Closed Ecosystem 2

This is a post from October 2016 which I thought timely today and a followup to my A Closed Ecosystem post from October 2020.  It was originally published under the title, "Is Dean Baquet Dumb?".  On reflection I don't think that's the problem, though Baquet is not as smart as he thinks he is.  The problem is he lives in an echo chamber where the people he knows just repeat the same things to each other so often they think it must be true (an example of this phenomenon can be found in this Congressional committee interview of a former Obama administration official who, in 2017, went on MSNBC to proclaim, presumably with some authority given her background, regarding Trump's collusion with the Kremlin.  When asked about what she knew, it turned out zero, but she assumed it was true from what she read in the press!)

I'm serious.  Dean Baquet is the editor of the New York Times.  I've often been critical of the Times because of the paper's bias, as well as the general incompetence and credulous nature of its reporters.   But I've just read an interview with Baquet by Ken Doctor of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard that's left me wondering if Baquet is ignorant or whether he just lives in a bubble where people say the same nonsense to each other over and over again until it becomes accepted as the truth.  I was alerted to the interview by an article at Powerline but found their summary so startling that I was unwilling to accept it as accurate until reading the interview myself.

("Stop me if you've heard this before", Dean Baquet from Nieman Lab) 

Two factual assertions Baquet references in the course of the interview raise the question of how smart he actually is.  The first is this comment:

The dirty secret of news organizations — and I think this is part of a story of what happened with Bush and the Iraq war — [is that] newspaper reporters and newspapers describe the world we live in. We really can be a little bit patriotic without knowing it. We actually tend to believe what politicians tell us — which is a flaw, by the way. I’m not saying that with pride. 

The lesson of the Iraq war, which I think started us down this track, was that I don’t think people really believed that the administration would actually lie about the WMDs, or that they would say the stuff so forcefully. 

Who really believed that Colin Powell would get up in front of the United Nations, a guy who was known for integrity? I think that was a shock to the system.

Ah, the old Bush lied gambit!  Except we now know that is not true, as every investigation, even by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, concluded President Bush did not lie about the intelligence and, as we know from the Dueffler Report on the interrogations of Saddam's military leaders and cabinet officials, they also thought Iraq had WMDs.  The question of lying is separate and distinct from whether Bush's decision on going to war was correct and about the competency of his plans for its conduct and the aftermath.  On those issues, I think him a failure and he deserves plenty of blame, though also some credit for ultimately deciding to proceed with the Surge, which President Obama cited in 2011 for bringing the security and stability to Iraq that enabled him to withdraw American forces.  What Baquet repeats is simply a Progressive talking point without a shred of actual factual support.  It's a myth.  This is from a journalist?
 
And remember Joe Wilson, of the "missing 16 words" and Valerie Plame fame, who became a Democratic hero for claiming the Bush Administration lied about Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons (the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Wilson was the one lying)?  Less well known is that Wilson gave a talk in 2002, opposing the planned invasion, in part on the grounds that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons that would inflict enormous casualties on American soldiers (Al Gore took the same position).  I guess everyone lied.

The second is this passage:

I was either editor or managing editor of the L.A. Times during the Swift Boat Incident.  Newspapers did not know — we did not quite know how to do it. I remember struggling with the reporter,  Jim Rainey, who covers the media now, trying to get him to write the paragraph that laid out why the Swift Boat allegation was false…We didn’t know how to write the paragraph that said, “This is just false.”

For those of you who may not remember, the "Swift Boat Incident" was, in their view, the slandering of Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record during the 2004 campaign.  If you notice, Baquet refers to it as an "allegation".  In the preferred liberal summary, the Incident was about mischaracterization of Kerry's record as a Swift Boat commander during the war and the awarding of his combat medals.  In reality, the television ads by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth focused primarily on Kerry's treasonous actions in carrying out secret negotiations with the communist government of North Vietnam and in denouncing his fellow soldiers for atrocities in front of the U.S. Congress, a denunciation used by the communists as justification for torturing American POWs.  All of this is completely true.

