reason he was only a third of a man. A brain saturated with beer and Hegelianism, in which
his friend Engels sketched out some brilliant idea. The Russian Revolution is a complete negation of Marx's prophecies. Where
there was almost no bourgeoisie, Communism has won there."
'""Men, Mr. Gog, are frightful savages who must be dominated by an unscrupulous savage like me. The rest is charlatanism,
literature, philosophy and music for the use of fools. And since savages are similar to criminals, the main ideal of any government
should be that the nation should resemble as closely as possible a penal establishment. The old tsarist dungeon is the last
word in political wisdom. Well thought out, the life of the prisoner is the most adapted to the vulgar average of men. Not
being free, they are, at last, exempt from the dangers and nuisances of responsibility and are in conditions of not being able
to do evil. As soon as a man enters prison, he must, by force, lead the life of an innocent man. Moreover, he has no thoughts
or worries, for those who think and command for him are already there; he works with the body, but his spirit rests. And he
knows that every day he will have something to eat and he will be able to sleep, even if he does not work, even if he is sick,
and all this without the worries that are incumbent upon the free man to obtain his bread every morning and a bed every night.
My dream is to transform Russia into an immense penal establishment, and do not imagine that I say this out of selfishness,
because with such a system, the most enslaved and sacrificed are the bosses and those who second them."
'..I.dared to ask one of my questions: "And the peasants?"
'"I hate the peasants," replied Vladimir Ilyich with a disgusting gesture, "I hate the mujik [peasant] idealized by that
softened Westerner called Turgenev and by that converted satyr hypocrite called Tolstoy. The peasants represent everything
I detest: the past, faith, heresy and religious mania, manual labor. I tolerate them and pet them, but I hate them. I would
like to see them all disappear, down to the last. For me, an electrician is worth a hundred peasants...
'"We will come to be able, I hope, to live with the food produced in a few minutes by the machines in our chemical factories,
and we will finally be able to finish off all the useless laborers. Life in Nature is a prehistoric shame...
'"Keep in mind that Bolshevism represents a threefold war: that of scientific barbarians against rotten intellectuals, of
the East against the West, and of the city against the countryside. And in this war we will not hesitate in the choice of weapons.
The individual is something that must be suppressed. It is an invention of those Greek idlers or those fantastical Germans.
Whoever resists will be extirpated like a malignant pustule. Blood is the best fertilizer offered to Nature...
'"Do not believe that I am cruel. All these executions and all these gallows that are raised by my order displease me. I
hate the victims, especially because they force me to kill them. But I cannot do otherwise. I boast of being the director of
a model penitentiary, of a peaceful and well-organized prison. But here are to be found, as in all prisons, the rebels, the
restless, those who have the stupid nostalgia of old ideologies and homicidal mythologies. All those are suppressed. I cannot
allow a few thousand sick people to compromise the future happiness of millions of men. Besides, after all, the ancient medical
bleedings were not a bad cure for bodies. There is some voluptuousness in feeling the master of life and death. Since the old
God was killed - I don't know if in France or Germany - certain satisfactions have been monopolized by man. I am, if you will,
a local demigod, camped between Asia and Europe, and so I can afford a little whim. These are the tastes whose secrets, after
the decline of the pagans, had been lost. Human sacrifices had something good: they were a deep symbol, a high teaching; a
healthy feast. And I, instead of the hymns of the faithful, feel the screams of the prisoners and of the dying come to me,
and I assure you that I would not change that symphony for Beethoven's 9th, announcing the beatitude to come."
I quote from this text because I genuinely think efficiency of empire eventually came to weigh, before Communism, as the
existential concern of both Leninism and Stalinism, that is to say the long-term survivability of Russia as it was mattered
most, i.e. its definitional indissolubility as empire--an empire of peasants (unlike the US, which was one immigrants), but
an empire all the same.
Leninism/Stalinism superceded tsarism because it, like Maoism, avoided the colonial disintegration of the vast empire-as-nation,
the nation which can only ever be conceived as empire or "cataclysmically"--for the foundational ethnos--lose all sense of
self and purpose otherwise; in that strict sense of imperial essentiality, which Tocqueville noted long before the appearance
of the Bolsheviks, Russia is the closest compeer of the United States.
If these spoiled and lazy SJWs had been made by their parents to leave home and get a real job, go rent an apartment, and start
paying the bills and taxes, and work their way through college... They wouldn't be SJWs, they would "grow up" pretty fast !
As I recall from my limited reading and discussions, the Bolshies were composed of "workers and soldiers soviets." The peasants
(many of them kulaks) weren't considered part of the revolutionary class and later fared quite badly. I'm not sure what the
Russian Revolution's parallel would be to our woke capitalists who adjust quite easily to SJW ideology since the SJW's don't
challenge them in any meaningful sense. Also, the Bolshies did more than virtue signal. Economic hard times here may dissipate
SJW energies rather quickly as their commitment to revolutionary change may turn out to be skin deep. A lost generation may
be violent at the fringes but its members have no traction unless the police and the military were to take up their cause.
But their version of social justice may be quite different than that of the university-educated SJW's.
You should add the important point that the Socialist-Revolutionaires (SRs, Esers) were much more popular than the Bolsheviks
among the intellectuals and also the common people. They were focused on the peasants, and after the war wanted to split Gentry
estates between the peasants.
The House of Government is indeed a great book. One of the best I've ever read about Bolshevism, and modern leftism and utopian
movements in general. It should be required reading for all incoming college freshmen.
Not only do the defectors regard these phenomenons as having been "rammed down workers'
throats" by the establishment, but they also want to discard the name "Communist" as "drawn
down to the dirt". Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are
resigning. Instead, they plan establish a new workers' party that doesn't put as much emphasis
on things like multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the
staples and rallying calls of today's left.
Nils Littorin, one of the defectors,
explained to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has
come to "dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic". Littorin suggested
that the left, as a movement, is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group,
instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class warfare.
"They don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT
movement and Greta Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s'
Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi
sickness," he explained to Lokaltidningen.
The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of
widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition"
and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development that "only benefits major companies".
According to Littorin, one of the underlying problems is a
"chaotic" immigration policy that has led to cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion
due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan
mentalities.
Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state
ideologies that are "rammed down people's throats". According to him, phenomena like
LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and "other
-isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality.
"Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that
human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you
are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin explained.
The goal, according to Littorin is to enter Malmö City Council by 2022. The name of the
party remains undetermined, but Littorin stressed that the word "Communist" will no longer be
present.
"It's a word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In
communist parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a
certain avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests,
instead of asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union,
it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in
100-year-old books. But the principles that Marx formulated, they still apply to me,"
Littorin concluded.
Earlier this week, Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party expressed
similar
thoughts in an opinion piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the
mainstream
left of completely abandoning
its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the
middle class".
Owing to its long-standing socialist traditions, Sweden currently has two active communist
parties , the Communist Party and the Swedish Communist Party, both dating back to the
1970s. Despite formally remaining loyal to Marxism-Leninism, the two are not on speaking terms.
Also, the Left Party, which unlike the two aforementioned ones has parliamentary
representation, was called the Communist Party for several decades
"... Not only do the defectors regard these phenomenons as having been "rammed down workers' throats" by the establishment, but they also want to discard the name "Communist" as "drawn down to the dirt". ..."
Not only do the defectors regard these phenomenons as having been "rammed down workers'
throats" by the establishment, but they also want to discard the name "Communist" as "drawn
down to the dirt".
Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are resigning. Instead, they
plan establish a new workers' party that doesn't put as much emphasis on things like
multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the staples and rallying
calls of today's left.
Nils Littorin, one of the defectors,
explained to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has
come to "dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic". Littorin suggested
that the left, as a movement, is going through a prolonged identity crisis and that his group,
instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class warfare.
"They don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT
movement and Greta Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s'
Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi
sickness," he explained to Lokaltidningen.
The right-wingers' major gains from the working class are, according to Littorin, a token of
widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to "low-wage competition"
and the "ghettoisation of communities", a development that "only benefits major companies".
According to Littorin, one of the underlying problems is a
"chaotic" immigration policy that has led to cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion
due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan
mentalities.
Littorin described multiculturalism, LGBT issues and the climate movement as state
ideologies that are "rammed down people's throats". According to him, phenomena like
LGBT-certification and the cult around 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and "other
-isms" happen at the expense of the real issues, such as income equality.
"Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that
human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you
are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old," Littorin explained.
The goal, according to Littorin is to enter Malmö City Council by 2022. The name of the
party remains undetermined, but Littorin stressed that the word "Communist" will no longer be
present.
It's a word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In
communist parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain
avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests, instead of
asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never
been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in 100-year-old books. But
the principles that Marx formulated, they still apply to me," Littorin concluded.
Earlier this week, Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party expressed
similar
thoughts in an opinion piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the
mainstream
left of completely abandoning
its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the
middle class".
Owing to its long-standing socialist traditions, Sweden currently has two active communist
parties , the Communist Party and the Swedish Communist Party, both dating back to the
1970s. Despite formally remaining loyal to Marxism-Leninism, the two are not on speaking terms.
Also, the Left Party, which unlike the two aforementioned ones has parliamentary
representation, was called the Communist Party for several decades.
"the injustices and oppression suffered by these minority groups."
You are way too "woke" for your own good ;-)
The problem here is where lies the proper measure of redress, because overdone it turns into
its opposite. Converting bathrooms in schools into gender neutral is one example here.
Moreover some groups are anti-social and need to be severely oppressed. One example is
financial oligarchy, especially financial oligarchy under neoliberalism. The other is neocons
as asocial group. I would love both of those groups oppressed, humiliated and ostracized.
Yet another is pedophiles as a social group, especially pedophiles that abuse the position
of authority (gay catholic priests, teachers which seduce/coerce students, etc).
The idea that each minority group is somehow entitled to compensation for the injustices
they suffered in the past or are suffering currently is probably a delusion. Much depends on a
larger picture: what particular group gives to a larger society. If the group contribution is
negative and the group resort to anti-social behavior then why the oppression is unjust ? It is
just an immune reaction of the society. After all one view is that "Justice is the advantage of
the stronger" (debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus.)
Also in some cases those groups are a minority for a reason.
The globalist cabal controls the money, the promotions, the tenure, the continuance of
careers. God help anyone who disagrees.
Pequiste Just maybe this embracing (that will sound bad in this context ) of all things
LGBTQPIBN+, no matter how bizarrre or disgusting, is to usher into a position of great
importance in the government, the likes of Pete Buttgeek?
The United Church of Christ in Ames, Iowa, for reasons unknown flew a LGBTQ flag/banner of
sexual perversion. A 30 year old Hispanic immigrant took it down and burned it. For this
"crime" he was sentenced to 16 years in prison!
Almost every day I read that another person has been fired from their job because they
tweeted the fact that there are only two genders. One of the most recent is the firing in the
UK of Maya Forstater, "the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two
sexes and that sex is immutable." This is more than a belief. It is a statement of fact, of
truth. There is no scientific evidence of a third gender, much less evidence of the hundreds of
genders that have been declared by utterly stupid people of no known intellectual capability or
accomplishment. Hermaphrodites are considered to be abnormalities, a failure of nature. When a
distinguisned author and a famous actor came to the defense of Maya Forstater, they were
shouted down by a multiple of subhuman excrement. https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/20/the-witch-hunting-of-jk-rowling/
The Western World has lost its way. It was only a short time ago that a Google senior
engineer, a white male, was fired because he posted a tweet or an email that spoke a truth that
men and women are good at different things and excel in different areas. His statement of
scientific fact violated the feelings of feminists, who maintain that there is no difference
between the capabilities of men and women. If women aren't excelling in men's areas, it is ipso
facto proof that women are being discriminated against. This claim doesn't work for men who are
not excelling in women's areas. The men can't claim they are not doing as well in women's areas
because they are discriminated against.
By making the claim that men and women are equal in every respect, feminists have destroyed
women's sports. Men now have the transgendered right to self-declare themselves women and to
compete against women in sports. Many women sports stars, such as Maria Sharapova, winner of
five Grand Slam titles, have protested this absurdity, and have been denounced and forced to
apologize for doubting that the males are really females even though the self-declared females
have penises and testicles and the muscle strength of males.
The results of men competing as women in sports contests clearly show that the two genders
are not equal in all respects as the ignorant dumbshit radical feminists insist. The attack on
women does not come from men. It comes from feminists and the alleged transgendered.
What kind of society is the West in which absolutely ridiculous declarations take precedence
over all known science and anatomical fact? How is it possible in the US, UK, and Europe for a
person to be imprisoned for disbelieving that one's gender is independent of one's anatomical
body?
A people this insane don't deserve to exist. The End must be Nigh.
In all of this, it's worth remembering the observation of La Rouchefoucald that "hypocrisy
is the tribute vice pays to virtue". The accusation of virtue signalling represents the refusal
of vice to pay this tribute.
... in my experience the kind of people who talk about VS also talk about 'clicktivism' and
similar; in other words, a lack of effort or cost is particularly characteristic of VS (and,
in their eyes, particularly repugnant).
...And what's about all these people who wear these: "I'm a Deplorable" – T-shirts?
SusanC 12.05.19 at 12:37 pm (no link)
I thought the concept was supposed to be (a)not actually doing anything to reduce a problem;
while (b) making ostentatious signs that purport to show you care about it.
A better example might be attending an Extinction Rebellion protest without changing your
own consumption/pollution causing activities.
I wonder if it somehow relates to the Mary Douglas cultural theory of risk?
If so, we might tentatively include, e.g. Making a big noise about terrorism without
really considering yourself to be at risk from it
"Vice signaling" was a good joke; I think it captures a notion that the affiliation the
person is attempting to signal is not a universally shared one,
SusanC 12.05.19 at 12:45 pm (no link)
For that matter, terrorism itself, in its typical modern form, could be regarded as vice
signalling: ostentatiously commiting public acts of violence ostensibly in support of a
political cause, without regard to whether the political cause is in fact being advanced by
their actions.
cs 12.05.19 at 1:37 pm (no link)
... I would say the implication is about the ostentation and a kind of insincerity.
Insincerity in the sense that the person displaying the rainbow flag wants to be seen as the
kind of person who cares about gay rights, when maybe they don't actually care about it all
that much. That isn't quite the same as hypocrisy I think.
I'll try to give my economic based explanation for this, based on this paper from Piketty:
Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right:Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political
Conflict
This paper has been cited here various times, however I'll drop this line from the
abstract that summarizes the main finding:
Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a
striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s,
the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower
education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education
voters, giving rise to a "multiple-elite" party systemin the 2000s-2010s: high-education
elites now vote for the "left", while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the
"right"
I would add to Phil @2 a third option.
(a) You're a hypocrite.
(b) The thing you're signalling isn't actually a virtue.
(c) You're attacking me by reminding everyone of a virtue I don't have.
I think the old-fashioned term for virtue signalling is sanctimony, not hypocrisy. Notably,
sanctimony is also compatible with genuine belief and/or commitment. It does connote that the
committed person has a degree of self-love over their commitments, and that perhaps the
frequency or intensity of their display of their commitments is caused by an underlying
desire to experience that self-love whenever the opportunity arises.
Sanctimony–correct word, I think–puts me in mind of that old bumper sticker, "I
brake for animals" of which I once saw an example tidily shortened to: "I bake animals".
The problem I have with the whole concept is the stereotyping and bias implicit in it.
When I see the Rainbow I'm supposed to think open minded, inclusive and left-thinking and
that's fully o.k in the minds of liberals, but not in the minds of the Conservatives who see
something else (which I'm not inclined to list).
When I see the MAGA I'm supposed to think closed minded, racist and right-thinking, but
Conservatives would see hard-working Americans trying to make their country a better
place.
Displaying a rainbow flag or wearing a MAGA hat strikes me as visible tribal identification
more than virtue signaling. I think MrMister's mention of sanctimony is closer to the truth.
Another poster mentioned Pharisees and public prayer. Consider a meeting to discuss replacing
culverts to allow better passage of spawning salmon. The participants represent various
interested parties, private and government. The meeting is disrupted by a person who proceeds
to lecture all present about the history of racism, broken treaties and Native American
reverence for nature. This person is not Native American. The speaker assumes that his/her
information is unknown to the audience. The information does nothing to advance the goal of
culvert replacement nor does it do anything to right historic wrongs. The speaker gets to
feel superior. This is high-grade virtue signaling.
It has been my experience that virtue signalling is often practiced on behalf of
marginalized groups by people who do not belong to that group but presume to speak for
them.
I'll second several commenters above: "virtue signalling" isn't primarily an accusation of
hypocrisy. The related accusations targeted at the right are "sanctimony" and "prudishness"
more than hypocrisy. The accusation is that you care more about "being seen as the sort of
person who supports X" than about X.
I think it means making a political statement in order to look good, where good is understood
in a moral sense. That's a real phenomenon, especially in our age of online
narcissism/personal branding, and it probably does affect the liberal-left more than the
right because left-liberal politics tends to be more morally inspired.
I agree with SusanC at 7 and cs at 10 that the term is mostly intended to suggest that you
support some cause or other that you don't really care about, as a way to identify yourself,
or establish bona fides, with some group.
I'm so far behind I'm still bemused by the thought that a flag lapel pin, pledges of
allegiance and praying in public, are all virtue signalling. The tie-ins to libertarian
economics and evolutionary psychology are even more puzzling, but maybe that's because I
think they're just ideological scams/Vavilovian mimicry trying to pass off nonsense as real
ideas.
"This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all
that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Obama said, to some laughs from the crowd.
"The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws." he
continued.
Obama cited college campuses and social media as a breeding ground for wokeness.
"One danger I see among young people particularly on college campuses," he said, "I do get
a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media,
there is this sense sometimes the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible
about other people and that's enough."
Obama then directly poked fun at 'woke' keyboard warriors:
"Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb
or then, I can sit back and feel good about myself: 'You see how woke I was? I called you
out.'" he mocked.
In a nutshell, Obama is saying we all need a little more aloha spirit -- being
respectful & caring for one another. Not being so quick to judge. Not seeing everything
as black/white. I hope you'll join me in bringing the spirit of aloha to the White House.
https://t.co/tYADx6Dzqs
Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did an
about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the usual
suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.
Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow
Chemical:
"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a corporation.
I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB
People are defending Warbama's helping DOW screw women who had breast cancer out of their
settlement. It's absolutely sickening to see people defending the indefensible. "She needed
the experience." WTAF does that even mean?
Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did
an about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the
usual suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.
Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow
Chemical:
"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a
corporation. I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB
of identity politics is bullshit. He's offended enough by irrationality that he's willing
to comment on that in public--now that he's out of the Presidency and doesn't have to win any
more elections.
However, none of that would stop him (or did stop him) using that kind of identity
politics to the hilt for his own political advantage.
#2 Go
on ahead and mock all you want. Those of us who see you for what you are will never stop
seeing it and calling you out on it. Boohoo mofo.
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism,
to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut,
The Undoing of Thought
Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities
for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison
des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway,
only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases
that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the
medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits,
moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals
,
1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics,
intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to
be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice
of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men,
Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and
formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to
the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal
of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward
in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted
men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon
is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian
hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close
altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the
lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in
the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little
more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the
greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement,
or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily
should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the
way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation
as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The
ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were
not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success."
It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas
the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek
sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates'
devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts
Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully
pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles
sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles
espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism
by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other
'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things
were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him.
To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche.
His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and
evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real
problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all
values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated
but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of
scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated
"one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality
of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral
if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence
against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul
which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is
measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human
mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.
The Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently
described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky,
erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless
in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication,
Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given
the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly
be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands
for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues
to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm
is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief
but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée
2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this
sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives
of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent
strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century
German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that
of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned
by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit."
Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he
writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists
are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions
of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction
of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the
mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular
tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s]
some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes
the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive
worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both
books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends
to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still
had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much
attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the
measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its
current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things,
this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual
divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not
fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is
"Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular
chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science":
these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism."
The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason
and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other
absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational
animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment.
Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine
-- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill
another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about
the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged
as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce,
anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and
moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to
tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which
substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality,
the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence
in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason
went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.
It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith
is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its
end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many
anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed
with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It
is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought
itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed
as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside,
by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason
of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's
scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual
in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty
the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic"
cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting
them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment
to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded
that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced?
In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points
out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular
age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond
reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection
of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological
practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been
greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in
the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences
hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality"
and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article
on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man
who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim,
in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition
that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive
forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he
explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic
matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed
that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly
think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given
culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces
from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels
(whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.
F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other
cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological
construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the
name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and
say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than
Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than
the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read
is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The
footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller,
are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.
The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high
culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone
who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum
of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed
up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition
demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its
own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which
its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity,
is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version
of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar
to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference:
Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of
the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this."
The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism
promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is
a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change
one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the
destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's
right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural
institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children
and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does
not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars
refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common
humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand
causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity"
meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but
the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier:
Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth."
Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as
their truth.
1The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928.
This translation is still in print from Norton.
2La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in
a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book
is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)
Maybe the fastest way to reduce STDs is to stop promoting homosexuality in our schools.
Since HIV inhibitors were created and HIV virtually cured, the gay community has been in
overdrive on the sexual practices that causes most of the STDs on the report. Just like the
80's the doctors in these studies suggest a massive increase in spending across everyone when
in fact, you can reduce the rate of these diseases massively by targeting this subsector of
society that continues these filthy practices.
"In 2014, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men accounted for 83% of primary
and secondary syphilis cases where sex of sex partner was known in the United States. Gay,
bisexual, and other men who have sex with men often get other STDs, including chlamydia and
gonorrhea infections. HPV (Human
papillomavirus) , the most common STD in the United States, is also a concern for gay,
bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. Some types of HPV can cause genital and anal
warts and some can lead to the development of anal and oral cancers. Gay, bisexual, and other
men who have sex with men are 17 times more likely to get anal cancer than heterosexual men.
Men who are HIV-positive are even more likely than those who do not have HIV to get anal
cancer."
"... The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion ..."
"... there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is. ..."
"... White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result. ..."
"... The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. ..."
"... White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. ..."
"... Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind. ..."
"... After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. ..."
"... that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , ..."
"... Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction. ..."
The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic
obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the
neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion. Nevertheless,
whether organic or not, the boomer generation's excessive regard for Israel is today authentic
and undeniable. A strong fealty to Israel is deeply entrenched amongst boomer-generation
conservatives. Indeed, when it comes to defending Israel and its conduct, many of these types
are like samurais on meth. They don't seem to care at all if their entire state or city should
devolve into a semi-anarchic New Somalia, but god forbid some Somali congresswoman should
lambaste the sacred Jewish state. That simply can't be countenanced here in the land of the
free!
Mind you, this article is not meant to constitute a polemic against Israel, or Jewish
ethnopolitics for that matter. The BDS movement is just as wrongheaded as Ziocuckoldry, in my
humble opinion. Although there is much wrong with Israel, there is plenty right with it as
well. Despite what the modern left may believe, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about
a state like Israel, one rooted in history, in genes, in religion, and in race. States built
around a shared ethnicity or a shared religion (or, as in Israel's case, an ample helping of
both) are generally more stable and successful than diverse societies erected upon propositions
most people and peoples don't really accept, or leftist values that have ideological quicksand
for their foundations.
With that said, there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I
mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world
affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by
powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as
Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there
is.
White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated
people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore.
That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other
peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have
nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are
populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That
also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an
unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural
Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would
rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result.
The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that
psychic injury. Because white boomers possess no group/tribal identity any longer, or
collective will, or sense of race pride, or civilizational prospects, because they have been enserfed by a viciously anti-white Cultural Marxist overclass, they have opted to live
vicariously through another race. White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an
identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another
people's identity and future instead of their own. Indeed, just as the cuckold doesn't
merely permit another man to penetrate his wife, but actually takes a kind of perverse pleasure
in the pleasure of that other man, in large measure by fetishizing his dominance and sexual
prowess, the Ziocuck likewise doesn't merely allow his civilization to be debased, he takes an
equally perverse pleasure in the triumphs of other peoples and nations, and by so doing
imagines, mistakenly of course, that America itself is still as free and proud a nation as
those foreign nations he fetishizes.
Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very
similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to
stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who
possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans
are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via
Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western
elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational
expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair
in the white, Western mind.
Through this sordid, vicarious identitarianism, threats to Jewish lives become threats to
their own white lives. Jewish interests become tantamount to their own interests. It is a sad
sight to behold anyhow, a people with no sense of dignity or shame, too cowed by political
correctness to stand up for their own group interests, too brainwashed to love themselves, too
reprogrammed to be themselves, idolizing alien peoples. Nevertheless, the need for belonging in
place, time, and history, and for collective purpose, doesn't just go away because Western
elites say being white signifies nothing but "hate". As white civilization aborts and hedonizes
itself into extinction, as whites practice suicidal altruism and absolute racial denialism,
atomized white individuals seek out other histories, other stories, other peoples to attach
themselves to and project themselves onto.
White Americans have thus foolishly come to see their own destiny as inseparable from the
destiny of a people whose destiny they don't really share.
After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level .
Israelis are optimistic
about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their
racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving.
As whites in America suffer from various epidemics of despair , their fellow white
Americans seem more interested in the imaginary plight of Israelis who can't stop winning
military skirmishes, embarrassing their Arab enemies, and unlawfully acquiring land and
resources in the Levant. The actual, visceral plight of their own people seems almost an
afterthought to most white Americans. The whole affair is frankly bizarre and shameful.
This peculiar psychological phenomenon of vicarious identitarianism is at least partially
responsible for the Zioboomer's undying devotion to Israel. Furthermore, that unwholesome
obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots,
learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said
demand , since the white race's many enemies have no intention of saving a place for
them or willingly handing them a say in that future). Until whites have a story and a spirit of
their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other
races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to
extinction.
A related phenomenon is Russia-cucking. White American conservatives who have seen through
Jewish bullshit often seem to conclude that the racial predicament in America is hopeless, so
they switch to Russia-cucking. Being pro-Russia is obviously more sensible than being
pro-Israel, but it's nationalism by proxy all the same.
It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high
maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same
people, I'm sure it will turn out different!
On the other hand, as someone over 40 who isn't a dramatic, hysterical weirdo like at
least 30% of those under 35 are, I'm liking my job prospects over the next 15 years as
employers get sick of this shit and notice a pattern. Wonder if they'll make "reverse age
discrimination" a thing.
It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high
maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same
people, I'm sure it will turn out different!
I'm no fan of Google (anymore) but to be fair, Google employs 103,459 people as of Q1
2019. 45 people throwing a fit is an acceptable margin considering their overall size.
I agree their is an issue with ageism but I disagree with the idea that it would reduce
the number of people throwing a fit because nutcases come in all ages.
It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high
maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same
people, I'm sure it will turn out different!
OTOH, consider that Google has over 100K employees, and in a few months 45 such stories
were collected... and the stories themselves cover a period of a couple of years. I don't
want to minimize the issues suffered by any mistreated employee, but I find it hard to
believe that any company could be so perfectly well-managed as to not have a couple dozen
cases per year where employees were pretty badly treated. Or, as you imply, that a couple
dozen employees might feel mistreated even when they aren't. I prefer to give the benefit of
the doubt to the individuals.
As a Google employee myself I do have some concern about the alleged retaliation against
the organizers of the walkout. That sort of thing could have a chilling effect on future
protests (though I've seen no evidence of it so far), and I think that's a potential problem.
It's important that employees feel free to protest actions by the company if a large enough
percentage of them are bothered by it. Personally, I didn't join the walkout, but some others
on my team did and I supported their action even though I didn't agree with their
complaint.
On the other hand, as someone over 40 who isn't a dramatic, hysterical weirdo like at
least 30% of those under 35 are, I'm liking my job prospects over the next 15 years as
employers get sick of this shit and notice a pattern. Wonder if they'll make "reverse age
discrimination" a thing.
FWIW, in my nearly 10 years with Google I've seen no evidence of age discrimination. A
large percentage of new hires are straight out of college (mostly grad school), which does
skew the employee population young, but I'm in my 50s and I've worked with guys in their 60s
and one in his mid-70s. Of course, my experience is anecdotal.
Please keep doing this. People without a sense of humor are the worst, especially when
they're cunts who report everybody whenever they don't get the job
I'm a straight white guy, and I have worked with a guy who was a never-ending source of
sexual and racist "jokes." I never reported him, but after a couple of months, I wished every
time I worked with him that he'd just shut the fuck up and do his job. Any tactful suggestion
that he do just that was met with more laughing, sneering, "it was only a joke" or "no, you
don't get it." Yes, I got it, man. Your shitty old boomer joke about how you hate your ugly
wife but want to fuck her anyway just wasn't funny. God, it was like a goddamn clown show you
couldn't turn off. It wasn't even so much that I was offended by his shit; it was that he
seemed to genuinely believe he was hilarious, and if you didn't think so, too, you had to
endure his constant, pathetic attempts to make you feel somehow inferior for not appreciating
his humor.
Anyway. People who mistakenly think they have a sense of humor are, indeed, the worst.
No. Consider the words "latino" and "latina." These are gender specific. The fact that
they specify gender is a great harm. A great deal of mental gymnastics are necessary to
perceive that harm, but it is possible.
Yet in the same sentence they mention "female". You can't make this shit up.
While gaslighting does indeed have a useful definition -- one that you can trivially learn
for yourself and I won't repeat here -- that meaning won't be helpful in understanding the
most common use of the word. Gaslighting is a term frequently used to blame someone else for
the difficulty one suffers reconciling reality with the ones own cognitive dissonance.
It's a form of psychological abuse where the abuser acts as if something is true when it
clearly isn't.
It's from a book where a character is driven mad by the people around her claiming the the
gaslights are lit when she can clearly see that they are not. She starts to think that she
must be losing her grip on reality if everyone else can see the gaslights but she can't.
It's not uncommon in abusive relationships, unfortunately.
That's not going to stop a PR disaster unless they do fire them. That's what being a
social justice warrior is all about: Mass shaming.
Point and shame. That's how you destroy careers and the standards of excellence that makes
a nation. No evidence required, don't bother reading the deposition, the personal is the
political, ad hominem attacks from beginning to end for defending someone (Minsky) that
wasn't accused of anything .
With metoo backfiring so that men don't trust being alone in an office with a woman,
feminism is looking a lot like a hate movement with the way they throw accusations of sex
crime around in order to get their hit of indignation to maintain their moral
superiority. Guilt by association, career destroyed, court of opinion adjourned.
Considering what RMS contributed not only to freedom but economic wealth you can see these
people don't care who they destroy and it doesn't matter if you are innocent of all charges
once your reputation is destroyed. Getting even isn't equality.
If they piss off men long enough, they're going to hit back with real patriarchy.
I mean just look at MGTOW... Instead of just being careful when choosing a mate, as they
should have been taught to be anyway, they're just going in the opposite extreme. A
considerable pool of men deciding to be bachelors is neither good for those men
psychologically, nor is it good for the species.
The backlash will be just as dumb as what we're seeing right now. This is a social
equivalent of England and France laying the groundwork for the second world war in
Versailles.
The eradication of accountability is going to come back to haunt us for decades to
come.
Last time I looked more than half the US population is female and President is elected, so
how is that a sign of the patriarchy?
the vast majority of corporate management is male
Studies have shown that men are more willing to put career ahead of family in an effort to
move up the ranks. What is stopping women from doing the same thing?
women are paid less for equal work
This has been debunked in numerous studies. Women are not paid less for equal work but are
paid less in general precisely because they don't do equal work and because during salary
negotiations at hiring time they are, on average, less forceful in demanding a higher
starting salary.
These reports claiming otherwise are looking solely at titles - oh Jane the Jr. Java
Developer makes less than Joe the Jr. Java Developer, obviously the company is paying women
less.
Let's not consider, however, that Jane only works 9-4 so she can be home with her kids,
won't pull weekend duties or be on call late night, whereas Joe is in at 7, leaves at 6,
works on weekends to meet deadlines and carries a pager 1 week out of 4. Also, let's not
consider that when being hired Joe negotiated up from the offered $68k start to a starting
salary of $75k as a base and Jane simply accepted the offered $68k.
Both were given the exact same opportunities, but Joe works harder, more hours and was
willing to negotiate a hgher starting wage.
But let's not let facts get in the way of a good attack narrative shall we?
they cannot be priests
Yes they can in many denominations, maybe not yours but others.
huge percentages of them have been raped
huge is an overstatement, studies show it around 20%. Also if you look at the statistics [wikipedia.org]
not all rapes are against women and not all rapes of women are by men.
If you approach any authority as a man and claim you were raped, not only will they likely
laugh in your face, but probably harass you as well. Women are afraid of not being believed.
Who really cares which gender is raped more often, is it too much to ask that the claims be
taken seriously regardless of gender?
If you want a female president, try nominating a decent female candidate. That criminal
narcissist the Democrats came up with last time couldn't even beat Trump, for fuck's
sake.
"... I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden hand ..."
"... It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized ..."
"... Back then Allyssa Milano and others were telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the allegation ..."
I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden
hand – same for those horrible pussy hats they came out with after Trump was elected.
It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized and ready to go when Kavanaugh was nominated (and
I'm not a fan–he's connected to Bush and the Patriot Act). They brought out Dr. Chrissy
Fraud and Julie Swetnick (who seemed quite mentally unstable with her accusations that
Kavanaugh was connected to gang rape parties).
Back then Allyssa Milano and others were
telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those
same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to
have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the
allegations.
And, of course, such accusations were barely mentioned in the MSM.
Doug Casey : The PC types say there are supposed to be 30 or 40 or 50 different genders --
it's a fluid number. It shows that wide swathes of the country no longer have a grip on actual
physical, scientific reality. That's more than a sign of decline; it's a sign of mass
psychosis.
There's no question that some males are wired to act like females and some females are wired
to act like males. It's certainly a psychological aberration but probably has some basis in
biology.
The problem is when these people politicize their psychological peculiarities, try to turn
it into law, and force the rest of the society to grant them specially protected status.
Thousands of people every year go to doctors to have themselves mutilated so that they can
become something else. Today they can often get the government or insurers to pay for it.
If you want to self-mutilate, that's fine; that's your business even if it's insane. To make
other people pay for it is criminal. But it's now accepted as normal by most of society.
The acceptance of politically correct values -- "diversity," "inclusiveness" -- trigger
warnings, safe spaces, gender fluidity, multiculturalism, and a whole suite of similar things
that show how degraded society has become. Adversaries of Western civilization like the
Mohammedan world and the Chinese justifiably see it as weak, even contemptible.
As with Rome, collapse really comes from internal rot.
Look at who people are voting for. It's not that Americans elected Obama once -- a mob can
be swayed easily enough into making a mistake -- but they reelected him. It's not that New
Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio once, but they reelected him by a landslide. All of the
Democratic candidates out there are saying things that are actually clinically insane and are
being applauded.
International Man : In fact, in the recent Democratic debate, candidate Julián
Castro even mentioned giving government-funded abortions to transgender women -- biological
men. It received one of the loudest bouts of applause from the audience.
That's not to mention that two other candidates spoke in broken Spanish when responding to
the moderator's questions.
A while back we were discussing the merits of a liberal arts education and the sad state of
our current education system. As part of that discussion, I looked at the current curriculum of
my old prep school to see if it changed much from when I was there. To my surprise and joy, it
changed very little. Students are still required to take four years of theology good Jesuit
theology. I was struck by the entry for the current theology department at Fairfield Prep and
now present it below.
In light of the current discussion about the rise of the new bolsheviki in the Democratic
Party, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the Ignatian approach to Roman Catholicism. I'm
pretty sure many of you will consider the black robes to be quite red. I, on the other hand,
find the teachings and example of Saint Ignatius of Loyola to be far more profound and worthy
of emulation than anything Marx or Lenin ever dreamed of.
-- -- -- -- -- --
What is theology? Fundamentally, it's about conversation.
The Greek word Theós (God) combined with logos (word, or reason) describes what
happens in theology classes at Fairfield Prep. Talking about God, discovering God in the person
of Jesus Christ, asking questions, having discussions and debates, and exploring the truths of
other world religions are some of the many things that happen in theology. Through exegetical
analysis of Scripture, learning the philosophies of the Saints (in particular, St. Ignatius of
Loyola), contemplation, and reflection, theology students at Fairfield Prep are drawn to a more
intimate experience of the Divine in their own lives.
In the classroom, students are exposed to the teachings of Christ regarding the Gospel
imperative – the care of the poor. Theology students are inspired to work for equality
and social justice in their local and global communities.
In the spirit of Christ, through Ignatian practices, students are encouraged to grow
spiritually and religiously by orienting themselves towards others. Practically speaking,
students are called to "Find God in All Things." By recognizing the presence of the Divine
within others and the universe we live in, students may be inspired to develop a deeper
appreciation and love for Creation – in particular, care for our environment.
Morality, ethics, philosophy, history, science – they are all present within
discussions of theology. Regardless of faith background (or lack thereof) all students are
encouraged to express their beliefs and share their life experiences in their own ways. In
theology, we are constantly working towards discovering Truth in our lives. Through science,
history, literature, Scripture, and the Sacraments, we understand that God can be found in all
things and in all ways here at Fairfield Prep. Join us as we continue the discussions, the
questions, the reflections, and the actions that will make this world a more loving place for
all.
- Mr. Corey J. Milazzo
Chair of the Theology Department
-- -- -- -- -- --
It's still there, the call to find God in all things and to be a man for others. I graduated
a few years before Father Pedro Arrupe presented his dissertation and made his presentation
which became known as his "Men for Others" thesis. But his ideas already ran through the halls
and faculty of Fairfield Prep by the end of the 60s. Community service was an integral part of
the curriculum back then as were frequent retreats based on the Ignatian spiritual exercises.
They still are. The Jesuits molded us into men for others, social justice warriors, but with a
keen sense of self-examination (the examen). When we graduated in the rose garden of Bellarmine
Hall under a beautiful June sun, we were charged with the familiar Jesuit call "ite inflammate
omnia" (go forth and set the world on fire).
That phrase in itself is provocative. It goes back to Saint Ignatius of Loyola himself. It
may go back much further, back to Saint Catherine of Siena. One of her most repeated quotes is
"Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire." Setting the world on fire must
have a different meaning back then. It sounds down right revolutionary these days.
In more recent times, Jesuits participated in the development of liberation theology, a
blending of the Church's professed preference for the poor and Marxism that is unsettling to
many both in and outside the Church. This expression of strident social justice was never
supported by the Vatican, especially when liberation theologists aligned themselves with armed
Marxist revolutions. Even Pope Francis was not a fan although as Father Bergoglio he said,
"The option for the poor comes from the first centuries of Christianity. It's the
Gospel itself. If you were to read one of the sermons of the first fathers of the Church,
from the second or third centuries, about how you should treat the poor, you'd say it was
Maoist or Trotskyist. The Church has always had the honor of this preferential option for the
poor."
Pope Francis seeks reconciliation with rather than expulsion of the liberation
theologists. This doesn't surprise me considering the Jesuits' firmly held faith in the primacy
of conscience, the belief that an informed conscience is the ultimate and final authority on
what is morally permissible, and it is the obligation of the individual to follow their
conscience even if it contradicts or acts against Church teaching. I believe that, but I also
believe the liberation theologists could benefit from a more rigorous examen to reach a higher
sense of discernment and a truly informed conscience.
I think the 1986 film "The Mission" captured some of these ideas and struggles very well with
the interplay of Father Gabriel, Roderigo Mendoza and both the secular and religious authorities
of that time. As a product of a Jesuit and Special Forces education, this film resonated with
me.
"... I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it. I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump. ..."
"... On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign ..."
"... And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself. And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite! ..."
"... Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared to face up to company executives. ..."
"... However, the right wing have very skilfully redirected the anger that SHOULD be directed at what Naomi cleverly calls the "Davos class" onto a very small "immigration" issue that we have in the UK today. ..."
"... It is not going to happen. The holier than thou, supremacist arrogance of the illiberal class, means they can never admit they were wrong. ..."
"... It's all about jobs, really, isn't it? There is a natural fear of 'the other', but if times are good and jobs (proper jobs, not ZHC) are plentiful, it feels less important. On the face of it, it seems odd that the most fear of immigration is in places where there isn't much immigration, but they're often places where there isn't much work either. ..."
"... Rights are important, but identity politics contain too much whimsy and focus on the self. ..."
"... Yes, but they're politically and economically cheap, don't require much thought, and you get to hang out with pop-stars. ..."
That ship has sailed. Bernie was the opportunity and it wasn't grasped. The moment for a 'left' alternative has been lost
for a long time. The whole globalised liberal paradigm - allied to the metropolitan elite's obsession with identity politics
at the expense of bottom-line issues - has been broken up by people who now realise centre-left politicians (Clinton/Obama)
have presided over whole communities being gutted in the name of 'free' trade (for 'free' trade read labour arbitrage). I felt
it in my bones that Trump would be elected - 55% of US households are worse off than they were in 2000, how on earth could anyone
possibly think that that would result or a vote for the status quo.
I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it.
I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.
On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded interests of Wall Street
and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order
to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.
I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly recreating an aggressive
Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for the US racist colonial assumption that the world and
its resources belongs to it in its sense of itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage
that belongs to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.
And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself. And to go beyond that, and
bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever
for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!
Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes how Trump went into an American
car factory and told the executives of that company that if they relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars
coming into America. Not all was misogyny in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat
bureaucratic machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared to face up
to company executives.
What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable contempt for 10s of
millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those
43 years.
What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated by Republican/Democrat
bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?
What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one of the family? A president
whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators in the Arab Spring?
A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need all the scented oils of Arabia.
Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.
Great article. I think there needs to be a lot of soul searching in certain sections of the media and amongst the left wing
political parties too. They don't have the correct approach to a rapidly changing ground swell of opinion. They are fast becoming
out of touch - leaving a huge void for more conservative rhetoric (euphemism) to take over.
The failure to tackle immigration
concerns across the west is the greatest example of comfy left wing elites being so far away from general consensus imo. The
assumption that if you are concerned about immigration then you are a racist, xenophobic half wit appears rife amongst elites
and the highly educated.
I agree that this is a great article. And I agree that there is a coming migration crisis that we need to be very worried
about, as the refugees from the Middle East try desperately for a better life away from conflict zones and poverty. However,
the right wing have very skilfully redirected the anger that SHOULD be directed at what Naomi cleverly calls the "Davos class"
onto a very small "immigration" issue that we have in the UK today.
The evidence for this is that in the EU referendum, the
areas that were most strongly Leave were generally speaking those with few or no immigrants. I campaigned for Remain here in
Stockport where there are very few immigrants and I also campaign regularly against privatisation in the NHS and over and over
again, I am told that immigrants are the problem in an area which has virtually none. I don't think that people are concerned
about immigration are half wits, but I think they've been manipulated.
"Fear the stranger" is an evolutionary response buried
deep in our brains that we need to control with rationality and it's such an easy button for the right wing to push. I grew
up in Northern Ireland so I saw this at first hand. My grandfather was a highly intelligent technocrat, but he was also an Orangeman.
He did not seem able to understand that the Catholics he knew and were his friends were the same "them" that he demonised. All
progressive people need now to find a way, as Naomi's article says, to repoint this anger to where it belongs. Sorry if this
makes me a comfy left wing elite!
It is not going to happen. The holier than thou, supremacist arrogance of the illiberal class, means they can never admit
they were wrong. Look at the past year here ATL and then BTL. Witness the absolute, unchanging and frankly extreme editorial
line, in the face of massive discourse and well argued opposition BTL. Even now there are no alarm bells ringing in the back
of their minds, they are right and everyone else is wrong. No attempt to understand, such is their unwavering belief in the
echo chamber. You will only find an attempted programme of re-education in these pages. They will be still be doing it as Europe
falls into the hands of the far-right.
I campaigned for Remain here in Stockport where there are very few immigrants and I also campaign regularly against privatisation
in the NHS and over and over again, I am told that immigrants are the problem in an area which has virtually none. I don't
think that people are concerned about immigration are half wits, but I think they've been manipulated. "Fear the stranger"
is an evolutionary response buried deep in our brains that we need to control with rationality and it's such an easy button
for the right wing to push.
It's all about jobs, really, isn't it? There is a natural fear of 'the other', but if times are good and jobs (proper jobs,
not ZHC) are plentiful, it feels less important. On the face of it, it seems odd that the most fear of immigration is in places
where there isn't much immigration, but they're often places where there isn't much work either.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation,
privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They
have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future
for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
Yes. But, in the meantime, the system has become so right-wing that it only permits a right-wing outburst - a Social-Democratic
one is instantly discredited by the totalitarian media outlets.
There is no way to articulate an effective response to this attack within the system.
This article is spot on except that both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren jumped on the Clinton neoliberal train for reasons
of political expediency. From now on, anything either of them say should be critically examined before being supported.
In order to justify the unjustifiable (a corporate elite exploiting the world as their own
private estate), they constructed an artificial equivalence to make it seem that their
self-interested economic system was part and parcel of a package of 'democracy',
'multi-racial tolerance', 'LGBT tolerance' etc, so that people would be fooled into thinking
that rejecting the economics meant rejecting all the other things too.
George Soros' "Open
Society Foundation'" is a key offender here. The false consciousness thus engendered does
indeed set the scene for fascism, but a genuine left opposition can and needs to be built and
we can only hope that we can succeed in so doing.
"... Kamala Harris is multi-cultural, East Indian and Jamaican, globalist educated in the USA and Canada. To be elected and earn rewards she identifies herself as an African-American. ..."
Kamala
Harris's Hillaryesque tweet re Trump meeting Kim at DMZ:
"This President should take the North Korean nuclear threat and its crimes against
humanity seriously. This is not a photo-op. Our security and our values are at stake."
Comments on the thread are telling, and she's not fooling anyone.
Thank goodness that there is one place where Globalism, Boeing, and Kamala Harris can be
discussed. From the bottom, looking up, they are intertwined. Corporate media strictly
ignores the restoration of the robber baron aristocracy, the supremacy of trade treaties, the
endless wars for profit, the free flow of capital, and corrupted governments. The sole
purpose is to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else.
There are many tell-tale signs that this is an apt description of the world. With
deregulation and outsourcing, there is no incentive to design and build safe airplanes. That
costs money. Two 737 Max(s) crash killing 346. Workplaces are toxic. The life expectancy in
the UK and USA is declining. The US dollar is used as a military weapon. Monopolies buy up
innovation. Corporate law breaking is punished by fines which are added to the cost of doing
business. There is no jail time for chief executives. The cost of storm damage is increasing.
Families are migrating to survive. Nationalist and globalist oligarchs are fighting over the
spoils. Last week the global economy was 10 minutes away from collapse by an American air
attack on Iran.
Kamala Harris is multi-cultural, East Indian and Jamaican, globalist educated in the
USA and Canada. To be elected and earn rewards she identifies herself as an
African-American. Neo-Populism and France's Yellow Vests are the direct response to
global capitalism that is supported by Corporate Democrats, New Labour Party, and Emmanuel
Macron. The rise of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in response is no coincidence.
especially read this by Helen Hanna in the comments section:
kamala looked aside while wells fargo bank established 3 million fraudulent accounts while
she was attorney general of california. she did nothing to punish them. she might as well be
wearing a hillary mask. as someone who lived in the bay area for 31 years, i remember her on
the 'matier and ross' interview program--her performance was juvenile and silly--- and i
remember her being willing to join the parade of willie brown's cocaine addicted mistresses,.
as number 21 and as a woman of color, she was a relief---not white, not skanky, no silver
cocaine spoon around her neck while pretending to eat dinner at chez michel with willie, but
why on earth would you want to join this parade and go out with this sleazy man whose kiton
suits do not improve his image one bit, a politician who offended the san francisco public by
his obnoxious habit of publicly flaunting his many skanky female hangers on, and reveling in
their 'whiteness.' what a bad choice kamala made. remember that pelosi and feinstein wouldn't
let willie brown anywhere near the inauguration podium of barack obama because these women
did not want willie's offensive background to sully obama. willie had had an illegitimate
child while 'serving as' mayor of san francisco, a city of 500 churches, mostly catholic. the
catholic church continued to retain him in the role --'of counsel.' that was astounding to
me, absolutely astounding.... willie also laundered drug money in a sutter street garage with
his haberdasher, wilkes bashford, but dianne feinstein prevented him from being jailed. i can
just see the sisterhood at temple emanuel where dianne feinstein worships--i can just see
them admonishing her for even suggesting one of serial adulterer willie's former mistresses
be the first woman president....is that why senator feinstein is keeping such a low profile
lately? what i don't understand is why pelosi and feinstein keep bringing us these
puppet-like women----hillary will always be bill's puppet and kamala will be willie's puppet.
you cannot possibly choose two more sleazy, obnoxious men to be your superior.
Those emotions erupted in the Thursday debate when Kamala Harris took on Biden for his earlier
remarks about the old days of the Senate when he could work collaboratively with Southern
segregationists such as Alabama's James Eastland. Harris said it was "very hurtful" to hear
Biden "talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputation and
career on the segregation of race in this country." She scored Biden also for working with such
senators in opposition to busing for racial balance in schools during the 1970s.
"Do you agree today, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America
then? Do you agree?" she asked with considerable emotion in her voice. She added it was a
personal matter with her given that she had benefited from busing policies as a young girl.
Biden retorted: "A mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise
racists." He added that he never opposed busing as a local policy arrived at through local
politics, but didn't think it should be imposed by the federal government. "That's what I
opposed," he said.
The exchange accentuated the extent to which racial issues are gaining intensity in America
and roiling the nation's politics to a greater extent than in the recent past. Biden's point,
as he sought to explain, was that there was a day when senators of all stripes could work
together on matters of common concern even when they disliked and opposed each other's
fundamental political outlook. That kind of approach could point the way, he implied, to a
greater cooperative spirit in Washington and to breaking the current political deadlock
suffused with such stark animosities. But that merely stirred further animosities, raising
questions about whether today's political rancor in Washington can be easily or soon
ameliorated.
"... a cosmetic surgeon in Baltimore is purportedly offering to lop off women's breasts -- including the breasts of teenage girls -- at a discount, to celebrate Pride month: ..."
"... Discount breast-lopping to celebrate a holiday -- is that not the most American thing ever? And you used to think two-for-one radial tire sales for Washington's Birthday were trashy! Can't you just feel the pride? ..."
"... A "pride month" sale on plastic surgery to mutilate children's breasts is the most "snapshot of America in 2019" story imaginable. ..."
I long thought the sexualization of little girls in beauty pageants had become gross, and until recently there seemed to be
a growing consensus about that. Now the sexualization of little boys dressed as girls is a cause of great celebration. Count me
out. https://t.co/j7nVQkRJEX
Meanwhile, a cosmetic surgeon in Baltimore is purportedly offering to lop off women's breasts -- including the breasts of teenage
girls -- at a discount, to celebrate Pride month:
1. Latest leak from our source in the affirming parents Facebook group: Dr. Beverly Fischer in Baltimore, MD is offering a
$750 discount on double mastectomies if booked during Pride month, according to this mother.
pic.twitter.com/Od9w0TFXPp
Discount breast-lopping to celebrate a holiday -- is that not the most American thing ever? And you used to think two-for-one
radial tire sales for Washington's Birthday were trashy! Can't you just feel the pride?
We are a sick civilization that deserves to be punished.
A "pride month" sale on plastic surgery to mutilate children's breasts is the most "snapshot of America in 2019" story imaginable.
Welcome to the brave new world, where the neoliberal obsession with consumerism (and the reduction of all human experience to
markets) meets prog-left social chaos. What an unholy union.
What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other
regards as an assault on the rights of women.
The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to what America should stand for
in the world.
"American interests and American values are inseparable," Pete Buttigieg told Rachel
Maddow.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute:
"We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and
our values."
Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values?
The mayor is proudly gay and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did
not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago.
In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Gay rights are human
rights," and she approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.
This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He
explained his concept of his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network, "The task I have
is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior."
The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gay rights are in conflict with what
progressives now call human rights.
And the world mirrors the American divide.
There are gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In
Brunei, homosexuality can get you killed.
To many Americans, diversity -- racial, ethnic, cultural, religious -- is our greatest
strength.
Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist
the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century,
like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for
centuries.
Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if
diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value?
Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment -- freedom of speech, religion and the
press.
Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to
Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed.
These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their
own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values
and their values conflict.
What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are,
after all, their countries?
Under our Constitution, many practices are protected - abortion, blasphemy, pornography,
flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs - that other nations regard as symptoms of a
disintegrating society.
When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a "basket of
deplorables" for being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic," she was
conceding that many Trump's supporters detest many progressive values.
True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be the values America champions
abroad?
With secularism's triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common
font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Without an
agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and
irreconcilable.
Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?
"... This book covers our current inability to allow all voices to be heard. Key words like "racism " and "?-phobia" (add your preference) can and do end conversations before they begin ..."
"... Hate speech is now any speech about an idea that you disagree with. As we go down the road of drowning out some speech eventually no speech will be allowed. Finger pointers should think about the future, the future when they will be silenced. It's never wrong to listen to different point of view. That's called learning. ..."
"... A very clear and balanced portrait of the current political landscape where a "minority of one" can be supposedly damaged as a result of being exposed to "offensive" ideas. ..."
"... A well documented journey of the transformation from a time when people had vehement arguments into Orwell-Land where the damage one supposedly "suffers" simply from having to "hear" offensive words, allows this shrieking minority to not only silence those voices, but to destroy the lives of the people who have the gall to utter them. ..."
This book covers our current inability to allow all voices to be heard. Key words like "racism " and "?-phobia" (add your preference)
can and do end conversations before they begin .
Hate speech is now any speech about an idea that you disagree with. As we go
down the road of drowning out some speech eventually no speech will be allowed. Finger pointers should think about the future,
the future when they will be silenced. It's never wrong to listen to different point of view. That's called learning.
I became interested in this book after watching Megyn Kelly's interview with Benson (Google it), where he gave his thoughts
on the SCOTUS decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states. He made a heartfelt and reasoned plea for tolerance and
grace on BOTH sides. He hit it out of the park with this and set himself apart from some of his gay peers who are determined that
tolerance is NOT a two-way street.
We are seeing a vindictive campaign of lawsuits and intimidation against Christian business
people who choose not to provide flowers and cakes for same-sex weddings. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no
law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Thumbing your nose at this core American freedom should alarm us all. Personally,
I'm for traditional marriage and I think the better solution would be to give civil unions the same legal rights and obligations
as marriage, but that's another discussion.
So what about the book? It exceeded my expectations. Ham and Benson are smart and articulate. Their ideas are clearly presented,
supported by hard evidence and they are fair and balanced. The book is a pleasure to read - - unless you are a die-hard Lefty.
In that case, it may anger you, but anger can be the first step to enlightenment.
A very clear and balanced portrait of the current political landscape where a "minority of one" can be supposedly damaged as
a result of being exposed to "offensive" ideas.
A well documented journey of the transformation from a time when people had vehement
arguments into Orwell-Land where the damage one supposedly "suffers" simply from having to "hear" offensive words, allows this
shrieking minority to not only silence those voices, but to destroy the lives of the people who have the gall to utter them.
The
Left lays claim to being the "party of tolerance", unless you happen to "think outside THEIR box", which, to the Left is INtolerable
and must not only be silenced, but exterminated... A great book!
The brilliant American physicist, Nobel prize winner, Richard Feynham was also descended
from LIthuanian Jews.He had no time for any religion, and refused all aspects of Jewishness.
He was a brilliant mant who contributed much to American Science.
Don't make generalisations based on race.
Every race has demons and devil, and brilliant angels, and all points in between.
Multiculturalism means that you confer political privileges on many an individual whose
illiberal practices run counter to, even undermine, the American political tradition.
Radical leaders across the U.S. quite seriously consider Illegal immigrants as candidates
for the vote -- and for every other financial benefit that comes from the work of American
citizens.
The rights of all able-bodied idle individuals to an income derived from labor not their
own: That, too, is a debate that has arisen in democracy, where the demos rules like a
despot.
But then moral degeneracy is inherent in raw democracy. The best political thinkers,
including America's constitution-makers, warned a long time ago that mass, egalitarian society
would thus degenerate.
What Bernie Sanders prescribes for the country -- unconditional voting -- is but an
extension of "mass franchise," which was feared by the greatest thinkers on Democracy. Prime
Minister George Canning of Britain, for instance.
Canning, whose thought is distilled in Russell Kirk's magnificent exegesis, "The
Conservative Mind," thought that "the franchise should be accorded to persons and classes
insofar as they possess the qualifications for right judgment and are worthy members of their
particular corporations."
By "corporations," Canning (1770-1827) meant something quite different to our contemporary,
community-killing multinationals.
"Corporations," in the nomenclature of the times, meant very plainly in "the spirit of
cooperation, based upon the idea of a neighborhood. [C]ities, parishes, townships, professions,
and trades are all the corporate bodies that constitute the state."
To the extent that an individual citizen is a decent member of these " little
platoons " (Edmund Burke's iridescent term), he may be considered, as Canning saw it, for
political participation.
"If voting becomes a universal and arbitrary right," cautioned Canning, "citizens become
mere political atoms, rather than members of venerable corporations; and in time this anonymous
mass of voters will degenerate into pure democracy," which, in reality is "the enthronement of
demagoguery and mediocrity." ("The Conservative Mind," p. 131.)
That's us. Demagoguery and mediocrity are king in contemporary democracies, where the
organic, enduring, merit-based communities extolled by Canning, no longer exists and are no
longer valued.
This is the point at which America finds itself and against which William Lecky, another
brilliant British political philosopher and politician, argued.
The author of "Democracy and Liberty" (1896) predicted that "the continual degradation of
the suffrage" through "mass franchise" would end in "a new despotism."
Then as today, radical, nascent egalitarians, who championed the universal vote abhorred by
Lecky, attacked "institution after institution," harbored "systematic hostility" toward "owners
of landed property" and private property and insisted that "representative institutions" and
the franchise be extended to all irrespective of "circumstance and character."
The franchise should be granted by whom? You're forgetting the 800 pound gorilla and where he
sits when he enters the room. Franchises and every other grant are granted by those who have
the power to grant them.
Canning's "organic, enduring, merit-based communities" will emerge, in ghastly form, as
the solipsistic constituencies of identity politics. Why do people like Omar laugh at America
and Americans? "Here's a people so stupid as to clasp the adder to its breast. You're
clasping? I'm biting."
Bernie is utopian. Utopians do terrible things if and when they have the power to do them.
But you can't fault him for insincerity.
The younger Tsarnaev who hid out near my home town was doing what his older brother told
him to do assuming that the bombing wasn't a false flag. Not an excuse. Only to say the kid
had no political convictions and probably wouldn't bother to vote if he could.
Sanders is just a wine and cheese socialist, totally an armchair theorist. He has no
background in actually doing anything besides being involved in politics which has provided a
living for him. It's doubtful he could run a couple of Walmarts. This is his last go-around
and he's out to see how much in contributions he can garner. Pushing the edge, theoretically
of course, keeps him in the conversation. He's worthless but such is the state of politics
where characters like him, Biden, and the rest of the Dem lineup could be taken seriously.
Just one big clown show.
@Jim
Bob Lassiter Yes, but, his wife could steal money from a collapsing college to serve her
daughter. Corruption must run in the family as Bernie has been conspicuously silent on this
subject. He must feel the Burn!
Neuroticism is characterized by "feeling negative feelings strongly," with the opposite of
Neuroticism being "Emotional Stability." Such "Negative Feelings" include sadness, anger and
jealousy. But females score particularly strongly on "anxiety" -- possibly because, in
prehistory, the children of anxious, protective mothers were less likely to get seriously
injured. But the key point is that the stereotype is correct.
And people are also correct to think that women -- that is, those who, on average, score
higher in Neuroticism -- will be less able to cope in the brutal world of power-politics.
Successful politicians -- the ones who get into their country's legislature but don't make
it to the very top -- score significantly lower than the general public in Neuroticism,
according to research published in the leading psychology journal Personality and Individual
Differences . [ The personalities of
politicians: A big five survey of American legislators , by Richard Hanania ,
2017]
And this research reveals something very interesting indeed. These "successful politicians,"
while being more emotionally stable than most voters, score higher in the personality
traits Extraversion ("feeling positive feelings strongly"), Conscientiousness ("rule-following
and impulse control") and Agreeableness ("altruism and empathy").
But this does not tend to be true of those who reach the very top of politics -- and
especially not of those who are perceived as great, world-changing statesmen. They tend to be
highly intelligent but above average on quite the opposite personality traits –
psychopathology and Narcissism [ Creativity and psychopathology , by F. Post British
Journal of Psychiatry, 1994]. However, high Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and
Extraversion are true of successful politicians in general.
In much the same way, run-of-the-mill scientists are above average in Agreeableness and
Conscientiousness but genius
scientists combine being relatively low in these traits with stratospheric
intelligence. This gives them creativity, drive and fearless to be original. [ At Our Wits'
End , by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie, 2018, Ch. 6]
This is important, because these are typically female traits: women score higher than
men in Agreeableness, Consciousness and Extraversion. This means that, in general, we would
expect the relatively few females who do reach high political office to be fairly atypical
women: low in mental instability and certainly moderately low in altruism, empathy or both --
think
Margaret Thatcher , who according to Keith Patching in his 2006 book Leadership,
Character and Strategy, was organizing her impending Bar Finals from her hospital bed
having just had twins; or even Theresa May. Neither of these British Prime Ministers have (or
had) neither of whom have particularly "feminine" personalities, though they may reflect (or
have reflected) very pronounced Conscientiousness, a trait associated with social conservatism.
[
Resolving the "Conscientiousness Paradox" , by Scott A. McGreal, Psychology
Today , July 27, 2015]
But, sometimes, a female politician's typically anxiety will apparently be " compensated " for
i.e. overwhelmed by her having massively high Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. This likely
occurred in the case of Jacinda Ardern, who suffers from
intense anxiety to the point of having being hospitalized.
This will become a problem in a time of crisis when, as happened with Ardern, such a
politician will become over-emotional. This, combined with very high empathy, would seem to
partly explain Ardern's self-identification with New Zealand's Muslims to the extent of donning
a head scarf and breaking down in public.
But it also explains why females, on average, tend to be more left-wing than males and more
open to refugees. They feel empathy and even sadness for the plight of the refugees more
strongly than do men [ Young
women are more left wing than men, study reveals, by Rosalind Shorrocks, The
Conversation, May 3, 2018
This means that there will be a tendency for females to push politics Leftwards and make it
more about empathy and other such "feelings." It also means that, in a serious crisis, they may
well even empathize with the enemy.
In that gay men are generally feminized males, this problem help would to explain why people
are skeptical of the suitability of homosexual men for supposedly "masculine" professions (such
as politics) [ The
extreme male brain theory of autism, by Simon Baron-Cohen, Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 2002], sometimes including political office. [ The Hidden Psychology
of Voting, by Zaria Gorvett, BBC News , May 6, 2015]
What about Science and Technology? Are they suited for that? Maybe science could use a little
more wisdom and conscientiousness.
J Robert Oppenheimer, the genius Physics professor, was known to be "temperamental" and
not suited for high stress assignment. So, along with several other genius's, some who came
over from Germany, he presided over the making of the A-bomb. Hallelujah just kidding.
There's an excellent book that covers J Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the A-bomb
called "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer".
The guy was totally volatile and emotionally unstable. While in school he left a knife in an
apple on his teacher's desk that he did not like.
After the bomb was dropped on JAPAN, in a documentary much later, he is shown with tears
in his eyes quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds".
A couple decades or so later there were interviews of some of these guys who were part of
the project and they were crying. They had the GENIUS to build such a monstrosity, but seemed
to have failed to understand the impact it would make on the world; breaking down in tears
when talking about it. They had no clue or ability of Foreknowledge. What would have happened
if more women were on the team? Would we all be annihilated by now? Or maybe no a-bomb would
have been made? Who knows .
Interesting. And I appreciate the citations to sources. But I find that interpretation of
psychiatric traits is a bit like reading tea leaves: there is a temptation to cherry-pick
one's preferred quotes and conclusions. For me, this article would have been stronger if it
had followed a recognized authority's path through the Big Five personality traits.
It seems rather unfair to pick a moron like Jacinda Ardern to represent all female
politicians. And even though when it comes to foreign policy, I'll take a Tulsi Gabbard over
any male politician like Rubio, Graham, Schumer, Pence, Trump, Pompeo, Bolton any day, I will
have to say, in general, you're right, the crop of female politicians we've seen today do not
inspire confidence in women as politicians, not just in the US but Merkel, May yikes. But
women had been good heads of states in the past, like Margaret Thatcher and Queen Victoria.
But they were the exceptions rather than the rule.
Also agree that gays make for bad politicians. Even though their moral degeneracy and
drama queen antics make politics look like a natural fit, their extreme narcissism means they
will always get sidetracked and can't stay focused. The only thing any gay man cares about is
his gayness. Plus no one outside the western world will ever give them an ounce of respect.
Picture Buttplug showing up in a muslim country as POTUS, with his husband! Either they'll
get stoned to death which will get us into war or the US will be the laughing stock of the
world. And then of course he'd have to go bomb some country just to prove his manhood,
getting us into more unnecessary wars. No gays for politics, ever.
There has been a very successful effort to paint Oppenheimer as a secular saint. But
Princeton's John Archibald Wheeler stated that he never trusted Oppenheimer. So what? Because
JAW was notorious for otherwise saying nice things about almost everyone else, especially his
academic rivals. Also JAW happily and productively worked on the US H-bomb project which was
embargoed by Oppenheimer and his many disciples.
I agree with the point made above, that, in our nuclear age, behavior in a crisis is the most
important personality trait. I think that men's crisis-calmness can suffer from macho/ego,
and with women, from anxiety and panic. Democratic candidate Amy K reportedly throws things
when angry, and to me, this is disqualifying. Assuming no nuclear destruction, the analysis
is this: We have devolved into a gigantic banana republic/soft dictatorship; whose
personality constellation is best suited to politics in a banana republic?
No female leader of any country, ever, has been particularly good, except one.
And that one was only because she was fortunate enough to be the PM of the UK at the same
time as Ronald Reagan was President of the US. He was handholding every single decision of
hers. Reagan was effectively running two countries (the #1 and #4 largest GDPs in the world
at that time). At least she was smart enough to let him tell her exactly what to do.
Given this dataset, no, women are not suitable for very high political office.
Is Ardern still wearing that hijab in order to cynically manipulate her insipid voters?
Anyway
I have come to realize that women, on the whole, tend to be poorly suited to many
traditionally male-doninated activities. Politics, for sure. Very few good, dependable female
politicians come to mind. But the list at my immediate recall that are emotional, vapid,
destructive slobs -- Angela Merkel, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Eva Perón,
Michelle Bachelet, Isabel Allende Bussi, Annie Lööf, Anne Hidalgo, Ursula von der
Leyen, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Rashida Tlaïb, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, et al --
seems practically limitless. Not only is the fairer sex not adept at political leadership,
but they are ill-suited to even vote rationally. The weakness of Anglo-American men's resolve
against the suffragettes was the beginning of the end.
Preeminent excellence seems to elude the grasp of women in a number of other careers. For
whatever reason, there are few women writers of prose fiction that can equal the heights men
have reached in that field. This despite the fact that the contemporary literary industry is
overwhelmingly dominated by women. True, there are the rare instances of female literary
transcendence in the guise of a Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, Okamoto Kanoko, Murasaki
Shikibu, Unica Zürn, and so on. But they tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
(On the other hand, women seem naturally gifted at lyric expression, with great female poets
existing since at least Sappho.)
Orchestral conducting, too, is a field wherein women cannot produce an equal or better of,
say, a Furtwängler, Mengelberg, or Beecham. There are plenty of them around today -- all
lousy. (To be fair, though, nearly all living conductors today -- male or female --
are lousy.)
I'm a university degree holding woman, of the traditional type with XX chromosomes, and since
I was a teen some forty years ago, I've thought that men are better suited for politics. Not
that a few women can't do it successfully (Thatcher and British Queens for examples) but that
it's a profession far more suited to men, being as many are more naturally mentally strong,
steady and rational, and not as given to bursts of emotion and utopian fancies as women can
often be. In fact, I'd be delighted if only U.S. born citizen male property owners over the
age of 25 were allowed to vote. How's that for being a Dissident?
' doesn't this prove I was wrong about Trump and his movement all along?
I was very wrong to discount the role of character, personality, and intelligence: Trump
is simply not fit to be President '
Raimondo's reaction to Dump's incredible imbecility re the Syria 'chemical attacks
'
' A child could see through the fake "chemical attack" supposedly launched by Bashar
al-Assad just as his troops defeated the jihadists and Trump said he wanted out of Syria
'
Yes anyone watching that white helmets footage is immediately cringing for those poor kids
being abused as props in a macabre stage play
"... Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm. ..."
"... Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough . Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples. ..."
"... Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic. He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act. ..."
"... One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked inside. ..."
In March 2017, young people armed with baseball
bats prowled the parking lots of Evergreen State College. They hoped to find Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, and presumably
bash his brains in. Bret had caught the ire of the student body after he refused to participate in an unofficial "Day of Absence,"
in which white students and faculty were told to stay home, away from the campus, while teachers and students of color attended as
they normally would. In prior years, people of color voluntarily absented themselves to highlight their presence and importance on
campus. In 2017, the event's organizers decided to flip the event, and white people were pressured to stay away from the school.
In a letter to the school's administration, Bret explained why he opposed
the idea:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order
to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first
is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force,
and an act of oppression in and of itself
On a college campus, one's right to speak -- or to be -- must never be based on skin color.
When word of Professor Weinstein's objection got out, enraged student activists began a hostile takeover of the school, and the
college president ordered the campus police force not to intervene. Professor Weinstein was told, in essence, that nobody would protect
him from young people with baseball bats. The police warned Professor Weinstein that their hands were tied and that he should stay
off campus for his own safety.
Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal
with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he
blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black
strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically
earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm.
And its core, the story of Bret Weinstein and Evergreen State College is about a college's descent into total chaos after someone
presented mild resistance to a political demonstration.
Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough
. Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples.
Before discussing what the Wilfrid Laurier University did to a woman named Lindsay Shepherd, it's important to know about Jordan
Peterson.
Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic.
He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity
to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Dr. Peterson objected to the bill because it set a new precedent -- requiring citizens to use certain pronouns to address people
with non-traditional gender identities. Dr. Peterson calls transexual
people by whatever gender they project , as long as he feels like they're asking him to do so in good faith, but he's wary of
people playing power games with him, and he saw something dangerous about the government mandating which words he must use. He believed
that under C-16, misgendering a person could be classified as hate speech, even it was just an accident.
Having spent much of his life considering the dangers that exist at the furthest ends of the political spectrum -- Nazi Germany
on the far right, the Soviet Union on the far left -- Dr. Peterson has developed a tendency to see things in apocalyptic terms.
In bill C-16, he saw what he considered the seeds of a serious threat to the freedom of expression -- a list of government-approved
words -- and decided it was a hill worth dying on.
He's controversial, verbose, discursive, sometimes grouchy, and almost incapable of speaking the language of television sound-bites.
He makes it easy for critics to attack and misrepresent him -- and ever since he took a stance against C-16, he's been subjected
to student protests and journalistic hit-pieces.
One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown
him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked
inside.
Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with his opinions, Dr. Peterson should have the right to express them without other
people suggesting that he be murdered with fire. Furthermore, people should be able to talk about what he says.
Enter the case of Lindsay Shepherd.
While working as a teacher's aid at Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd showed students two clips from public access
television featuring Jordan Peterson debating someone over bill C-16. After showing the clips, she asked her students to share their
thoughts.
Days later, the school called her into a meeting with a panel of three superiors. They said that they had gotten a number of complaints
from students. Lindsay asked how many complaints they had received, and was told that the number was confidential.
The panel claimed that she had created a toxic environment by showing the clips and facilitating a discussion without taking a
side against Dr. Peterson's view. They said it was as if she had been completely neutral while showing one of Hitler's speeches.
The panel thought the clip probably violated the Human Rights Code, and they demanded Shepherd to submit all of her future lesson
plans ahead of time so that they could be vetted.
Although one student expressed some concern about the class, the number of formal complaints that the administrators had received
was actually zero.
During their discussion, Lindsay said:
The thing is, can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure that they are insulated away
from this? Is that what the point of this is? Because to me that is against what a university is about.
Lindsay found herself at the mercy of school administrators whose brittle spirits couldn't bear to present students with opinions
that they might have found offensive. She had believed that universities were places where people could explore ideas. On that day,
the panel showed her just how wrong she'd been.
And she caught it all on tape.
Over the past few years, the news has become littered with stories of schools overrun by children while hand-wringing professors
and administrators do everything possible to placate them. Recently, a group called "The Diaspora Coalition"
staged a sit-in at Sarah Lawrence.
Their demands
included, among other things, that they get free fabric-softener. The origin of their grievance was an
op-ed published in the
New York Times about the imbalance between left-leaning and right-leaning school administrators.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business,
sums the phenomenon up tidily :
You get kids who are much more anxious and fragile, much more depressed, coming onto campus at a time of much greater political
activism -- and now these grievance studies ideas about, 'America's a matrix of oppression,' and, 'look at the world in terms
of good versus evil.' it's much more appealing to them, and it's that minority of students, they're the ones who are initiating
a lot of the movements
Every day, or at least every week, I get an email from a professor saying, 'you know, I used a metaphor
in class and somebody reported me.' and once this happens to you, you pull back. You change your teaching style
What we're seeing
on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors. And once we can't trust each other, we can't do
our job.
We can't risk being provocative, raising uncomfortable ideas. We have to play it safe, and then everybody suffers.
To understate it, President Donald Trump is a deeply troubling human being. However, he may have done a good thing on Thursday,
March 21st, when he signed an
executive order that requires public schools to "foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse
debate."
Schools that don't comply may lose government-funded research grants.
In theory, the order will compel colleges to prevent scenes like those at Evergreen State and Sarah Lawrence. Schools will have
serious financial incentives to protect their professors from mobs of unruly children. If all goes well, students will learn to engage
with controversial opinions without resorting to baseball bats or demanding Snuggle Plus fabric softener.
One would be remiss if they didn't consider the hidden or unintended consequences of the new policy, though. The executive order
is vague, and it gives no criteria for judging whether an institution complies with its requirements. Instead, the specific implementation
is left for structures lower on the hierarchy to decide. Hopefully, nobody decides that Young Earth theories must be taught alongside
evolution.
The policy could very well become a tool by which the dominant political party punishes schools that lean in the opposite direction.
Since there is a 12-to-1 imbalance between liberals and conservative college administrators right now, it would be a Republican administration
punishing liberal colleges.
This is hardly a perfect solution -- but at least it's an effort to address the problem. The stability of our society depends
on an endless balancing act between the left and the right. The political landscape of academia has tilted too far left, and it's
clearly becoming insular and unstable. Now it's necessary to push things back toward the center.
Hopefully, this recent executive order does more good than harm.
Postscript
After the events at Evergreen State College, the school was forced to settle with Bret Weinstein and his wife, who was also a
professor there. The college paid the couple $500,000. Enrollment at the college is said to have dropped "catastrophically."
After the events at Wilfrid Laurier University, the school released several letters of apology. It is being sued for millions
of dollars by Lindsay Shepherd and Jordan Peterson.
Forty professors endorsed the demands made by the Diaspora Coalition at Sarah Lawrence, and several others endorsed challenging
Samuel Abrams's tenure -- Abrams being the person who wrote the op-ed that appeared in the New York Times.
As the narrative of a 'racist, homophobic
attack' on actor Jussie Smollett in Chicago continues to collapse, politicians and celebrities
who fueled the outrage over the incident are quietly backing away and hoping no one
notices.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation on Thursday mandating that every school in
the state teach students about "the political, economic, and social contributions" of LGBTQ
people and people with disabilities.
The legislation, which will apply
starting in the 2020-21 school year, requires that the boards of education for middle and high
schools ensure that instructional materials, such as text books, include accurate portrayals of
the contributions made by LGBTQ people and those with disabilities.
The University of Michigan Has At Least 82 Full-Time Diversity Officers at a Total Annual
Payroll Cost of $10.6M.
so applying some crude arithmetic, 8 cost $1M meaning they are paid upward of 100k apiece?
Or if it's differently apportioned the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity makes some
unimaginably astronomical salary and the others are in the 60-80k range?
Maybe they are including a travel allowance as part of "payroll"? I know much of what they
do is recruitment since back in the 90s my then-bf was one of only two -- count 'em, TWO --
Blacks in the entire graduate physical sciences division at the University of Chicago. He was
in Computer Science (machine learning) and the other was in Chemistry. They would send him
back to Atlanta where he gone to school at Morehouse and the University of GA.
"... Well, if the objective of having many women on board is to keep all the occupants occupied full-time on a one-to-one basis instead of letting them get busy at shooting at people, then I am all for that, they should adopt it for the whole of NATO, especially the US. ..."
"... Sounds like a good Scandinavian way of addressing NATO policy deficiencies. But when through your distraction you end up crashing into oil tankers, just don't blame it on the Russians or the Chinese. ..."
From the article this gem: "It is advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a
natural thing and a completely different environment, which I look at as positive,"
Lieutenant Iselin Emilie Jakobsen Ophus said. She is a navigation officer at KNM Helge
Ingstad, according to Defense Forum.
Well, if the objective of having many women on board is to keep all the occupants
occupied full-time on a one-to-one basis instead of letting them get busy at shooting at
people, then I am all for that, they should adopt it for the whole of NATO, especially the
US.
Sounds like a good Scandinavian way of addressing NATO policy deficiencies. But when
through your distraction you end up crashing into oil tankers, just don't blame it on the
Russians or the Chinese.
Also in the article a very nice picture of the frigate (not the one at the top, the one a
little further down the page) which makes for an excellent picture of a George-Soros-frigate.
It should be renamed KNM George Soros. Anyone for an HMS George Soros Aircraft carrier?
"... With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect most Democrat leaders now realize that their attempt to take out Judge Brent Kavanaugh with false charges that he sexually assaulted someone in High School was a disaster. Their heavy handed, Bolshevik tactics backfired and galvanized a broad spectrum of Americans who were sickened by the spectacle of a verbal lynch mob being led by the decrepit Diane Feinstein. ..."
"... that he dated Dr. Ford for six years. He said that she never mentioned being the victim of sexual assault or misconduct. He also stated that Dr. Ford did not mention any fear of close quarters or flying, and that the two traveled together, including on a small propeller plane. also said that he witnessed Dr. Ford, drawing from her background in psychology, help prepare her roommate, Ms. Monica McLean, for a potential polygraph examination when Ms. McLean wasinterviewing for jobs with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office. He stated that Dr. Ford helped Ms. McLean become familiar and less nervous about the exam. ..."
"... No! Let's see her tried for perjury with full discovery I will be glad to be a pro bone consultant on that trial and i have a lot of experience. ..."
"... The Dems COULD have made Kavanaugh's support for torture a principled reason for opposing him. ..."
"... The Dems could've raised all kinds of principled objections to Kavanaugh; but tellingly, they chose not to. They chose to take the low road instead. ..."
"... They are complicit. Especially Feinstein. SHe's AOK with torture and 24-7 surveillance. WHat do you expect from an ardent cannabis prohibitionist? ..."
"... Indeed. That would have been a principle worth highlighting. And the question put forward - "Should a torture supporter serve on the Supreme Court?" But..Dianne Feinstein and Chuckie Schumer were never interested in that. All they were interested in was creating a media spectacle and that's exactly what they did by holding on to Ford's letter for 2 months and unleashing it the day before the vote. ..."
"... Christine Ford, Monica McLean and the others should testify to a grand jury. Isn't perjury what they indicted & convicted Gen. Flynn & George Papadopolous for? ..."
"... Why is it that Christine Ford can get away with blatantly and repeatedly lying to Congress about a federal judge but Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos were dragged through court (no doubt at great expense to them) for so-called minor lies to FBI interrogators? ..."
"... Launching 18 USC 1001 prosecutions like so many torpedoes might look expeditious in the short term but in the long term, it will be bad for both the working agent on the street and for justice in the bigger picture. ..."
"... Ford lied to the senate judiciary committee under oath. In your scheme of things people like Avenatti and his female tools can slander and libel at will in conformations even if they are interviewed by the FBI? OK, then the FBI should interview them under oath. ..."
"... If at least one Democrat is going to be removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee as a result of the midterm election realignment, I nominate 'Spartacus' as the guy. ..."
"... Kavanaugh's real crime was he went after Bill Clinton and now he paid the price for it. It's too bad in Yale they don't teach them how to watch their backs in Washington. ..."
"... Brian Merrick has been revealed as the boyfriend. He is a realtor in Malibu. His letter states: " Despite trying to maintain a long distance relationship, I ended the relationship once I discovered that Dr. Ford was unfaithful while living in Hawaii. After the breakup, I took her off the credit card we shared. But nearly 1 year later, I noticed Dr. Ford had been charging the card and charged about $600 worth of merchandise. When confronted, Dr. Ford said she did not use the card but later admitted the use after I threatened to involve fraud prevention." 'Revealed: The Man Accusing Blasey Ford of Lying About Polygraphs.' The Daily Caller, October 3, 2018. https://dailycaller.com/201... ..."
"... A woman who said that she attended UNC with Dr. Ford, identified a third woman, name blotted out, and stated that the three of them "used to purchase drugs" from a male whose name also has been blotted out. The three of them "regularly attended parties with members of his fraternity." The witness said "that she was present at --a blotted out name of an apartment--"one night in April 1987 when Dr. Ford and --someone again blotted out--"arrived to consume drugs." This witness "said that the Dr. Ford she knew had an active and robust social life in college." (Sept.25) ..."
With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect most Democrat leaders now realize
that their attempt to take out Judge Brent Kavanaugh with false charges that he sexually assaulted someone in High School was a disaster.
Their heavy handed, Bolshevik tactics backfired and galvanized a broad spectrum of Americans who were sickened by the spectacle of
a verbal lynch mob being led by the decrepit Diane Feinstein. The truth about the sex-fraud, Dr. Chrissie Ford, is now exposed
by the voluminous report issued by Senator Grassley's Judiciary Committee staff. Read it
here . (
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2018-11-02%20Kavanaugh%20Report.pdf
). Here are the highlights:
The Committee was informed that Dr. Ford had a fear of flying caused by Justice Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault on her
more than 35 years before. That was a lie and the committee staffers discovered subsequently that Dr. Ford had racked up a ton
of frequent flyer miles. When asked about her fear of flying and about whether she had ever helped anyone prepare for a polygraph
examination, Dr. Ford acknowledged that she flew to the hearing and traveled by plane for work and leisure. Indeed, Dr. Ford listed
on her CV that one of her hobbies includes international surf travel.
The Judiciary staffers interviewed 17 people who had information about Dr. Ford's allegations. No one could corroborate her
claims about Judge Kavanaugh. In fact, two men testified that they had a contact with Dr. Ford as teen-agers that was in line
with the account provided by Dr. Ford except that it was consensual.
A long time boyfriend of Chrissie testified:
that he dated Dr. Ford for six years. He said that she never mentioned being the victim of sexual assault or misconduct. He also
stated that Dr. Ford did not mention any fear of close quarters or flying, and that the two traveled together, including on a small
propeller plane. also said that he witnessed Dr. Ford, drawing from her background in psychology, help prepare her roommate, Ms.
Monica McLean, for a potential polygraph examination when Ms. McLean wasinterviewing for jobs with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's
Office. He stated that Dr. Ford helped Ms. McLean become familiar and less nervous about the exam. The Judiciary Committee report
also details the allegations and findings from others who alleged sexual misconduct by the Judge. It was all a pack of lies. A contrived
hit job intended to destroy the man's reputation and try to cow him into backing away from the nomination. That bullying tactic failed
spectacularly. It ended up rallying a broad swath of the American public, especially women, who understand fairness and justice.
The injustice on display by the Democrats ended up helping the Republicans nail down a bigger majority in the Senate. Look for fewer
Democrat seats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Absolutely agree. With Nadler now openly talking about impeaching Kavanaugh, there is no alternative. The truth must be brought
out. The alternative is to leave him exposed permanently and keep this whole plan viable for use against future nominees. With
RBG approaching retirement this is critical.
Getting to the actual facts would be a great good. But we know that will not happen. The administration and the senate have already
shown their attitude toward professional quality investigation. That appears to be the last thing they want. If they actually
believed any of what they said, they would follow your advice. We will see.
On second thought that is probably an unfair standard. Opening up discovery for a trial would have negative effects even for
a very solid case.
"The administration and the senate have already shown their attitude toward professional quality investigation."
You mean the Mueller "Russia" investigation? That is beyond a joke at this point. Dr. Ford should be charged. She's got $1 million
or more from the go bribe fund me accounts. She should lawyer up. So should Ms. Mclean.
I think the lesson to be learned is that getting all the facts simply cannot be done, which is why we have a statute of limitations,
and why Dr. Ford's accusation should not ever have seen the light of day 30 years after the purported event.
Most liberals seem to think the statute of limitations has to do with the purported offender "living with guilt," but the law
does not acknowledge the "sensation of guilt." The statute is because after a period of time the offense cannot be fairly prosecuted
because witnesses die or move away, memories fade, evidence degrades or disappears, and so forth, and this shoddy exhibition is
proof of the validity of that principle.
I do not see how you can fault Grassley's efforts to get the facts. He bent over backward to accommodate the Democrats lies about
Kavanaugh and the WH authorized the the additional FBI investigation.
The Dems COULD have made Kavanaugh's support for torture a principled reason for opposing him. Then if they lost, which they were
likely going to do anyway, it would have at least been considered fair politics and it would have placed the spotlight on a very
ugly chapter in the country's recent history that needs to be addressed.
Shaming, shunning, bullying, threats of violence, and violence are all now accepted as methods by the left. They are totally consumed
in a political tribalism. Rather than raising the moral standards of the group they are using the most primitive instincts and
you can see this in many of the tweets from the left that use gross sexual imagery to demean their "enemies".
The more I read on group psychology such as Freud, Le Bon, etc. the more concerned I become whether the age of reason, principles,
and science will survive group psychosis given the powerful tools like social media enabling it. Social media is one of the most
dangerous technologies we have developed.
"In order to make a correct judgment upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals
come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive
instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under
the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion
to an ideal.
While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely
prominent.
It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group. Whereas the intellectual capacity
of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as
high above his as it may sink deep below it." - Gustave Le Bon
Indeed. That would have been a principle worth highlighting. And the question put forward - "Should a torture supporter serve
on the Supreme Court?" But..Dianne Feinstein and Chuckie Schumer were never interested in that. All they were interested in was
creating a media spectacle and that's exactly what they did by holding on to Ford's letter for 2 months and unleashing it the
day before the vote.
Christine Ford, Monica McLean and the others should testify to a grand jury. Isn't perjury what they indicted & convicted Gen.
Flynn & George Papadopolous for?
The recent accident that RBG experienced has probably caused both Democrats and Republicans some concern that there may soon be
another Supreme Court seat to fill under a Trump administration.
Why is it that Christine Ford can get away with blatantly and repeatedly lying to Congress about a federal judge but Michael Flynn
and George Papadopoulos were dragged through court (no doubt at great expense to them) for so-called minor lies to FBI interrogators?
Off topic: I'd love to read PT's take on the mid-term election with attention paid to the boxes of suddenly-discovered ballots
in AZ that have put (wouldn't you know!) Democratic Senate candidate Sinema in the lead. And in light of the FL recount, I'd also
be interested in what he has to say about the flagrant disregard for chain of custody of [the infamous] Broward Co. boxes of ballots.
Why is it that ballots discovered post-election day always seem to help Democrats? I don't recall ever reading or hearing about
newly-discovered ballots that benefited Republican candidates.
In my experience lying to the FBI, 18 USC 1001, was used very, very infrequently. It was used as an add on charge in the prosecution
of some of the Watergate subjects and they had been placed under oath. It was used to my knowledge to prosecute an individual
who had made a false accusatory statement in the Ray Donavan investigation in the early 80's, another debacle instigated by Senate
Democrats. Otherwise it was rarely used, and it shouldn't be used in my opinion unless the person has been given a
separate warning
and waiver, or placed under oath.
Once Big Government has opened the floodgates on prosecuting people for lying to the FBI, especially when it becomes obvious that
it is being used selectively, and in isolation in order to hang a charge on somebody in pursuit of manifestly political ends,
cooperation with FBI Agents trying to do their job will, and should, dry up. Who needs to take a chance on some partisan operation,
such as Bob Mueller, parsing their adverbs and adjectives for signs of deceit when the option is to take advantage of your right
to silence.
Launching 18 USC 1001 prosecutions like so many torpedoes might look expeditious in the short term but in the long term, it will
be bad for both the working agent on the street and for justice in the bigger picture.
Ford lied to the senate judiciary committee under oath. In your scheme of things people like Avenatti and his female tools can
slander and libel at will in conformations even if they are interviewed by the FBI? OK, then the FBI should interview them under
oath.
If at least one Democrat is going to be removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee as a result of the midterm election realignment,
I nominate 'Spartacus' as the guy.
Now that there's a new AG in town--one who isn't either cowed, incompetent, or possibly blackmailed--Mrs.Ford may get her just
deserts.
Kavanaugh's real crime was he went after Bill Clinton and now he paid the price for it. It's too bad in Yale they don't teach
them how to watch their backs in Washington.
"The injustice on display by the Democrats ended up helping the Republicans nail down a bigger majority in the Senate. Look
for fewer Democrat seats on the Senate Judiciary Committee."
While this may have held true for the Senate, it didn't in the House.
I agree with you in the sense that many of the Democrat candidates did not take the ultra progressive (socialist?) path. Many
seemed more centrist.
That was the result of state and country Democratic parties.
I think this because I definitely see a difference in the different county Republican parties in my state.
Unfortunately in my state (CO) what happens in Boulder and Denver usually carries. And as we say in CO, Boulder is about 40
square miles surrounded by reality. Denver is becoming a similar alternate reality.
Thus, I am ashamed to say, our current Governor is a person from a quite alternate reality from the one in which I live.
Brian Merrick has been revealed as the boyfriend. He is a realtor in Malibu. His letter states: " Despite trying to maintain a
long distance relationship, I ended the relationship once I discovered that Dr. Ford was unfaithful while living in Hawaii. After
the breakup, I took her off the credit card we shared. But nearly 1 year later, I noticed Dr. Ford had been charging the card
and charged about $600 worth of merchandise. When confronted, Dr. Ford said she did not use the card but later admitted the use
after I threatened to involve fraud prevention."
'Revealed: The Man Accusing Blasey Ford of Lying About Polygraphs.' The Daily Caller, October 3, 2018.
https://dailycaller.com/201...
A male witness "(Sept. 26): stated that when he was a 19-year-old college student, he visited D.C. over spring break and kissed
a girl he believes was Dr. Ford. He said that the kiss happened in the bedroom of a house which was about a 15-to- 20 minute walk
from the Van Ness Metro, that Dr. Ford was wearing a swimsuit under her clothing, and that the kissing ended when a friend jumped
on them as a joke. The witness said that the woman initiated the kissing and that he did not force himself on her. "
A woman who said that she attended UNC with Dr. Ford, identified a third woman, name blotted out, and stated that the three
of them "used to purchase drugs" from a male whose name also has been blotted out. The three of them "regularly attended parties
with members of his fraternity." The witness said "that she was present at --a blotted out name of an apartment--"one night in
April 1987 when Dr. Ford and --someone again blotted out--"arrived to consume drugs." This witness "said that the Dr. Ford she
knew had an active and robust social life in college." (Sept.25)
PT, thanks very much for posting this.
I cannot find any mention of this Judiciary Committee report at the Washington Post web site.
They had a ton of coverage of Ford's allegation before the vote, including a lengthy interview with her current husband.
It says a lot about them that they have, unless I have missed something, ignored this report.
Could the reason they are ignoring it be that they don't want to publicize anything which contradicts the line that "Women tell
the truth"?
A line that they have used to great political effect, in particular in the sinking of the Senate candidacy of Judge Roy Moore
of Alabama.
"... What will the postmortem statue of neoliberalism look like? ..."
"... "You stupid Wap, you just scratched my car. That dirty Mick tripped me when I wasn't looking." ..."
"... That [N-word] SOB is just like them other Jew-boy globalists who are sending our jobs to Chinamen and whatnot. Screw him and all the damned Democrat libtards. ..."
LP: You've recently highlighted that this is a
tricky time for historians and those who want to examine the past, like filmmakers.
Well-intentioned people who want to confront the injustices of history may end up replacing one
set of myths for another. You point out the distortion of history in films like "Selma" which
offer uplifting narratives about black experiences but tend to leave out or alter meaningful
facts, such as the ways in which blacks and whites have worked together. This is ostensibly
done to avoid a "white savior" narrative but you indicate that it may serve to support other
ideas that are also troubling.
AR: Exactly, and in ways that are completely compatible with neoliberalism as a style of
contemporary governance. It boils down to the extent to which the notion that group disparities
have come to exhaust the ways that people think and talk about inequality and injustice in
America now.
It's entirely possible to resolve disparities without challenging the fundamental structures
that reproduce inequalities more broadly. As my friend Walter Benn Michaels and I have been
saying for at least a decade, by the standard of disparity as the norm or the ideal of social
justice, a society in which 1% of the population controls more than 90% of the resources would
be just, so long as the 1% is made up non-whites, non-straight people, women, and so on in
proportions that roughly match their representation in the general population.
It completely rationalizes neoliberalism. You see this in contemporary discussions about
gentrification, for example. What ends up being called for is something like showing respect
for the aboriginal habitus and practices and involving the community in the process. But what
does it mean to involve the community in the process? It means opening up spaces for
contractors, black and Latino in particular, in the gentrified areas who purport to represent
the interests of the populations that are being displaced. But that has no impact on the logic
of displacement. It just expands access to the trough, basically.
I've gotten close to some young people who are nonetheless old school type leftists in the
revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and I've been struck to see that the
identitarian tendency in DSA has been actively opposing participation in the Medicare for All
campaign that the national organization adopted. The argument is that it's bad because there
are disparities that it doesn't address. In the first place, that's not as true as they think
it might be, but there's also the fact that they can't or won't see how a struggle for
universal health care could be the most effective context for trying to struggle against
structural disparities. It's just mind-boggling.
LP: If politicians continue to focus on issues like race, xenophobia, and homophobia without
delivering practical solutions to the economic problems working people face, from health care
costs to the retirement crisis to student debt, could we end up continuing to move in the
direction of fascism? I don't use the word lightly.
AR: I don't either. And I really agree with you. I was a kid in a basically red household in
the McCarthy era. I have no illusions about what the right is capable of, what the bourgeoisie
is capable of, and what the liberals are capable of. In the heyday of the New Left, when people
were inclined to throw the fascist label around, I couldn't get into it. But for the first time
in my life, I think it's not crazy to talk about it. You have to wonder if Obama, who never
really offered us a thing in the way of a new politics except his race, after having done that
twice, had set the stage for Trump and whatever else might be coming.
Thanks, Yves. For decades now Reed has set the standard for integrating class-based
politics with anti-racism. I only wish Barbara Fields, whom he mentions, could get as much
air time.
Those who argue for identity-based tests of fairness (e.g. all categories of folks are
proportionately represented in the 1%) fail to think through means and ends. They advocate
the ends of such proportionality. They don't get that broad measures to seriously reduce
income and wealth inequality (that is, a class approach) are powerful means to the very end
they wish for. If, e.g., the bottom 50% actually had half (heck, even 30 to 40%) of income
and wealth, the proportionality of different groups in any socioeconomic tier would be much
higher than it is today.
There are other means as well. But the point is that identity-driven folks strip their own
objective of it's most useful tools for it's own accomplishment.
In reading this, my mind was drawn back to an article that was in links recently about a
Tea Party politician that ended up being sent to the slammer. He was outraged to learn that
at the prison that he was at, the blacks and the whites were deliberately set against each
other in order to make it easier for the guards to rule the prison.
It is a bit like this in this article when you see people being unable to get past the
black/white thing and realize that the real struggle is against the elite class that rules
them all. I am willing to bet that if more than a few forgot the whole
Trump-supporters-are-racists meme and saw the economic conditions that pushed them to vote
the way that they did, then they would find common cause with people that others would write
off as deplorable and therefore unsalvageable.
Howard Zinn, in " A Peoples' History of the United States" makes a similar argument about
the origins of racism in southern colonial America. The plantation owners and slave owners
promoted racism among the working class whites towards blacks to prevent them ( the working
class blacks and whites) from making common cause against the aristocratic economic system
that oppressed both whites and blacks who did not own property.
The origin of militias was to organize lower class whites to protect the plantation owners
from slave revolts.
The entire book is an eye-opening story of class struggle throughout US history.
The origin of militias was to organize lower class whites to protect the plantation
owners from slave revolts.
The militias were the bulk of the military, if the not the military, for large periods of
time for all of the British American Colonies for centuries. The colonists were in fairly
isolated, often backwater, places for much of the time. Between the constant small scale
warfare with the natives and the various threats from the French and Spanish military, there
was a need for some form of local (semi) organized military. It was the British government's
understandable belief that the colonists should pay at least some of the expensive costs of
the soldiers and forts that were put in place to protect them during and after the Seven
Years War that was the starting step to the revolution; the origins of modern American
policing especially in the South has its genesis in the Slave Patrols although there was some
form of police from the start throughout the Colonies form the very beginning even if it was
just a local sheriff. The constant theme of the police's murderous brutality is a legacy of
that. The Second Amendment is a result of both the colonists/revolutionarie's loathing, even
hatred, of a potentially dictatorial standing army of any size and the slave holders'
essential need to control the slaves and to a lesser degree the poor whites.
people gang up (in racial groups – maybe that's just easiest though it seems to have
systematic encouragement) in prison for protection I think. The protection is not purely from
guards. There are riots in which one could get seriously injured (stabbed), one could get
attacked otherwise etc.. Because basic physical safety of one's person is not something they
provide in prison, maybe quite deliberately so.
"I am willing to bet that if more than a few forgot the whole Trump-supporters-are-racists
meme and saw the economic conditions that pushed them to vote the way that they did, then
they would find common cause with people that others would write off as deplorable and
therefore unsalvageable."
In those for whom poverty caused them to vote for Trump. But some voted for Trump due to
wealth. And whites overall have more wealth than blacks and so overall (not every individual)
are the beneficiaries of unearned wealth and privilege and that too influences their view of
the world (it causes them to side more with the status quo). Blacks are the most economically
liberal group in America. The thing is can one really try simultaneously to understand even
some of say the black experience in America and try hard to understand the Trump voter at the
same time? Because if a minority perceives those who voted for Trump as a personal threat to
them are they wrong? If they perceive Republican economic policies (and many have not changed
under Trump such as cutting government) as a personal threat to them are they wrong? So some
whites find it easier to sympathize with Trump voters, well they would wouldn't they, as the
problems of poor whites more directly relate to problems they can understand. But so
what?
I am glad that Reed mentioned the quasi-religious nature of identity politics, especially
in its liberal form. Michael Lind made a similar observation:
As a lapsed Methodist myself, I think there is also a strong undercurrent of
Protestantism in American identity politics, particularly where questions of how to promote
social justice in a post-racist society are concerned. Brazil and the United States are
both former slave societies, with large black populations that have been frozen out of
wealth and economic opportunity. In the United States, much of the discussion about how to
repair the damage done by slavery and white supremacy involves calls on whites to examine
themselves and confess their moral flaws -- a very Protestant approach, which assumes that
the way to establish a good society is to ensure that everybody has the right moral
attitude. It is my impression that the left in Brazil, lacking the Protestant puritan
tradition, is concerned more with practical programs, like the bolsa familia -- a cash
grant to poor families -- than with attitudinal reforms among the privileged.
Many white liberals are mainline Protestants or former Protestants and I think they bring
their religious sensibilities to their particular brand of liberalism. You can see it in the
way that many liberals claim that we cannot have economic justice until we eliminate racist
attitudes as when Hillary Clinton stated that breaking up the big banks won't end racism. Of
course, if we define racism as a sinful attitude it is almost impossible to know if we have
eliminated it or if we can even eliminate it at all.
Clinton and liberals like her make essentially the same argument that conservatives make
when they say that we cannot have big economic reforms because the problem is really greed.
Once you define the problem as one of sin then you can't really do anything to legislate
against it. Framing political problems as attitudinal is a useful way to protect powerful
interests. How do you regulate attitudes? How do you break up a sinful mind? How can you even
know if a person has racism on the brain but not economic anxiety? Can you even separate the
two? Politicians need to take voters as they are and not insist that they justify themselves
before voting for them.
I thought this reference to the Protestant way of self-justification or absolving oneself
without talking about class in the US is true but was perhaps the weakest point. The
financial elites justify their position and excuse current inequalities and injustices
visiting on the 99% by whatever is the current dominate culturally approved steps in whatever
country. In the US – Protestant heritage; in India – not Protestant heritage; in
Italy – Catholic heritage, etc. Well, of course they do. This isn't surprising in the
least. Each country's elites excuse themselves in a way that prevents change by whatever
excuses are culturally accepted.
I think talking about the Protestant heritage in the US is a culturing interesting artifact
of this time and this place, but runs the danger of creating another "identity" issue in
place of class and financial issues if the wider world's elite and similar self excuse by
non-Protestant cultures aren't included in the example. Think of all the ways the various
religions have been and are used to justify economic inequality. Without the wider scope the
religious/cultural point risks becoming reduced to another "identity" argument; whereas, his
overall argument is that "identity" is a distraction from class and economic inequality
issues. my 2 cents.
Chris Hedges has been warning about the rise of American Fascism for years, and his
warnings are coming to fruition- and still, the general population fails to recognize the
danger. The evils and violence that are the hallmarks of fascist rule are for other people,
not Americans. The terms America and Freedom are so ingrained in the minds of citizens that
the terms are synonymous. Reality is understood and interpreted through this distorted lens.
People want and need to believe this falsehood and resist any messenger trying to enlighten
them to a different interpretation of reality- the true view is just to painful to
contemplate.
The horrors of racism offer a nugget of truth that can misdirect any effort to bring about
systemic change. Like the flow of water finding the path of least resistance, racist
explanations for current social problems creates a channel of thought that is difficult to
alter. This simple single mindedness prevents a more holistic and complicated interpretation
to take hold in the public mind. It is the easy solution for all sides- the tragedy is that
violence, in the end, sorts out the "winners". The world becomes a place where competing
cultures are constantly at each others throats.
Falling in the racism/ identity politics trap offers the elite many avenues to leverage
their power, not the least of which is that when all else fails, extreme violence can be
resorted to. The left/progressives have become powerless because they fail to understand this
use of ultimate force and have not prepared their followers to deal with it. Compromise has
been the strategy for decades and as time has proven, only leads to more exploitation. Life
becomes a personal choice between exploiting others, or being exploited. The whole system
reeks of hypocrisy because the real class divisions are never discussed or understood for
what they are. This seems to be a cyclical process, where the real leaders of revolutionary
change are exterminated or compromised, then the dissatisfaction in the working classes is
left to build until the next crisis point is reached.
WWIII is already under way and the only thing left is to see if the imperialist ideology
will survive or not. True class struggle should lead to world peace- not world domination.
Fascists are those that seek war as a means of violent expansion and extermination to suit
their own ends. Hope for humanity rests in the idea of a multipolar world- the end of
imperialism.
Agressive war is the problem, both on the small social scale and the larger stage between
nations. The main question is if citizens will allow themselves to be swept up into the
deceptions that make war possible, or defend themselves and whatever community they can form
to ensure that mass destruction can be brought under control.
The real crisis point for America will be brought about by the loss of foreign wars- which
seem inevitable. The citizenry will be forced to accept a doubling down on the existing
failures or will show the fortitude to accept failure and defeat and rebuild our country.
Seeking a mythic greatness is not the answer- only a true and sober evaluation will suffice-
it must be a broader accommodation that accepts responsibility for past wrongs but does not
get caught up in narrow, petty solutions that racist recriminations are hallmark. What is
needed is a framework for a truth and reconciliation process- but such a process is only
possible by a free people, not a conquered one. It is only on this foundation that an
American culture can survive.
This will take a new enlightenment that seems questionable, at least in the heart of
American Empire. It entails a reexamination of what freedom means and the will to dedicate
oneself to building something worth defending with ones life. It has nothing to do with
wanting to kill others or making others accept a particular view.
It is finding ones place in the world, and defending it, and cultivating it. It is the
opposite of conquest. It is the resistance to hostility. In a word, Peace.
I don't disagree with many of your assertions and their warrants but I am growing
disturbed by the many uses of the word 'Fascism'. What does the word mean exactly beyond its
pejorative uses? Searching the web I am only confused by the proliferation of meanings. I
believe it's time for some political or sociological analyst to cast off the words 'fascism'
and 'totalitarianism' and further the work that Hannah Arendt started. We need a richer
vocabulary and a deeper analysis of the political, social, philosophical, and human contents
of the concepts of fascism and of totalitarianism. World War II was half-a-century ago. We
have many more examples called fascism and totalitarianism to study and must study to further
refine exactly what kinds of Evil we are discussing and hope to fight. What purpose is served
sparring with the ghosts as new more virulent Evils proliferate.
You have brought up a very important point. The meaning of words and their common usage.
But I have to disagree that "new more virulent Evils" require a new terminology. To my mind,
that plays right into the hand of Evil. The first step in the advancement of evil is the
debasement of language- the spreading of lies and obfuscating true meaning. George Orwell's
doublespeak.
I don't think its a matter of casting off the usage of words, or the creative search to
coin new ones, but to reclaim words. Now the argument can be made that once a word is
debased, it looses its descriptive force- its moral force- and that is what I take as your
concern, however, words are used by people to communicate meaning, and this is where the easy
abandonment of words to their true meaning becomes a danger for the common good. You cannot
let someone hijack your language. A communities strength depends on its common use and
understanding of language.
Where to find that common meaning? Without the perspective of class struggle taken into
account- to orientate the view- this search will be fruitless. Without a true grounding,
words can mean anything. I believe, in America, this is where the citizenry is currently, in
a state of disorientation that has been building for decades. This disorientation is caused
by DoubleSpeak undermining common understanding that is brought about by class consciousness/
solidarity/ community. In a consumerist society, citizens take for granted that they are lied
to constantly- words and images have no real meaning- or multiple meanings playing on the
persons sensibilities at any given moment- all communication becomes fundamentally marketing
and advertising BS.
This sloppiness is then transferred into the political realm of social communication which
then transforms the social dialog into a meaningless exercise because there is really no
communication going on- only posturing and manipulation. Public figures have both private and
public views. They are illegitimate public servants not because they withhold certain
information, but because they hold contradictory positions expressed in each realm. They are
liars and deceivers in the true sense of the word, and don't deserve to be followed or
believed- let alone given any elevated social standing or privilege.
Your oppressor describes himself as your benefactor- or savior- and you believe them, only
to realize later that you have been duped. Repeat the cycle down through the ages.
DoubleSpeak and controlling the interpretation of History are the tools of exercising
power. It allows this cycle to continue.
Breaking this cycle will require an honesty and sense of empathy that directs action.
Fighting evil directly is a loosing game. You more often than not become that which you
fight against. Directly confronting evil requires a person to perform evil deeds.
Perpetuation of War is the perfect example. It must be done indirectly by not performing evil
actions or deeds. Your society takes on a defensive posture, not an aggressive one. Defense
and preservation are the motivating principles.
Speaking the truth, and working toward peace is the only way forward. A new language and
modes of communication can build themselves up around those principles.
Protecting oneself against evil seems to be the human condition. How evil is defined
determines the class structure of any given society.
So much energy is wasted on trying to convince evil people not to act maliciously, which
will never happen. It is what makes them evil- it is who they are. And too much time is
wasted listening to evil people trying to convince others that they are not evil- or their
true intensions are beneficent- which is a lie.
"Sparing with ghosts", is a good way of describing the reclaiming of historical fact. Of
belief in the study of history as a means to improve society and all of humankind thru
reflection and reevaluation. The exact opposite desire of an elite class- hell bent on self
preservation as their key motivating factor in life. If you never spar with ghosts, you have
no reference to evaluate the person standing before you- which can prove deadly- as must be
constantly relearned by generations of people exploited by the strong and powerful.
The breaking point of any society is how much falsehood is tolerated- and in the West
today- that is an awful lot.
"I've gotten close to some young people who are nonetheless old school type leftists in
the revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and I've been struck to see that the
identitarian tendency in DSA has been actively opposing participation in the Medicare for All
campaign that the national organization adopted "
Check to see how their parents or other relatives made or make their money.
This is quite the challenge. I know a large number of upper middle class young people who
are amenable to the socialist message but don't really get (or don't get at all) what it
means. (I'm convinced they make up a large portion of that percentage that identifies as
socialist or has a positive image of socialism.) But it would be wrong to write them off.
A related point that I make here from time to time: all these UMC kids have been
inculcated with a hyper-competitive world view. We need a systemic re-education program to
break them free.
as a complementary anecdote, i know of economically bottom 50% people who are devout
anti-socialists, because they deal with "micro-triggers" of free-riders, cheaters, petty
theft in their everyday life.
To them, the academic/ivory tower/abstract idea of equality in class, equality in income
is an idealistic pipe dream versus the dog-eat-dog reality of the world.
Interesting that you mention "economically bottom 50% people who are devout
anti-socialists, because they deal with "micro-triggers" of [low income?] free-riders,
cheaters, petty theft in their everyday life."
I read a lot of their snarling against alleged low income "moochers" in the local media.
What I find disturbing is their near total blindness to the for-profit businesses,
millionaires and billionaires who raid public treasuries and other resources on a regular
basis.
Just recently, I read a news story about the local baseball franchise that got $135
million dollars (they asked for $180 million) and the local tourism industry complaining
about their reduction in public subsidies because money had to be diverted to homeless
services.
No one seems to ever question why profitable, private businesses are on the dole. The fact
that these private entities complain about reductions in handouts shows how entitled they
feel to feed from the public trough. Moreover, they do so at a time of a locally declared
"homeless emergency".
Yet, it is the middle class precariat that condemn those below them as 'moochers and
cheaters', while ignoring the free-riders, cheaters and grand larceny above them.
There is no class consciousness. The working stiffs admire their owners so the only people
left to blame for their difficult life conditions are the poor below them on the social
hierarchy. Or they blame themselves, which is just as destructive. In the interim, they enjoy
the camaraderie that sporting events provide, so give the owners a pass. Bread and
Circuses.
A capitalist critique is the only way to change this situation, but that would require
learning Marxist arguments and discussing their validity.
There is that, or Charity for the poor, which only aggravates the class conflict that
plagues our society.
The third way is actually building community that functions on a less abusive manner,
which takes effort, time, and will power.
I homed in on your phrase "they deal with 'micro-triggers' of free-riders, cheaters, petty
theft in their everyday life" and it landed on fertile [I claim!] ground in my imagination. I
have often argued with my sister about this. She used to handle claims for welfare, and now
found more hospitable areas of civil service employment. I am gratified that her attitudes
seem to have changed over time. Many of the people she worked with in social services shared
the common attitudes of disparagement toward their suppliants -- and enjoyed the positions of
power it offered them.
I think the turning point came when my sister did the math and saw that the direct costs
for placing a homeless person or family into appallingly substandard 'housing' in her area
ran in the area of $90K per year. Someone not one of the "free-riders, cheaters, [or villains
of] petty theft in their everyday life" was clearly benefiting. I am very lazy but I might
try to find out who and advertise their 'excellence' in helping the poor.
A "re-education" program? That usage resurrects some very most unhappy recollections from
the past. Couldn't you coin a more happy phrase? Our young are not entirely without the
ability to learn without what is called a "re-education" program.
The comments in this post are all over the map. I'll focus on the comments regarding
statues commemorating Confederate heroes.
I recall the way the issue of Confederate statues created a schism in the NC
commentarient. I still believe in retaining 'art' in whatever form it takes since there is so
little art in our lives. BUT I also believe that rather than tear down the Confederate
statues of Confederate 'heroes' it were far better to add a plaque comemorating just what
sorts of heroism these 'heroes' performed for this country. That too serves Art.
Tearing the statues down only serves forgetting something which should never be
forgotten.
This was intended as a separate comment to stand alone. I believe Art should not forget
but should remember the horrors of our past lest we not forget.
It occurred to me that centrists demonize the left as unelectable based entirely on tokens
of identity. Long haired hippies. The other. It works because the political debate in America
is structured entirely around identity politics. Nancy Pelosi is a San Francisco liberal so
of course white people in Mississippi will never vote for the Democrats. Someone like Bernie
Sanders has a message that will appeal to them but he is presented as to the left of even
Pelosi or alternately a traitor to the liberal identity siding with racists and sexists.
Actually, all of these oppressions are rooted in working class oppression. But that is
inconsistent with the framing of ascriptive identity.
This was a great post. Didn't know about Adolph Reed. He gets straight to the point
– we have only 2 options. Either change neoliberal capitalism structurally or modify
its structure to achieve equality. Identity politics is a distraction. There will always be
differences between us and so what? As long as society itself is equitable. As far as the
fear of fascism goes, I think maybe fascism is in the goal of fascism. If it is oppressive
then its bad. If it is in the service of democracy and equality the its good. If our bloated
corporatism could see its clear, using AR's option #2, to adjusting their turbo neoliberal
capitalism, then fine. More power to them. It isn't racism preventing them from doing this
– it is the system. It is structural. Unfortunately we face far greater dangers,
existential dangers, today than in 1940. We not only have an overpopulated planet of human
inequality, but also environmental inequality. Big mess. And neither capitalism nor socialism
has the answer – because the answer is eclectic. We need all hands on deck and every
practical measure we can conjure. And FWIW I'd like to compare our present delusions to all
the others – denial. The statue of Robert E. Lee, imo, is beautiful in its conveyance
of defeat with deep regret. The acceptance is visible and powerful. What will the postmortem
statue of neoliberalism look like?
Do you really want 'equality' however you might define it? We are not born equal. Each of
us is different and I believe each of us is therefore very special. [I suppose I echo the
retort of the French regarding the equality of the sexes: "Vive la Difference!".] I believe
we should celebrate our inequalities -- while we maintain vigilance in maintaining the equal
chance to try and succeed or fail. The problem isn't inequality but the extreme inequalities
in life and sustenance our society has built -- here and more abroad. I don't mind being
beaten in a fair race. An unfair race lightens my laurels when I win. But our societies run
an unfair competition and the laurels far too heavily grace the brows of those who win. And
worse still, 'inequality' -- the word I'll use for the completely disproportionate rewards to
the winners to the undeserving in-excellent 'winners' is not a matter solved by a quest for
'equality'. The race for laurels has no meaning when the winners are chosen before the race
and the 'laurels' cost the welfare and sustenance for the losers and their unrelated kin who
never ran in the race. And 'laurels' were once but honors and there is too far little honor
in this world.
Nothing denotes a naive idealistic "progressive" than the demand for near absolute
equality in terms of money and status in their future society.all or nothing i guess.
I have read and appreciated many comments by 'Susan the other'. I would not ever
characterize her comments as those of a naive idealistic "progressive" demanding absolute
equality I should and must apologize if that is how you read my comment. I intended to
suggest equality is not something truly desirable in-itself. But re-reading her comment I
find much greater depth than I commented to --
'Susan the other' notes: "The statue of Robert E. Lee, imo, is beautiful in its conveyance
of defeat with deep regret." In answer to her question: "What will the postmortem statue of
neoliberalism look like?" I very much doubt that the post mortem statue of Neoliberalism will
show regret for anything save that all the profits were not accrued before those holding the
reins, the Elite of Neoliberalism, might gracefully die without care for any children they
may have had.
Thanks for this post. I am really surprised these days by black "liberal" media folks who
insist that racism be addressed before inequality/class issues. They are almost vehement in
their discussions about this. Are they protecting neoliberalism because it benefits them
.???
My previous admittedly overlong reply has yet to show. Darn.
But this question is an important one.
Yes, they do very much.
One of the reasons the Civil Rights struggle died was the co-option of the Black elites,
especially of the Civil Rights Movement, by the American elites. After Martin Luther King's
assassination, his Poor People's Campaign slowly died. A quiet quid pro quo was offered.
Ignore all the various social, economic, political and legal wrongs done to all Americans,
and yes blacks in particular, and just focusing on black identity and social "equality" or at
least the illusion of campaigning for it, and in you will be given a guaranteed, albeit
constrained, place at the money trough. Thus the Black Misleadership Class was born.
All the great movements in past hundred plus years have had their inclusivity removed.
Suffragism/Feminism, the Union Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, even the Environmental
Movement all had strong cross cultural, class, and racial membership and concerns. Every
single of these movements had the usually white upper class strip out everyone else and
focusing only on very narrow concerns. Aside from the Civil Rights Movement, black
participation was removed, sometimes forcefully. They all dropped any focus on poor people of
any race.
A lot of money, time, and effort by the powerful went into doing this. Often just by
financially supporting the appropriate leaders which gave them the ability to push aside the
less financially secure ones.
Reading this post in its entirety I feel the author must become more direct in critique.
Old jargon of class or race or a "struggle against structural disparities" should be replaced
by the languages of such assertions as: " the larger objective was to eliminate the threat
that the insurgency had posed to planter-merchant class rule" or "It just expands access to
the trough, basically". Why mince words when there are such horrors as are poised against the
common humanity of all?
Your comment is too brief and too enigmatic. If by Adolf you mean Adolf H. -- he is dead.
New potentially more dangerous creatures roam the Earth these days beware.
I consider currently one of our great intellectuals in that he understands and can use
language to make his case in a layman not necessarily friendly but accessible .
and as a southern born white male I think maybe I should watch Glory I remember a '67 show
and tell when a black classmate had a civil war sword come up in their sugar cane field, and
when I and a friend found a (disinterred yuck) civil war grave just out in the woods in north
florida. People seem to have forgotten that times were chaotic in our country's checkered
past I was in massive race riots and massive anti war protests as a child of the '60s, but
since I was in the single digits at the time no one payed me any mind as a for instance my
dad somehow got the counselors apartment in a dorm at florida state in 68′ and I
remember people in the the dorms throwing eggs at the protesters. It was nuts.
Ferguson's INET paper got me thinking about what triggers racism in us. As a kid, ethnic
pejoratives were usually a reaction to some injury. "You stupid Wap, you just scratched
my car. That dirty Mick tripped me when I wasn't looking." I tend to agree with the
premise that bailing out Wall Street and letting Main Street lose out offers a powerful
trigger for a racist reaction. People might have been softening on their lifelong covert
racism when they succumbed to Obama's charm. But when you lose your job, then your house, and
wind up earning a third of what you did before the GR, that is the sort of thing that
triggers pejorative/racist reactions. That [N-word] SOB is just like them other Jew-boy
globalists who are sending our jobs to Chinamen and whatnot. Screw him and all the damned
Democrat libtards. Then, when a MAGA-hatted Trump echoes those sentiments over a PA
system, the ghost of Goebbels is beaming.
The FBI is looking into claims that women have been asked to make false accusations of
sexual harassment against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for money -- but all may
not be as it seems. The alleged scheme aimed at Mueller, who has been investigating unproven
ties between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, came to the attention of his
office after several journalists and news outlets, including RT, were contacted by a woman
claiming that she had been approached by a man offering money if she would fabricate claims
against him.
13 days ago I received this tip alleging an attempt to pay off women to make up
accusations of sexual misconduct against Special Counsel Bob Mueller. Other reporters
received the same email. Now the Special Counsel's office is telling us they've referred the
matter to the FBI pic.twitter.com/oqh4Fnel5u
Burkman told The Atlantic that he has no clue who the woman is, suggesting he represents a
different accuser.
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores referred all inquiries back to the special counsel,
however we imagine the "all survivors must be believed" standard applies.
The false flags and fake scandals are flying fast and furious in the final weeks before
the election. Let's see if Mueller is able to construct another charge against Trump. The
collusion failed. Obstruction? Failed. Got to concoct something else.
Remember, this is the guy in charge of the FBI during 911. He's good at constructing a
narrative and has a LOT to lose if the house intelligence committee stays in GOP hands.
I am shocked this man is roaming free tonight. We must believe the women, unless and until
Mueller can prove his innocence. There is too much smoke for there not to be some fire. At
this point, he should resign and begin the process of constructing his defense.
Meanwhile, on the Gateway Pundit, they are spinning this way more aggressively at
Mueller....
The Gateway Pundit obtained a copy of the charges.
What we know: The woman is a "very credible witness." Her story are corroborated. The
incident happened in 2010 in New York City. The woman is a professional.
The Mueller apologists are already trashing the accuser -- and don't even know who she
is!
OMG, this story is the best. It keeps giving. So, the phony security company, "Surefire
Intelligence", which Jacob Wohl created and then claimed he had no connection to, but was
registered to his mom's home phone number, has a guy named "Matthew Cohen" as a supposed
founder, who is supposedly ex-Mossad. The profile for "Matthew Cohen" in one place is a photo
of actor Christoph Waltz, and in another place is a photo of Jacob Wohl himself.
Now Jack Burkman, who's the one who has been promoting this story, says he was being
hoaxed by Wohl. When a reporter was talking to Wohl and brought up the fact that "Surefire
Intelligence" is registered to his mom's phone number, he hung up.
So far, no women have come forward with any allegations against Mueller, but several have
come forward with allegations saying Wohl offered them $20,000 to make up phony
allegations.
The special counsel's office confirmed to CNBC that it learned about the "scheme" from
journalists who had been approached by a woman alleging that she had been offered $20,000 by
Burkman "to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert
Mueller." -
CNBC
So con men covering Bad Bob.....as though CNBC has any credibility...
I think FBI and CIA live in strong conviction that they are Rex Mundi. They can do
whatever they want. There is no law for them at all. Typical demokratorship
Let's see. I believe all Victims. Where have I heard that before? Amazing how the Demtards
have fall guys lined up for miles to take the hit for the team. Their spin control is amazing
to watch in action. I so hope this is true. Mueller seems like an evil cat.
These counter claims sound a whole lot like the technique of inserting "confidential
informants" into the Trump Campaign to insert information - or DISINFORMATION - into the
storyline.
what if this whole Pillsbury email was manufactured to create a counter narrative that
people are paid off.....?
see, no one trusts anyone anymore......so, might as well question everything. or not
question ANYTHING and just #believewomen
Mueller is a huge snake; a guy who'll grin widely into your face as he plants evidence to
frame you from the ground up. Ask those who've been released from years of imprisonment
because of Mueller's set ups. They've got a few things to say about Robert Mueller...
A rapist? Who the hell knows but those involved at the time?
I'd put nothing past this uranium mule Mueller. Nothing. Deepest Statist Mueller's career
was made on being a silent and gruesomely pernicious bastard who'd go there for his pals. A
DC Fixer; like his devotee James Comey. Real dirty crums. And they hold a shitload of
blackmail-able secrets.
"... An article IIRC in the Nation by a restaurant worker specifically discussed how #MeToo had ignored waitresses and there was no change in behavior. ..."
"... Hundreds of McDonald's employees, emboldened by the #MeToo movement, demonstrated outside company headquarters in Chicago on Tuesday to draw attention to alleged sexual harassment at work ..."
"... McDonald's employees only. No show of solidarity by other women. As a result, look how small the protest was. I rest my case. ..."
"... I think the movement, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons, should and must center working class women. I'm not seeing that. I would be very happy indeed to see it. ..."
"... Caliban and the Witch ..."
"... Fundamental to all civilised systems of criminal law is the doctrine nulla poena sine lege ..."
"... "Inappropriate behavior," is not a category of conduct known to the criminal law. Nor, for that matter, is making a person feel uncomfortable. Awkward advances without a guilty mind is also not a criminal offense. ..."
"... Due process rights were hard won over many centuries. If we are to abandon, even with the best of intentions, nulla poena sine lege ..."
"... I loathe party culture, exactly because it encourages assault. ..."
"... a Jobs Guarantee would make it easier for a woman to leave an abusive workplace. A Post Office Bank, by giving every woman her own checking account as a matter of right, would make it easier for women to leave abusive relationships. Sometimes it's more effective to be indirect. ..."
"... Wages for restaurant workers such that they don't have to depend on potentially abusive customers for tips. A third way also does not appear: Encouraging cooperatives . So the question of whose ..."
Sorry, but this is going to be a long one. Because I've become increasingly frustrated by
the little asides in Water Cooler related to MeToo. So buckle up, buttercup.
Justice for Emmett Till and #Believewomen are only in conflict if you want to pit groups
of victims against each other. I'm not surprised to see a GOPer do it, but I'm disappointed
it's going on here. What Emmett Till and women of sexual assault (and men and children of
sexual assault) have in common is that there is no justice for them. This idea that we need
"due process" for the MeToo stuff is all well and good, but where exactly is it supposed to
come from? What #Believewomen and #MeToo (which includes men and boys, see, e.g. Terry Crews
for a famous example) are really about are holding the powerful accountable and telling the
world that the current system does not work for women (or anyone else who has been sexually
assaulted). How is that a bad thing? Unless you want to read #Believewomen as meaning that
you should literally never doubt a woman, regardless of any other facts. That's like saying
Black Lives Matter doesn't care about non-black lives, when everyone knows that's right-wing
crap. BLM focuses on a failing of the system. MeToo focuses on a failing system. As for due
process -- Larry Nassar, the largest known pedophile in sports history (that we know of) --
was repeatedly reported to the authorities. At one point, a police department made a victim
sit down with him so he could explain how she had "misinterpreted" his treatment for abuse.
It literally took a victim of his growing up, becoming a lawyer and studying how to prove
sexual assault cases, then building evidence and turning it over to the Indianapolis Star to
get anyone to do anything. And in the meantime, hundreds of women and girls were assaulted,
including most of the last two women's Olympic teams. That's not due process, it is a system
that protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Not exactly an unknown or rare
phenomenon limited to women.
So if people really care about "due process"* for MeToo, then it would be nice to see as
much time spent on discussing what that process might look like than just taking potshots at
people, many of whom are sexual assault victims, who are demanding society listen to them and
believe them instead of naturally lining up to defend the person in power. And that's what
#Believewomen really means – the word of the powerless should have as much credibility
as the powerful. Nothing about that would not deny justice to Emmett Till. A movement is not
defined by its twitter hashtag.
* Spoiler alert, they don't. Or, rather, I think lambert does, but most do not. It's just
another way to avoid accountability. After all, most of the more notable MeToo allegations
are employment or similar situations, where due process does not apply in any other context,
but now suddenly bosses want to invoke it for themselves. Please don't try to invoke it when
they fire you because you won't work a last-minute Saturday shift. Because you can't. But
report the boss for sexual harassment and be prepared for a lot of process. So much process,
you may never get through it all. Which is the other joke, companies have tons of process re
sexual harassment complaints, almost all of which is designed to protect the harasser.
Which brings me to class. I've seen a lot of picking at #MeToo for being focused on women
("identity") instead of class. This confuses me since, while any woman can be a victim, poor
and working class women (and men) have even fewer options of redress (I won't even get into
incarcerated men and women). See the recent
McDonalds' strike over sexual harassment, a labor action which shouldn't be surprising
since as many as 40% of women in the fast food industry
experience sexual harassment . Moreover, institutional sexism -- like racism -- has roots
in capital accumulation and labor exploitation. For an interesting read on this, see
The Caliban and the Witch . Which is not to say it's all about class, it isn't. Racism
and sexism exist, they exist for everyone regardless of class, but the effects of them are
greatly exacerbated by poor and working class people's material conditions and they are tied
directly to the system that creates those conditions. To the extent people want to discuss
due process, it should be about creating systems that hold the powerful accountable for their
abuse of power, a challenge that extends across society.
"And that's what #Believewomen really means – the word of the powerless should
have as much credibility as the powerful."
It is wise, when starting a movement, to say what you "really mean." As it stands,
#Believewomen MEANS convicting defendants on the sole word of one person – the victim.
If we really start doing that, women will be among the victims, along with other powerless
people.
" only in conflict if you want to pit groups of victims against each other." What do you
mean, "want"? That's a classic straw man. The slogan you're defending pits them against each
other – that's Lambert's point.
You also say that enforcement against either assault or sexual harassment is nightmarish
and often ineffective. That I'll believe, and it's a necessary point. Actually, law
enforcement and "justice" generally are pretty nightmarish. Tangle sex up in that and it only
gets worse. The point of #Metoo was to convince us that we have a problem, and it
accomplished that. Slogans that mean what you don't mean only detract from the
accomplishment.
It is simply disingenuous to say that #MeToo has taken up the cause of lower class women.
The restaurant industry is one of the biggest employers in America and harassment of women is
pervasive. How many #MeToo luminaries have talked up the problems they face? An article
IIRC in the Nation by a restaurant worker specifically discussed how #MeToo had ignored
waitresses and there was no change in behavior.
And that protest was NOT promoted by the loose #MeToo movement. See this from USA
Today:
Hundreds of McDonald's employees, emboldened by the #MeToo movement, demonstrated
outside company headquarters in Chicago on Tuesday to draw attention to alleged sexual
harassment at work
Most of my thoughts (which are evolving) on #MeToo are summed up in
this post on the McDonalds strikers : I think the movement, for both ethical and
pragmatic reasons, should and must center working class women. I'm not seeing that. I would
be very happy indeed to see it.
My 2015 post on the wonderful Caliban and the Witch is
here . I concluded:
However, if one takes the view that "Now is the time" -- however defined -- in the
present day, it also behooves one to do the math; it has always seemed to me that a bare
majority, 50% plus one, as sought by the legacy parties, is insufficient to do much but
perpetuate, among other things, the legacy parties. It also seems to me that sintering
together demographics based on identity politics -- Christian, Black, White, Hispanic,
Young, Old, Male, Female, Rural, Urban -- can only produce these bare majorities. It also
seems to me that a focus on "economic class" can't give an account of the sort of events
that Federici describes here. Hence, to bend history's arc, some sort of grand unified
field theory that goes beyond 50%, to 80%, is needed (along with the proposed provision of
concrete material benefits[1]). Work like Federici's is a step toward such a theory, and so
I applaud it.
Setting aside the lack of a unified field theory, it seems to me that without centering
working class women, #MeToo remains very much in 50% plus one territory.
Let me address your conclusion:
To the extent people want to discuss due process, it should be about creating systems
that hold the powerful accountable for their abuse of power, a challenge that extends
across society.
Fundamental to all civilised systems of criminal law is the doctrine nulla poena
sine lege -- no punishment without a law. There are hundreds of offenses on the
criminal statute books. Assault, sexual assault and indecent assault are serious criminal
offenses, attracting heavy sentences upon a conviction.
"Inappropriate behavior," is not a category of conduct known to the criminal law.
Nor, for that matter, is making a person feel uncomfortable. Awkward advances without a
guilty mind is also not a criminal offense.
Due process rights were hard won over many centuries. If we are to abandon, even with
the best of intentions, nulla poena sine lege for one set of behaviors, we'd best
believe it will be abandoned for other behaviors, and for purposes less benevolent. Have we
thought that through?
That said, if we think back to the Dred Scott case and its fate, it's clear that movements
can change law; we will have to see what happens with #MeToo. Feminist legal scholar
Catherine
MacKinnon urges[2]:
Sexual harassment law can grow with #MeToo. Taking #MeToo's changing norms into the law
could -- and predictably will -- transform the law as well. Some practical steps could help
capture this moment. Institutional or statutory changes could include prohibitions or
limits on various forms of secrecy and nontransparency that hide the extent of sexual abuse
and enforce survivor isolation, such as forced arbitration, silencing nondisclosure
agreements even in cases of physical attacks and multiple perpetration, and confidential
settlements. A realistic statute of limitations for all forms of discrimination, including
sexual harassment, is essential. Being able to sue individual perpetrators and their
enablers, jointly with institutions, could shift perceived incentives for this
behavior.
However, it's clear that the criminal justice system in which due process rights are
embedded isn't a justice system at all for this category of offenses. I wrote
: " [W]e as a society have no way of adjudicating sexual assault claims that treats the
assaulted with a level of dignity sufficient for them to come forward at the time " (The
backlog of unprocessed rape kits pointed to by Tarana Burke shows this clearly, even if
nothing else did.) I'm personally acquainted both with someone who was sexually assaulted,
and someone who was falsely accused of "inappropriate behavior," and I've wracked my brains
trying to imagine a system of adjudication under which either could have received
justice -- the first never did, the second was ultimately cleared -- but without success. I
can't see how MacKinnon's fixes would have helped either one.
I'd certainly welcome different and parallel forms of
adjudication that would have achieved justice for my friends; nobody said "due process"
had to be achieved only through the court sytem, after all. For example, although this is a
limited solution that applies to neither of my friends, an alternative adjudication system
that puts the burden of proof on the male if the other party is female and both are drunk
would probably brake a lot of bad behavior on campus; this of course speaks to my priors,
since I loathe party culture, exactly because it encourages assault.
NOTE
[1] For example, a Jobs Guarantee would make it easier for a woman to leave an abusive
workplace. A Post Office Bank, by giving every woman her own checking account as a matter of
right, would make it easier for women to leave abusive relationships. Sometimes it's more
effective to be indirect.
[2] One way to redress power imbalances in the workplace -- building union power, say
through card check -- does not appear on MacKinnon's list of legal transformations. A second
way also does not appear: Wages for restaurant workers such that they don't have to
depend on potentially abusive customers for tips. A third way also does not appear:
Encouraging cooperatives . So the
question of whose and which norms are to be transformed remains
salient.
UPDATE You write:
And that's what #Believewomen really means – the word of the powerless should have
as much credibility as the powerful. Nothing about that would not deny justice to Emmett
Till. A movement is not defined by its twitter hashtag.
If that's what it really means, that's not what it really says. The hash tag isn't
#BelieveThePowerless, after all. I think it's simpler to take the movement at its word. If
the organizers wish to change the slogan because it's sending the wrong message, then they
will. If they don't, then the hash tag is sending the message they want.
I agree that movements don't totally define themselves by the choices they make
with their slogans. But those choices matter. The Bolsheviks won the day under the slogan
"Peace, Land,
Bread." "Less War, Gentler Serfdom, Access to Bread" just wouldn't have had the same
impact.
There's an older episode of The Green Room with Paul
Provenza when the late Patrice O'Neal, arguably one of the best stand-up comics in recent
history, gets serious for a moment, saying: "I love being able to say anything I want. I had to
learn how to stop caring about people not laughing. Because the idea of comedy, really, is not
everybody should be laughing. It should be about 50 people laughing and 50 people horrified.
There should be people who get it and people who don't get it."
O'Neal gets right to the chaotic, trickster heart of comedy with that statement. Comedy at
its best balances humor against shock–not necessarily vulgarity, mind you, but a sort of
unsettling surprise. It's a topsy-turvy glimpse at an uncanny, upside-down world, which, if the
joke lands, provides a bulwark against torpor and complacency. Great comedy inhabits the
absurdity of the world. It makes itself into a vantage point from which everything seems
delightfully ridiculous, including (often especially) the comedians themselves. We wouldn't
need comedy in a world that wasn't absurd. Perhaps that's why Dante only included humor in his
Inferno . There is no absurdity in paradise.
Unfortunately, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette , a comedy special recently released on
Netflix, only embraces the non-laughter half of O'Neal's dictum. It's the very epitome of
self-serious, brittle, didactic, SJW "comedy." It's not funny. And worse, it's not meant to be.
Gadsby, a queer Australian comedian, uses her "stand-up special" as a way to destroy the very
medium she pretends to be professionally engaged in. Her basic argument is that, since comedy
is by its very nature self-deprecating (true), people who define themselves as members of an
oppressed minority shouldn't engage in comedy because they're only participating in the
violence already being done to them by society at large.
We have allowed "social justice" types, a tiny fringe minority of unhappy and often unstable
people, rewrite the rules of our entire civilization and culture.
All the way back to Aristophanes comedy has often included a political component or an effort
to "educate" audiences or at least make them think about things. But the actual comedy part
is essential. Otherwise it's just a lecture.
We might just be witnessing the death of Art. As the SJW furies brutally and effectively
enforce The Narrative in literary fiction, film, TV, comedy, etc. they destroy the potential
for creative genius in these mediums and kill off most of the audience. It was already hard
enough for those arts to compete with new media forms. The SJW's hostile takeover of Art just
makes the triumph of Real Life As Entertainment all the more complete.
Whereas twenty years ago I might be spending my free time reading a novel and attempting
to write a short story, today I'm reading articles on The American Conservative and posting
this comment.
"... the implications of the study are deadly serious. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have confirmed the right-wing political essence of identity politics and postmodernist thought, based on anti-Marxism, irrationalism and the rejection of the Enlightenment and objective truth. ..."
"... 'It's a very scary time for young men,' Trump told reporters on the very day that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian went public with their hoax. Both express a fear of false attacks on men, whether levied by regretful sluts, lefty liberals, radical academics, or whoever else." ..."
On October 2, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian published an article
titled "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship," incorporating the
results of a year-long effort to publish hoax articles, deliberately comprised of bunk facts
and irrational and reactionary conclusions, in academic journals associated with gender, racial
and identity studies.
The results expose the intellectual bankruptcy of identity politics and postmodernist
philosophy. Their proponents, who dominate university humanities departments worldwide, are
charlatans who have published or given favorable "revise and resubmit" comments to the most
absurd and vulgar pseudo-scientific arguments.
These include: a purported 1,000-hour study of dog "humping" patterns at dog parks that
concludes by calling for human males to be "trained" like dogs to prevent rape culture; a
long-form poem produced through a teenage angst poetry generator about women holding
spiritual-sexual "moon meetings" in a secret "womb room" and praying to a "vulva shrine;" a
proposal to develop feminist robots, trained to think irrationally, to control humanity and
subjugate white men; and additional articles relating to male masturbation. Another proposal,
which was praised by reviewers in a paper that was ultimately rejected, encouraged teachers to
place white students in chains to be shamed for their "white privilege."
