Say it with me, please: the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.
Recently on C-SPAN Anthony Fauci, who was against mask mandates before he was for them, said that “America has an independent spirit” but now it’s “time to do what you’re told.”
Saying it with me, please: No!
To grasp a true understanding of economics — production, the division of labor, wealth-creation, which comes from the freedom of individuals to exchange goods and services voluntarily — is to eat a forbidden fruit: once you’ve chewed and digested it, you will never again be able to see the world as you saw it before. And though this newly discovered knowledge enlightens you forever afterward, it also brings with it a corollary effect which is not so desirable: you see as well that the rest of the world understands nothing of this at all, and that you, having grasped it, can never go back.
It’s in light of that preface I offer you the following information, which will completely — and I do mean completely — confirm for you, in no uncertain terms whatsoever, the fact that well-educated and seemingly intelligent people are every bit as susceptible as any other person (and probably more so) to utterly irrational ideas, catastrophically stupid notions and dogmatic ideological beliefs, which go part-and-parcel with the politico-economic-ethical ideas they’ve passively accepted:
The New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever.
As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.
While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever [my boldface emphasis].
Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it.
One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.”
I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention.
These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives.
SARS-CoV-2 is not some special killer virus, or even significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).
Unfortunately, because of their profession – expertise in the incidence, distribution, and control of disease within a population– there is a danger that their ideas will be endowed with undeserved authority. Although not expressly stated, that is, presumably, the article’s objective: to encourage readers to conclude that, if this is what the experts are doing, perhaps I should, too. That is why the Times did not run an article about how 700 lawyers or baseball players or receptionists are living now.
I urge readers not to pay attention to the ideas propagated in that article….
The Covid-19 hysteria, scientifically called mass psychogenic illness, that began in March has yet to peak. And if some have it their way it will continue indefinitely, merely going, in medical terminology, from epidemic to endemic. That is, it will never fully go away no matter what. We apparently finally have some medicines that work with countless more being tested, doctors have gotten better at applying treatments, vaccines are being administered in what is by far record time, and yet the media and public health community onslaught shows absolutely no sign of abating.
We have heard White House Covid-19 task force member Dr. Deborah Birx claim “This is not just the worst public health event. This is the worst event that this country will face, not just from a public health side.” Oy! This even as we’re now hearing the mainstream media, led by cult figure Dr. Anthony Fauci, say that the vaccinations now being rolled out don’t mean the masks can come off. Start with the second first.
(Link)
Reader, if the above frightens or unnerves or unsettles you in any way at all — and it absolutely should, no matter what side of the so-called aisle you place yourself upon — fight with me this craven, pathetic, automatonic mindset, and fight it tooth and nail. Because this is uncharted water that the world is entering into, at breakneck speed and infected with mass psychogenic illness, and the end result will be command-and-control of individual lives.
Here is one reason I say that:
“China used artificial intelligence & big data to identify Americans likely to participate in Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter protests and then they sent them videos through TikTok on how to riot.”
Of course we all remember as well, way back in April (2020), when no less than the New York Times, itself one of the world leaders in propaganda, admitted to being duped, along with millions of others, by Chinese misinformation.
This, reader, is why independent thought and the desire to think for yourself — which has always been a prerequisite to human flourishing and human happiness — is more necessary now than ever before.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who was once a bartender and is now a partisan politician extraordinaire, recently said that those not on her side (politically) would be “crying in the refrigerator” if we were to ever get behind the bar or wait on tables. I believe I can speak a little to this subject, having bartended for more years than her (by quite some time, I’m afraid to say) while simultaneously and profoundly disagreeing with virtually every single one of her explicitly communistic politic-economic convictions, and I can tell you in all truth and sincerity that I’ve never once cried in a refrigerator. One wonders a little, though, I must admit, where she came up with that image.
Partisan politics are a dead-end road. For both sides. They lead nowhere. And more: both sides can sling insults back and forth forever and yet they aren’t even opposites. “They’re two sides of the same penny,” as H.L. Mencken accurately observed, long ago.
The following is a tweet from a conservative who’s worked blue-collar jobs aplenty, as have countless other conservatives, just like countless liberal-dems.
As readers of this website know, I celebrate wealth and wealth-creation, and I believe in it. I believe in it because I know where real wealth derives — i.e. the division of labor, production, and the freedom to exchange — and I know also that exchange is the very engine of human progress and civilization. Wealth-creation is a virtue; making money is an art. It is the hypocrisy I don’t particularly care for — especially in corrupt partisan political elitists who believe they are better suited than we ourselves to determine how our lives should be led.
If it doesn’t strike you as a bit presumptuous that a politician — whom you didn’t vote for and would never vote for, and whose politico-economic views you find reprehensible (because, unlike her, you know exactly where they lead) — can legally tell you and me how to live our lives and spend our money, I’d like to buy you a drink and discuss this.
The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission.
I repeat: The only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Ask yourself: whose permission? And why?
Something else all people should be aware of regarding AOC: she has absolutely no conception of the astronomical amounts of fossil-fuel and industry and technology — and this includes a great deal of rare-earth minerals — required at every level of production and implementation and maintenance for so-called renewables. She has no comprehension of it whatsoever.
As I’ve written about before:
As with the production of silicon chips, production of c-Si wafers begins with the mining of silica, found in the environment as sand or quartz. Silica is refined at high temperatures to remove the oxygen and produce metallurgical grade silicon, which is approximately 99.6% pure. However, silicon for semiconductor use must be much purer.
Higher purities are achieved through a chemical process that exposes metallurgical grade silicon to hydrochloric acid and copper to produce trichlorosilane gas. The trichlorosilane is then distilled to remove remaining impurities, which typically include chlorinated metals of aluminum, iron and carbon. It is finally heated or “reduced” with hydrogen to produce silane gas. The silane gas is heated again to make molten silicon, used to grow monocrystalline silicon crystals or used as an input for amorphous silicon.
The next step is to produce crystals of either monocrystalline or policrystalline silicon. Monocrystalline silicon rods are pulled from molten silicon, cooled and suspended in a reactor at high temperature and high pressure. Silane gas is then introduced into the reactor to deposit additional silicon onto the rods until they “grow” to a specified diameter.
To produce multicrystalline silicon, molten silicon is poured into crucibles and cooled into blocks or ingots. Both processes produce silicon crystals that are extremely pure (from 99.99999% to 99.9999999%), which is ideal for microchips, but far more than required by the PV industry. The high temperatures required for c-Si production make it an extremely energy-intensive and expensive process, and also produces large amounts of waste. As much as 80% of the initial metallurgical grade silicon is lost in the process.
Sawing c-Si wafers creates a significant amount of waste silicon dust called kerf, and up to 50% of the material is lost in air and water used to rinse wafers. This process may generate silicon particulate matter that will pose inhalation problems for production workers and those who clean and maintain equipment. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set exposure limits to keep ambient dust levels low and recommends the use of respiratory masks. But it has been suggested that, despite the use of respiratory masks, workers remain overexposed to silicon dust.
The use of silane gas is the most significant hazard in the production of c-Si because it is extremely explosive and presents a potential danger to workers and communities. Accidental releases of silane have been known to spontaneously explode, and the semiconductor industry reports several silane incidents every year.
Further back in the silicon supply chain, the production of silane and trichlorosilane results in waste silicon tetrachloride, an extremely toxic substance that reacts violently with water, causes skin burns, and is a respiratory, skin and eye irritant. Although it is easily recovered and reused as an input for silane production, in places with little or no environmental regulation, silicon tetrachloride can constitute an extreme environmental hazard.
The extremely potent greenhouse gas sulfur hexafluoride is used to clean the reactors used in silicon production. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change considers sulfur hexafluoride to be the most potent greenhouse gas per molecule; one ton of sulfur hexafluoride has a greenhouse effect equivalent to that of 25,000 tons of CO2. It can react with silicon to make silicon tetrafluoride and sulfur difluoride, or be reduced to tetrafluorosilane and sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide releases can cause acid rain, so scrubbers are required to limit air emissions in facilities that use it.
It is imperative that a replacement for sulfur hexafluoride be found, because accidental or fugitive emissions will greatly undermine the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions gained by using solar power.
Other chemicals used in the production of crystalline silicon that require special handling and disposal procedures include the following:
Large quantities of sodium hydroxide are used to remove the sawing damage on the silicon wafer surfaces. In some cases, potassium hydroxide is used instead. These caustic chemicals are dangerous to the eyes, lungs and skin.
Corrosive chemicals like hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid and hydrogen fluoride are used to remove impurities from and clean semiconductor materials.
Toxic phosphine or arsine gas is used in the doping of the semiconductor material. Though these are used in small quantities, inadequate containment or accidental release poses occupational risks. Other chemicals used or produced in the doping process include phosphorous oxychloride, phosphorous trichloride, boron bromide and boron trichloride.
Toxic phosphine or arsine gas is used in the doping of the semiconductor material. Though these are used in small quantities, inadequate containment or accidental release poses occupational risks. Other chemicals used or produced in the doping process include phosphorous oxychloride, phosphorous trichloride, boron bromide and boron trichloride.
Isopropyl alcohol is used to clean c-Si wafers. The surface of the wafer is oxidized to silicon dioxide to protect the solar cell.
Lead is often used in solar PV electronic circuits for wiring, solder-coated copper strips, and some lead-based printing pastes.
Small quantities of silver and aluminum are used to make the electrical contacts on the cell.
Chemicals released in fugitive air emissions by known manufacturing facilities include trichloroethane, acetone, ammonia and isopropyl alcohol.
Monocrystalline silicon (mono c-Si) is formed when the one single crystal cools into a cylinder (called a rod or ingot). Thin wafers are then cut from the cylinder.
Mono c-Si is produced in large quantities for the computer industry. Because the purity of silicon needed for solar PV is less than that required for silicon chips, the PV industry has historically relied on purchasing (at reduced cost) silicon wafers and polysilicon feedstock rejected by the chip makers. The production of solar grade silicon is growing as demand in the PV industry is outstripping the available computer industry castoffs.
Mono c-Si is produced in large quantities for the computer industry. Because the purity of silicon needed for solar PV is less than that required for silicon chips, the PV industry has historically relied on purchasing (at reduced cost) silicon wafers and polysilicon feedstock rejected by the chip makers. The production of solar grade silicon is growing as demand in the PV industry is outstripping the available computer industry castoffs.
In addition to the chemicals used by all crystalline silicon cell production, additional chemicals used to manufacture mono c-Si solar cells include ammonium fluoride, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, phosphorous oxychloride and tin. Like most industrial chemicals, these materials require special handling and operating standards to prevent workplace hazards or exposure to toxics.
To make multicrystalline silicon (multi c-Si) wafers, molten silicon is poured into crucibles under an inert atmosphere of argon gas and slowly cooled to form thin squares. These cells are typically less pure than mono c-Si – particularly around the edges, due to contact with the crucible during crystallization. They are less efficient but are also less expensive and less energy-intensive to make. Multi c-Si has a significant share of the c-Si market, at about 67% in 2004. Overall, the lifecycle impacts of mono c-Si and multi c-Si have a similar profile, although the energy used in production is higher for mono c-Si. Other materials used or produced in the manufacturing of multi c-Si that require special handling and operating procedures include ammonia, copper catalyst, diborane, ethyl acetate, ethyl vinyl acetate, hydrogen, hydrogen peroxide, ion amine catalyst, nitrogen, silicon trioxide, stannic chloride, tantalum pentoxide, titanium and titanium dioxide.
This, I assure you, is only the beginning.
It doesn’t even touch upon wind-turbines and the rare-earth minerals required for that — nor the extreme environmental degradation it causes; nor does it touch upon the twenty million tons of cement (the making of cement also requires a great deal of mining) sunk deep into the earth and required in order to anchor every single wind-turbine, which the Audubon society calls “Condor Cuisinarts” for all the birds and bats these monstrosities kill. Nor does it touch upon the fact that wind and solar both require massive (taxpayer) subsidization to sustain and even more fossil-fuels to back them up because of the intermittency problem, nor to the fact that wind and solar are both far more likely to contaminate ground water than hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
And so it goes, the propaganda machines rolling endlessly on and on …
Think for yourself.
Bad ideas, reprehensible ideas, evil ideas — they only pose a threat when people don’t articulate and stand up for good ideas.
Bad ideas only flourish when they’re obscured by doublespeak and darkness, by equivocation, jargon, groupthink — when open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas is ridiculed and disallowed and leaders of the once-free-world are telling us all that the debate, if there ever was one (and there wasn’t), is over.
Nazi fascists and communist fascists are (e.g.) two variations on the same theme, and that theme is anti-individualism — which is to say, collectivism, which is to say tribalism. But both groups should be free to speak. Even the very left-leaning ACLU used to agree with me on this — until they were corrupted by a progressively carious ideology.
Bad ideas, I repeat, are only dangerous when people don’t articulate and fight for good ideas.
Good ideas are ideas that are right and true.
Good ideas promote peace, prosperity, goodwill. They stand ideologically opposed to the initiation of force and do not look the other way when, for example, partisan politics dominate. Good ideas do not pretend someone is suddenly a hero who in reality is clearly declining, unwell, and who has made a career of corruption and lies, who has repeatedly handled young human-beings this way.