A secondary theme was an attack on Kerry's claim, made on the floor of the Senate, that he spent Christmas on his Swift Boat in Cambodia, in what would have been an illegal incursion at the time, a demonstrably false claim.  The final claim was that his actions in combat were not deserving of his medals and that he had manipulated the system to obtain them.  This claim is controversial and the only one in which the Veteran's group which may not be accurate (unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on this topic focuses almost exclusively on this last point and is very one-sided).

When YouTube first became available several years ago, I went back and found the original Swiftboat ads.  Unfortunately, they are not all still available but my fragmentary notes indicate that six of them focused on Kerry's post service actions - negotiating with the enemy, his Congressional testimony and throwing the ribbons from his medals away in a protest.  Two others and part of a third dealt with his Christmas in Cambodia fabrication and one part of one raised the question of the validity of his medals.  I view all except the last as fair game. 

The Swift Boat Veterans were a coalition of two groups.  The first were POWs, held in North Vietnam under brutal conditions, who deeply resented John Kerry's support for the enemy.  The second were members of the Swift Boat unit who had served with, before or after Kerry.  The leader of the second group was John E O'Neill, who had debated Kerry on the Vietnam War back in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show.  I happened to see O'Neill on C-Span during the 2004 campaign.  In response to a question he referred to President Bush as "an empty suit".  This was always about John Kerry, not Bush.

By mischaracterizing the substance of the Swiftboat attacks and turning them into merely a dirty political tactic, Democrats and their media accomplices sought to avoid dealing with the substance raised by the ads; Kerry's statements after his service disparaging the U.S and his fellow servicemen and the question of why so many people disliked the man.  I was still reading the Times back then and the Swift Boat ads were out there for weeks before the paper wrote a word about them, apparently because it wasawaiting instructions from the Kerry campaign about what to respond.  The Times finally printed a front page story presenting the Kerry campaign response, but omitting a full explanation of what the controversy was about it must have been very baffling for many readers.  In any event, Baquet appears to have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

Strangely enough, during the 2004 campaign there was an incident that really was what Democrats call Swifboating; the attempted smear of George W Bush by 60 Minutes and Dan Rather over his service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) during the Vietnam War.  You want to know how bad TANG was?  Let's do a thought experiment.

Brett Hume at Fox News reports a story a few weeks before the 2004 election, claiming John Kerry got his Vietnam War medals under false pretenses as a way to get sent home early from the war and avoid further combat because he was a coward.

Hume's main source for the story is a Republican politician in Massachusetts who is also a Vice-Chair for the Bush reelection committee, a fact not disclosed in the story.

The politician's daughter has denounced his story about Kerry as a lie, but this does not appear in the story.

No one who actually served with Kerry confirms the story.

Brett Hume's son has been working on fundraisers for the Republican party in Massachusetts.

The Fox News producer of the segment knows beforehand that the charges of cowardice were false and that Kerry volunteered to remain in Vietnam.

Before the segment aired, the Fox News producer calls the Bush campaign to give them a heads up that it would be running.

And, most importantly of all, it turns out the key document, supposedly created in 1973, is of doubtful provenance, with the person providing it to Fox giving three different stories of how he obtained it and then turns out it was created with the 2003 version of Microsoft Word!

Everything I've just outlined is accurate except for substituting Fox for CBS, Kerry for Bush, and changing the circumstances slightly to match Kerry's history.  How do you think the New York Times would have covered this story?   We would have never heard the end of it and TANGing would now be a common term for disreputable political smear campaigns.

I've come to expect "Bush lied" and accusations of "Swiftboating" from people who don't know much.  I didn't expect the editor of the New York Times would be one of them.  He seems like someone with very little intellectual curiosity.

ADDED: Baquet was to carry his conceit further when, after Donald Trump's election in 2016 he announced to readers of the Times that the paper would lie to them about the incoming President in order to topple him and reverse the results of the election.

ADDED:  And we have further evidence of the degradation of journalism with the recent announcement by the University of Texas School of Journalism that it had created the Dan Rather Awards for News and Guts in order to honor the newsman responsible for the 60 Minutes hoax regarding George W Bush and the Texas Air National Guard.

Insularity

Insularity: ignorance of or lack of interest in cultures, ideas, or peoples outside one's own experience.