There is an element of humor in the fact that such drivel could win accolades from academics
and journals. The "dog park" article was even selected as one of the most influential
contributions in the history of the Gender, Place and Culture journal!
But the implications of the study are deadly serious. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian
have confirmed the right-wing political essence of identity politics and postmodernist thought,
based on anti-Marxism, irrationalism and the rejection of the Enlightenment and objective
truth.
Most chillingly, the authors also submitted a re-write of a chapter from Hitler's Mein
Kampf , with language altered to reference female identity and feminism. The paper, titled
"Our struggle is my struggle: solidarity feminism as an intersectional reply to neoliberal and
choice feminism," was accepted for publication and greeted with favorable reviews.
"I am extremely sympathetic to this article's argument and its political positioning," one
academic wrote. Another said, "I am very sympathetic to the core arguments of the paper."
In the wake of their public disclosure, Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have come under
attack by the proponents of postmodernism and identity politics, who claim the hoax is a
right-wing attack on "social justice" disciplines.
Typical is the argument of Daniel Engber, who wrote in Slate : "How timely, too,
that this secret project should be published in the midst of the Kavanaugh imbroglio -- a time
when the anger and the horror of male anxiety is so resplendent in the news. 'It's a very
scary time for young men,' Trump told reporters on the very day that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and
Boghossian went public with their hoax. Both express a fear of false attacks on men, whether
levied by regretful sluts, lefty liberals, radical academics, or whoever else."
In reality, the hoax has exposed the fact that it is the proponents of identity politics who
are advancing views parallel to the far right. While they are enraged with those who voice
concern about the elimination of due process and the presumption of innocence for the targets
of the #MeToo campaign, they are unbothered by the fact that the writings of Adolf Hitler are
published and praised in feminist academic circles.
Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian are self-described liberals who are concerned that the
present identity hysteria is "pushing the culture war to ever more toxic and existential
polarization," by fanning the flames of the far right. As a result, identitarians are
"affecting activism on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities in a way which is
counterproductive to equality aims by feeding into right-wing reactionary opposition to those
equality objectives."
In contrast, the authors' aim is to "give people -- especially those who believe in
liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice -- a clear reason to look at
the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, 'No, I will not
go along with that. You do not speak for me.'"
The hoax's authors are correct to link the identity politics proponents' hostility to
equality with their opposition to rationalism, scientific analysis and the progressive gains of
the Enlightenment. But the roots of this right-wing, irrationalist, anti-egalitarian
degeneration are to be found in the economic structure of capitalist society.
The academic architects of postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in
academia, often with salaries upwards of $100,000–$300,000 or more. As a social layer,
the theoreticians of what the World Socialist Web Site refers to as the "pseudo-left"
are in the wealthiest 10 percent of American society. Their political and philosophical views
express their social interests.
The obsession with "privilege," sex, and racial and gender identity is a mechanism by which
members and groups within this layer fight among themselves for income, social status and
positions of privilege, using degrees of "oppression" to one up each other in the fight for
tenure track jobs, positions on corporate or non-profit boards, or election to public office. A
chief purpose of the #MeToo campaign, for example, is to replace male executives and male
politicians with women, while ignoring the social needs of the vast majority of working class
women.
The weaponization of identity politics is directed down the social ladder as well. By
advancing the lie that white workers benefit from "white privilege," for example, the
proponents of identity politics argue: the spoils of Wall Street should not go to meeting the
social needs of the working class, including white workers, who face record rates of
alcoholism, poverty, opioid addiction, police violence and other indices of social misery.
Instead, the world's resources should go to me . It is this visceral class hatred that
serves as the basis for absurd and reactionary arguments like those advanced in the hoax
papers.
Nor have the politics of racial identity improved the material conditions for the vast
majority of minority workers. Inequality within racial minorities has increased alongside the
introduction of affirmative action programs and the increasing dominance of identity politics
in academia and bourgeois politics. In 2016, the top 1 percent of Latinos owned 45 percent of
all Latino wealth, while the top 1 percent of African-Americans owned 40.5 percent and the
richest whites owned 36.5 percent of white wealth.
The influence of postmodernism in academia exploded in the aftermath of the mass protests of
the 1960s and early 1970s. Based explicitly on a rejection of the revolutionary role of the
working class and opposition to the "meta narrative" of socialist revolution, it is not
accidental that identity politics and postmodernism have now been adopted as official
ideological mechanisms of bourgeois rule.
In recent decades, a massive identity politics industry has been erected, with billions of
dollars available from corporate funds and trusts for journals, non-profits, publications,
fellowships and political groups advancing racial or gender politics. Identity politics has
come to form a central component of the Democratic Party's electoral strategy. Imperialist wars
are justified on the grounds that the US is intervening to protect women, LGBT people and other
minorities.
The growing movement of the working class, broadening strikes across industries and
widespread interest in socialism on college campuses pose an existential threat to the
domination of postmodernism. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have struck a well-timed blow
against this reactionary obstacle to the development of scientific socialist consciousness.
October 12, 2018 Identity
Politics and the Ruling Class by James Munson Reagan ditched the Fairness Doctrine. Now his youth complain they're shunned by
the politically-correct media. Clinton's Telecommunications Act let mergers trample
the free press. Now it pains his wing that we read rants and conspiracy, instead of news.
So much that Hillary employed teams of fact-checkers in 2016, figuring we couldn't trust our
own minds to parse reality from clown-babble. Then–contrarily–she blamed her loss
on hopeless cases. If one or the other were true, democracy would be a lost cause, and perhaps
that's crossed her mind since losing, despite a majority of votes. But it can't explain why
close to half of us had the common sense to not vote for either hopeless party.
Yet, to hear either speak, tribal privileges are fracturing America. Not the top .001%'s
privilege to half the wealth, nor the military's to the bulk of our taxes. Rather, half of the
poor's designation, versus the other half's. Somehow, minorities -the lowest rung in terms of
media ownership- bully the mainstream press, and rednecks -the next-lowest- bully the rest.
(Hourly-waged Russians command any overlap.) And since, according to the Right (and much of the
Left), 'political-correctness' stifles all other manner of free speech, elites are powerless to
restore order to their own, private empires, or prevent the hordes tearing us up over what
bathroom to use.
Really? Have we lost our pussy-grabbing Executive and Judiciary branches to the wanton touch
of #MeToo? Can our founding, 'self-evident truths' not outwit pc's chauvinism? On the other
hand, how is it 'deplorables' are blind to exploding class inequality, yet so attuned to the
nuances of race, gender, and their nomenclature?
'Identity-politics' explain everything recently, from Trump and Kavanaugh, to Crazy Rich
Asians . Francis Fukuyama has a new book out (I've read only part), regarding its tension
with liberalism–group versus individual rights, etc., tepidly joining him to more-hawkish
mouth-pieces like Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro (and some Left doom-sayers) who warn its
steam-rolling our democracy. Their over-arching fear is that identity politics suppress
rational–though not always politically-correct–thought, giving extremists on both
sides the floor, who don't mind confronting 'identity' on racist (and sexist, etc) terms. Ergo,
more than an analytical device or a school of (not always congruent) ideas, a movement. A
juggernaut, if you read and believe the hype.
But if so, whose? Saying 'first respect my uniqueness, then treat me as equal' provides
snares that 'first treat me as equal, then respect my uniqueness' does not. The Left has a long
history with -and can tie most of its successes- to the latter. The labor movement, for
instance, united presumed-cultural rivals and coordinated dozens of languages. Ergo, the
Left , by definition -the many against the privileged few- would have to be amnesiac,
or -more likely- not the Left, to think a plan that tries to establish the differences first
would better serve their goals.
Perhaps the cultural wins (like marriage equality) and sizable, politico-economic losses
(demise of Unions, etc.) of the past few decades have inspired reorientation. There's evidence,
so long as we define the 'Left' as ruling, Neoliberal Democrats. Certainly their Wall Street
financiers can accept women CEOs and gay marriage more-readily than Union wages and universal
healthcare. (After all, the point of capitalism is to pocket the most one can without
sparking an insurrection.) BUT an elite-run party -paid for by Wall Street–doesn't
constitute a Left. Nor is it able to absorb popular will. Proven, since they lose most of their
elections.
Also, that leftists would demand censorship when most everyone of them believe the Right is
in control, and when they're silenced within their own party, seems farce. Again
there's evidence, college students sometimes dis-invite conservative speakers, and we figure,
as Reagan did, they're taught to (so he hiked tuition). But I doubt censorship exists as
agenda, nor even as sentiment on any grand scale. Think, whenever something explodes multiple
parties besides the bomber take credit. Where are the professors claiming this attack? If 18%
are communists (as the American Enterprise Institute warns), what sort of communist links class
to 'identity', not labor?
The other 'fear' is that over-zealous freshman are taking control, like in the Princeton and
Evergreen incidents. Perhaps but it contradicts the wisdom of Occupy!, which refused the
collaborative financial, political, educative, and other aligned powers from pigeon-holling
their complaints. -Wisdom that we credit to the young of the movement.
There's also a notion that dis-investment has engendered a new 'tribalism'. But even though
'color-blindness', for example, has excused softening equal-opportunity legislation (welfare
reform, voting law, etc.), which baits 'identity', as minorities are often dis-empowered under
the ruse of equality, color-blindness came out of the neoliberal play-book and expanded
Leftward from think-tanks on the Right. In other words, while it's hard to gauge its impact, it
marks a very separate program from the Left-academia or 'bottom-up' narratives.
Furthermore, most every poll finds 'economic inequality', not racial, gender, or other
inequalities to be the #1 problem with America. So, while it's not unreasonable that our
decline in wealth and status might see us retreat toward other than liberal identities
(Fukuyama's point), unless someone's peddling those narratives, one plainly sees more leverage
in class-solidarity.
As for the Right, what should be 'self-evident' is that complaining minority recognition is
unfair to the majority rests on the same argument it decries; that your privilege impedes my
privilege (instead of the reverse). Evident, at least to a Harvard-educated lawyer like Ben
Shapiro. Yet you find all that fallacious, 'populist' reaction in his books. Do they speak to
him or he to them? Does he speak for them?
Of course, identity politics aren't new. The Spanish liberal-philosopher, Jose Ortega y
Gasset wrestled with it a century ago, when his homeland's empire was crumbling, and came up
with a lot better answers (though it didn't save Spain from its fascist clown). Spain even had,
in his words, 'a common past, language, and race, yet had split into mainly-regional factions
because it had failed to invent a sufficiently-attractive collective program for the
future' . [i]
Isn't he right? Rather than hell-bent on forcing this or that culture on the rest of us,
aren't the 'extreme' Left, Right, and clusters of us in between are just figuring out that,
increasingly, being 'American' means losing ground to the .001% and their top brass? The
opening passage to the Combahee River Collective's manifesto says as much: ' focusing upon our
own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics . We believe that the
most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as
opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.'
Last week Gary Younge revived that notion in a piece titled ' It comes as no shock that
the powerful hate identity politics ' [ii] , reminding that without
'women', 'blacks', and other self-referential vanguards we wouldn't have democracy, anyway.
It's an important point, and I agree, but is his over-arching theme–that the powerful
hate it–also true?
Whether 'identity-politics' raise tensions or awareness among the crowd might be a secondary
matter. First is whom they neglect. For all the media's naval-gazing, the system, itself gets
rare attention. Mind, all political strategies shoulder contradictions. But it's odd that
cultural issues (not to say there's no overlap) would hold the foreground right when fraudulent
wars, torture, bank crime, rigged elections, police violence, tax-breaks for the rich, willful
habitat destruction, and a widely-evident and growing gap between rich and poor and state and
population have laid the political, economic, and judicial systems bare. Matters such as
environmental or foreign policy are largely out of public reach, except with massive, boots on
the ground confrontation. In which case, atomizing class politics seems counter-intuitive to
the extreme.
Unless it's not us preaching it. It bears saying, in an oligarchy, oligarchs speak in order
to make their actions less–not more–clear. That's what a shill like Ben Shapiro
(Hillary does the work herself on the Left) laments when his talks get ignored (or
Ocasio-Cortes ignores him). Shapiro's a cause-celeb for saying identity politics threatens our
democracy, because it censors Right voices. Yet it appears complaining gets him more,
not less, airtime. In fact, I've heard too little substance in his' speeches (or Hillary's of
late) to warrant an interview, otherwise. Thus I suspect its the opposite of censorship; hyping
the market, that threatens our democracy. Threatens for real, like the Telecom Act, not just
prescriptively, like 'Russo-bots' and 'terrorism'.
"... The way you have to term everything just right. And if you don't term it right you discriminate them. It's like everybody is going to be in the know of what people call themselves now and some of us just don't know. But if you don't know then there is something seriously wrong with you. ..."
On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and
the resentful. Team Resentment is manned -- pun very much intended -- by people who are
predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and
predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white "allies" do their dutiful part). These
teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most
routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.
Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam
Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, "
Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape ," most Americans don't fit into
either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social
media might suggest -- including a general aversion to PC culture.
You don't say. More:
If you look at what Americans have to say on issues such as immigration, the extent of
white privilege, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, the authors argue, seven distinct
clusters emerge: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the
politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.
According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives,
and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are
progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of
Americans who don't belong to either extreme constitute an "exhausted majority." Their
members "share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to
be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national
conversation."
Hmm. If one out of four people believe something, are they really "far" out of the American
mainstream? In the report, "Traditional Liberals" and "Passive Liberals" make up 26 percent of
the population. Aren't they part of the mainstream too? Or am I reading this wrong? Here's a
graphic from the "Hidden Tribes" report that shows how they sort us:
How do the authors define these groups? Here:
Anyway, the story goes on to say that r ace and youth are not indicators of openness to PC.
Black Americans are the minority group most accepting of PC, but even then, 75 percent of them
think it's a problem. More:
If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and
education.
While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness,
just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87
percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a
problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.
Political tribe -- as defined by the authors -- is an even better predictor of views on
political correctness. Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political
correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists
are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a
problem.
Here's the heart of it:
So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally
representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly
educated -- and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than
$100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And
while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of
progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives,
progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
This, a thousand times:
As one 57- year-old woman in Mississippi fretted:
The way you have to term everything just right. And if you don't term it right you
discriminate them. It's like everybody is going to be in the know of what people call
themselves now and some of us just don't know. But if you don't know then there is something
seriously wrong with you.
So, guess who runs most of the institutions in this country: academia, media, entertainment,
corporations? Educated, rich white liberals (and minorities who come out of those institutions,
and who agree with their PC ideology). They have created a social space in which they lord
their ideology over everybody else, and have intimidated everyone into going along with it, out
of fear of harsh consequences, and stigma, for dissenters.
Mounk points out that it's not that majorities believe racism and bigotry aren't things to
be concerned about. They do! It's that they believe that PC is the wrong way to address those
problems.
If you have the time,
read the whole "Hidden Tribes" report on which Mounk bases his essay. They reveal something
that has actually been brought out by Pew Research studies in the past: that US political
conversation is entirely driven by the extremes, while most people in the middle are more open
to compromise. It's not that most of these people are moderates, are centrists. It's that they
aren't driven by a strong sense of tribalism.
The authors call these "hidden tribes" because they are defined not by race, sex, and the
usual tribal markers, but rather by a shared agreement on how the world works, whether they're
aware of it or not. Where individuals come down on these points generally determines where
they'll come down on hot button political and cultural issues (e.g., immigration,
feminism):
You shouldn't assume that most Americans share the same basic values. As the report
indicates, there are substantive differences among us. It's simply not accurate to blame
tension over these divisions on extremists of the right or the left who exaggerate them. Though
the differences are real, what seems to set the majority-middle apart is their general
unwillingness to push those differences to the breaking point.
I want to point out one aspect of the analysis that means a lot to me, as a religious
conservative. It's on page 81 of the report. Here's a graph recording answers to the question,
"How important is religious faith to you?"
Religion is important to almost two-thirds of Americans. The only tribe in which a majority
finds it unimportant are Progressive Activists. According to the study:
Strong identification with religious belief appears to be a strong tribal marker for the
Devoted and Traditional Conservatives, and an absence of religious belief appears to be a
marker for Progressive Activists.
Guess which tribe runs the culture-making institutions in our society (e.g., major media,
universities, entertainment)?
I am reminded of something one of you readers, a conservative academic, wrote to me once:
that you feel safe because your department is run by traditional liberals, who don't agree with
you, but who value free and open exchange of ideas. You are very worried about what happens
when those people -- who are Baby Boomers -- retire, because the generational cohort behind
them are hardcore left-wing ideologues who do not share the traditional liberal view.
Hollywood has been at the forefront of the political resistance to President Donald Trump,
using awards shows, social media and donations to promote progressive positions on issues
from immigration to gun control.
Now, the entertainment industry is using its star power and creativity to support
down-ballot candidates in the Nov. 6 elections. Down-ballot races are typically state and
local positions that are listed on voting ballots below national posts.
This approach is part of the way Hollywood is rewriting its script for political action
following Trump's shock election in 2016.
I can't blame anyone for advocating for their political beliefs in the public square. But
these are among the most privileged people on the planet. They are Progressive Activists -- and
they are massively out of touch with the rest of the country, though they have massively more
cultural power to define the narrative than their adversaries.
Here's another interesting factoid from the report:
Progressive Activists are unique in seeing the world as a much less dangerous place than
other Americans. For other tribes, the differences are much smaller. On average, 14 percent
of Americans view the world as generally safe and nonthreatening, while among Progressive
Activists almost three times as many people hold this view (40 percent). This figure is
especially striking in light of Progressive Activists' deep pessimism about the direction of
the country (98 percent say it is going in the wrong direction) and their emotions toward the
country (45 percent say they currently feel "very" scared about the country's direction).
Think of the psychology of this! How can they feel that the world is "generally safe and
nonthreatening" while at the same time be "very" scared about the direction of the US? The
answer, I think, is that in their own lives , they feel secure. And why not? Remember
this from Yascha Mounk's essay on this study:
So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally
representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly
educated -- and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than
$100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree.
Economically, educationally, and racially, Progressive Activists are the most elite group in
the country.
Look at this amazing factoid:
First, notice that one out of three African Americans think that people are too sensitive
about race, the same percentage of Traditional Liberals who do. A solid majority of Hispanic
Americans believe that, and nearly three out of four Asian Americans believe that. Sixty
percent of Americans overall agree with this viewpoint. Who rejects it overwhelmingly?
Progressive Activists -- the rich, educated white people who control academia and media.
Note well that majorities are not saying that racism isn't a problem (81 percent
agree that we have serious problems with racism), only that there is too much emphasis on it.
Do you get that? They're saying that racism is a serious issue, but it has been
disproportionately emphasized relative to other serious issues. On bread-and-butter issues like
college admissions, Progressive Activists are far, far removed from everybody else, even
Traditional Liberals:
The numbers are similar on gender issues. Progressive Activists are radically far apart from
the views of most Americans. No wonder the media can't understand why everybody doesn't agree
with them that Brett Kavanaugh is a sexist monster.
Finally, the last chapter of the study focuses on what its authors call the "Exhausted
Majority" -- Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged and Moderates:
The four segments in the Exhausted Majority have many differences, but they share four
main attributes:
– They are more ideologically flexible
– They support finding political compromise
– They are fatigued by US politics today
– They feel forgotten in political debate
Importantly, the Traditional Conservatives do not belong to the Exhausted Majority, while
the Traditional Liberals do. The key difference lies in their mood towards the country's
politics. While the Exhausted Majority express disillusionment, frustration, and anger at the
current state of US politics, Traditional Conservatives are far more likely to express
confidence, excitement and optimism. As such, the Traditional Conservatives hold a
meaningfully different emotional disposition towards the country that aligns them more with
the Devoted Conservatives.
That's really interesting. Having read the detailed descriptions of the various tribes, I
fall more into the Traditional Conservative camp, but I am much more pessimistic about the
country's politics than TCs in this study. What accounts for that? Is it:
a) I spend a lot of time looking at the cultural fundamentals and trends, especially
regarding religion, and believe that the optimism of Traditional Conservatives is irrational;
or
b) I spend a lot of time reading and analyzing the mainstream media, including social
media, and therefore overestimate the power and influence of Progressive Activists
I'd say the answer is probably 80 percent a) and 20 percent b). I believe my fellow
Traditional Conservatives (like the Devoted Conservatives to our right) believe that things are
more stable than they actually are.
Anyway, if you have the time, I encourage you to
read the entire report. It's basic point is that neither extreme of left and right speak
for the majority of Americans, though their stridency, and the nature of media to emphasize
conflict, conditions most of us to think that things are far more polarized than they actually
are.
For me, the best news in the entire report is learning how sick and tired most Americans are
of political correctness. It's not that most people believe there aren't serious problems in
the country having to do with race, sex, immigration, and so forth. It's that people are tired
of the Progressive Speech Police stalking around like Saudi imams with sticks in hand, whacking
anyone who fails to observe strict pieties. As Yascha Mounk says in his piece about the
report:
The gap between the progressive perception and the reality of public views on this issue
could do damage to the institutions that the woke elite collectively run. A publication whose
editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to
a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership
decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population
when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next
election.
Yes. And -- drums please -- that has a lot to do with how we got Trump.
If there is one thing that still unites Americans across the ever more intellectually
suffocating and bitterly polarized political spectrum our imaginations have been crammed into
like rush hour commuters on the Tokyo Metro, it's our undying love of identity politics.
Who doesn't love identity politics? Liberals love identity politics. Conservatives love
identity politics. Political parties love identity politics. Corporations love identity
politics. Advertisers, anarchists, white supremacists, Wall Street bankers, Hollywood
producers, Twitter celebrities, the media, academia everybody loves identity politics.
Why do we love identity politics? We love them for many different reasons.
The ruling classes love identity politics because they keep the working classes focused on
race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on, and not on the fact that they
(i.e., the working classes) are, essentially, glorified indentured servants, who will spend the
majority of their sentient existences laboring to benefit a ruling elite that would gladly
butcher their entire families and sell their livers to hepatitic Saudi princes if they could
get away with it. Dividing the working classes up into sub-groups according to race, ethnicity,
and so on, and then pitting these sub-groups against each other, is extremely important to the
ruling classes, who are, let's remember, a tiny minority of intelligent but physically
vulnerable parasites controlling the lives of the vast majority of human beings on the planet
Earth, primarily by keeping them ignorant and confused.
The political parties love identity politics because they allow them to conceal the fact
that they are bought and paid for by these ruling classes, which, in our day and age, means
corporations and a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs who would gut you and your kids like
trout and sell your organs to the highest bidder if they thought they could possibly get away
with it. The political parties employ identity politics to maintain the simulation of
democracy that prevents Americans (many of whom are armed) from coming together, forming a
mob, dismantling this simulation of democracy, and then attempting to establish an actual
democracy, of, by, and for the people, which is, basically, the ruling classes' worst
nightmare. The best way to avoid this scenario is to keep the working classes ignorant and
confused, and at each other's throats over things like pronouns, white privilege, gender
appropriate bathrooms, and the complexion and genitalia of the virtually interchangeable
puppets the ruling classes allow them to vote for.
The corporate media, academia, Hollywood, and the other components of the culture industry
are similarly invested in keeping the vast majority of people ignorant and confused. The folks
who populate this culture industry, in addition to predicating their sense of self-worth on
their superiority to the unwashed masses, enjoy spending time with the ruling classes, and
reaping the many benefits of serving them and, while most of them wouldn't personally
disembowel your kids and sell their organs to some dope-addled Saudi trillionaire scion, they
would look the other way while the ruling classes did, and then invent some sort of convoluted
rationalization of why it was necessary, in order to preserve democracy and freedom (or was
some sort of innocent but unfortunate "blunder," which will never, ever, happen again).
The fake Left loves identity politics because they allow them to pretend to be
"revolutionary" and spout all manner of "militant" gibberish while posing absolutely zero
threat to the ruling classes they claim to be fighting. Publishing fake Left "samizdats" (your
donations to which are tax-deductible), sanctimoniously denouncing racism on Twitter, milking
whatever identity politics scandal is making headlines that day, and otherwise sounding like a
slightly edgier version of National Public Radio, are all popular elements of the fake Left
repertoire.
Marching along permitted parade routes, assembling in designated "free speech areas," and
listening to speeches by fake Left celebrities and assorted Democratic Party luminaries, are
also well-loved fake Left activities. For those who feel the need to be even more militant,
pressuring universities to cancel events where potentially "violent" and "oppressive" speech
acts (or physical gestures) might occur, toppling offensive historical monuments, ratting out
people to social media censors, or masking up and beating the crap out of "street Nazis" are
among the available options. All of these activities, by herding potential troublemakers into
fake Left ghettos and wasting their time, both on- and off-line, help to ensure that the ruling
classes, their political puppets, the corporate media, Hollywood, and the rest of the culture
industry can keep most people ignorant and confused.
Oh, and racists, hardcore white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other far-Right wing nuts my
God, do they love identity politics! Identity politics are their entire worldview (or
Weltanschauung, for you Nazi fetishists). Virtually every social, political, economic, and
ontological phenomenon can be explained by reducing it to race, ethnicity, religion, or some
other simplistic criterion, according to these "alt-Right" geniuses. And to render everything
even more simplistic, each and every one of their simplistic theories can be subsumed into a
meta-simplistic theory, which amounts to (did you guess it?) a conspiracy of Jews.
According to this meta-theory, this conspiracy of Jews (which is headquartered in Israel,
but maintains offices in Los Angeles and New York, from which it controls the corporate media,
Hollywood, and the entire financial sector) is responsible for well, anything they can think
of. September 11 attacks? Conspiracy of Jews. Financial crisis? Jews, naturally. Black on Black
crime? Jews again! Immigration? Globalization? Gun control laws? Abortion? Drugs? Media bias?
Who else could be behind it all but Jews?!
See, the thing is, there is no essential difference between your identity
politics-brainwashed liberal and your Swastika-tattooed white supremacist. Both are looking at
the world through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or some other type of
"identity." They are looking through this "identity" lens (whichever one it happens to be)
because either they have been conditioned to do so (most likely from the time they were
children) or they have made a conscious choice to do so (after recognizing, and affirming or
rejecting, whatever conditioning they received as children).
Quantum physicists, Sufi fakirs, and certain other esoterics understand what most of us
don't, namely, that there is no such thing as "the Truth," or "Reality," apart from our
perception of it. The world, or "reality," or whatever you want to call it, is more than happy
to transform itself into any imaginable shape and form, based on the lens you are looking at it
through. It's like a trickster in that regard. Look at "reality" through a racist lens, and
everything will make sense according to that logic. Look at it through a social justice lens,
or a Judeo-Christian lens, or a Muslim lens, or a scientific or a Scientologist lens, or a
historical materialist or capitalist lens (it really makes no difference at all) and
abracadabra! A new world is born!
Sadly, most of us never reach the stage in our personal (spiritual?) development where we
are able to make a conscious choice about which lens we want to view the world through. Mostly,
we stick with the lens we were originally issued by our families and societies. Then we spend
the rest of our fleeting lives desperately insisting that our perspective is "the Truth," and
that other perspectives are either "lies" or "errors." The fact that we do this is
unsurprising, as the ruling classes (of whatever society we happened to be born and socialized
into) are intensely invested in issuing everyone a "Weltanschauung lens" that corresponds to
whatever narrative they are telling themselves about why they deserve to be the ruling classes
and we deserve to exist to serve them, fight their wars, pay interest on their loans, not to
mention rent to live on the Earth, which they have claimed as their own and divided up amongst
themselves to exploit and ruin, which they justify with "laws" they invented, which they
enforce with armies, police, and prisons, which they teach us as children to believe is "just
the way life is" but I digress.
So, who doesn't love identity politics? Well, I don't love identity politics. But then I
tend to view political events in the context of enormous, complex systems operating beyond the
level of the individuals and other entities such systems comprise. Thus I've kind of been
keeping an eye on the restructuring of the planet by global capitalism that started in the
early 1990s, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., when global capitalism (not the U.S.A.)
became the first globally hegemonic system in the history of aspiring hegemonic systems.
Now, this system (i.e., capitalism, not the U.S.A), being globally hegemonic, has no
external enemies, so what it's been doing since it became hegemonic is aggressively
destabilizing and restructuring the planet according to its systemic needs (most notably in the
Middle East, but also throughout the rest of the world), both militarily and ideologically.
Along the way, it has encountered some internal resistance, first, from the Islamic
"terrorists," more recently, from the so-called "nationalists" and "populists," none of whom
seem terribly thrilled about being destabilized, restructured, privatized, and debt-enslaved by
global capitalism, not to mention relinquishing what remains of their national sovereignty, and
their cultures, and so on.
I've been writing about this for over
two years , so I am not going to rehash it all in detail here (this essay is already rather
long). The short version is, what we are currently experiencing (i.e., Brexit, Trump, Italy,
Hungary, et cetera, the whole "populist" or "nationalist" phenomenon) is resistance (an
insurgency, if you will) to hegemonic global capitalism, which is, essentially, a
values-decoding machine, which eliminates "traditional" (i.e., despotic) values (e.g.,
religious, cultural, familial, societal, aesthetic, and other such non-market values) and
replaces them with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity.
The fact that I happen to be opposed to some of those "traditional" values (i.e., racism,
anti-Semitism, oppression of women, homosexuals, and so on) does not change my perception of
the historical moment, or the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and economic forces shaping that
moment. God help me, I believe it might be more useful to attempt to understand those forces
than to go around pointing and shrieking at anyone who doesn't conform to my personal views
like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers .
But that's the lens I choose to look through. Maybe I've got it all assbackwards. Maybe what
is really going on is that Russia "influenced" everyone into voting for Brexit and Donald
Trump, and hypnotized them all with those Facebook ads into hating women, people of color,
transsexuals, and the Jews, of course, and all that other "populist" stuff, because the
Russians hate us for our freedom, and are hell-bent on destroying democracy and establishing
some kind of neo-fascist, misogynist, pseudo-Atwoodian dystopia. Or, I don't know, maybe the
other side is right, and it really is all a conspiracy of Jews transsexual, immigrant Jews of
color, who want to force us all to have late-term abortions and circumcise our kids, or
something.
I wish I could help you sort all that out, but I'm just a lowly political satirist, and not
an expert on identity politics or anything. I'm afraid you'll have to pick a lens through which
to interpret "reality" yourself. But then, you already have, haven't you or are you still
looking through the one that was issued to you?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Along those lines, a female reader of this blog left this comment on a thread about
Alexis
Grenell's shocking New York Times op-ed denouncing "white women" for worrying that
their sons, brothers, and fathers might be falsely accused of rape. Grenell, who is a white
woman, lambasted them over what she calls a "blood pact between white men and white women." My
reader commented
Many white women have, in fact, made a kind of "blood pact" with white men: we call it
"family" in saner times. The expectation that abstract loyalty to any random person who
shares one's gender should override one's loyalty to their actual fathers, brothers,
husbands, and sons (as well as their actual mothers, sisters, and daughters) is profoundly
sad.
With more and more fatherless homes and very small families, I wonder how many women go
through life with no tight, enduring, loving, secure bonds with a father, husband, brother,
or son. Family is where these bonds that transcend individual identity can form. But if your
marriage can be dissolved for no reason, even the most primary bonds are insecure. Without
that, it's just tribe vs. tribe.
It is worth considering that many of these hysterical activists really do despise
the family, and are eager to see families turn on each other over politics. Consider this
tweet, from the senior art critic at New York magazine:
Come gather round people wherever you roam & shun any republican family member you
have. Until this president is gone. You don't need to tell that family member that you are
shunning them. Just stand up for your country very close to home. Make it hurt for both of
you. Rise. Rise
Anyone -- left-wing or right-wing -- who would turn their back on a family member over the
family member's politics is a disgrace. I have family members and good friends with whom I
disagree strongly on politics. Anybody who tries to come between us can go to hell.
This may seem trivial to some. But I canthelp but notice that whenever there is a photo of
one of these kind of protests,at least 1/4 to a third of the protesters are taking "Selfies"
of themselves
Maybe its because im 50 years old. .Maybe im an old fogie . But it really strikes me how
immature and narcissistic most of these protesters seem .
Its like the NYT op/ed that Mr Dreher linked to yesterday. I may disagree with much of
what Paul Krugman writes.But at least he writes like an adult . The NYT op/ed that Mr Dreher
linked to reads like it was written by a 16 year old high school student
Ive long thought that those surrounded by those that they agree with , tend to not be good at
debating. For instance, a liberal that lives in a conservative part of Mississippi, is
probably good at debating.Whereas a liberal tht lives in Berkley CA probably has never had to
learn how to acutaly debate someone
The same goes for conservatives. Mostof the conservatives that I have met in Baltimore
tend to be good at debating.Because they need to be.They cant simply state a conservative
position and just sit back while everyone around them agrees with them
I think that the problem with liberalism nowdays is that a liberal is far more likely to
be surrounded by liberal media and liberal pop culture. To be in a "bubble" a conservative
has to restrict themselves to only watching FoxNews and reading the WSJ.And they pretty much
have to tune out almost all modern American pop culture.And if they go to college, they have
to go to Liberty University
All a liberal has to do in order to be in a bubble is to watch mainstream media and read
mainstream newspapers[like the NYT] and they just have to go to their local college and watch
and listen to mainstream pop culture
It didn't used to be this way.When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, igrew up in
extremely liberal areas. And the liberals that I knew were very good at discussing politics.
Nowdays the liberals that I know[and there are many in Baltimore] just repeat and giggle
about, some joke that Samantha Bee told about Republicans. The older liberals that I know are
able to discuss politics.But the younger liberals really cant seem to discuss things in any
kind of adult manner. Since they really seem to have never heard any disagreeing
viewpoints
"... Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. ..."
"... This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem." ..."
"... We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as "cultural studies" or "identity studies" (for example, gender studies) or "critical theory" because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of "theory" which arose in the late sixties. ..."
Three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous
conclusions.
Harvard University's Yascha Mounk writing for The Atlantic:
"Over the past 12 months, three scholars -- James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter
Boghossian -- wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous
conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender
studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable
Sokal Squared doesn't just expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of
dreck, though. It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license
discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals.
This tendency becomes most evident in an article that advocates extreme measures to
redress the "privilege" of white students.
Exhorting college professors to enact forms of "experiential reparations," the paper
suggests telling privileged students to stay silent, or even BINDING THEM TO THE FLOOR IN
CHAINS
If students protest, educators are told to "take considerable care not to validate
privilege, sympathize with, or reinforce it and in so doing, recenter the needs of privileged
groups at the expense of marginalized ones. The reactionary verbal protestations of those who
oppose the progressive stack are verbal behaviors and defensive mechanisms that mask the
fragility inherent to those inculcated in privilege."
In an article for Areo magazine, the authors of the hoax explain their motivation:
"Something has gone wrong in the university -- especially in certain fields within the
humanities.
Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances
has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars
increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their
worldview.
This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has
been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the
three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of
this problem."
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected
peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as "cultural
studies" or "identity studies" (for example, gender studies) or "critical theory" because it
is rooted in that postmodern brand of "theory" which arose in the late sixties.
As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields "grievance studies" in
shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail
in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance
studies, which is corrupting academic research.
Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and
sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been
to reboot these conversations.''
To read more, see Areo magazine + "academic grievance studies and the corruption of
scholarship"
"... At the time the eligible voters were males of European descent (MOED), and while not highly educated they were relatively free of propaganda and IQ's were higher than today. After giving women the right to vote and with other minorities voting the MOED became a minority voter. ..."
"... So today with propaganda and education being what it is, not to mention campaign financing laws especially post Citizen United, and MSM under control of 6 companies, the entire voting class is miseducated and easily influenced to vote for candidates chosen by the elites ..."
"... The founders who incited the revolution against British rule were the American Elites (also British citizens) who wanted more. The elites today got everything they want. They have no need for revolution. The common folk are divided, misinformed, unorganized, leaderless and males are emasculated. Incapable of taking control peacefully or otherwise. ..."
"... This was the high-tariff-era and the budget surplus was an issue all through the balance of the 19th Century. So what were the politics about? 1. Stirring stump (Trump) speeches were all about "waving the bloody shirt" ..."
"... In my view of the fundamental dynamic - namely that of history being one unbroken story of the rich exploiting the poor - representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up now would be madness. ..."
The constitution was a creation of the elite at the time, the property class. Its mission was to prevent the common folk from
having control. Democracy=mob rule= Bad.
The common folk only had the ability to elect representatives in the house, who in turn would elect Senators. Electors voted
for President and they were appointed by a means chosen by the state legislature , which only in modern times has come to mean
by the popular vote of the common folk. Starting from 1913 it was decided to let the common folk vote for Senator and give the
commonfolk the illusion of Democracy confident they could be controlled with propaganda and taxes (also adopted in 1913 with the
Fed)
At the time the eligible voters were males of European descent (MOED), and while not highly educated they were relatively
free of propaganda and IQ's were higher than today. After giving women the right to vote and with other minorities voting the
MOED became a minority voter.
Bernays science of propaganda took off during WWI, Since MOED's made up the most educated class (relative to minorities and
women) up to the 70's this was a big deal for almost 60 years , although not today when miseducation is equal among the different
races, sexes and ethnicities.
So today with propaganda and education being what it is, not to mention campaign financing laws especially post Citizen
United, and MSM under control of 6 companies, the entire voting class is miseducated and easily influenced to vote for candidates
chosen by the elites
So how do the common folk get control over the federal government? That is a pipe dream and will never happen. The founders
who incited the revolution against British rule were the American Elites (also British citizens) who wanted more. The elites today
got everything they want. They have no need for revolution. The common folk are divided, misinformed, unorganized, leaderless
and males are emasculated. Incapable of taking control peacefully or otherwise.
Pft has a point. If there was ever a time for the people to take the republic into its hands, it may have been
just after the Civil War when the Dems were discredited and the Repubs had a total control of Congress.
This was the high-tariff-era and the budget surplus was an issue all through the balance of the 19th Century.
So what were the politics about? 1. Stirring stump (Trump) speeches were all about "waving the bloody shirt"
All manner of political office-seekers devoted themselves to getting on the government gravy train, somehow.
The selling of political offices was notorious and the newspaper editors of the time were ashamed of this.
Then there was the Whiskey Ring. The New York Customs House was a major source of corruption lucre.
Then there was vote selling in blocks of as many as 10,000 and the cost of paying those who could do this.
Then there were the kickbacks from the awards of railroad concessions which included large parcels of land.
If there ever was a Golden Age of the United States it must have been when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
karlof1 @ 34 asked:"My question for several years now: What are us Commonfolk going to do to regain control of the federal government?"
The only thing us "common folk" can do is work within our personal sphere of influence, and engage who you can, when you can,
and support with any $ you can spare, to support the sites and any local radio stations that broadcast independent thought. (
if you can find any). Pacifica radio, KPFK in LA is a good example. KPFA in the bay area.
Other than another economic crash, I don't believe anything can rouse the pathetic bovine public. Bread and circuses work...
The division of representative power and stake in the political process back at the birth of the US Constitution was as you
say it was. But this wasn't because any existing power had been taken away from anyone. It was simply the state of play back then.
Since that time, we common people have developed a more egalitarian sense of how the representation should be apportioned.
We include former slaves, all ethnic groups and both genders. We exclude animals thus far, although we do have some - very modest
- protections in place.
I think it has been the rise of the socialist impulse among workers that has expanded this egalitarian view, with trade unions
and anti-imperialist revolutions and national struggles. But I'm not a scholar or a historian so I can't add details to my impression.
My point is that since the Framers met, there has been a progressive elevation of our requirements of representative government.
I think some of this also came from the Constitution itself, with its embedded Bill of Rights.
I can't say if this expansion has continued to this day or not. History may show there was a pinnacle that we have now passed,
and entered a decline. I don't know - it's hard to say how we score the Internet in this balance. It's always hard to score the
present age along its timeline. And the future is never here yet, in the present, and can only ever be guessed.
In my view, the dream of popular control of representative government remains entirely possible. I call it an aspiration rather
than a pipe dream, and one worth taking up and handing on through the generations. Current global society may survive in relatively
unbroken line for millennia to come. There's simply no percentage in calling failure at this time.
It may be that better government comes to the United States from the example of the world nations, over the decades and centuries
to come. Maybe the demonstration effect will work on us even when we cannot work on ourselves. We are not the only society of
poor people who want a fair life.
In my view of the fundamental dynamic - namely that of history being one unbroken story of the rich exploiting the poor - representative
government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect it from the
predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up now would be
madness.
"representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect
it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give up
now would be madness."
Here, here! I fully agree with you.
In my opinion, representative government was stronger in the U.S. from the 1930's to the 1970's and Europe after WW2. And as
a result the western world achieved unprecedented prosperity. Since 1980, the U.S. government has been captured by trans-national
elites, who, since the 1990's have also captured much of the political power in the EU.
Both Europe and the U.S. are now effectively dictatorships, run by a trans-national elite. The crumbling of both is the result
of this dictatorship.
Prosperity, and peace, will only return when the dictators are removed and representative government is returned.
"Both Europe and the U.S. are now effectively dictatorships, run by a trans-national elite. The crumbling of both is the result
of this dictatorship."
Exactly!! I feel like the Swedish knight Antonius Block in the movie the 7th Seal. There does not seem any way out of this
evil game by the death dealing rulers.
Love it. But you fad3d at the end. It was Gingrich, not Rodham, who was behind Contract on America, and GHWBush's Fed Bank
group wrote the legislation that would have been Bush's second term 'kinder, gentler' Gramm-Leach-Bliley bayonet up the azs of
the American Dream, as passed by a majority of Congress, and by that point Tripp and Lewinski had already pull-dated Wild Bill.
God, can you imagine being married to that hag Rodham? The purple people-eating lizards of Georgetown and Alexandria. Uurk.
I'm reading a great FDR book, 'Roosevelt and Hopkins', a signed 1st Ed copy by Robert Sherwood, and the only book extant from
my late father's excellent political and war library, after his trophy wife dumped the rest of his library off at Goodwill, lol.
They could have paid for her next booblift, ha, ha, ha.
Anyway, FDR, in my mind, only passed the populist laws that he did because he needed cannon fodder in good fighting shape for
Rothschild's Wars ("3/4ths of WW2 conscripts were medically unfit for duty," the book reports), and because Rothschild's and Queens
Bank of London needed the whole sh*taco bailed out afterward, by creating SS wage-withholding 'Trust Fund' (sic) the Fed then
tapped into, and creating Lend-Lease which let Rothschilds float credit-debt to even a higher level and across the globe. Has
it all been paid off by Germany and Japan yet?
Even Lincoln, jeez, Civil War was never about slavery, it was about finance and taxation and the illegitimate Federal supremacy
over the Republic of States, not unlike the EU today. Lincoln only freed the slaves to use them as cannon fodder and as a fifth
column.
All of these politicians were purple people-eating lizards, except maybe the Kennedy's, and they got ground and pounded like
Conor McGregor, meh?
"representative government is one of the greatest achievements of the poor. If we could only get it to work honestly, and protect
it from the predations of the rich. This is a work in progress. It forms just one aspect of millennia of struggle. To give
up now would be madness."
Compare to: Sentiments of the Nation:
12º That as the good Law is superior to every man, those dictated by our Congress must be such, that they force constancy and
patriotism, moderate opulence and indigence; and in such a way increase the wages of the poor, improve their habits, moving away
from ignorance, rapine and theft.
13º That the general laws include everyone, without exception of privileged bodies; and that these are only in the use of the
ministry..
14º That in order to dictate a Law, the Meeting of Sages is made, in the possible number, so that it may proceed with more
success and exonerate of some charges that may result.
15. That slavery be banished forever, and the distinction of castes, leaving all the same, and only distinguish one American
from another by vice and virtue.
16º That our Ports be open to friendly foreign nations, but that they do not enter the nation, no matter how friendly they
may be, and there will only be Ports designated for that purpose, prohibiting disembarkation in all others, indicating ten percent.
17º That each one be kept his property, and respect in his House as in a sacred asylum, pointing out penalties to the offenders.
18º That the new legislation does not admit torture.
19º That the Constitutional Law establishes the celebration of December 12th in all Peoples, dedicated to the Patroness of
our Liberty, Most Holy Mary of Guadalupe, entrusting to all Peoples the monthly devotion.
20º That the foreign troops, or of another Kingdom, do not step on our soil, and if it were in aid, they will not without the
Supreme Junta approval.
21º That expeditions are not made outside the limits of the Kingdom, especially overseas, that they are not of this kind yet
rather to spread the faith to our brothers and sisters of the land inside.
22º That the infinity of tributes, breasts and impositions that overwhelm us be removed, and each individual be pointed out
a five percent of seeds and other effects or other equally light weight, that does not oppress so much, as the alcabala, the Tobacconist,
the Tribute and others; because with this slight contribution, and the good administration of the confiscated goods of the enemy,
will be able to take the weight of the War, and pay the fees of employees.
Temple of the Virgen of the Ascencion
Chilpancingo, September 14, 1813.
José Mª Morelos.
23º That also be solemnized on September 16, every year, as the Anniversary day on which the Voice of Independence was raised,
and our Holy Freedom began, because on that day it was in which the lips of the Nation were deployed to claim their rights with
Sword in hand to be heard: always remembering the merit of the great Hero Mr. Don Miguel Hidalgo and his companion Don Ignacio
Allende.
Answers on November 21, 1813. And therefore, these are abolished, always being subject to the opinion of S. [u] A. [alteza]
S. [very eminent]
"... I think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman. The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix, who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the Senate. ..."
anastasia says:
September 28, 2018 at 4:47 am GMT 300 Words They were too afraid of the women's movement,
and therefore could not bring themselves to challenge her in any way. Interspersed between the
prosecutors questions which did not have the time to develop, was the awards ceremony given by
the democrats to the honoree.
But we , the people, all saw that she was mentally disturbed. Her appearance (post clean
up); her testimony, her beat up looks, drinking coke in the morning, the scrawl of her
handwriting in a statement to be seen by others, the foggy lens, the flat affect, the little
girl's voice and the incredible testimony (saying "hi" to her rapist only a few weeks later and
expecting everyone to believe that is normal, remembering that she had one beer but not
remembering who took her home; not knowing that the offer was made to go to California as if
she were living on another planet, her fear of flying, her duper's delight curled up lips
– all the tell tale signs were there for all the world, except the Senate the media, to
see.
She went to a shrink with her husband in 2012, and it was her conduct that apparently needed
explaining, so she confabulated a story about 4 boys raping her when she was 15 to explain her
inexplicable conduct to her husband, and maybe even to her friends. She later politicized the
confabulation, and she is clearly going to make a few sheckels with her several go fund me
sites that will inexplicably show $10.00 donations every 15 seconds.
She was the leaker. She went to the press almost immediately in July. They were too afraid
to point that out to everyone because the phoniest thing about her was that she wished to
remain anonymous.
Ludwig Watzal says:
Website
September 28, 2018 at 1:13 pm GMT 400 Words As a foreign observer, I watched the whole
hearing farce on CNN till midnight in Germany. For me, from the beginning, it seemed a set up
by the Democratic Party that has not emancipated itself from the Clinton filth and poison. As
their stalwart, Chuck Schumer said after the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh that the Dems will
do everything to prevent his confirmation. They found, of course, a naive patsy in Dr. Ford,
not to speak of the other two disgraceful women that prostituted themselves for base motives.
Right from the beginning, Dr. Ford played to me the role of an innocent valley girl, which
seemed to make a great impression on the CCN tribunal that commented biasedly during the breaks
of the hearing committee. It was a great TV-propaganda frame.
Don't forget; the so-called sexual harassment occurred 36 years (!) ago. Dr. Ford was 15,
and Judge Kavanaugh was 17 years old. But Dr. Ford discovered her "suffering" after she heart
from the nomination of Kavanaugh in July 2018. Why didn't she complain to the police after the
"incident" happened in 1982 or at least after the "me to movement" popped up? May it as it is.
Everybody who knows the high school or prep-school-life and behavior of American youths should
not be surprised that such incidents can happen. When I studied at the U of Penn for my M.A.
degree, I got to know American student campus life. For me, it was a great experience. Every
weekend, wild parties were going on where students were boozed and screwed around like hell.
Nobody made a big fuss out of it.
On both sides, the whole hearing was very emotional. But get one argument straight: In a
state of the law the accuser has to come up with hard evidence and not only with suspicions and
accusations; in a state of the law, the accused has not to prove his innocence, which only
happens in totalitärian states.
Why did the majority of the Judiciary Committee agree on a person like the down-to-earth and
humdrum person such as Mitchell to ask questions? It seems as if they were convinced in advance
of Kavanaugh's guilt. The only real defender of Kavanaugh was Senator Lindsey Graham with his
outburst of anger. If the Reps don't get this staid Judge Kavanagh confirmed they ought to be
ashamed of themselves.
This hearing was not a lesson in a democratic process but in the perversion of it.
@WorkingClass Really – everyone should know by now that in any sex related offence,
men are guilty until proven innocent .& even then "not guilty" really means the defendant
was "too cunning to be found guilty by a patriarchal court, interpreting patriarchal Law."
My comment on those proceedings today was this: "This is awful, I've never seen a more
tawdry, sleazy performance in my life – and I've seen a few. No Democrat will ever get
my vote again. They can find some other party to run with. Those people are despicable.
Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSRUK-l7dM”
;
Later on, I noted: "None of this has anything to do with his record as a judge – and
that's not such a good record: https://www.lawfareblog.com/judge-brett-kavanaugh-national-security-readers-guide
at least if you're concerned with the Constitutional issues SCOTUS will actually decide. None
of it, not one word. It's irrelevant. It's partisan harassment, it's defamation, it's
character assassination, and all of it is *irrelevant* , it's useless – and in the end
it will be both futile, because there will be a party line vote, and counterproductive,
because a lot of people will be totally repelled by the actions of the Clintonistas –
because that's what those people are."
The Neocons are evil. They despise Middle America almost as much as do the wild-eyed
Leftists, just in a different way for slightly different specific reasons.
Well it looks like the repubs will get what they want – a woman abusing (like their
President) alcoholic defender of the rich and powerful. Fits right into their "elite" club.
After watching the Big Circus yesterday, I rate Ford's performance a 6 (sympathetic person,
but weak memory and zero corroboration). Cavanaugh gets an 8 (great opening statement,
wishy-washy and a dearth of straight answers during questioning). Had it been a tie, the fact
that the putative event occurred when he was 17 would break it.
@anastasia Good points, but yesterday's inference is that she became permanently
disturbed by the incident 36 years ago . In my experience, most psychologists are attracted
to that field to work out personal issues -- and aren't always successful. Ms. Ford fits that
mold, IMHO.
One thing I haven't heard is a challenge to Ford's belief that her attackers intended
rape. That may or may not be true. Ford testified about "uproarious laughter." That sounds to
me more like a couple of muddled, drunken male teens having their idea of "fun" -- i.e.,
molestation and dominance (which is certainly unacceptable, nonetheless).
Much ado about nothing. Attempted political assassination at it's best. American's have once
more been disgusted to a level they previously thought impossible. Who among us here does not
remember those glorious teenage years complete with raging hormones? What man does not
remember playing offense while the girl's played defense? It was as natural as nature itself.
No harm, no foul, that's just how we rolled back in the late 70′s and early 80′s.
@anastasiaI think you've really nailed it, Anastasia. Watching this farce on TV, a
few things were quite obvious to me: Christine Ford is a very disturbed and unhappy woman.
The Republicans were afraid to question her. So, they brought on this attorney from Phoenix,
who was a total flop. Senator Graham finally rode in to save the day. (I am not accustomed to
praising Graham. But he was effective yesterday.) The lead democrats, Feinstein, Leahy, and
Durbin, were actually ashamed when senior Republicans publicly called them out for the sham
they were perpetrating on the American people. The silly Senator from Hawaii and Dick
Blumenthal demonstrated that they had no shame. All in all, it was a low point for the
Senate.
For his part, Kavanaugh is oddly obtuse for one who is said to be such a great jurist.
Meek, mild and emotional, he does not seem up to the task of defending himself.
It appears that Ms. Mercer wrote this before the second half when things were looking
bleak.
Reminded me of Super Bowl 51 at halftime. I even tuned out just like I did that game until
I checked in later to see that the Patriot comeback was under way.
@mike k You are a useful idiot for the destruction of western civilization. Men are not
abusers of women, excepting a few criminals. Men protect families from criminals.
@Haxo Angmark Yes, Ms Mitchell did a very incompetent job, but it won't matter. Kavanaugh
will be confirmed Saturday, due to his own counterattack and refusal to be a victim.
Little miss pouty head cute face was a huge liar, obvious from the second I heard her. The
kind of chick who can go from a little sad voice to screaming and throwing dishes and
brandishing a knife in a heartbeat.
"... There are some who, though uncomfortable with the abrogation of the presumption of innocence that is characteristic of the Democrats' treatment of the sexual assault allegations, are eager to seize on any opportunity to keep Kavanaugh off the court. ..."
"... A central aim of the Democrats' strategy in the Kavanaugh hearings has been to obscure the most important class issues. They adopt the tone of phony moral outrage over the three-decade-old allegation while expressing no similar anger or even concern over the crimes committed by the American ruling class throughout the world. ..."
"... Not a day goes by where the US military is not dropping bombs or launching drone strikes, with the death toll from the "war on terror" well over one million. Thirteen thousand immigrant children are currently locked up in internment camps. Thousands of workers in the US die each year from industrial accidents and work-related illnesses. When Democratic Senator Cory Booker complains about the "patriarchy," he looks past the fact that the fall in life expectancy in the working class is largely driven by alcoholism, drug abuse and depression among men. ..."
"... Kavanaugh is himself complicit in these crimes, from which the relentless focus on allegations of sexual misconduct is intended as a diversion. There is documentary evidence Kavanaugh helped author Alberto Gonzales' "torture memos" during the Bush administration. He is on the record praising the constitutionality of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. Email exchanges prove he advocates repealing the right to abortion for millions of women across the country. ..."
"... The Democratic Party's refusal to address such issues is a deliberate decision. They are themselves guilty of involvement in these crimes -- and intend for them to continue, whether Kavanaugh or some other reactionary is on the court. ..."
"... twenty years ago Kavanaugh was a central player in the Republicans' anti-democratic use of sex scandals to attempt to bring down the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton ..."
After nearly nine hours of Senate testimony by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his
accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the public is no closer to knowing what did or did not happen
over thirty years ago, when Ford alleges Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. Kavanaugh's future
as the nominee now depends on the outcome of an FBI investigation to which Senate Republicans
agreed on Friday.
The allegations of sexual assault have become the sole issue in Kavanaugh's confirmation,
and the Democratic Party and the media have presented Kavanaugh's guilt on this matter as a
foregone conclusion. The focus of the proceedings reflects the political priorities of the
Democratic Party and the interests of the affluent social layers to which it is appealing.
There are some who, though uncomfortable with the abrogation of the presumption of
innocence that is characteristic of the Democrats' treatment of the sexual assault allegations,
are eager to seize on any opportunity to keep Kavanaugh off the court. The ends, as the
saying goes, supposedly justify the means. They should be warned: This is bad politics, bad
strategy and even worse tactics. There are political consequences to such efforts to confuse
and cover up the real issues confronting the working class.
A central aim of the Democrats' strategy in the Kavanaugh hearings has been to obscure
the most important class issues. They adopt the tone of phony moral outrage over the
three-decade-old allegation while expressing no similar anger or even concern over the crimes
committed by the American ruling class throughout the world.
Not a day goes by where the US military is not dropping bombs or launching drone
strikes, with the death toll from the "war on terror" well over one million. Thirteen thousand
immigrant children are currently locked up in internment camps. Thousands of workers in the US
die each year from industrial accidents and work-related illnesses. When Democratic Senator
Cory Booker complains about the "patriarchy," he looks past the fact that the fall in life
expectancy in the working class is largely driven by alcoholism, drug abuse and depression
among men.
Kavanaugh is himself complicit in these crimes, from which the relentless focus on
allegations of sexual misconduct is intended as a diversion. There is documentary evidence
Kavanaugh helped author Alberto Gonzales' "torture memos" during the Bush administration. He is
on the record praising the constitutionality of mass surveillance by the National Security
Agency. Email exchanges prove he advocates repealing the right to abortion for millions of
women across the country.
The Democratic Party's refusal to address such issues is a deliberate decision. They are
themselves guilty of involvement in these crimes -- and intend for them to continue, whether
Kavanaugh or some other reactionary is on the court.
The Democrats are not even capable of addressing the fact that twenty years ago
Kavanaugh was a central player in the Republicans' anti-democratic use of sex scandals to
attempt to bring down the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton . To raise
this issue would expose the fact that the Democrats are engaged in the same methods today.
As part of their effort to center opposition to Kavanaugh on allegations of sexual
misconduct, the Democrats are utilizing the methods of #MeToo, which have consisted of treating
allegations as fact and the presumption of innocence as an unnecessary burden that must be
dispensed with.
The WSWS takes no position on whether or not Kavanaugh is guilty of the allegations against
him. However, as a legal matter, all that has been presented are the uncorroborated assertions
of one individual. At Thursday's hearing, Democratic senators carried out a degrading
spectacle, poring over Kavanaugh's high school yearbook and his puerile, 16-year-old references
to drinking, flatulence and vomiting as though they prove he is guilty of sexual assault.
The media has followed suit. In an editorial board statement published Thursday night, the
New York Times presented Kavanaugh's testimony as "volatile and belligerent." The
statement makes no reference to Kavanaugh's political views, but concludes that he was "hard to
believe," "condescending," "clumsy," "coy," "misleading" and likely a "heavy drinker." The
reader is led to conclude that he must be guilty of the alleged crime.
Speaking on CNN last week, Hawaii Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono said the presumption of
innocence "is what makes it really difficult for victims and survivors of these traumatic
events to come forward." New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer told reporters that there
is "no presumption of innocence" in Kavanaugh's case because "it's not a legal proceeding, it's
a fact-finding proceeding."
The character of the Democrats' operation in relation to the Kavanaugh hearing allowed this
arch-reactionary to present himself as the victim of what he referred to in his opening
statement as a "left-wing" conspiracy. The Democrats are, in fact, engaged in a highly staged
political operation. However, there is nothing left-wing about it. On the contrary, the
Democrats have adopted the political methods of the far-right.
The presumption of innocence is no small matter and dispensing with it has the most
far-reaching consequences. Socialists have always stood against efforts by representatives of
the bourgeoisie to obscure the class issues and undercut democratic consciousness. The causes
with which the left has been historically associated involve a defense of the democratic and
egalitarian principles established by the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century,
including the presumption of innocence and due process.
The use of emotion and prejudice to weaken popular support for these rights, divide the
working class, and facilitate state repression, militarism and corporate exploitation is the
historical tradition of right-wing politics. Basic democratic principles are always most
vulnerable when the ruling class is able to play on moods of mass retribution against alleged
perpetrators of crimes, particularly sexual violence, due to its inherent emotional appeal.
The Democrats' strategy in the Kavanaugh hearings has much in common with these traditions.
Appeals to moods of vengeance and encouragement of visceral hatred of the accused are the
methods of medieval justice. They are being employed to advance the Democratic Party's efforts
to consolidate a political constituency among the affluent upper-middle class.
Socialists hold no brief for Brett Kavanaugh. But the tactics used against him will be
employed with a thousand times more force and power against the oppressed and those opposed to
the policies of the ruling elite. The case of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, persecuted for
years on the basis of trumped-up sexual allegations, is one such example.
The operation of the Democrats in the Kavanaugh hearing cannot be separated from the
character of its entire opposition to the Trump administration. It has sought to suppress and
divert popular opposition to Trump behind the reactionary militarist and anti-democratic agenda
of dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus. In this conflict within the ruling
class, there is no progressive or democratic faction.
Kavanaugh is a political reactionary and an enemy of the working class. However, in waging
its opposition to this right-wing Republican and the Trump administration, the working class
must not allow itself to be subordinated to the agenda of the Democrats. To do so would only
disarm the working class, undermine democratic rights and facilitate the ever more right-wing
trajectory of American politics.
... it appears that 21st century sexual politics now affords women the best of all worlds. She may now participate as an equal
in dorm party drinking games with men.
And yet she remains so vulnerable that 35 years later an alleged incident involving the exposure of a (presumably flaccid)
male member - as a result of such activities - seemingly merits serious investigation as an 'assault'...
Prosvirnin
is the most talented writer.
Limonov
has by far the most colorful personality.
Dugin
has been the most effective at promoting himself in the West. Prokhanov probably has the most name
recognition in Russia. Galkovsky created the most powerful memes.
Krylov
provided the esoteric flavoring.
And yet out of all of Russia's
right-wing intellectuals
, there is perhaps none so unique as Egor Kholmogorov.
This
is ironic, because out of all of the above, he is the closest to the "golden mean" of the Russian
nationalist memeplex.
He is a realist on Soviet achievements,
crimes, and lost opportunities, foregoing both the Soviet nostalgia of Prokhanov, the kneejerk Sovietophobia
of Prosvirnin, and the unhinged conspiracy theories of Galkovsky. He is a normal, traditional Orthodox
Christian, in contrast to the "atheism plus" of Prosvirnin, the mystical obscurantism of Duginism, and the
esoteric experiments of Krylov. He has time neither for the college libertarianism of Sputnik i Pogrom
hipster nationalism, nor the angry "confiscate and divide" rhetoric of the National Bolsheviks.
Instead of wasting his time on
ideological rhetoric, he reads Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and writes
reviews
about it on his website.
And about 224 other books
.
And this brings us to what makes
Kholmogorov so unique: He is an extremely well-read autodidact.
This allows him to write informed and
engaging articles on a very wide variety of different topics and breaking news.
In my opinion, Kholmogorov is simply the
best modern Russian right-wing
intellectual
, period.
Unfortunately, he is almost entirely
unknown in the English-speaking world; he does not angle for interviews with Western media outlets like
Prosvirnin, nor does he energetically pursue foreign contacts like Dugin. Over the years I have done my very
small part to remedy this situation, translating two of Kholmogorov's articles (
Europe's
Week of Human Sacrifice
;
A Cruel French Lesson
). Still, there's only so much one blogger with many other things to write about
can do.
Happily, a multilingual Russian fan of
Kholmogorov has stepped up to the plate: Fluctuarius Argenteus. Incidentally, he is a fascinating fellow in
his own right – he is a well recognized expert in Spanish history and culture – though his insistence on
anonymity constrains what I can reveal, at least beyond his wish to be the "Silver Surfer" to Kholmogorov's
Galactus.
We hope to make translations of
Kholmogorov's output consistently available on The Unz Review in the months to come.
In the meantime, I am privileged to
present the first Fluctuarius-translated Kholmogorov article for your delectation.
***
A New Martin Luther?: James Damore's Case from a Russian Conservative Perspective
Google fires employee James Damore
for "perpetuating gender stereotypes.
– You persecute your employees for
having opinions and violate the rights of White men, Centrists, and Conservatives.
– No, we don't. You're fired.
A conversation just like or similar to
this one recently took place in the office of one of modern information market monsters, the Google
Corporation.
Illustration to the Google scandal.
James Damore fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes". Source: Screenshot of Instragram user bluehelix.
Google knows almost everything about us,
including the contents of our emails, our addresses, our voice samples (
OK Google
), our favorite
stuff, and, sometimes, our sexual preferences. Google used to be on the verge of literally looking at the
world with our own eyes through Google Glass, but this prospect appears to have been postponed, probably
temporarily. However, the threat of manipulating public opinion through search engine algorithms has been
discussed in the West for a long while, even to the point of becoming a central
House of Cards
plotline.
Conversely, we know next to nothing
about Google. Now, thanks to an ideological scandal that shook the company, we suddenly got a glimpse of
corporate values and convictions that the company uses a roadmap to influencing us in a major way, and
American worldview even more so. Suddenly, Google was revealed to be a system permeated by ideology,
suffused with Leftist and aggressively feminist values.
The story goes this way. In early
August, an anonymous manifesto titled
Google's Ideological Echo Chamber
was circulated through the
local network of Google. The author lambasted the company's ideological climate, especially its policy of
so-called diversity. This policy has been adopted by almost all of US companies, and Google has gone as far
as to appoint a "chief diversity officer". The goal of the polity is to reduce the number of white
cisgendered male employees, to employ as many minorities and women as possible and to give them fast-track
promotions – which, in reality, gives them an unfair, non-market based advantage.
The author argues that Leftism and
"diversity" policies lead to creating an "echo chamber" within the company, where a person only talks to
those who share their opinions, and, through this conversation, is reinforced in the opinion that their
beliefs are the only ones that matter. This "echo chamber" narrows one's intellectual horizon and undermines
work efficiency, with following "the party line" taking precedence over real productivity.
In contrast to Google's buzzwords of
"vision" and "innovation", the author claims that the company has lost its sight behind its self-imposed
ideological blindfold and is stuck in a morass.
As Google employs intellectuals, argues
the critic, and most modern Western intellectuals are from the Left, this leads to creating a closed Leftist
clique within the company. If the Right rejects everything contrary to the God>human>nature hierarchy, the
Left declares all natural differences between humans to be nonexistent or created by social constructs.
The central Leftist idea is the class
struggle, and, given that the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie struggle is now irrelevant, the atmosphere of
struggle has been transposed onto gender and race relations. Oppressed Blacks are fighting against White
oppressors, oppressed women challenge oppressive males. And the corporate management (and, until recently,
the US presidency) is charged with bringing the "dictatorship of the proletariat" to life by imposing the
"diversity" policy.
The critic argues that the witch-hunt
of Centrists and Conservatives, who are forced to conceal their political alignment or resign from the job,
is not the only effect of this Leftist tyranny. Leftism also leads to inefficiency, as the coveted job goes
not to the best there is but to the "best woman of color". There are multiple educational or motivation
programs open only to women or minorities. This leads to plummeting efficiencies, disincentivizes White men
from putting effort into work, and creates a climate of nervousness, if not sabotage. Instead of churning
out new ground-breaking products, opines the critic, Google wastes too much effort on fanning the flames of
class struggle.
What is the proposed solution?
Stop diving people into "oppressors" and
"the oppressed" and forcefully oppressing the alleged oppressors. Stop branding every dissident as an
immoral scoundrel, a racist, etc.
The diversity of opinion must apply to
everyone. The company must stop alienating Conservatives, who are, to call a spade a spade, a minority that
needs their rights to be protected. In addition, conservatively-inclined people have their own advantages,
such as a focused and methodical approach to work.
Fight all kinds of prejudice, not only
those deemed worthy by the politically correct America.
End diversity programs discriminatory
towards White men and replace them with non-discriminatory ones.
Have an unbiased assessment of the costs
and efficiency of diversity programs, which are not only expensive but also pit one part of the company's
employees against the other.
Instead of gender and race differences,
focus on psychological safety within the company. Instead of calling to "feel the others' pain", discuss
facts. Instead of cultivating sensitivity and soft skins, analyze real issues.
Admit that not all racial or gender
differences are social constructs or products of oppression. Be open towards the study of human nature.
The last point proved to be the most
vulnerable, as the author of the manifesto went on to formulate his ideas on male vs. female differences
that should be accepted as fact if Google is to improve its performance.
The differences argued by the author are
as follows:
Women are more interested in people, men
are more interested in objects.
Women are prone to cooperation, men to
competition. All too often, women can't take the methods of competition considered natural among men.
Women are looking for a balance between
work and private life, men are obsessed with status and
Feminism played a major part in
emancipating women from their gender roles, but men are still strongly tied to theirs. If the society seeks
to "feminize" men, this will only lead to them leaving STEM for "girly" occupations (which will weaken
society in the long run).
It was the think piece on the natural
differences of men and women that provoked the greatest ire. The author was immediately charged with
propagating outdated sexist stereotypes, and the Google management commenced a search for the dissent, with
a clear purpose of giving him the sack. On 8th August, the heretic was revealed to be James Damore, a
programmer. He was fired with immediate effect because, as claimed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, "portions of
the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our
workplace". Damore announced that he was considering a lawsuit.
We live in a post-Trump day and age,
that is why the Western press is far from having a unanimous verdict on the Damore affair. Some call him "a
typical sexist", for others he is a "free speech martyr". By dismissing Damore from his job, Google
implicitly confirmed that all claims of an "echo chamber" and aggressive Leftist intolerance were precisely
on point. Julian Assange has already tweeted: "Censorship is for losers, WikiLeaks is offering a job to
fired Google engineer James Damore".
It is highly plausible that the Damore
Memo may play the same breakthrough part in discussing the politically correct insanity as WikiLeaks and
Snowden files did in discussing the dirty laundry of governments and secret services. If it comes to pass,
Damore will make history as a new Martin Luther challenging the Liberal "Popery".
However, his intellectual audacity
notwithstanding, it should be noted that Damore's own views are vulnerable to Conservative criticism.