Good ideas do not do this. Good ideas allow for the open exchange and the debate of ideas and simultaneously, as a corollary, bar the initiation of physical force and violence.
If you’d like to test how much your friends actually care about you — and how much they care about free speech as well, and understand it — it has never been simpler to do so than right now, and I can personally testify to this: all you have to do is tell your friends that you fully support freedom of speech for Donald Trump and his voters and, even if you’re not a fan of Donald Trump and have repeatedly said so, watch how many of your friends distance themselves from you, and watch how fast this distancing occurs. I predict you will be surprised.
Still, the fact remains: Free speech does not mean speech with which only you or the majority agrees. Free speech includes the crucial freedom to dissent from the majority — in fact, part of the legal meaning of free speech is the freedom to disagree, as it includes also the freedom not to support (financially or otherwise) one’s detractors and antagonists.
The political function of the right to free speech is not to subsidize people and their speaking platforms — that, I emphasize, is not included — but rather to protect dissenting voices and unpopular minority views from forcible suppression, either by government or other people. Many if not most lawyers and judges, as I’ve recently discovered, do not know this. But even more disheartening and appalling is the level of their apathy concerning the overwhelming importance of such issues, as well as their ignorance (and I don’t use that word lightly) concerning the philosophical principles underpinning it all. Disheartening, I say, and discouraging because these are the very people who, in theory, are best educated and therefore best positioned to effect actual change, and yet so many remain willfully ignorant and do not care enough to make any attempt at serious rectification. They care about getting paid, getting through the case, and then, finally, moving along to the next, and that, I can tell you upon great authority, is the only thing they care about.
The difference between speaking with your fists and speaking with your ideas is a difference which was once self-evident. It is so no longer. So I’ll articulate that difference now: spoken and written speech and physical blows are separated by a clear-cut line which is also a principle, and that principle is the prohibition of the initiation of physical force upon another’s physical person. Property is an extension of person.
Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. [my emphasis in boldface] As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it — so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership — force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).
When you lose the distinction between freedom of speech (written as well as spoken) and freedom of action, you lose the freedom of both — and that is the point at which you begin to see things like book-banning and book-burning.
Even more terrifyingly, you’ll begin to see more and more people defending, with enraged righteousness and sanctimony, the governmental enforcement of book-banning and book-burning. And that is when you can know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the right to free speech has been entirely nullified. Then — perhaps only then — will some people see the heartbreaking paradox of it all: the right was destroyed because the majority (i.e. vox-populi, i.e. democracy) did not want the right. The majority voted against it. They rejected it. They wanted all individual people, themselves and their loved ones included, to live their lives not by right but by permission: the permission of politicians and bureaucrats. Thus individual rights were not inalienable in the end but, all along, were purely subject to vote — to the whims and will of the majority.
Yes: people scoff incredulously when someone warns about the inescapable dangers of democracy — specifically, I mean, the majority possessing the power to vote down the right to the life and property of any minority, their incredulity and scoffs coming from their not being able to imagine that the rights of, for instance, an entire latino or black community could ever be fully voted down by a majority, and I hope to high heaven that this is true. But I suggest the following thought-exercises instead: imagine virtually any and all Native American Indian tribes — imagine them still, to this very day, in 2020, not being allowed to own property on “their” own land.
And if that, too, is difficult to imagine, try imagining your family, or a group of your friends, or any very small gathering of likeminded people. Then imagine that your family or this small group of likeminded people, yourself included, believe in and wish to exercise your right to read and even teach, on private property and to anyone who voluntarily and consensually wishes to attend, the novels To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men and even more daringly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then imagine government agents, who learned of your readings and your teachings through a Facebook post and then a Twitter controversy, come onto your property and arrest you and your entire family for teaching these books, and the reason they arrest all of you for this is that you broke the law, because the majority has deemed these books illegal and so it is now against the law to teach or even read them.
I sincerely hope the glaring outrage in the examples above help clarify, at least somewhat, why it is that I am and always will be an uncompromising, intransigent defender of the inalienable right to free speech, and also why I will never make any apologies for my defense of free speech, no matter how rabid the mob, no matter how many people whom I thought were my friends go on to slander me and, in a craven act absolutely indefensible and inexcusable, involve those who have not shunned me, and who don’t even share my views yet are deemed guilty by continued association with me — I who would dare, even in this “Trump-era,” to defend the absolute and inalienable right to free speech, yours included, even when I profoundly disagree with what’s being spoken.
This is, as well, by logical elaboration, precisely why I stand by my conviction that force-initiation should be barred from human interaction, and the fact that this idea, this beautiful, elegant, intelligent, once-bedrock idea, has become in any way controversial is the total testament to the sheer lunacy of today’s dominant philosophical ideologues, which finds its poisoned crucible in academia.
Future generations will, you may depend upon it, regard this era in the same way that sane people today regard people from 150 years ago who used to gather in asylums and mental wards in order to laugh at and ridicule the mentally ill.
Also, just for the record, rights are inalienable, in the literal sense, and for this very reason are not subject to vote, as I hyperbolically suggested in my example above: they are inalienable because the person or institution which breaches or violates or otherwise infringes upon the rights of an individual is in the wrong. As such, this person or institution must answer to the law. Rights do not stop club blows. Neither do they stop punches and kicks. But the person or people who assault an individual by means of club blows or punches or kicks has committed a crime. It is not a coincidence that wrong is the opposite of right in a politico-ethical context as well.
The right to assembly does not include the right to obstruct public thoroughfares, and all groups, no matter the ideology they espouse, should not be allowed such public obstruction. Yet know this also: if #BLM and ANTIFA are permitted such obstruction, Proud Boys must be permitted as well. The right to assembly, properly understood and accurately codified, is the right to assemble on your own property or on the property of those who allow you to assemble on their property.
When you think about free-speech in context of the over-cited example of yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater, simply ask whose property the theater is. That’s who has the right. If that doesn’t fully clarify the issue, think of that crowded theater as your home or your parents’ home, and think of the crowd as dinner guests who have been invited over and who’ve voluntarily agreed to come. Now think of one among these guests in your home, at your dinner party, seriously yelling out FIRE!
I am and always will be the first to tell you that it’s most certainly not inspiring to fight for freedom of speech by fighting for people who hold reprehensible views and ideas: whether it’s the sexually obsessed and their ghastly, stomach-churning depictions of consensually staged atrocity exhibitions (including depictions of horrific racism — and I do repeat: fully consensual) or whether, similarly, it’s the NAZIS and all the other collectivists and racists, including, of course, our current CRT theorists, whose overt racism is given a pass. No, it is not inspiring at all. But remember this always: in any shift, on any level — state, city, or national — away from freedom and toward authoritarianism and tyranny, every infringement of individual rights has started with the subjugation of the rights of the least appealing practitioners. In this way, the unappealing nature of the beliefs and ideas in question stand as a true test of one’s understanding of the principle — the principle of liberty, which includes free speech — as it stands also as a test of the depth of one’s conviction for the principle. And that’s when you really see the sorting of the men from the boys. Because, like rights and like freedom itself, free speech has unfortunately become another of these things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what it entails and actually means, and then virtually no one believes in it.
Most people only believe in free speech when the speech conforms to things with which people already think and agree.
That’s not what the right to freedom of speech means.
(Note: one aspect of the sex industry that does and always should fall squarely within the proper jurisdiction of law and government — and it is a critical one, about which many on today’s left have become sickeningly silent and apathetic — is the protection of minors and other non-consenting people. And if you really want to make yourself infuriated and ill at the same time, read about the outrageously, gut-wrenchingly criminal videos that have been uploaded to mainstream porn sites and permitted to stay there — I’m talking about actual crimes and staggering violations captured on camera — and even more horrifyingly: read about the purveyors and partakers and defenders of this monstrous criminality and injustice.)
I reiterate my opening sentence: Bad ideas and evil ideologies only become dangerous when people default on the process of articulating and standing up for good ideas. If you want to fight bad ideas or ideas opposed to your own, you don’t shut down free speech — never that — and you don’t initiate or instigate physical force and violence, as the #BLM and ANTIFA mobs have been doing for many months now (never forget Henry Dorn). Rather, you think and you reason and you articulate and you express yourself on the battleground of ideas. You will be shunned, hated, ridiculed, and quite possibly harassed by any number of others — some of whom you were under the impression were your friends — but you will have stood up for a true and vital principle: a principle as rare as it is timeless.
Ideas are good. The exchange of ideas is good. Thought is good. Thought begets thought. Ideas beget ideas. Energy begets energy. Wealth begets wealth. The universe is infinitely complex. Let people be free — free to exchange goods and ideas — and all people will grow and prosper and flourish as a result. Introduce force — shut societies down by force — propound force, forbid certain thoughts, cut-off the free flow of all ideas except the ones you already believe in, and you’ll only bring misery, hatred, depression, death.
I have a friend named Joseph who is by any standard imaginable politically and economically liberal. He votes a straight democratic ticket. He believes in a “robust” welfare state. He’s a runner and a triathlete. He’s getting a second degree in environmental science. We go back several years, and we once worked together for while. He is my friend. He’s also an increasingly rare individual: someone who knows fairly well my laissez-faire-classic-liberal views, doesn’t agree with much of it, and yet he likes to talk about these and many other subjects, including fiction, poetry, and basketball, and he’s stayed my friend. We make each other laugh, and I genuinely enjoy his company. I believe he genuinely enjoys mine. We never run out of things to talk about.
I crossed paths with Joesph a few weeks back — we hadn’t seen each other in a while — and he told me an interesting and frightening story: something that had recently happened to him. He’d received an email, he said, from his university — part of a mass mail-out — which spoke of the importance of #Black Live Matter. He told me that he’d replied to this email, not realizing that his reply would also go out to the thousands of others who had, like him, received the original message, and in his reply, my friend Joseph wrote that while he was very sympathetic to the #BLM cause, he wrote also that he believed all lives matter.
Let me ask: reading that just now, did you wince, as I did, at that last part? You were right to wince.
He was harassed, hammered, and threatened like hell.
Just for the record, Joseph is an exceptionally sweet person, polite, kind, articulate, and as gentle as a dove. He’s also neither white nor cis nor hetero.
He told me he was harassed so viciously, receiving a number of death threats, in fact, that he seriously feared for his safety.
In addition to that, as you would suspect, he was strongly encouraged to make an appointment to come in and speak with one of the university faculty, who would fully explain to him why his saying that “all lives matter” is racist and wrong.
I myself can tell you a little about harassment. Ask me sometime. So I commiserated with my friend Joseph. Harassment is one thing, he said. When it spills over and in any way starts to involve friends, family, or co-workers, it becomes something else entirely. Yes, I completely agree.
Faddish theories, such as those advanced by Jacques Derrida, born out of the 1930’s Frankfurt School and then taken to stupefying lengths by today’s Critical Race Theorists, teach students that all language, whether written or spoken, is shaped, conditioned, and structured not by the conceptual apparatus of the human brain but rather by “power” and “power structures.” So that any thesis or argument, no matter how reasonable, rational, and logically valid the thesis or argument actually is — no matter how much internal consistency and sense it makes, no matter how precisely it corresponds to actual reality — it can and should be rejected based purely upon the skin color and gender of the writer or speaker.
This means that the content of words and sentences do not matter.
I repeat: to people who subscribe to this nonsensical fad, the content of words and sentences do not matter.
It means that unchosen things (like skin color) are primary — even over and above logic and sense.
It means that wrong and right — i.e. virtue — is predetermined. In this way, like all forms of determinism, it contradicts itself at the outset. (That, incidentally, is one of the many ways the entire theory is invalidated and obliterated.)
Belief in this sort of fashionable nonsense is one reason that, more often than not these days — and this never used to happen — when a progressive-liberal acquaintance of mine sees the books I’ve got under my arm or am reading at a coffeeshop, this same acquaintance will often scoff or even reprimand me these days for having books by, for instance, Friedrich Hayek, Christopher Hitchens, Ludwig von Mises, and even (this happened very recently) The Discovery of Freedom, by Rose Lane Wilder, which I’ve read several times and was rereading in order to quote for an article. It goes without saying here that none of these acquaintances has ever answered yes when I’ve asked if they really know these writers or the contents of their books, and not a single one has ever, when I’ve asked, been able to give me any kind of real recapitulation of what these writers actually think. The exchanges are not usually ever confrontational — although that has happened a time or two as well — but they’re not exactly friendly, either. At the same time, I’m never questioned or scoffed at when these same people see me reading, for instance, Martha Nussbaum or Noam Chomsky or Paul Krugman or Naomi Klein, all of whom I’ve read and do read, to better understand their exact ideas and arguments and to better grasp where they’re coming from.
Even more interesting, however, at least to me, is that when my more conservative acquaintances see the same books under my arm or sitting upon my table, I am never — and I mean never — scoffed at or reprimanded or chastised by these acquaintances, and usually it’s the precise opposite: I’m asked with curiosity about the books I’m reading, whether by Krugman, Nussbaum, Hayek, von Mises, Chomsky, or whoever, and I’m as often asked to share my views and opinions. Do you know what that used to be called?
Conversation. A good conversation. I would note also that my laissez-faire-classic-liberal views are much too freewheeling and radical for these same conservative acquaintances of mine, without a single exception that I can think of, and yet this doesn’t ever, not once, outrage them or bother them, at least not in any way that is noticeable to me. On the contrary, they like to talk about it and are even amused by my live-and-let-live views.