 

I like to occasionally read The Ringer, the Bill Simmons founded website featuring sports and pop culture.  I particularly like the sports coverage, find the pop culture stories sometimes interesting.  The Ringer every once in a while carries articles on politics which inevitably are Progressive-oriented, unable to fathom why anyone not a racist is not a Progressive, and exhibiting an invincible ignorance of basic facts and history.  I now know to avoid reading the overtly political articles but those attitudes can creep into their other posts.

A few days ago The Ringer ran a piece by Matthew Sigur on Chris Stapleton's new album, Starting Over.  I like Stapleton's music, read the article and came across this passage:

He’s no politician, and he doesn’t have all the answers. However, when asked about topics like gun violence, lack of care for U.S. veterans, or supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, Stapleton won’t back down from his beliefs.

“I’m for love, kindness, equality, being good to good people,” he says. “Some things don’t register to me if it’s against humanity.”

What is that supposed to be telling me?  I think in the context of the first paragraph, Sigur is signaling that Stapleton is on the right side of social justice and wokeness.  But look again at the quote from Stapleton and you can read it as merely asserting truisms that most people believe.  I certainly support love, kindness, equality and being good to good people, - it's how I try to live my life - but if you read this blog you know what I also think about social justice and wokeness.

Let's look more closely at that first paragraph, to what Sigur considers "topics".

The first is "gun violence" which is more a slogan than a topic.  I'm against violence in civilian life unless it is in self-defense.  I think most people are, regardless of their views about the "gun violence" or the Second Amendment.  I gather "gun violence" are Progressive code words for a grab bag of government actions they advocate but in and of itself the phrase is empty of substantive content.

"Lack of care for U.S. veterans".  All those in support of lack of care for veterans, please raise your hands.  I thought so.

And now we come to "supporting the Black Lives Matter movement".  That's where Stapleton's brilliant response comes into play.  It looks like Sigur takes it as supporting BLM.  But BLM explicitly opposes equality as well as love and kindness outside of a specific racial context, and denies our common humanity.  My guess is that Sigur, like many liberals or Progressives who don't pay close attention to substance, does not understand this about BLM.  I read Stapleton's response as very clever at not saying anything controversial.

What is most illuminating is that Sigur thinks believing in love, kindness, equality and being good to good people are characteristics exclusively of those on the Left.

That got me thinking of something else that's been bugging me.  On our recent two month trip back East we saw a lot of lawn signs like this:

“IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER / WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS / NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL / SCIENCE IS REAL / LOVE IS LOVE / KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING”

They are often accompanied by Hate Has No Home Here and Biden/Harris signs.

But I was left scratching my head.  It appeared to be signaling that the posters were claiming something in defiance of the ignorant and bigoted types who don't believe.  But what the heck do these slogans mean? 

I think there are few people who don't think that Black Lives Matter, but I would ask those with the signs, if someone says, "All Lives Matter" should they be fired from their job, told to shut up, or be considered racist?  And do the posters actually support the entire platform of the Black Lives Matter organization which endorses, among other things, elimination of the nuclear family?

"Women's Rights Are Human Rights".  I believe in equality under the law but what, specifically is this supposed to mean?  As it stands it's just a meaningless statement.

"No Human Is Illegal".  Huh?  Is this an awkward way of saying they support open borders?  Do they believe humans can commit illegal acts? 

"Science Is Real".  Now there's a really controversial statement!  Having read enough Progressive tropes on this subject they think this is a shot at the ignorant non-Progressives who they think don't believe in science.  But even Progressives don't actually believe that slogan.  Ideologues like science that supports their views and dislikes science that does not and that's true across the political spectrum.  Doubt it?  Have a discussion with a Progressive about evolutionary biology and you'll be called transphobic or sexist, they'll go after your job, and try to deplatform you.  The people most likely to employ this slogan actually don't really know the science involved at any depth beyond sloganeering.  Want to talk the science, technology and data on climate change?  That's a topic I know a lot about and most of those who recite "Science is real" don't - just ask them some questions; trust me.