Unfortunately, like the bulk of Western thought, they fall into the trap of Leftist "cultural
constructivism" and Conservative naturalism.
Allegedly, there are only two possible
viewpoints. Either gender and race differences are biologically preordained and therefore unremovable and
therefore should always be taken into account, or those differences are no more than social constructs and
should be destroyed for being arbitrary and unfair.
The ideological groundwork of the
opposing viewpoints is immediately apparent. Both equate "biological" with "natural" and therefore "true",
and "social" with "artificial" and therefore "arbitrary" and "false". Both sides reject "prejudice" in favor
of "vision", but politically correct Leftists reject only a fraction of prejudices while the critic calls
for throwing all of them away indiscriminately.
As a response, Damore gets slapped with
an accusation of drawing upon misogynist prejudice for his own ideas. Likewise, his view of Conservatives is
quite superficial. The main Conservative trait is not putting effort into routine work but drawing upon
tradition for creative inspiration. The Conservative principle is "innovation through tradition".
The key common mistake of both Google
Leftists and their critic is their vision of stereotypes as a negative distortion of some natural truth. If
both sides went for an in-depth reading of Edmund Burke, the "father of Conservatism", they would learn that
the prejudice is a colossal historical experience pressurized into a pre-logical form, a collective
consciousness that acts when individual reason fails or a scrupulous analysis is impossible. In such
circumstances, following the prejudice is a more sound strategy than contradicting it. Prejudice is
shorthand for common sense. Sometimes it oversimplifies things, but still works most of the time. And, most
importantly, all attempts to act "in spite of the prejudice" almost invariably end in disaster.
Illustration to the Google scandal. A
fox sits gazing at the Google's Ideological Echo Chamber exposing the ideas of the fired engineer James
Damore. Source: Screenshot of Instragram user bluehelix.
However, the modern era allows us to
diagnose our own prejudice and rationalize them so we could control them better, as opposed to blind
obedience or rejection. Moreover, if the issue of "psychological training" ever becomes relevant in a
country as conservative as Russia is, that is the problem we should concentrate on: analyzing the roots of
our prejudices and their efficient use.
The same could be argued for gender
relations. Damore opposes the Leftist "class struggle of the genders" with a technocratic model of
maximizing the profit from each gender's pros and cons. This functionalism appears to be logical in its own
way, but is indeed based on too broad assumptions, claiming that all women are unfit for competition, that
all of them like relationships and housekeeping while all men are driven by objects and career. And, as
Damore claims biological grounds for his assumptions, all our options boil down to mostly agreeing with him
or branding him as a horrible sexist and male chauvinist.
However, the fact that gender roles
historically developed based on biology but are, as a whole, a construct of society and culture does not
give an excuse to changing or tearing them down, as clamored by Leftists. Quite the contrary: the social,
cultural, and historical determinism of these roles gives us a reason to keep them in generally the same
form without any coups or revolutions.
First, that tradition is an
ever-growing accumulation of experience. Rejecting tradition is tantamount to social default and requires
very good reasons to justify. Second, no change of tradition occurs as a result of a "gender revolution",
only its parodic inversion. Putting men into high heels, miniskirts, and bras, fighting against urinals in
public WCs only reverses the polarity without creating true equality. The public consciousness still sees
the "male" as "superior", and demoting "masculinity" to "femininity" as a deliberate degradation of the
"superior". No good can come of it, just as no good came out of humiliating wealth and nobility during the
Communist revolution in Russia. What's happening now is not equal rights for women but the triumph of gender
Bolshevism.
Damore's error, therefore, consists in
abandoning the domain of the social and the historical to the enemy while limiting the Conservative sphere
of influence to the natural, biological domain. However, the single most valuable trait in conservative
worldview is defending the achievements of history and not just biological determinism.
The final goal of a Conservative
solution to the gender problem should not be limited to a rationalist functionalization of society. It
should lead to discovering a social cohesion where adhering to traditional male and female ways and
stereotypes (let's not call them roles – the world is not a stage, and men and women not merely players)
would not keep males and females from expressing themselves in other domains, provided they have a genuine
calling and talent.
The art of war is not typical of a
woman; however, women warriors such as Joan of Arc leave a much greater impact in historical memory. The art
of government is seen as mostly male, yet it makes great female rulers, marked not by functional usefulness
but true charisma, all the more memorable. The family is the stereotypical domain of the woman, which leads
to greater reverence towards fathers that put their heart and soul into their families.
Social cohesion, an integral part of it
being the harmony of men and women in the temple of the family, is the ideal to be pursued by our Russian,
Orthodox, Conservative society. It is the collapse of the family that made gender relations into such an
enormous issue in the West: men and women are no longer joined in a nucleus of solidarity but pitted against
one another as members of antagonistic classes. And this struggle, as the Damore Memo has demonstrated, is
already stymieing the business of Western corporations. Well, given our current hostile relations, it's
probably for the better.
A quick observation and a fascinating parallele. Serena Williams and the US global
hyperpower.
Serena at 36 got bitten fair and square at US open by a girl of 20, almost half her age.
So she throws up a nuclear tantrum, publicly calling the referee a thief, threatening that he
will never referee again, obviously thanks to her money, power and gender.
During her post-game interview, Serena told a news conference, "I'm here, fighting for
women's rights, for women's equality, and for all kind of stuff it made me think that it was
a sexist remark [referring to the penalty the referee Ramos awarded her]."
The declining US fights for human rights as declining Serena fights for women's rights.
Both invoke exceptionalism and higher principles and go nuclear when they cannot win any more
under the established international rules. The irony of killing the Yemenis en mass whilst
"fighting" for the human rights of terrorists in Syria is just like Serena fighting for
women's rights against another younger and more capable woman.
Kiza - interesting point. Yes clearly Serena retrofitted the women's movement to justify
what was an old-fashioned Connors/McEnroe male tennis tantrum, although extremely mild
comapred to some of the crap those two pulled back in the day.
What goes without saying is the behaviour is as repulsive when Serena does it as when
McEnroe/Connors did.
Serena at 36 is no longer the dominant force just as America is no longer. However, it is
fair to say the winner is where she is because she trained extensively and I believe lives in
America so really she is an example of globalism and racial diversity, if not American
exeptionalism.
Women's tennis post Serena will not be dominated by Americans, but by American training of
the best players regardless of their origination
"... "I'm here, fighting for women's rights, for women's equality, and for all kind of stuff it made me think that it was a sexist remark [referring to the penalty Ramos awarded her] ..."
"... "I don't believe it's a good idea to apply a standard of 'If men can get away with it, women should be able to, too,' ..."
"... "Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?" ..."
"... "we cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with this is the sort of behavior that no one should be engaging in on the court." ..."
After being penalized for calling chair umpire Carlos Ramos a "thief," Williams
summoned up the evil spirits of political correctness to plead her case. She was heard
telling officials
that many male tennis players have done "much worse" without any sort of retribution.
In other words, Ramos was a cave-dwelling "sexist" put on earth to thwart the progress
of womanhood.
During her post-game interview, Serena told a news conference, "I'm here,
fighting for women's rights, for women's equality, and for all kind of stuff it made me think
that it was a sexist remark [referring to the penalty Ramos awarded her] .
There were faint echoes of Oprah Winfrey's famous speech
at the Golden Globes in that it was the right message delivered at exactly the wrong time and
place.
So now, America's dethroned tennis queen, playing the gender card game instead of tennis, is
acting spokesperson for downtrodden women everywhere. Yet certainly Williams has heard of John
McEnroe, the former American tennis star whose on-court temper tantrums are now legendary. In
1990, for example, this loudmouthed male was tossed out of the Australian Open – not
just penalized – for verbally abusing the chair umpire, much like Williams did.
Since it may come off as chauvinistic for me – a burly male – to criticize
Serena, perhaps it would be more appropriate to quote Martina Navratilova, 61, one of the
greatest
female tennis players of all time.
"I don't believe it's a good idea to apply a standard of 'If men can get away with it,
women should be able to, too,' Navratilova
wrote in a New York Times op-ed regarding Williams' epic meltdown. "Rather, I think
the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our
sport and to respect our opponents?"
The Czech-born American went on to comment that "we cannot measure ourselves by what we
think we should also be able to get away with this is the sort of behavior that no one should
be engaging in on the court."
Eureka! Navratilova – who hails from a bygone era when the vision of political
correctness, 'virtue signaling' and 'social justice warriors' was just a flash in the pan
– nailed it. Instead of looking to some external other to explain our life circumstances
– like losing a tennis match, for example, or a presidential election (wink, wink)
– people should look to themselves as the agents for proactive and positive change. Such
a message, however, would quickly sink the Liberal ship, which is predicated upon the idea that
the world is forever divided between oppressor and oppressed. What the Liberals fail to
appreciate, however, is that they are becoming the real oppressors as they continue to sideline
anybody who does not think and act exactly as they do.
Following Serena's epic meltdown, the Melbourne-based Herald Sun published a cartoon by Mark
Knight that shows the American tennis star as she proceeds to stomp on her racket, mouth open
and hair going straight up. It was not a flattering or subtle drawing, but given the
circumstances, that should probably come as no surprise.
2015: 12 Charlie Hebdo illustrators shot dead for depiction of prophet Muhammad -
thousands line streets demonstrating for freedom of sattire & humour
2018: Mark Knight draws caricature of Serena Williams - thousands shout racist &
demand his removal from Twiter and the media pic.twitter.com/NDpFrbigca
The Liberal outrage came fast and heavy as critics slammed the caricature as racist and
offensive. It would take hundreds of pages to recite them all, but as one example, CNN
columnist Rebecca Wanzo
labeled the cartoon as an example of – wait for it – "visual
imperialism," which is manifest by "a black grotesque seeming natural."
Never mind that the behavior of Serena Williams was "grotesque," which is what
inspired Knight's unflattering drawing of her in the first place. That is what is meant by a
'caricature', where the artist attempts to convey the essence of an event through imagery. Yes,
sometimes brutal imagery.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The
Moscow News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in
2013.
A quick observation and a fascinating parallele. Serena Williams and the US global
hyperpower.
Serena at 36 got bitten fair and square at US open by a girl of 20, almost half her age.
So she throws up a nuclear tantrum, publicly calling the referee a thief, threatening that he
will never referee again, obviously thanks to her money, power and gender.
During her post-game interview, Serena told a news conference, "I'm here, fighting for
women's rights, for women's equality, and for all kind of stuff it made me think that it was
a sexist remark [referring to the penalty the referee Ramos awarded her]."
The declining US fights for human rights as declining Serena fights for women's rights.
Both invoke exceptionalism and higher principles and go nuclear when they cannot win any more
under the established international rules. The irony of killing the Yemenis en mass whilst
"fighting" for the human rights of terrorists in Syria is just like Serena fighting for
women's rights against another younger and more capable woman.
Kiza - interesting point. Yes clearly Serena retrofitted the women's movement to justify
what was an old-fashioned Connors/McEnroe male tennis tantrum, although extremely mild
comapred to some of the crap those two pulled back in the day.
What goes without saying is the behaviour is as repulsive when Serena does it as when
McEnroe/Connors did.
Serena at 36 is no longer the dominant force just as America is no longer. However, it is
fair to say the winner is where she is because she trained extensively and I believe lives in
Amerikkka so really she is an example of globalism and racial diversity, if not Amerikkkan
exeptionalism.
Women's tennis post Serena will not be dominated by Amerikkkans but by Amerikkkan training
of the best players regardless of their origination
As commented elsewhere, all her screeching about double standards for women are utter BS. She
broke the rules while playing against another woman and not a man. The men's tennis league is
utterly irrelevant since she may as well have compared her league to men's football. She
failed by the standards of her league and not those of another. It was clear that she was
breaking the rules of her league and she was the one that escalated the conflict. It has
nothing to do with women's rights.
The PC drones are rather mentally deficient. They respond to trigger phrases and not to
concepts or principles.
Australian cartoonist Mark Knight is in trouble with J K Rowling and other self-styled
guardians of who may portray Serena Williams in meltdown and who may not. The offending
drawing below:
I agree with Martina Navratilova on Serena Williams conduct
" Navratilova went so far as to write an editorial for the New York Times in which she
claimed that, in complaining post-match that Ramos would not have reacted the same way to an
argumentative male player, Williams was "missing the point" and would have been better served
conducting herself with "respect for the sport we love so dearly."
"I don't believe it's a good idea to apply a standard of 'If men can get away with it,
women should be able to, too,' " Navratilova said of Williams in her editorial. "Rather, I
think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor
our sport and to respect our opponents?"
Serena Williams behaviour ruined the experience of victory for Naomi Osaka, if you get a
chance to see film of the whole debacle with the booing crowd! She looked like the most
miserable winner in ever.
Another issue is that Williams deliberately puts on a tantrum and then claims the tantrum is
normal emotional behaviour. On top of that, she tries to pass off this spoilt-brat outburst
as characteristic of how strong, feminist women behave. All done as much to deny Osaka the
joy of winning her first major championship as to attack the umpire.
And people who should know better swallow Williams' idiocy hook, line and sinker.
Very apt: "So we excuse the
rules and condemn their application---but only for certain people"
I suspect nationalism or ethnocentrism were also factors, not only identity politics. Selena has ungly history of tantrum thouth
and that might point to poriblems with performance enhancing drags (she did have a unexplained meltdown in Wimbledon 2014)
Notable quotes:
"... Drama and literature at their best offer illustrative anecdotes -- small stories that represents larger truths. The absurdist theater of the women's U.S. Open tennis final, along with the mania it provoked, has become just such an anecdote. It illustrates the bleak assessment Edward Ward, my former philosophy professor and friend, once uttered over cheese sandwiches in the campus cafeteria: "We live in a society where we excuse the rules, and condemn their application." ..."
Serena Williams Serves Tantrum, Scores for Identity PoliticsSo we excuse the
rules and condemn their application---but only for certain people
Drama and
literature at their best offer illustrative anecdotes -- small stories that represents larger
truths. The absurdist theater of the women's U.S. Open tennis final, along with the mania it
provoked, has become just such an anecdote. It illustrates the bleak assessment Edward Ward, my
former philosophy professor and friend, once uttered over cheese sandwiches in the campus
cafeteria: "We live in a society where we excuse the rules, and condemn their
application."
Indifference to behavioral regulations and standards of practice had become common to the
point of banality, Ward argued, subjecting anyone who attempted to enforce the rules to
vilification.
For those who do not closely follow professional tennis, here's a review of the controversy.
Serena Williams, undoubtedly one of the greatest players in the history of the game, was facing
a rising superstar from Japan, Naomi Osaka. Williams is only one grand slam championship away
from tying the all-time record, but has recently struggled to triumph over her younger
opponents (most tennis players retire in their early to mid-thirties; Williams is 37). Osaka
had already defeated Williams with ease at the Miami Open in March.
It appeared that the U.S. Open was headed for a repeat early in the match, with Osaka
asserting swift dominance. Early in the first set, however, the linesman, Carlos Ramos, called
a court violation on Williams' coach because he was signaling her -- an illegal activity in the
sport of tennis. Rather than accept the warning, Williams unleashed a reality TV-style tirade
on Ramos, excoriating him for "misreading" her coach's hand gestures and making bizarre
reference to her daughter: "I never cheat I have a daughter, and I stand for what is right for
her."
(Immediately following the match, in a rare and refreshing moment of honesty, Williams'
coach admitted that he was signaling her the entire time, making Williams look both deceitful
and foolish. Most post-match commentary has conveniently omitted the coach's confession from
the record.)
After Williams lost the opening set's fifth game, she slammed her racket into the ground,
causing its frame to bend. Intentional damage to a racquet is a code violation, and Ramos
penalized her a point, the standard punishment for a second offense. Osaka quickly won the next
game, making her the winner of the first set with a lopsided score of 6-2.
Williams then began screaming at Ramos, telling him that he was wrong to penalize her and
protesting that the warning she received should not count as a violation because she was not
cheating. Ramos sat silently as Williams ridiculed his performance as linesman and demanded
that he apologize.
The second set advanced quickly with Osaka continuing to make fast work of Williams. During
every break in play, Williams continued to badger Ramos, indicating that she would not stop
until he announced over his microphone that he was sorry for what he did to her. He ignored her
expressions of anger.
After Osaka pulled ahead 4-3, Williams again berated Ramos for his monstrous failures as a
human being. Bringing her rant to a climax, she called him a "liar" and a "thief."
To impugn the character of a linesman violates the code of conduct governing play in
professional tennis. Ramos flagged her for the third time, issuing the penalty of a forfeited
game, making the set score 5-3. Williams pleaded with supervising officials of the tournament
-- one man, one woman -- to overturn Ramos' calls, and they refused. She then made the
contemptible claim that excited countless social media users and political commentators around
the country: "I've seen men get away with his all the time. Just because I'm a woman, you are
going to take this away from me."
Osaka won the second set, 6-4, and in doing so, became the first Japanese champion of the
U.S. Open. The audience loudly booed and jeered throughout the awards ceremony, and the
commissioner of the U.S. Open disgraced herself by saying, on air and in front of the rightful
champion, "This isn't the end we were looking for." Williams made an attempt to recover some
dignity by instructing her vulgar fans to stop heckling, but the entire event had already
transformed into an ugly American extravaganza. Most infuriating was that Osaka looked
dejected, unable to enjoy her first grand slam victory.
The next day, USA Today ran an opinion piece with the headline "Sexism Cost Serena
Williams Tennis Title." Many other writers and TV analysts, none of whom seemed to know
anything about tennis rules or history, began reciting from the same fatuous and phony script.
A few have even tried to racialize the story, though given that Osaka's father is Haitian, that
narrative has failed to gain traction.
Acting as though Ramos were self-evidently a misogynist, most media mouthpieces ignored that
throughout the U.S. Open, male players have been called for 86 violations and women only 22.
Nine of the 10 largest fines in tennis history for on-court violations have gone to men. Ramos
himself has earned the wrath of men's champions Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Roger Federer
for making calls they felt were too rigid and punitive.
The mob has also compared Williams' tantrum with the boorish imbecility of 1980s tennis
stars John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. While it's true that both players often acted with
disrespect more reminiscent of barroom drunks than professional athletes, they also benefitted
from terribly lenient regulations of professional tennis. The ATP did not standardize the rules
or crack down on outlandish player conduct until the late 1980s. Not coincidentally, McEnroe
was ejected from the 1990 Australian Open after his fourth violation in a single match.
And yet arguing about the rules and pointing to the score of the match -- it is almost
certain that Osaka would have won regardless -- feels oddly archaic. Many of Williams'
desperate defenders are acting in emotional accordance with some strange, eschatological
commitment to identity politics, and no amount of factual information will dissuade them.
Another term my friend was fond of using was "biased apperception." The critics who call Ramos
sexist without giving him the opportunity to defend himself have adopted a position and are
working backwards to validate it. To pull this off, they have no choice but to excuse the rules
and condemn their application. There is no debate that Williams broke three different rules,
yet the lineman is sexist because he chose to apply them.
Rebecca Traister, a leading feminist writer for New York , begins her boring and
predictable interpretation of the events with the following admission (which negates all the
subsequent sentences in her essay):
I don't care much about the rules of tennis that Serena Williams was accused of violating
at Saturday night's U.S. Open final. Those rules were written for a game and for players who
were not supposed to look or express themselves or play the game as beautifully and
passionately as either Serena Williams or the young woman who eventually beat her,
20-year-old Naomi Osaka, do.
Overlooking Traister's weird disparagement of every women's champion who proceeded Williams
and Osaka as ugly and impassive, and her incoherent grammar (how is a game supposed to "express
themselves"?), it is revealing that she prefaces her entire argument by saying that rules do
not matter if the right people did not author them. The crime is not the transgression, but the
enforcement.
The "excuse the rules, condemn the application" mentality is a societal sickness responsible
for much that troubles our body politic.
To begin with an example that will interest those who practice identity politics, President
Donald Trump has thrived on condemning those who enforce the rules. Though he regularly
demonstrates a daunting pattern of dishonesty, is an unnamed co-conspirator in a criminal
indictment, has seen several of his associates indicted or convicted of crimes, and continually
makes a mockery of decorum and etiquette, whenever he is caught in an act of wrongdoing, his
immediate response is to spit a venomous stream of clichés: "fake news," "deep state,"
"witch hunt."
Another example is the bailout of the big banks that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Few
disagreed that the world's major financial institutions violated the rules, but the idea of
accountability was suddenly radical and unthinkable.
If a connection between corporate malfeasance, presidential malpractice, and a tennis
champion's childish outburst seems tenuous, consider that in all three cases the
get-out-of-jail-free card is an appeal to ideology. Rules, we are asked to believe, are
irrelevant, and even themselves infringements on belief systems like populism and feminism that
are regarded as more important.
The self-involvement and extreme subjectivity necessary for such a destructive belief
permeates into non-ideological aspects of culture. Grade inflation in higher education, as any
instructor can attest, exists largely because students cannot fathom suffering consequences for
lazy or mediocre work. The issuance of assignments and exams is fine, but to actually grade
them according to an objective standard is evil.
America needs a serious dose of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. One should act only
in such a way that one would approve of everyone else acting in a given situation.
Writing for The New York Times , retired tennis champion Martina Navratilova wisely
states, "We cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with.
In fact, this is the sort of behavior that no one should be engaging in on the court. There
have been many times when I was playing that I wanted to break my racket into a thousand
pieces. Then I thought about the kids watching. And I grudgingly held on to that racket."
Obvious to anyone but the willfully ignorant, this is a far better formula for a healthy
society than "I don't care about the rules."
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) released the following statement relating to
umpiring decisions during the 2018 US Open Women's final:
"Carlos Ramos is one of the most experienced and respected umpires in tennis. Mr. Ramos'
decisions were in accordance with the relevant rules and were re-affirmed by the US Open's
decision to fine Serena Williams for the three offences. It is understandable that this high
profile and regrettable incident should provoke debate. At the same time, it is important to
remember that Mr. Ramos undertook his duties as an official according to the relevant rule
book and acted at all times with professionalism and integrity."
"The Grand Slam Rule Book can be found here. Player on site offences including the point
penalty schedule used in this instance can be found in Article III."
ARTICLE III: PLAYER ON-SITE OFFENCES -- pages 36-48
I follow tennis and am not a feminist. There were two things the ump should have done. First, everyone knows that all players
in tennis are getting coached. If ump was going to call it, he should have warned both players and coaches before the match.
Second, when Serena was mouthing off during the changeover, he should have told her: "you've made your point, one more insult
and you're going to get a penalty" and then, just ignore her. If she keeps it up then you dick her.
As for Serena, she is a brand. Which is why she blew up for being caught cheating. It was more important for her to defend her
image than to win the match
Kalmia, September 15, 2018 at 9:17 am
Serena Williams is not unusual in being a world-class athlete/competitor who is also a very very bad loser. Her behavior
wasn't that unusual and the punishment in the game was appropriate, it should have ended with that. In my view, it's the crowd
and her supporters who are the real villains here for letting their bias towards her (and identity politics) warp their sense of
justice and fairness. Poor Osaka deserved much better than the booing and rash of hot takes.
Jeeves, September 15, 2018 at 4:36 pm
Rat: Williams was livid because she was getting her tutu kicked all over the court. Desperate and depraved gamesmanship was
all it was.
Although you'd never know it from the terrible reporting in this article, following the game-penalty imposed by Ramos, Osaka
intentionally gave Serena the next game by missing returns of Serena's serve -- I suppose hoping to calm down the woman who was
her tennis idol growing up. It didn't work, though, because Serena was unappeased–and outplayed. (To top it off, the stupid TV
commentators wanted to give Serena kudos for her quieting of her booing fans at the awards presentation. No-class athlete,
no-class fans.)
Sisera, September 15, 2018 at 10:16 pm
@WorkingClass
Agreed & isn't it funny how in the world of many centrist 'apologist' types, fighting back against identity politics,
entitlement of elites, etc. is in and of itself identity politics?
I mean it's like the grade school insult of 'I know you are but what am I'….and many (albeit not this author) say it with all
the smugness and gotchaness in the world.
They adhere to identity politics and have no self awareness and hence can't recognize it.
Ivo Olavo Castro da Silva, September 16, 2018 at 12:31 am
The fact that Serena's fans and the media supported her disgusting actions only confirm their total absence of any moral
standard.
Tennis Fan, September 16, 2018 at 10:05 am
In response to "Rat says…Why did the judge decide that the final was the time to start applying an otherwise-ignored rule?
Sure, it would have been preferable for her to keep her cool, but it's understandable why Williams was livid."
It may be that coaches get away with coaching quite often, however, IMHO the umpire happened to actually catch the coach
right in the act of coaching (and if you see the video of the supposed incident, her coach, Patrick, actually gives two head-nods
in that very brief moment and to me, the head-nods acknowledge that they made eye contact-my personal opinion only).
The umpire immediately decided to call it out... Who knows, maybe in that very moment, he felt it wasn't fair for her to
be getting coaching, he actually caught the coaching, and his gut instinct was to make the call on it. I don't fault the umpire
one bit. Had Serena accepted the call and moved on, the entire tide of the match may have taken a different turn.
"... The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society ..."
"... "Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear." Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive." ..."
"... "A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others," he said. In an interview with the Times ..."
Well, if Rabbi Sacks and other Jews want anti-Semitism, I think they should look much closer
to home. This is from the Jerusalem Post in 2007:
Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy
Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and threatens liberal
democracy, Britain's top Jewish official warned in extracts from [a recently published] book
Jonathan Sacks, Britain's chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an attempt to affirm
Britain's diverse communities and make ethnic and religious minorities more appreciated and
respected. But in his book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society , he said
the movement had run its course. "Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to
segregation," Sacks wrote in his book, an extract of which was published in the
Times of London.
"Liberal democracy is in danger," Sacks said, adding later: "The politics of freedom
risks descending into the politics of fear." Sacks said Britain's politics had been poisoned
by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for
rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken
up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been "inexorably divisive."
"A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain,
injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others," he said. In an interview
with the Times , Sacks said he wanted his book to be "politically incorrect in the
highest order." ( Sacks:
Multiculturalism threatens democracy , The Jerusalem Post , 20th October
2007 ; emphasis added)
So Sacks claimed that "Britain's politics had been poisoned" by a self-serving,
self-pitying, self-aggrandizing ideology that "began with Jews" and had been "inexorably
divisive." His claim is absolutely classic anti-Semitism, peddling a stereotype of Jews as
subversive, manipulative and divisive outsiders whose selfish agitation has done huge harm to a
gentile society.
Sacks was right, of course: Jews do demand special treatment and did indeed invent the
"identity politics" that has poisoned British politics (and
American ,
Australian ,
French and Swedish
politics too).
By saying all that, Sacks was being far more "anti-Semitic" than Jeremy Corbyn was, even by
the harshest interpretation of those comments on Zionists. Furthermore, Sacks has proved that
Corbyn was right. Zionists do lack irony. In 2007 Sacks, a staunch Zionist, claimed
that the "poisoning" of British politics "began with Jews." In 2018 he's condemning Jeremy
Corbyn for saying something much milder about Zionists.
Fourth Wave Feminism:Why No One EscapesToday's outsized Femocracy is more
desperate and (self) destructive than it's successful progenitors. By JOANNA WILLIAMS
• September
4, 2018
Feminism, in its second wave, women's liberation movement guise, has passed its first half
century. And what a success it has been! Betty Friedan's frustrated housewife, bored with
plumping pillows and making peanut butter sandwiches, is now a rarity. We might still be
waiting for the first female president, but women -- specifically feminists -- are now in
positions of power across the whole of society.
Yet feminism shows no sign of taking early retirement and bowing out, job done. Instead, it
continues to reinvent itself. #MeToo is the cause du jour of fourth-wave feminism but,
disturbingly, it seems to be taking us further from liberation and pushing us towards an
increasingly illiberal and authoritarian future. It's time to take stock.
Over the past five decades, women have taken public life by storm. When it comes to
education, employment, and pay, women are not just doing better than ever before -- they are
often doing better than men too. For over a quarter of a century, girls have outperformed boys
at school. Over 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded to women. More women than men
continue to graduate school and more doctorates are awarded to women. And their successes don't
stop when they leave education behind. Since the 1970s, there has been a marked increase in the
number of women in employment and many are taking managerial and professional positions. Women
now comprise just over half of those employed in management, professional, and related
occupations.
Women aren't just working more, they are being paid more. Women today earn more in total
than at any other point in time and they also earn more as a proportion of men's earnings. For
younger women in particular, the gender pay gap is narrowing. Between 1980 and 2012, wages for
men aged 25 to 34 fell 20 percent while over the same period women's pay rose by 13 percent.
Some data sets now suggest that women in their twenties earn more than men the same age.
Although high-profile equal pay campaigns appear to suggest otherwise, when we compare the pay
of men and women employed in the same jobs and working for the same number of hours each week,
the gender pay gap all but disappears. Four out of every 10 women are now either the sole or
primary family earner -- a figure which has quadrupled since 1960.
But this is not just about the lives of women: it is feminism as an ideology that has been
incredibly successful. For over four decades, feminist theory has shaped people's lives. Making
sense of the world through the prism of gender and seeking to root out sexual inequality is now
the driving force behind much that goes on in the public sphere.
Back in 1986, in one of the first examples of new legislation explicitly backed by
feminists, the Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. This
has had a profound impact upon all aspects of employment legislation. As a result, a layer of
managers and administrators, sometimes referred to as "femocrats," are employed to oversee
sexual equality and manage sexual harassment complaints in workplaces and schools.
Elsewhere, the influence of feminism can be seen in the expansion of existing laws. When
Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed in 1972 it was designed to protect people from
discrimination based on sex in education programs that received federal funding. It was a
significant -- and reasonably straightforward -- piece of legislation introduced at a time when
women were underrepresented in higher education. It first began to take on greater significance
following a 1977 case led by the feminist lawyer and academic Catharine MacKinnon in which a
federal court found that colleges could be liable under Title IX not just for acts of
discrimination but also for not responding to allegations of sexual harassment.
Not surprisingly, definitions of sexual harassment began to expand in the late 1970s. In
education, the term came to encompass a "hostile environment" in which women felt uncomfortable
because of their sex. By this measure, sexual harassment can occur unintentionally and with no
specific target. Furthermore, a hostile environment might be created by students themselves
irrespective of the actions of an institution's staff. As a result, colleges became responsible
for policing the sexual behavior of their students too.
Pressing forward under the Obama administration, sexual misconduct cases on campuses were
tried under a preponderance of the evidence standard rather than a higher standard of clear and
convincing evidence. Within these extrajudicial tribunals, students -- most often young men --
could be found guilty of sexual assault or rape and expelled following unsubstantiated
allegations and with little opportunity to defend themselves. Although current Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos has revoked the Obama-era guidelines that instituted these kangaroo
courts, many institutions under pressure to react have expanded their zero tolerance policies,
often at the expense of basic due process and fairness.
In the 1970s, radical feminists opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that it
individualized and deradicalized feminism. "We will not be appeased," they asserted. "Our
demands can only be met by a total transformation of society, which you cannot legislate, you
cannot co-opt, you cannot control."
Yet today, a feminist outlook now shapes policy, practice, and law at all levels of the
government, as feminists seek to transform society through the state rather than by opposing
it. Most recently this has taken form in the demand for affirmative consent, or "yes means
yes," to be the standard in rape cases. This places the onus on the accused to prove they had
sought and obtained consent; in other words they must prove their innocence.
This is a radical shift, yet it is being enshrined in legislation with little discussion.
California and New York have passed legislation requiring colleges to adopt an affirmative
consent standard in their sexual assault policies. In 2016, the American Law Institute,
influential with state legislators, debated introducing an affirmative consent standard into
state laws. The proposal was ultimately rejected but the fact that it was even taken seriously
shows feminism's growing legal influence.
History tells us that legislation driven by feminism can have unintended consequences. The
Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), passed in 1994 as part of President Clinton's massive $30
billion crime bill, aimed to put 100,000 police officers on the street and funded $9.7 billion
for prisons. VAWA sought more prosecutions and harsher sentences for abuse in relationships.
But a more intensive law enforcement focus on minority communities, coupled with mandatory
arrests of both partners on the scene of a dispute, resulted in unanticipated blowback. Police
were accused of over-criminalizing minority neighborhoods; critics said women were disinclined
to call the police for fear of being arrested themselves. A 2007 Harvard study suggests that
mandatory arrest laws may have actually increased intimate partner homicides and, separately,
women of color have described violence at the hands of the arresting police officers.
Ultimately, the crime bill merely punished; it didn't help prevent domestic abuse against
women.
♦♦♦
Although all women have in some way benefited from feminism's decades-long campaign against
inequality, it is clear that some -- namely middle- and upper-class college graduates -- have
been more advantaged than the rest. Feminists in the 1960s argued that all women had interests
in common; they shared an experience of oppression. The same can hardly be said today. An elite
group of women with professional careers and high salaries has little in common with women
juggling two or more jobs just to make ends meet. Yet the feminist voices that are heard most
loudly continue to be those of privileged women.
High-profile feminists like Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy
planning at the State Department, and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, sell books and make headlines
for criticizing family-unfriendly employment practices and the gender pay gap. Good for them!
But remember that these women have incomes and lifestyles that put them in a different league
from the vast majority of women -- and men. They identify more closely with the tiny proportion
of male CEOs than they do with women who have jobs rather than careers, who wear uniforms
rather than dry-clean-only suits to work, who have no time to hit the gym before heading to the
office. Their push for "lean-in" circles appeals more to young college grads than women
struggling just to put food on the table. Their vociferous feminist call to arms falls flat in
Middle America -- yet we are told they speak for all women.
In 2018, feminists do walk the corridors of power. But in order to maintain their position
and moral high ground they must deny the very power they command. For this reason, feminism can
never admit its successes -- to do so would require its adherents to ask whether their job is
done. For professional feminists, women who have forged their careers in the femocracy,
admitting this not only puts their livelihoods at risk, but poses an existential threat to
their sense of self. As a result, the better women's lives become, the harder feminists must
work to seek out new realms of disadvantage.
The need to sustain a narrative of oppression explains the continued popularity of the
#MeToo phenomenon. In October 2017, The New York Times ran a story alleging that
Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who had the power to make and break careers, had committed
a number of serious sexual offenses. (The allegations against Weinstein mounted and he is now
being charged with sexual assault and rape.) Over the following weeks and months, accusations
of sexual misconduct were leveled against a host of other men in the public eye.
Such serious accusations need to be dealt with in the courts and, if found guilty, the
perpetrators punished accordingly. But rather than arrests, trials, and criminal proceedings,
#MeToo has gathered pace through social media. Actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter on October
18 and asked women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to "write 'me too' as a reply to
this tweet." Thousands of women came forward to call out their own abusers or simply to add
their names to a growing list of victims. #MeToo took on a life of its own; it readily lent
itself to an already-established fourth-wave feminist narrative that saw women as victims of
male violence and sexual entitlement.
Women in the public eye are now routinely asked about their own experiences of sexual
harassment. Some have publicly named and shamed men they accuse of sexual assault or, as with
the case of comedian Aziz Ansari, what can perhaps best be described as "ungentlemanly
conduct." Others are more vague and suggest they have experienced sexual harassment in more
general terms. What no woman can do -- at least not without instigating a barrage of criticism
-- is deny that sexual harassment is a major problem today.
The success of #MeToo is less about real justice than the common experience of suffering and
validation. It is a perfect social media vehicle to drive the fourth-wave agenda into another
generation. Hollywood stars and baristas may have little in common but all women can lay claim
to having experienced male violence and sexual harassment -- or, failing that, potentially
experiencing abuse at some indeterminate point in the future. Statistics on domestic violence,
rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are used to shore up the narrative that women, as a
class, suffer at the hands of men.
But scratch the surface and often these statistics are questionable. In recent years, at the
hands of femocrats, definitions of violence and sexual harassment have been expanded. On
campus, all kinds of behaviors, from touching through clothes to non-consensual sex, are
grouped together to prove the existence of a rape culture. When sexual harassment is redefined
as unwanted behavior it can encompass anything from winking, to whistling, to staring, to
catcalling. There is little objectively wrong with the action -- it is simply the fact that it
is unwanted that makes it abusive. Today, we are encouraged to see violence, especially
violence against women and girls, everywhere: in words that wound, personified in a boorish
president, in our economic and legal systems. This is violence as metaphor rather than violence
as a physical blow. Yet it is a metaphor that serves a powerful purpose -- allowing all women
to share in a common experience of victimhood, and, as such, justifying the continued need for
elite feminism.
Problems with #MeToo are too rarely discussed. Violence and sexual assaults do occur, but
these serious crimes are trivialized by being presented as on a continuum with the metaphorical
abuse. The constant reiteration that women are victims and men are violent perpetrators does
not, in itself, make it true. It pits men and women against each other and, in the process,
infantilizes women and makes them fearful of the world. It also masks a far more positive
story: rates of domestic violence have been falling. Between 1994 and 2011, the rates of
serious intimate partner violence perpetrated against women -- defined as rape, sexual assault,
robbery, or aggravated assault -- fell 72 percent.
The consequences of entrenching in law assumptions that women are destined to become victims
of male violence and harassment are dangerously authoritarian. Feminists now look not to their
own resources, or to their family and friends, but to the state to protect them. Black men in
particular can find themselves disproportionately targeted by feminist-backed drives for legal
retribution. A 2017 report from the National Registry of Exonerations suggests that black men
serving time for sexual assault are three-and-a-half times more likely to be innocent than
white defendants who have been convicted of the same crime.
In the meantime, demands for the punishment of bad behavior are inevitable. Male catcalling
in the UK and France could soon be a criminal offense. While similar bans have been
unsuccessful in the U.S., there are plenty of street harassment laws at the state level that
feminists could co-opt if necessary. Additionally in England, there are proposals to
criminalize "upskirting" or taking a photograph up a woman's skirt. Upskirting is a vile
invasion of a person's privacy. However, the majority of instances are covered under existing
indecency and voyeurism laws. The proposal, as with others, is a feminist signaling device: the
message is, yet again, that the world is a hostile place for women and their only course of
action is to seek redress from the state.
Meanwhile, working-class women are effectively exploited as a voiceless stage presence,
brought on when convenient to shore up the authority of the professional feminist. On occasion
this means the livelihoods of regular women are placed in jeopardy for the greater good of the
collective. Earlier this year, a group of A-list Hollywood actresses petitioned against tipping
waitresses in New York restaurants, arguing it was exploitive and encouraged sexual harassment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, servers shot back that they would like to continue receiving tips,
thank you very much.
♦♦♦
Fourth-wave feminism is increasingly authoritarian and illiberal, impacting speech and
behavior for men and women. Campaigns around "rape culture" and #MeToo police women just as
much as men, telling them how to talk about these issues. When The Handmaid's Tale
author Margaret Atwood had the effrontery to advocate for due process for men accused of sex
crimes, her normally adoring feminist fans turned on her. She referred to it in a Globe and
Mail essay in January entitled "Am I a Bad Feminist?"
"In times of extremes, extremists win," she wrote. "Their ideology becomes a religion,
anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and
moderates in the middle are annihilated."
The fact is, men are publicly shamed every day, their livelihoods and reputations teetering
on destruction, before they even enter a courtroom.
Frankly, it is disastrous for young women to be taught to see themselves as disadvantaged
and vulnerable in a way that bears no relationship to reality. Whereas a previous generation of
feminists fought against chaperones and curfews, today's #MeToo movement rehabilitates the
argument that women need to be better protected from rapacious men, or need "safe spaces."
Women come to believe that they will be harassed walking down the street, that they will be
paid less than men for the same work, and that the world is set against them. The danger is
that, rather than competing with men as equals, women will be so overwhelmed by the apparent
size of the struggle that they will abandon all efforts and call upon external helpmates, like
the state and ugly identity politics that push good men away. Women's disadvantage thus become
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All the while, the real problems experienced by many American women -- and men -- such as
working long hours for a low wage and struggling to pay for child and healthcare costs, are
overlooked.
When second-wave feminism burst onto the scene more than 50 years ago it was known as the
women's liberation movement. It celebrated equality and powerfully proclaimed that women were
capable of doing everything men did. Today, this spirit of liberation has been exchanged for an
increasingly authoritarian and illiberal victim feminism. With every victory, feminism needs to
reassert increasingly spurious claims that women are oppressed. For women and men to be free
today, we need to bring back the spirit of the women's liberation movement. Only now it's
feminism from which women need liberating.
"The people I've heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile
people who've proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces. A lot of
them have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their
enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it
is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed
identity as being of recognizably European descent." • Also "Asian American professional,"
although when you think about it, "Asia American" is a pretty problematic ascribed
identity.
The best-case scenario looking
forward is that Donald Trump is successful with rapprochement toward North Korea and Russia and
that he throws a monkey wrench into the architecture of neoliberalism so that a new path forward
can be built when he's gone. If he pulls it off, this isn't reactionary nationalism and it isn't
nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... Here's the rub: Mr. Trump's critique of neoliberalism can accommodate class analysis whereas the Democrats' neoliberal globalism explicitly excludes any notion of economic power, and with it the possibility of class analysis. To date, Mr. Trump hasn't left this critique behind -- neoliberal trade agreements are currently being renegotiated. ..."
I thought this part of Urie's piece was especially good:
Left apparently unrecognized in bourgeois attacks on working class voters is that the
analytical frames at work -- classist identity politics and liberal economics, are ruling
class ideology in the crudest Marxian / Gramscian senses. The illusion / delusion that they
are factually descriptive is a function of ideology, not lived outcomes.
Here's the rub: Mr. Trump's critique of neoliberalism can accommodate class analysis
whereas the Democrats' neoliberal globalism explicitly excludes any notion of economic
power, and with it the possibility of class analysis. To date, Mr. Trump hasn't left this
critique behind -- neoliberal trade agreements are currently being renegotiated.
Asserting this isn't to embrace economic nationalism, support policies until they are
clearly stated or trust Mr. Trump's motives. But the move ties analytically to his critique
of neoliberal economic policies. As such, it is a potential monkey wrench thrown into the
neoliberal world order. Watching the bourgeois Left put forward neoliberal trade theory to
counter it would seem inexplicable without the benefit of class analysis.
"... The identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. ..."
"... Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment. Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best. ..."
"... Precious time is spent fighting against those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or 'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping ..."
"... It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism. ..."
"... There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing thought, it is anathema to the very concept. ..."
"... 'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity politics. ..."
"... The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment when in reality they strengthen it. ..."
"... Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in charge keep the masses divided and distracted. ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
"... Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra. ..."
The
identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy
that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. A core principle of
socialism is the idea of an overarching supra-national solidarity that unites the international
working class and overrides any factor that might divide it, such as nation, race, or gender.
Workers of all nations are partners, having equal worth and responsibility in a struggle
against those who profit from their brain and muscle.
Capitalism, especially in its most evolved, exploitative and heartless form - imperialism -
has wronged certain groups of people more than others. Colonial empires tended to reserve their
greatest brutality for subjugated peoples whilst the working class of these imperialist nations
fared better in comparison, being closer to the crumbs that fell from the table of empire. The
international class struggle aims to liberate all people everywhere from the drudgery of
capitalism regardless of their past or present degree of oppression. The phrase 'an injury
to one is an injury to all' encapsulates this mindset and conflicts with the idea of
prioritising the interests of one faction of the working class over the entire collective.
Since the latter part of the 20th century, a liberally-inspired tendency has taken root
amongst the Left (in the West at least) that encourages departure from a single identity based
on class in favour of multiple identities based upon one's gender, sexuality, race or any other
dividing factor. Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the
shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment.
Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best.
At the time of writing there are apparently over
70 different gender options in the West, not to mention numerous sexualities - the
traditional LGBT acronym has thus far grown to LGBTQQIP2SAA
. Adding race to the mix results in an even greater number of possible permutations or
identities. Each subgroup has its own ideology. Precious time is spent fighting against
those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing
pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as
the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement
is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or
'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping "
lesbians'.
The ideology of identity politics asserts that the straight white male is at the apex of the
privilege pyramid, responsible for the oppression of all other groups. His original sin
condemns him to everlasting shame. While it is true that straight white men (as a group) have
faced less obstacles than females, non-straight men or ethnic minorities, the majority of
straight white men, past and present, also struggle to survive from paycheck to paycheck and
are not personally involved in the oppression of any other group. While most of the world's
wealthiest
individuals are Caucasian males, millions of white men exist who are both poor and
powerless. The idea of 'whiteness' is itself an ambiguous concept involving racial profiling.
For example, the Irish, Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews may look white yet have suffered more than
their fair share of famines, occupations and genocides throughout the centuries. The idea of
tying an individual's privilege to their appearance is itself a form of racism dreamed up by
woolly minded, liberal (some might say privileged) 'intellectuals' who would be superfluous in
any socialist society.
Is the middle-class ethnic minority lesbian living in Western Europe more oppressed than the
whitish looking Syrian residing under ISIS occupation? Is the British white working class male
really more privileged than a middle class woman from the same society? Stereotyping based on
race, gender or any other factor only leads to alienation and animosity. How can there be unity
amongst the Left if we are only loyal to ourselves and those most like us? Some 'white' men who
feel the Left has nothing to offer them have decided to play the identity politics game in
their search of salvation and have drifted towards supporting Trump (a billionaire with whom
they have nothing in common) or far-right movements, resulting in further alienation, animosity
and powerlessness which in turn only strengthens the position of the top 1%. People around the
world are more divided by class than any other factor.
It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than
to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism.
Fighting oppression through identity politics is at best a lazy, perverse and fetishistic form
of the class struggle led by mostly liberal, middle class and tertiary-educated activists who
understand little of left-wing political theory. At worst it is yet another tool used by the
top 1% to divide the other 99% into 99 or 999 different competing groups who are too
preoccupied with fighting their own little corner to challenge the status quo. It is ironic
that one of the major donors to the faux-left identity politics movement is the privileged
white cisgender male billionaire
George Soros , whose NGOs helped orchestrate the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine that gave
way to the emergence of far right and neo-nazi movements: the kind of people who believe in
racial superiority and do not look kindly on diversity.
There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist
thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal
culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics
have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing
thought, it is anathema to the very concept.
'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury
to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted
identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from
colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that
sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity
politics.
The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by
the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab
and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about
political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a
cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment
when in reality they strengthen it.
Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in
charge keep the masses divided and distracted. In the West you are free to choose any
gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are
not allowed to question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Identity politics is the
new opiate of the masses and prevents organised resistance against the system. Segments of the
Western Left even believe such aforementioned 'freedoms' are a bellwether of progress and an
indicator of its cultural superiority, one that warrants export abroad be it softly via NGOs or
more bluntly through colour revolutions and regime change.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the
board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a
guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. Read more
In a conversation with the Financial Times last week, Henry Kissinger made a highly
significant remark about President Donald Trump's attempt to improve the United States'
relations with Russia. The conversation took place in the backdrop of the Helsinki summit on
July 16. Kissinger said: "I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from
time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn't
necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could
just be an accident."
Kissinger did not elaborate, but the drift of his thought is consistent with opinions he has
voiced in the past – the US' steady loss of influence on global arena, rise of China and
resurgence
of Russia necessitating a new global balance .
As far back as 1972 in a discussion with Richard Nixon on his upcoming trip to China,
signifying the historic opening to Beijing, Kissinger could visualize such a rebalancing
becoming necessary in future. He expressed the view that compared with the Soviets (Russians),
the Chinese were "just as dangerous. In fact, they're more dangerous over a historical period."
Kissinger added, "in 20 years your (Nixon's) successor, if he's as wise as you, will wind up
leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese."
Kissinger argued that the United States, which sought to profit from the enmity between
Moscow and Beijing in the Cold War era, would therefore need "to play this balance-of-power
game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to
discipline the Russians." But in the future, it would be the other way around.
Of course, Kissinger is not the pioneer of US-Russia-China 'triangular diplomacy'. It is no
secret that in the 1950s, the US did all it could to drive a wedge between Mao Zedong and
Nikita Khrushchev. The accent was on isolating "communist China". Khrushchev's passion for
'peaceful co-existence' following his summit with Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 at Camp David
became a defining moment in Sino-Soviet schism.
But even as Sino-Soviet schism deepened (culminating in the bloody conflict in Ussuri River
in 1969), Nixon reversed the policy of Eisenhower and opened the line to Beijing, prioritizing
the US' global competition with the Soviet Union. The de-classified Cold-War archival materials
show that Washington seriously pondered over the possibility of a wider Sino-Soviet war. One
particular memorandum of the US State Department recounts an incredible moment in Cold War
history – a KGB officer querying about American reaction to a hypothetical Soviet attack
on Chinese nuclear weapons facilities.
Then there is a memo written for Kissinger's attention by then influential China watcher
Allen S. Whiting warning of the danger of a Soviet attack on China. Clearly, 1969 was a pivotal
year when the US calculus was reset based on estimation that Sino-Soviet tensions provided a
basis for Sino-American rapprochement. It led to the dramatic overture by Nixon and Kissinger
to open secret communications with China through Pakistan and Romania.
Will Putin fall for Trump's bait? Well, it depends. To my mind, there is no question Putin
will see a great opening here for Russia. But it will depend on what's on offer from the US.
Putin's fulsome praise for Trump on North Korean issue and the latter's warm response was a
meaningful exchange at Helsinki, has been a good beginning to underscore Moscow's keenness to
play a broader role in the Asia-Pacific.
Beijing must be watching the 'thaw' at Helsinki with some unease. The Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesperson welcomed the Helsinki summit. But the mainstream assessment by Chinese
analysts is that nothing much is going to happen since the contradictions in the US-Russia
relations are fundamental and Russophobia is all too pervasive within the US establishment.
The government-owned China Daily carried an editorial – Has the meeting
in Helsinki reset US-Russia relations? – where it estimates that at best, "
Helsinki summit represents a good beginning for better relations between the US and Russia."
Notably, however, the editorial is pessimistic about any real US-Russia breakthrough, including
on Syria, the topic that Putin singled out as a test case of the efficacy of Russian-American
cooperation.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times featured an editorial
giving a stunning analysis of what has prompted Trump to pay such attention ("respect") to
Russia -- China
can learn from Trump's respect for Russia . It concludes that the only conceivable
reason could be that although Russia is not an economic power, it has retained influence on the
global stage due to military power:
Trump has repeatedly stressed that Russia and the US are the two biggest nuclear powers
in the world, with their combined nuclear arsenal accounting for 90 percent of world's total,
and thus the US must live in peace with Russia. On US-Russia relations, Trump is
clearheaded.
On the contrary, if the US is piling pressure on China today, it is because China, although
an economic giant, is still a weak military power. Therefore:
China's nuclear weapons have to not only secure a second strike but also play the role
of cornerstone in forming a strong deterrence so that outside powers dare not intimidate
China militarily Part of the US' strategic arrogance may come from its absolute nuclear
advantage China must speed up its process of developing strategic nuclear power Not only
should we possess a strong nuclear arsenal, but we must also let the outside world know
that China is determined to defend its core national interests with nuclear power.
Indeed, if the crunch time comes, China will be on its own within the Kissingerian triangle.
And China needs to prepare for such an eventuality. On the other hand, China's surge to create
a vast nuclear arsenal could make a mockery of the grand notions in Moscow and Washington that
they are the only adults in the room in keeping the global strategic balance.
"To my mind, there is no question Putin will see a great opening here for Russia."
So, what exactly can Trump offer Russia? Letting them "win" in Syria, when the Syrian
people, lead by Assad and aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, have already won?
Perhaps, it is the return of bankrupt and banderised Ukraine? Now that would be a
prize!
Perhaps, Trump could offer the withdrawal of NATO forces from Russia's borders and a
place in the "international community"? That worked out well in the 90s, didn't it?
Maybe, relief from sanctions could be the clincher? That would rescue the "tattered"
Russian economy, wouldn't it?
The Nixon to China gambit by Trump ignores the stark reality that Trump is in office but
not in power. The entire media and the "intelligence community" has been angling to
impeach him since his election, and they may well succeed after the mid-terms.
Why would Putin and loyal Russians take any offer to dump China seriously?
Besides, Putin and loyal Russians have seen through the true reasons behind what can only
be called anti Russian RACIST hysteria.
Its not ideological or cultural. It is an ancient urge: Russia must submit to the
US/EU/NATO Borg Collective, or be destroyed. Could anyone have missed the rant in the US
media, incited by the "intelligence community", which just happened to be "thrown under
the bus", by Trump, just because he met Putin?
Trump is also going to be the victim of the same urge.
He cannot be controlled, so he must be destroyed.
Simples!
The Yanks will start their endless electioneering soon, four years is nothing, the
dolts start the game going for new president years berfore the election date. Sure they
hate any nation that stands-up to them they actually beleive they have a god-given righ
to rule the world as they spread their sick ways around the globe calling them freedom?
choice?, playing one nation against the other is an old game, lets hope Russia never
crosses China, as together they can keep the war-monger, nation-destroyer two faced snake
USA in check.
"Why would Putin and loyal Russians take any offer to dump China seriously?"
There is not even room for that question. Russia is STRATEGIC partner of China and
they never contemplate under no circumstances to have that differently.... Whoever thinks
Russia might take some offer in consideration to turn against China is DEAD WRONG.
The idea that demography is political destiny is not new. Peter Brimelow and Edwin Rubenstein
warned of its dangers in the pages of National Review in the 1990s. Steve Sailer later
argued
that Republicans would fare better by targeting white voters. The problem with these observations was not their accuracy, but their
audience. The GOP establishment and donor elites had little interest in such thinking until Donald Trump's
breakthrough
in 2016. But what happens when Trump leaves office? Will the GOP return to its old ways, as Trump's former chief of staff Reince
Priebus has
predicted ? The answer is almost certainly no. The reasons have little to do with the GOP elite, however, whose views have not
substantially changed. They instead have everything to do with what is happening in the other party. As Brimelow and Rubenstein recently
pointed out in VDARE (and as I did at
American Renaissance
), while the nation is not expected to reach majority-minority status until
2045 , the Democratic Party is already approaching that historic milestone. The political consequences of these changes will
be profound and irreversible. The developments that are unfolding before our eyes are not a fluke, but the beginning of a new political
realignment in the United States that is increasingly focused on race.
The Emerging Majority-Minority Party While warnings of brewing demographic trouble were being ignored by the establishment
right, they received a better reception on the left. In 2004, Ruy
Teixeira and John Judis wrote a book called
The Emerging Democratic
Majority that triumphantly predicted that demographic change would soon produce a "new progressive era." The theory's predictive
powers waxed and waned over the years, but after Trump's 2016 election Teixeira and another coauthor, Peter Leyden, insisted that
Democrats would soon sweep away an increasingly irrelevant GOP and forcibly
impose their will, much as had already happened in California. These arguments have a glaring weakness, however. They assumed
that Democrats would continue to draw the same level of support from white voters. Instead, many have been fleeing to the GOP. Throughout
the 20 th Century, Democrats had won the presidency only by winning or keeping it close among these voters. Barack Obama
was the first to break this pattern, defeating John McCain in 2008 while losing the white vote by
12 percent
. Four years later he beat Mitt Romney while losing it by
20 percent
. Hillary Clinton lost the white vote in 2016 by a similar 20-point
margin . This
loss of white support, coupled with the continued demographic change of the country, has helped push the Democratic Party toward
majority-minority status. Since 1992, the white share of the Democratic presidential vote has dropped an average of about one percent
per year. At its current rate, it could tip to majority-minority status by 2020. It will occur no later than 2024. The political
consequences of this shift are already apparent. In 2008, Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination with
the overwhelming backing of
black voters.
Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in 2016 with similar black and Latino
support . This year's state elections have continued the trend, with minority candidates winning Democratic gubernatorial nominations
in Georgia ,
Texas , New Mexico , and
Maryland , with another likely win in
Arizona later this year. This sudden
surge in minority candidates is not an indicator of increased open mindedness, but of demographic change. While the national
Democratic Party is only just approaching majority-minority status, in much of the nation it is already there.
While the demographic trend of the Democratic Party seems clear enough – as does its leftward drift and increased embrace of minority
candidates – it is still possible to argue that the nation's politics will not divide along racial lines. The most obvious alternative
is that both parties will compete for minority votes and both will experience demographic change in an increasingly
multiracial nation. Could this happen? Black voters seem least likely to change. They already routinely provide Democrats with
90 percent of their votes. They are the backbone of the party, with a former president, nearly 50
members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and numerous mayors in
major American cities among their ranks. Given the Democratic Party's steadfast commitment to black issues such as affirmative action
and Black Lives Matter, few are likely to be won over by the occasional attempts at Republican
outreach . Latinos also typically
support Democrats in presidential elections by a 2-to-1 margin, but they have been a more serious target for Republicans, including
President
George W. Bush , his acolyte
Karl Rove , authors of the
GOP autopsy
released after Mitt Romney's 2012 loss, and occasional
writers
in National Review . Some have observed that many Latinos
value whiteness and are more likely to
self-identify
as white thelonger they have been in the country.
In fact, some Latinos arewhite , particularly
those from Latin America's leadershipclass . Others have
reported on
substantialhostility
that exists between Latinos and blacks that may make them more likely to see whites as natural allies. There are several problems
with these arguments. The most important are
persistent
race-based
IQ differences that will keep most mestizos (who are the
bulk of Latino immigrants)
trapped at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum regardless of their racial identification. Arguments that they will assimilate
like their European predecessors fail to explain why
racialhierarchies have
persisted in their home
nations for hundreds of years. These inequalities probably explain the high levels of
Hispanicsupport for government programs that
are likely to keep most of them tied to the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. Although Asians also
support Democrats
by a 2-to-1 margin, they seem potentially more
promising . Unlike America's black and Latino populations, East Asians (such as Japanese and Chinese) have IQs that may be slightly
higher than that of white Americans on average.
Moreover, affirmative action policies backed by Democrats typically
work to
their detriment
. However, most Asian immigrants
are not East Asians and their IQs (such as those of Indians or Pakistanis) are much
lower . Finally, no matter
what their nationality, Asians are generally unsympathetic
to whites
who want to restrict nonwhite immigration. Unsurprisingly, all of these reasons have contributed to Asians
movingaway
from the Republican Party, not toward it. Some argue that Republicans have no choice but to accept demographic change and move left
to gain minority support. The GOP may well move left in
ways
that
are
acceptable to its white
working class
base and help it with white moderates – such as protecting Social Security and Medicare. But it will never win a
bidding
war with Democrats for their base of minority voters, nor would the GOP base let it try.
White polarization is the mirror image of nonwhite polarization and its causes are similar. Numerous
scholars have
citedgenetics
as a basis for reciprocal altruism among closely-related kin and hostility toward outsiders among humans and in the animal kingdom
in general. This ethnocentrism is instinctual, present
amongbabies , and whites are
not immune from its effects. Most are socialized to suppress their ethnocentric instincts, but they remain only a
shortdistance beneath the surface. Academics sometimes
argue that
positive direct contact is a promising strategy for overcoming racial differences, but research has shown that the
negativeeffects are more
powerful – something a cursory glance at
crime statistics would
confirm. Rampant white flight and segregation in
neighborhoods
,
schools , and personal
relationships provide the most definitive evidence on the negative influence of direct contact. Its impact on voting is also
well established, particularly for whites and blacks. The shift of white Southerners away from the Democratic Party after civil rights
legislation was enacted in the 1960s was almost immediate and has
remained
strong ever since. White flight produced similar
political
advantages for Republicans in suburbs across the country during this period. Their advantage has softened since then, but primarily
because the suburbs have become
less white , not
lesssegregated . White voting is similarly affected
by proximity to Hispanics. White flight and segregation are a constant in heavily Latino areas in
both
liberal and conservative
states. The resulting political backlash in places like
California and
Arizona has been well-documented and confirmed
by
academicresearch
. Support for President Trump has also been shown to be highly
correlated with
whiteidentity
and
opposition to immigration. These trends are expected to become stronger over time.
Experimental
research has shown that growing white awareness of demographic change makes them more
conservative , less favorably disposed to
minorities, and feel greater attachment to other whites. The effects are heightened the more whites think they are
threatened . The associated
ideological effects are just as important. The influence of ideology is obvious in socially conservative states like North Dakota
and Kansas . However, the Democrats'
growing leftward tilt has become an issue even in liberal states like those in New England, many of which now regularly
elect
Republicans as governors
. In fact, liberal Massachusetts has had
just one Democratic governor in the past quarter century. The power of leftist ideology to drive whites together may reach its
zenith if Democrats resume their attack on segregation in neighborhoods and schools.
De facto segregation has
protected
white liberals from the consequences of their voting
decisions for years. If Democrats are
returned to power, however, they appear
ready
to
touch this electoral
third rail
.
Further evidence of racial polarization can be found by looking abroad. Ethnic conflict has been a constant in human relations –
everywhere and throughouthistory . More recently,
64 percent of
all civil wars since 1946 have divided along ethnic lines
. Such conflicts are highly correlated with genetic diversity and
ethnic polarization . Some of the worst examples,
such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan, have included ethnic cleansing and genocide. Race-based identity politics are just a lower
form of ethnic conflict. Like ethnic conflict more generally, the strength of such politics depends on the level of ethnic diversity
and corresponding racial polarization. In homogenous societies, for example, politics tends to divide along class and cultural lines.
As a society becomes more diverse, however, ethnicity begins to play a growing
role . Politics and
parties that are explicitly
ethnically-based usually do not appear until much later, when a nation has become more diverse and has begun to suffer extreme racial
polarization. Such politics have been shown to produce substantial ethnic
favoritism
. Their appearance is often a
prelude to civilwar or
partition . The United
States has not reached this stage, but its future can be seen in other nations that are further down the road. One example is Brazil.
While the United States will not become majority-minority until 2045, Brazil reached that milestone in
2010 . For much of the 20
th Century, Brazil viewed itself as a harmonious racial
democracy and a model for the rest of the world, but this image has been tarnished in recent years. The nation's changing demographics
demonstrated their power with the election of Lula da Silva in 2002 and his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010. Support
for these two presidents – both members of the leftist Workers Party – was
concentrated
in the largely black northern half of the country, while opposition was concentrated in the mostly
white south . Their victories depended on
the nation's changing demographics. Once elected, they rewarded their black supporters with substantial expansions of
affirmative action and
a new cash transfer system, called Bolsa Família, which disproportionately
benefitted
Afro-Brazilians. Since then, Brazil's fortunes have taken a turn for the
worse . Rousseff was
impeached
after a massive corruption scandal in 2016. Crime has
exploded . Black activists
nowderide the notion of "
racial democracy " and have become
more
militant
on racial issues. An explicitly
black political party has
also appeared. This has corresponded with a similar backlash in the white population. The leading candidate for the presidential
election this year is Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the
Trump of the Tropics . A white separatist movement called the
South is My Country is drawing substantial support. Brazilians are reportedly
losing faith in
democracy and becoming more receptive to
military
rule .
The preponderance of the evidence – domestic, international, historical, and scientific – suggests that American politics will
continue to polarize along racial and ethnic lines. At least in the short term, Republicans will benefit as white voters flee from
the other party. But will the GOP adequately capitalize on these gains?
Various elements of the
GOPestablishment
, including the
business elite and pro-immigration donors like the
Koch brothers , continue to hold substantial
power within the party. Reince Priebus probably echoed their views when he
said , "I think post-Trump, the party basically returns to its traditional role and a traditional platform."
Such status quo thinking ignores too much. There are numerous signs that the party is changing. Trump's popularity within his
own party is the
second highest among all presidents since World War II, trailing only George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Congressional
Never Trumpers like Bob
Corker , Jeff Flake
, and
Mark Sanford have been defeated or stepped aside. Prominent
columnists ,
analysts , and at least
one former GOP leader
are now declaring it Trump's party.
These changes are not solely about Trump, however. There were signs of change before his arrival. Eric Cantor's primary defeat
in 2014 was widely
attributed to softness on immigration, which met furious
grassroots opposition . Moreover, if Trump's rise were
merely a one-off event, we would not be seeing the simultaneous rise of nationalist movements in Europe, which is facing its own
immigration crisis .
The more likely answer is that these changes reflect something more powerful than any individual, even the president of the United
States. The same survival
instinct that is present in all living creatures still burns brightly within the world's European peoples. Trump was not the
cause, but a consequence – and we will not go gently into the night.
Patrick McDermott(email him)is a political analyst in Washington, DC.
This ethnocentrism is instinctual, observable even among babies. Whites are not immune from its effects. Most are socialized
to suppress their ethnocentric instincts, but they remain only a short distance beneath the surface.
Even the most vile race-virtuosos' ethnocentric instincts boil to the surface in the flight to "good schools" for their children.
The "Good schools" rationale works for them. Gets them away from the city, away from those awful Blacks. It was always diversity
for thee. The closest most liberals get to diversity is the Hispanic housekeeper. Because the Blacks, you know, they steal the
liquor/silver/Waterford". Heard variations of this a million times..
Brilliant synthesis. Excellent article. Patrick McDermott hits it out of the ballpark, noting correctly that ethnocentrism is
"instinctual". So true. So obvious. And this suppressed truth is just the tip of the iceberg. America lives under 'intellectual
occupation'.
But the hardening scientific facts involving race, kinship, and phenotype are testament to the hollowness of 'anti-racist'
rhetoric and ideologies that dominate so much of the American landscape.
These liberal creeds pretend to repudiate (all) 'racism' and bigotry, but in political fact, they strategically target only
white Americans. This makes these lofty 'values' not only disingenuous but unfair and destructive.
Highfalutin (but bogus) liberalism has come to play a diabolical role. It undermines white cohesion and white solidarity. Meanwhile,
from high above, irreversible demographic changes are being orchestrated.
MacDermott correctly observes that the West's unsought ethno-racial transformation is what's behind the reinvigoration of white
identity in Europe and America. This at least is good news.
Says MacDermott:
"Ethnic conflict has been a constant in human relations -- everywhere and throughout history. More recently, 64 percent of
all civil wars since 1946 have divided along ethnic lines. Such conflicts are highly correlated with genetic diversity and ethnic
polarization. Some of the worst examples, such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan, have included ethnic cleansing and genocide."
Very true. Very important. And while MacDermott avoids mentioning a more obvious example, the most persistent expression of
this phenomena can be seen in Israel/Palestine, where allegedly 'Semitic' Jews are doing whatever it takes to keep their lesser
(Semitic) cousins at arms length–in this case, in the caged ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank.
Undue and uncompromising Jewish influence in Zio-America is allowing this race-born outrage to continue. Sadly, Israeli savagery
routinely receives Zio-Washington's unconditional blessing, trillion-dollar subsidy, and unflinching diplomatic cover.
But besides the disputed territory and Israel's untouchable political power, what nourishes the endless Israel/Palestine impasse?
Jewish 'exceptionalism' is one key motivator.
The Chosen people are convinced that they are born vastly superior to their Semitic cousins.
Thus, strict segregation is required for the assurance of 'Jewish (genetic) continuity'. This objective however requires steadfast
cruelty since the natives are still restless and rebelling.
Supremacism means never having to say you're sorry. This is especially true since, ironically, peace between Jews and Arabs
could potentially lead to increased Jewish 'outmarriage' in Israel and consequently, the gradual reduction in Israeli (Jewish)
IQ and Jewish 'exceptionalism' (supremacy).
Over time, potential genetic intermingling would very possibly undermine Jewish magnificence and therefore, Jewish cohesion.
This could then translate into a loss of Jewish solidarity and 'community'. It's possible.
This downturn could subsequently affect Jewish wealth and power, and that is certainly not an outcome that the Jewish community
desires.
Leaders of the global Jewish community are smart enough to envision this scenario and to prevent it from happening. They use
The Holocaust (and it's potential re-0currance) as an all-purpose excuse. But it's phony. Self-segregation is a sacred, ancient
Jewish value. Thus the glamorization of interracial romance is directed only at the goyim, as is the message of Open Borders.
Just turn on your TV. It's there constantly.
These 'liberal, democratic' messages however are never advocated in Israel, nor are they directed at young Jews via Israeli
TV, news, entertainment or education.
You will never see glamorous depictions of Jewish/Arab miscegenation on Israeli television, even though black/white 'family
formation' on Jewish-owned mass media in America is ubiquitous.
Hostile US elites (Jews) apparently want non-Jewish whites to become mixed, brown. This racial objective however is anathema
to Jewish values. It's strictly for the goyim.
Meanwhile, whites in America are not permitted to think or hold values like Israeli Jews, or to even express similar preferences
inside the civilization that they and their forefathers created. This speaks volumes about the lack of freedom in America. Yes,
we live under intellectual occupation.
For many Israeli Jews (the dominant thinking goes) strict segregation–if not active warfare–is the only sure way to maintain
'hafrada' (separation) for Jews in Israel since they are surrounded by tens of millions of similar-looking but 'unexceptional'
Arabs.
Unlike America, walls (and segregation) remain sacred in Israel. But not here.
In fact, some Latinos are white, particularly those from Latin America's leadership class
I think the reality is, Latinos/Hispanics simply form lines like any group would do. I am white, all my fellow Hispanic friends
are white, and we consider ourselves essentially an ethnicity within Whiteness, just like Italians, or high-caste French Creoles,
White Persians, Lebanese or Jordanians.