That is the truth, and I ask you to consider it. Please take a moment and consider my last three or so paragraphs. It is stupendously significant.
The fact is that today’s progressive left in America are now closer to thought-police than they are conversationalists.
Thought-policing is now regarded as a virtue by a great many — the majority, I think — in today’s leftist circles.
The seriousness of this cannot be exaggerated or overstated. It is only a short step from this to book-banning and book-burning.
Answer this honestly: if ten or even five years ago, I’d have said to you that in the year 2020, progressive-liberals would be banning books like To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, would you have believe me?
Me neither.
This is testament to how cocooned-off today’s progressive left has become, but not only that. It is also a testament to how hard-core this mindset is hammered into school curricula all across the country: specifically, I mean, how any ideas that might stand opposed to their own — the ones they’ve already been told are the only valid and legitimate ideas — they are to be rejected categorically and condemned with religious fervor, without weighing a single word from any of these oppositional ideas. And more: anyone who holds ideas that are not the same as their own, they are enemies. Outright. The instigation of force now is no longer off the table.
That is one reason that right-wing rhetoricians and lawyers, like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, who whatever you think of their views, routinely beclown even the best and brightest of the progressive-liberal set: because the progressive-liberal worldview is so patently insular and out-of-touch.
Here’s how one writer recently explained it, in a true story, which he titled “I Was The Mob, Until The Mob Came For Me”:
I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.
Within the world created by the various apps I used, I got plenty of shares and retweets. But this masked how ineffective I had become outside, in the real world. The only causes I was actually contributing to were the causes of mobbing and public shaming. Real change does not stem from these tactics. They only cause division, alienation, and bitterness.
How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.
Just a few years ago, many of my friends and peers who self-identify as liberals or progressives were open fans of provocative standup comedians such as Sarah Silverman, and shows like South Park. Today, such material is seen as deeply “problematic,” or even labeled as hate speech. I went from minding my own business when people told risqué jokes to practically fainting when they used the wrong pronoun or expressed a right-of-center view. I went from making fun of the guy who took edgy jokes too seriously, to becoming that guy.
When my callouts were met with approval and admiration, I was lavished with praise: “Thank you so much for speaking out!” “You’re so brave!” “We need more men like you!”
Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very transgressions I’d called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I’d been creating a toxic environment for years at my workplace; that I’d been making the space around me unsafe through microaggressions and macroaggressions alike.
Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture….
Aggressive online virtue signaling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act. It has no human depth. It’s only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.
(Link)
Perhaps the most frightening part of the whole phenomena — a phenomena that’s becoming more urgent by the day, as America inches closer and closer to outright civil war — is how catastrophically dangerous, politically, economically, epistemically, and morally, the ideas of today’s progressive left are, precisely because they explicitly advocate, in one form or another, whether by banning, burning, barring, looting, vandalizing, extorting, and more, the instigation of force and coercion. And yet it is people like me, who have a lifelong and uncompromising commitment — a commitment well-documented and simple to verify — to individual rights and the absolute, inalienable equality of all humans before the law, property and person, as well as the absolute abolition of the initiation of force, governmental and otherwise, we are the “anti-democratic fascists.”
This, ladies, gentleman, and everyone else, out-Orwells George Orwell.
It is also a matter of mathematical fact that the economic views of today’s progressive left can and will only ever end in economic ruin, as they only ever have.
It is a problem when a student goes through university where each and every course is taught by a left-leaning professor. For more conservative students, the toxic and hostile university environment needn’t cripple their intellectual development. These students arrive at university with conservative ideas and will naturally seek out and read conservative authors in their own time to balance out the latest application of progressive doctrine to which they are subjected in class. The most ambitious will be familiar with both Mises and Marx, Keynes and Hayek, Galbraith and Friedman, Krugman and Sowell, Picketty and Peterson. But we ought to worry about the progressive student who arrives with progressive ideas, and is then showered in class with more of the same and reinforces them in their own time. Such students live in a much smaller cultural universe than the cosmopolitan intellectual world through which the conservative will be made to travel. This isn’t to deny that bigoted reactionaries on the opposite side of the spectrum also inhabit a tiny intellectual space. But that does not excuse the closing of the mind at a university.
In 2014, one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of moral psychology was publicly accused of homophobia for showing his class a video about the phenomenon of ‘Moral Dumbfounding.’ A transcript of the video Jonathan Haidt showed his class can be read here, and a transcript of the apology he offered his class the next day can be found here. A subsequent investigation by the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity found no evidence of wrongdoing. But, rather than being put off by this brush with reputational disaster, Haidt became fascinated by the problem of hypersensitivity at university. “It’s a crazy time, but it’s also a fascinating time to be a social scientist,” he has since remarked, “It’s the dawn of a new religion, and I study moral psychology as though religion, politics, even sports, they’re all manifestations of a tribalism.”
In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt recalls a telling experiment. He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold. To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives. This he calls the ‘conservative advantage,’ and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.
Haidt’s research echoes arguments made by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. Both Sowell and Pinker contend that conservatives see an unfortunate world of moral trade-offs in which every moral judgment comes with costs that must be properly balanced. Progressives, on the other hand, seem to be blind to, or in denial about, these trade-offs, whether economic and social; theirs is a utopian or unconstrained vision, in which every moral grievance must be immediately extinguished until we have perfected society. This is why conservatives don’t tend to express the same emotional hostility as the Left; a deeper grasp of the world’s complexity has the effect of encouraging intellectual humility. The conservative hears the progressive’s latest demands and says, “I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but I think you’ve overlooked the following…” In contrast, the progressive hears the conservative and thinks, “I have no idea why you would believe that. You’re probably a racist.”
(Link)
As I’ve written before, the real paradox of dogma is this:
If you successfully shut down all public debate and discourse, is this a way of making sure that you win? Or is it an admission that you’ve already lost?
To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.
When you succeed at last in getting everyone to utter the correct words, to say the right slogans and shibboleths, no matter that fewer and fewer of the people saying them understand the actual ideas and the ideologies behind the words they’re speaking, you have definitely succeeded in the task of indoctrinating an entire group of human beings. And that is ultimately why today’s left has already lost: like all insular groups, it’s eating itself to death.
It’s no secret that I love books. It turns out, though, much to my surprise, some books should be banned after all. At least, that’s what progressive-liberal democrats in California recently decreed. It seems that the Maoists and Stalinists are vindicated and were correct all along (they called it “book-cleansing” — a practice that’s good for people because people should not think too much for themselves). A bureau of planners should determine what citizens are and are not allowed to read.
Book-banning and censorship — this is what freedom actually is, as everybody knows. And anybody who denies it is a “fascist.” This is what “real democracy” is all about, of course.
This, reader, is yet another glimpse at today’s left.
If you’ve ever doubted the supreme role that ideas play in human life, I hope that today’s myopic left and their unhinged espousal of censorship and book-banning helps concretize the point — because the call for book-banning and the shutdown of free speech is directly and demonstrably rooted in a specific leftist ideology that almost none of its perfervid adherents understands in full: it’s called Critical Race Theory (CRT).
(The acronym jargon is important, by the way, insofar as it’s a giveaway that you’re dealing with pure dogmatism and dogmatists, and in such realms as these, thinking for yourself is forbidden — purely the stuff of “fascists,” and so punishable by law.)
CRT has, among many other abhorrences, made it possible for seemingly sane people to actually think that those of us who believe in freedom of speech are, in fact, the “radical anti-democratic fascists” since we fight passionately against any and all forms of censorship, including but not limited to book-banning and book-burning, because it means we support any view opposed to our own. (I sincerely hope you see the fatal contradiction built into this [non] argument.)
I offer this to you now as but a tiny sampling of the left’s Orwellian assault on free speech and advocacy of left-wing authoritarianism, which is happening worldwide and at breakneck speed, and which a number of my detractors have said I “exaggerate.” So I eagerly await your “anti-fascist” defense of book-banning now, as I look forward also to your “anti-fascist” defense of book-burning and the keeping of careful lists of people like me who’ve committed the unthinkable crime of disagreeing with you about what you think of as the “virtue” of banning books, and who dares to call himself a classic liberal and yet would never, in a trillion years, side with today’s left.
Click the pic to read the full article.
Just incidentally — not that it matters to the advocates of book-banning — To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the world’s greatest, most elegantly written, genuinely stirring and convincing books in absolute and unequivocal condemnation of racial injustice; and Tom Robinson and Atticus Finch are two of the greatest and most unforgettable characters in American literature: total heroes who stand for what all humans should stand for, and which today’s left loathes.
You are not allowed to speak freely:
UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE APPEARED TODAY IN THE POST-MILLENNIAL:
Black Lives Matter protester and journalist filmed assaulting Trump-supporters on Saturday in Washington, DC, Brittany S. McAlister, 29, of Washington, DC, was caught on viral video assaulting at least two individuals. She is a third-year journalism student at Howard University and works as a freelance journalist.
The first assault caught on video later retweeted by President Trump, McAlister kicked an unconscious man on the ground after he was sucker-punched by Kenneth Wayne DeBerry, who was arrested and charged. She was holding a camera at the time.
Brittany S. McAlister, 29, of Washington, DC, was caught on viral video assaulting at least two individuals. She is a third-year journalism student at Howard University and works as a freelance journalist.
McAlister kicked an unconscious man on the ground after he was sucker-punched by Kenneth Wayne DeBerry, who was arrested and charged. She was holding a camera at the time.
Soon after, she sprinted up behind a woman carrying an American flag and punched her in the head before running away.
Earlier in the day, far-left group Refuse Fascism had profiled the D.C. social-justice activist in a now-deleted tweet. McAlister gave a speech against Trump and his followers at Black Lives Matter Plaza.
McAlister was active on social media but has deactivated and deleted all her known accounts after videos of the assaults went viral. She also removed her personal website where she described herself as a “freelance backpack journalist” who runs the magazine, Pawzels.
She has yet to be arrested. The Metropolitan Police Department did release a photo of McAlister, soliciting tips from the public to identify her.
This is important.
I’ve written the following, complete with video footage, because it is urgent and vital that people have some real idea of what they’re backing when they back today’s political left, which has become dominated by an ideology of mindlessness and hatred, an ideology of force and coercion over consensual voluntary human action and goodwill among all people.
A study conducted by the left-leaning Center for Policing Equity reveals that police are 42% less likely to use lethal force when arresting black people than when arresting whites. Yet, the authors of this study buried that data on the 19th page of a 29-page report. Then, the Washington Post cited this report as proof that police are more likely to kill blacks than whites and that “there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers.”
Other facts about murder rates, unsolved murders, and interracial murders all point to the same conclusion: the allegation of systemic violence by whites and police against people of color is false [my emphasis].
(Source)
FBI statistics corroborate this.
Numerous other studies confirm it as well.
The political left, who once, many decades ago, believed (at least nominally) in freedom of speech, no censorship, peace, love, rock-and-roll, free expression, has now become this:
WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC BLM/ANTIFA VIOLENCE. THIS VIDEO IS FROM YESTERDAY:
Feel the Tolerance — and note the BLM lady steals his phone after he’s knocked unconscious
If, like me, you’re not a Donald Trump fan and yet, totally unlike me, you see nothing really wrong with any of the above, or even if you don’t espouse the violence but still kind of sort of sympathize with these mindless BLM/ANTIFA hordes, you are off-the-rails. You’re horrifyingly wrong. You’re the problem. The instigation of force is always wrong. The suppression of freedom — religious freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, freedom of speech and expression, even when you disagree with it — is wrong. You are on the wrong side of the issue — and more: you are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of philosophy and ethical inquiry, critical inquiry, and you are disastrously, appallingly, devastatingly in error.
And just for the record: I support these comparatively peaceful Trump marchers astronomically more than I support these mindless violent BLM/ANTIFA nihilists. These are people propelled by blind support of ideas and an ideology they do not remotely comprehend, and the exclusively economic component of which is impossible — doomed by mathematical law to fail. In light of this, I ask you to consider for a moment, in all sincerity, the blind rage driving them — and all this over a dogma they don’t begin to understand.
That dogma is called Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory evolved out of the 1930’s Frankfurt School ideology called Critical Theory, which was, as it described itself, a “social theory … a Marxist-Hegelian critique of society and culture [seeking] to reveal and challenge power structures.”
Critical Race Theory uses these same terms to described itself but adds this: “Racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.”
This “power-structure paradigm” comes directly from Karl Marx, who himself obsessed over “economic power structures” – who, indeed, could not get over the fact that when individuals are left alone, alone and free to exchange voluntarily with other individuals who are also acting voluntarily and consensually, many among them will through this voluntary process grow wealthy. Their work and focus and effort may very likely, in fact, bring them excess capital, which they can save or reinvest, and as a result of which, they will often become even wealthier.
Neither could Karl Marx quite get his head around the idea that in a free society, wherein all exchange is voluntary and consensual, the determining factor of the success of any and all businesses, no matter how small or large the business may be, is always the consumer, who either will or will not pay money for the goods or services being offered. As long as a society remains free and voluntary, the consumer is the one solely in control — because the consumer can choose to shop here or there or not at all.