The easiest way to tell if an "ethnic" is conservative or republican (outside of obvious virtue signalers), is to ask yourself,
" Is this person white ?". Other than famous actors and political types that have the luxury being "liberal" (e.g. Salma
Hayek) every day Hispanics, Persians and Arabs that are white, act, do and think, like every day White Anglo-Saxons, Germanics
and Nordics–for the most part (obviously IQ plays a part). Don't get me wrong, there is a difference in IQ and mindset in the
particulars between a Norman and a (white-ish) Sicilian, some IQ, some cultural, but if and when a civil war comes–no one will
have ANY problem knowing where they and others stand and belong.
Reince Priebus: "I think post-Trump, the party basically returns to its traditional role and traditional platform."
And that would be U.S. hegemony and market fundamentalism? Unlikely and unattractive. U.S. military dominance starves our society
and enriches the national security state and the rogue regimes in Tel Aviv and Riyadh. Market fundamentalism does not take into
account human frailty, and would produce widespread desperation.
What can be gleaned from Mr. McDermott's instructive article is that, like it or not, identity needs to be included in the
political lexicon of working class and middle class whites. Elite whites continue to cede power to blacks and browns in politics
and business as the slide into Idiocracy accelerates. This is an opportunity for disaffected whites from the Democratic Party
and Republican Trump supporters to form a coalition.
The political consequences of these changes will be profound and irreversible.
When Ted Kennedy was pushing the 1965 opening of our borders to atone for racism, he made repeated assurances that we would
not end up where we ended up. He said the level of immigration would remain the same, the ethnic mix would not inundate America
with immigrants from any particular place or nation, that the ethnic pattern of America would not be changed, and that we wouldn't
have something crazy like a million immigrants a year, certainly not poor ones who would place a burden on citizens.
When Reagan's amnesty happened, again promises where made that we could and would keep our country. Now, it looks like Brazil
is our future.
Elections are already being decided by racial votes of minorities, which aren't considered racist by that half of America that
eagerly anticipates our demise. What a rude surprise they are in for when they discover they are still white and will be honorary
deplorables once they no longer have political power.
But will the GOP adequately capitalize on these gains?
Ha, Derbyshire doesn't call it the Stupid Party for nothing.
Regarding my home state of Arizona, that 66% figure is an interesting anomaly. Except for my fellow writers, most of the white
folks I know are pretty conservative. Many secretly supported Trump or voted Libertarian in protest of the lousy mainstream choices.
Perhaps this is a reflection of white flight from California.
You dense "scientific" racists can't see the forest for the trees, as is always the case. The importance of this election has
nothing to do with demographics. But you wouldn't know that because all you want to do is scream raceracerace all de liblong day.
No. The importance of this race is that Ocasio-Cortez is "a strikingly perfect candidate, both in policy positions and refusal
to take corporate money. She fits the identity politics profile without once using identity politics virtue-signaling to cover
for lousy policies. This is shattering to the Clintonista crowd, who are spinning like tops."
However, most Asian immigrants are not East Asians and their IQs (such as those of Indians or Pakistanis) are much lower.
Really? How come so many are doctors, scientists and computer programmers? Those aren't typically low-IQ professions. Is this
just a case of aggressive brain-drain? Do all the stupid ones stay behind in India?
In homogenous societies, for example, politics tends to divide along class and cultural lines. As a society becomes more
diverse, however, ethnicity begins to play a growing role.
Yup. That's probably why the Democratic Party traded class war for race war.
Really? How come so many are doctors, scientists and computer programmers?
The advance guard in the US was the professional elite. Not so in the UK. Subcontinentals are much closer, or even below, average
there. Even here, motel owners may outnumber doctors, scientists, and computer programmers combined.
Is this just a case of aggressive brain-drain?
Yes.
And it's worse in Canada.
Do all the stupid ones stay behind in India?
There are a billion more people in India than in the US. Do the arithmetic.
OK. I'll make it simple for you because your understanding doesn't extend beyond simple.
Ocasio-Cortez is a very good candidate, and, unless she is co-opted–which, 99 out of a 100 (notice my use of "statistics,"
I mean damned lies, you statistics-worshipers) is the chance she will be–she is a hundred times better than Crowley the Clintonite
hack. Racists are really stupid. They vote against their own interests, just like all "conservatives."
The author throws around 'left' and 'right' as if they transparently applied in the case of ethnic politics. I would argue that
it has been the economic 'right' that has relentlessly pursued diversity of populations – quite arguably for millennia, and certainly
in the last 50 years. Some sane economic leftists realize this, although they are an endangered and shrinking group.
However if it is the right that is the main mover in favor of diversity (empire preferred to nation state for the easier control
of labor), I'm not sure what solutions there are. Whites voting for the Republican Party is not a long time viable solution since
the owners of that party have fundamentally different interests than the white working class (as leftists have correctly pointed
out over and over).
Ocasio's victory is a nightmare for the Democrats. The Leftist media is touting her as the future of the party, but her platform
makes Obama look like a rightwing extremist.
- Federal Jobs Guarantee
- Medicare for All
- Tuition-free public college
- Reduce prisons by 50%
- Defund ICE
But the real poison pill is her unwavering support for the Palestinians. I'm not making a value judgment on this or any other
of her policies, but if the GOP can tag the next Democratic presidential candidate with Ocasio's worldview, then expect a Trumpslide
in 2020.
What do the (((brains))) and (((primary funders))) behind the Democratic party think of this rising star? Here are some choice
quotes from NY Jewish Week:
To some, the stunning victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of Israel, over 10-term Rep. Joseph Crowley
(D-Queens-Bronx), an Israel supporter, in Tuesday's Democratic primary is seen as another nail in the coffin of Democratic support
for the Jewish state.
"If she maintains her anti-Israel stance, she will be a one-term wonder," predicted George Arzt, a New York political operative.
"I don't think you can have someone with those views in New York City. If she moderates, she could win again. If she doesn't,
there will be massive opposition to her -- maybe even a cross-over candidate from the Latino community with pro-Israel views."
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist, said he sees Ocasio-Cortez's overwhelming victory -- she won with 57.5
percent of the vote -- as "another step in the ongoing divorce proceedings between the pro-Israel community and the Democratic
Party."
Jeff Wiesenfeld, a former aide to both Republican and Democratic elected officials, said he read Ocasio-Cortez's Twitter
and Facebook postings and said she has voiced opinions that are "downright hostile to Israel."
After 60 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in May while attempting to breach the fence along the Israel-Gaza
border, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter: "This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state
or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protestors. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity,
as anyone else. Democrats can't be silent about this anymore."
"We have never stepped into a situation in New York City in which a member of Congress starts out hostile to us," he added.
"This is a new frontier."
"While Jewish Democrats support much of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's domestic policy agenda, we disagree with her past statement
regarding Israel, as well as her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel," it added. "In the coming days and months, we hope to learn more about Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's
views, but at the moment, her position on Israel is not in line with our values."
What will Jewish Democrats do if the Ocasio/DSA platform becomes mainstream in the Democratic party? Join up with the anti-Trump
neocons and vote for a third party? While the Republicans can win nationwide elections without Jewish money and votes, there's
no evidence that the Democrats can, at least not yet.
Another factor in Ocasio's surprise victory, as so delicately pointed out by the noted political analyst Andrew Anglin, is
that:
"Furthermore, people want to f*ck her."
No shit. Her good looks and likeable personality mean that she's likely in the media spotlight to stay, no matter how much
the MSM (((gatekeepers))) might want to shield the general public from her, ahem, "problematic" views.
As an aside, I believe her nationwide appeal is enhanced by her complete lack of the godawful, ear-grating Nuyorican accent
so commonplace among her co-ethnics. In fact she speaks with a general American accent with barely even a hint of New Yorkese.
I don't know if this is part of a generalized homogenization of regional accents throughout the country, or if she affects this
dialect for personal and/or political reasons. Either way, it only adds to her appeal.
If the Ocasio-Sanders wing of the Dems continues its electoral ascendancy, then Donald Trump will start looking more and more
like the moderate adult in the room compared to the infantile, gibsmedat, tantrum-throwers on the far left. Which is terrible
news for the Clintonite, corporate bloodsucker wing of the Dems, but fantastic news for the rest of us.
If the Ocasio-Sanders wing of the Dems continues its electoral ascendancy, the same people who voted for Trump will vote for them.
You have no understanding whatsoever about the mood of the current polity.
Economics is just a tool to that end. When identity looked to be more productive, they pivoted quite gracefully.
Welfare bureaucrats derive their power from the poor, not the working, and there are many more poor abroad than at home. Creating
a welfare state thus creates a giant constituency for importing more poor, and poorer.
One of the credos of realism has been "There are no angels, so set the devils against one another." As pie-in-the-sky as economists
can be, they're closer to the truth on this one than the pro-regulation forces, who assume, by definition, that the regulators
will be angels.
Americans, at least Unz reviewers, lump all Hispanic speakers into one category. Does Cortez even speak Spanish, except for her
ethnic purposes? More important, a Puerto Rican origin is both Creole and Roman Catholic. That puts them in a category all their
own. She has no love for Israel because her background did not come under the influence of the Christian Zionist Churches. Her
black origins make her atavistically side with the Palestinians.
You have no clue about "Trump supporters." For your information, they will vote for anyone who shakes things up. Their second
choice after Trump was Sanders. These are facts. Read 'em and weep.
The Establishment wants to pretend that these voters don't exist. Even though they tipped the election. Along with most people
(even here) they want to keep everything in neat boxes labelled Right vs Left, Rep vs Dem, etc etc. Spares them the 'vexation
of thinking'.
Actually, I have a quite contrary view of the political implications of these shifts in racial demographics. For those interested,
here's a link to a long article I published a few years ago on this same exact topic:
"... Today we see anti-racism being elevated into a quasi-religion that may be used to justify totalitarian policies. One benefit of this initiative is that it allows the elite to preserve the gap in material wealth between themselves and the victim class. Ending racism is less expensive than ending inequality! ..."
Numerous sources give very high figures for Jews and these have tended to be memory-holed
and maligned as you know what.
Consequently sources which report a low number of jews (do you know of any?) from the period
are at least as suspect, and ones from a later period and embraced by Jewish scholars more
so.
And one must remember that apart from the many name changes by Jews in the Old Bolshevik era
(lots of name changes amongst Israel's 'founders' too) they made substantial effort to hide
their jewishness, as have later sources.
One might consider the attempted Bokshevik coup in Germany a year after the Russian one.
Even wikipedia has to report that this 'Spartacus uprising' was led almost wholly by Jews.
What would they have done had they won? Might the conflation of anti-nationalist communist
violence and Jewish Supremacy have been what led in part to Hitler and his racial nationalists?
There was also a coup in Hungary led by Bela Kun. I agree with you that the threat of Communism
played a role in the rise of militant nationalism and its anti-Semitic aspect. The role of Jews
in the leadership of every Communist uprising is crisply documented by Winston Churchill in his
1920 article http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html
Paul Johnson in Modern Times claims that Jews did not make up a large percentage of party
members but that is less impressive than their domination of the top ranks. Germany in the 20s
and 30s had an abundance of motives to support a strong nationalist leader since the terms of
the Versailles Treaty were unjust and unendurable, and the solution seemed to involve at least
the willingness to use force to remove the burden. The democratic parties were insufficiently
decisive and would likely have succumbed to Communist agitation or at best preserved a very
unpleasant status quo. The weakness of Communism is that it reduces everything to economics and
the material dimension. It demands the right to dictate without addressing the spiritual
dimension of life. Hitler, by contrast, appealed to national pride and national unity, in
addition to the national need to escape from poverty.
Today we see anti-racism being elevated into a quasi-religion that may be used to
justify totalitarian policies. One benefit of this initiative is that it allows the elite to
preserve the gap in material wealth between themselves and the victim class. Ending racism is
less expensive than ending inequality!
responding to PG's comments and the comments of Rational
Zionist, among them, being many NY Intellectuals, invented mugged reality (Neoconism) , but
party slithering is a another name for divide and conquer.
Fudmier's example as to how to control the vote:
You present an idea to 6 people (there are seven votes including yours, you are the one);
virtually everyone is indifferent or against your idea. Before the vote, how can you make the
outcome favorable to your side? Divide the opinions on a related subject so that the people
must vote for your idea if they take a side on the related subject. I am always either a
Democrat or a Republican, cannot vote for anything the other party presents, no matter how
good it is. So make the idea Republican or Democratic.
them me Total vote for against my idea
no division 1 2 3 4 5 6 ME 7 Me 6 I lose
divide by party D R D R D R ME 7 Me+3 3 I win
As the simple analysis suggests: it is easy to win a vote when the idea is Glued to the
two AAs (glue, attached, or associated). The unpopular idea Glued and attached or associated
with the political party issue splits the vote (such activity divides and weakens the
political power inherent in the voting power of the masses). For example, if we make the vote
to turn off all of the drinking water. the only vote will be mine, but if we say turn off the
drinking water to all but those who are green, we divide the vote. and control the
outcome.
This brings us to the democratic dilemma: should the non green people be included in vote
on that issue? In fact, it is exactly this problem that those who wrote the constitution
intended to establish.
The aggressive foreign policies and national security positions mentioned by PG have been
attached to the standard Jewish line; in other words the duty of a Jew to recognize
him/herself as a Jew and to vote as a member of the clan has been glued to the AAs. It is
nearly impossible to vote for Jewish interest and not vote to demolish Palestinian homes.
I am hoping this list can develop ways to analyse current events into a set of fair play
rules, reading, learning and analyzing books, journals and events and writing about them is
not enough; some kind of action is needed to bring into reality the findings of these
readings, learning and analysis produce. The best way to offset misleading, false or invented
propaganda is to force it to into a rule based debunking process. Simple rules that everyone
can learn, understand and adopt.
Capitalist Russia and its resources represent a major competitor to the resources and
schemes of the capitalist neocon led west. Hating Russia is like being a democrat or a
republican,it keeps the pharaoh options open.
DemoRats use identity politics to achieve their goals. And if it does not suit their goals it
is thrown in the garbage can as used napkin.
Also it is stupid to view candidates from the prism of identity politics: "In a mature
society, it would not matter if someone was black, white, gay, Jewish, young, old, whatever but
what policies they bring to the party. This article, going out of its way to label Nixon as LGBT
and Sanders as Jewish, really only means that they are letting the other side set the rules and
that is never a winning position. Unfortunately we do not live in a mature society."
Notable quotes:
"... Albright: "Younger women, Hillary Clinton will always be there for you" plus that other thing she said. ..."
By Gaius Publius , a professional writer living
on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby,
Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius , Tumblr and Facebook . GP article archive here . Originally published at DownWithTyranny
Albright: "Younger women, Hillary Clinton will always be there for you" plus that
other thing she said.
How cynical is the Democratic Party's support for identity politics? To this observer,
it seems impossible not to notice that those in control of the Democratic Party care about
"identity politics" -- about supporting more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ
candidates, etc. -- only when it suits them. Which means, if you take this view, that their
vocal support for the underlying principles of "identity politics" is both cynical and
insincere.
As I said, this has been apparent for some time. I've never seen it documented so well in
one place, however, until this
recent piece by Glenn Greenwald.
For example, Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016 not only encouraged a vote for Clinton
because men and women had a duty to support her as a woman, yet they attacked support for
Sanders as specifically misogynist:
The 2016 presidential election was the peak, at least thus far, for the tactics of
identity politics in U.S. elections. In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton's potential
status as the first female candidate was frequently used not only to inspire her supporters
but also to shame and malign those who supported other candidates, particularly Bernie
Sanders.
In February 2016 -- at the height of the Clinton-Sanders battle -- former Clinton
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright introduced Hillary Clinton at a New Hampshire rally by
predicting a grim afterlife for female supporters of Sanders, while Clinton and Cory
Booker cheered: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!" she
announced.
Though Albright apologized
in the New York Times for her insensitive phrasing after a backlash ensued, she did
reaffirm her central point: "When women are empowered to make decisions, society benefits.
They will raise issues, pass bills and put money into projects that men might overlook or
oppose."
At roughly the same time, Clinton supporter Gloria Steinem said female supporters of
Sanders
were motivated by a primitive impulse to follow "the boys," who, she claimed, were behind
Sanders. Just this week, the Clinton loyalist and Salon writer Amanda Marcotte said Trump
won "because some dudes had mommy issues," then clarified that she
was referring to left-wing misogynists who did not support Clinton: "I also have those
moments where I'm like, 'Maybe we need to run Bland White Guy 2020 to appease the fake
socialists and jackass mansplainers.'"
Greenwald notes in passing that no one was making the case for supporting Sanders because he
would be the first Jewish president, and he doesn't expect that case to be made in 2020 should
Sanders run again.
He concludes from this that "despite the inconsistencies, one of the dominant themes that
emerged in Democratic Party discourse from the 2016 election is that it is critically important
to support female candidates and candidates of color, and that a failure or refusal to support
such candidates when they present a credible campaign is suggestive evidence of underlying
bigotry."
The Past as Prologue: Cynthia Nixon
Apparently, however, Democratic Party interest in electing strong progressive women (Hillary
Clinton includes
herself on that list) has dissipated in the smoke of the last election. As Greenwald notes,
"Over and over, establishment Democrats and key party structures have united behind straight,
white male candidates (including ones tainted by corruption), working to defeat their credible
and progressive Democratic opponents who are women, LGBT people, and/or people of color.
Clinton herself has led the way."
The article is replete with examples, from the Brad Ashford–Kara Eastman battle in
Nebraska, to the Bob Menendez–Michael Starr Hopkins–Lisa McCormick three-way
contest in New Jersey, to the Ben Cardin–Chelsea Manning primary in Maryland. In all
cases, the Party backed the white male candidate (or in Menendez's case, the whiter male
candidate) against the woman, the person of color, and the LGBTQ candidate. Not even the smoke
of 2016's identity fire remains.
Which brings us to the 2018 candidacies of Cynthia Nixon and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
Let's start with Cynthia Nixon, running against corrupt ,
anti-progressive NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo sides with Republicans to defeat progressive
measures, rules with an iron hand, is white and male. Yet he's also supported and endorsed by
almost every national Democrat who matters:
In New York state, Cynthia Nixon is attempting to become the first female governor, as
well as the first openly LGBT governor, in the state's history. She's running against a
dynastic politician-incumbent, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom the New York Times denounced this
year for being "tainted" by multiple corruption scandals.
But virtually the entire Democratic establishment has united behind the white male
dynastic prince, Cuomo, over his female, LGBT challenger. That includes Clinton
herself, who
enthusiastically endorsed Cuomo last month, as well as Democratic Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand , who -- despite starting a political action committee with the explicit
purpose of supporting women running for office -- also
endorsed Cuomo over Nixon in March. [emphasis mine]
To make the main point again: How cynical and insincere is the Democratic Party's support
for identity politics? Very.
A Local Race with National Consequences: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Joe Crowley
This cynical drama is also playing out in the race between corrupt
Joe Crowley , the likely next Democratic leader of the House (if he survives this election)
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The same dynamic is now driving the Democratic Party primary campaign in New York's 14th
Congressional District, a district that is composed of 70 percent nonwhite voters. The
nine-term Democratic incumbent, Joe Crowley, is a
classic dynastic machine politician . His challenger, a 28-year-old Latina woman,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has generated nationwide excitement for her campaign after her
inspiring introduction video went viral . At a fundraising event, Crowley accused his
opponent of playing identity politics, saying she
was trying to make the campaign "about race."
Despite all that, virtually the entire Democratic establishment has united behind the
white male incumbent, and virtually none is supporting the woman of color who is challenging
him. Yesterday, the very same Gillibrand who has a PAC to support female candidates
and who endorsed Cuomo over Nixon announced that she was supporting Crowley over
Ocasio-Cortez. [emphasis added]
Note that these are not low-profile, low-consequence races. Both are positions of enormous
power -- in Nixon's case, due to the office; in Crowley's case, due to his position as the
Dauphin to Nancy Pelosi's soon-to-step-down monarch.
These are races with exponentially greater consequences than usuals. And where is the
Democratic Party in this? With the (corrupt) white male and against the woman, as always these
days.
"Identity Politics" Is Not a Cookie-Cutter Solution to Electoral Choices
I'd like to make two additional points. First, by any intelligent standard, candidates
"identities" should only be one factor only in considering support for them. Only the right
wing and 2016 Clinton advocates like Madeleine Albright, quoted above, make the most simplistic
argument about "identity" support -- and even then, the simplistic argument seemed to apply
only to support for Clinton herself and never to other women.
For example, would even Clinton supporters have supported Carly Fiorina against a male
Democrat for president? Obviously not. And Clinton herself, a former New York senator, did not
support Zephyr Teachout in 2014 when
Teachout ran against Andrew Cuomo for governor . Nor did then-Democratic primary candidate
Hillary Clinton campaign for Zephyr Teachout in her 2016 race for the the NY-19
House seat .
Ideological concerns also drive decisions like these, as in fact they should. Fiorina would
likely be too far right for Clinton to support, and Teachout too far left. This is a fair basis
on which to decide. It was also a fair basis on which to decide support for Clinton as
well.
The Ocasio-Crowley Battle Is a Very High-Leverage Fight
A second point: I recently wrote about the importance of progressive involving themselves
heavily in high-leverage races -- like the Bernie Sanders 2016 race, for example -- where the
payoff would have been huge relative to the effort. (You can read that piece and its argument
here: " Supporting
Aggressive Progressives for Very High-Leverage Offices ".)
The Ocasio-Crowley contest is similarly high-leverage -- first, because he's
perceived as vulnerable and acting like he agrees , and second because it would, to use a
chess metaphor, eliminate one of the most powerful (and corrupt) anti-progressive players from
House leadership in a single move.
Again, Crowley is widely seen as the next Democratic Speaker of the House. He would be worse
by far than Nancy Pelosi, and he's dangerous. He has blackmailed, as I see it, almost all of
his colleagues into supporting him by the implicit threat of, as Speaker, denying them
committee assignments and delaying or thwarting their legislation. He also controls funding as
Speaker via the leadership PAC and the DCCC. Even Mark Pocan, co-chair of the CPC and normally
a reliable progressive voice and vote, is reportedly whipping support for Crowley among his
colleagues.
Crowley plays for keeps. Taking him off the board entirely, removing him from the House for
the next two years, would produce a benefit to progressives far in excess of the effort
involved.
Progressives, were they truly smart, would have nationalize this race from the beginning and
worked tirelessly to win it. The payoff from a win like this is huge. Larry
Coffield ,
June 26, 2018 at 5:27 am
I think identity politics has always served as a diversion for elites to play within the
neoliberal bandwidth of decreasing public spending. Fake austerity and an unwillingness to
use conjured money for public QE are necessary for pursuing neoliberal privatization of
public enterprises. Therefore Bernie and his MMT infrastructure are anathema to corporate
democrats and their Wall St. benefactors.
Moral Monday represents what I deem as people over profit. I would rather be a spoiler
than enable corporate sociopaths to.expand mass incarceration, end welfare as we know it,
consider the killing of a half-million Iraqi children an acceptable cost, or oversee the
first inverted debt jubilee in 2008 to forgive the liabilities of fraudsters by pauperizing
debtors.
responding to PG's comments and the comments of Rational Zionist, among them, being many
NY Intellectuals, invented mugged reality (Neoconism), but party slithering is a another name
for divide and conquer.
Fudmier's example as to how to control the vote:
You present an idea to 6 people (there are seven votes including yours, you are the one);
virtually everyone is indifferent or against your idea. Before the vote, how can you make the
outcome favorable to your side? Divide the opinions on a related subject so that the people
must vote for your idea if they take a side on the related subject. I am always either a
Democrat or a Republican, cannot vote for anything the other party presents, no matter how
good it is. So make the idea Republican or Democratic.
Here is a simple example:
no division 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Total votes 7. Voted for me 1 (myself only) I lose
divide by party D R D R D R R Total votes 7. Voted for me (3 republican votes and myself) 4 I
win
As the simple analysis suggests: it is easy to win a vote when the idea is Glued to the
two AAs (glue, attached, or associated). The unpopular idea Glued and attached or associated
with the political party issue splits the vote (such activity divides and weakens the
political power inherent in the voting power of the masses). For example, if we make the vote
to turn off all of the drinking water. the only vote will be mine, but if we say turn off the
drinking water to all but those who are green, we divide the vote. and control the
outcome.
This brings us to the democratic dilemma: should the non green people be included in vote
on that issue? In fact, it is exactly this problem that those who wrote the constitution
intended to establish.
The aggressive foreign policies and national security positions mentioned by PG have been
attached to the standard Jewish line; in other words the duty of a Jew to recognize
him/herself as a Jew and to vote as a member of the clan has been glued to the AAs. It is
nearly impossible to vote for Jewish interest and not vote to demolish Palestinian homes.
I am hoping this list can develop ways to analyze current events into a set of fair play
rules, reading, learning and analyzing books, journals and events and writing about them is
not enough; some kind of action is needed to bring into reality the findings of these
readings, learning and analysis produce. The best way to offset misleading, false or invented
propaganda is to force it to into a rule based debunking process. Simple rules that everyone
can learn, understand and adopt.
Capitalist Russia and its resources represent a major competitor to the resources and
schemes of the capitalist neocon led West. Hating Russia is like being a democrat or a
republican, it keeps the pharaoh options open.
Working-class white people may claim to be against identity politics, but they actually
crave identity politics.
I think they probably see it more of a "if you can't beat them, join them" scenario. They
see the way the wind is blowing and decide if they want representation, they have to play the
game, even if they don't really like the rules.
They know enough about the EU to know that it isn't one of their patrons and sponsors.
They also know that Westminster have been systematically misrepresenting the EU for their own
purposes for decades, and they can use the same approach.
This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards . Replies may
also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs .
Not a fool and I don't hate anyone at 55 I have 1.2M in investments, I make 165k a year and
pay 40k+ a year in taxes. I to come across people who live off of we everyday and expect to
free load. I am not a blowhard just an engineer who pays for sloth.
I've met many fools like you in my over 50 years on the planet, blowhards parading their
ignorance as a badge of pride, thinking that their hatred of anyone not exactly like them is
normal, mistaking what some cretin says on the far right radio for fact.
You people would be comical if not for the toxicity that your stupidity engenders.
Al Jazeera tries to do a better job, at least providing a spectrum of opinion and a lot of
depth in quite a few issues, something most other networks fail to do these days.
Don't fall into the associated trap either, of the false equation between STATED and ACTUAL
goals.
Fox and Hunt are fully aware that to actually admit their actual goal, would be (probably)
just about the only thing which would provoke an electoral backlash which would sweep the
Conservatives from office. The NHS is proverbially "the nearest thing the English have, to a
religion" and is a profoundly dangerous subject for debate.
Fox and Hunt may be weaving an incomprehensible web of sophistry and misdirection, but no
part of it is accidental.
Please, please don't make the unfounded assumption that people like Fox, Johnson, Cameron et
al are as stupid as they sometimes appear.
Fox and Hunt, in particular, know exactly what they are engaged in - a hard-right coup
designed to destroy government control over the NHS and route its enormous cash flows into
the pockets of their private, mostly American sponsors. It isn't necessary to look far, to
discover their connections and patronage from this source.
Johnson is consumed by ambition, as was Cameron before him; like Cameron, he makes much of
his self-presumed fitness for the role, whilst producing no supporting evidence of any
description.
Brexit, as defined by its advocates, CANNOT be discussed precisely because no rational
debate exists. It hinges upon the Conservative Party's only fear, that of disunity leading to
Opposition. They see that Labour are 50-odd seats short of a majority, and that's ALL they
see.
What in God's green world are you talking about? Did you read that before pressing "Post"?
It's obvious that you have no knowledge whatsoever of the subject.
The "race riots" of the 1940s and 1950s were essentially about employment protection (the
first, regarding the importation of Yemeni seamen into the North-East of England). The mostly
Pakistani influx into the North-West of England was an attempt to cut labour costs and prop
up a dying, obsolete industry, mortally wounded by the loss of its business model in the
aftermath of Empire; an industry whose very bricks and mortar are long since gone, but the
imported labour and their descendants remain... the influx of Caribbean labour into London
and the South-East was focussed around the railways and Underground, to bolster the local
labour force which had little interest in dead-end shift-work jobs in the last days of steam
traction and the increasingly run-down Underground.
Labour, in those days, was strongly anti-immigration precisely because it saw no value in
it, to their unionised, heavy-industry voter base.
Regarding the ideological, anti-British, anti-democratic nature of Labour's conversion to
mass immigration, you need only read the writings and speeches of prominent figures of the
day such as Roy Hattersley and Harriet Harman, who say exactly this, quite clearly and in
considerable detail. Their ideological heirs, figures like Diane Abbot (who is stridently
anti-white and anti-British), Andrew Neather and Hazel Blears, can speak for themselves.
I was recently struck by this part of the Guardian obituary of Lady Farrington of Ribbleton:
' she possessed the important defining characteristic that, above others, wins admiration
across all the red leather benches in the House of Lords: she knew what she was talking
about'
Too often these days we are governed by people who don't know what they are talking about.
Never has this been truer than the likes of Fox, Davis, Johnson, and other Brexiteers.
But this doesn't seem to matter much anymore. At times it seems that anyone can make
generised assertions about something, without having to back them up with evidence, and then
wave away questions about their veracity.
Opinion now trumps evidence regularly, even on the BBC where Brexit ideology is often now
given a free pass. The problem for those of us who value expertise is that with the likes of
Trump, and some EU Leavers, we are up against a bigotry which is evangelical in nature. A
gospel that cannot be questioned, a creed that allows no other thinking.
The best you can do is complain about "this?" This WHAT? Try a noun. You're being an
embarrassment to troglodytes everywhere. Don't just point and leap up and down. Your
forefathers died in bringing you a language. Be an expressive hominid and name the thing that
hurts.
It seems at the moment the Guardian also suffers from a glut of experts without expertise.
Not a day goes by that my jaw doesn't drop at some inane claim made by what seems to be a
retinue of contributors who have neither good writing skills nor a particularly wide look on
things. An example today: "Unlike Hillary Clinton, I never wanted to be someone's wife". How
extraordinary. Who says she ever 'wanted to be someone's wife'? Maybe she fell in love with
someone all those years ago and they decided to get married? Who knows. But sweeping
statements like that do not endear you to quite a few of your once very loyal readers. It's
annoying.
I think this posits an overriding explanation for people's actions that doesn't exist. Even
the idea that immigration is a new liberal plot. Take the wind rush generation of immigrants
while there was a Tory government at the time I think the idea this was an attempt to
undermine white working class gains is provably nonsensical
The problem with this article, and the numerous other similar pieces which appear in the
various editions of the Guardian on a "regular-and-often" basis, is that it completely avoids
a very basic point, because it has no answer to it.
It is this.
The white British (and by extension, Western) populations never wanted mass immigration
because they knew from the outset, that its purpose was to undermine the social and political
gains they had wrested from the political and financial elite after 1945. They cared not at
all for the fratricidal conflicts between alien religions and cultures, of which they knew
little and regarded what they did know as unacceptable.
The US achieved a huge economic boom without it. Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the
USA were popular destinations for the British population whose goal and mantra was "no return
to the thirties" and who emigrated in large numbers.
White semi-skilled and unskilled (and increasingly, lower middle class) populations
everywhere reject, and have always rejected third world mass immigration (and more recently,
in some areas, mass emigration from the former Soviet Union) for the simple, and sufficient
reason that they have no possible reason or incentive to support or embrace it. It offers
them nothing, and its impact on their lives is wholly negative in practical terms - which is
how a social group which lives with limited or no margins between income and outgoings,
necessarily
perceives life.
Identity politics has no roots amongst them, because they correctly perceive that whatever
answer it might produce, there is no possible outcome in which the preferred answer will be a
semi-skilled, white family man. They inevitably pick up a certain level of the constant blare
of "racist bigot, homophobe, Islsmophobia" from its sheer inescapability, but they aren't
COMPLETELY stupid.
"... For example, when a Republican talks about "freedom" they don't mean "freedom from want". They mean "freedom from government oppression", but only government oppression. ..."
"... Democrats act the same way about different things. When a Democrat says "diversity", they only mean diversity of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Diversity of ideas? Diversity of class? Not so much. When a Democrat says "privilege" it refers to "white" and "male". Privilege of wealth? (i.e. like the dictionary definition) That generally gets forgotten. ..."
"... -- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... -- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) ..."
I've come to realize that there's a lot of confusion out there due to people using words with very specific definitions.
For example, when a Republican talks about "freedom" they don't mean "freedom from want".
They mean "freedom from government oppression", but only government oppression.
Private oppression? Republicans will either deny it exists, or justify it.
When a Republican is "pro-life" it only refers to birth.
Because those very same pro-life people are generally pro-war and pro-death penalty.
Democrats act the same way about different things.
When a Democrat says "diversity", they only mean diversity of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Diversity of ideas? Diversity of class? Not so much.
When a Democrat says "privilege" it refers to "white" and "male".
Privilege of wealth? (i.e. like the dictionary definition) That generally gets forgotten.
And then there is the bipartisan misuse of words, which revolves around war and wealth.
When they say "humanitarian war" they mean, um, some contradictory concepts that are meaningless, but are designed to make you feel
a certain way.
When they say "socialism" they really mean "state oppression" regardless of the economic system.
As for the many version of socialism with minimal or non-existent central governments? Or when socialist programs work? No one talks
about them.
Let's not forget substituting or mixing up "middle class" for "working class".
"Working class" now equals "poor", which isn't right.
They use "working class" as a smear too.
When you say "working class" some people
automatically insert certain words in front of it, as if it's generally understood.
When many hear discussion of outreach to "working class" voters, they silently add the words "white" and "male" and all too often
imagine them working on a factory floor or in construction. They shouldn't. According to another analysis by CAP from late last
year, just under 6 in 10 members of the working class are white, and the group is almost half female (46 percent).
The topic of the needs and interests of the working class is usually race and gender neutral. Only the dishonest or indoctrinated
can't wrap their minds around that fact.This is important because working class values don't require a race or gender lens.
a new report released today by the Center for American Progress makes a convincing argument, using extensive polling data, that
this divide does not need to exist. As it turns out, in many cases, voters -- both college educated and working class, and of
all races -- are in favor of an economic agenda that would offer them broader protections whether it comes to work, sickness or
retirement.
"The polling shows that workers across race support similar views on economic policy issues," said David Madland, the co-author
of the report, entitled "The Working-Class Push for Progressive Economic Policies." "They support a higher minimum wage, higher
taxes on the wealthy, and more spending on healthcare and retirement. There is broad support among workers for progressive economic
policy."
This shows that it's possible to make economic issues front and center in a campaign platform in a way that doesn't just talk
to working class whites and dismisses the concerns of female and minority voters. It also shows that the oft-discussed dilemma
among Democrats -- whether to prioritize college educated voters or working class ones -- may be a false choice.
Propaganda is all about false choices. To accomplish this, the media has created a world in which the working class
exist only in the margins .
With the working class largely unrepresented in the media, or represented only in supporting roles, is it any wonder that people
begin to identify in ways other than their class? Which is exactly what the
ruling class
wants .
I can't believe I used to fall for this nonsense! It takes a stupendous level of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously celebrate
the fortunes of someone from a specific identity while looking past the vast sea of people from said identity who are stuck in
gut-wrenching poverty. We pop champagnes for the neo-gentry while disregarding our own tribulations. It's the most stunning form
of logical jujitsu establishment shills have successfully conditioned us to accept; instead of gauging the health of the economy
and the vitality of our nation based on the collective whole, we have been hoodwinked to accept the elevation of a few as success
for us all.
Diversity has become a scam and nothing more than a corporate bamboozle and a federated scheme that is used to hide the true nature
of crony capitalism. We have become a Potemkin society where tokens are put on the stage to represent equality while the vast
majority of Americans are enslaved by diminishing wages or kneecapped into dependency. The whole of our politics has been turned
into an identity-driven hustle. On both sides of the aisle and at every corner of the social divide are grievance whisperers and
demagogues who keep spewing fuel on the fire of tribalism. They use our pains and suffering to make millions only to turn their
backs on us the minute they attain riches and status.
It's only when you see an article written by the ruling elite, or one that identifies with the ruling elite, that you realize
just how out-of-touch they can be. The rich really
are different - they are sociopaths.
They've totally and completely bought into their own
righteousness,
merit and virtue .
Class ascendance led me to become what Susan Jacoby classifies in her recent New York Times Op-Ed "Stop Apologizing for Being
Elite" as an "elite": a vague description of a group of people who have received advanced degrees. Jacoby urges elites to reject
the shame that they have supposedly recently developed, a shame that somehow stems from failing to stop the working class from
embracing Trumpism. Jacoby laments that, following the 2016 election, these elites no longer take pride in their wealth, their
education, their social status, and posits that if only elites embraced their upward mobility, the working class would have something
to aspire to and thus discard their fondness for Trump and his promises to save them.
That level of condescension just blows my mind. It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working
class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil, or Russia, than I do with the wealthy elite in my own country. Don't think that the wealthy
haven't figured that out too.
That is the only word you need pay attention to.
I am inferior therefore expendable.
How the lofty will fail. They will succumb to those who are lessor in their minds.
Nice post gjohn.
That is the only word you need pay attention to.
I am inferior therefore expendable.
How the lofty will fail. They will succumb to those who are lessor in their minds.
Nice post gjohn.
It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil,
or Russia, than a do with the wealthy elite in my own country.
Don't think that the wealthy haven't figured that out too.
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life.
-- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) source
@thanatokephaloides I have been a worker and an employer for most of my career. I associate with many of the same ilk.
None of us working / employer types can afford to hire the millions of under employed. Maybe a few here and there. We are not
wealthy, nor are we taking advantage of the poor. Try to put this lofty idealism into perspective.
It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil,
or Russia, than a do with the wealthy elite in my own country.
Don't think that the wealthy haven't figured that out too.
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life.
-- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) source
pay $125K per kid for college if you earn more than 125K. That makes zero sense. A parent has no legal obligation to a child
after age 18, but the 18 year old must include parental income if they apply for PELL. If they are included in their parents family,
then the family must be legally obligated to pay for college. 18 can legally die, go to war, be incarcerated, and contractually
bound, but they can't have a drink or be legally entitled to the same rights and benefits as everyone else.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours." It is no wonder there is so much resentment at all levels and an economic coalition can't be formed. Somebody
is always measuring who mom loves best. At no time did Bernie say a word about means testing a GD thing. It is why he was able
to transcend labels.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours."
Especially when one considers the chances of that being true are really quite small.
Contrary to the Randian beLIEf, they didn't build what they have all by themselves. Society carried quite a bit of the freight
here.
pay $125K per kid for college if you earn more than 125K. That makes zero sense. A parent has no legal obligation to a child
after age 18, but the 18 year old must include parental income if they apply for PELL. If they are included in their parents
family, then the family must be legally obligated to pay for college. 18 can legally die, go to war, be incarcerated, and contractually
bound, but they can't have a drink or be legally entitled to the same rights and benefits as everyone else.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours." It is no wonder there is so much resentment at all levels and an economic coalition can't be formed. Somebody
is always measuring who mom loves best. At no time did Bernie say a word about means testing a GD thing. It is why he was able
to transcend labels.
That starts out on disparities in housing, but rounds abouts to the "Elite Class" and the urban gentrification by corporatist
democrats. It points out how the democratic party caters to this elite wing, and how the NIMBY-ism of the elites blocks affordable
housing laws. It ends up with some observations:
"Taking it a step further, a Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading
to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also -- as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate --
to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House."
We really can't afford the wealthy parasite class anymore nor should we suffer their think tanks that make folks worship them
and their lifestyles of indulgence and greed!
"... The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers. ..."
"... Consequently, the ruling elite have funded "black history," "women's studies," and "transgender dialogues," in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These "studies" have replaced real history with fake history. ..."
PCR's latest is really good. I love it when he gets to ripping, and doesn't stop for 2000+ words or so. It reads a lot better
than Toynbee, fersher.
The working class, designated by Hillary Clinton as "the Trump deplorables," is now the victimizer, not the victim. Marxism
has been stood on its head.
The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups
and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming
at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers.
The ruling elite favors a "conversation on race," because the ruling elite know it can only result in accusations that will
further divide society. Consequently, the ruling elite have funded "black history," "women's studies," and "transgender dialogues,"
in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These "studies" have replaced real history
with fake history.
All of America, indeed of the entire West, lives in The Matrix, a concocted [and false] reality. Western peoples are so
propagandized, so brainwashed, that they have no understanding that their disunity was created in order to make them impotent
in the face of a rapacious ruling class, a class whose arrogance and hubris has the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
History as it actually happened is disappearing as those who tell the truth are dismissed as misogynists, racists, homophobes,
Putin agents, terrorist sympathizers, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists. Liberals who complained mightily of McCarthyism
now practice it ten-fold.
The United States with its brainwashed and incompetent population -- indeed, the entirety of the Western populations are
incompetent -- and with its absence of intelligent leadership has no chance against Russia and China, two massive countries
arising from their overthrow of police states as the West descends into a gestapo state. The West is over and done with. Nothing
remains of the West but the lies used to control the people. All hope is elsewhere.
It has nothing to do with marxism. I think "cultural marxism" is used in the same context.
It's basically just a label used by right-wingers to describe all the identity politics
etc that faux lefties like the neoliberal democrats engage in to distract their voters from
looking at actual leftist economic policies. So instead of trying to narrow the gaps between
economic classes it's focuses on giving all identities, cultures and subcultures equal
worth.
If that makes sense.. My vocabulary kind of lacked the words I was looking for to try to
give a good description just now.. (English being my 2nd language an all)
On February 21, the New York Times published a notice calling on college students
to describe and document any sexual encounter "that may not be viewed as sexual assault but
which constitutes something murkier than a bad date." The notice incldues a submission form
where students can accuse individuals of having engaged in something the Times calls
"gray-zone sex." The Times asks its young tipsters to include names, email addresses,
phone numbers and colleges, plus text message records and photographs documenting the
encounters.
The Times ' announcement, written by gender editor Jessica Bennett and Daniel
Jones, reads in its entirety:
As stories of sexual misconduct continue to dominate the news, a debate has erupted over a
particular kind of encounter, one that may not be viewed as sexual assault but which
constitutes something murkier than a bad date.
We've seen it play out on a public stage, from the Aziz Ansari incident to The
NewYorker's "Cat Person" story. So-called "gray-zone sex" has prompted
impassioned conversations about -- and personal reflection on -- what constitutes consent and
how we signal our desire or apprehension in the moment. This debate is especially vibrant on
college campuses, where for years students and administrators have grappled with the
issue.
We want to hear how you handle consent for sexual intimacy in relationships and
encounters. Do you have a particular experience you find yourself thinking back to? What was
said, texted or hinted at, through words or physical cues, that moved the encounter forward
-- or stopped it? How did it make you feel at the time, and how do you think about it
now?
The February 21 solicitation links to an article Bennett wrote on December 16, 2017 titled,
"When Saying 'Yes' Is Easier Than Saying 'No,'" which sheds further light on what the
Times means when it asks "what constitutes consent?" The two articles together show
the provocative and witch-hunting character of the Times ' efforts to compile a
database of sexual harassment allegations on college campuses across the country.
"For years," Bennett begins in the December article, "my female friends and I have spoken,
with knowing nods, about a sexual interaction we call 'the place of no return.' It's a kind of
sexual nuance that most women instinctively understand: the situation you thought you wanted,
or maybe you actually never wanted, but somehow here you are and it's happening and you
desperately want out, but you know that at this point exiting the situation would be more
difficult than simply lying there and waiting for it to be over. In other words, saying yes
when we really mean no."
Bennett provides two examples, one from her personal life and another from a short story
published late last year in the New Yorker titled "Cat person." In both cases, the
woman is interested in the man, they court one another, and they both agree to have sex. In the
New Yorker story, which is also linked in the February 21 announcement, the
protagonist is physically unsatisfied by her partner, who she complains is "heavy" and "bad in
bed." Later, the protagonist tells all her friends a version of this encounter, "though," the
author explains, "not quite the true one."
Bennett says "there are other names for this kind of sex: gray-zone sex, in reference to
that murky gray area of consent; begrudgingly consensual sex, because, you know, you don't
really want to do it but it's probably easier to just get it over with; lukewarm sex, because
you're kind of 'meh' about it; and, of course, bad sex, where the 'bad' refers not to the
perceived pleasure of it, but to the way you feel in the aftermath Sometimes 'yes' means 'no,'
simply because it is easier to go through with it than explain our way out of a situation."
"Consent" is a legal term that marks the line between noncriminal and criminal conduct. Sex
without consent can, and should, lead to the filing of a complaint followed by the initiation
of a criminal investigation, prosecution and, if a jury is persuaded by the evidence,
conviction. It is a basic legal tenet that the accused cannot be punished by the state for acts
that are not proscribed by law, and in the American system, conduct that falls in a "gray zone"
by its very nature does not meet the threshold for conviction: guilt "beyond a reasonable
doubt."
But the Times 's call for young people to submit reports of "gray-zone sex" is
aimed at creating a parallel system, outside the framework of the law, in which the accused
have no right to privacy or to due process. As law professor Catharine MacKinnon wrote in a
Times column on February 4, "#MeToo has done what the law could not."
Playing the role of prosecutors in the court of public opinion, the gender editor and her
cohorts at the New York Times are creating a massive database that it can dig through
to ruin the careers and lives of students and professors based on unproved accusations of
sexual conduct that, in any event, is not illegal.
The aim of this reactionary campaign is both political and pecuniary.
First, the Times hopes to create a political and cultural climate in which a broad
array of consensual conduct is deemed punishable, even if it does not violate any legal
statute.
The Times 's appeal for accusations comes after a number of spreadsheets have
surfaced where students and faculty can anonymously submit accusations of harassment or "creepy
behavior" on the part of male collegues or teachers. The submissions will involve a massive
invasion of privacy. Individuals, without their knowledge or consent, may be placed in a
situation where their most intimate behavior is being secretly documented and forwarded to the
New York Times . Texts and even photographs will be examined and leered over by the
gender editor and her colleagues. It is not difficult to imagine the abuses of privacy that
will flow from the Times 's efforts to procure salacious material.
There are countless legal issues involved. There are many states that outlaw the
transmission of sexually explicit and lewd material over the Internet. Will the individuals who
foolishly transmit the material requested by the Times be opening themselves up to
prosecution? If the Times 's editors discover that one or another submission describes
sexual behavior that occurred between minors, will they inform the police that they have
evidence of a violation of age-of-consent laws?
If the Times receives a submission that describes a consensual sexual encounter
between a student and an older faculty member or administrator, will it decide that it must
inform the institution of a possible violation of institutional regulations? And what happens
if and when prosecutors, having initiated investigations into "gray-zone sex," obtain
supboenas, demanding that the Times turn over its files? Who can doubt that the
Times will comply with court orders, regardless of the consequences for those who are
caught up in the escalating witch hunt?
Second, the call for "gray-zone sex" stories is a shameless effort to make money. In early
February, the Times announced a 46 percent increase in digital subscriptions over the
past year, and its stock price has increased 40 percent since October, the month it published
the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Reuters wrote, "Subscriptions in the quarter also got
a boost from the newspaper's coverage of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment story, helping
the company post the highest-ever annual subscription revenue of $1 billion." It was also in
October 2017 that the Times announced the position of "gender editor," at which point
Bennett declared that gender "needs to exist throughout every section of the paper."
However, the newspaper has had trouble attracting younger readers who are more likely to
turn to social media and independent websites for news. In 2017, the Times launched
its own Discover section on Snapchat "with the aim of capturing younger demographics,"
Business Insider wrote. The Times 's campaign to broaden the #MeToo campaign
to include "gray-zone sex" stories, with a focus on college campuses, is a part of its filthy
business strategy.
Don't worry about republicans ..democrats are ruining themselves all alone .every time the
deplorables see something like this they will double down on anything but a Dem.
Regardless of one's view on blacks or whites this is a major Stupid for a politician.
Chuck Schumer votes against South Carolina federal judge nominee because he's
white
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Donald Trump's nominee for a
long-vacant South Carolina federal judgeship not because of his qualifications but because of
his race.
The decision drew the quick ire of South Carolina's two U.S. senators and U.S. Rep. Trey
Gowdy, R-Spartanburg, a former federal prosecutor.
Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a Senate floor speech Wednesday he would not support
Greenville attorney Marvin Quattlebaum for a vacancy on the U.S. District Court in South
Carolina
Voting for Quattlebaum, he said, would result in having a white man replace two
African-American nominees from the state put forth by former President Barack Obama.
Schumer said he would not be a part of the Trump administration's pattern of nominating
white men.
"The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President
Trump's selections for the federal judiciary," Schumer said.
"It's long past time that the judiciary starts looking a lot more like the America it
represents," he continued. "Having a diversity of views and experience on the federal bench
is necessary for the equal administration of justice."
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the Senate's sole black Republican, pushed back on
Schumer's rationale and urged other Senate Democrats to instead address diversity issues by
starting with their offices.
"Perhaps Senate Democrats should be more worried about the lack of diversity on their own
staffs than attacking an extremely well-qualified judicial nominee from the great state of
South Carolina," Scott tweeted Thursday morning.
"... The central fact of US political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites. ..."
"... And by voting against its own interests, the white working class isn't just making itself poorer, it's literally killing itself. ..."
"... With some slight variations, Krugman was essentially re-stating the thesis of my 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, in which I declared on the very first page that working people "getting their fundamental interests wrong" by voting for conservatives was "the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests". ..."
On New Year's Day, the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman issued a series of
tweets in which he proclaimed as follows:
The central fact of US political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians
who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites.
and then, a few minutes later:
And by voting against its own interests, the white working class isn't just making itself poorer, it's literally killing itself.
Was I psyched to see this! With some slight variations, Krugman was essentially re-stating the thesis of my 2004 book, What's
the Matter With Kansas?, in which I declared on the very first page that working people "getting their fundamental interests wrong"
by voting for conservatives was "the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests".
... ... ...
Let me be more explicit. We have just come through an election in which underestimating working-class conservatism in northern
states proved catastrophic for Democrats. Did the pundits' repeated insistence that white working-class voters in the north were
reliable Democrats play any part in this underestimation? Did the message Krugman and his colleagues hammered home for years help
to distract their followers from the basic strategy of Trump_vs_deep_state?
I ask because getting that point wrong was kind of a big deal in 2016. It was a blunder from which it will take the Democratic
party years to recover. And we need to get to the bottom of it.
"... With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public's trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting freak elected by accident, "a disrupter" of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people. ..."
"... They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics -- especially entropy , the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats. ..."
"... The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called "intellectuals-yet-idiots," hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. ..."
"... Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43). ..."
"... This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for "social justice," is to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer. ..."
"... The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds . Almost nothing in America's financial life is on the level anymore, from the mendacious "guidance" statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine and education have become -- two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth ! ..."
"... Um, forgotten by Kunstler is the fact that 1965 was also the year when the USA reopened its doors to low-skilled immigrants from the Third World – who very quickly became competitors with black Americans. And then the Boom ended, and corporate American, influenced by thinking such as that displayed in Lewis Powell's (in)famous 1971 memorandum, decided to claw back the gains made by the working and middle classes in the previous 3 decades. ..."
"... "Wow – is there ever negative!" ..."
"... You also misrepresent reality to your readers. No, the black underclass is not larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated now than in the 1960's, when cities across the country burned and machine guns were stationed on the Capitol steps. The "racial divide" is not "starker now than ever"; that's just preposterous to anyone who was alive then. And nobody I've ever known felt "shame" over the "outcome of the civil rights campaign". I know nobody who seeks to "punish and humiliate" the 'privileged'. ..."
"... My impression is that what Kunstler is doing here is diagnosing the long crisis of a decadent liberal post-modernity, and his stance is not that of either of the warring sides within our divorced-from-reality political establishment, neither that of the 'right' or 'left.' Which is why, logically, he published it here. National Review would never have accepted this piece ..."
"... "Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class -- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor." ..."
"... Young black people are told by their elders how lucky they are to grow up today because things are much better than when grandpa was our age and we all know this history.\ ..."
"... It's clear that this part of the article was written from absolute ignorance of the actual black experience with no interest in even looking up some facts. Hell, Obama even gave a speech at Howard telling graduates how lucky they were to be young and black Today compared to even when he was their age in the 80's! ..."
"... E.g. Germany. Germany is anything but perfect and its recent government has screwed up with its immigration policies. But Germany has a high standard of living, an educated work force (including unions and skilled crafts-people), a more rational distribution of wealth and high quality universal health care that costs 47% less per capita than in the U.S. and with no intrinsic need to maraud around the planet wasting gobs of taxpayer money playing Global Cop. ..."
"... The larger subtext is that the U.S. house of cards was planned out and constructed as deliberately as the German model was. Only the objective was not to maximize the health and happiness of the citizenry, but to line the pockets of the parasitic Elites. (E.g., note that Mitch McConnell has been a government employee for 50 years but somehow acquired a net worth of over $10 Million.) ..."
On America's 'long emergency' of recession, globalization, and identity politics.
Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA's sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated
sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array
of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing
globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.
A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency , persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into
question our ability to carry on "normal" life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the
public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities
we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible
opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008,
despite official trumpet blasts heralding "recovery" and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.
With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is
no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis
and dysfunction and the public's trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting
freak elected by accident, "a disrupter" of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire.
A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership
is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people.
Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species
of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise
to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of "normal" life in the USA.
They chatter
about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace
problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics
-- especially entropy , the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth
on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats.
The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant of
an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure in our time to establish
a utopia on earth. By the logic of the day, "inclusion" and "diversity" are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting
down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically determined, yet so-called
cis-gendered persons (whose gender identity corresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by dint of
not being "other-gendered" -- thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry
anyone?
The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called "intellectuals-yet-idiots," hierophants trafficking in fads
and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming
human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual
despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
In case you haven't been paying attention to the hijinks on campus -- the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the
kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves -- here is the key take-away: it's not about
ideas or ideologies anymore; it's purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting!
In fact, it's intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career advancement. It's rather perverse that this passion for tyranny
is suddenly so popular on the liberal left.
Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor
pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that
unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right
of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43).
The new and false idea that something labeled "hate speech" -- labeled by whom? -- is equivalent to violence floated out of the
graduate schools on a toxic cloud of intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called "post-structuralist" philosophy,
where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain comprised of
one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down
to the proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values, in particular the search for truth. Under this
scheme, all human relations were reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their oppressors, the former generally
"people of color" and women, all subjugated by whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described "oppressed"
and "marginalized" are based on the credo that the ends justify the means (the Alinsky model).
This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for "social justice," is
to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the
social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual
boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and
administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear
puzzling to the casual observer.
I would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair
over the outcome of the civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of progressive ideology. It did not bring
about the hoped-for utopia. The racial divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black president. Today,
there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case for progress
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The recent flash points of racial conflict -- Ferguson, the Dallas police ambush, the
Charleston church massacre, et cetera -- don't have to be rehearsed in detail here to make the point that there is a great deal of
ill feeling throughout the land, and quite a bit of acting out on both sides.
The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it's worth,
is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and '65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced
considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another. And that is exactly why
a black separatism movement arose as an alternative at the time, led initially by such charismatic figures as Malcolm X and Stokely
Carmichael. Some of that was arguably a product of the same youthful energy that drove the rest of the Sixties counterculture: adolescent
rebellion. But the residue of the "Black Power" movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with
a common culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running "multiculturalism and diversity" crusade that effectively
nullifies the concept of a national common culture.
What follows from these dynamics is the deflection of all ideas that don't feed a narrative of power relations between oppressors
and victims, with the self-identified victims ever more eager to exercise their power to coerce, punish, and humiliate their self-identified
oppressors, the "privileged," who condescend to be abused to a shockingly masochistic degree. Nobody stands up to this organized
ceremonial nonsense. The punishments are too severe, including the loss of livelihood, status, and reputation, especially in the
university. Once branded a "racist," you're done. And venturing to join the oft-called-for "honest conversation about race" is certain
to invite that fate.
Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class
-- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor. Hung out to dry economically,
this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors as the poor blacks before them: absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births,
drug abuse. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped up the floor with the middle-middle class above them, foreclosing on their
homes and futures, and in their desperation many of these people became Trump voters -- though I doubt that Trump himself truly understood
how this all worked exactly. However, he did see that the white middle class had come to identify as yet another victim group, allowing
him to pose as their champion.
The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of
stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds . Almost nothing in America's financial life
is on the level anymore, from the mendacious "guidance" statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of
the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud
that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine
and education have become -- two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth !
Life in this milieu of immersive dishonesty drives citizens beyond cynicism to an even more desperate state of mind. The suffering
public ends up having no idea what is really going on, what is actually happening. The toolkit of the Enlightenment -- reason, empiricism
-- doesn't work very well in this socioeconomic hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is just
a social construct, just whatever story you feel like telling about it. On the right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some
years ago when he bragged, of the Bush II White House, that "we make our own reality." The left says nearly the same thing in the
post-structuralist malarkey of academia: "you make your own reality." In the end, both sides are left with a lot of bad feelings
and the belief that only raw power has meaning.
Erasing psychological boundaries is a dangerous thing. When the rackets finally come to grief -- as they must because their operations
don't add up -- and the reckoning with true price discovery commences at the macro scale, the American people will find themselves
in even more distress than they've endured so far. This will be the moment when either nobody has any money, or there is plenty of
worthless money for everyone. Either way, the functional bankruptcy of the nation will be complete, and nothing will work anymore,
including getting enough to eat. That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will beg someone to step up and push them
around to get their world working again. And even that may not avail.
James Howard Kunstler's many books include The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking,
Technology, and the Fate of the Nation , and the World Made by Hand novel series. He blogs on Mondays and Fridays at
Kunstler.com .
I think I need to go listen to an old-fashioned Christmas song now.
The ability to be financially, or at least resource, sustaining is the goal of many I know since we share a lack of confidence
in any of our institutions. We can only hope that God might look down with compassion on us, but He's not in the practical plan
of how to feed and sustain ourselves when things play out to their inevitable end. Having come from a better time, we joke about
our dystopian preparations, self-conscious about our "overreaction," but preparing all the same.
Look at it this way: Germany had to be leveled and its citizens reduced to abject penury, before Volkswagen could become the world's
biggest car company, and autobahns built throughout the world. It will be darkest before the dawn, and hopefully, that light that
comes after, won't be the miniature sunrise of a nuclear conflagration.
An excellent summary and bleak reminder of what our so-called civilization has become. How do we extricate ourselves from this
strange death spiral?
I have long suspected that we humans are creatures of our own personal/group/tribal/national/global fables and mythologies. We
are compelled by our genes, marrow, and blood to tell ourselves stories of our purpose and who we are. It is time for new mythologies
and stories of "who we are". This bizarre hyper-techno all-for-profit world needs a new story.
"The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it's worth,
is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and '65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced
considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another."
Um, forgotten by Kunstler is the fact that 1965 was also the year when the USA reopened its doors to low-skilled immigrants
from the Third World – who very quickly became competitors with black Americans. And then the Boom ended, and corporate American,
influenced by thinking such as that displayed in Lewis Powell's (in)famous 1971 memorandum, decided to claw back the gains made
by the working and middle classes in the previous 3 decades.
Hey Jim, I know you love to blame Wall Street and the Republicans for the GFC. I remember back in '08 you were urging Democrats
to blame it all on Republicans to help Obama win. But I have news for you. It wasn't Wall Street that caused the GFC. The crisis
actually had its roots in the Clinton Administration's use of the Community Reinvestment Act to pressure banks to relax mortgage
underwriting standards. This was done at the behest of left wing activists who claimed (without evidence, of course) that the
standards discriminated against minorities. The result was an effective repeal of all underwriting standards and an explosion
of real estate speculation with borrowed money. Speculation with borrowed money never ends well.
I have to laugh, too, when you say that it's perverse that the passion for tyranny is popular on the left. Have you ever heard
of the French Revolution? How about the USSR? Communist China? North Korea? Et cetera.
Leftism is leftism. Call it Marxism, Communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism, or what have you. The ideology is the
same. Only the tactics and methods change. Destroy the evil institutions of marriage, family, and religion, and Man's innate goodness
will shine forth, and the glorious Godless utopia will naturally result.
Of course, the father of lies is ultimately behind it all. "He was a liar and a murderer from the beginning."
When man turns his back on God, nothing good happens. That's the most fundamental problem in Western society today. Not to
say that there aren't other issues, but until we return to God, there's not much hope for improvement.
Hmm. I just wandered over here by accident. Being a construction contractor, I don't know enough about globalization, academia,
or finance to evaluate your assertions about those realms. But being in a biracial family, and having lived, worked, and worshiped
equally in white and black communities, I can evaluate your statements about social justice, race, and civil rights.
Long story short, you pick out fringe liberal ideas, misrepresent them as mainstream among liberals, and shoot them down. Casuistry,
anyone?
You also misrepresent reality to your readers. No, the black underclass is not larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated
now than in the 1960's, when cities across the country burned and machine guns were stationed on the Capitol steps. The "racial
divide" is not "starker now than ever"; that's just preposterous to anyone who was alive then. And nobody I've ever known felt
"shame" over the "outcome of the civil rights campaign". I know nobody who seeks to "punish and humiliate" the 'privileged'.
I get that this column is a quick toss-off before the holiday, and that your strength is supposed to be in your presentation,
not your ideas. For me, it's a helpful way to rehearse debunking common tropes that I'll encounter elsewhere.
But, really, your readers deserve better, and so do the people you misrepresent. We need bad liberal ideas to be critiqued
while they're still on the fringe. But by calling fringe ideas mainstream, you discredit yourself, misinform your readers, and
contribute to stereotypes both of liberals and of conservatives. I'm looking for serious conservative critiques that help me take
a second look at familiar ideas. I won't be back.
I disagree, NoahK, that the whole is incohesive, and I also disagree that these are right-wing talking points.
The theme of this piece is the long crisis in the US, its nature and causes. At no point does this essay, despite it stream
of consciousness style, veer away from that theme. Hence it is cohesive.
As for the right wing charge, though it is true, to be sure, that Kunstler's position is in many respects classically conservative
-- he believes for example that there should be a national consensus on certain fundamentals, such as whether or not there are
two sexes (for the most part), or, instead, an infinite variety of sexes chosen day by day at whim -- you must have noticed that
he condemned both the voluntarism of Karl Rove AND the voluntarism of the post-structuralist crowd.
My impression is that what Kunstler is doing here is diagnosing the long crisis of a decadent liberal post-modernity, and his stance is not that of either
of the warring sides within our divorced-from-reality political establishment, neither that of the 'right' or 'left.' Which is
why, logically, he published it here. National Review would never have accepted this piece. QED.
This malaise is rooted in human consciousness that when reflecting on itself celebrating its capacity for apperception suffers
from the tension that such an inquiry, such an inward glance produces. In a word, the capacity for the human being to be aware
of his or herself as an intelligent being capable of reflecting on aspects of reality through the artful manipulation of symbols
engenders this tension, this angst.
Some will attempt to extinguish this inner tension through intoxication while others through the thrill of war, and it has
been played out since the dawn of man and well documented when the written word emerged.
The malaise which Mr. Kunstler addresses as the problem of our times is rooted in our existence from time immemorial. But the
problem is not only existential but ontological. It is rooted in our being as self-aware creatures. Thus no solution avails itself
as humanity in and of itself is the problem. Each side (both right and left) seeks its own anodyne whether through profligacy
or intolerance, and each side mans the barricades to clash experiencing the adrenaline rush that arises from the perpetual call
to arms.
"Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class
-- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor."
And to whom do we hand
the tab for this? Globalization is a word. It is a concept, a talking point. Globalization is oligarchy by another name. Unfortunately,
under-educated, deplorable, Americans; regardless of party affiliation/ideology have embraced. And the most ironic part?
Russia
and China (the eventual surviving oligarchies) will eventually have to duke it out to decide which superpower gets to make the
USA it's b*tch (excuse prison reference, but that's where we're headed folks).
And one more irony. Only in American, could Christianity,
which was grew from concepts like compassion, generosity, humility, and benevolence; be re-branded and 'weaponized' to further
greed, bigotry, misogyny, intolerance, and violence/war. Americans fiddled (over same sex marriage, abortion, who has to bake
wedding cakes, and who gets to use which public restroom), while the oligarchs burned the last resources (natural, financial,
and even legal).
"Today, there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case
for progress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963."
Spoken like a white guy who has zero contact with black people. I mean, even a little bit of research and familiarity would
give lie to the idea that blacks are more pessimistic about life today than in the 1960's.
Black millenials are the most optimistic group of Americans about the future. Anyone who has spent any significant time around
older black people will notice that you don't hear the rose colored memories of the past. Black people don't miss the 1980's,
much less the 1950's. Young black people are told by their elders how lucky they are to grow up today because things are much
better than when grandpa was our age and we all know this history.\
It's clear that this part of the article was written from absolute
ignorance of the actual black experience with no interest in even looking up some facts. Hell, Obama even gave a speech at Howard
telling graduates how lucky they were to be young and black Today compared to even when he was their age in the 80's!
Here is the direct quote;
"In my inaugural address, I remarked that just 60 years earlier, my father might not have been served in a D.C. restaurant
-- at least not certain of them. There were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Very few black judges. Shoot, as Larry Wilmore
pointed out last week, a lot of folks didn't even think blacks had the tools to be a quarterback. Today, former Bull Michael Jordan
isn't just the greatest basketball player of all time -- he owns the team. (Laughter.) When I was graduating, the main black hero
on TV was Mr. T. (Laughter.) Rap and hip hop were counterculture, underground. Now, Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night, and Beyoncé
runs the world. (Laughter.) We're no longer only entertainers, we're producers, studio executives. No longer small business owners
-- we're CEOs, we're mayors, representatives, Presidents of the United States. (Applause.)
I am not saying gaps do not persist. Obviously, they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists. Don't worry -- I'm going to
get to that. But I wanted to start, Class of 2016, by opening your eyes to the moment that you are in. If you had to choose one
moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be -- what nationality,
what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into -- you wouldn't choose 100
years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now. If you had to choose a time
to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, "young, gifted, and black" in America, you would choose right now. (Applause.)"
I love reading about how the Community Reinvestment Act was the catalyst of all that is wrong in the world. As someone in the
industry the issue was actually twofold. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act turned the mortgage securities market into
a casino with the underlying actual debt instruments multiplied through the use of additional debt instruments tied to the performance
but with no actual underlying value. These securities were then sold around the world essentially infecting the entire market.
In order that feed the beast, these NON GOVERNMENT loans had their underwriting standards lowered to rediculous levels. If you
run out of qualified customers, just lower the qualifications. Government loans such as FHA, VA, and USDA were avoided because
it was easier to qualify people with the new stuff. And get paid. The short version is all of the incentives that were in place
at the time, starting with the Futures Act, directly led to the actions that culminated in the Crash. So yes, it was the government,
just a different piece of legislation.
Kunstler itemizing the social and economic pathologies in the United States is not enough. Because there are other models that
demonstrate it didn't have to be this way.
E.g. Germany. Germany is anything but perfect and its recent government has screwed up with its immigration policies. But Germany
has a high standard of living, an educated work force (including unions and skilled crafts-people), a more rational distribution
of wealth and high quality universal health care that costs 47% less per capita than in the U.S. and with no intrinsic need to
maraud around the planet wasting gobs of taxpayer money playing Global Cop.
The larger subtext is that the U.S. house of cards was planned out and constructed as deliberately as the German model was.
Only the objective was not to maximize the health and happiness of the citizenry, but to line the pockets of the parasitic Elites.
(E.g., note that Mitch McConnell has been a government employee for 50 years but somehow acquired a net worth of over $10 Million.)
P.S. About the notionally high U.S. GDP. Factor out the TRILLIONS inexplicably hoovered up by the pathological health care
system, the metastasized and sanctified National Security State (with its Global Cop shenanigans) and the cronied-up Ponzi scheme
of electron-churn financialization ginned up by Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Banksters, and then see how much GDP that reflects
the actual wealth of the middle class is left over.
Right-Wing Dittoheads and Fox Watchers love to blame the Community Reinvestment Act. It allows them to blame both poor black people
AND the government. The truth is that many parties were to blame.
One of the things I love about this rag is that almost all of the comments are included.
You may be sure that similar commenting privilege doesn't exist most anywhere else.
Any disfavor regarding the supposed bleakness with the weak hearted souls aside, Mr K's broadside seems pretty spot on to me.
I think the author overlooks the fact that government over the past 30 to 40 years has been tilting the playing field ever more
towards the uppermost classes and against the middle class. The evisceration of the middle class is plain to see.
If the the common man had more money and security, lots of our current intrasocial conflicts would be far less intense.
Andrew Imlay: You provide a thoughtful corrective to one of Kunstler's more hyperbolic claims. And you should know that his jeremiad
doesn't represent usual fare at TAC. So do come back.
Whether or not every one of Kunstler's assertions can withstand a rigorous fact-check, he is a formidable rhetorician. A generous
serving of Weltschmerz is just what the season calls for.
America is stupefied from propaganda on steroids for, largely from the right wing, 25? years of Limbaugh, Fox, etc etc etc Clinton
hate x 10, "weapons of mass destruction", "they hate us because we are free", birtherism, death panels, Jade Helm, pedophile pizza, and more Clinton hate porn.
Americans have been taught to worship the wealthy regardless of how they got there. Americans have been taught they are "Exceptional" (better, smarter, more godly than every one else) in spite of outward appearances.
Americans are under educated and encouraged to make decisions based on emotion from constant barrage of extra loud advertising
from birth selling illusion.
Americans brain chemistry is most likely as messed up as the rest of their bodies from junk or molested food. Are they even
capable of normal thought?
Donald Trump has convinced at least a third of Americans that only he, Fox, Breitbart and one or two other sources are telling
the Truth, every one else is lying and that he is their friend.
Is it possible we are just plane doomed and there's no way out?
I loathe the cotton candy clown and his Quislings; however, I must admit, his presence as President of the United States has forced
everyone (left, right, religious, non-religious) to look behind the curtain. He has done more to dis-spell the idealism of both
liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, rich and poor, than any other elected official in history. The sheer amount
of mind-numbing absurdity resulting from a publicity stunt that got out of control ..I am 70 and I have seen a lot. This is beyond
anything I could ever imagine. America is not going to improve or even remain the same. It is in a 4 year march into worse, three
years to go.
Mr. Kuntzler has an honest and fairly accurate assessment of the situation. And as usual, the liberal audience that TAC is trying
so hard to reach, is tossing out their usual talking points whilst being in denial of the situation.
The Holy Bible teaches us that repentance is the first crucial step on the path towards salvation. Until the progressives,
from their alleged "elite" down the rank and file at Kos, HuffPo, whatever, take a good, long, hard look at the current national
dumpster fire and start claiming some responsibility, America has no chance of solving problems or fixing anything.
Kunstler must have had a good time writing this, and I had a good time reading it. Skewed perspective, wild overstatement, and
obsessive cherry-picking of the rare checkable facts are mixed with a little eye of newt and toe of frog and smothered in a oar
and roll of rhetoric that was thrilling to be immersed in. Good work!
aah, same old Kunstler, slightly retailored for the Trump years.
for those of you familiar with him, remember his "peak oil" mania from the late 00s and early 2010s? every blog post was about
it. every new year was going to be IT: the long emergency would start, people would be Mad Maxing over oil supplies cos prices
at the pump would be $10 a gallon or somesuch.
in this new rant, i did a control-F for "peak oil" and hey, not a mention. I guess even cranks like Kunstler know when to give
a tired horse a rest.
Kunstler once again waxes eloquent on the American body politic. Every word rings true, except when it doesn't. At times poetic,
at other times paranoid, Kunstler does us a great service by pointing a finger at the deepest pain points in America, any one
of which could be the geyser that brings on catastrophic failure.
However, as has been pointed out, he definitely does not hang out with black people. For example, the statement:
But the residue of the "Black Power" movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with a common
culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running "multiculturalism and diversity" crusade that effectively nullifies
the concept of a national common culture.
The notion of a 'national common culture' is interesting but pretty much a fantasy that never existed, save colonial times.
Yet Kunstler's voice is one that must be heard, even if he is mostly tuning in to the widespread radicalism on both ends of
the spectrum, albeit in relatively small numbers. Let's face it, people are in the streets marching, yelling, and hating and mass
murders keep happening, with the regularity of Old Faithful. And he makes a good point about academia loosing touch with reality
much of the time. He's spot on about the false expectations of what technology can do for the economy, which is inflated with
fiat currency and God knows how many charlatans and hucksters. And yes, the white working class is feeling increasingly like a
'victim group.'
While Kunstler may be more a poet than a lawyer, more songwriter than historian, my gut feeling is that America had better
take notice of him, as The American ship of state is being swept by a ferocious tide and the helmsman is high on Fentanyl (made
in China).
Re: The crisis actually had its roots in the Clinton Administration's use of the Community Reinvestment Act
Here we go again with this rotting zombie which rises from its grave no matter how many times it has been debunked by statisticians
and reputable economists (and no, not just those on the left– the ranks include Bruce Bartlett for example, a solid Reaganist).
To reiterate again : the CRA played no role in the mortgage boom and bust. Among other facts in the way of that hypothesis is
the fact that riskiest loans were being made by non-bank lenders (Countrywide) who were not covered by the CRA which only applied
to actual banks– and the banks did not really get into the game full tilt, lowering their lending standards, until late in the
game, c. 2005, in response to their loss of business to the non-bank lenders. Ditto for the GSEs, which did not lower their standards
until 2005 and even then relied on wall Street to vet the subprime loans they were buying.
To be sure, blaming Wall Street for everything is also wrong-headed, though wall Street certainly did some stupid, greedy and
shady things (No, I am not letting them off the hook!) But the cast of miscreants is numbered in the millions and it stretches
around the planet. Everyone (for example) who got into the get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme of house flipping, especially if they lied
about their income to do so. And everyone who took out a HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) and foolishly charged it up on a consumption
binge. And shall we talk about the mortgage brokers who coached people into lying, the loan officers who steered customers into
the riskiest (and highest earning) loans they could, the sellers who asked palace-prices for crackerbox hovels, the appraisers
who rubber-stamped such prices, the regulators who turned a blind eye to all the fraud and malfeasance, the ratings agencies who
handed out AAA ratings to securities full of junk, the politicians who rejoiced over the apparent "Bush Boom" well, I could continue,
but you get the picture.
"The Holy Bible teaches us that repentance is the first crucial step on the path towards salvation. Until the progressives, from
their alleged "elite" down the rank and file at Kos, HuffPo, whatever, take a good, long, hard look at the current national dumpster
fire and start claiming some responsibility, America has no chance of solving problems or fixing anything."
Pretty sure that calling other people to repent of their sin of disagreeing with you is not quite what the Holy Bible intended.
Yes, it can be used for that , but often the goal is to channel, and contain the thinking
from or to whatever, not degrade. Using modern neoliberal economics as an example. The older
19th and early 20th century mainstream political economy were deeper, more comprehensive, and
often better at explaining economics. It was also called political economy, and not just
economics for that reason.
There was a real financed campaign to narrow the focus on what we call economics today.
Part of that effort was to label people very narrowly as just economic beings, which is what
libertarianism is, and to label economic thought outside of it as socialism/communism, which
is Stalinism, which is the gulag, which is bad thought. The economists studying this were
just as intelligent, thoughtful, and incisive, but the idea, the worm of
people=money=economics created a thought stop, or an an un-acknowledgment of anything else,
the inability to even see anything else.
I sometimes think some are against the masses getting any higher education because one is
exposed to other ways of thinking, and believing. A student might never change their beliefs,
but the mind is expanded for considering the possibilities and at looking at where others are
coming from. Those mindworms are also more obvious, and less useful.
So you could be ninety year blockhead, but if you are willing to listen, to think on what
you are exposed to in college, your mind is expanded and strengthen. Which is perhaps the
main goal of a liberal arts education. Even a very hard college education will still have
some of the same effect.
"The economists studying this were just as intelligent, thoughtful, and incisive, but the
idea, the worm of people=money=economics created a thought stop, or an an un-acknowledgment
of anything else, the inability to even see anything else."
So would you say identity politics is the same thing in reverse? Intelligent people
looking at issues from every perspective but that of money and economics?
Yes, as it is used now. It can be very important, but what I have against identity
politics as it is done today is that it is the first and last answer to everything. Many
people can see, they just think one's identity is paramount. MLK said it best when he talked
about being judged for the content of their character rather than the color of their
skin.
Please keep in mind that the identity being used could anything. Your sex, gender,
orientation, age, class, religion, anything.
And I feel like the Democrats get so distracted. They have been talking about sexual
harassment and stuff instead of the TAX BILL. It is so damn easy to get them to take their
eyes off the ball! and get played again and again. . . and TRAGIC given the consequences . .
.
It's the perfect "distraction". Allows them to engage in virtue-signaling and "fighting
for average Americans". It's all phony, they always "lose" in the end getting exactly what
they wanted in the first place, while not actually having to cast a vote for it.
It's all related, less safety net and more inequality means more desperation to take a
job, *ANY* job, means more women putting up with sexual harassment (and workplace bullying
and horrible and illegal workplace conditions etc.) as the price of a paycheck.
Horrible Toomey's re-election was a parallel to the Clinton/Trump fiasco. The Democrats
put up a corporate shill, Katie McGinty that no-one trusted.
"Former lobbyist Katie McGinty has spent three decades in politics getting rich off the
companies she regulated and subsidized. Now this master of the revolving-door wants
Pennsylvania voters to give her another perch in government: U.S. Senator." Washington
Examiner.
She was a Clintonite through and through, that everyone, much like $Hillary, could see
through.
To paraphrase the Beatles, you say you want a revolution but you don't really mean it. You
want more of the same because it makes you feel good to keep voting for your Senator or your
Congressman. The others are corrupt and evil, but your guys are good. If only the others were
like your guys. News flash: they are all your guys.
America is doomed. And so much the better. Despite all America has done for the world, it
has also been a brutal despot. America created consumerism, super-sizing and the Kardashians.
These are all unforgivable sins. America is probably the most persistently violent country in
the world both domestically and internationally. No other country has invaded or occupied so
much of the world, unless you count the known world in which case Macedonia wins.
This tax plan is what Americans want because they are pretty ignorant and stupid. They are
incapable of understanding basic math so they can't work out the details. They believe that
any tax cut is inherently good and all government is bad so that is also all that matters.
They honestly think they or their kids will one day be rich so they don't want to hurt rich
people. They also believe that millionaires got their money honestly and through hard work
because that is what they learned from their parents.
Just send a blank check to Goldman Sachs. Keep a bit to buy a gun which you can use to
either shoot up a McDonalds or blow your own brains out.
And some people still ask me why I left and don't want to come back. LOL
Macedonia of today is not the same are that conquered the world. They stole the name from
Greeks.
That being said, the US is ripe for a change. Every policy the current rulers enact seems
to make things better. However, I suspect a revolution would kill majority of the population
since it would disrupt the all important supply chains, so it does not seem viable.
However, a military takeover could be viable. If they are willing to wipe out the most
predatory portions of the ruling class, they could fix the healthcare system, install a
high-employment policy and take out the banks and even the military contractors. Which could
make them very popular.
Yeah, right. Have you seen our generals? They're just more of the same leeches we
have everywhere else in the 0.01%. Have you seen any of the other military dictatorships
around the world, like actually existing ones? They're all brilliantly corrupt and total
failures when it comes to running any sort of economy. Not to mention the total loss of civil
rights. Americans have this idiotic love of their military thanks to decades of effective
propaganda and think the rule of pampered generals would somehow be better than the right to
vote. Bleh.
This is a military dictatorship. The fourth and sixth amendments have been de facto
repealed. Trump cared about one thing and one thing only, namely to repeal the estate tax. He
is the ultimate con man and this was his biggest con. It is truly amazing how he accomplished
this. He has saved his family a billion $$$. He will now turn over governing to the generals
and Goldman Sachs. He may even retire. Truly amazing. One has to admire the sheer perversity
of it all. When will the American electorate get tired of being conned? The fact is they have
nothing but admiration for Trump. We live in a criminal culture, winner take all. America
loves its winners.
There is an old 2003 David Brooks column in which he mentions that
"The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which
is explicitly for the mega-upper class. Al Gore, who ran a populist campaign, couldn't even
win the votes of white males who didn't go to college, whose incomes have stagnated over the
past decades and who were the explicit targets of his campaign. Why don't more Americans want
to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves?"
Then Brooks goes on to explain
"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey
that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans
say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right
away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that
favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them."
The Republicans have conditioned people to believe government services (except for
defense/military) are run poorly and need to be "run like a business" for a profit.
The problem is that not all government services CAN be profitable (homeless care, mental
health care for the poor, EPA enforcement, OSHA enforcement). And when attempts are made to
privatize some government operations such as incarceration, the result is that the private
company tries to maximize profits by pushing for laws to incarcerate ever more people.
The history of the USA as viewed by outsiders, maybe 50 years hence, will be that of a
resource consuming nation that spent a vast fortune on military hardware and military
adventures when it had little to fear due to geography, a nation that touted an independent
press that was anything but, a nation that created a large media/entertainment industry which
helped to keep citizens in line, a nation that fostered an overly large (by 2 or 3 times per
Paul Whooley) parasitical financial industry that did not perform its prime capital
allocation task competently as it veered from bubble to bubble and a nation that managed to
spend great sums on medical care without covering all citizens.
But the USA does have a lot of guns and a lot of frustrated people.
Maybe Kevlar vests will be the fashion of the future?
The provision to do away with the estate tax, if not immediately, in the current versions
(House and Senate) is great news for the 1%, and bad for the rest of us.
And if more people are not against that (thanks for quoting the NYTImes article), it's the
failure of the rest of the media for not focusing more on it, but wasting time and energy on
fashion, sports, entertainment, etc.
he provision to do away with the estate tax . . . is great news for the 1%
I think it's even a little more extreme than that. The data is a few years old, but it is
only the top 0.6% who are affected by estate taxes in the United States. See the data at
these web sites:
The military adventures were largely in support of what Smedley Butler so accurately
called the Great "Racket" of Monroe Doctrine colonialism and rapacious extractive
"capitalism" aka "looting."
It took longer and costed the rich a bit more to buy up all the bits of government, but
the way they've done will likely be more compendious and lasting. Barring some "intervening
event(s)".
While Republicans show their true colors, im out there seeing a resurgence of civil
society. And im starting to reach Hard core Tea Party types. Jobs, Manufacturing, Actual
Policy.
"... There is a big difference between shills for corporate capitalism and imperialism, like Corey Booker and Van Jones, and true radicals like Glen Ford and Ajamu Baraka. The corporate state carefully selects and promotes women, or people of color, to be masks for its cruelty and exploitation. ..."
"... The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The old feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering oppressed women. This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew that it is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new form of feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO or woman president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits that prostitution is about choice. What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose to be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics. ..."
DN: What about the impact that you've seen of identity politics in America?
CH: Well, identity politics defines the immaturity of the left. The corporate state embraced
identity politics. We saw where identity politics got us with Barack Obama, which is worse than
nowhere. He was, as Cornel West said, a black mascot for Wall Street, and now he is going
around to collect his fees for selling us out.
My favorite kind of anecdotal story about identity politics: Cornel West and I, along with
others, led a march of homeless people on the Democratic National Convention session in
Philadelphia. There was an event that night. It was packed with hundreds of people, mostly
angry Bernie Sanders supporters. I had been asked to come speak. And in the back room, there
was a group of younger activists, one who said, "We're not letting the white guy go first."
Then he got up and gave a speech about how everybody now had to vote for Hillary Clinton.
That's kind of where identity politics gets you. There is a big difference between shills
for corporate capitalism and imperialism, like Corey Booker and Van Jones, and true radicals
like Glen Ford and Ajamu Baraka. The corporate state carefully selects and promotes women, or
people of color, to be masks for its cruelty and exploitation.
It is extremely important, obviously, that those voices are heard, but not those voices that
have sold out to the power elite. The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The
old feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering
oppressed women. This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew
that it is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new
form of feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO
or woman president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits
that prostitution is about choice. What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose
to be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics.
"... Donald Trump used alt-right messaging to get into the White House, but he and his third-rate staff haven't the slightest clue of what gave rise to the deplorables in the first place and how to address the root despair of the western working class ..."
"... And all authorities suggest to exploit the despair with soundbites and posturing. Granted, this is a platitude, but how to obtain compelling soundbites and posturing? I think that the best technique is based on so-called wedge issues. ..."
"... A good wedge issue should raise passions on "both sides" but not so much in the "center", mostly clueless undecided voters. ..."
"... Calibrate your position so it is a good scrap of meat for your "base" while it drives the adversaries to conniptions, the conniptions provide talking points and together, drive the clueless in your direction. Wash, repeat. ..."
"Donald Trump used alt-right messaging to get into the White House, but he and his
third-rate staff haven't the slightest clue of what gave rise to the deplorables in the first
place and how to address the root despair of the western working class." VietnamVet
I do not know how highly rated the staff was, but it was sufficiently high. If the opponent
has fourth-rate staff, it would be wasteful to use anything better than third-rate. Figuring what
gave rise to the deplorable is a wasted effort, sociologist differ, and in politics the "root
causes" matter only a little.
And all authorities suggest to exploit the despair with soundbites and posturing. Granted,
this is a platitude, but how to obtain compelling soundbites and posturing? I think that the best
technique is based on so-called wedge issues.
A good wedge issue should raise passions on "both sides" but not so much in the "center",
mostly clueless undecided voters.
Calibrate your position so it is a good scrap of meat for your "base" while it drives the
adversaries to conniptions, the conniptions provide talking points and together, drive the clueless
in your direction. Wash, repeat.
(Never mind that if Thomas Frank is correct, and the Democrats are the party of the professional
classes, the Democrats cannot possibly be the party of "marginalized" people.) Being the sort of
person I am, my first thought was to ask myself what the heck Reid could mean by "tribe," and how
a "tribe" can act as a political entity.[1] Naturally, I looked to the Internet and did a cursory
search; and it turns out that, at least at the scholarly level, the very notion of "tribe" is both
contested and a product of colonialism.
David
Wiley, Department of Sociology and African Studies, Michigan State University, 2013
Tribe, a concept that has endeared itself to Western scholars, journalists, and the public
for a century, is primarily a means to reduce for readers the complexity of the non-Western societies
of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the American plains. It is no accident that the contemporary
uses of the term tribe were developed during the 19th-century rise of evolutionary and racist
theories to designate alien non-white peoples as inferior or less civilized and as having not
yet evolved from a simpler, primal state. The uses and definitions of 'tribe' in the sociological
and anthropological literature are varied and conflicting. Some authors appear to define tribe
as common language, others as common culture, some as ancestral lineages, and others as common
government or rulers. As anthropologist Michael Olen notes, "The term tribe has never satisfied
anthropologists, because of its many uses and connotations. Societies that are classified as tribal
seem to be very diverse in their organization, having little in common." Morton H. Fried and this
author contend that "the term is so ambiguous and confusing that it should be abandoned by social
scientists."
Even more striking is the invention of ethnic (labeled tribal) identities and their varied
and plastic salience across the African continent. In some cases, "tribal identifies" have been
invented in order to unite colonial and post-colonial clerical workers or other occupational and
social groups to serve the interests of the members even though they were not bound together by
language or lineage.
In the United States, where similar derogatory language of tribe has been used to characterize
and stereotype Native American or First Nations peoples, the identity has been reified in federal
legislation that requires "tribes," formerly under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to accept that
formal tribal identification in order to access the hunting, fishing, farming, and casino rights
of reservations. Almost humorously, the Menominee peoples of Wisconsin decided to decline that
nomenclature because many members lived in Milwaukee and other non-reservation sites; however,
they then learned they must reverse that vote and re-declare themselves as "a tribe" in order
to regain their reservation rights.
So, from the 30,000 foot level, it seems unlikely that what scholars mean (or do not mean) by
"tribe" is the same as what Reid means, simply because there is no coherent meaning to be had.[2]
My second thought was to try to fit "tribe" into the framework of identity politics, where tribes
would be identities, or possibly bundles of allied[3] identities. Here's a handy chart showing the
various ways that identity can be conceptualized, from
Jessica A. Clarke*, "Identity and Form," California Law Review , 2015:
(Clarke gives definitions of ascriptive, elective, and formal identity --
for Adolph Reed on ascriptive identity, see here -- but I think the definitions are clear enough
for our purposes from the examples in the table.) However, if we look back to Reid's quote, we see
that she conflates ascriptive identity ("black or brown") with elective identity ("the sort of Pabst
Blue Ribbon voter, the kind of Coors Lite-drinking voter")[4], and also conflates both of those with
formal identity (if one's ethnicity be defined by one's own citizenship papers, or those of one's
parents, or a changed surname; one thinks of Asian cultures putting the family name last in American
culture, for example). So there is no coherence to be found here, either.
Let's return then to Reid's words, and look to her operational definition:
which party goes out and find more people who are like them
JANELLE MONÁE: Hi, sweetie. You know I love, love, love you. First: pronouns! I want to make
sure that I'm being respectful of how I'm referring to you. I know that the way we view ourselves
and how we want to be addressed can change depending on where we are in life.
AS: I love that you asked me! Thank you. I have felt at times that she/her pronouns weren't
entirely fitting, but I've never felt uncomfortable with them. It's more important for me to open
up that conversation around pronouns and how gender itself is a construct that doesn't make much
sense in our society.
JM: Got it. I remember seeing you for the first time in Colombiana, and then, like many people,
I was drawn to your character in The Hunger Games as Rue. I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, so just seeing
this little black girl in a dystopian world being a hero for an oppressed community, I was intrigued!
The way you embodied this character felt like you were mature enough to understand how important
she was to the movie but also how important the Rues all over the world are to our society.
AS: That's one of the best compliments that I've received! I remember we saw each other at
the Tyler, the Creator show; we took a picture with Solange. You were wearing a jacket that said
"black girl magic" on it, and I flipped out.
JM: Me, too! I was like, I am right between you and Solange, two people who are the epitome
of black girl magic! I saw you later on, and you had just shot Everything, Everything, which,
by the way, you are incredible in. The original story was written by a black woman [NicolaYoon],
and your director [Stella Meghie] is also a black woman. What was going through your mind as you
were considering the role?
AS: I kind of wrote it off initially because I figured it was one of those instances where
I was receiving a script for a YA romance project that was intended for a white actress. I thought
maybe they'd float the idea of casting it in a more diverse manner but that ultimately it wouldn't
end up going that direction, because that's happened to me a lot. Then I realized that this project
was based on a book written by a black woman and that the casting was intentionally diverse. I'd
never seen a story like this made for an interracial couple. I'm not someone who generally has
a pop or mainstream sensibility, but I see the incredible power of infiltrating these larger movies
that show a lot of people who we are and how diverse and beautiful our community is. I thought
it would be really powerful to see a black girl [lead] character like Maddy who is joyous and
creative and dimensional specifically marketed to teenagers and young adults. We don't always
get to see black women carrying that energy. That's one of the reasons why I respect and love
you so much!because I feel like you perpetuate such whimsy and joy!
JM: Aw! Well, whenever I see you doing your thing, I feel like we're from the same tribe
because I take a similar approach when I'm choosing projects. With the roles of Teresa in
Moonlight and Ms. Mary Jackson in Hidden Figures , they're two women of color
from totally different backgrounds and eras!from the hood to NASA, these black women were the
backbones of their communities. I thought it was so important to let the rest of the world know
that we're not monolithic. And with Hidden Figures in particular, I was so proud to be a part
of exposing that if it were not for these women, we would not have gone to space. That's American
history! Black history is part of American history, and it should be treated as such.
(Note in passing that I loathe the phrase "open up," which I define as "carefully engineered for
a celebrity by public relations professionals." ) Of course, both actors are -- and rightly --
proud of their work, but note the carefully calibrated ways they establish that they are (as
Joy Reid says) "like" each other. Oh, and do note the caption: "Miu Miu dress, price upon request."
Class snuck in there, didn't it? In fact, we might go so far as to formalize Reid's definition of
"tribe" as follows:
Tribes are people who are "like" each other when class is not taken into account
With that, let's take an alternative approach to conceptualizing tribes and tribalism, one that
incorporates class. From former Arab Spring
activist Iyad El-Baghdadi , I present the following charts, taken from
the Twittter . (I'll present each
chart, then comment briefly on it.) There are five:
Figure 1: Tribal Divisions
Comment: I'm taking El-Baghdadi's "ethnic affiliation," as a proxy for Reid's "tribe"; the verticality
is clearly the same.)
Figure 2: Class Divisions
Comment: El-Baghdadi's representation of class divisions is fine as a visual shorthand, but I
don't think it's an accurate representation. I picture the class structure of the United States not
as a "normal distribution" with a fat "middle class" (I don't even accept
"middle class" as a category) but as a power curve with a very few people at the head of the
curve (
the "1%," more like the 0.01% ), followed by a steep shoulder of
the 10% (white collar professionals, from Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal ), and trailed
by a long tail of wage workers (and unwaged workers, as I suppose we might call the disemployed,
unpaid caregivers,
System D
people like loosie-selling Eric Garner, and so on). If you want to find who hasn't had a raise
in forty years, look to the long tail, which I would call l "working class," rather than "lower class."
Figure 3: Privilege Divisions
Comment: Taking once again El-Baghdadi's "ethnic affiliation," as a proxy for Reid's "tribe,"
and conceptualizing WASPs as a tribe, it's clear to me, if I look at my own history, that I'm
more likely ti have good luck than some other tribes. I'm more likely to have intergenerational
wealth in the form of a house, or even financial assets, more likely to be highly educated, more
likely to have the markers and locutions that enable me to interact successfully with bureaucratic
functionaries, etc. I didn't earn any of those advantages; I would have had to have chosen to be
born to different parents to avoid them. I think we can agree that if we were looking for an operational
definition of justice, this wouldn't be it.
Figure 4: Punching Sideways
Comment: Classically, we have owners following Gould's maxim by bringing in (mostly black) scabs
to break
the Homestead Strike in 1892, with a resulting "tribal" conflict -- although those scabs might
protest -- and rightly -- that (a) they were only trying to provide for their families and
(b) that the Jim Crow system
had denied them the "good jobs" that in justice would have given them (leaving aside the question
of who implemented Jim Crow, and for what material benefits). In modern times we have "tribes" (white,
black, Asian, at the least) battling on the field of "affirmative action" having weaponized their
ascriptive identities. Here again, representatives of some "tribes" would protest -- and
rightly -- that systems like "legacy admissions" give some "tribes" unjust advantage over others, but
the hidden assumption is one of resource constraint; given a pie of fixed size, if Tribe A is to
have more, Tribe B must have less. Note that programs like "tuition-free college" tend to eliminate
the resource constraint, but are "politically feasible" only if Tribes A and B solve their collective
action problem, which is unlikely to be done based on tribalism.
Figure 5: Punching Up
Comment: This diagram implies that the only "legitimate" form of seeking justice is vertical,
"punching up." This eliminates clear cases where justice is needed within and not between classes,
like auto collisions, for example, or the household division of labor. More centrally, the nice thing
about thinking vertically is that it eliminates obvious absurdities like "Justice for black people
means making the CEO of a major bank black (ignoring the injustices perpetrated using class-based
tools disproportionately against black people in, say, the foreclosure crisis, where
a generation's-worth of black household wealth was wiped out under America's first black President).
Or obvious absurdities where justice is conceived of as a woman, instead of a man, using the power
of office to kill thousands of black and brown people, many of them women, to further America's imperial
mission.
* * *
Concluding a discussion on politics and power that has barely begun -- and is of great importance
if you believe, as I do, that we're on the midst of and ongoing and highly volatile legitimacy crisis
that involves the break-up and/or realignment of both major parties -- it seems to me that El-Baghdadi
visual representation, which fits tribalism into a class-driven framework, is both analytically coherent
(as Reid's usage of "tribe" is not) and points to a way forward from our current political arrangements
(as Reid's strategy of bundling "punching sideways" tribes into parties while ignoring class does
not).
More to come .
spending nearly
$13.7 billion. Just two years ago, it seemed that Seoul and Beijing were embarking on a honeymoon
phase when President Park Geun-hye attended a military parade in Tiananmen Square commemorating the
end of World War II!the only U.S. ally to do so.
Then THAAD happened.
In July 2016, Seoul and Washington announced their decision to deploy the anti-missile system.
China opposed the deployment, saying it undermined China's security and would destabilize the region
because its radars could be used by the United States to track China's missile activities.
China wanted to "teach South Korea a lesson" for the effrontery of the THAAD deployment. Shortly
after the announcement, Beijing
banned the airing
of Korean TV shows, films, and K-pop acts in China. After it was revealed that Lotte Group!a South
Korean conglomerate operating 112 stores in mainland China!once owned the land THAAD would be based
on, Chinese state media called for a nationwide boycott of the company. By March 2017, nearly half
of Lotte's stores on the mainland
were shutdown , due to vague "safety violations." That same month, Beijing banned its travel
agencies from selling trips to Korea, resulting in a 66 percent
decrease in Chinese
visitors from last year. Shortly after President Moon Jae-in was elected to the Blue House in May
2017, he announced the suspension of further THAAD deployments until further review.
Many South Koreans told me they expected blowback from the decision to deploy THAAD, but the swiftness
and intensity of Beijing's retaliation caught them off guard. Beijing's response to THAAD, they said,
"opened our [South Korean] eyes to China's true colors ." Simply put, they believed Beijing
could not be relied on to consider South Korea's interests if China's interests were on the line.
This disillusionment is fanning mistrust and has damaged China's image in South Korea. A March 2017
Asan Institute poll found that,
for the first time ever , Koreans had a more favorable view of Japan than of China. This was
a shocking finding; Japan has consistently been South Koreans' least favorite country after North
Korea.
In spite of growing mistrust, South Koreans recognize the crucial role Beijing plays in reining
in Pyongyang. Many interlocutors said they believed, in spite of THAAD, that Chinese officials wanted
to maintain good relations with South Korea!albeit on China's terms.
"... the reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert states and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population is because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire ..."
"... To distill it to an aphorism, "A million guys with one buck, are no match for one guy with a million bucks." ..."
"... Another point: The poorer people are, the more vulnerable they are to identity politics. ..."
"... What do all races, genders, nationalities and creeds have in common? An overwhelming majority of them are working class. That's why I am white and Nationalist but not a White Nationalist. The working class wants work and wages. The ruling class gives us war and welfare. Solidarity is the only effective defense against concentrated wealth. Absent solidarity the working class is a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. Witness the American prole. Simultaneously under the lash and at each others throats. ..."
"... Some minorities are more equal than others. The Deep State, for example. ..."
"... It's impossible to have a functional political system when the political parties themselves are allowed to decide what issues voters get to vote on, and can racially divide the electorate by providing policy packages which play to voter weaknesses. This results in absurd results like blacks in the US voting for mass unskilled immigration via the Democrats, and poor American whites voting for increased defense spending and financial liberalisation via the Republicans. ..."
My thesis is very simple: the reason why the US always support
foreign minorities to subvert states and use domestic minorities to suppress
the majority US population is because minorities are very easy to manipulate
and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the
AngloZionist Empire. That's all there is to it.
I think that minorities often, but not always, act and perceive things in
a way very different from the way majority groups do. Here is what I have observed:
Let's first look at minorities inside the US:
They are typically far more aware of their minority identity/status
than the majority. That is to say that if the majority is of skin color
A and the minority of skin color B, the minority will be much more acutely aware
of its skin color. They are typically much more driven and active
then the majority. This is probably due to their more acute perception of being
a minority. They are only concerned with single-issue politics , that single-issue being, of course, their minority status. Since minorities
are often unhappy with their minority-status, they are also often resentful
of the majority . Since minorities are mostly preoccupied by their minority-status
linked issue, they rarely pay attention to the 'bigger picture' and that, in
turn, means that the political agenda of the minorities typically does
not threaten the powers that be . Minorities often have a deep-seated
inferiority complex towards the putatively more successful majority.
Minorities often seek to identify other minorities with which
they can ally themselves against the majority.
To this list of characteristics, I would add one which is unique to foreign
minorities, minorities outside the US: since they have no/very little prospects
of prevailing against the majority, these minorities are very willing
to ally themselves with the AngloZionist Empire and that, in turn, often
makes them depended on the AngloZionist Empire, often even for their physical
survival.
The above are, of course, very general characterizations. Not all minorities
display all of these characteristics and many display only a few of them. But
regardless of the degree to which any single minority fits this list of characteristics,
what is obvious is that minorities are extremely easy to manipulate and that
they present no credible (full-spectrum) threat to the Empire.
The US Democratic Party is the perfect example of a party which heavily relies
on minority manipulation to maximize its power. While the Republican Party is
by and large the party of the White, Anglo, Christian and wealthy voters, the
Democrats try to cater to Blacks, women, Leftists, homosexuals, immigrants,
retirees, and all others who feel like they are not getting their fair share
of the proverbial pie. Needless to say, in reality there is only one party in
the US, you can call the the Uniparty, the Republicracts or the Demolicans,
but in reality both wings of the Big Money party stand for exactly the same
things. What I am looking at here is not at some supposed real differences,
but the way the parties present themselves. It is the combined action of these
two fundamentally identical parties which guarantees the status quo in US politics
which I like to sum up as "more of the same, only worse".
I would like to mention an important corollary of my thesis that minorities
are typically more driven than the majority. If we accept that minorities are
typically much more driven than most of the population, then we also immediately
can see why their influence over society is often out of proportion with the
numerical demographical "weight". This has nothing to do with these minorities
being more intelligent or more creative and everything to do with them willing
to being spend much more time and efforts towards their objectives than most
people.
So we have easy to manipulate, small groups, whose agenda does not threaten
the 1% (really, much less!), who like to gang up with other similar minorities
against the majority. Getting scared yet? It gets worse.
Western 'democracies' are mostly democracies only in name. In most of them
instead of "one man one vote" we see "one dollar one vote" meaning that big
money decides, not "the people". Those in real power have immense financial
resources which they cynically use to boost the already totally disproportional
power of the various minorities. Now this is really scary:
Easy to manipulate, small groups, highly driven, whose agenda does not threaten
the ruling plutocracy, who like to gang up with other similar minorities against
the majority and whose influence is vastly increased by immense sums of money
invested in them by the plutocracy. How is that for a threat to real people
power, to the ideals of democracy?!
The frightening truth is that the combination of minorities and big money
can easily hijack a supposedly 'democratic' country and subjugate the majority
of its population to the "rule of the few over the many".
Once we look this reality in the face we should also become aware of a very
rarely mentioned fact: while we are taught that democracies should uphold the
right of the minorities, the opposite is true: real democracies should
strive to protect majorities against the abuse of power from minorities!
I know, I have just committed a long list of grievous thoughtcrimes!
At those who might be angry at me, I will reply with a single sentence: please
name me a western country where the views of the majority of its people are
truly represented in the policies of their governments? And if you fail to come
up with a good example, then I need to ask you if the majority is clearly not
in power, then who is?
I submit that the plutocratic elites which govern the West have played a
very simple trick on us all: they managed to focus our attention on the many
cases in history when minorities were oppressed by majorities but completely
obfuscated the numerous cases whereminorities oppressed majorities.
Speaking of oppression: minorities are far more likely to benefit and, therefore,
use violence than the majority simply because their worldview often centers
on deeply-held resentments. To put it differently, minorities are much more
prone to settling scores for past wrongs (whether real or imagined) than a majority
which typically does not even think in minority versus majority categories
.
Not that majorities are always benign or kind towards minorities, not at
all, humans being pretty much the same everywhere, but by the fact that they
are less driven, less resentful and, I would argue, even less aware of their
"majority status" they are less likely to act on such categories.
Foreign minorities play a crucial role in US foreign policy. Since time immemorial
rulers have been acutely aware of the " divide et impera " rule, there
is nothing new here. But the US has become the uncontested leader in the art
of using national minorities to create strife and overthrow a disobedient regime.
The AngloZionist war against the Serbian nation is the perfect example of how
this is done: the US supported any minority against the Serbs, even groups that
the US classified as terrorists, as long as this was against the Serbs. And,
besides being Orthodox Slavs and traditional allies of Russia, what was the
real 'crime' of the Serbs? Being the majority of course! The Serbs had no need
of the AngloZionists to prevail against the various ethnic (Croats) and religious
(Muslims) minorities they lived with. That made the Serbs useless to the Empire.
But now that the US has created a fiction of an independent Kosovo, the Kosovo
Albanians put up a
statue of Bill Clinton in Prishtina and, more relevantly, allowed the Empire
to build the
Camp
Bondsteel mega-base in the middle of their nasty little statelet, right
on the land of the Serbian population that was ethnically cleansed during the
Kosovo war. US democracy building at its best indeed
The same goes for Russia (and, the Soviet Union) where the US went as far
as to support the right of self-determination for
non-existing
"captive nations" such as "Idel-Ural" and "Cossakia" . I would even argue
that the Empire has created several nation ex nihilo (What in the world
is a "Belarussian"?!).
I am fully aware that in the typical TV watching westerner any discussion
of minorities focusing on their negative potential immediately elicits visions
of hammers and sickles, smoking crematoria chimneys, chain gangs, lynchmobs,
etc. This is basic and primitive conditioning. Carefully engineered events such
as the recent riots in Charlottesville only further reinforce this type of mass
conditioning. This is very deliberate and, I would add, very effective. As a
result, any criticism, even just perceived criticism, of a minority immediately
triggers outraged protests and frantic virtue-signaling (not me! look how good
I am!!).
Of course, carefully using minorities is just one of the tactics used by
the ruling plutocracy. Another of their favorite tricks is to created conflicts
out of nothing or ridiculously bloat the visibility of an altogether minor topic
(example: homo-marriages). The main rule remains the same though: create tensions,
conflicts, chaos, subvert the current order (whatever that specific order might
be), basically have the serfs fight each other while we rule .
In Switzerland an often used expression to describe "the people" is "the
sovereign". This is a very accurate description of the status of the people
in a real democracy: they are "sovereign" in the sense that nobody rules over
them. In that sense, the issue in the United States is one of sovereignty: as
of today, the real sovereign of the US are the corporations, the deep state,
the Neocons, the plutocracy, the financiers, the Israel Lobby – you name it,
anybody BUT the people.
In that system of oppression, minorities play a crucial role, even if they
are totally unaware of this and even if, at the end of the day, they don't benefit
from it. Their perception or their lack of achievements in no way diminishes
the role that they play in the western pseudo-democracies.
How do with deal with this threat?
I think that the solution lies with the minorities themselves: they need
to be educated about the techniques which are used to manipulate them, and they
need to be convinced that their minority status does not, in reality, oppose
them to the majority and that both the majority and the minorities have a common
interest in together standing against those who seek to rule over them all.
Striving to remain faithful to my "Putin fanboy" reputation, I will say that
I believe that Russia under Putin is doing exactly the right thing by giving
the numerous Russian minorities a stake in the future of the Russian state and
by convincing the minorities that their interests and the interest of the majority
of the people are fundamentally the same: being a minority does not have to
mean being in opposition to the majority. It is a truism that minorities need
to be fully integrated into the fabric of society and yet this is rarely practiced
in the real world. This is certainly not what I observe today in Europe or the
US.
The French author Alain Soral has proposed what I think is a brilliant motto
to deal with this situation in France. He has called his movement "Equality
and Reconciliation" and as of right now, this is the only political movement
in France which does not want to favor one group at the expense of the other.
Everybody else either wants to oppress the "français de souche" (the native,
mostly White and Roman-Catholic majority) on behalf of the "français de branche"
(immigrants, naturalized citizens, minorities), or oppress the "français de
branche" on behalf of the "français de souche". Needless to say, the only ones
who benefit from this clash is the ruling Zionist elite (best represented by
the infamous
CRIF , which makes the US AIPAC look comparatively honorable and weak).
As for Soral, he is vilified by the official French media with no less hate
than Trump is vilified in the US by the US Ziomedia.
Still, equality and reconciliation are the two things which the majorities
absolutely must offer the minorities if they want to prevent the latter to fall
prey to the manipulation techniques used by those forces who want to turn everybody
into obedient and clueless serfs. Those majorities who delude themselves and
believe that they can simply solve the "minority problem" by expelling or otherwise
making these minorities disappear are only kidding themselves. To 'simply' solve
the "minority problem' by cracking down on these minorities inevitably
"While we all typically [have] several co-existing identities inside
us (say, German, retired, college-educated, female, Buddhist, vegetarian,
exile, resident of Brazil, etc. as opposed to just "White"), in manipulated
minorities one such identity (skin color, religion, etc.) becomes over-bloated
and trumps all the others." -- The Saker
That's a great critique of "identity politics" and one reason why identity
politics is self-limiting, maybe even self-destructive (as well as destructive
of democracy).
Another point: The poorer people are, the more vulnerable they are to identity politics.
It's like an Indian movie I once saw that was constructed as a family
history. When the family experienced many setbacks, one after another, until
they were all disheartened, the patriarch of the family spoke up, saying,
"Remember, we are Bengali!" That was the turning point in the film: after
that things began to improve for the family so that the film could have
a happy Bolliwood ending.
That was like saying, "Remember, we have a proud history!"
There was also a Yiddish joke that someone told me, like this: There
was a young Jewish man in some place like Minsk, somewhere in Eastern Europe,
and he saw an advertisement by none other than a great member of the Rothschild
banking family. The ad said "Wanted: young Jewish man for difficult and
physically challenging assignment." So the hero (or anti-hero?) of this
story set out immediately for Paris. Unfortunately, our hero experienced
many tragedies, even losing an arm and a leg. But he was determined and
he persevered, with the help of a crutch. Finally, he had to camp out in
front of the gate of the Rothschild mansion outside of Paris.
Eventually,
the great Rothschild had his carriage stop and spoke to the man, saying,
"You know, I've seen you standing here day after day what is it that you
want?"
Our hero brought out the advertisement that he had carried with him
through all his misadventures. The great Rothschild read the advertisement
and exclaimed, "What's the matter with you? Did you not read that the job
was physically challenging?" To which our hero responded, "Yes, but, Mr.
Rothschild, the ad says "young Jewish man."
Being myself a gentile, I did not at first get the joke, but eventually
I got a chuckle out of it.
What do all races, genders, nationalities and creeds have in common?
An overwhelming majority of them are working class. That's why I am white
and Nationalist but not a White Nationalist. The working class wants work
and wages. The ruling class gives us war and welfare. Solidarity is the
only effective defense against concentrated wealth. Absent solidarity the
working class is a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. Witness the
American prole. Simultaneously under the lash and at each others throats.
I also lived for 5 years in Washington, DC, which was something like
70% Black and, at the time, openly and often rudely hostile to Whites
(I never thought of myself as a color before, but I sure felt like one
during those 5 years). And now I am a "legal alien" living in the US.
Anyway, while I am "White" (what a nonsensical category!)
Nonsensical? Really? Both the DC blacks and their DC (((paymasters)))
hate your "category" but you're still confused and want to hold hands and
educate them ? Do you have children?
The French author Alain Soral has proposed what I think is a brilliant
motto to deal with this situation in France. He has called his movement
"Equality and Reconciliation" and as of right now, this is the only
political movement in France which does not want to favor one group
at the expense of the other.
Demographically speaking, the native French group ( white category
FYI) is already doomed to lose their homeland unless they reverse the invasion
and punish the plotters. Reconciling with their invaders would be assisted
suicide, surely. Almost as bad as the forced miscegenation idea proposed
by Nicolas "Jew Midget" Sarkozy a few years back.
You need to wake up and check for any vitamin/mineral deficiencies you
might have, Saker. Our ancestors butchered countless invaders to
give us the land we're standing on – they didn't reconcile it away.
One single question shows how profoundly silly The Saker's his "solution"
is:
Why would it be easier to convince resentful, envious minorities to just
get along with the majority than to convince the elites to act better, according
to the noblesse oblige principle?
Elites will always misuse their power. Minorities/majorities will always
quarrel and resent each other.
Give us (back) ethnically homogeneous states instead. No panacea, but
the besf we can hope for.
The ruling elites of US (both democrats and republicans) can be divided
into 2 categories:
1. The ones who think that they are better because of their race.
2. The ones who think that they are better because they were able to overcome
the feeling of being better because of their race. In other words – the
morally superior ubermensch instead of racially superior ubermensch.
In reality, category 2 doesn't exist (at least not among the ruling elites)
– they are all liars. They haven't been able to overcome any feeling of
superiority, they just added another one – the one of moral superiority.
Actually, the ruling elites for the most part are still category 1, only
pretending to be category 2. Not only do they feel they are superior to
other races, they feel they are superior to their own race – the poorer
members of it.
The ruling elites are manipulating the population of US into declaring
that they belong in either one of these 2 camps. Result: Charlottesville
riots.
This post would sound eminently reasonable if the white identitarians
had any kind of state blessing, but they are a de facto criminal element
being suppressed. Not for the sake of democracy, but for the sake of the
elite who are Jewish, not Zionist, and not very Anglo.
White nationalism would have zero credibility if actual white leadership
were transparently in control over the state. The wellspring of their support
comes from the fact that what whites do exist in the power structure are
absolutely and transparently subservient to other interests.
One of the problems is that the US was (and still is) a republic-with
a small r. The republican form of government assumes that the voters are
too stupid or ignorant to pass laws, so they have to hire professional political
types to write their governing laws for them. The politicos are easy targets
for the powers that be to manipulate, evidently.
The problem is – as always – with the numbers. The large influx of migrants
is changing the demographics and that changes the goals and behaviour of
each group. The minority groups can see the promised land in the future
when they will take over. The majority knows that they cannot stop it by
"equality and reconciliation" (whatever that would mean in practise, maybe
endless workshops to whine about each other?).
The numbers game has gone too far and there is no easy way to restore
stability. E.g. the labor markets in the West cannot be fixed without drastic
restrictions on supply of new labor from the Third World. The article has
some valuable insights, but the lame 'solution' it suggests is useless.
Another issue not addressed is that many minorities are a majority in
their regions leading to a geographic instability by putting borders in
question. That separation actually makes sense in many cases.
What we have had for some time are the elites behaving badly, they have
stopped being responsible and thoughtful. The best solution I can see would
be for the elites to sober up and start taking their role seriously again.
Short of that, we will have chaos, and not the fun type of chaos. Those
are the wages of the baby boomer idiocy.
Manipulated majorities are an even greater danger.
At the last French elections the political elite did anything possible to
prevent Front National getting legal political power.
With fifteen % of the votes, of those who bothered to vote, some 44%, Macron
got an absolute majority in French parliament, some 360 seats.
FN six or so.
Yet, alas, anyone knows he won the elections, but not the streets.
As his popularity goes down, Sun King habits, the strikes announced for
11 and 12 September will show who really is in power in France.
If you want to lesson the influence of minorities in western democracies,
then its essential to provide a more a la carte form of democracy that is
less open to elite manipulation. Options include getting rid of political
parties and voting directly for heads of government departments, or allowing
voters to vote on which party gets to run each of the key government departments.
It's impossible to have a functional political system when the political
parties themselves are allowed to decide what issues voters get to vote
on, and can racially divide the electorate by providing policy packages
which play to voter weaknesses. This results in absurd results like blacks
in the US voting for mass unskilled immigration via the Democrats, and poor
American whites voting for increased defense spending and financial liberalisation
via the Republicans.
There is no way around this problem without radically changing the political
system.
Easier said than done. Most minorities would support anti-majority politics
even IF they knew they were being manipulated. You severely underestimate
the human attraction to tribalism.
A more plausible plan would be to turn minorities against so-called 'AngloZionist'
values, which is already partially complete, since minorities are rarely
Anglos and therefore don't subscribe to their values as much. Have a look
at any SJW gathering. Always disproportionately white, even in very diverse
cities. It's much easier to convince even longtime resident minorities like
blacks that things like transgenderism is bullshit, than it is to convince
emotionally committed whites.
This would result in a country that allows multiple competing tribalisms,
but none of which would be very useful as pawns by the elites. Not as good
as homogeneity, but better than the current situation.
"Everybody gang up against the WEIRDs" is a nice thought and I would
love to see it, but it's just not very likely.
There is only effective way defuse the explosive potential of minorities:
Educate minorities and explain to them that they are being manipulated
Educate those joining anti-minority movements that they are also being
manipulated
Offer the minorities a future based on equality and reconciliation
Put the spotlight on those who fan the flames of conflict and try to
turn minorities and majorities against each other
Surprisingly weak and naive.
A simple question:
What's wrong with Serb approach in Kosovo before Western intervention?
Spare me "virtue signalling" .. if you can.
I think it would've worked if West hadn't stepped up with overwhelming
FORCE.
It worked in "Operation Storm". Serbs as victims but that's precisely the
point.
Perfect example how it CAN work.
So .following the same logic ..if IF .West used the same approach why
it wouldn't work?
Say .French government does exactly the same as Croats did with Serbs in
Croatia or Serbs with Albanians/whatever in Kosovo.
There is only effective way defuse the explosive potential of minorities:
Educate minorities and explain to them that they are being manipulated
Educate those joining anti-minority movements that they are also being
manipulated
While those ideas have merit, I predict they'll be impossible to implement.
Education is an active process and one cannot "be" educated in the passive
sense. People, like other creatures, can be schooled and trained, but that's
not the same as acquiring an education.
There are several reasons why the majority will never acquire any meaningful
education. Most people simply do not possess the requisite curiosity to
begin any sort of educational process and would rather make decisions based
on immediate emotions. A true education requires active questioning of the
standing myths and myths are evidently too comfortable for most to discard
or even doubt. Most folks appear too lazy and or too timid to face the hard
truths and would rather follow the dictates of some slick Peruna peddler.
A shocking percentage of people apparently love the feeling of "superiority"
of "knowing" something even if their belief is utter, easily discardable,
hogwash and actively reject any challenges to it. For example, the mindless
charge of "conspiracy theorist" is used to dismiss, without thinking, anything
but the spoon fed drivel they see on teevee.
I could go on, but this is already too long and is mostly preaching to
the choir.
Which is a key reason that things are not likely to improve for at least
a few more millennia. Accepting wages is a form of slavery, and most folks
simply cannot see beyond that trap. The system has evolved so that people
readily accept the idea of wages as a necessity (along with the extortion
and theft known as taxes). There's a huge difference between making (earning)
a living and holding a job for wages, but I doubt I'll ever be able to convince
anyone of that.
Tolstoy wrote about the concept of wage slavery over a century ago and
it makes good reading to this day.
"But in reality the abolition of serfdom and of [chattel] slavery was
only the abolition of an obsolete form of slavery that had become unnecessary,
and the substitution for it of a firmer form of slavery and one that holds
a greater number of people in bondage."
The ruling class gives us war and welfare. Solidarity is the only
effective defense against concentrated wealth. Absent solidarity the
working class is a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. Witness
the American prole. Simultaneously under the lash and at each others
throats.
All true, except the part about solidarity, which would definitely be
a huge step in the right direction for us proles and peasants, but is probably
as unobtainable as true education of the masses.
As I see it, the best an individual can do is to toss a monkey wrench
into the system whenever we can get away with it, but that requires an understanding
of who are enemies are and that seems nearly impossible to achieve. Thus
it's effective only in theory. In practice, it's probably as ephemeral as
a gas emission in a tornado.
Short of that, we will have chaos, and not the fun type of chaos.
Chaos is on the march.
It appears the minority has magically organized itself and planned
a 10-day march from Charlottesville to DC, there to demand the impeachment/removal
of Donald Trump, and to carry on a non-violent occupation (irony
alert).
Manipulated majorities are an even greater danger.
An even bigger threat is the manipulat ing minorities aka certain
(most?) elements of the money bag crowd.
This problem has been recognized for millennia and was discussed in detail
by many early Americans who nevertheless argued in favor of a constitution
and a centralized bureaucracy that favored the rich.
Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.
-Diogenes of Sinope, quoted by Stobaeus, iv. 31c. 88
But if you will take note of the mode of proceedings of men, you
will see that all those who come to great riches and great power have
obtained them either by fraud or by force; and afterwards, to hide the
ugliness of acquisition, they make it decent by applying the false title
of earnings to things they have usurped by deceit or by violence.
- Niccolo Machiavelli , HISTORY OF FLORENCE AND OF THE AFFAIRS OF
ITALY, Book 3 chap 3Para 8
" wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want
of it. On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of
dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence."
THOMAS PAINE, DISSERTATION ON FIRST-PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT, 1795
AfroAmericans who are descended from slaves should take into account
the fact that their ancestors were protected because they had value. As
a result they now number some 42 million and produced the last President.
Comparison with the indigenous natives who after centuries of genocide number
about 2 million and are mostly on reservations should give pause.
Nonwhites within the borders of the US are not innocent bystanders They
are enthusiastically voting The Historic Native Born White American Majority
into a violently persecuted racial minority within the borders of America..
If you have a greater identification with Muslim "Americans" and Hindu
"Americans" than European American Natives then just go back to Russia..and
take the Hindus and Muslims with you.
It wasn't very nice of you not to let my comment go through yesterday
in response to commenter Eric .on The Vineyard of the Saker
You are waging demographic warfare against my Racial Tribe .
@WorkingClass The Chinese in California are Chinese Race Nationalist
The Hindus in California are Hindu Race Nationalists You are a Civic Nationalist
Cuck.
Using minorities as an excuse to oppress majorities is a classic colonial
technique. The British set themselves up as the "protectors" of the Muslims
in India, the Turks in Cyprus and the Protestants in Ireland, for example.
Putin justifies his actions in Ukraine by claiming that he is "protecting"
the ethnic Russian minority from the dastardly ethnic Ukrainian majority.
Ditto for the various cyber-attacks on Estonia. One assumes that the same
treatment would be meted out to the Belarusians if they dared to assert
their national sovereignty. The US captive nations legislation the author
refers to includes Belarus (designated "White Ruthenia"), Ukraine and the
three Baltic republics. I am unaware of any alliance ever having existed,
or existing today, between Serbia and Russia. Like "Eurasia", that "alliance"
seems to have been invented by US neocons when they were trying to use Putin
as an "asset".
Is it ok with you that the Chinese and Hindus in California voted The
Historic Native Born White American Majority in California into a racial
minority?
"Manipulated minorities represent a major danger to democratic states."
Well, yes. But the manipulation of minorities to change legal frameworks
or disassemble governments has been ongoing since the French Revolution.
'They' first foster a sense of oppression, more or less justified, then
move to grant the new rights. Monarchies suffered the strategy. Europe should
know the drill, witness the received oral tradition "Czechoslovaquia is
another spelling for Rothschild."
Breaking up the US along racial lines is exactly what 'they' want. They
want the fighting "whites" to come out, give the reason for changes in law.
The Trump impeachment is deliberate provocation.
There has never been a 'white nation', it is a silly, ahistorical idea.
Nations are built around culture. Fight for the culture. Use the damn high
IQ.
@Issac "White nationalism would have zero credibility if actual white
leadership were transparently in control over the state."
Nope, but thanks for playing. White nationalism would have zero credibility
if the leadership actually promoted American–WASP–interests. There is no
escaping the Posterity clause, period. There is no magic dirt, no civic
nationalism, no immersion in American culture, that can replace descendants
of the English colonists that understand the importance of the Rights of
Englishmen. The US was never intended to be the world's largest rest stop
for every poor downtrodden person on Earth. Minorities now all undocumented
immigrants since 1965 (Hart-Cellar).
Homogeneous nation's are born from Heterogeneous nation's. We are witnesses
to the birth pains. The length of the labor depends on how long the majority
will tolerate the minorities. Reconciliation isn't just impossible–its not
even on the table, unless you reverse time. They. Have. To. Go. Back.
@Anon Well..you are wrong about that..America since it's inception has
always been a White Nation If you don't believe me..just ask Professor Noel
Ignatieve-the Father of White Studies. Where I differ from Professor Noel
Ignatieve:I think it's GREAT that America has historically been a White
Nation as did Socialist Labor Leader Samuel Gompers.
As far as your last two sentences go:Bring back the 1888 Chinese Legal
Immigrant Exclusion Act!!!!
Saker
The highly racialized Nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc is the Voting
Bloc for War on Christian Russia not Trump's Whitey Racist Voting Bloc..
@Intelligent Dasein Damned right. If anything, he is the descendant
of African slave traders . But his skin is sort of black and he's
got a funky name, so he can pass as one of the "oppressed" minorities.
@jacques sheete 1 Timothy 5:18 ESV /
For the Scripture says, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the
grain," and, "The laborer deserves his wages."
Wages are as old as dirt. I can understand why you find them objectionable.
But with what will you replace them?
There's a huge difference between making (earning) a living and holding
a job for wages, but I doubt I'll ever be able to convince anyone of
that.
Try me.
I was a union man back in the day when private sector unions were active
and had support in Washington. We had a contractual relationship with employers
that was qualitatively different from serfdom or chattel slavery and a huge
improvement over the wage slavery that prevailed before the American labor
movement.
As ideologies go the Anarchists have the best of it. But even they are
Utopians. Capitalism sux. There will never be a free market utopia. But
neither will there be a workers paradise. Human beings are limited in what
they can accomplish by human nature. That's the law. I'm only interested
in what works in the real world, however imperfectly.
Nature does not know political frontiers. She first puts the living
beings on this globe and watches the free game of energies. He who is
strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favorite child, the
right to be the master of existence.
If a people limits itself to domestic colonization, at a time when
other races cling to greater and greater surfaces of the earth's soil,
it will be forced to exercise self-restriction even while other nations
will continue to increase.
For some day this case will occur, and it will arrive the earlier
the smaller the living space is that a people has at its disposal. As,
unfortunately only too frequently, the best nations, or, better still,
the really unique cultured races, the pillars of all human progress,
in their pacifistic blindness decide to renounce the acquisition of
new soil in order to content themselves with 'domestic* colonization,
while
inferior nations know full well how to secure enormous areas on this
earth for themselves, this would lead to the following result:
The culturally superior, but less ruthless, races would have to limit,
in consequence of their limited soil, their increase even at a time
when the culturally inferior, but more brutal and more natural, people,
in consequence of their greater living areas, would be able to increase
themselves without limit.
In other words: the world will, therefore, some day come into the
hands of a mankind that is
inferior in culture but superior in energy and activity.
For then there will be only two possibilities in the no matter how
distant future: either the world will be ruled according to the ideas
of our modern democracy, and then the stress of every decision falls
on the races which are stronger in numbers, or the world will be dominated
according to the law of the natural order of energy, and then the people
of brute strength will be victorious, and again, therefore, not the
nations of self-restriction.
But one may well believe that this world will still be subject to
the fiercest fights for the existence of mankind.
In the end, only the urge for self-preservation will eternally succeed.
Under its pressure so-called 'humanity,' as the expression of a mixture
of stupidity, cowardice, and an imaginary superior intelligence, will
melt like snow under the March sun. Mankind has grown strong in eternal
struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.
Hint: today in an appearance on an internationally broadcast program,
a minion from Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD) dismissed as "conspiracy
theory" the suggestion that the USA/(Trump admin) is involved in Afghanistan
"because Afghanistan has vast lithium resources, which US needs for new
technologies" [see this 2010 report,
Read More
Minorities are nothing but trouble, even though political correctness
demands that we not see that or dare to say so. History offers not a single
– NOT ONE SINGLE – example of harmony and mutual love between the minorities
and the majority in any community/country/nation. Prove me wrong, cite one
significant exception.
Don't cite Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans in the American melting
pot. They came with full intent to be melted, they came white, Christian,
and western in outlook and culture. They came pre-cooked for the melting
pot. Can't say the same for the Muslims streaming in today. Nor for the
Hindus and the Orientals coming in today. Leaving aside the Muslims (not
even worth discussing in any talk of assimilation), the Hindus and Orientals
today stand aside and apart, both groups highly conscious of their groups'
share in the American pie. The Hispanics will make Spanish the lingua Franca
– already largely done in California. So what exactly can the melting of
Spanish and English languages produce? Spanglish? No, it will be one or
the other, depending on which group acquires demographic majority and sufficient
political clout. Who will melt whom?
Is it ok with you that the Chinese and Hindus in California voted
The Historic Native Born White American Majority in California into
a racial minority?
Please elaborate on what you mean. I definitely do not see myself as
a racial minority in California.
Manipulated Minorities Represent a Major Danger for Democratic States
The solution is an easy one – we must abandon the Jew Matrix of identity
politics and return to the Christian Matrix of neighborliness.
Jew thought is about biological identity, and all the fear and hate associated
with it – the Christian philosophical mindset is an intellectual entreaty
to "love your neighbor as you love yourself." Hmm – one favors gonad driven
actions – the other using our brains to overcome our biology, and make peace
and abundance.
The differences are stark and profound – we can see what the Jew way
has brought us – Jew tribalism is killing America and the West.
If we want a just kind world we cannot abandon philosophical Christianity.
Philosophical Christianity is not about "the virgin birth" and "the ascension
into heaven" – it is about a practical way to peaceably live with each other
and build an abundance for all.
@Cloak And Dagger Non-Hispanic white is now down to 37.7% of the California
population as of 2016 according to the U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts ..probably
less if you include all the uncounted illegals.
"I would even argue that the Empire has created several nation ex nihilo
(What in the world is a "Belarussian"?!)."
Hey, us Anglo-Zionists didn't create Belarus. That was an indigenous
or possibly German puppet state created (sort of) in early 1918. It was
then conquered by the Bolsheviks and reborn as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist
Republic, a constituent republic of the USSR till it fell apart, at which
point it became (sort of) independent.
The Anglo-Zionists had nothing to do with any of this, with probable
exception of the collapse of the USSR.
@Intelligent Dasein Actually, if we go back a dozen or two generations,
it's probable most people on the planet are descended from both slaveowners
and slaves. Especially if you're a little loose with the definition of slave.
@Bragadocious If we had ever made a serious consistent effort to kill
all the Indians, they'd be gone. But there seem to be quite a few of them
still around. About 5M, in fact, considerably more than lived in the boundaries
of the USA in 1491.
Argentina had similar Indian problems during the same time period (late
19th century) we were fighting our final Indian wars. But they had a different
approach: extermination.
Quite successful at it, too. Very few Indians left in Argentina. And
they didn't import any other minorities, which means Argentina is now upwards
of 90% "white." Much more so than USA, in fact.
If we accept that minorities are typically much more driven than
most of the population, then we also immediately can see why their influence
over society is often out of proportion with the numerical demographical
"weight". This has nothing to do with these minorities being more intelligent
or more creative and everything to do with them willing to being
spend much more time and efforts towards their objectives than most
people.
It's true that there is greater activism, but the key ingredient is probably
ethnic patronage.
A.H. gave an (approving) explanation of how it works:
"In the old Austria, nothing could be done without patronage. That's
partly explained by the fact that nine million Germans were in fact rulers,
in virtue of an unwritten law, of fifty million non-Germans. This German
ruling class took strict care that places should always be found for Germans.
For them this was the only method of maintaining themselves in this
privileged situation. The Balts of German origin behaved in the same way
towards the Slav population."
Hitler's Table Talk. Conversation Nº 109, 15th-16th January 1942
American Jewry has been following the same policy since the early 1900′s,
pushing for Jewish candidates in key placings, who if successful, are expected
to return the favour. On a "level playing field" this has a ratchet effect
whereby corporate management and key media, finance and government positions
can be gradually taken over with Anglos squeezed out in a rather unobvious
way ("He wasn't the right candidate for reasons A,B,C X,Y,Z").
Educate the minorities! I have bwen hearing that for over 50 years. I
believe that was a substantial rationale for Federal Aid to education. How
has it worked? What does the US Census data show for the indicator median
education level persons over 25 years of age in 1960 demonstrate when compared
to 2010? Compare for both white and black. Wow! we all are much smarter.
Okay, as Rodney King so aptly stated it "why can' t everbody just get along?"
@Wally okay wally, i'm only going to say this once, so please pay attention.
the gas chambers were but one method by which jews were killed. starvation,
disease, forced labor, firing squads, killed legions. what if it was only
4 million jews who perished in the camps? or 3? does that make it better.
one last thing: elie wiesel is not the wonderful man he is purported to
be.
Wages are as old as dirt. I can understand why you find them objectionable.
But with what will you replace them?
Dear Sir, as I've often stated, I like what you have to say and agree
with 99% of it. I also respect the fact that your reply to me was obviously
respectful and sincere.
My usual answer to your question is to replace them with nothing. For
example if I had a case of the gleet, I'd rather not replace it; I'd rather
do without. Instead of wages and a time clock, I advocate finding other
(hopefully respectable) sources of income.
I realize that in this environment, it's nearly impossible to do without
wages, but that shows how much our system sux, hence my objection to them
and the system. I pretty much became disgusted with the concept after working
at a few jobs that were really akin to slavery or some other unsavory paid
profession, so I worked to make a living without punching time clock. That's
not to say that I did not receive money for my services, but I managed to
do without a direct boss during my earning days. Several other rather cantankerous
members of my family manged to do the same, and some still do. I'm not saying
that to brag, but to point out that it can be done.
I do admit that it now seems nearly impossible to do that sort of thing,
but a close neighbor, in his thirty's, manages to do that and does quite
well. He does have the advantage of both a good work ethic and access to
a family business though.
The bottom line for me is that it's too bad that we have to submit to
bosses for the most part to earn a living. From that we seem to learn to
submit to other forms of "authority" with little or no questioning, and
it seems to be a downhill slide from there. Also, the more power the bosses
get, they more they control, and the less chance there is for people to
become independent. that's no way to live.
Since you consider "working for wages" as not "making a living,"
That is a false statement. It is both illogical and unreasonable based
on what I actually said.
Working for wages in one of several ways of earning a living. It just
happens to be, in my way of thinking, one of the least desirable for many
reasons.
I'm curious what you would consider to constitute "making a living."
Educate the minorities! I have bwen hearing that for over 50 years.
I believe that was a substantial rationale for Federal Aid to education.
Most folks are entirely ineducable and seem to like it that way. Of course,
it's a fine sounding pretext for mass brainwashing and it's attendant bureaucracy
and source of profits.
How has it worked?
It's probably worked just as intended but not at all as advertised!
See John Taylor Gatto and Upton Sinclair's "The Goslings" and the Goosestep"
which basically describe schooling in America as a tool for corporations.
what if it was only 4 million jews who perished in the camps? or
3? does that make it better?
Well, in several countries you can go to jail, and many have, for saying
it was less than 6, so go figure. Norman Finkelstein was destroyed by the
"Holocaust Industry" for showing in the simplest terms that if you add up
the numbers of supposed "victims" and "survivors", the official figures
are patently absurd. The more you dig, the more absurd it gets.
The Saker: You are not a "minority." You are a Caucasian, the European
branch, ethnically Russian. You are Christian, specifically Orthodox. You
are one of the interesting groups that make up the Caucasian peoples. You
have nothing in common with blacks/Asians.
The Democratic party is the party of nonwhites, non-Christians, sexual
degenerates. Manipulation has nothing to do with this. Minorities know they
are inferiors. What they are doing is because they realize they can never
accomplish what Caucasians/Europeans/ Christians/neopagans have accomplished.
This means it is time for separation/deportation/repatriation.
This is coming. An RCC priest "confessed" to having been in the KKK when
he was a teenager. The US Conference of Bishops has established an ad hoc
committee to address racism. This is the final nail in the coffin of the
RCC. Homosexuals have taken over the priesthood. Priests do not preach about
hell, sin, repentance. Now that this KKK priest has been exposed, from now
on sermons will only cover "racism," the worst sin.
Caucasian Christans/pagans have to deal with the reality that world history
can be summed up in two words: IQ, which is tied to race. The past 2000
years of Western civilization united under the RCC are gone. There has to
be a new paradigm shift to deal with the future and what needs to be done.
@anonymous I hope they act like they have at every event they have been
a part of and the president acts accordingly. Trump needs to hire people
to record the whole thing and put it all up on a new website thats created
just to host the event. Dozens of live feeds from dozens of angles. All
put up on this new website just so there will be no confusion. Once the
left riots, because they will riot, National guard needs to be called and
these domestic terrorists need to be put down. He then needs to put out
an executive order to shut down all propaganda news agencies that are spinning
this, and if people want to see what happened, view the live feeds from
dozens of angles on the newly created website. And if people bitch about
how its wrong to have this up, fuck them. Its time to take off the kiddy
gloves.
@Tim Howells It was more like around 300,000 in all of the German camps
since their inception back in the mid-1930′s, according to the International
Red Cross. And that refers to all camp inmates of all ethnic backgrounds.
It is entirely possible that many Jews may have been killed on the Eastern
Front or in the Soviet Union, but that can hardly be blamed solely upon
the Germans, who were not known to be savagely cruel or vengeful- even though
the anti-partisan actions may have led to some excesses.
In any case, there is zero evidence for "millions of Jews" killed by
the Germans. There are no mass graves commensurate with such figures, nor
is there any documentary evidence of a deliberate plan of "extermination."
@jacques sheete I understand you quite well I think. I have worked on
commission. I have been self employed. For a time I was a soldier. I have
worked for wages for mom and pop business and for large corporations and
held both union and non union jobs. I did a few years working for a not
for profit homeless shelter. I am a Jack of all trades and (unfortunately)
master of none.
On union jobs (IBEW and Teamsters) I had the great benefit of having
a contract with my employer that spelled out the duties and privileges of
both the worker and the company. This meant that both labor and management
worked from the same set of rules. The path to promotion was defined as
was the possible cause for termination. Personalities had nothing to do
with anything. The boss and I followed the same rules. It was nothing like
being subject to the whims and prejudices of one man.
" For example if I had a case of the gleet, I'd rather not replace it;
I'd rather do without."
Having a "job" can be worse than the gleet.
Unfortunately a mans gotta eat.