“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”
This Marxian view is now sometimes known as the “conflict doctrine,” which stands in stark contrast to the classical-liberal doctrine known as the “harmony doctrine” (or “harmony principle”), which I fully and unequivocally espouse and am prepared to prove to you.
In a society where human cooperation and coordination is voluntary, all rights-respecting individuals are allied.
Classical-liberal thinkers, like Carl Menger, Eugene Böhm-Bawerk, von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and many others, long ago successfully refuted the conflict doctrine – demolished it, in fact – and they did so by codifying and detailing specifically the ways in which business-owners, investors, and workers in free societies are not pitted against one another but the opposite: they’re natural allies in a vibrant and harmonious system. Which is one of the many reasons a leading Marxist scholar famously told the New Yorker Magazine, in the mid 1990’s (and I quote):
“Ludwig von Mises was right all along.”
Critical Race Theory — and all the privilege-and-fragility jargon that goes with it — does not know any of this.
Because Critical Race Theory inherited the conflict-doctrine from its ideological predecessor, which in turn inherited the conflict-doctrine from Karl Marx, Critical Race Theory, like Critical Theory before it, isn’t aware at all of the crushing refutations that knock the legs out from under their entire ideological worldview.
I’m not exaggerating. The truth is that if people knew how monumentally wrong CRT (like CT before it) actually is, they’d not only faint from shock: they’d likely never make a full recovery. That is the danger of dogma.
In addition to this, Critical Race Theory stands ideologically opposed to the Civil Rights Movement, which believed in equality of rights and thus stressed the importance of treating each person as an individual, as against some unthinking cog in a racial collective.
“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” said Martin Luther King, stirringly.
I do too.
Critical Race Theory, on the other hand, is concerned not with individuals and the “content of their character,” but rather with “inequalities of outcome,” which, as you have no doubt already guessed, are the result of “racial power structures.”
Every person should know at the very least that Critical Race Theory and its ideologues are racist to the core – by definition – and not only that: they’re racist in the most insidious way possible because they masquerade as something non-racist, and would have the rest of the world believe that this were true.
As one self-described “Raceologist” and Racial Theorist recently put it: “I need White people to understand that all White people are racist.”
Critical Race Theory, baseborn and misbegotten from the outset — and history will, you may depend upon it, cause future generations to wince at these CRT theories — would in all sincerity have you believe that it can know the contents of every single individual human brain who has white skin, yet without ever seeing or knowing the person in any way at all. I ask you to pause a moment and process that.
This warped ideological belief, which is taught in public schools all across the world and taken totally seriously, is what enables Critical Race Theorists to lecture you and me with a straight face about racism, while simultaneously telling us that an entire race of humans is racist not because of the contents of their minds, but because of their skin color.
If you don’t see the horrifying ideological contradiction contained in that one thing alone, I urge you to reread it.
Contrast this ideological perspective and worldview with the “harmony doctrine” — knowing at the same time how successful the harmony doctrine has been and still is in anti-discrimination movements, at which it’s aimed laser-like to abolish inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to slavery, to Jim Crow.
Yes, the harmony doctrine has succeeded. It didn’t happen overnight, and the work is not completed, but nothing else can even compare. Nothing else can or will end discrimination.
Indeed, one of the greatest abhorrences (and that’s saying a lot) contained within Critical Race Theory — an abhorrence which has gone largely unnoticed – is that in promoting and pushing for violence and riots and looting, because, in their words, “the Civil Rights protests didn’t work,” it in so doing completely ignores how overwhelmingly successful the Civil Rights protests were. In ignorning this and pushing simultaneously for more violence and looting, they spit into the faces of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and many, many other heroes, whose principled stand and rational ideas won out and will continue to win out, even in spite of these CRT racists advocating violence and injustice.
Racial theorists are also inexplicably unwilling to denounce and condemn the countries and Marxist regimes in our present-day which continue to practice slavery:
There are 167 countries that still have slavery, affecting about 46 million people.
While over a hundred countries still have slavery, six countries have significantly higher numbers:
India (18.4 million)
China (3.4 million)
Pakistan (2.1 million)
Bangladesh (1.5 million)
Uzbekistan (1.2 million)
North Korea (1.1 million)
India has the highest number of slaves in the world at 18.4 million slaves. This number is higher than the population of the Netherlands and is approximately 1.4% of India’s entire population. All forms of modern slavery exist in India, including forced child labor, forced marriage, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups.
China has the second-highest number of slaves at 3.4 million, which is less than a quarter of India’s.
Other countries that have significantly high slave populations are Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan.
Why?
Why are Critical Race Theorists so deafeningly silent on the subject of present-day slavery, the practioners of which are so often Marixst or Neo-Marxist?
Here’s one possible explanation:
“We are trained Marxists,” #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors said.
And quoting the official #BlackLivesMatter mission statement:
• “A progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local state, and federal levels, to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth”
• “Reparations … in the form of a guaranteed minimum livable income”
• “Reparations … in the form of corporate and government reparations … and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land”
• “Reparations … in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and … the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs”
• “Federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized”
• “Real, meaningful, and equitable universal health care”
• “A constitutional right at the state and federal level to a fully-funded education”
Also the following, written right after the homophobic, murderous dictator Fidel Castro died, appeared on a BLM platform.
“We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante.”
The article continues:
“Revolution is continuous and is won first in the hearts and minds of the people and is continually shaped and reshaped by the collective. No single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution. The revolution begins only when the whole is fully bought in and committed to it. And it is never over…. Revolution is rooted in the recognition that there are certain fundamentals to which every being has a right, just by virtue of one’s birth: healthy food, clean water, decent housing, safe communities, quality healthcare, mental health services, free and quality education, community spaces, art, democratic engagement, regular vacations, sports, and places for spiritual expression are not questions of resources, but questions of political will and they are requirements of any humane society.”
The article concludes with this eye-popper:
“With Fidel’s passing there is one more lesson that stands paramount: when we are rooted in collective vision when we bind ourselves together around quests for infinite freedom of the body and the soul, we will be victorious. As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!”
In light of all this explicit Marxist and Neo-Marxist ideology — propagandistic to the core and which is an inherent part of Critical Race Theory’s ideological inheritance — one cannot help but wonder if any of the proponents of Critical Race Theory have a good idea about how racist Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were. (They were both horribly anti-Semitic, as well, but that would not bother a great many of the Critical Race Theorists.)
WARNING: The following quotes, which I find disgusting and reprehensible, contain a number of racial slurs. These are from the stated intellectual thought-leaders of today’s left, BLM and ANTIFA included. Let that sink in a moment — especially after you watch some of the video clips I’ve uploaded below.
“This splendid territory [the Balkans] has the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization. Slavonians, Greeks, Wallachians, Arnauts, twelve millions of men, are all held in submission by one million of Turks, and up to a recent period, it appeared doubtful whether, of all these different races, the Turks were not the most competent to hold the supremacy which, in such a mixed population, could not but accrue to one of these nationalities” (Karl Marx, “The Russian Menace to Europe,” 1853).
“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend,’ even though his interest and capital were guaranteed… It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like” (Karl Marx, “Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester,” 1862).
“Tremaux proved that the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one … a very significant advance over Darwin” (Karl Marx, in a letter to Friedrich Engels, August 7, 1866).
“The expulsion of a Leper people from Egypt, at the head of whom was an Egyptian priest named Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is also the basic type of the Jew” (Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, May 10, 1861).
“Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs, do not belong at all to the Indo-German race, but are des intrus [intruders], who must again be hurled back beyond the Dnieper, etc” (Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, June 24, 1865).
“The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way,” wrote Karl Marx, in a scarcely disguised espousal of genocide.
In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels elaborated his thoughts on the subject of race, saying “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species…. If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”
“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit,” wrote Adolph Hitler.
As one journalist recently explained it:
With the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism. Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.
Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.
Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require [i.e. force] white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”
Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.
(Source)
One of America’s greatest propagandists, Barack Obama, and his media lapdogs still tirelessly propagandizing:
I close with this data, from a non-partisan source:
Twelve cases cited by the New York Times occurred over 21 years and amount to roughly one out of every 27,000 murders committed over this period. Like the Times editorial, virtually every major media outlet repetitively focus on just a few of the 15,000 murders and 6.9 million violent crimes that are committed per year in the U.S.—particularly those with the potential to stir racial strife. The same outlets then use these cases, which amount to a minuscule fraction of all violence, to spread false, sweeping narratives.
Such journalism exploits the statistical fact that anecdotes can be highly deceitful and the psychological fact that people are easily misled by them because it’s easier to grasp stories than data. It also disregards the Times own news and editorial standards, which claim that “we tell our readers the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.”
The same Times editorial claims that “racial inequality remains rampant” in “enforcement of the law,” but the comprehensive facts of this matter reveal just the opposite. As documented in a 2018 paper in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science:
“The most common means of testing for racial disparity in police use of deadly force is to compare the odds of being fatally shot for blacks to the odds of being fatally shot for whites.”
That common approach is misleading because it uses the false assumption that white and black people commit life-threatening crimes at the same rates.The cogent way to analyze this issue is to compare the odds of being fatally shot to each race’s “involvement in those situations where the police may be more likely to use deadly force.”
Based on four different national datasets on “murder/nonnegligent manslaughter, violent crime, and weapons violations,” “in nearly every case, whites were either more likely to be fatally shot by police or police showed no significant disparity in either direction.”
And I’m not just referring to his distressingly obvious cognitive decline, nor to the allegations of voter-fraud, which are not going away any time soon.
“You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” — Joe Biden, in reference to Barack Obama
“Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.” — Joe Biden
“In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” — Joe Biden
There’s also Joe Biden’s liberal use of racial slurs and his unequivocal downplaying of civil rights as he prepared to run for president back in 1986 and in a speech to black leaders of the NAACP pushed for the group to “move beyond” busing as an issue to integrate American schools.
Remember also, clear back to 2019, when someone named Kamala Harris had the unmitigated gall to call out Joe Biden for “coddling the reputations of segregationists”? This was before she was in his hip-pocket, of course, but do you know why she said that? It was largely for Joe Biden’s unapologetic and decades-long friendships with Democrat Senator James Eastland, an arrant racist with whom Joe Biden was extremely chummy for years, as well as his famous friendship with the Republican senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond.
I will not bother to list here all the sexual harassment allegations, nor the sexual assault, nor the infamously disgusting Anita Hill debacle, which Biden led — all of which things I have very little doubt a corrupt prevaricating career politician like Joe Biden is guilty of. Why should I bother listing it all here? It doesn’t matter, unless, of course, the allegations are leveled at someone who’s not a progressive-liberal-democratic.
Nor will I delve into Joe Biden’s appalling record on LGBT issues, as documented so accurately by (for instance) Outspoken Magazine, which is a thoroughly left-wing publication.
But upon second thought, I guess I will:
In 1973, As a senator Joe Biden said gay people could not receive security clearances because they would be a “security risk.” “Biden also agreed to answer later by mail a series of questions on U.S. Civil Service and military job discrimination which Robert Vane, a gay activist, presented him. ‘My gut reaction,’ Biden told Vane, ‘is that they [homosexuals] are security risks but I must admit I haven’t given this much thought…I’ll be darned!’” according to The Morning News
As a U.S. senator, Joe Biden supported Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. In 1993, Joe Biden voted in favor of H.R. 2401 (National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1994) which codified the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy concerning gays in the military.
More than 14,500 service members were discharged from the military for violating the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy between 1994 and 2011, according to the non-profit watchdog and lobby group, the Service members Legal Defense Network.
In August 1994, Biden was one of 23 Democrats to vote for S.Amdt. 2434. The amendment “cut off federal funds to any school district that teaches acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle.” The 63-36 vote came during debate on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides $12.5 billion in federal funds to the nation’s public schools.
In 1998, Delaware Pride board member Vicki Morelli said that “none” of Delaware’s congressional delegation, including Biden, stood up for gay rights and instead stayed quiet. “They’re all good enough politicians that they know not to make hateful comments against gays, yet not to fight so vigorously for gay rights that alienate voters,” she said to The News Journal on Jul. 26, 1998.
Richard Grenell became the highest ranking openly gay federal official when he was confirmed by the Senate for the prestigious ambassadorship to Germany. He was then appointed by President Trump to serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence, the only openly gay man to serve in a presidential Cabinet. Biden never once acknowledged or congratulated Grenell on the historic appointment and the watershed moment for gay representation in government.
In 1996, the Defense Of Marriage Act defined marriage “as only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife… The measure defined marriage as between a man and a woman and allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages. Same-sex couples could not claim federal benefits,” according to PolitiFact. DOMA “amends the Federal judicial code to provide that no State, territory, or possession of the United States or Indian tribe shall be required to give effect to any marriage between persons of the same sex… Establishes a Federal definition of: (1) ‘marriage’ as only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” Biden was one of 85 senators to vote in favor.
Biden repeatedly reiterated his support for the Defense Of Marriage Act. As a senator in 2004 he stated, “This has long been a state issue, and it should remain that way.” In February 2004, Biden said he opposed President Bush’s proposed marriage amendment, but did so by describing it as unnecessary and touting his prior vote for the Defense Of Marriage Act.
“As President Bush said on a previous occasion, this issue should be left to the states. I agree. That’s why I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a ‘union between one man and one woman’ and does not require any state to recognize a same-sex union sanctioned under the laws of another state,” he said, according to The News Journal.