@Ivy The white trash (as of 2016, down to 37.7% of California's population)
has simply been replaced by brown trash in California. The only question
remaining is which ethnic elite will run the state ..the jooies or the chinkies
or the hindus. Or will the ethnics simply rule via a de facto coalition?
Whitey's demise in CA is an accomplished fact ..with AZ and TX soon to follow
and eventually OR, WA, ID, and CO. The efforts of James K. Polk are soon
to be fully reversed. And yes, Ivy, you will have employment ..every Chinese
has been promised a white house boy and white concubine by 2050.
the same tolerant technology has been applied five thousand years ago
in the Sumerian civilization
what was a non semitic composed society. Few hundred years prior to the
destruction of that culture
semitic tribes were allowed to settle in, first in smaller numbers , then
in the name of tolerance larger migrating groups were allowed , and enjoyed
benefits of education, comfortable, cultured living. The original majority
of the population were builders and workers , the migrants for the most
part were users, who's interest were to find an easy way to become the more.
The complete opposite of mentality. In time the semitic migrants were able
to build up a fifth column , moved in to powerful positions such as religion
and astrology , and from then on destruction has begun. The original populous
were pushed out, part of them were forcefully crossbred , the rest of them
flee and
build new countries in Europa . The migrants of that time gained written
culture , tailored clothing ,
the benefit of toilet so not to go to the bushes to relieve themselves .
This time around there is no place left to flee.
@WorkingClass I, too, think I understand from whence you come.
I agree with the concept of labor unions but recognize that they too
can be turned against the interests of the workers, and unfortunately, have
been.
I do applaud you for your success working within the system and I have
no doubt that you did it as a sincere, able and good man. I also respect
your views and thank you for sharing them.
As for bosses, I loathe them so much that I myself never hired employees
because I didn't want to be a boss any more than I wanted to answer to one.
I almost get physically sick when I see that the window of opportunity for
youngsters to follow a independent lifestyle is next to nil and getting
tougher all the time.
I do still counsel my younger relatives to acquire as much experience
as they can so that they are in a position to have some control over their
own lives. I'm also actively involved in fortifying my grandkids with both
defiance and the attitudes and skills to back it up.
Is that attitude Utopian? No doubt to some degree it is, but so is the
attitude of submission, i.e., the wish for everything to be taken care of
so long as one submits.
There is much contention as to whether even a single jew was killed
in a gas chamber.
Not only is there much contention, but there is no credible evidence
that it really happened. Besides, the numbers are farcical.
Where do they get 6 million?
"Allowing for a maximum of 100,000 who succeeded in emigrating from
Europe, this would bring the total number of Jews under the direct rule
of Nazi Germany to about 3,200,000."
Distribution of the Jewish Population of Europe 1933-. 1940," prepared
by Mr. Moses Moskowitz
AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 1941-1942, page 662
"I submit that the real truth is totally different. My thesis is very
simple: the reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert
states and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population
is because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities
present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire. That's
all there is to it."
That is pretty much it, save for the origins. WASP culture's Germanic
basis began by hating the native British Isles. That set the pattern:WASPs
most hate those from whom they steal or otherwise wrong gravely. The Reformation
provided the perfect theological and philosophical justifications for that
pattern to become something much greater.
The Anglo-Saxon Puritans were Judaizing heretics. You cannot over-emphasize
that point. WASAP culture from the moment it was crystalized, truly formed,
was one that saw the world through Jewish-influenced, Jewish-fawning, eyes.
Naturally and inevitably, once the true WASPs gained total control of the
government, with the Puritan Revolution, their fearless leader, Oliver Cromwell,
allied with Jews. He took Jewish money to wage war, to exterminate cultures
and make at least virtual serfs of whole populations.
White Christian populations.
WASP culture began with an alliance with Jews, allowing Jews back into
England, with special rights and privileges that the vast majority of British
Isles native Christians did not have, that allowed the WASPs to continue
waging war to exterminate white Christian cultures.
When WASPs encountered non-whites, they began to grasp the value of using
them – non-whites and non-Christians – as tools and weapons with which to
batter the white Christians they wished to destroy.
That is the reason the 'Anglo-Zionist Empire' uses minorities as it does.
You cannot separate the Jewish Problem from the WASP Problem. You cannot
solve the Jewish Problem without solving the 'WASP Problem.
The USA started to imitate post-Maydan Ukraine: another war with statues... "Identity
politics" flourishing in some unusual areas like history of the country. Which like in
Ukraine is pretty divisive.
McAuliffe was co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and was one of her superdelegates
at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Notable quotes:
"... The thrust appears to be to undercut components of his base while ratcheting up indignation. WaPo and the Times dribble out salacious "news" stories that, often as not, are substance free but written in a hyperbolic style that assumes a kind of intrinsic Trump guilt and leaps from there. They know better. No doubt they rationalize this as meeting kind with kind. ..."
"... It reminds me of the coverage in the run up to Nixon's resignation. Except this one's on steroids. I believe the DC folks fully expect Trump to be removed and now are focusing on the strategy that accrues the maximum benefit to their party. Unfortunately, things strongly favor the Democrats. ..."
"... Democrats want to drag this out as long as possible and enjoy the chipping away at segments of the Republican base while the Republicans want to clear the path before the midterms. However, the Republican officials, much as many or most can't stand Trump, have to weave a thin line because taking action against Trump would kill them in the primaries and possibly in the general. ..."
"... So the Democrats are licking their chops and hoping this can continue until the midterms with the expectation they will then control Congress. ..."
"... Some of you still don't get it. Trump isn't our last chance. Its your last chance. Yet still so many of you oxygen thieves still insist RUSSIA is the reason Hillary lost. You guys are going to agitate your way into a CW because you can't accept you lost. Many of you agitating are fat, slow, and stupid, with no idea how to survive. ..."
"... From day one after the unexpected (for the punditry class and their media coherts) elections results everybody was piling on Trump. The stories abound about his Russia Collusion (after one year of investigation not even a smoke signal) or his narcistic attitudes (mind you LeeG Trump always addresses people as We where as Humble Obama always addresses in the first person). ..."
"... I get this feeling the Swamp doesn't want a President who will at least try to do something for the American people rather than promises (Remember Hope and Change ala Obama, he got the Change quite a bit of it for him and his Banker Pals from what is left of the treasury and we the people are left with Hope). ..."
"... Someone on the last thread said in a very elegant way that what binds us Americans together is one thing, economic opportunity for all. I believe that was Trump's election platform, with the "for all" emphasized frequently. ..."
"... There is quite the precedent for the media treating trump as they do, Putin has been treated quite similarly, as well as any other politician the media cars disagree with [neocons/neolibs]... ..."
"... I think, during the election campaign, the negative media coverage may have well be a boon to him. Anyone who listened to the media, and then actually turned up at a Trump rally to see for himself, immediately got the idea that the media is full of shit. I think this won Trump a fair number of converts. ..."
"... But I think by now they are just over the top. It almost reminds me of Soviet denunciations of old communists who have fallen out of favor. ..."
"... The one clear thing is that there is a coup attempt to get rid of Donald Trump led by globalist media and supra-national corporate intelligence agents. Charlottesville may well be due to the total incompetence of the democratic governor and mayor. ..."
"... On the other hand, the razing of Confederate Memorials started in democrat controlled New Orleans and immediately spread to Baltimore. This is purposeful like blaming Russia for losing the 2016 election. ..."
"... The unrest here at home is due to the forever wars, outsourcing jobs, tax cuts for the wealthy and austerity. Under stress societies revert to their old beliefs and myths. John Brennon, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar are scorpions; they can't help themselves. After regime change was forced on Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine; a color revolution has been ignited here in the USA; damn the consequences. We are the only ones that can stop it by pointing out what is really happening. ..."
"... What I see in my Democrat dominated county is that the blue collar folks are noting this overt coup attempt and while they didn't vote for Trump are beginning to become sympathetic towards him. I sense this is in part due to the massive mistrust of the MSM and the political establishment who are viewed as completely self-serving. ..."
"... I read a transcript of the entirety of Trump's news conference upon which CBS and others are basing their claims that Trump is "defending white supremacists," and at no point did he come within hand grenade distance of doing anything of the sort. What he did do is accuse the left wing group of being at fault along with the right wing group in causing the violence, and he did not even claim that they were equally at fault. ..."
"... There is no doubt whatever that his statement was entirely accurate, if in no other respect in that the left's decision to engage in proximate confrontation was certain to cause violence and was, in fact, designed to do so regardless of who threw the first punch. CBS and other media of its caliber are completely avoiding mentioning that aspect of the confrontation. ..."
"... CBS et. al. have been touting the left's possession of not one but two permits for public assembly, but they carefully do not point out that the permits were for two areas well removed from the area where the conflict occurred, and that they did not have a permit to assemble in that area. ..."
"... The media is flailing with the horror of Trump's advocacy of racial division, but it is the Democratic Party which has for more than a decade pursued the policy of "identity politics," and the media which has prated endlessly about "who will get the black vote" or "how Hispanics will vote" in every election. ..."
"... As a firm believer in the media efforts to sabotage Trump and a former supporter (now agnostic, trending negative - Goldman Sachs swamp creatures in the Oval Office????), he greatly disappointed me. First, i will state, that I do not believe Trump is antisemitic (no antisemite will surround himself with rich Jewish Bankers). ..."
"... It doesn't matter whether Trump is getting a raw deal or not. Politics has nothing to do with fairness. ..."
"... But when you've lost Bob Corker, and even Newt Gingrich is getting wobbly, when Fox News is having a hard time finding Republicans willing to go on and defend Trump, you don't need to be Nostradamus to see what's going to happen. ..."
The media, and political elite, pile on is precisely what I expect. The chattering political classes
have converged on the belief that Trump is not only incompetent, but dangerous. And his few allies
are increasingly uncertain of their future.
The thrust appears to be to undercut components of his base while ratcheting up indignation.
WaPo and the Times dribble out salacious "news" stories that, often as not, are substance free
but written in a hyperbolic style that assumes a kind of intrinsic Trump guilt and leaps from
there. They know better. No doubt they rationalize this as meeting kind with kind. Trump
is the epitome of the salesman that believes he can sell anything to anyone with the right pitch.
Reporters that might normally be restrained by actual facts and a degree of fairness simply are
no longer so constrained.
It reminds me of the coverage in the run up to Nixon's resignation. Except this one's on
steroids. I believe the DC folks fully expect Trump to be removed and now are focusing on the
strategy that accrues the maximum benefit to their party. Unfortunately, things strongly favor
the Democrats.
Democrats want to drag this out as long as possible and enjoy the chipping away at segments
of the Republican base while the Republicans want to clear the path before the midterms. However,
the Republican officials, much as many or most can't stand Trump, have to weave a thin line because
taking action against Trump would kill them in the primaries and possibly in the general.
So the Democrats are licking their chops and hoping this can continue until the midterms
with the expectation they will then control Congress. After that they will happily dispatch
Trump with some discovered impeachable crime. At that point it won't be hard to get enough Republicans
to go along.
The Republicans can only hope to convince Trump to resign well prior to the midterms. They
hope they won't have to go on record with a vote and get nailed in the elections.
In the meantime the country is going to go through hell.
Yes, we are staring into the depths and the abyss has begun to take note of us. BTW the US
was put back together after the CW/WBS on the basis of an understanding that the Confederates
would accept the situation and the North would not interfere with their cultural rituals.
There was a general amnesty for former Confederates in the 1870s and a number of them became
US senators, Consuls General overseas and state governors.
That period of attempted reconciliation has now ended. Who can imagine the "Gone With the Win"
Pulitzer and Best Picture of the Year now? pl
Some of you still don't get it. Trump isn't our last chance. Its your last chance. Yet still
so many of you oxygen thieves still insist RUSSIA is the reason Hillary lost. You guys are going
to agitate your way into a CW because you can't accept you lost. Many of you agitating are fat,
slow, and stupid, with no idea how to survive.
I totally disagree with you LeeG. From day one after the unexpected (for the punditry class
and their media coherts) elections results everybody was piling on Trump. The stories abound about
his Russia Collusion (after one year of investigation not even a smoke signal) or his narcistic
attitudes (mind you LeeG Trump always addresses people as We where as Humble Obama always addresses
in the first person).
I get this feeling the Swamp doesn't want a President who will at least try to do something
for the American people rather than promises (Remember Hope and Change ala Obama, he got the Change
quite a bit of it for him and his Banker Pals from what is left of the treasury and we the people
are left with Hope). I hope he will succeed but I learnt that we will always be left with
Hope!
That last tweet is from the Green Party candidate for VP. Those are just a few examples from
a quick Google search before I get back to work. Those of you with more disposable time will surely
find more.
Someone on the last thread said in a very elegant way that what binds us Americans together
is one thing, economic opportunity for all. I believe that was Trump's election platform, with
the "for all" emphasized frequently.
I believe Charlottsville was a staged catalyst to bring about Trump's downfall, there
seems now to be a "full-court press" against him. If he survives this latest attempt, I'll be
both surprised and in awe of his political skills. If he doesn't survive I'll (and many others,
no matter the "legality of the process") will consider it a coup d'etat and start to think of
a different way to prepare for the future.
There is quite the precedent for the media treating trump as they do, Putin has been treated
quite similarly, as well as any other politician the media cars disagree with [neocons/neolibs]...
I think, during the election campaign, the negative media coverage may have well be a boon
to him. Anyone who listened to the media, and then actually turned up at a Trump rally to see
for himself, immediately got the idea that the media is full of shit. I think this won Trump a
fair number of converts.
But I think by now they are just over the top. It almost reminds me of Soviet denunciations
of old communists who have fallen out of favor.
As far as statue removal goes: There should be legal ways of deciding such things democratically.
There should also be the possibility of relocating the statues in question. I imagine that there
should be plenty of private properties who are willing to host these statues on their land.
This should be quite soundly protected by the US constitution.
That these monuments got, iirc, erected long after the war is nothing unusual. Same is true
for monuments to the white army, of which there are now a couple in Russia.
As far as the civil war goes, my sympathies lie with the Union, I would not be, more then a
100 years after the war, be averse to monuments depicting the common Confederate Soldier.
I can understand the statue toppler somewhat. If someone would place a Bandera statue in my surroundings,
I would try to wreck it. I may be willing to tolerate a Petljura statue, probably a also Wrangel
or Denikin statue, but not a Vlassov or Shuskevich statue.
Imho Lees "wickedness", historically speaking, simply isn't anything extraordinary.
Col., thank you for this comment. I grew up in the "North" and recall the centenary of the Civil
War as featured in _Life_ magazine. I was fascinated by the history, the uniforms and the composition
of the various armies as well as their arms. I would add to that the devastating use of grapeshot.
I knew the biographies of the various generals on both sides and their relative effectiveness.
I would urge others to read Faulkner's _Intruder in the Dust_ to gain some understanding of the
Reconstruction and carpetbagging.
I believe the choice to remove the monument as opposed to some other measure, such as the bit
of history you offer, was highly incendiary. I also find it interesting that the ACLU is taking
up their case in regard to free-speech:
http://tinyurl.com/ybdkrcaz
I was living in Chicago when the Skokie protest occurred.
"They came to Charlottesville to do harm. They came armed and were looking for a fight."
I agree. This means Governor McAuliffe failed in his duty to the people of the Commonwealth
and so did the Mayor of Charlottesville and the senior members of the police forces present in
the city. Congradulations to the alt-left.
They - the left - previously came to DC to do harm - on flag day no less. Namely the Bernie
Bro James Hodgkinson, domestic terrorist, who attempted to assasinate Steve Scalise and a number
of other elected representatives. The left did not denounce him nor his cause. Sadly they did
not even denounce the people who actually betrayed him - those who rigged the Democratic primary:
Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
The one clear thing is that there is a coup attempt to get rid of Donald Trump led by globalist
media and supra-national corporate intelligence agents. Charlottesville may well be due to the
total incompetence of the democratic governor and mayor.
On the other hand, the razing of Confederate Memorials started in democrat controlled New
Orleans and immediately spread to Baltimore. This is purposeful like blaming Russia for losing
the 2016 election.
The protestors on both divides were organized and spoiling for a fight.
The unrest here at home is due to the forever wars, outsourcing jobs, tax cuts for the
wealthy and austerity. Under stress societies revert to their old beliefs and myths. John Brennon,
Lindsey Graham, John McCain, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar are scorpions; they can't help themselves.
After regime change was forced on Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine; a color revolution has been
ignited here in the USA; damn the consequences. We are the only ones that can stop it by pointing
out what is really happening.
It seems to me that this brouhaha may work in Trump's favor. The more different things they accuse
Trump of (without evidence), the more diluted their message becomes.
I think the Borg's collective hysteria can be explained by the "unite the right" theme of the
Charlottesville Rally. A lot of Trump supporters are very angry, and if they start marching next
to people who are carrying signs that blame "the Jews" for America's problems, then anti-Zionist
(or even outright anti-Semitic) thinking might start to go mainstream. The Borg would do well
to work to address the Trump supporters legitimate grievances. There are a number of different
ways that things might get very ugly if they don't. Unfortunately the establishment just wants
to heap abuse on the Trump supporters and I think that approach is myopic.
There will always be an outrage du jour for the NeverTrumpers. The Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow,
Morning Joe & Mika ain't gonna quit. And it seems it's ratings gold for them. Of course McCain
and his office wife and the rest of the establishment crew also have to come out to ring the obligatory
bell and say how awful Trump's tweet was.
What I see in my Democrat dominated county is that the blue collar folks are noting this
overt coup attempt and while they didn't vote for Trump are beginning to become sympathetic towards
him. I sense this is in part due to the massive mistrust of the MSM and the political establishment
who are viewed as completely self-serving.
It is illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia to wear a mask that covers one's face in most public
settings.
LEOs in Central Va encountered this exact requirement when a man in a motorcycle helmet entered
a Walmart on Rt 29 in 2012. Several customers reported him to 911 because they believed him to
being acting suspiciously. He was detained in Albemarle County and was eventually submitted for
mental health evaluation.
This is not a law that Charlottesville police would be unfamiliar with.
Chomsky:
"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were. "It's a major
gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant."
"what they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally
self-destructive."
"When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who
win – and we know who that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the
opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism."
I read a transcript of the entirety of Trump's news conference upon which CBS and others are basing
their claims that Trump is "defending white supremacists," and at no point did he come within
hand grenade distance of doing anything of the sort. What he did do is accuse the left wing group
of being at fault along with the right wing group in causing the violence, and he did not even
claim that they were equally at fault.
There is no doubt whatever that his statement was entirely accurate, if in no other respect
in that the left's decision to engage in proximate confrontation was certain to cause violence
and was, in fact, designed to do so regardless of who threw the first punch. CBS and other media
of its caliber are completely avoiding mentioning that aspect of the confrontation.
CBS et. al. have been touting the left's possession of not one but two permits for public assembly,
but they carefully do not point out that the permits were for two areas well removed from the
area where the conflict occurred, and that they did not have a permit to assemble in that area.
A pundit on CBS claimed that "if they went" to the park in question, which of course they did,
"they would not have been arrested because it was a public park." He failed to mention that large
groups still are required to have a permit to assemble in a public park.
The media is flailing with the horror of Trump's advocacy of racial division, but it is the
Democratic Party which has for more than a decade pursued the policy of "identity politics," and
the media which has prated endlessly about "who will get the black vote" or "how Hispanics will
vote" in every election.
Lars, but they came with a legal permit to protest and knew what they would be facing. The anti-protestors
including ANTIFA had a large number of people being paid to be there and funded by Soros and were
there illegally. The same mechanisms were in place to ramp up protests like in Ferguson which
were violent and this response was no different.
However, the Virginia Governor a crony of the Clintons, ordered a police stand down and no
effort was made to separate the groups. I remind you also that open carry is legal in Virginia.
So, IMHO this was deliberately set up for a lethal confrontation by the people on the left.
I will also remind you that the American Nazi Party and the American Communist Party among others,
are perfectly legal in the US as is the KKK. Believing and saying what you want, no matter how
offensive, is legal under the First Amendment. Actively discriminating against someone is not
legal but speech is. Say what you want but that is the Constitution.
Your last paragraph is a suitably Leftist post-modern ideological oversimplification of an
infinitely complex phenomenon. It also reveals a great deal of what motivates the SJW Left:
" As for the notion that this is a 'cultural issue', I quote: 'Whenever I hear the word
culture, I reach for my revolver.' 'Culture' is the means by which some people oppress others.
It's much like 'civilization' or 'ethics' or 'morality' - a tool to beat people over the head
who have something you want. "
First, it is a cultural issue. It's an issue between people who accept this culture as a necessary
but flawed, yet incrementally improvable structure for carrying out a relatively peaceful existence
among one another, and those whose grudging, bitter misanthropy has led them to the conclusion
that the whole thing isn't fair (i.e. easy) so fuck it, burn it all down. In no uncertain terms,
this is the ethos driving the radical Left.
Second, I don't know exactly which culture created you, but I'm fairly sure it was a western
liberal democracy, as I'm fairly certain is the case with almost all Leftists these days, regardless
of how radical. And I'm also fairly certain the culture you decry is the western liberal democratic
culture in its current iterations. But before you or anyone else lights the fuse on that, remember
that the very culture you want to burn down because it's so loathsome, that's the thing that gave
you that shiny device you use to connect with the world, it's the thing that taught you how to
articulate your thoughts into written and spoken word, so that you could then go out and bitch
about it, and it even lets you bitch about it, freely and with no consequences. This "civilization"
is the thing that gives rise to the "morals" and "ethics" that allow you to take your shiny gadgets
to a coffee shop, where the barista makes your favorite beverage, instead of simply smashing you
over the head and taking your shiny gadgets because he wants them. These principles didn't arise
out of thin air, and neither did you, me, or anyone else. This culture is an agreed-upon game
that most of us play to ensure we stand a chance at getting though this with as little suffering
as possible. It's not perfect, but it works better than anything else I've seen in history.
In his inimitable fashion, I'll grant Tyler (and the Colonel, as well) the creditable foresight
to call this one. Those of you who find yourselves wishing, hoping, agitating, and activisting
for an overturn of the election result, and/or of traditional American culture in general would
do well to take their warnings seriously.
If traditional American culture is so deeply and irredeemably corrupt, I must ask, what's your
alternative? And how do you mean to install it? I would at least like to know that. Regardless
of your answer to question one, if your answer to question two is "revolution", well then you
and anyone else on that wagon better be prepared to suffer, and to increase many fold the overall
quotient of human suffering in the world. Because that's what it will take.
You want your revolution, but you also want your Wi-Fi to keep working.
You want your revolution, but you also want your hybrid car.
You want your revolution, but you also want your safe spaces, such as your bed when you sleep
at night.
If you think you can manage all that by way of shouting down, race baiting, character assassinating,
and social shaming, without bearing the great burden of suffering that all revolutions entail,
you have bitter days ahead. And there are literally millions of Americans who will oppose you
along the way. And unlike the kulaks when the Bolsheviks rode into town, they see you coming
and they're ready for you. And if you insist on taking it as far as you can, it won't be pretty,
and it won't be cinematic. Just a lot of tragedy for everyone involved. But one side will win,
and my guess is it'll be the guys like Tyler. It's not my desire or aim to see any of that happen.
It's just how I see things falling out on their current trajectory.
The situation calls to mind a quote from a black radical, spoken-word group from Harlem who
were around in the early to mid 60s, called the Last Poets. The line goes, "Speak not of revolution
until you are willing to eat rats to survive." Just something to think about when you advocate
burning it all down.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) has added his name to a growing list of public officials
in state governments encouraging the removal of Confederate statues and memorials throughout the
South. Late in the day on Wednesday McAuliffe released an official statement saying monuments
of Confederate leaders have now become "flashpoints for hatred, division and violence" in a reference
to the weekend of violence which shook Charlottesville as white nationalists rallied against the
city's planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. McAuliffe further described the monuments as
"a barrier to progress" and appealed to state and local governments to take action. The governor
said:
As we attempt to heal and learn from the tragic events in Charlottesville, I encourage Virginia's
localities and the General Assembly – which are vested with the legal authority – to take down
these monuments and relocate them to museums or more appropriate settings. I hope we can all now
agree that these symbols are a barrier to progress, inclusion and equality in Virginia and, while
the decision may not be mine to make...
It seems the push for monument removal is now picking up steam, with cities like Baltimore
simply deciding to act briskly while claiming anti-racism and concern for public safety. Of course,
the irony in all this is that the White nationalist and supremacist groups which showed up in
force at Charlottesville and which are even now planning a major protest in Lexington, Kentucky,
are actually themselves likely hastening the removal of these monuments through their repugnant
racial ideology, symbols, and flags.
Bishop James Dukes, a pastor at Liberation Christian Center located on Chicago's south side,
is demanding that the city of Chicago re-dedicate two parks in the area that are named after former
presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson. His reasons? Dukes says that monuments honoring
men who owned slaves have no place in the black community, even if those men once led the free
world.
Salve, Publius. Thanks for the article. Col. Lang made an excellent point in the comments' section
that the Confederate memorials represent the reconciliation between the North and the South. The
same argument is presented in a lengthier fashion in this morning's TAC
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-confederate-monuments-represent-reconciliation/
. That reconciliation could have been handled much better, i.e. without endorsing Jim Crow. I
wish more monuments were erected to commemorate Longstreet and Cleburne, JB Hood and Hardee. I
wish there was more Lee and less Forrest. Nonetheless, the important historical point is that
a national reconciliation occurred. Removing the statues is a symbolic act which undoes the national
reconciliation. The past which is being erased is not the Civil War but the civil peace which
followed it. That is tragic.
IMO, most of the problems majority of people (specially the ruling class) have with Donald Trump'
presidency is that, he acts and is an accidental president, Ironically, everybody including, him,
possibly you, and me who voted for him knows this and is not willing to take his presidency serious
and act as such. IMO, he happens to run for president, when the country, due to setbacks and defeat
on multiple choice wars, as well as national economic misfortunes and misshapes, including mass
negligence of working class, was in dismay and a big social divide, as of the result, majority
decided to vote for some one outside of familiar cemented in DC ruling class knowing he is not
qualified and is a BS artist. IMO that is what took place, which at the end of the day, ends of
to be same.
" Removing the statues is a symbolic act which undoes the national reconciliation."
That is the intent. The coalition of urban and coastal ethnic populists and economic elites
has been for increased concentration and expansion of federal power at the expense of the states,
especially the Southern states, for generations. This wave of agitprop with NGO and MSM backing
is intended to undo the constitutional election and return the left to power at the federal level.
I agree with most of Trump's policy positions, but he is negating these positions with his out-of-control
mouth and tweets.
As much as I have nothing but contempt and loathing for the "establishment" (Dems, Republicans,
especially the media, the "intelligence" community and the rest of the permanent government),
Trump doesn't seem to comprehend that he can't get anything done without taming some of these
elements, all of whom are SERIOUSLY opposed to him as a threat to their sinecures and riches.
"Who is this OUTSIDER to come in and think that he in charge of OUR government?"
What seems like a balanced eyewitness account of Charlottesville that suggests that although the
radicals on both sides brought the violence, it was the police who allowed it to happen.
The need to keep protesters away from counter-protesters particular when both are tooled should
be obvious to anyone, but not so with the protest in Charlottevlle.
-"Trump isnt our last chance. Its your last chance."
Reminds me of the 60's and the SDS and their ilk. A large part of the under 30 crowd idolized
Mao's Little Red Book and convinced themselves the "revolution" was imminent. So many times I
heard the phrase "Up Against the Wall, MFs." Stupid fools. Back then people found each other by
"teach-ins" and the so called "underground press." In those days it took a larger fraction to
be able to blow in each other's ear and convince themselves they were the future "vanguard."
These days, with the internet, it is far easier for a smaller fraction to gravitate to an echo
chamber, reinforce group think, and believe their numbers are much larger than what, in reality,
exists. This happens across the board. It's a rabbit hole Tyler. Don't go down it.
Yes, Forts Bragg, Hood, Lee, AP Hill, Benning, etc., started as temporary camps during WW1
and were so named to encourage Southern participation in the war. The South had been reluctant
about the Spanish War. Wade Hampton, governor of SC said of that war, "Let the North fight. the
South knows the cost of war." pl
I would like to share my viewpoint. As a firm believer in the media efforts to sabotage Trump
and a former supporter (now agnostic, trending negative - Goldman Sachs swamp creatures in the
Oval Office????), he greatly disappointed me. First, i will state, that I do not believe Trump
is antisemitic (no antisemite will surround himself with rich Jewish Bankers).
But violence on all sides is absolute BS. Nazi violence gets its own sentence and language at least as strong as the language he has
no trouble hitting ISIS with. Didn't hear that. So I guess in his mind, the threat the US faced
from Nazis during WW2 was less than a ragtag, 3rd world guerilla force whose only successes are
because of 1. US, Saudi, and other weapons, and their war on unstable third world countries. Give
me a break - did he never watch a John Wayne movie as a kid?
When I discuss nazi's, F-bombs are dropped. I support the right of nazi's to march and spew
their vitriolic hatred, and even more strongly support the right of free speech to counter their
filth with facts and arguments and history.
I am sorry, but Antifa was not fighting against the
US in WW2. If one wants to critique Antifa, or another group, that criticism belongs in a separate
paragraph or better in another press conference. Taking 2 days to do so, and then walking it back,
is the hallmark of a political idiot (or a billionaire who listens to no one and lives in his
own mental echo chamber).
If Trump gets his info and opinions from TV news, despite having the $80+ billion US Intel
system at his beck and call, he is the largest idiot on the planet.
It doesn't matter whether Trump is getting a raw deal or not. Politics has nothing to do with
fairness.
But when you've lost Bob Corker, and even Newt Gingrich is getting wobbly, when Fox News is
having a hard time finding Republicans willing to go on and defend Trump, you don't need to be
Nostradamus to see what's going to happen.
"... Trump is attacked. The ACLU is attacked. Peace activists opposed to the CIA's regime change operation in Syria are attacked. Tucker Carlson is attacked. Everyone attacked that the CIA and various other aspects of the Deep State want attacked as if the MSM were all sent the same talking points memo. ..."
In the aftermath of competing protests in Charlottesville a wave of dismantling of
Confederate statues is on the rise. Overnight Baltimore
took
down
four Confederate statues. One of these honored Confederate soldiers and sailors,
another one Confederate women. Elsewhere statues were
toppled or defiled
.
The Charlottesville conflict itself was about the intent to dismantle a statue of General
Robert E. Lee, a commander of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The
activist part of the political right protested against the take down, the activist part of the
political left protested against those protests. According to a number of witnesses
quoted
in the LA Times sub-groups on both sides came prepared for and readily engaged in violence.
In 2003 a U.S. military tank pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein on Firdos Square in
Baghdad. Narrowly shot TV picture made it look as if a group of Iraqis were doing this. But
they were mere actors within
a U.S. propaganda show
.
Pulling down the statue demonstrated a lack of respect towards those who had fought under,
worked for or somewhat supported Saddam Hussein. It helped to incite the resistance against the
U.S. occupation.
The right-wing nutters who, under U.S. direction, forcefully toppled the legitimate
government of Ukraine
pulled
down
hundreds of the remaining Lenin statues in the country. Veterans who fought under the
Soviets in the second world war
took this
as
a sign of disrespect. Others saw this as an attack on their fond memories of better times and
protected them
. The forceful erasement of history further split the country:
"It's not like if you go east they want Lenin but if you go west they want to destroy him,"
Mr. Gobert said. "These differences don't only go through geography, they go through
generations, through social criteria and economic criteria, through the urban and the rural."
Statues standing in cities and places are much more than veneration of one person or group.
They are symbols, landmarks and fragments of personal memories:
"One guy said he didn't really care about Lenin, but the statue was at the center of the
village and it was the place he kissed his wife for the first time," Mr. Gobert said. "When
the statue went down it was part of his personal history that went away."
Robert Lee was a brutal man who fought for racism and slavery. But there are few historic
figures without fail. Did not George Washington "own" slaves? Did not Lyndon B. Johnson lie
about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and launched an unjust huge war against non-white people
under false pretense? At least some people will think of that when they see their statues.
Should those also be taken down?
As time passes the meaning of a monument changes. While it may have been erected with a
certain ideology or concept
in
mind
, the view on it will change over time:
[The Charlottesville statue] was unveiled by Lee's great-granddaughter at a ceremony in May
1924. As was the custom on these occasions it was accompanied by a parade and speeches. In
the dedication address, Lee was celebrated as a hero, who embodied "the moral greatness of
the Old South", and as a proponent of reconciliation between the two sections. The war itself
was remembered as a conflict between "interpretations of our Constitution" and between
"ideals of democracy."
The white racists who came to "protect" the statue in Charlottesville will hardly have done
so in the name of reconciliation. Nor will those who had come to violently oppose them. Lee was
a racist. Those who came to "defend" the statue were mostly "white supremacy" racists. I am all
for protesting against them.
But the issue here is bigger. We must not forget that statues have multiple meanings and
messages. Lee was also the man who
wrote
:
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest
joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead
of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
That Lee was a racist does not mean that his statue should be taken down. The park in
Charlottesville, in which the statue stands, was recently renamed from Lee Park into
Emancipation Park. It makes sense to keep the statue there to reflect on the contrast between
it and the new park name.
Old monuments and statues must not (only) be seen as glorifications within their time. They
are reminders of history. With a bit of education they can become valuable occasions of
reflection.
George Orwell wrote in his book 1984: "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny
and obliterate their own understanding of their history." People do not want to be destroyed.
They will fight against attempts to do so. Taking down monuments or statues without a very wide
consent will split a society. A large part of the U.S. people voted for Trump. One gets the
impression that the current wave of statue take downs is seen as well deserved "punishment" for
those who voted wrongly - i.e. not for Hillary Clinton. While many Trump voters will dislike
statues of Robert Lee, they will understand that dislike the campaign to take them down even
more.
That may be the intend of some people behind the current quarrel. The radicalization on
opposing sides may have a purpose. The Trump camp can use it to cover up its plans to further
disenfranchise they people. The fake Clintonian "resistance" needs these cultural disputes to
cover for its lack of political resistance to Trump's plans.
Anyone who wants to stoke the fires with this issue should be careful what they wish
for.
"That Lee was a racist does not mean that his statue should be taken down."
How about the fact that he was a traitor?
"George Orwell wrote in his book 1984: 'The most effective way to destroy people is to
deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.'"
The only reason statues of traitors like Lee exist is because the South likes to engage in
'Lost Cause' revisionism; to pretend these were noble people fighting for something other
than the right to own human beings as pets.
erasing history seems part of the goal.. i feel the usa has never really addressed
racism.. the issue hasn't gone away and remains a deep wound that has yet to heal.. events
like this probably don't help.
The statues of Lee and his ilk should come down because they are TRAITORS who deserve no
honor. Washington and Jefferson may have owned slaves but they were PATRIOTS. Its really that
simple.
I don't want to get derailed into the rights or wrongs of toppling statues. I wonder whose
brilliant idea it was to start this trend
right at this particular tinder box moment.
That said, the USA has never ever truly confronted either: 1) the systemic genocide of the
Native Americans earlier in our history; and b) what slavery really meant and was. NO
reconciliation has ever really been done about either of these barbarous acts. Rather, at
best/most, we're handed platitudes and lip service that purports that we've "moved on" from
said barbarity - well I guess WHITES (I'm one) have. But Native Americans - witness what
happened to them at Standing Rock recently - and minorities, especially African Americans,
are pretty much not permitted to move on. Witness the unending police murders of AA men
across the country, where, routinely, most of the cops get off scott-free.
To quote b:
The Trump camp can use it to cover up its plans to further disenfranchise they people. The
fake Clintonian "resistance" needs these cultural disputes to cover for its lack of
political resistance to Trump's plans.
While I dislike to descend into the liturgy of Both Siderism, it's completely true that
both Rs and Ds enjoy and use pitting the rubes in the 99% against one another because it
means that the rapine, plunder & pillaging by the Oligarchs and their pet poodles in
Congress & the White House can continue apace with alacrity. And: That's Exactly What's
Happening.
The Oligarchs could give a flying fig about Heather Heyer's murder, nor could they give a
stuff about US citizens cracking each other's skulls in a bit of the old ultra-violence.
Gives an opening for increasing the Police State and cracking down on our freedumbs and
liberties, etc.
I heard or read somewhere that Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer are absolutely committed
to not impeaching Donald Trump because it means all the Ds have to do is Sweet Eff All and
just "represent" themselves as the Anti-Trump, while, yes, enjoying the "benefits" of the
programs/policies/legislation enacted by the Trump Admin. I have no link and certainly cannot
prove this assertion, but it sure seems likely. Just frickin' great.
Lee was not a racist; I'd say you are addressing your own overblown egos. The U.S. Civil War
was long in coming. During the 1830's during Andrew Jackson's presidency, and John Calhoun's
vice-presidency, at an annual state dinner, the custom of toasts was used to present
political views. Jackson toasted the Union of the states, saying "The Union, it must be
preserved." Calhoun's toast was next, "The Union, next to our liberty, most dear."
Calhoun was a proponent of the Doctrine of Nullification, wherein if a national law
inflicted harm on any state, the state could nullify the law, until such time as a
negotiation of a satisfactory outcome could come about. The absolute Unionists were outraged
by such an idea.
My memory tells me that the invention of the cotton gin made cotton a good crop, but that you
needed the slaves. Slaves represented the major money invested in this operation. Free the
slaves and make slave holders poor. Rich people didn't like that idea. I think maybe the
cotton was made into cloth in the factories up north. Just saying.
How would 'addressing the problem' actually work? Should all native Americans and people of
colour go to Washington to be presented with $1 million each by grovelling white men?
But, the memorials to GW, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
et al
, does
not honor them for owning slaves. Memorials of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis,
et
al
, is because they took up arms against a legitimate government simply to support of a
vile system.
@6
The manufacturing states put export duties on the agricultural states, and tariffs on British
imported cloth. The English mills were undercutting the U.S. mills prices for a number of
reasons, not the least of which was they were more experienced in the industry.
The difference between a statue of Lee vs. a statue of Washington, Jefferson, LBJ, etc., is
that Washington, Jefferson, and LBJ did some good things to earn our respect even though they
did a lot of bad things, too. The Confederacy did no good things. It would be like erecting a
statue to honor Hitler's SS.
If there were statues honoring the SS, would anyone be surprised if Jews objected? Why
then does anyone fail to understand why blacks object to Confederate symbols?
I would, however, support statues that depict a Confederate surrendering. Perhaps the
statue of Lee on a horse could be replaced with a statue of Lee surrendering to Grant?
I am not a fan of the "counter-protests." Martin Luther King never "counter-protested" a
KKK rally. A counter-protest is a good way to start a fight, but a poor way to win hearts and
minds. It bothers me when the 99% fight among themselves. Our real enemy is the 1%.
George Washington "the father of our country" was a slave owner, a rapist and a murderer.
What do we expect from his descendants?
should we remove his face of the dollar bill and destroy his statues?
The civil war was due to economic reasons, free labor is good business.
Now cheap Mexican-labor ( the new type of slavery) is good business to the other side.
when will the new civil war in the US start?
@b
Many years ago, within the leadership of my student organization, I initiated to rename the
University I was attending, which was named after a communist ideological former state acting
figure, with very bloody hands, co-responsible for the death of tenths of thousands and
thousands of people. Today I still think, that educational and cultural institutions (and
many more) should be named either neutral, or by persons with cultural background and with
impeccable moral history, no many to be found. On the other side, I opposed the removal of
the very statue of the same person at a nearby public plaza - and there it stands today - as
a rather painful reminder of the past bloody history of my country, that went through a
conflict, that today seems so bizarre. Wherever I go, I look into black abyss, knowing, that
the very culture I belong to (the so called Christian Liberal Free Western World) has
inflicted so many horrors and crimes against other nations and ethnic groups, its even
difficult to count. Karlheinz Deschner wrote 10 books, titled "The Criminal History of
Christianity (Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums - on YT you can find videos him reading
from it). Yes, this is the very civilization, we Westerners originate from. It was deadly for
centuries - and its about time to change this. And keeping the memory of our so bloody
history, will help us to find the right and hopefully more peaceful solutions in the future.
Don`t tear down monuments or change street names, but give them the so often shameful
meaning, they had in history.
Then southern states have no business being part of United States of America since their
history and customs are not honored. That is good overall I think. Best for the world.
Southern states are very unlikely to attack any other sovereign state thousands of miles
away, but all united as unitary state, we can see how persistent in their aggression on the
rest of the world they are. 222 years out of its 239 years US has been aggressor:
https://www.infowars.com/america-has-been-at-war-93-of-the-time-222-out-of-239-years-since-1776/
Time to break US lust for attacking, invading and raiding other countries.
what little of this history i know - which is to say very little - kgw reflects what i have
read.. the problem is way deeper.. if you want to address racism, you are going to have to
pull down most of the statues in the usa today of historical figures..
if - that is why way you think it will matter, lol.. forgot to add that.. otherwise, forget
pulling down statues and see if you can address the real issue - like @4 rukidding and some
others here are addressing..
A little false equivalency anyone? I'm sure Adolph Hitler had some reasonable remarks at some
point in his life, so, I guess we should tolerate a few statues of him also? States rights as
the cause for the U$A's civil war? baloney, it was about the murder and enslavement of
millions of humans.
Bob Dylan's "Only a Pawn in Their Game" still
spells out
unsurpassed the divide and
rule strategy, to my mind. Powers that be are rubbing their hands with satisfaction at this
point, one would think.
I like your observation, b, that statues don't necessarily represent what they did when
they were erected. It's an important point. It meant something at the time, but now it's a
part of today's heritage, and has often taken on some of your own meaning. To destroy your
own heritage is a self-limiting thing, and Orwell's point is well taken. Perhaps people
without history have nowhere in the present to stand.
Have to add, slavery wasn't the cause for the war. It was centralization, rights of the
states. Yankees wanted strong central government with wide array of power, Southerners
didn't. Yankees were supported by London banking families and their banking allies or agents
in the US, Southerners were on their own. I personally think Southerners were much better
soldiers, more honorable and courageous, but we lacked industrial capacity and financial
funds. I could be biased having Southern blood, but my opinion anyway.
therevolutionwas@10 - Have to agree. The events leading up to the US Civil War and the war
itself were for reasons far more numerous and complex then slavery. Emancipation was a
fortunate and desirable outcome and slavery was an issue, but saying the entire war was about
ending slavery is the same as saying WW II was mostly about stopping Nazis from killing jews.
Dumbing down history serves nobody.
Still wondering how specifically the 'real issue' can be addressed. I don't think any amount
of money will compensate plains Indians .actually some are quite well off due to casinos. But
the days of buffalo hunting are gone and white people will not be going back where they came
from. As for blacks in urban ghettos you could build them nice houses in the suburbs but I
doubt if that will fix the drugs/gangs problem.
"That Lee was a racist does not mean that his statue should be taken down."
If the sole criteria for taking down any statues was that a man was a 'racist', meaning
that he hated people of color/hated black people, can we assume then that all those who owned
slaves were also racist?
Then all the statues in the whole country of Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Monroe and
perhaps all the Founding Daddies who owned slaves, should be removed. I am playing devil's
advocate here.
Fashions come and go.... and so the vices of yesterday are virtues today; and the virtues
of yesterday are vices today.
Bernard is correct at the end: "The fake Clintonian "resistance" needs these cultural
disputes to cover for its lack of political resistance to Trump's plans." The Demos have
nothing, so they tend to fall back on their identity politics.
....In total, twelve presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives, eight of whom
owned slaves while serving as president. George Washington was the first president to own
slaves, including while he was president. Zachary Taylor was the last president to own slaves
during his presidency, and Ulysses S. Grant was the last president to have owned a slave at
some point in his life.
Pitting people against people by inciting and validating fringe groups is a tried and true
social manipulation ploy.....and it seems to be working as intended.
Focus is on this conflict gets folks riled up and myopic about who the real enemies of
society really are.....and then that riled up energy is transferred to bigger conflicts like
war between nations.....with gobs of "our side is more righteous" propaganda
Humanity has been played like this for centuries now and our extinction would probably be
a kinder future for the Cosmos since we don't seem to be evolving beyond power/control based
governance.
And yes, as Dan Lynch wrote just above: "It bothers me when the 99% fight among
themselves. Our real enemy is the 1%"
Robert E. Lee a racist? No, he was a man of his time. B, you blew it with this one. You have
confused what you don't know with what you think you know.
Now, if Lee was a racist, what about this guy?
From Lincoln's Speech, Sept. 18, 1858.
"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I
was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.
While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the
question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in
regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about
in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races -- that I am not
nor ever have been in favor of making VOTERS or jurors of negroes, NOR OF QUALIFYING THEM
HOLD OFFICE, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that
there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever
forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch
as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior
and inferior, and I as much as any of her man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race."
All states who joined the confederation cited the "need" and "right" to uphold slavery in
their individual declarations. To say that the civil war was not about this point is strongly
misleading. Like all wars there were several named and unnamed reasons. Slavery was the most
cited point.
The argument of rather unlimited "state rights" is simply the demand of a minority to
argue for the right to ignore majority decisions. With universal state rights a union can
never be a union. There is no point to it. What is needed (and was done) is to segregate
certain fields wherein the union decides from other policy fields that fall solely within the
rights of member states. The conflict over which fields should belong where hardly ever
ends.
P. S.--If it were up to me, I'd tear down monuments to most of the U$A's
presidents for perpetuating and abetting the rise of an empire who has enslaved and murdered
millions around the globe, simply for profits for the few. Economic slavery has replaced the
iron shackles, but the murder is still murder...
P. S.--If it were up to me, I'd tear down monuments to most of the U$A's presidents for
perpetuating and abetting the rise of an empire who has enslaved and murdered millions around
the globe, simply for profits for the few. Economic slavery has replaced the iron shackles,
but the murder is still murder...
Posted by: ben | Aug 16, 2017 2:45:29 PM |
28
/div
The Northern manufacturers were exploiting the South and wanted to continue doing so. They
didn't much care that the raw materials came from slave labor.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to encourage slave rebellion
(meaning
fewer white Southern men available for military service)
and to punish the South.
Yet, while slavery ended when the North won, we all know how that turned out. For nearly
100 years
(and some might say, even today)
, many black people were still virtual
slaves due to discrimination and poor education.
B@27: you're missing a couple of very basic points.
First, not all states that seceded issued declarations. Virginia, for example, of which
the 'racist' Robert E. Leehailed, only seceded after Lincoln made his move on fort sumter. In
fact, Virginia had voted against secession just prior but, as with 3 other southern states,
seceded when Lincoln called for them to supply troops for his war.
Speaking of declarations of causes, have a look at the cherokee declaration. Yes, united
indian tribes fought for the confederacy.
Finally, the causes for secession are not the causes for war. Secession is what the
southerners did. War is what Lincoln did. One should not have automatically led to the
other.
Well, just reading the comments here it is obvious that there are several versions of history
taught at different times in the last century. If not, then all of us would "know" the real
reason for the CW - there would be no need for discussion. What is also obvious is that this
delving back into a muddied history, the defacing of formerly meaningful objects, the
thrusting of certain "rights" into the face of anyone even questioning them - all of it is
working. It is working extremely well in distracting us from things like the numerous
economic bubbles, the deep state scratching at war or chaos everywhere, politicians who are
at best prevaricating prostitutes and at worst thieves enriching themselves at our expense as
we struggle to maintain in the face of their idiocy.
It simply doesn't MATTER what started the Civil War - it ought to be enough to look at the
death toll on BOTH sides and know we don't need to go there again.
Who stands to gain from this? Because it surely isn't the historically ignorant antifa
bunch, who are against everything that includes a moral boundary. It isn't the alt-right, who
get nothing but egg on their face and decimation of position by virtue of many being "white".
CUI BONO?
The single answer is threefold: media, the government and the military - who continue to
refuse to address any of our problems - and feed us a diet of revolting pablum and
double-speak.
Honestly, congress passed a law legalizing propaganda - did anyone notice? Did anyone
factor in that they allowed themselves freedom to lie to anyone and everyone? It wasn't done
for show - it was done to deny future accountability.
Don't let this site get bogged down in history that is being constantly rewritten on
Wikipedia. Don't buy into the left/right division process. Don't let your self identify with
either group, as they are being led by provocateurs.
The lies we know of regarding Iraq, Syria, Libya - aren't they enough to force people to
disbelieve our media completely? The HUGE lies in our media about what is going on in
Venezuela should be quite enough (bastante suficiente) to make most people simply disbelieve.
But they cannot because they are only allowed to see and hear what our government approves -
and for our government, lying is quite legal now.
Let the emotions go - they are pushed via media to force you to think in white or black,
right or left, old vs young - any way that is divisive. Getting beaten for a statue would
likely make the guy who posed for it laugh his butt off most likely...
Speaking of Lincoln's quotes, here is a good one to dispel the myth about slavery being the
cause of war.
Pres. Abraham Lincoln: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so."
I the civil war was for the most part connected with the federal reserve central bank
charter right which unionist Yankees frightful about possible restraints of bankers rights
were keen to give London banking families unrestricted rights to do whatever they please in
the US. Other reasons exclusively included expanding federal government powers. Adding
personal income tax would be unimaginable prior to CW. Creation of all those fed gov agencies
too. It was all made possible by London bankers' servants Yankees.
The civil war in the US was not really started because of slavery. Robert E. Lee did not
join the south and fight the north in order to preserve slavery, in his mind it was state's
rights. Lincoln did not start the civil war to free the slaves.
You're right. The Emancipation Act was an afterthought really because Europe had turned
against the idea of slavery before the Civil War broke out, in fact was repelled by it, and
Lincoln knew that it would hurt commerce.
The southern states felt they had a right to secede, using the tenth amendment as the legal
basis. It states simply " The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the
people.".
Furthermore, the union of states was referred to many times by the founders as a compact.
Under the theory of compacts, when one party doesn't honor said compact, it is rendered
null.
Slavery, regardless of how we may feel today, was a legal and federally protected
institution. With the rise of the republican party, a campaign of agitation towards the south
and slavery had begun. It is this agitation towards a legal institution that rankled
southerners.
The south saw this coming well before the election of Lincoln. William seward, the
favorite to win the election, gave a speech in l858 called "the irrepressible conflict". The
south well knew of this and saw the writing on the wall if a republican was elected
president.
When reading the declarations of causes, this background should be kept in mind if one
wants to understand the southern position. Or, one can just count how many times the word
'slavery' appears like a word cloud.
Probably the best articulated statement on the southern position was south Carolina's
"address to the slaveholding states".
I'm afraid if you go back in time, no US president can be saved from a well-deserved statue
toppling. Including Abraham Lincoln, the hypocrite who DID NOT, and I repeat, DID NOT abolish
slavery. The U.S "elite" has always been rotten through and through, so good luck with those
statues.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves
You used Lincoln's inaugural address to show that the war was not over slavery. It's plain
enough coming from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
Lincoln, in that same inaugural address, stated what the war would be fought over ......
and it was revenue.
Here's the quote:
The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places
belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be
necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among
the people anywhere.
As a rare book dealer and history buff with thirty-odd years of experience reading and
studying original civil war era periodicals and documents, a fact stands out for me about
these now-controversial statues. None is from the civil war period. Many, like the Lee statue
in this article, date to the 1920's, which was the era of the second Ku Klux Klan. The
infamous movie "Birth of a Nation" inspired the nationwide revival of that faded terrorist
group. The year that statue was dedicated a hundred thousand Klansmen paraded in full regalia
in the streets of Washington.
The children and grandchildren of the men who had taken up arms against the United States
had by then completed a very flattering myth about 1861 - 1865. Consider too that
romanticized lost cause mythology was integral to the regional spirit long before the
rebellion. The Scots Irish who settled the American south carried with them the long memory
their forebears' defeats at the Boyne and Culloden, at the hands of the English – the
very ancestors of the hated Yankees living to the north of their new homeland.
Note also that many more CSA statues and memorials were built in the 1960s, as symbols of
defiance of the civil rights movement of that era. The War for the Union was fought at its
heart because the elite of the old south refused to accept the result of a fair and free
democratic election, but for those who came after, white supremacy became the comforting myth
that rationalized their ancestors' incredibly foolish treason.
"Robert Lee was a brutal man who fought for racism and slavery."
Would this have been written in his time? Would it be written today in other countries
(Africa included) where slavery (aka human trafficking) is big business today?
I'm disappointed that Moon of Alabama, usually so astute in its presentations, would print
this article.
That the many statutes of America's founding fathers should be re-evaluated is actually a
great idea. Many of these people were simply oligarchs who wanted to be the top of the
pyramid instead of the British. Many owned slaves and perpetuated slavery. Others, like
Andrew Jackson were legitimate psychopaths. Pretty much all of them cheered the genocide of
Native Americans. So maybe we *should* have different heros.
Using the logic b spells out above, one could argue that statues of Nazis should be
allowed too, after all they did come up with the Autobahn (modern highways), jet engines, and
viable rockets, all technology used all over the world. Some patriotic, well meaning Germans
fought in the Wehrmacht, don't they deserve statues, too? What about the Banderists and
Forest Brothers? The Imperial Japanese? Don't those well-meaning fascists deserve to
celebrate their heritage?
But simply saying that idea out loud is enough to realize what a crock that notion is.
Nazis and fascists don't deserve statues, neither do confederates. Neither do most Americans,
for that matter.
Trying to make some moral equivalence between NeoNazis and the leftists who oppose them is
about as silly as it gets. I don't support violence against these idiots, and they have the
same rights as anyone else in expressing their opinion. But to paint legit NeoNazis and the
leftists opposing them (admittedly in a very juvenile manner) in the same brush ("Both sides
came prepared for violence") is utter hogwash. We don't give Nazis a pass in Ukraine, don't
give them a pass in Palestine, and we sure as hell don't give them a pass in the US. It
doesn't matter what hypocritical liberal snowflake is on the other side of the barricade, the
Nazi is still a f*****g Nazi.
"Robert Lee was a brutal man who fought for racism and slavery."
b, you have just displayed your ignorance of the character of Robert E. Lee, why he
fought, and what he fought for. To give you the short n sweet of it, General Lee was a
Christian gentleman respected by those in the North as well as the South. He fought the
Federal leviathan as it had chosen to make war on what he considered to be his home and
country--the State of Virginia. The issue at hand was not racism and slavery but Federal
tyranny. Lincoln himself said he had no quarrel with slavery and as long as the South paid
the Federal leviathan its taxes, the South was free to go. Make a visit to Paul Craig Roberts
site for his latest essay which explains the world of the 1860s American scene much more
eloquently than I can ...
b is completely wrong in thread. The USA has been a highly racist power system historically
where killing non-Whites has been a major historical policy. Lee is not merely a racist, he
epitomizes this policy and is a symbol of it. Attacking racist symbols is essential to
destroying racism.
Historicus@38: that 'fair and free democratic election' was replete with Lincoln supporters
printing counterfeit tickets to the convention in order to shut out seward supporters.
The gambit worked and the rest, as they say, is history.
james @2--You are 1000000000% correct. And given the current state-of-affairs, will
continue to fester for another century if not more thanks to historical ignorance and elite
Machiavellian maneuvering.
Southern Extremist self-proclaimed Fire Eaters were the ones that started the war as they
took the bait Lincoln cunningly offered them. If they'd been kept away from the coastal
artillery at Charlestown, the lanyard they pulled may have remained still and war avoided for
the moment. The advent of the US Civil War can be blamed totally on the Constitution and
those who wrote it, although they had no clue as to the fuse they lit.
Chattel Slavery was introduced in the Western Hemisphere because the enslaved First
Peoples died off and the sugar plantations needed laborers. Rice, tobacco, indigo, "Naval
Stores," and other related cash crops were the next. Cotton only became part of the mix when
the cotton gin made greatly lessened the expense of its processing. But, cotton wore out the
thin Southern soils, so it cotton plantations slowly marched West thus making Mexican lands
attractive for conquest. But slaves were used for so much more--particularly the draining of
swamps and construction of port works. The capital base for modern capitalism was made
possible by slavery--a sentence you will NOT read in any history textbook. There are a great
many books written on the subject; I suggest starting with Marcus Rediker's
The Slave
Ship: A Human History
, followed by Eric Williams's classic
Capitalism and Slavery
, Edward Baptist's
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism
, and John Clarke's
Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery
and the Rise of European Capitalism
.
There are even more books published about the war itself. But as many have pointed out,
it's learning about the reasons for the war that's most important. Vice President Henry
Wilson was the first to write a very detailed 3 volume history of those reasons,
Rise and
Fall of the Slave Power in America
beginning in 1872, and they are rare books indeed;
fortunately, they've been digitized and can be found here,
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Wilson%2C+Henry%2C+1812-1875%22
Perhaps the most complete is Allan Nevins 8 volume
Ordeal of the Union
, although for
me it begins too late in 1847,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_Union
Finally, no study of the period's complete without examining the unraveling and utter
dysfunction of the political process that occurred between 1856 and 1860 that allowed Lincoln
to win the presidency, Roy Nichols's
The Disruption of American Democracy
illustrates
that best.
The US Civil War can't be boiled down to having just one cause; it's causes were multiple,
although slavery--being an economic and social system--resides at its core. As an historian,
I can't really justify the removal of statues and other items of historical relevance,
although displaying the Confederate Flag on public buildings I see as wrong; better to
display the Spirit of '76 flag if stars and stripes are to be displayed. (I wonder what will
become of the UK's Union Jack if Scotland votes to leave the UK.) Personal display of the
Stars and Bars for me amounts to a political statement which people within the Outlaw US
Empire still have the right to express despite the animus it directs at myself and other
non-Anglo ethnicities. (I'm Germanic Visigoth with Spanish surname--people are surprised at
my color when they hear my name.)
The current deep dysfunction in the Outlaw US Empire's domestic politics mirrors that of
the latter 1850s somewhat but the reasons are entirely different yet solvable--IF--the
populous can gain a high degree of solidarity.
There's also the school of thought that holds that Honest Abe freed the slaves in order that
northern industrialists could acquire replacements for workers lost in the war.
@37
Aye Woogs. All about expanding fed gov powers, most of which was focused on permanent central
banking charter. Many forget that central banking charter had been in place before CW in the
US and that great statesman Andrew Jackson repelled it. The first central banking charter
caused terrible economic suffering, which is why it was repelled. People had more sense then.
Not so much now.
"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United
States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the
funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided
the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I
take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families.
That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin
fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I
have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal I will rout you out!"
~Andrew Jackson
It saddens me that so many buy into the South fought for slavery. That story line was used in
the same manner that Weapons of Mass Destruction was used to war with Iraq. The difference is
the internet was able to get the truth out. Doesn't do much good to argue as most believe the
Confederate slavery propaganda. The US is done as a nation. A thousand different groups that
hate each other preaching no hate. Yes it will limp along for a while but it's done for.
many thanks for the history, and the books. I read Murray's essay and consider it a good
take....
".... As an historian, I can't really justify the removal of statues and other items of
historical relevance, although displaying the Confederate Flag on public buildings I see as
wrong..."
I have to agree.
& there is at least one sane (african american) person in LA, as per below article
"....Los Angeles resident Monique Edwards says historical monuments, like the Confederate
statue removed from Hollywood Forever Cemetery, need to be preserved and used as teachable
moments...."
Yankees wanted strong central government with wide array of power, Southerners didn't.
Yankees were supported by London banking families and their banking allies or agents in the
US, Southerners were on their own.
I recall that it was the slavers that wanted the central government to enforce the
Fugitive Slave Act
even in states that outlawed slavery; it was the slavers that
insisted that slavery be legal in the new territories, regardless of the wishes of the
settlers.
Also, the London industrial and banking interest strongly supported the breakaway slavers
because:
(1) It was the slave produced cotton that fueled the textile industry in England.
(2) Imported British ¨prestige¨ items found a ready market with the nouveau riche
planters grown fat on stolen labor.
(3) A Balkanized NA would be more subject to pressure from the ¨Mother Country.¨
(4) Lincoln refused to borrow from the bankers and printed ¨greenbacks¨ to finance
the war; this infuriated the bankers.
Neo-Confederate revisionism creates mythical history, in a large part, by attempting to
deify vile human beings.
Ben@26: Lincoln stated that he would only use force to collect imposts and duties.
The first battle of the war (actually more a skirmish) was the battle of Phillipi in
western Virginia in early June, l86l.
To the best of my knowledge, there were no customs houses in western Virginia as it was
not a port of entry. This was simply an invasion by the union army at Lincoln's command that
revealed his true colors. The war was Lincoln's war, plain and simple.
@51
Joey, I would like yo offer you fairy dust to buy. Interested? Luckily we should part our
ways soon. Should have happened ages ago if you ask me. Your history is not our own. You were
aggressors fighting for foreign entity. Time for us to part I think. have your own history
and say whatever you want there. We will have ours.
In my view, b is comparing a modern sensibility on race relations with that of a mid 19th
century confederate leader and so with this bad thesis it is quite easy to dismiss this post
entirely. Was the north that much more enlightened on the treatent of blacks? I think not.
Was the emancipation proclamation largely a political gesture to incite ire and violence not
only among southerners but also slaves living in these states towards their owners?
Meanwhile, the effect of such a proclamation was exempt on states where said effect would not
"pinch" the south. The north, if anything, was even more racist using blacks as a means
towards the end to consolidate power even more centrally.
It honestly reads like most neutral apologetic drivel out of the "other" msm which is on
the ropes right now from an all-out wholly political assault. If you truly wanted to educate
people on their history you would stand up for fair and honest discourse. Make no mistake,
this is all about obscuration and historical-revisionism. Globalists gotta eat.
"Slavery as an institution, is a moral &political evil in any Country... I think it
however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race... The blacks are immeasurably
better off." Robert E. Lee
Sounds like a man with opinions, but without the burning fire to see that evil enshrined
in a state-policy towards blacks. Basically, one condemns him for sharing a popular view of
the day. CALL THE THOUGHT POLICE!
From a British point of view, Washington and Jefferson were traitors as well.
As for Lee, he was racist, but doesn't seem to have been more racist than the average Yankee.
No more racist than Sherman or Lincoln, and less racist than many of the Confederate top
guys, for instance.
Then, there's the nutjob idea that forcefully taking down other statues in the South will
make these guys "win". At least, the Lee statue had a more or less legal and democratic
process going on, which is the only way to go if you don't want to look like a Taliban.
Really, did these idiots not understand that bringing down Confederate statues without due
process will massively piss off most of the locals? Do they really want the local hardliners
to come armed and ready to use their guns, one of these days? Is this the plan all along, to
spark another civil war for asshat reasons?
(Like B, toppling Saddam and communist statues was the very first thing I thought of. As
if these poor fools had just been freed from a terrible dictatorship, instead of nothing
having changed or been won at all in the last months)
I agree with Woogs (25). How stoopid are we ? History has been re-written and manipulated
going back a long way. Most of the readers here know that our "masters" , and their versions
of history are not accurate. Yet here we are arguing and such ... " he was good...NO He was
bad...." acting as if we know truth from fiction. Back then, as now, it was all planned.
Divide and conquer. Slavery was the "excuse" for war. The Power Elite" were based in Europe
at that time and saw America as a real threat to their global rule. It was becoming too
strong and so needed to be divided. Thus the people of those times were played....just as we
are today. Manipulated into war. Of course America despite the Civil War , continued to grow
and prosper so the elite devised another plan. Plan "B" has worked better than they could
have ever imagined. They have infected the "soul" of America and the infection is spreading
rapidly.Everyone , please re-read oilman2 comments (31)
Thanks B, precisely my thinking. It has a smell of vendetta. And I believe this sort of old
testament thinking is very common in the u.s. of A. What's currently happening will further
alienate both sides and lead to even more urgent need to externalize an internal problem via
more wars.
In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated that there were over 1,500 "symbols of
the Confederacy in public spaces" in the United States. The majority of them are located,
as one might expect, in the 11 states that seceded from the union, but as Vice aptly points
out, some can be found in Union states (New York, for example has three, Pennsylvania,
four) and at least 22 of them are located in states that didn't even exist during the Civil
War.
How can that be possible? Because largely, Confederate monuments were built during two
key periods of American history: the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1920s and the civil
rights movement in the early 1950s and 1960s.
To be sure, some sprung up in the years following the Confederacy's defeat (the concept
of a Confederate memorial day dates back to back to 1866 and was still officially observed
by the governments of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, as of the publication of
the Southern Poverty Law Center's report), and some continue to be built!USA Today notes
that 35 Confederate monuments have been erected in North Carolina since 2000.
But when these statues!be they historical place markers, or myth-building icons of Lee
or Stonewall Jackson!were built seems to suggest these monuments have very little to do
with paying tribute to the Civil War dead and everything to do with erecting monuments to
black disenfranchisement, segregation, and 20th-century racial tension.
I don't know if b. realizes how many German monuments got destroyed because people did not
wish to recall this particular part of history, the bomb raids of the allies helped, of
course, but there are cemeteries of Marx, Engels and Lenin statues, and
only revisionists recall what was destroyed
after WWII
.
Young people need some space to breath. They don't need monuments of war heros.
b wrote "Statues standing in cities and places are much more than veneration of one person or
group. They are symbols, landmarks and fragments of personal memories..."
Symbols indeed, traits in cultural landscapes. This piece may add another dimension to the
importance of cultural landscape in the context of this conversation:
"To this day, the question remains: why would the Southerners remember and celebrate a losing
team, and how come the non-Southerners care about it so passionately? A convenient answer
revolves around the issue of slavery; i.e., a commemoration of the era of slavery for the
former, and, for the latter, the feeling that the landscape reminders of that era should be
entirely erased."
and
"In the past two decades, the American(s)' intervention has brought down the statues of
Hussein, Gaddafi, Davis, and Lee respectively. Internationally, the work seems to be
completed. Domestically, the next stage will be removing the names of highways, libraries,
parks, and schools of the men who have not done an illegal act. Eventually, all such traits
in the cultural landscape of Virginia may steadily disappear, because they are symbols of
Confederacy."
http://www.zokpavlovic.com/conflict/the-war-between-the-states-of-mind-in-virginia-and-elsewhere/
It warms my heart that you are not a racist. But who really gives a fuck? And what makes you
think not favoring your own kind like every other racial and ethnic group does makes you a
better than those of your own racial group?? Something is wrong with you.
You are certainly entitled to your attitudes, hatreds, memories, affinities and such. You
are not entitled to your own history. History is what happened. Quit lying about it!
Lee is the past. Obama is the present. The 'Nobel Peace Prize' winner ran more concurrent
wars than any other president. He inaugurated the state execution of US citizens by drone
based on secret evidence presented in secret courts. He was in charge when ISIS was created
by the US Maw machine. What about removing his Nobel Peace Prize?
A long time ago Christians destroyed the old god's statues because they were pagan and didn't
comply with their religion (or is it ideology?). Muslims followed and did the same on what
was left. They even do that now when ISIS blows up ancient monuments.
What is next? Burning books? Lets burn the library of Alexandria once again...
Joeymac 69:
I didn't mean the Charlottesville mess was done without due process. I refer to the cases
that have happened these last few days - a trend that won't stop overnight.
Extremists from both sides aren't making friends on the other ones, and obviously are only
making matters worse.
Somebody 63:
"It is futile to discuss what the confederacy was then, when white supremacy groups consider
them their home today."
That's the whole fucking problem. By this logic, nobody should listen to Wagner or read
Nietzsche anymore. Screw that. Assholes and criminals from now should be judged according to
current values, laws and opinions, based on their very own crimes. People, groups, states,
religions from the past should be judged according to their very own actions as well, and not
based on what some idiot would fantasize they were 1.500 years later.
Looks like the Lee apologetics and claims that the war was about state's rights (go read the
CSA constitution, it tramples the rights of its own member states to *not* be slave holding)
or tariffs are alive and well in these comments. That's what these statues represent: the
utter perversion of the historical record. And as pointed out @38, none of these statues are
from anywhere near the Civil War or Reconstruction era.
I think anyone and everyone who instigates a successful campaign to destroy a memorial which
glorifies war should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace & Sanity and be memorialised in
bronze, nearby, as a permanent reminder that war WAS a racket, until Reason prevailed.
No offense intended.
Arch-propagandist Rove said "[Those] in what we call the reality-based community, [who]
believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not
the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our
own reality [e.g Russia hacked the election]. And while you're studying that
reality!judiciously, as you will!we'll act again, creating other new realities [e.g. Neo-Nazi
White Supremacism], which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're
history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
There is a coup underway to get rid of Trump [who's 'unpardonable crime' seems to be that
he isn't going along with the War Party]. The War Party will try anything, anything, if there
is a hope that it will work to get rid of him. When Trump launched the cruise missiles
against Syria, there was a moment's silence, totally spooky given all the bs that was flying
... Would he start a war with Russia? Would Trump go all the way with that, as Clinton
probably would have done? When the attack fizzled out, the chorus resumed their attacks as
though nothing had happened.