Later that year, Biden said, “this has long been a state issue, and it should remain that way,” according to The News Journal.
In June 2006, Biden said he did not oppose a federal marriage constitutional amendment on substance, but that he opposed “the timing” of the amendment. Appearing on Anderson Cooper 360, host John Roberts asked, “are you more against the amendment itself or the timing of it?”
“I’m against the timing of it. Look, marriage is between a man and a woman. Tell me why that has to be put in the Constitution now?” Biden said.
Biden said he did not know whether a federal marriage amendment would be “writing discrimination into the Constitution” as Mary Cheney had characterized it. “You also have Mary Cheney and Russ Feingold both saying that, to pass this amendment, would be to write discrimination into the Constitution. Is this really writing discrimination into the Constitution?” Roberts asked on Anderson Cooper 360.
“Look, I don’t — I don’t know whether it would be writing discrimination into the Constitution… marriage has always been something we left to the states… We don’t pass a federal law telling you the conditions on which you can get married, who can marry you, how you can get married.”
That same year, on Meet The Press, Biden defended DOMA once again. Host Tim Russert asked Biden, “The president used his radio address yesterday, and tomorrow in the Rose Garden, to talk about a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.”
“You know, think about this. The world’s going to Hades in a handbasket… and we’re going to debate, the next three weeks, I’m told, gay marriage, a flag amendment, and God only knows what else… We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act. We’ve all voted—not, where I’ve voted, and others have said, look, marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. Nobody’s violated that law, there’s been no challenge to that law. Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Asked at a July 2007 campaign event if “in the next five years, you’re president, do you see gay marriage in the future?” Biden responded “I don’t.” “I have to ask you this because it does affect me and my family directly” an attended asked in Iowa. “But if, in the next five years, if you’re president, do you see gay marriage in the future?” Biden responded: “I don’t. Here’s what I do see. I see an absolute guarantee of civil union with the exact same rights. Now, here’s the dilemma. Here’s the dilemma. The truth of the matter is states have made legal, through licensing, the performance of marriage what religions have essentially consecrated. That’s how they view it,” according to Fox News.
During the 2008 vice presidential debate when asked if he would support gay marriage, then-Senator Biden said “[Neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage,” referring to his running mate, according to Reuters.
At a debate that year, moderator Gwen Ifill asked Biden, “Let’s try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?”
“No,” Biden responded.
At the February 7, 2020 Democrat debates, Biden claimed “I was the first major leader holding public office to call for same sex marriage. So I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad.”
At the March 15, 2020 Democrat debate, Biden repeated the false claim that he was the first person of any administration “to go on national television” in support of gay marriage. “And by the way, I might add, I’m the first person to go on national television in any administration and say I supported gay marriage. I supported gay marriage when asked. And so it started a ripple effect.”
In 2000, vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney “spoke out in favor of gay marriage and rights.” “Dick Cheney spoke out in support of gay marriage and rights during the 2000 vice presidential debate, breaking with his running mate George W. Bush and earning the support of the progressive Human Rights Campaign.”
Multiple prominent Democrats came out in support of gay marriage long before Biden. “Beyond Cheney, many Democrats also supported gay marriage before Biden. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., opposed DOMA in 1996, when 14 senators voted against the legislation. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., supported gay marriage in 2011, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., also came out for gay marriage in 2009… before Biden,” according to Fox News.
In November 2011, Obama HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan “became the first sitting Cabinet secretary to announce support for marriage equality” nearly a half-year before Biden’s endorsement. “U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan became the first sitting cabinet secretary to announce support for marriage equality, saying on Nov. 15 that he ‘absolutely’ supports marriage equality in an exclusive interview with Metro Weekly… We’ve got more work to do in the Obama administration in a second term.’ Asked if that included marriage equality, Donovan confirmed it did, saying, ‘Like marriage equality,’” according to Metro Weekly.
In June 2011, the Obama White House was already looking at how Obama could announce support for same-sex marriage, nearly a year before Biden endorsed it. “The White House would not comment on whether Mr. Obama was ready to endorse same-sex marriage… And Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is gay, said in an interview that a top adviser to Mr. Obama, whom he would not name, asked him this year, ‘What would be the effect if he came out for same-sex marriage?’ ‘My own view is that I look at President Obama’s record, he was probably inclined to think that same-sex marriage was legitimate, but as a candidate for president in 2008 that would have been an unwise thing to say,’ Mr. Frank said,” according to The New York Times.
Biden and Obama White House aides insisted Biden did not endorse gay marriage during his 2012 Meet The Press interview. In May 2012, after Biden signaled support for same-sex marriage on Meet the Press, top Obama White House officials immediately sought to walk back Biden’s comments. “Despite his record, in several presidential debates this year, Biden questionably claimed that he was the first major political leader to support gay marriage… top Obama administration officials immediately sought to walk back Biden’s comments in the interview…‘Chaos … erupted inside the West Wing after an e-mailed transcript of the interview landed in the in-box of the White House press team,’ according to an insider account by investigative reporter Jo Becker,” reports Fox News.
Biden’s office then gave a statement to NBC saying Biden was speaking on his own, not on behalf of the administration, and that Biden “had not fully endorsed” same-sex marriage. “Biden’s office, however, would tell NBC’s Chuck Todd, shortly after the ‘Meet the Press’ interview concluded, that he was speaking on his own and not on behalf of the administration. A spokesperson for the vice president further clarified the ‘Meet the Press’ remarks, stating in part that Biden had not fully endorsed same-sex marriage… Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.’ Biden never explicitly said that he backed marriage equality, but he implied it,” according to The Huffington Post.
Biden voted for an amendment in 1993 to codify the Department Of Health And Human Services’ prohibition of the permanent immigration of HIV+ individuals. “Vote on Senator Don Nickles’ (R-OK) amendment to codify the Department of Health and Human Services’ prohibition of the permanent immigration of HIV+ individuals. The amendment passed by a vote of 76-23: R 42-1, D 34-22. The Human Rights Campaign opposed this amendment.
Biden claimed he was “ambivalent on the issue” but voted for the amendment, saying the issue was “bigger than whether HIV should be on the list or off the list.” According to The Washington Times on Feb. 19, 1993, “Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, said he was ambivalent on the issue but ultimately sided against Mr. Clinton. ‘One side of me says just let the public health officials make the decision, and both Republican and Democratic officials have agreed on it [to drop the ban],’ he said. ‘But it seems to me the policy is bigger than whether HIV should be on the list or off the list.’”
The Obama-Biden administration spent two years crafting the Iran Nuclear Deal that eased sanctions on the Iranian regime and allowed the nation to enrich uranium and plutonium that could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Iran is one of eight nations that puts homosexuals to death and one of 69 nations where homosexuality is criminalized. A year after the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Obama-Biden administration secretly sent $400 million in cash to the Iranian government. The Trump administration withdrew from the Iranian Nuclear Deal. Biden says he will reinstate the deal if elected president.
“Former Vice President Joe Biden, for one, has said he will return to the agreement only once Iran is in compliance. But he’s also pledged to find a way to ‘strengthen and extend it.’ A senior Biden campaign adviser said the former vice president knows a lot can change by 2021, but he sees pledging a return to the 2015 agreement as, among other things, an important signal to send to U.S. allies in Europe who are furious over Trump’s abandonment,” according to Politico.
(Link to Outspoken Magazine whose work here is accurate and important.)
There’s also Joe Biden (and Barack Obama’s) sickening “War-On-Drugs” — Biden, as you of course know was the driving force behind the so-called Drug Czar — and (like Obama) is directly responsible for the mass incarceration and destruction of countless innocent lives, many minorities among them, costing American taxpayers 182 billion annually, all because of this utterly pointless war-on-drugs (so-called) and the belief in this mythical thing known as a victimless crime.
And so it goes, the propaganda machines rolling on and on and on …
The term methodological individualism was coined by the Austrian economist and historian Joseph Schumpeter, who also, incidentally, coined the term creative destruction, in reference to the “gales of innovation” which freedom of exchange unleashes.
Methodological individualism is another way of saying individualistic method. Both terms denote “a principle of explanation, in which the individual human being serves as the basic and most fundamental unit of analysis in the social sciences.”
A social system is a system of individual relationships.
All actions are performed by individuals.
The individualistic method — or methodological individualism, if you prefer — does not, however, claim that only individual human beings are real and that social phenomena do not exist. It holds, rather, that each individual human being is alone able to think, feel, and act.
Methodological individualism rests upon the principle that the relevant object of political and ethical inquiry are the individual human beings in question, as distinguished from a society, race, class, sex, or any other group. Quoting Karl Popper:
“[Social phenomena] should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. of human individuals, and we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.).”
The reason this principle is so critical to ground in the facts that give rise to it (and to thereafter deeply defend) is that any other view of humanity — which is to say, any view that doesn’t recognize the individual as the proper standard by which societies are gauged and maintained — results in command and control: other humans, purveyors of force, seizing control over other individual human lives.
Individualism has always been mischaracterized by critics, most of whom to this day charge it with treating individuals as “a hermetically sealed atom” — atomistic, is their word for it — isolated, shut off, cut off, uninfluenced by others.
This very mischaracterization underpins J.K. Galbraith’s ersatz demonstration in his obscenely influential book, from 1958, The Affluent Society. Galbraith’s arguments are to this day deployed routinely — despite the thorough debunkings a number of Galbraith’s fellow economists and philosophers have given his arguments.
As Friedrich Hayek famously explained it in his devastating critique of The Affluent Society:
Professor Galbraith’s argument could be easily employed, without any change of the essential terms, to demonstrate the worthlessness of literature or any other form of art. Surely an individual’s want for literature is not original with himself in the sense that he would experience it if literature were not produced. Does this then mean that the production of literature cannot be defended as satisfying a want because it is only the production which provokes the demand? (Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,'” in Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University of Chicago Press, 1967).
Economic theory is not built or based upon the unintelligible notion that each individual person arrives at her or his values in a vortex — some metaphysically impossible place sealed-off from all other human action and interaction — and the fact that this is how critics characterize individualism tells you how little they themselves understand the term. Human choices do not occur in a vacuum.
Of course individuals learn from one another — especially in a free society: learn from, influence, build upon, reciprocate, and so on — and we do so as individual humans acting voluntarily.
This is good, and it is healthy.
It does not, as J.K. Galbraith proposes, invalidate individual choice, neither does it make values “artificial and illegitimate.” On the contrary, it makes all choice and valuing possible.
Because valuing is choice.
Read more:
The early reviews have been wonderful.
It was toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and absturse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disuputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrorte philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequences of this general indifference.
— The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980)
Chapter 32
The power of ideas and the supreme role of ideas in human existence can be seen no more starkly than in the fact that people subscribe to them without any hesitation, wavering, or scruples.
Societies are the result of human action, human action the result of ideologies.
As the Czeslaw Milosz passage which I quote at the top of this chapter captures so perfectly, societies and any concrete order of social affairs are the direct outcome of ideas.
Ideas have consequences, whether for good or for ill.
The following is a real-life illustration — writ sickeningly large — of what can happen when the idea of individuality, individualism, and independent thinking are not regarded as primary but replaced instead with the ideology of egalitarianism by force:
When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they did so with the intention of obliterating its hierarchical political culture in order to reconstruct Cambodian society from ground zero as the world’s most egalitarian, and therefore revolutionary social order.
That passage comes from historian Karl Jackson, in a heartbreaking book, published by Princeton Press, called Cambodia 1975 – 1978. In this book, Jackson describes the Khmer Rouge (which was the name of the socialist-communist-Marxist party that took over Cambodia in the mid-1970’s) as “sectarians and radical egalitarians [who] saw the diversity and differences between people as the root of all evil.”
This, extrapolated and elaborated from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was the ideology. It was led by a cult-of-personality named Pol Pot, Western educated, who was also the architect of the Killing Fields – a seemingly incomprehensible genocide where Cambodian cities were systematically depopulated and the entire Cambodian population enslaved on collective farms with a horrifyingly draconian ideology-of-equality imposed upon all.
“Typically, the slightest dissent would be punished by the offender getting clubbed or starved to death, and so many Cambodians were dispatched by such methods (approximately 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 according to one estimate) that fields filled with corpses became the macabre hallmark of the regime” (Ibid).
From the Journal of Asian Studies (1998):
“First, they tried to eliminate the use of linguistic registers that connoted kinship, age and other social differences. The word comrade, mitt, was suppose to replace titles, honorifics and even kin terms. Second, many non-verbal cues that connoted status, such as polite greeting forms and bending down before superiors, were also discouraged.”
A historian by the name of Jay Jordens writes that the “Khmer Rouge realized Buddhism was at the core of Khmer ideas of social hierarchy. Thus by abolishing religion and destroying all vestiges of Buddhism; monks, texts, images, rituals, and so on, they might destroy the moral underpinnings of the beliefs in ‘unequal souls'” (Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia, 1996).
And from the website Asia Pacific Curriculum:
By 1977, the distrust on the part of the leadership had reached paranoiac heights and the purges of suspected traitors increased. Even the ranks of the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were purged, sending increasingly larger numbers of them and their families to prisons where they were tortured and then murdered. The most notorious of these prisons was S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. Out of an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were sent to S-21, only seven survived.
Prisoners housed there were photographed and tortured to produce confessions. When the interrogators were finished, the prisoners’ corpses were carried by truck to the “killing fields” outside of Phnom Penh. There are approximately 20,000 of these mass graves in various locations in the country.
The relatively short time that Pol Pot ruled — approximately four years — was a living nightmare. An estimated one-quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. I ask you to please pause for a moment and process that.
The Cambodian people who survived survived only on “a ladle of watery rice gruel a day.” They were forced into back-breaking labor most of their waking hours – separated from their families (families do not matter in the Communist ideology, if you don’t know, since all humans are comrades equally — loved equally, and it’s supposedly reciprocal — your parents the same as the parents of others whom you’ve never seen in your life and who did not raise you).
Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported for even minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”
And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.
Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities. Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry. Virtually the entire population worked on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government couldn’t force people into instant expertise and the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into agriculture.
In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet he and his genocidal regime nevertheless stand out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioners of their ideology, which regards individual human life as a non-existent phenomena, and therefore unimportant, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a murderous contempt and disregard for individual human life:
“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”
The Khmer Rouge is among the most ghastly of proofs you will ever read about regarding the paramount role of ideas in human life.
For those who harangue and harass me and others like me for our defending individuality and individual rights, please read deeply about Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge — their annihilation of individual rights, individuality, and independent thinking — read what it led to in Cambodia.
As Vincent Cook expressed it so well:
Mass death is certainly no stranger to Communism. Even today a terrible famine stalks North Korea to remind us of the lethal nature of Marxism. However, Pol Pot has earned a special place in the history of Marxian Communism as his Khmer Rouge earned the special distinction of being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.
Most Marxists would recoil at the suggestion that Pol Pot is the logical conclusion of their social philosophy, yet any honest assessment of Marx’s theory cannot conceal the fact that the radical egalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge is precisely what Marx predicted would be the ultimate culmination of all human history. It must be clearly kept in mind that industrial socialism, as it was known in the former Soviet Union and other mainstream Marxist states, is not the endpoint of Marx’s philosophy of history. In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.
Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.
It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem, as it’s known, seems downright minor even though it’s not: simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.
“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).
Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.
Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nature itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which come about through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), they began evacuating Phnom Penh. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.
“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook also wrote, and he’s right:
“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”
There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time passes — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment or rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites and ideologically bankrupt intellectuals explicitly calling for Communism and telling us, as a “reminder,” that “Communism is good.” These people and their mindset need to be ideologically exposed and defeated — routed — on the battleground of ideas, because the truth is that when the facts are made clear and the philosophies presented in full, without any equivocation, circumlocution, jargon, or obfuscation, they don’t even have an argument, and so they don’t stand a chance. Nobody has a right to the life or labor of another human being.
The Cambodian Killing Fields should stand eternally as horrific and twisted reminder of the philosophy of egalitarianism, and the human race should never forget that any minister of force preaching the egalitarian doctrine-of-envy is the direct descendent and ideological disciple of Pol Pot.
This is excerpted from Chapter 25 of my forthcoming.
Chapter 25
Howard Zinn, who was not a historian, is the author of a cultic classic called A People’s History of the United States, which is a tour-de-force of historical misinformation, sloppy scholarship, and outright prevarications. This perhaps partially explains why on the subject of history and the role of the historian Howard Zinn once wrote:
“History is not about understanding the past [but about] changing the future.”
I know of no serious historian who would agree with that statement, which strikes me now as a pretty good definition of propaganda.
Given that Howard Zinn was not, by any reasonable standard imaginable, an actual historian, it is more than a little paradoxical, then, that this same Howard Zinn authored a book entitled A People’s History of the United States, which is now a staple in American colleges and high-schools and junior-high-schools all across the country, and for which reason I’m including a mention of it here, in this book: because prevarications and misinformation on this level, influencing countless young minds, must be countered relentlessly, forcefully, intellectually, factually.
It is, for example, a poorly known fact that Howard Zinn – who grew fabulously wealthy in the United States he hated: rich and famous here because people willingly and voluntarily paid him money in exchange for his book of misinformation (a process I fully support, incidentally, caveat emptor), loading him up with the dollar bills he claimed to hate, via the laissez-faire system he explicitly antipathized (Howard Zinn was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of the United States [CPUSA], though never, to my knowledge, allowed his money to in any way be expropriated and redistributed, as the CPUSA dictates would have it), who, indeed, never left the America he hated so much, dying here, an old man, famous and venerable, in 2010 – was a vocal defender of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and also the Mao Zedong-era China:
“China,” wrote Howard Zinn, in A People’s History, “was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control” — this in praise of Chairman Mao, the murderer, who has the blood of approximately 100 million on his hands. (Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, who also propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khemer Rouge, called Mao’s China “a just society,” and, perhaps anticipating the locavore fad we’re now enjoying, also described Mao’s blood-red China as “a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level.”)
I want to at this point remind all readers and respectfully ask readers never to forget that Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were, in terms of sheer numbers of people killed, two of the most murderous tyrants in world history.
It is a poorly known fact, as well, that Howard Zinn was a huge supporter of the homophobic dictator Fidel Castro who, wrote Howard Zinn, “set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Zinn unfortunately neglects to even mention, let alone elaborate upon, Castro’s decades and decades of systematic repression, the forced international isolation, the horrific poverty created and fostered by him, the grinding oppression, and of course the mass executions of regime opponents, intellectuals, journalists, and homosexuals.
Why does Howard Zinn neglect to mention all of that?
To ask the question is, I believe, to answer it.
In the opening of his bestselling book A People’s History, Howard Zinn begins with this description of Christopher Columbus:
“So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians…. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.”
Here is how Hans Koning described Christopher Columbus, in a book titled Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, which appeared the year before Howard Zinn’s book was published:
“The population were Arawak Indians … a people who had developed agriculture (corn, yams, cassava), who could spin and weave, but had no iron, no horses, no beasts of burden…. Their society seems to have been based on village communes where most property was jointly held…. Some of these people wore little gold ornaments in their ears and noses.”
Neither Koning’s book nor Zinn’s book cite any sources, which is unheard of for a work of history which purports to contain authentic scholarship, and neither men were, I repeat, actual historians.
Here, however, is the main thing I wish to point out now.
Among the most famous passages in all of Howard Zinn’s literature is the opening paragraph of A People’s History, wherein readers are treated to a loose transcription of Christopher Columbus’s log (or diary). Zinn’s transcription, which is again following the lead of Hans Koning’s description in the book that appeared just the year before Zinn’s, introduces passages with leading sentences and then, in an appalling display of academic dishonesty, omits full sentences — at which point proceeding to quote completely out of context and striking out all passages from Columbus’s log that controvert his pre-formulated genocidal narrative.
Christopher Columbus, whatever you think you know of him, wasn’t, for the record, guilty of genocide.
In his log entry for October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote:
“I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange.”
Both Howard Zinn and Hans Koning completely omitted this passage.
But the worst is still to come.
In the same paragraph of A People’s History — the opening paragraph — Howard Zinn, purporting to transcribe Columbus’s log, writes the following. I’m quoting Howard Zinn precisely – and by that I mean I’m including Zinn’s crucial use of ellipses:
“They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
That is, I say again, an exact quote from Chapter 1, paragraph 1, of A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. This passage has been cited countless times over the years and decades, and it’s not a stretch to say that this Howard Zinn passage has had and continues to have real societal ramifications.
It is a total deception and fraud.
Please look now at what Howard Zinn omitted, without any mention of omitting it, and look what he replaced with ellipses. I quote from Christopher Columbus’s log:
“I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”
This translation comes from a well-known scholar named Robert Henderson Fuson – perhaps the most widely used translation of Columbus’s logs – who explains this passage further:
“The cultural unity of the Taino” (a more specific name of the tribe which Zinn calls the Arawaks [something like “Native American Indians” verus “Apache Indians”]) “greatly impressed Columbus. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occured to Samuel Eliot Morison (among many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made [in his logs], theorizing that the people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.”
The boldface emphasis is mine.
Zinn’s use of ellipses between the sentences “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” is in actuality Zinn’s linking together two sentences which are not even in the same paragraph.
As a matter of fact, they’re not even in the same entry date in Christopher Columbus’s log. They’re two days apart.
The truth is that Christopher Columbus, who was a devout Catholic at a time when Spain was under Muslim siege – the Muslims had long-ago conquered the Iberian Penisula, and 1492 was the very year that the crucial battle of Granada occurred – the truth, I repeat, is that Christopher Columbus, who was no saint or angel, but a soldier, sailor, and missionary, was driven to save Christianity. He therefore made it his mission to counter Muslim conquest and to, in turn, spread Christianity in order to combat Muslim rule.
Christopher Columbus was a man motivated, like all missionaries, by his drive to convert people to his faith. Which is why Christopher Columbus also wrote in his log, about these same natives – and this is something else you find nowhere mentioned in any of Howard Zinn’s literature:
“I want the natives to develop a friendsly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”
Howard Zinn’s famous passage is outrageously deceptive in its selective quoting, and Howard Zinn, who has influenced so many millions of young minds, is arrantly guilty of context-dropping and academic fraud – omissions which are crafted precisely to convince all readers that Christopher Columbus had no care or concern for the physical or mental well-being of the natives but was only driven by “a frenzy for gold,” as Zinn says, which then led Columbus to enslave the natives for profit – when, that is, he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs, since they could not supply him with vast treasures of gold, from mines which existed only Columbus’s imagination.
Howard Zinn writes:
“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”
In response to which, the anthropologist Carol Delaney, also translator of Columbus’s logs, writes this:
“Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.”
In reference to Columbus’s October 12, 1492, entry, Carol Delany writes this:
“In my first reading of the diary I could not understand why he seemed so driven to find gold. But this understanding changes when one realizes that finding the gold was necessary not only to repay the people who had invested in the voyage (and to induce them to finance another), [but was also] essential if he was ever to finance another Crusade. Today, we might disapprove of that motive, but at the time [when the Moors were taking over, with extreme force and violence, much of Europe] it was felt to be a worthwhile and Christian duty.”
Carol Delany says this as well:
“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”
The natives also gave back plenty of diseases to the Europeans.
It is also a fact that Christopher Columbus never owned a slave.
It is a fact that Christopher Columbus adopted an indigenous child and made this child his son, and Howard Zinn does not mention this.
It is a fact that Christopher Columbus did not commit genocide.
I’m no zealous admirer of Christopher Columbus, nor am I his defender. That is not my primary point here. I believe in accuracy and historical truth, of which Howard Zinn and his detestable book make a mockery, and that — historical truth and historical accuracy — is what I seek to defend.
The fact is that Howard Zinn’s gurus Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh have far more blood on their hands than Christopher Columbus ever did, and I will leave you with a quote from an excellent historian named Oscar Handlin, of Havard University, who’s meticulous in his research and mind-spinningly well-read, and who in 1980 reviewed Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, before Zinn’s book developed its cultic and slavish following:
It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.
Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980.
As many among us stated in the beginning: absent a cure or vaccination, you simply cannot stop the spread of any coronavirus or rhinovirus, novel or non-novel.
Nor does the virus get bored or tired and so move on to another planet. This is why I’m posting a recent thread I read (click on each image to enlarge):
I agree with every significant point Doctor James Todaro makes here.
Reader, no matter how silly and nonsensical you or I may find a given idea or ideology, so long as you and I are silent and unwilling (or unable) to counter these ideas and ideologies — relentlessly, thoroughly, forcefully, intellectually counter and refute them — we all remain vulnerable to the spread of these ideologies, which are far more dangerous than any coronavirus conceivable, no matter how ridiculous and nonsensical these ideas actually are at their root.
Why do I say so?
Because thoroughly examining, analyzing, and thinking through the nature of ideas and ideologies requires a great deal of effort, a continual effort, which is precisely what most among the general population are unwilling to do, and because the politico-economic ramifications are never the cause but the effect — merely the end result and consequences of the spread of these bad ideas, which are philosophical in their provenance and as such begin in the minds of individual human beings, who then write them down and teach them, and in this way these ideas spread through the halls of higher education and into homes and across airwaves, the majority of people accepting them by default as much as by anything: because a thorough counter and refutation would require a great deal of time and effort and thought.
Thus do ideas and ideologies — no matter how bad, ridiculous, or nonsensical they actually are — propagate and spread like mushrooms.
Yet at the foundation of every philosophical idea, there is a cogent issue — cogent in the sense that there is an authentic need within the human mind: a need which some ideas strive genuinely to clarify and other ideas strive genuinely to confuse.
The fight for ideas is in this way a fight for human consciousness and clarity therein — a fight for the human mind at large, no matter the race, sex, sexual-orientation, gender, color, or any other non-essential characteristic of the humans involved — and the ideas which prevail determine the society in which we all will live.
Human society, always remember, is a product of human action, and human action is shaped and directed by ideas. Thus society and any concrete order of social affairs are the direct result and outcome of ideas.
Human societies would not exist without social cooperation.
Ultimately, there are only two possible types of social cooperation:
There is cooperation by means of voluntary choice and coordination — which precisely because it is voluntary may be accurately called contractual — and there is cooperation by means of coercion, command, and subjugation.