Their tactical attacks change as they are revealed to be fakes. The current attack,
probably using War Party provacateurs operating on both sides, is the next tactical phase -
out with 'Russian Hacking the Election', in with 'Trump White Supremacist Nazi'. If there is
the standard CIA regime change plan behind this (as outlined by John Perkins and seen in
Ukraine, Libya, Syria)] and the relatively passive actions don't work, they will ultimately
resort to hard violence. At that stage, they resort to using snipers to kill people on both
sides.
The anti-fas' are supposedly liberal, anti-gun, but there already have been stories of
them training with weapons, even working with the Kurds in Syria so the ground is laid for
their use of weapons. There are those on the Trump side who would relish the excuse for gun
violence irrespective on consequence so the whole thing could spiral out of control very
rapidly and very dangerously.
Disclosure - I do not support Trump [or any US politico for that matter]. The whole US
political system is totally corrupt and morally bankrupt. Those that rise [or more accurately
those that are allowed to rise] to the top reflect that corruption and bankruptcy. This could
get very very messy.
There's nothing wrong with being racist. Racism is simply preference for one's extended
family. 'b' calls the admittedly rather goony lot at C'ville 'white supremacists'. But do
they want to enslave blacks or rule over non-whites? No. In fact most of the alt-right lament
the slave trade and all its ills, including mixing two groups who, as Lincoln pointed out,
had no future together. What the left wants to do is reduce Confederate American heritage and
culture down to the slavery issue, despite the fact only a few Southerners owned slaves.
Now, within ethnic European countries, should whites be supreme? You're goddamn right they
should. Just as the Japanese should practice 'yellow supremacy', and so on and so forth. Most
of you lot here, being liberals, will be in favour of no fault divorce. You understand there
can be irreconcilable differences which in way suggest either person is objectively bad. The
same applies to disparate ethnicities. If white Slovaks and Czechs can't get one, why would
white and non-white groups?
You lefties need to have a serious moral dialogue over your rejection of
ethno-nationalism! Time to get on the right side of history! Have you noticed the alt-right,
despite being comprised of 'hateful bigots', is favourably disposed toward Iran, Syria, and
Russia? That's because we consistently apply principles which can protect our racially,
culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse planet, and mitigate conflict. But the woke
woke left (not a typo) meanwhile has to 'resist' imperialism by constantly vilifying America.
ITS NOT THAT I'M IN FAVOUR OF ASSAD OR PUTIN, ITS JUST THAT AMERICA IS SO NAUGHTY! OH, HOW
BASE ARE OUR MOTIVES. OH, WHAT A POX WE ARE. Weak tea. You have no theoretical arguments
against liberal interventionism or neoconservativism.
Newsflash folks. Hillary Clinton doesn't fundamentally differ from you in principle. She
merely differs on what methods should be employed to achieve Kojeve's universal homogeneous
state. Most of you just want to replace global capitalism with global socialism. Seen how
occupy wall street turned out? Didn't make a dent. See how your precious POCs voted for the
neoliberal war monger? Diversity increases the power of capital. The only force which can
beat globalization is primordial tribalism.
Lee actually thought the Civil War an awful tragedy. He was asked to choose between his
state and his country. That's not much different from being asked to choose between your
family and your clan.
Lee was a racist.
That might be true, depending on one's definition of a racist. But then, why should Abraham
Lincoln get a pass? It's well known that he did not start the Civil War to end slavery --
that idea only occurred to him halfway through the conflict. But there's also the fact that,
while he was never a great fan of slavery, he apparently did not believe in the natural
equality of the races, and
he
even once professed to have no intention of granting blacks equality under the law:
"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was
really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. While
I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the
question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in
regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about
in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races -- that I am not
nor ever have been in favor of making VOTERS or jurors of negroes, NOR OF QUALIFYING THEM
HOLD OFFICE, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that
there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will
forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And
inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position
of superior and inferior, and I as much as any of her man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race."
It turns out that history's a complicated thing! To bad it wasn't all written by Hollywood
with a bunch of cartoon villains and heroes ...
One gets the impression that the current wave of statue take downs is seen as well deserved
"punishment" for those who voted wrongly - i.e. not for Hillary Clinton. While many Trump
voters will dislike statues of Robert Lee, they will understand that dislike the campaign
to take them down even more.
You nailed it, b. The way things are headed, I now wonder if I will someday be arrested
for owning Lynard Skynard albums (the covers of which usually had Confederate battle flags)
or for having watched Dukes of Hazard shows as a child. It's starting to get that crazy.
Anyway, thanks for running a sane blog in a mad world!
Good interview with a Black, female pastor in Charlottsville who was in church when the march
began Friday night. They caught a lot that wasn't on network news.
"Don't let this site get bogged down in history that is being constantly rewritten on
Wikipedia. Don't buy into the left/right division process. Don't let your self identify with
either group, as they are being led by provocateurs.
The lies we know of regarding Iraq, Syria, Libya - aren't they enough to force people to
disbelieve our media completely? The HUGE lies in our media about what is going on in
Venezuela should be quite enough (bastante suficiente) to make most people simply disbelieve.
But they cannot because they are only allowed to see and hear what our government approves -
and for our government, lying is quite legal now.
Let the emotions go - they are pushed via media to force you to think in white or black,
right or left, old vs young - any way that is divisive. Getting beaten for a statue would
likely make the guy who posed for it laugh his butt off most likely..."
Posted by: Oilman2 | Aug 16, 2017 3:09:32 PM | 31
Well said. Hope to see your thoughts in the future.
And as always, Karlof1 you have some insights I rarely get ever else (especially not in a
comment section)
______________________________
"The US Civil War can't be boiled down to having just one cause; it's causes were
multiple, although slavery--being an economic and social system--resides at its core. As an
historian, I can't really justify the removal of statues and other items of historical
relevance, although displaying the Confederate Flag on public buildings I see as wrong;
better to display the Spirit of '76 flag if stars and stripes are to be displayed. (I wonder
what will become of the UK's Union Jack if Scotland votes to leave the UK.) Personal display
of the Stars and Bars for me amounts to a political statement which people within the Outlaw
US Empire still have the right to express despite the animus it directs at myself and other
non-Anglo ethnicities. (I'm Germanic Visigoth with Spanish surname--people are surprised at
my color when they hear my name.)
The current deep dysfunction in the Outlaw US Empire's domestic politics mirrors that of
the latter 1850s somewhat but the reasons are entirely different yet solvable--IF--the
populous can gain a high degree of solidarity."
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 16, 2017 3:51:18 PM | 45
____________________________
Also, somebody @63, very poignant to mention. While I could care less whether about some
statues stand or fall (it helps living outside the empire), to deny that they are (generally)
symbols of racism, or were built with that in mind, is a little off base in my eyes. Going to
repost this quote because I think it had quite a bit of value in this discussion.
"In 2016 the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated that there were over 1,500 "symbols of
thE Confederacy in public spaces" in the United States. The majority of them are located, as
one might expect, in the 11 states that seceded from the union, but as Vice aptly points out,
some can be found in Union states (New York, for example has three, Pennsylvania, four) and
at least 22 of them are located in states that didn't even exist during the Civil War.
How can that be possible? Because largely, Confederate monuments were built during two key
periods of American history: the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1920s and the civil rights
movement in the early 1950s and 1960s.
To be sure, some sprung up in the years following the Confederacy's defeat (the concept of
a Confederate memorial day dates back to back to 1866 and was still officially observed by
the governments of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, as of the publication of the
Southern Poverty Law Center's report), and some continue to be built!USA Today notes that 35
Confederate monuments have been erected in North Carolina since 2000.
But when these statues!be they historical place markers, or myth-building icons of Lee or
Stonewall Jackson!were built seems to suggest these monuments have very little to do with
paying tribute to the Civil War dead and everything to do with erecting monuments to black
disenfranchisement, segregation, and 20th-century racial tension."
Racism means zero understanding or tolerance of other people/cultures, an attitude that
ones own culture or skin colour or group is far superior to those 'others'.
Hear, hear. Generally, a resurgence of American nationalism WILL take the form of populist
socialism because it will mark a turning away from the global police state which America is
leading currently and will replace it with nationalistic spending on socialist programs with
an emphasis on decreased military spending. This will continue ideally until a balance of low
taxation and government regulation form a true economy which begins at a local level from the
ground up.
In 1861, the vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, offered this
foundational explanation of the Confederate cause:
"Its corner-stone rests, upon the
great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to
the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
This, our new government, is the
first, in the history of the world,
based upon this great physical, philosophical, and
moral truth.
"
how much public space in the US should be dedicated to monuments honoring these people in
the coming century? and for the children and grandchildren of slaves walking by them every
day? what about their heritage? and the public monuments to the indigenous people of this
land who we genocided? oh right, as a country we have still not even officially recognized
that genocide. monuments should not be solely a reflection of the past, but of the future, of
who we want to be. who we choose to recognize in our public spaces says a lot about us.
It's pretty fair too say several of the "alt-right" leaders who planned this event agent are
provocateurs or Sheep Dipped assets running honeypot "white nationalist" operations.
You can see from the make-up of the phony "Nazis" in the groups and their continued use of
various propaganda that serves only to tie people and movements OPPOSED by the Deep State to
"Nazis" and racist ideology, you can see how on the ground level, this event has psyop
planners' fingerprints all over it.
It's also fair too say the complicit media's near universal take on the event signals a
uniform, ready-made reaction more than likely dictated to them from a single source.
Trump is attacked. The ACLU is attacked. Peace activists opposed to the CIA's regime
change operation in Syria are attacked. Tucker Carlson is attacked. Everyone attacked that
the CIA and various other aspects of the Deep State want attacked as if the MSM were all sent
the same talking points memo.
And keep in mind, this all comes right after the news was starting to pick up on the story
that the Deep State's bullshit narrative about a "Russian hack" was falling apart.
Also keep in mind it comes at a time when 600,000 Syrians returned home after the CIA's
terrorist regime change operation fell apart.
The statues were erected when the KKK was at its peak, to keep the blacks in their place.
They started getting torn down after the 2015 massacre of black churchgoers by a Nazi. For
once, don't blame Clinton.
My only argument with your post is "Chattel Slavery was introduced in the Western
Hemisphere"
Chattel = movable property as opposed to your house. In that day and long before women and
children were chattel.
Thinking about what might have been might help. If the south had won would we have had a
strong enough central government to create and give corporate charters and vast rights of way
to railroads which then cross our nation. Would states have created their own individual
banking systems negating the need for the all controlling Federal reserve? Would states have
their own military units willing to join other states to repel an attack instead of the MIC
which treats the rest of the world like expendable slaves?
Before our constitution there was the Articles of Confederation. Article 1,2+3.....
Article I. The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America."
Article II. Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every
Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the
United States, in Congress assembled.
Article III. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with
each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and
general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or
attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any
other pretense whatever.
This first set of laws in the new world was later undone in a secret convention with
Madison, input from Jefferson and others found on our money and other honorariums. 1868 gave
us the 14th amendment to the constitution that freed all who are born within this nation and
were given equal rights. (Not saying that this worked for all slaves. Within a few years this
was used to create corporate persons with access to the bill of rights.
I am thinking there were many reasons that people who lived in those times had to fight
for what they did. We today are not in a position to judge why individuals fought. Certainly
many poor white southerners who owned no slaves at all fought and died. Was it to keep slaves
they did not own enslaved or did they fight and die for issues around protection of local or
state rights, freedoms and way of life?
Histories are written and paid for by the winners who control that particular present time
for the glorification of those rulers. A vast removal of historical artifacts speaks of a
weak nation fading into the west's need to clean up some points from history of mean and
brutal behaviors which we as a nation support now in the present but try and make it about
others.
A paragragh here from lemur 77 comment...
"Now, within ethnic European countries, should whites be supreme? You're goddamn right they
should. Just as the Japanese should practice 'yellow supremacy', and so on and so forth. Most
of you lot here, being liberals, will be in favour of no fault divorce. You understand there
can be irreconcilable differences which in way suggest either person is objectively bad. The
same applies to disparate ethnicities. If white Slovaks and Czechs can't get one, why would
white and non-white groups?"
What is the United States of America? It is made up of British, French, Spanish and
Russian territories aquired or conquered, the original colonists in turn taking them from the
native inhabitants. The US has had a largley open imigration policy, people of all cultures,
languages and skin colours and religions.
Why should white Europeans be supreme in the US lemur?
The following is the guts of a posting from Raw Story that I see as quite related.
"
White House senior strategist Steve Bannon is rejoicing at the criticism President Donald
Trump is receiving for defending white nationalism.
Bannon phoned The American Prospect progressive writer and editor Robert Kuttner Tuesday,
according to his analysis of the interview.
In the interview, Bannon dismissed ethno-nationalists as irrelevant.
"Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element," Bannon noted.
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
Bannon claimed to welcome the intense criticism Trump has received.
"The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want
them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go
with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
Kuttner described Bannon as being in "high spirits" during the call
"You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and
therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely
blamed for his boss's continuing indulgence of white supremacists," Kuttner explained. "But
Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of
taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his
rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury."
"They're wetting themselves," Bannon said of opponents he planned to oust at State and
Defense.
"
Curtis 6 isn't me. However, I somewhat agree with the point.
Joe 41
Very true. Lee saw himself as defending Virginia. Slavery was the chief issue used in the
states declarations of secession. But the end goal was a separate govt (that actually banned
the importation of new slaves).
Nemesis 57
Excellent. Racism was bad in the North, too.
Strange how the left are pulling down statues of democrats, and the right are fighting to
have them stand. The confederates were democrats, but nobody seem to remember that now
anymore.
Nothing strange about it. The Democrats dropped the southern racists and the Republicans
picked them up with the Southern Strategy. It's all pretty well documented. The current
Republicans are not heirs to Lincoln in any meaningful way.
...."The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I
want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we
go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.".....
Those who make silly talk about "Patriots and Traitors" (Swallows and Amazons?) are being
obtuse about their history. The whole system was racist through and through, depended upon it
and was built upon it, starting with the very first rapacious sorties inland from the swampy
coast.
Some excellent commentary here, including james's percipient notes, Grieved's point,
RUKidding's and karlof1's, perry's observations and speculations.
Aside, this "99% v.1%" discourse is disempowering and one has to ask whose interests such
talk and attendant disempowerment serve.
This is a meaningful post on a touchy subject. Global Brahmins are looting the developed
world. Color revolutions and ethnic rifts make great fire sales. In a sane world, old
monuments would molder away in obscurity. Instead a faux resistance to divide and conquer the
little people has commenced. But, it is careening out of control due to austerity and job
loss. Deplorable Bushwhackers are fighting for tribalism and supremacy. After the 27 year old
war in Iraq, subjected Sunnis turned to their ethnic myths and traditions to fight back;
obliterating two ancient cities and themselves. The Chaos is coming west.
The problem is that people focus on the effects of history, like slavery and the holocaust,
but if you go into the causes and context of these events, then you get accused of
rationalizing them. Yet being ignorant of the causes is when history gets repeated. By the
time another seriously bad effect rises, it's too late.
As for slavery, it's not as though peoples lives haven't been thoroughly commodified before
and continue to be. Yes, slavery in the early part of this country was horrendous and the
resulting racism arose from the more reptilian parts of people's minds, but that part still
exists and needs to be better understood, not dismissed.
It should also be noted that if it wasn't for slavery, the African American population would
otherwise only be about as large as the Arab American population. It is a bit like being the
offspring of a rape. It might the absolute worst aspect of your life, but you wouldn't be
here otherwise. It's the Native Americans who really got screwed in the deal, but there are
not nearly enough of them left, to get much notice.
PS,
For those who know their legal history, no, I'm not using a pseudonym. There is a lot of
family history in this country, from well before it was a country.
"... Allen Dulles masterminded the coup that turned Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh out of office and installed the Shah on the Peacock Throne. Less than a year later he presided over the operation that ousted Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. He set in motion plots to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Fidel Castro in Cuba. He delegated to his deputy, Richard Bissell, leadership of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. ..."
"... Corporate greed is not new but for members of the US Congress and the Administartion to support corporate interests over Americans safety and put money ahead of the protection of the people of our country as well as the people of other nations is a violation of our US Constitution and these people should not be immune from prosecution. G.W. Bush destroyed the infrastructure of an entire country and he killed hundreds of thousand of innocent citizens just so Brown & Root and Halliburton, V.P. Cheney's company, could receive billions of dollars of US taxpayer monies to rebuild the very infrastructure that Bush destroyed that provided the life support for the people of Iraq. ..."
"... George W. Bush asked the question after 9/11-- "Why do they hate us?" The answer he came up with was, "Because of our Freedoms." When you read this book, you come face to face for the real reasons THEY (most of the rest of the world) hate us. It's because these Bush's "freedoms" are only for the United States, no other non-white, non-Christian, non-corporate cultures need apply. ..."
"... The missionary Christian, Corporatism of the Dulles Brothers--John, the former head of the largest corporate law firm in the world, then Secretary of State, and his brother Allen, the head of the CIA all the way from Korea through Vietnam -- constitutes the true behavioral DNA of America-in-the-world. It's enough to make you weep for the billions of people this country has deprived of freedom and security for the last sixty years. ..."
"... This book is, in fact, a MUST READ... for anyone who wants to know what their taxes have paid for in the last half century--for anyone who wants to know just exactly why the rest of the world wants either to attack us or throw us out of their countries. And a must read for anyone who no longer wishes their "representatives" in Washington to keep facilitating the stealing and killing all over the world and call it American Exceptionalism. ..."
"... Foster promptly works on a policy of "rollback" to replace the "containment" policy of Truman and Kennan. ..."
"... The 1953 coup of democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran was similar in the sense that it was made more urgent by Mosaddegh's nationalization of British oil interests after the Brits refused to let Mosaddegh audit their books or negotiate a better deal. ..."
"... Kinzer writes that Foster saw a danger in a country like Iran becoming prosperous and inspiring others toward neutrality that might result in eventual creep toward the USSR, hence he and others like him had to be eliminated. How much the coup was driven to help the UK is unknown. The blowback from intervention in South America and Iran has since come back to haunt the US in the form of skepticism and greater Leftist angst against the US and the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. ..."
"... This type of neutrality was against the Dulles' worldview, and in his memoir, Sukarno lamented "America, why couldn't you be my friend?" after the CIA spent a lot of manpower trying to topple his regime in 1958. There was also the training of Tibetan rebels in Colorado in 1957 and the ongoing plot to assassinate Congo's Lumumba, given with Ike's consent. ..."
"... Allen Dulles' reign at CIA reads like the nightmare everyone worried about "big government" warns you about. Experiments interrogating prisoners with LSD, the purchase to the movie rights of books like The Quiet American in order to sanitize them, planting stories in major newspapers, planting false documents in Joseph McCarthy's office to discredit him, along with the private armies and escapades. Dulles comes under official criticism by Doolittle, who wrote that he was a bad administrator, bad for morale, and had no accountability-- all of which was dismissed by Eisenhower who saw Allen as the indispensible man. ..."
"... When Castro seizes power in Cuba, the Eisenhower Administration made it official policy to depose him. ..."
"... Dulles' last act was on the Warren Commission investigating JFK's assassination. This was problematic because Dulles' goal was to keep CIA assassination operations in Cuba a secret. Kinzer writes of Lyndon Johnson's desire to make Oswald a lone gunman with no political attachments, which brings us to a whole other story. ..."
"... I was surprised that President Eisenhower, whose administration is commonly thought to be one of tranquility, approved toppling governments and assassinating leaders. In some ways, he was the front man, for instance urging Congress to approve funds for "maintenance of national independence" but really for fomenting a coup in Syria and installing a king in Saudi Arabia to get US friendly governments to oppose Gamal Nasser (p. 225). ..."
"... the story of these two scions of an American aristocratic family, who were fully steeped in Calvinistic Protestantism (and it's capitalist ethic) and unquestioningly convinced of American Exceptionalism and it's Manifest Destiny to lead the world and make it safe for democracy and American Business ..."
"... It is an exposition of the quintessential, archetypical American (WASP) mindset, worldview or psychology that has motivated our collective international behavior over the past six or seven decades. ..."
"... All State employees that don't hew the line are regularly fired or transferred to obscure jobs or roles and in place are pro-CIA hardliners. ..."
"... There is much here that further condemns Eisenhower. In many cases he fully supported and endorsed their plans while pretending not to, fully employing the most cynical of strategies; "plausible deniability". ..."
"... Having read the 2012 Eisenhower biography by Jean Edward Smith I was surprised here by the wealth of information that ties Eisenhower more directly to clandestine activities and their purposes. Particularly disappointing is his continues build up for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba after Kennedy's election but before he took office and will little effort to brief the incoming president. Similarly our Vietnam involvement in the 1950's was so deep already as to make a Kennedy pullout far more difficult. ..."
"... There is much here about these issues and the corrupt relationships between the Dulles's prior careers at Sullivan and Cromwell and their support of private interests while working at State and the CIA ..."
"... At the heart of the story is the unfortunate belief by the brothers that if a country was not totally in agreement with American philosophy they were against us. Any nationalist leaders of a former colonial nation that believed in land reform or neutrality on the international scene had to be evil and must be destroyed. If they were not with us, they had to be communist. This American foreign policy changed the history of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. ..."
"... Its interesting to note that Kinzer asserts that on the death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in 1953, Eisenhower offered the position of Chief Justice to John Foster Dulles. According to Kinzer, Dulles turned it down because he wanted to stay at the State Department. The story has always been that Ike had promised Earl Warren the first seat on the Supreme Court in exchange for his support in the 1952 election - Warren had been out maneuvered by Richard Nixon to get the bid for the vice presidency. How different legal history would have been had John Foster Dulles become Chief Justice! ..."
"... Author Stephen Kinzer explores the unique situation in which the intelligence gathering agency is also an actor. Throughout he illustrates how the relationship of their leaders enabled two agencies that would normally question and check each other, to work in seamless harmony to carry out the covert operations that both saw as primary instruments of American power. Behind them was President Eisenhower who had used covert operations during World War II and who approved their actions. In the end the author posits that the policies were the President's and the brothers were more his servants than his masters. ..."
One of them was the most powerful US Secretary of State in modern times. The other built the
CIA into a fearsome engine of covert war. Together, they shaped US foreign policy in the 1950s,
with tragic consequences that came to light in the decades that followed. These were the Dulles
brothers, Foster and Allen, born and reared in privilege, nephews of one Secretary of State and
grandsons of another.
What they did in office
Allen Dulles masterminded the coup that turned Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh
out of office and installed the Shah on the Peacock Throne. Less than a year later he presided
over the operation that ousted Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. He set in motion plots to assassinate
Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Patrice Lumumba in
the Congo, and Fidel Castro in Cuba. He delegated to his deputy, Richard Bissell, leadership of
the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Later, out of office, he chaired the Warren Commission
on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "'From the start, before any evidence was reviewed, he
pressed for the final verdict that Oswald had been a crazed gunman, not the agent of a national
and international conspiracy.'"
Foster Dulles repeatedly replaced US ambassadors who resisted his brother's assassination plots
in countries where they served. Pathologically fearful of Communism, he publicly snubbed Chinese
foreign minister Chou En-Lai, exacerbating the already dangerous tension between our two countries
following the Korean War. The active role he took in preventing Ho Chi Minh's election to lead
a united Vietnam led inexorably to the protracted and costly US war there. He reflexively rejected
peace feelers from the Soviet leaders who succeeded Josef Stalin, intensifying and prolonging
the Cold War. Earlier in life, working as the managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, the leading
US corporate law firm, Foster had engineered many of the corporate loans that made possible Adolf
Hitler's rise to power and the growth of his war machine.
What does it mean now?
At half a century's remove from the reign of the formidable Dulles brothers, with critical
documents finally coming into the light of day, we can begin to assess their true impact on US
history and shake our heads in dismay. However, during their time in office that spanned the eight
years of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency and, in Allen's case, extended into Kennedy's, little
was known to the public about about Allen's activities (or the CIA itself, for that matter), and
Foster's unimaginative and belligerent performance at State was simply seen as a fair expression
of the national mood, reflecting the fear that permeated the country during the most dangerous
years of the Cold War.
Diving deeply into recently unclassified documents and other contemporaneous primary sources,
Stephen Kinzer, author of The Brothers, has produced a masterful assessment of the roles played
at the highest levels of world leadership by these two very dissimilar men. Kinzer is respectful
throughout, but, having gained enough information to evaluate the brothers' performance against
even their own stated goals, he can find little good to say other than that they "exemplified
the nation that produced them. A different kind of leader would require a different kind of United
States."
Their unique leadership styles
To understand Foster's style of leadership, consider the assessments offered by his contemporaries:
Winston Churchill said "'Foster Dulles is the only case I know of a bull who carries his own china
shop around with him.'"
Celebrated New York Times columnist James Reston "wrote that [Foster] had become a 'supreme
expert' in the art of diplomatic blundering. 'He doesn't just stumble into booby traps. He digs
them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps.'"
Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Foster "misleads
public opinion, confuses it, [and] feeds it pap." "A foreign ambassador once asked Foster how
he knew that the Soviets were tied to land reform in Guatemala. He admitted that it was 'impossible
to produce evidence' but said evidence was unnecessary because of 'our deep conviction that such
a tie must exist.'" (Sounds similar to the attitude of a certain 21st-century President, doesn't
it?)
Allen, too, comes up very, very short: "He was not the brilliant spymaster many believed him
to be. In fact, the opposite is true. Nearly every one of his major covert operations failed or
nearly failed . . . [Moreover,] under Allen's lackadaisical leadership, the agency endlessly tolerated
misfits." He left the CIA riddled with "lazy, alcoholic, or simply incompetent" employees.
Stephen Kinzer was for many years a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, reporting
from more than fifty countries. The Brothers is his eighth nonfiction book. It's brilliant.
W. J. Haufon June 27, 2014
Without John Foster Dulles There Would Have Been No Hitler and No Nazi Germany!
After the Treaty of Versailles mandated the imposition of incredibly severe monetary reparations
on Germany, John Foster Dulles in the 1930s, as a partner in his law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell,
assembled a coalition of banks to lend Germany over $1 trillion, (in today's dollars), supposedly
for them to pay these reparations. Had Foster not organized these massive bank loans to Hitler's
Germany and organized the sale of raw materials such as cobalt to fabricate armor plating to build
Germany's war machine, there would have been no Nazi war machine or an Adolf Hitler to kill millions
of Americans, ally troops and civilians in a war that would have never happened.
As a reward our government appointed John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State so he could continue
his war against democracy by orchestrating the overthrow of democratically elected leaders such
as the Prime Minister of Iran to restore the Shah, and then continuing his reign of terror against
other democratically elected governments such the CIA overthrow of the President of Guatemala
in 1954 by his brother Allen, Director of the CIA, and installing a US controlled puppet President
so the United Fruit could continued its monopolistic hold on the banana industry in that country
and eventually throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Oh did I mention that JFD was a stockholder in United Fruit. Corporate greed is not new
but for members of the US Congress and the Administartion to support corporate interests over
Americans safety and put money ahead of the protection of the people of our country as well as
the people of other nations is a violation of our US Constitution and these people should not
be immune from prosecution. G.W. Bush destroyed the infrastructure of an entire country and he
killed hundreds of thousand of innocent citizens just so Brown & Root and Halliburton, V.P. Cheney's
company, could receive billions of dollars of US taxpayer monies to rebuild the very infrastructure
that Bush destroyed that provided the life support for the people of Iraq.
Our Founding Fathers would never had fought to build a country of democratic principals if
they knew that the political representatives in this country would worship money and support corporate
greed over American human rights and freedoms.
G.W. Bush said that the attacks on 9-11 were because "they hate our freedoms". What a disgrace
for a President to lie and not say it was because we have been interfering and overthrowing democratically
elected governments for decades. Shame on you Mr. Bush, but you will meet your Maker one day and
you can explain why you killed so many people just so you and your friends could receive billions
of dollars in profits. "May God Have Mercy on Your Very Soul"
Mike Feder/Sirius XM and PRN.FM Radio on October 11, 2013
Best Political/Historical Book in Years
You know those reviews clips, headlines or ads that say "Must Read" or, "...if you only read
one book this year..."
I have to say, with all the books I've read before and am reading currently, this one is absolutely
the most eye-opening, informative and provocative one I've come across in many years.
And--after all I've read about American politics and culture--after all the experts I've interviewed
on my radio show... I shouldn't be shocked any more. But the scope of insanity, corruption and
hypocrisy revealed in this history of the Dulles brothers is, in fact, truly shocking.
Just when you thought you knew just how bad the United States has been in the world, you come
across a history like this and you suddenly become aware of the real depths to which "our" government
has sunk in subverting decency, freedom and democracy all over the world.
George W. Bush asked the question after 9/11-- "Why do they hate us?" The answer he came
up with was, "Because of our Freedoms." When you read this book, you come face to face for the
real reasons THEY (most of the rest of the world) hate us. It's because these Bush's "freedoms"
are only for the United States, no other non-white, non-Christian, non-corporate cultures need
apply.
The missionary Christian, Corporatism of the Dulles Brothers--John, the former head of
the largest corporate law firm in the world, then Secretary of State, and his brother Allen, the
head of the CIA all the way from Korea through Vietnam -- constitutes the true behavioral DNA
of America-in-the-world. It's enough to make you weep for the billions of people this country
has deprived of freedom and security for the last sixty years.
I grew up practically in love with America and the Declaration of Independence. When I was
a kid the USA had just beaten the Nazis. I saw the picture of the marines raising the flag at
Iwo Jima. I knew men in my neighborhood that had liberated concentration camps.
But they never taught us the real history of America in high school and barely at all in college.
If they had given us a clear picture of our true history, there never would have been a Vietnam
in the first place--and no Iraq or Afghanistan either; Global Banks wouldn't have gotten away
with stealing all our money and crashing our economy and Christian fundamentalist and corporate
puppets wouldn't have taken over our government.
Karma is real. You can't steal a whole country, kill and enslave tens of millions of human
beings, assassinate democratically elected leaders of countries, bribe and corrupt foreign governments,
train the secret police and arm the military of dictators for decades-- You cannot do all this
and escape the judgment and the punishment of history.
This book is, in fact, a MUST READ... for anyone who wants to know what their taxes have
paid for in the last half century--for anyone who wants to know just exactly why the rest of the
world wants either to attack us or throw us out of their countries. And a must read for anyone
who no longer wishes their "representatives" in Washington to keep facilitating the stealing and
killing all over the world and call it American Exceptionalism.
I'll also add that Stephen Kinzer is also a terrific writer; clear, articulate, factual and
dramatic. His inside the inner circle revelations of the Dulles brothers and their crimes is morbidly
page-turning.
Chris on October 11, 2013
The Dark-side of American foreign policy
The American people and the world at large still feel the reverberations from the policies
and adventures of the Dulles' brothers. They are in part to blame for our difficult relations
with both Cuba and Iran. This history helps answer the question, "Why do they hate us?" The answer
isn't our freedom, it's because we try to topple their governments.
The Dulles brother grew up in a privileged, religious environment. They were taught to see
the world in strictly black and white. Both were well-educated at Groton and the Ivy League schools.
Both worked on and off in the government, but spent a significant amount of time at the immensely
powerful law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. They had virtually identical world views but nearly opposite
personalities. (John) Foster was dour, awkward, and straight-laced. Allen was outgoing, talkative,
and had loose morals.
There's no need for a blow-by-blow of their lives in this review. The core of the book revolves
around Foster Dulles as the Secretary of State under Eisenhower and Allen as the Director of the
CIA The center of the book is divided into six parts, each one dealing with a specific foreign
intervention: Mossaddegh of Iran, Arbenz of Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Lumumba of the
Congo, Sukarno of Indonesia and Castro of Cuba.
The Dulles view was that you were either behind the US 110% or a communist, with no room for
neutrals. Neutrals were to be targeted for regime change. The author lays out explicitly all the
dirty tricks our government tried on other world leaders, from poison to pornography. This dark
side of American foreign policy can help Americans better understand our relationships with other
countries.
My difficulty with this book is the final chapter. The author throws in some pop-psychology
such as; people take in information that confirms their beliefs and reject contradictory information,
we can be confident of our beliefs even when we're wrong, etc. The Dulles brothers are definite
examples of these psychological aspects. Then the author says the faults of the Dulles brothers
are the faults of American society, that we are the Dulles brothers. I felt like a juror in a
murder trial during the closing statements, "It's not my client's fault, society is to blame!"
In most of America's foreign adventures, the American people have been tricked with half-truths
and outright lies. Further more, these men received the best educations and were granted great
responsibility. They should be held to a higher standard than "Oh well, everyone has their prejudices."
I agree with the author that the public should be more engaged in foreign policy and have a
better understanding of our history with other nations. However, I think he goes too far in excusing
their decisions because they supposedly had the same beliefs as many Americans.
Harry Glasson August 24, 2015
So Eisenhower wasn't really a "do nothing" president, but based on this book, I wish he had
done less.
This is the most interesting and important book I have read in the past twenty or more years.
Most Americans, myself included, considered John Foster Dulles a great Secretary of State, and
few ordinary people knew Allen Dulles or had any idea how the CIA came to be what it is.
Learning the facts as they have been gradually made public by those who were witnesses, and
others who researched and wrote about the behavior of the United States during the height of the
Cold War has been an enlightening and saddening experience. I was in high school during Eisenhower's
first term, in college during his 2nd term, in the Air Force during JFK's time in office and deployed
to Key West during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
My view of America was the same as that of most Americans. I was patriotic. I bought into the
fear of Communist world dominance and the domino theory. But there was much that was being done
in the name of fighting Communist domination around the world that was monumentally counterproductive,
and contrary what we consider to be some of our basic principles.
This book helps fill important gaps in my knowledge. I highly recommend it to anyone who would
like to know what really was going on during the Cold War, its impact on where we are today, and
Kinzer's take on why it happened that way.
Mcgivern Owen L on August 15, 2015
The Cold War at it Core
This reviewer generally takes careful notes while he reads-the better to compose a future review.
In the case of "The Brothers", he was drawn right into the flow of the story.
"The Brothers" covers the period from the late 1940s to the mid -1960s when John Foster Dulles
was the powerful Secretary of State and Allen Dulles was the Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency. They fermented regime changes in Iran. Guatemala, Indonesia, the Belgian Congo and Iran.
And, as many know by now, Cuba as well. The troubles they stirred up in Iran and Cuba persist
to this day. The book jacket also states that the Dulles' "led the United States into the Vietnam
War..." That statement is unproven within these pages. The Vietnam conflict was vastly too complicated
to be reduced to one sentence.
"The Brothers" is sharply written and well documented. There are 55 pages of end notes in a
328 pages of text. Author Kinzer ostensibly turns on the brothers for all their regime changing
activities. He then reverses course and arrives at a most sensible elucidation: The brothers Dulles
were a product of their times and "exemplified the nation that produced them". A different kind
of leader would require a different United States". This reviewer can live with that sentiment.
There was a deadly serious Cold War in session during this period the brothers Dulles were
at the core. Author Kinzer deserves credit for capturing the essence of that era as well as he
does.
Amazon Customer on August 10, 2015
Informative and entertaining while also scary. Author oversimplifies, omits much about diplomacy
besides the Cold War.
This is my third Kinzer book (The Crescent and the Star and Reset), he is a master at spinning
off new books from research collected while writing other books. This work peels back the cover
on U.S. covert and overt foreign policy in the 1950s and what happens when two brothers have too
much power within an Administration that has the public's trust and far too little of its scrutiny.
It is a joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles who were Secretary of State (1953-1958)
and CIA Director (1953-1961), respectively.
Some reviewers have pointed out that Kinzer tends to oversimplify his message. For example,
Eisenhower and Dulles' overthrow of Mohammed Mosadegh, for example, may have had something to
do with our needing Britain's support in SE Asia more than simply a crusade to eliminate anyone
who was not clearly "for us" or "against the Communists." This book covers some of the territory
of Trento's Prelude to Terror, Perkin's controversial Confessions of an Economic Hitman and the
similar compilation A Game as Old as Empire. You may not believe what you read here as the facts
certainly seem more like fiction. Did the U.S. really (clumsily) secretly spend blood and treasure
to try and subvert governments on every continent? How many assassinations and overthrows did
Eisenhower surreptitiously give the go-ahead on? Eisenhower essentially comes across as a monster
from our 2015 vantage point. But is he any different than a President Obama who is given intelligence
and orders drone strikes to assassinate enemies of U.S. foreign policy? You be the judge. This
book speaks volumes about what is learned by declassification of documents over time. I will say
that I read a great biography on George Kennan last year and there appears to be little overlap;
Kennan's foreign policy may have been too dovish for the Dulles, but he had helped create the
precursor to the CIA, the Office of Policy Creation, on which both Dulles brothers worked--this
connection gets no attention from Kinzer. Much of the diplomatic effort during the Cold War--
which did exist-- at this time are left unmentioned by Kinzer, which is problematic.
The Dulles family grew up with an international mindset. One grandfather (John W. Foster) was
an Ambassador (before that title was formalized) to several countries, including Russia, before
becoming Secretary of State.The other was a missionary to India. They had other family connections
working in diplomacy and such a career seemed just fine to them. Their father was a conservative
Presbyterian minister who had an awkward relationship with his wayward children. Kinzer writes
that the boys (and their younger sister) essentially saw America as the City on a Hill that was
bringing light to the nations through democracy and capitalism.
Studying at Princeton hitched them to the rising star of Woodrow Wilson, who they adored.
Sister Eleanor deserves her own biography, she was a pioneer as a PhD female economist who did
relief work in WWI, attended Bretton Woods after WWII, and made her own career in diplomatic service.
John Foster (Foster henceforth) attended the Paris peace conference with Wilson and was disappointed
with the outcome, both he and Eleanor arguing along with J.M. Keynes that the German reparations
were simply setting the stage for the next European war. At the time, Foster was working in international
law for U.S. business interests, and even supposedly ghostwrote a rebuttle to Keynes' book to
serve his own interests. Foster's law firm designed the legal arrangements by which U.S. firms
could profit off the German reparations, which allowed him to be wealthy even during the Great
Depression. He was the more religious of the bunch and was mostly faithful to his wife.
Meanwhile, Allen Dulles was serving in the newly-formed Foreign Service while sleeping with
as many women as would have him. In a "What would have been?" moment of history Allen reportedly
brushed off meeting Vladimir Lenin, after Lenin supposedly called him just before Lenin went to
St. Petersburg for the Russian Revolution, in order to engage in a soiree with a couple of blonde
Swiss females. His own sister recounts that he had "at least a hundred" affairs, and his wife
approved of some and disapproved of others. A sign of the times, they remain married although
she probably miserably. This continued on all through his CIA years and makes one wonder why recent
CIA chief David Petraeus had to resign for anything.
Kinzer interestingly calls Wilson out for being a hypocrite, citing his inconsistent application
of the doctrine of self-determination. While that doctrine stirred nationalist sentiment in Eastern
Europe and the Middle East, Wilson obviously didn't apply it to the Philippines, Hawaii, or other
U.S.-occupied territories. Nonetheless, the three sibling Wilson devotees attend the Paris peace
talks together. Foster returns to his law firm where he's made a full partner while Allen remains
in the Foreign Service until joining the firm himself in 1926.
The author ignores much of Foster's religious interest and involvement in these years. Foster
changed his mind several times in life, whether in his religious devotions or from isolationist
to interventionist. Interestingly, Foster was a German sympathizer and refused to believe any
tales being produced about the Nazis as his firm had many German business interests. Allen disagreed
strongly after touring Germany himself, and after Germany began defaulting on its debts the firm
severed ties.
Allen Dulles built up his network through the law firm, the Council on Foreign Relations, and
his old Foreign Service contacts and made a fortune molding business deals for European connections,
including those in Nazi Germany. After the U.S. enters the war, Dulles is recruited by "Wild Bill"
for the new OSS, becoming the first OSS officer behind enemy lines, sneaking into Switzerland
to do so. He meets with all sorts of characters while feeding intelligence to the U.S., much of
which was false, but enough was helpful enough to expand his reputation. Of course, he has many
affairs, including a long one with a woman his wife approved of and shared with him. Interestingly,
when the Valkyrie operation was launched by German traitors to kill Hitler and restore order,
Dulles was the main contact with the U.S. relaying news back to Washington. The participants wanted
to sue for peace, but FDR officially rejected the olive branch and Dulles was not allowed to negotiate
on any such olive branch. After the War, Truman abolishes the OSS.
Foster helps draft the U.N. Charter and becomes an internationalist, seeing world peace as
a Christian ideal. Foster apparently contributed to the "Six Pillars of Peace" outline by the
Federal Council of Churches in 1942. He eventually reverses after the Iron Curtain falls, becoming
a militant anti-Communist and seeing the USSR as truly and evil empire, the antithesis of everything
American. Reinhold Niebuhr eventually pens critiques of Foster as he begins to promote a black-and-white
vision of the world.
Both brothers backed the Dewey campaign in 1948, which left them disappointed. However, Dewey
appoints Foster Dulles to fill a void in the Senate, which immediately elevates Foster into a
higher realm, although he promptly loses the special election for the seat. Nonetheless, he is
appointed to the State Department by Truman and impresses people in negotiating the final treaty
with Japan in 1950. This makes him a good choice for Secretary of State when Eisenhower is elected
in 1952, and Foster promptly works on a policy of "rollback" to replace the "containment"
policy of Truman and Kennan.
However, Kinzer also writes that NSC-68, a top secret foreign policy strategy signed by Truman
in 1950, was monumental in militarizing the response to the USSR and that the Dulles operated
under an NSC-68 mindset. "A chilling decree" according to Kinzer, NSC-68 called for a tripling
of defense spending in order to prevent Soviet influence from overtaking the West. Allen Dulles
was appointed the first civilian director of the CIA and the die was cast.
The 1950s roll like the Wild West, with Eisenhower signing off on expensive operations, assassinations,
and propaganda campaigns at home and abroad. Supposedly, more coups were attempted under Eisenhower
than in any other administration, and recently declassified documents show that Dulles' CIA actively
engaged in Eisenhower-warranted assassination plots in the Congo and elsewhere. Perhaps Richard
Bissell, Eisenhower's enforcer is more to blame than Kinzer allows. The CIA-backed 1954 coup in
Guatemala was actually initiated by Truman years earlier, but demonstrated Eisenhower's resolve.
"Once you commit the flag, you've committed the country." Dulles' secret armies in Guatemala and
the Philippines needed U.S. airpower for support. If the media went with a story exposing operations,
or a pilot was shot down, it didn't matter-- the mission must succeed once the U.S. was committed.
The CIA even used religious-based propaganda in Guatemala to foment political change, having priests
on the CIA payroll publish editorials denouncing Communism.
Guatemala also showed the intersection of U.S. business interests and foreign policy. The coup
was encouraged by the United Fruit Company, which had been a client of the Dulles' NY law firm
and Allen Dulles had served on its Board of Directors; others in the Eisenhower Administration
had ties. While Guatemala's president was democratically elected, he was a leftist, and anyone
showing Leftist sympathies was to be eliminated, particularly in the Western hemisphere. The
1953 coup of democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran was similar in the sense that it
was made more urgent by Mosaddegh's nationalization of British oil interests after the Brits refused
to let Mosaddegh audit their books or negotiate a better deal. Kinzer writes, however, that
Foster in particular was unable to see anyone as "neutral." Mosaddegh believed in democracy and
capitalism and could have been an ally, but Mosaddegh and others like Egypt's Nasser were nationalists
who favored neither the US nor the USSR, but courted deals from both. Kinzer writes that Foster
saw a danger in a country like Iran becoming prosperous and inspiring others toward neutrality
that might result in eventual creep toward the USSR, hence he and others like him had to be eliminated.
How much the coup was driven to help the UK is unknown. The blowback from intervention in South
America and Iran has since come back to haunt the US in the form of skepticism and greater Leftist
angst against the US and the 1979 overthrow of the Shah.
Ho Chi Minh had initially offered the US an olive branch after WWII and was not opposed to working
with US interests, but the more he was rebuffed the more he turned to harder Communism. John Foster
Dulles apparently hated the French for abandoning Vietnam, and never forgave them. While Eisenhower
did not want to replace the French in Vietnam, he eventually warmed to the idea as Foster promoted
the "domino theory" that if one nation fell victim to Communism then others would soon follow
and the eventual war would widen. Better to install brutal dictators as in Iran and South Vietnam
than let a country fall. Another enemy was Sukarno in Indonesia who was trying to thread the needle
between democracy, socialism, nationalism, and Islam. This type of neutrality was against
the Dulles' worldview, and in his memoir, Sukarno lamented "America, why couldn't you be my friend?"
after the CIA spent a lot of manpower trying to topple his regime in 1958. There was also the
training of Tibetan rebels in Colorado in 1957 and the ongoing plot to assassinate Congo's Lumumba,
given with Ike's consent.
Allen Dulles' reign at CIA reads like the nightmare everyone worried about "big government"
warns you about. Experiments interrogating prisoners with LSD, the purchase to the movie rights
of books like The Quiet American in order to sanitize them, planting stories in major newspapers,
planting false documents in Joseph McCarthy's office to discredit him, along with the private
armies and escapades. Dulles comes under official criticism by Doolittle, who wrote that he was
a bad administrator, bad for morale, and had no accountability-- all of which was dismissed by
Eisenhower who saw Allen as the indispensible man.
Eventually both John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower become old and unhealthy, Eisenhower suffering
a heart attack in 1955 and Foster dying of cancer in 1959. Allen Dulles' libido slows slightly
as age takes its toll and he becomes more detached from operations at the CIA, creating a more
dangerous situation. When Castro seizes power in Cuba, the Eisenhower Administration made
it official policy to depose him. While Dulles was officially in charge at the CIA, he was
far detached from the details of the anti-Castro operations which the media had exposed and continued
at great risk of failure.
Newly-elected JFK inherits the Bay of Pigs invasion plans and faces a political dilemma: Back
off and be accused of sparing Castro since the government was invested in success, or go forward
and risk a disaster. Unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy would not consent to air support or other official
military measures to help the CIA's army once it landed, dooming the operation. Those closest
to the operation begged Dulles and others to cancel the operation to no avail. Dulles was enjoying
a speaking engagement elsewhere in the region, giving the appearance of attachment to the operation
while being completely oblivious to its failure. The White House forced him to resign in 1961.
Dulles' last act was on the Warren Commission investigating JFK's assassination. This was
problematic because Dulles' goal was to keep CIA assassination operations in Cuba a secret. Kinzer
writes of Lyndon Johnson's desire to make Oswald a lone gunman with no political attachments,
which brings us to a whole other story.
Kinzer concludes the book with armchair psychology, writing that the Dulles brothers succummed
to cognitive biases, including confirmation bias. They saw everything in the world as they wanted
to, and not as it was. They were driven by a missionary Calvinism and the ideal of American Exceptionalism
that clouded their lenses. They also seemed to consider themselves infallible in their endeavors.
Ultimately, "they are us," writes Kinzer, which is why it is important to learn from them. The
parallels with recent American military and para-military endeavors is also clear, but Kinzer
lets the reader make those comparisons.
I learned a great deal from the history of this book, studying the Dulles is an integral part
in studying the execution of American foreign policy in the Cold War. Some of the omissions, simplifications,
and psychoanalysis mar the book somewhat. 3.5 stars out of 5.
Doug Nort, on April 23, 2015
Too Much Passion;Too Few Facts
This book is marred by Kinzer's repeated overstatements and failures to marshal facts to support
his theses about the Dulles brothers.
His failure to persuade me begins early: In the introduction Kinzler wrote of the naming of
Washington's Dulles airport: "The new president, John F. Kennedy, did not want to name an ultra-modern
piece of America's future after a crusty cold-war militant." He provides no documentation that
Kennedy himself thought that. Given that JFK was proud of his own credentials as a cold warrior,
it is unlikely that was his objection. It is much more likely his objection (or that of the staffer
speaking for him in the matter) was that Foster Dulles was an iconic figure of the Eisenhower
administration-which Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen viewed as having made a hash of things-or
that he was a stalwart of the Republican Party, or that Dulles disapproved of a Catholic becoming
president. Kinzler apparently thinks his sweeping statement is self-evident but it isn't to me.
A few pages later Kinzler gives us another hint that the pages to come will contain sweeping,
unsupported generalizations. He wrote "The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America."
My goodness, didn't they share their times with FDR and Ralph Bunche and Dwight Eisenhower and
Tom Watson and A. Phillip Randolph and George Marshall and a host of others who, although coming
from backgrounds quite different from the brothers Dulles, are just as much the American story?
The accomplishments and peccadillos of two brothers with an upper-class pedigree is hardly "the
story of America."
Chapter eleven contains several such unsupported or historically blinkered generalizations.
At one point (sorry-I'm a Kindle reader, no page numbers), after noting "the depth of fear that
gripped many Americans during the 1950s." Kinzler asserts that "Foster and Allen were the chief
promoters of that fear." Crowning the brothers as chief fear-mongers ignores some powerful other
voices: Khrushchev, Joe McCarthy, General Curtis Lemay, Nixon, Churchill, Drew Pearson, Robert
Welch and his John Birch Society-the list could continue.
At another point Kinzler says, "They [the brothers] never imagined that their intervention[s]
. . . would have such devastating long-term effects." He cites Vietnam, Iran falling into violently
anti-American leadership, and the Congo descending "into decades of horrific conflict." Regarding
Vietnam, I think most historians would say that JFK, LBJ, and McNamara bear much, much more responsibility
than do the Dulles brothers. As for their Iran and Congo sins, I believe those developments were
much more due to unpredictable consequences than to the Dulles' blindness. Yogi is right: "Predictions
are hard, especially about the future."
And on the same page (excuse me "location") Kinzler is quite certain that "Their lack of foresight
led them to pursue reckless adventures that, over the course of decades, palpably weakened American
security." The reader who already believes that will nod and read on while the reader who expects
this ringing declaration to be followed by specifics that provide powerful support will read it
and say, like the customer in the fast food ad, "where's the beef?"
OK, enough already. Kinzler's writing obviously pushed my buttons and I wouldn't have finished
the book but for it being a selection of my book club. I am fine with criticism of people and
policies when well-documented-for example Michael Oren's Power, Faith and Fantasy-but I lose patience
with book-length op-ed pieces such as The Brothers.
Dale P. Henkenon, April 6, 2015
Cuba Si! Yankee No!
If a work based on Cold War history could construct a case against American (U.S.) exceptionalism,
The Brothers by Stephen Kinzler would be a strong candidate. It illustrates the dangers of a coupling
of foreign policy and covert operations involving what we now know as regime change.
It is a story of the Dulles brothers and coups arranged by the executive branch triad composed
of the President (Ike) and the dynamic duo of the Dulles brothers as Secretary of State and Director
of the CIA (without congressional oversight) in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, the Congo and
Vietnam.
It is a story that deserved to be told and it is told well. It is somewhat slow going at the
start and one-dimensional but is a captivating read regardless. It is not a rigorous biography
or history of the era and the events it depicts. It is driven by the thesis that our actions in
the developing world even though driven by anti-communism or American idealism or Christian fundamentalist
fervor (all were involved) can have baleful results.
The results can be so bad that Americans are now resented and even hated and have been for
generations in large parts of the world. Highly recommended.
R. Spell VINE VOICE on March 28, 2015
Who We Are as Americans in the 50s
Engaging historical perspective that while dragging and repetitive at times, has so much information
that frames our world now, and generally NOT in a positive way, that it should be required reading.
Yes, I was aware of the name as a 61 yr old. But I was not aware of their roles. Not aware of
brothers. Not aware of Allen's involvement in the CIA Nor aware of their careers at the massive
law firm of Cromwell and Sullivan.
But reading this was stunning and made me angry. George Dulles was more responsible for the
Cold War than anyone. And documents after the war shows the Soviets were not near as devious as
we give them credit for. But our fear painted a view of a hidden enemy bent on our destruction.
We missed opportunities with Khrushchev. More importantly and totally unaware to me, these guys
we responsible for government overthrows and were actively involved in the 1950s with alienating
Vietnam leading eventually to a horrible loss of civilian lives and more importantly to me, American
soldiers who were led in to the wrong war at the wrong time.
But let us not forget the documented CIA overthrows of Congo, Guatemala,Indonesia and Iran.
Is this America? Well, in the post WWII world, we lost our values and stooped to such tactics.
There are stories here America doesn't study and they should. How the interface of commerce,
politics and war can lead to disastrous results that haunt us today.
Read this book to learn. Not all of it will make you proud. Yes, I learned. And yes, I'm angry
and ashamed.
Schnitzon February 25, 2015
Allen Dulles May have Inadvertently Saved the US from a Nuclear Holocaust
It is ironic that the Bay of Pigs debacle commissioned by Allen Dulles may have inadvertently
prevented the incineration of millions of Americans in a nuclear holocaust. As the author points
out when John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency he was told by his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower
that the invasion of Cuba by Cuban refugees with support from the US should move forward. As a
young, new President of the US, Kennedy did not want to appear weak so when Dulles presented him
with the plan seeking his approval Kennedy found himself in a box.
On the one hand Kennedy had doubts regarding the chances for success. On the other hand he
wanted to appear strong to the people of the US and the world. This was the first true test of
his presidency and legacy. After the abject failure of the operation Kennedy to his credit took
full responsibility in his address to the American people but he would never again trust the CIA
or the military.
Fast forward tot he Cuban missile crisis. If Kennedy had not experienced the Bay of Pigs failure
he probably would have placed more trust in the military and CIA who were vehemently urging him
to bomb Cuba at various stages of the crisis. If he had taken the military's advice it would have
likely resulted in escalation and possibly nuclear war with Russia. As it turned out Kennedy rejected
the advice and negotiated a settlement which saved face for both sides. Kennedy's wisdom born
of a past failure saved the day.
Compelling and informative about an era which had a darker ...
OLD1mIKEon February 17, 2015
The Dulles Brothers. They changed History.
Five Stars. Great book. Readable. Well researched, Informative. Highly recommended for someone
interested in mid 20th century history or understanding the root cause of the anti-american animosity
in certain parts of the world.
The Dulles brothers played pivotal roles in an incredible number of historic events that shaped
the 20th century. They exemplified american attitudes and beliefs of their day and were placed
in positions to act on these beliefs. The book not only presents their part in history, but also
helps us understand the reasoning behind their actions.
I should leave the book review end with the above paragraphs, but I was originally unaware
of how many key historical events of the 20th century the brothers participated in and influenced.
I find it impossible not to casually speculate on their effect on history. John Foster helped
write the Reparation portion of the WWI Treaty of Versailles. Some historians believe German anger
over the unfairness of the reparations to be one element causing WWII. John Foster helped write
the 1924 Dawes Plan that opened the door to American investment in Germany. Even in 1924 John
Foster was obsessed with fighting communism. He saw a strong Germany as an effective stop gap
against communistic expansion. Foster used his affiliation with Sullivan & Cromwell and his friendship
with Hjalmar Schacht, Hitlers Minister of Economics, to increase American investment in Germany
and its industry. Without international investment, Germany probably could not have supported
it's military aspirations. Allen and the CIA was instrumental in the 1953 Iranian Coup that overthrew
the democratically elected Iranian Government to install the Shaw of Iran. This action and the
heavy handed governing style of the Shaw certainly led to some of the anti American resentment
in the middle east today and the Iranian (Islamic) Rebellion in 1979. The Iranian Rebellion probably
helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. In regard to Vietnam. Foster, acting as Eisenhower's Secretary
of State, refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accord. Over considerable objections, John Foster and
Allen chose and installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the 1st president of the newly created Republic of
South Vietnam. Diem had been a minor official in Vietnam and was Interior Minister for three months
in 1933. He had not held a job since. Once in power, Allen's CIA helped keep him there. John Foster
continued to support the escalation of our involvement in Vietnam until his death in 1959. Allen
took a hands off approach to the Bay of Pigs operation (17 April 1961), but as the Director of
the CIA, it was his responsibility. JFK fired him in November 1961. There are JFK Assassination
Conspiracy Theory's that include CIA involvement. It is interesting that Lyndon Johnson personally
chose Allen to be a member of the Warren Commission. Add U2 Spy Planes, Congo revolts, overthrow
of South American leaders, Cuba and a host more. The policies and action of these two men changed
global history and probably still effect the beliefs of many today.
Loves the View VINE VOICE on December 2, 2014
Attitude, Access, Ambition and US Foreign Policy
Stephen Kinzer shows how instrumental these brothers were in the design of US foreign policy
in the post war years. He shows how their attitudes and personalities were formed, developed,
and grew to influence the course of history.
The brothers' learned statecraft at their grandfather's side. John W. Foster, US ambassador
to three countries, later served as President Harrison's trouble shooter and Secretary of State.
He helped in the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii and later used his State Department
connections to engineer government policy to benefit his corporate clients. Kinzer shows how the
brothers benefited from their grandfather's access and came to dual pinnacles of power in shaping
US foreign policy: one heading the CIA, the other the Department of State.
The 1950's operations weren't as hidden as I expected. Allen Dulles, in the Saturday Evening
Post, beamed with pride for removing Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
He even has copies made of Diego Rivera's critical mural where he is depicted taking money while
his brother shakes hands with a local puppet and Eisenhower is pictured on a bomb. Many willingly
joined in dirty tricks, for instance Cardinal Spellman wrote a pastoral letter to Guatemalan Catholics
calling their President a dangerous communist.
I was surprised that President Eisenhower, whose administration is commonly thought to
be one of tranquility, approved toppling governments and assassinating leaders. In some ways,
he was the front man, for instance urging Congress to approve funds for "maintenance of national
independence" but really for fomenting a coup in Syria and installing a king in Saudi Arabia to
get US friendly governments to oppose Gamal Nasser (p. 225).
With today's internet and 24 hour news cycle, can large covert operations such as those against
the President Sukarno (the first president of Indonesia who naively looked to the US for help
in developing his nation's fledgling democracy) go under the radar? I presume the CIA budget can
still hide items such as the $6 million a year paid to the Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen (who should
have been tried at Nuremberg (p. 185)).
By preventing compromise when compromise was possible, the brothers and President Eisenhower,
prolonged the Cold War into the Khruschev era and sowed the seeds of the Vietnam War. The lack
of reflection or personal responsibility is clear in the quote on p. 283 when years later Allen
Dulles coolly tells Eric Sevareid regarding the torture and murder of Patrice Lumumba, that "
we may have overrated the danger.." How would the Congo be today if the US had left its fledgling
democracy alone, and not have installed Mobutu in a leadership position?
The last coup attempt in the book is the Bay of Pigs. It was an Eisenhower approved intervention
and there seemed that to be no turning back for Kennedy. Its fiasco signaled the end of Allen
Dulles, but not the Cold War since its relic, Vietnam as a domino, was an image deeply ingrained
in policy DNA.
In a side story, the brothers show little consideration to their sister, who had to push to
have a career. She marginally benefits from the family name. They do not see that they have been
born on third base and she on first. In fact, when it is convenient for them, they try to fire
her, yet still go to her house for holiday dinners.
Kinzer concludes with recent work in psychology and personality profiling (" blind ourself
to contrary positions prepared to pay a high price to preserve our most cherished ideas declarations
of high confidence mainly tell you an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind
beliefs become how you prove your identity.." p. 322) that not only characterize the brothers,
but a lot of the thinking in the Cold War.
These paradigms are with us today. Too many politicians and their appointees still their job
as responding to lobbyists, not just for big business, but for foreign countries with interests
contrary to those of the US. Similarly there are those who force their economic ideology on small
and helpless countries. The book tells a sobering and troubling story. It is greatly at odds with
what is taught in high schools. This book has been out for a year now, and it seems the story
told is just more noise in political system. Unfortunately it will make a large event for insiders
in Washington to reflect on what we now call "muscular" foreign policy and its results.
Regnal the Caretakeron November 13, 2014
Nasty lawyers and the rise of CIA
These two globo-corporate lawyers dictated USA foreign policy during governance of four presidents:
Roosevelt, Truman (he signed CIA into the law in 1947), Eisenhower and Kennedy. They were called
'Cold Warriors' and built Cold War model which rested on the premise that any growing social influence
in Third World countries must be resisted because socialist gains are always irreversible. Any
nation that tried to stay 'neutral' had to face CIA interventions that did not bring anything
positive for populations (notably we learn in details about Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Indonesia,
Vietnam and Cuba). Eisenhower times were the worst, when covert capability of CIA grew massively.
Fascinating work by Stephen Kinzer can be easily extrapolated to help explain XXI century behavior
of Washington. Not much has changed.
Craig N. Warrenon November 12, 2014
Making the World Safe for Democracy (and American Business).
I've learned more about the development of American foreign policy and international relations
in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, especially since WWII, in reading the story of
these two scions of an American aristocratic family, who were fully steeped in Calvinistic Protestantism
(and it's capitalist ethic) and unquestioningly convinced of American Exceptionalism and it's
Manifest Destiny to lead the world and make it safe for democracy and American Business,
than I have anywhere else.
This is more than a biography (or double biography) of two very influential actors in American
history, politics and international relations. It is an exposition of the quintessential,
archetypical American (WASP) mindset, worldview or psychology that has motivated our collective
international behavior over the past six or seven decades.
Digital Rightson June 14, 2014
A "How to Not Run Foreign Policy" Primer
Stephen Kinzer's new book offers a very focused and surgical condemnation of the Dulles brothers
foreign policy collaboration in the 1950's that has resulted in a horrid and nightmarish chain
of events ever since.
Allen Dulles at CIA, first as a lead operative for covert missions and then as it's second
Director and John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State lead foreign policy during the Eisenhower
Presidency. The book goes through six operations to overthrow or destabilize governments through
that time; Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Vietnam and the formerly Belgian Congo.
In each case Kinzer shows the limited lens of cold war anti communism that resulted in the
Dulles' tunnel vision where grouping all non-Pro American groups as enemies and communists. He
equally addresses their lack of personal curiosity and intellect and preference for slogans and
absolutism over analysis or objective debate. All State employees that don't hew the line
are regularly fired or transferred to obscure jobs or roles and in place are pro-CIA hardliners.
It is painful reading. The objective was to both create the world they wanted while limiting
the use of US military personnel to achieve those ends. The short cuts and limited world vision
have exacted a terrible price. Sadly there is not a place in the world where their activities
resulted in any sustainable success and in fact have lead to perhaps millions of deaths and suspicions
and misunderstandings for the next 50 to 60 years.
There is much here that further condemns Eisenhower. In many cases he fully supported and
endorsed their plans while pretending not to, fully employing the most cynical of strategies;
"plausible deniability".
Having read the 2012 Eisenhower biography by Jean Edward Smith I was surprised here by
the wealth of information that ties Eisenhower more directly to clandestine activities and their
purposes. Particularly disappointing is his continues build up for the Bay of Pigs invasion in
Cuba after Kennedy's election but before he took office and will little effort to brief the incoming
president. Similarly our Vietnam involvement in the 1950's was so deep already as to make a Kennedy
pullout far more difficult.
There is much here about these issues and the corrupt relationships between the Dulles's
prior careers at Sullivan and Cromwell and their support of private interests while working at
State and the CIA
It's grim but the writing is good and the story is well worth knowing.
C. Ellen Connally, May 22, 2014
An amazing tale of intrigue and deception
As we fly in or out of Dulles International Airport, no one gives much thought to the namesake,
John Foster Dulles. Sure, he was Secretary of State and some Americans have a vague knowledge
of his brother Allan Dulles, director of the CIA and long time super spy and intelligence person.
Reading Stephen Kinzer's book, THE BROTHERS reveals the truth about the Dulles brothers and how
they changed American and World History.
At the heart of the story is the unfortunate belief by the brothers that if a country was
not totally in agreement with American philosophy they were against us. Any nationalist leaders
of a former colonial nation that believed in land reform or neutrality on the international scene
had to be evil and must be destroyed. If they were not with us, they had to be communist. This
American foreign policy changed the history of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central
America.
There is much blame put on President Johnson for the War in Viet Nam. But reading THE BROTHERS
shows that the roots of the Viet Nam Conflict go back many years. Likewise, the situation in the
Middle East. We have to go back and look at the foreign policy that created the tensions that
now exist and the men that shaped that foreign policy.
Its interesting to note that Kinzer asserts that on the death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson
in 1953, Eisenhower offered the position of Chief Justice to John Foster Dulles. According to
Kinzer, Dulles turned it down because he wanted to stay at the State Department. The story has
always been that Ike had promised Earl Warren the first seat on the Supreme Court in exchange
for his support in the 1952 election - Warren had been out maneuvered by Richard Nixon to get
the bid for the vice presidency. How different legal history would have been had John Foster Dulles
become Chief Justice!
Kinzer is a masterful story teller. This book is extremely readable and a must read for understanding
the history of American foreign policy and how individual people can change.
John Berryon March 13, 2014
What Our History Lessons Didn't Tell Us!
It has been a long time since an author has captured my interest so quickly and made me question
everything I have been taught or have learned about our country. Churchill once said Democracy
is the worst kind of government except all others. This comment keeps reverberating around in
my mind as I read this book. I am one of those people that have flown into Dulles airport countless
times, yet never gave a moments thought as to why, what or even if there was a who to the airports
name. I grew up during the cold war and I vividly remember the fear of the Big Russian Bear overtaking
us with their form of government and the possibility of nuclear war. It would have never crossed
my mind that my very own government aided and abetted in promoting this fear in order for us to
gain public moral outrage and support for our endeavors. I kept trying to tell myself this was
different times, yet the author pointed out countless times where there were those in the known
that were summarily dismissed for having counter opinions.Or leaders from our allies that would
not support the Dulles brothers opinions and missions that so disagreed with who we told the world
we were. Abraham Lincoln once said "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test
a man's character, give him power". I can think of no better example of failure in handling power
than the two Dulles brothers. Not only was I continuously shocked by their gross misuse of power,
but I found myself being angry at them as well because of the fear I remember my mother facing
as a widower with three children to raise. She needed not to have been this afraid with all the
other issues she had to deal with but because of President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers
she had to face this fear as well. Whether or not Mr. Kinzer took liberties with the political
agenda's of the leaders we either overthrew or attempted to overthrown does not matter to me at
all. The fact that we promoted our country as a free democracy yet we were willing to dance with
any leader in the world as long as they did exactly what we wanted them to do is so counter to
the way I was raised to believe still leaves me reeling.
Currently in the news President Putin has said in no uncertain terms that the U.S. is responsible
for the revolution taking place in the Ukraine. In the past I would have said he is just another
Russian bully trying to get his way. After reading The Brothers I now wonder what, if anything,
my country had to do with promoting this revolution. I heard our Ukraine Ambassador say almost
word for word what I read in this book our ambassador's under the power of The Brother's said
back during the cold war. The author tells us that the U.S. with its secret prisons and torture's
may have actually invented terrorism.
This author has opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking and I am so disappointed in opportunities
missed and I am so disappointed with our current leaders for having learned apparently nothing
from history.
If you love reading history then please buy this book and ask your family to read it as well.
Do I believe everything I read, no not usually, but in this case there are just too many facts
that distort my view of who we are to dismiss.
James Gallen VINE VOICE on March 4, 2014
An Indepth Study Of American Covert Action
"The Brothers" tells the story of the brothers Dulles, John Foster and Allen, who drove American
foreign policy through much of the 1950s. Grandsons of Secretary of State John Foster and nephews
of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the two grew up in an atmosphere mixing high diplomacy with
the spirit of Christian Crusaders. Their path to power was linear. At the law firm of Sullivan
and Cromwell they represented companies with interests around the world and came to see their
clients' interests united with America's. As Foster moved into politics and government service
he often brought Allen with him.
Although expected to be Secretary of State in a Dewey Administration, Foster came in with Dwight
Eisenhower in 1953. With Allen as Director of Central Intelligence, they formed a team that searched
the world for dragons to slay. Guided by a world view of us, American Christian capitalists, against
them, Socialist Evil Doers, they identified their foes and went after them. Among their successes
were Guatemalan President Árbenz, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and Congolese leader
Patrice Lumumba. TYhose who got away included Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. This book is a study
of American covert operations in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo and Cuba. Allen's
Bay of Pigs operation is a case study of disaster.
Author Stephen Kinzer explores the unique situation in which the intelligence gathering
agency is also an actor. Throughout he illustrates how the relationship of their leaders enabled
two agencies that would normally question and check each other, to work in seamless harmony to
carry out the covert operations that both saw as primary instruments of American power. Behind
them was President Eisenhower who had used covert operations during World War II and who approved
their actions. In the end the author posits that the policies were the President's and the brothers
were more his servants than his masters.
Kinzer portrays the Brothers as men with rigid, narrow outlooks that saw enemies in independent
nationalists and conspiracies in disorganized movements. He presents them as two sides of the
coin, the molders and reflectors of public opinion. The book is not flattering. It depicts the
Dulles brothers as men whose flawed expectations caused many problems for the U.S. and the world
by destroying men who America need not have fought. Ultimately he concludes that they were representatives
of the people they served and their successes, and failures, are our own. "The Brothers" forces
the reader to confront a portion of America's past with its triumphs and shames. Although Kinzer
gives his opinions, he provides the facts to permit the reader to form his own. Any serious student
of history would do well to delve beneath the surface of our history and appreciate its deep currents
and lasting effects.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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