To the extent that societies are formed by means of voluntary agreement and cooperation, the logical relationship between individuals in this cooperative society remains symmetrical: they are all parties to interpersonal exchange contracts. Jane has the same relation to Jennifer as Jennifer has to Jane.
To the extent that societies are forged in coercion, compulsion, or subjugation, there is one who commands, and then there are those who obey these commands. The logical relations between these two classes is asymmetrical: there is the one in power, and there are the people under the subjugation of that power, and it is the powerful who choose and direct action, while the others — the wards — live and act as mere pawns under the will of any given leader’s fingers.
The power that calls into life and animates any social body is always ideological might, and the thing which makes an individual a part of any society is always her or his own conduct.
What differentiates the coercive bond from the voluntary-contractual bond is, to a precisely proportionate extent, the scope in which the choices of the individuals can legitimately shape and determine the course of events.
Whether the director is an individual or an organized group of individuals and whether the director is a manaical tyrant or a good-hearted paternal despot is of no fundamental relevance for the structure of the whole system. The whole point here is to specify that there are, in the final analysis, only two possible types of social cooperation: voluntary and coercive.
Wrote Friedrich August von Hayek.
The distinction between these two types has also been made by many other thinkers throughout history: for instance, Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1789), called it “a contrast between warlike nations and commercial nations.”
Saint Simon described it as “the contrast of pugnacious nations against peaceful or industrial nations.”
Herbert Spencer — a human being of utter (if inconsistent) genius, in my opinion — in his voluminous Principle of Sociology (1914), described it as “a contrast of individual freedom and those of a militant structure.”
Werner Sombart depicted it as “heroes versus peddlers.”
And Ludwig von Mises:
“The state as an apparatus of compulsion and coercion is by necessity a hegemonic organization … [whereas] the characteristic feature of peaceful civilization is the voluntary-contractual structure proper to human cooperation.”
Voluntary human action, which includes the process of voluntary exchange and freedom of association, is not a “zero-sum game,” as you’ve been told, nor is it a “win-lose” arrangement, as you’ve also had hammered into your head. Neither does the introduction of money as a medium which facilitates the process of exchange alter this bedrock fact.
Peaceful societies and peaceful cooperation are only possible under voluntary-contractual organization, and “human civilization as it has been hitherto known to historical experience is preponderantly a product of contractual relations,” as von Mises also wrote. He then continued:
“Where there are violent conflicts and as far as there are such conflicts, there is neither cooperation nor societal bonds. Those political parties which in their eagerness to substitute the coercive system for the contractual system point at the rottenness of peace and of bourgeois security, extol the moral nobility of violence and bloodshed and praise war and revolution as eminently naturel methods of interhuman relations, but here they contradict themselves. For their own utopias are designed as realms of peace. The Reich of the Nazis and the commonwealth of the Marxians are planned as societies of undisturbed peace. They are to be created by pacification – i.e., the violent subjection of all those not ready to yield without resistance. In a contractual world, various states can quietly coexist. In a coercive, hegemonic world there is no possibility of this: there only can be one Reich or commonwealth and only one ruler. Socialism must choose between a renunciation of the advantages of division of labor encompassing the whole earth and all peoples and the establishment of a world-embracing coercive order. It is this fact that made Russian Bolshevism, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism “dynamic” – i.e. aggressive. Under voluntary, contractual conditions, empires are quietly dissolved into a loose league of autonomous member nations. The hegemonic system is bound to strive after the annexation and forceful usurping of all independent states.
“The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under the rule of law as differentiated from the welfare state or paternal states. Right (as law) is the complex of rules which specify, sanction, and determine the orbit in which individuals are free to act. No such orbit is left to wards who live under a coercive regime of power. In such a state, there is no right or right law. There are only directives and regulations which the director may change daily and apply with what discrimination he or she pleases and which the wards must obey” (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action).
There is no type of freedom and liberty except the type which voluntary action and voluntary exchange brings about. In a totalitarian society, the only freedom that is left to the individual, because it cannot be denied to him or her, is the freedom to obey or not obey.
The heartbreaking truth about human enslavement is that it’s existed across all races and all major cultures, and it has existed since the dawn of humankind: Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Jewish, African, Asian, European, Mayan, Aztec, and countless others.
As long as there have been human beings, there have also been purveyors of force enslaving their fellow human beings. And please make no mistake: slavery is purely a product of force and violence.
In the words of an erudite Carribean scholar named Orlando Patterson, who happens to be black and yet who has none of the present-day pusillanimous illusions about slavery’s widespread history:
“Slavery is preeminently a relationship of power and dominion originating in and sustained by violence.”
The unspeakably barbaric practice of slavery is not, I do repeat and emphasize and will continue to repeat and emphasize, confined to a particular race, racial type, tribe, group, or biochemical pedigree. No major culture is exempt. The abomination of slavery is an immoral practice of which all races, at one time or another, are guilty, and slavery predates every single one of the world’s major religions, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
All this is a matter of basic historical fact.
Not only has slavery existed on every inhabited continent of planet earth, but it was, for thousands and thousands of years, up until only recently, thoroughly commonplace. Please note also that in what is now termed the United States of America, slavery existed “long before Christopher Columbus’s ships appeared on the horizon,” and “slavery and slave-trading prevailed among African peoples since prehistoric times” (Dr. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities).
The word “slave” itself is a deriviative of the word “Slav” – as in Slavic people – and do you know why?
Because the Slavic people were enslaved on such a gigantic scale for so long – both by their fellow Europeans and also by the Ottomans – so gigantic a scale that the word “Slav” soon become synonymous with “slave.” In the late 18th century, Adam Smith accurately chronicled and condemned these very acts of slavery, which still existed in Adam Smith’s lifetime: specifically, in Poland, Hungary, and Russia.
Our current atrocity exhibition which is better known as postmodern multicultural revisionist history isn’t quite foolish enough to deny that slavery existed in Africa — where, I say again, it is also ancient, as it is ancient among every race and pedigree — though this same current postmodern multicultural revisionist atrocity exhibition would now have you believe that slavery in Africa was a less brutal form of force and subjugation: a less repugnant slavery, as it were, a more benign enactment and manifestation of this abhorrence.
This postmodern revisionism is absolute nonsense, utterly false.
“The paternalistic arrangments were at one of a spectrum which included brutal subjugation and even using slaves as human sacrifices” wrote Thomas Sowell. “Africans were for millennia used as plantation slaves in Egypt, Sudan, Zanzibar, and many other countries, and the number of people enslaved within Africa itself exceeded the numbers exported” (Ibid).
Powerful tribes, moreover, like the Bantu and the Yao, routinely enslaved members of weaker tribes, and the Ashanti and the Fanti tribes later became inland suppliers for the European slave-traders who, for fear of violence as well as disease, were loath to enter Africa’s interior.
Here, too, is something else you will under no circumstances be taught or told concerning the monstrous injustice and immoral institution of slavery:
Precisely because slavery in Africa was indigenous and entrenched, the African slaveholders found it very simple indeed to cooperate with Islamic slave-traders and European slave-traders. Why, specifically? Because, in essence, these tribal African chiefs were relocating their fellow African human beings, whom they’d already enslaved. So entrenched had this practice become on the continent of Africa that when Western societies like Great Britain and the United States began, at last, legally abolishing slavery “tribal leaders in Gambia, Congo, Dahomey, and other African nations, which had prospered under the slave trade, sent delegations to London and Paris to vigorously protest the abolition of slavery” (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death).
Furthermore, in the late 18th century, when, in Sierra Leone, certain British attempted the establishment of a safe African haven for freed slaves, these same British were frequently defeated by hostile indigenous African tribes who attacked, slaughtered, and enslaved the British settlers.
In Liberia, as well, later attempts by Americans for this same sort of safe haven resulted in similar violence.
Slavery, never forget (and please never underestimate the significance of this), originates in and is sustained by the initiation of force and violence.
Which is precisely why in order for slavery to exist and persist on any sort of widespread scale, legal sanction is required.
I urge all readers to process that — and so I’ll say it again:
Slavery requires legal sanction in order to exist.
The inexpressible injustice of slavery – which is the most blatant and sustained form of individual-rights violation imaginable – cannot survive its legal repeal.
It is precisely for this reason an absolutely incredible phenomena that the overwhelming statist element of slavery is almost never explicitly named or identified.
Why is it almost never named or identified?
Even more baffling: why is the one and only true and fullproof inoculation against slavery – historically and also philosophically – why is it completely ignored, even into the present-day, while at the same time racism and authoritarian brutality are at the forefront of present-day society?
The one and only true and foolproof inoculation I speak of is a principle called individual rights, which entails a limited government that protects against the initiation of force – legally banning its instigation – and whose moral-philosophical base is rooted in the recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and property, and only that.
If you truly want, as I do, and as I have fought for all my adult life – losing many people in the process whom I thought were friends – if, I repeat, you truly want to rid the world of all slavery and racism and discrimination, there is only one way: the full recognition of and the total and legal implementation of individual rights – in every arena of human life, economic and political.
So I ask again: why is this principle, which is the only solution to all forms of slavery, racism, and discrimination, completely ignored?
Why in colleges and schools across the entire world is there universal condemnation of the 250 years of American slavery – which, like all slavery throughout all human history, should indeed be absolutely condemned and never forgotten – and yet no significant mention of the fact that the abolitionist movement which eventually won out was grounded in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century, and that Great Britain and then America were the first to formally, legally abolish this monstrous injustice, America even going to war over it – a war in which hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans (all races, all colors, all sexes) died?
Why no discussion of these facts?
Why no discussion, either, of the irrefutable fact that only in the Europe and North America of that era did advanced thinkers – all sexes, all racial pedigrees – begin to at last assail, philosophically, decisively, once and for all, the horrors and injustices underpinning the entire theory of slavery?
Why no talk of the fact that only in the Europe and North America of that era was there an express intellectual intention of expunging the horrific theory that undergirded the legal sanction of human bondage, which sanction and which theory had, up until the Western Enlightenment, existed for all human history, across all inhabited continents, among all racial groups?
Why no credit given to the fact that this express intellectual intention of pure determination and philosophical power is what ultimately won out and succeeded?
Why? I ask again.
Why?
Montesquieu, in his brilliant The Spirit of Laws, was among the very first to voice uncompromising, articulate, and thorough opposition to the practice of human bondage – arguing, as he did, that slavery is “evil by its very nature … as corrupting for the master quite as much as for the slave.”
Of Montesquieu, the even more articulate and brilliant Voltaire said this:
“If anyone has ever battled to restore liberty, the right of nature, to slaves of all kinds, surely it was Montesquieu. He pitted reason and humanity against all kinds of slavery.”
Reason is the faculty for the integration of knowledge, which all individual human beings possess.
Wrote Spinoza.
This faculty, which all indivdual human beings indeed possess, is precisely the thing that today’s so-called racial theorists want you to reject.
They are emphatic that you reject it, in fact, because their entire theory crumbles into dust if individuality and the corollary faculty of reason exists – apart from race, sex, sexual-orientation, gender, biochemical pedigree – which it does.
This is precisely why you are now told that individuality is largely a myth, that humans have no significant idenity apart from the race, tribe, sex, gender, or group which begot them – that racism is something of which only white people are capable – and that to protest this undeniable fact is merely a sign of your “fragility” precisely because you are white and thus fragile perforce.
Do you know what this sort of obvious fallacy is called? It’s called a Kafka-trap – and it is a fallacy of the most puerile sort. Do you know what you do with Kafka-traps? You pitilessly crush them under your boot, and then you consign them to the only place they could conceivably belong: the dustbin of human knowledge.
I ask you to consider the following:
Even if you agree with #BlackLivesMatter, take one look at their proposed solutions to societal ills.
What will you see?
You will see garden-variety neo-marxism: a select bureau of supposed enlightened planners and leaders who alone are qualified to determine for the rest of us how we must conduct our lives.
This deadly doctrine can play out in no other way than it’s always played out.
Racial theory, Marxist to the hilt, loathes individualism. Racial theory therefore explicitly calls into question the entire notion of individuality.
“Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in which we live,” writes Robin DiAngelo, a total lightweight intellectually, an abomination who hates laissez-faire yet charges approximately $6000.00 per hour to lecture white people, many of whom own corporations and are quite wealthy, on their inescapable sins of whiteness. Robin DiAngelo further exhorts readers “to let go of your individual narrative and grapple with the collective messages we all receive as members of a larger shared culture.”
Uh, okay.
Reader, even if you think that’s good advice – and I hope to hell you don’t – it is crucial that you recognize the insurmountable fatal flaw in this (non) argument and all other arguments of this sort: if human knowledge is not shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human mind – regardless of race, sex, gender, pedigree, et cetera – but rather predetermined through “socialization,” as racial theory insists, this by necessity includes, as well, the assertions made by all racial theorists: their purported knowledge is not shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human mind, which operates by means of reason, but rather is determined and predetermined by so-called “socialization.”
Thus, there is and can be no standard or reason for us to think their assertions more accurate than the assertions of anyone else, including (for instance) Donald Trump. You see? You cannot use reason, even in faulty form, to prove that reason is impotent. It contradicts itself at the very outset.
One might also, of course, point out, purely for posterity sake, that “people of privilege” – and this must include, for example, black leaders in Africa, or Latin plutocrats in South America, and so on – are right, rather than wrong, in their authoritarianism, and thus that fragility is not a central concept in addressing racism, as Robin DiAngelo (et al) argues that it is. Or, in other words, by her own (postmodern) standards, there is no way here to determine accurate from inaccurate.
No matter how trendy it is to hate America, one should not ever, in the interest of truth and accuracy at the very least, neglect to mention the full context of the facts — as, for this same reason, you should not ever forget either all the Native American Indians who owned slaves — whether Cherokee, Comanche, Muskogee, Apache, Osage, or any of the others. Nor of course should you forget to discuss the black people in America who also owned slaves.
Most important of all, one shouldn’t ever (and I mean ever) neglect to categorically condemn the many races and governments who right now legally sanction, support, and still practice slavery.
One should, moreover, condemn these barbarous institutions unflinchingly, as one should equally condemn the regimes who enforce and uphold these institutions, irrespective of the color, class, creed, nationality, or race of those in power. Because humans are fundamentally defined not by race or blood or nationality, but by individuation and the rational faculty, and this is precisely why the enslavement of any other human being by any other human being, totally apart from race, is a moral crime.
I ask all progressives the wide-world over to condemn these current slave-practicing regimes now — I demand it, in fact — and I demand also, for the sake of justice and accuracy, that progressives the wide-world over condemn these regimes with an even greater fervor than the fervor exhibited in the hatred and fractional history given about America, which abolished slavery through a principle so powerful that this principle alone must always be returned to if full freedom is the goal, which it is.
I look forward to a loud and unapologetic denunciation and condemnation of (for instance) Libya, North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, all of which countries indeed still practice slavery on a widespread scale right now.
Here is a small sampling of what I mean:
There are 167 countries that still have slavery, affecting about 46 million people.
While over a hundred countries still have slavery, six countries have significantly higher numbers:
India (18.4 million)
China (3.4 million)
Pakistan (2.1 million)
Bangladesh (1.5 million)
Uzbekistan (1.2 million)
North Korea (1.1 million)
India has the highest number of slaves in the world at 18.4 million slaves. This number is higher than the population of the Netherlands and is approximately 1.4% of India’s entire population. All forms of modern slavery exist in India, including forced child labor, forced marriage, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups.
China has the second-highest number of slaves at 3.4 million, which is less than a quarter of India’s.
Other countries that have significantly high slave populations are Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan.
(Link)
Condemn these regimes now, I ask again, for precisely the same reasons you condemn America for her past — a past which America was among the first to correct, and which she did on philosophical grounds — but in addition I also ask this: condemn them with far greater passion since these regimes still continue to practice the heinous, immoral, barbaric institution of human enslavement, and since they still, in the present-day, continue to ignore individual human rights.
Condemn also these present-day slavers and their horrific regimes-of-power, so often Marxist or Neo-Marxist — and do so with the same or greater conviction that you condemn America and the west.
I will close with an open question to all progressives:
What do you regard as the more important issue: the mascot name of an American football team? Or the Marxist regimes in our present day enslaving over 25 million of our fellow human beings — and this includes forced marriage, forced child labor, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups?
Which?
Will you condemn as well, with equal passion, the Native American tribes and the Asians and Indians and all the other people and races who’ve fully sanctioned and practiced slavery since the dawn of humankind, as every major civilization in human history has?
Will you?
Or will you only condemn America?
Today is the 90th birthday of the American economist Dr. Thomas Sowell — a true genius and independent-thinker, who’s been an inspiration to me for a long time, and from whom I’ve learned a great deal. I sincerely believe that it has never been more important to read and understand Thomas Sowell.
In his autobiography — A Personal Odyssey — Thomas Sowell writes that as a young student, while getting his economics degrees, he was, like most economists of that time, a devoted Marxist, but that in conducting deep and unflinching studies of the effects of bureaucracy and any number of government interventions, including minimum wage laws, Native American Indian Reservations and the disastrous housing projects, the data led him to an inescapable and overwhelming conclusion: freedom and voluntary exchange promotes prosperity among human beings; governments and their bureaus and their endless taxation schemes do nothing but hamper human prosperity.
As the economist Richard Eblieng put it:
“Thomas Sowell soon found that the people planning, guiding, and administrating the regulatory and welfare state had self-interested goals and purposes that often had little or nothing to do with actually improving the circumstances of those for whom such legislation supposedly had been passed. Usually very much to the contrary.”
In his book Knowledge and Decisions Thomas Sowell says it this way:
“Historically, freedom is a rare and fragile thing . . . Freedom has cost the blood of millions in obscure places and in historic sites ranging from Gettysburg to the Gulag Archipelago…. That something which costs so much in human lives should be surrendered piecemeal in exchange for rhetoric and vague visions of the future seems grotesque. Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. Above all, it is the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.”
On questions of race, racism, rights, justice, so-called social justice and so on, Thomas Sowell and his literature has stood monolithic, an irrefutable force, with reams of hard data which no academic professor of whom I’m aware has ever seriously attempted to refute in full. (Most timely now: Black Rednecks & White Liberals and Discrimination & Disparities.)
Thomas Sowell reminds us over and over how unique America was in its foundational principle — the principle of individual rights: the only country in the history of the world ever explicitly founded on this principle, and which, even when horrifyingly breached at different periods in American history, nevertheless remains the principle that must necessarily be returned to — a self-correcting sort of principle — if, that is, true political-economic freedom for each and every individual is the goal, which for him and for me it is.
In so much of his literature also, he reminds us how justice as that term was originally and constitutionally conceived meant the impartial enforcement of the rule of law, in which the rule of law referred to the protection of individual liberty, private property, and freedom of association and contract, as well as the freedom of each to pursue her or his own individual happiness. The law, in turn, was meant to represent the rules within which free people may voluntarily act and interact, without interference from the government or other criminals and agents of force.
Thomas Sowell disclosed as well, in devastating detail, that in the 20th century the quest for redistributive or “outcome” justice has sought to replace the true conception of justice — saying that most people are, in actuality, not overly concerned in their day-to-day lives with whether “Joe has earned more than Samuel,” as long as there is a general sense that their relative incomes have been acquired honestly and without favors, privileges, and political corruption. It is the self-appointed elites for whom this issue predominantly matters.
Thomas Sowell also documents in detail the horrific consequences which have followed and must inevitably follow when intellectual elites seek to replace individual choice and voluntary exchange with their elitist social-engineering schemes: individual autonomy stripped, private lives transferred to government, voluntary exchange replaced by state coercion, even while more and more political schemes are continuously implemented in the futile attempt to mend the multitude of problems the original schemes created — and all “with little or no thought to the cost in terms of either material standards of living or their impact on the actual human beings who must serve as the manipulated ingredients for these redistributive recipes…. It is this freedom that is being threatened in America and the world in general by those who, like the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, continue to claim that everything is permitted to them in the pursuit of making us and our world over into their utopian image of how they think we all should be.”
In Thomas Sowell’s view, the primary problem with the social engineer can be found in the fact that the social engineer wishes to treat people as blank slates upon which the central-planner and her committee can imprint any desired behavioral qualities the said planner deems best. If individual human beings don’t conform to this planner’s preferred forms of behavior, it must mean that evil agents are at work against the government, and governmental force thereby justified.
Perhaps most controversially of all, Thomas Sowell showed in clear and cogent terms that what often passes for “black culture” in the United States, with its particular language, customs, behavioral characteristics, and attitudes toward work and leisure, is in fact a collection of traits adopted from earlier white southern culture.
[Sowell] traces this culture to several generations of mostly Scotsmen and northern Englishmen who migrated to many of the southern American colonies in the 18th century. The outstanding features of this redneck culture, or “cracker” culture as it was called in Great Britain at that time, included “an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and abeyant imagery.” It also included “touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization….
In spite of racial prejudice and legal discrimination, especially in the southern states, by the middle decades of the 20th century a growing number of black Americans were slowly but surely catching up with white Americans in terms of education, skills, and income. One of the great perversities of the second part of the 20th century, Sowell showed, is that this advancement decelerated following the enactment of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, with the accompanying affirmative action and emphasis on respecting the “diversity” of black culture. This has delayed the movement of more black Americans into the mainstream under the false belief that “black culture” is somehow distinct and unique, when in reality it is the residue of an earlier failed white culture that retarded the south for almost 200 years (Link).
And — brace yourself — this:
Sowell also says much about how the institution of human bondage is far older than the experience of black enslavement in colonial and then independent America. Indeed, slavery has burdened the human race during all of recorded history and everywhere around the globe. Its origins and practice have had nothing to do with race or racism. Ancient Greeks enslaved other Greeks; Romans enslaved other Europeans; Asians enslaved Asians; and Africans enslaved Africans, just as the Aztecs enslaved other native groups in what we now call Mexico and Central America. Among the most prominent slave traders and slave owners up to our own time have been Arabs, who enslaved Europeans, Africans, and Asians. In fact, while officially banned, it is an open secret that such slavery still exists in a number of Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Equally ignored, Sowell reminds us, is that it was only in the West that slavery was challenged on philosophical and political grounds, and that antislavery efforts became a mass movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery was first ended in the European countries, and then Western pressure in the 19th and 20th centuries brought about its demise in most of the rest of the world. But this fact has been downplayed because it does not fit into the politically correct fashions of our time. It is significant that in 1984, on the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the British Empire, there was virtually no celebration of what was a profound historical turning point in bringing this terrible institution to a close around the world (Ibid).
For his lifelong heterodoxy and intransigent independence-of-thought, Thomas Sowell has been smeared by the left — the academics, in particular — as he’s also been vilified, antipathized, demonized, anathematized. Yet his theses have not been refuted or overcome — and for one simple reason above all the others: his ideas are largely right, and the ideas of his enemies are largely wrong.
Because the freedom of each individual — irrespective of race or skin color, sex or gender — is timeless.
On the merits of his arguments and for his articulateness in expressing these arguments — his power to bring complex ideas down to the level of complete comprehensibility — and his accumulation of hard factual data, Thomas Sowell is a total testament to the superiority of individual autonomy, liberty, and voluntary exchange.
On a separate but related note, a man by the name of Kash Lee Kelly — biracial — recently made a remarkable video in which he said the following:
“Black lives matter will come out and start a race war, but they won’t come out and deal with our race.”
Not long ago, The Longevity Project, which studied over 1000 people from youth to death, loosely confirmed, among many other things, what for many seems a fairly obvious truth — namely:
“The groups and people with whom you most closely associate determine the type of person you yourself become.”
I believe Kash Lee Kelly grasps the truth of this — whether explicitly or implicitly — which I also believe is the reason he’s able to articulate so perfectly why he himself does not care to associate with #BlackLivesMatter. This perhaps explains as well how he’s able to see past the tremendous amounts of pressure and hype, the emotional noise, and in spite of it all, spot the Neo-Marixst egalitarian-tribalism of today’s left, which categorically denies the primacy of the individual — specifically, I mean, in grasping how this ideology leads to mindlessness and groupthink.
Protest injustice, yes, protest authoritarianism and racism — protest it at the top of your lungs — any and all forms of it, and I will protest alongside you. But under no circumstances ally yourself with any organization or group which would replace injustice with more injustice — or with a mutated form of the injustice that the protests were initially protesting against.
Do not align yourself with any gang, group, clique, cult, tribe, party, et cetera, which in the name of reparations or anything else, would subordinate one group of individuals to another — and I’m referring here most specifically to the deep and disturbing anti-semitic strain which caused the Women’s March to implode, and the leaders of which, many of them, are now leaders and manifesto-writers for Black Lives Matter:
Know this as well:
Not wanting to be robbed or raped is not a “privilege.”
Indeed, the whole concept of “privilege” — and I implore you to consider this — has been twisted so tortuously by the postmodern intellectual elites that most people now using this term have replaced the (legitimate) word “rights” with it.
All humans, in other words, have the absolute right not to be raped and robbed — of this I assure you.
To call this a “privilege” is to invite psychological-epistemological chaos — which is to say: it is to confuse thought, since all humans, no matter the race, sex, gender, or any other non-essential, think by means of language. Proper definitions are therefore the first-line of defense against mental disintegration, because in identifying and denoting the essence of what is, proper definitions foster and facilitate understanding, comprehension, apprehension, which is how humans live and prosper.
I can absolutely assure you also that in conflating a “privilege” with a “right,” one is dealing with much more than mere semantics:
This is an epistemic error the ramifications of which are, in the larger context of what gives rise to it, a kind of indoctrination.
“First, confuse the vocabulary.”
Do you think I exaggerate or overstate?
Then don’t read the Seattle rioters’ list of demands — which explicitly call for yet another socialist utopia, believing, like countless socialists before them, that this alone will provide the exultant cure to the dark racist empire’s perilous ills by featuring a new 21st century era of censorship and segregation:
Or this:
Or this:
Or this:
Or this:
Or this:
That provides just a small glimpse into why this strain of today’s leftist ideology will, like the Women’s March (and for the exact same reasons), implode: because it’s philosophically bankrupt.
The collateral damage here will be all the well-meaning people appalled, like so many of us, by blatant brutality — brutality against any individual human being — and who, for lack of a better alternative, aligned themselves with this corrosive ideology, which, you may depend upon it, will not survive, thanks to the overtly racist, tribalistic, anti-individualistic (non)thought-leaders of today’s left.
Thomas Sowell, ninety years young today, is an antidote.