But there is a bigger problem with "Science is Real".  Those using the slogan also like to assert they will "follow the science" (see, for instance, Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo), with the pretense that science can provide the solution to complicated societal issues without political input.  But while science can inform us, it does not dictate solutions in a political context - those solutions depend on the values we bring to the decision making.  Take Covid.  What are the types of expertise you need to decide what is the best course for a society?  It is not exclusively public health experts; it's why there is such discussion and disagreement about the true costs of lockdowns.  Are we just trying to prevent, or delay, or end the diseases?  What are the costs of each strategy in doing so?  Moreover, as we've seen with Covid, even public health experts do not agree, there is actually no such thing as one certain thing the science tells us. And let's look at the track record here - public health experts opposed travel bans, told us for two months that non-medical personnel wearing masks was stupid and useless, banned private efforts to develop Covid tests, saying "we've got this", and more recently told us that a Covid immunity shield descended on those demonstrating and rioting in favor of causes supported by public health officials.

Science is important.  I'm an analytical type and don't like it when Left or Right jumps right over analysis to advocacy.  More worrying is seeing more and more scientists doing the same.  A final example - science can tell us, and has told us, a lot more in recent years about fetuses but it can only inform, not answer, the moral questions and competing values around abortion.  

"Love Is Love".  I'm on board for that!  Though I suspect there is a secret decoder ring subtext I am missing.

"Kindness Is Everything".  That's a demonstrably false statement.  This is something way beyond generally taking an approach of kindness or, as Chris Stapleton put it, "being good to good people". It's actually quite simpleminded if taken literally and I am confident if you probe poster attitudes on political topics you'll find they don't believe it either.  And you can't support the goals of the Black Lives Matter organization and also believe "kindness is everything".

In the instances described above we see insularity in action.  Progressive sloganeering that actually doesn't make much sense deployed against non-Progressive strawmen that exist in their minds, but not in real life.

As for me, I'll roll with this lawn sign:

Righteous Acts

The Trump administration has recently taken four important actions confronting the scourge of racial discrimination and stereotyping underlying Critical Race Theory and embraced by the advocates of Woke theology (for more on the dangers posed by CRT read other posts in the Your Future series). They are the cornerstones of a strong Federal response to CRT and are certain to be immediately undone if Joe Biden is elected.

The first is the investigation of Princeton University by the Department of Education based upon the admission by its President that it is a racist institution, and therefore possibly acting in contravention of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Second, the Department of Justice lawsuit against Yale University for its alleged discriminatory admission practices, also in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

But it is the next two that are, by far, the most important:

On September 4, Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a directive banning Critical Race training in the Federal government. This followed the revelation that such training has infiltrated the federal bureaucracy in recent years.

Vought's letter states:

"These types of 'trainings' not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce. We can be proud that as an employer, the Federal government has employees of all race, ethnicities, and religions."

Banned is:

". . . any training on 'critical race theory', 'white privilege', or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil." 

The final act is the Executive Order (EO) issued by President Trump on September 22 banning Critical Race Theory training by Federal contractors and grantees, an EO impacting a wide array of institutions from business corporations doing business with the government to colleges and universities which receive federal grants (the details of the EO can be found at the end of this post).

Democrats and their media allies have falsely and repeatedly claimed that this EO bans diversity training. This is a lie.

To the contrary, the order explicitly:

 . . .  does not prevent agencies, the United States Uniformed Services, or contractors from promoting racial, cultural, or ethnic diversity or inclusiveness, provided such efforts are consistent with the requirements of this order.

Moreover it allows for academic discussion of Critical Race Theory, providing:

Nothing in this order shall be construed to prohibit discussing, as part of a larger course of academic instruction, the divisive concepts listed in section 2(a) of this order in an objective manner and without endorsement.

It is a moral disgrace that 56 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, large parts of the academy, media, and one of our political parties have embraced this doctrine (the tipoff is anyone invoking the term "systemic racism" supports CRT) and that such an Executive Order is needed. 

As progressive Zaid Jilani has noted:

The portion of people who view their race as defining them declined a lot during the 20th century, coinciding with a big decline in implicit and explicit bias. These folks really looked at that and said we want to crank it up again?

And beyond just the effect on race relations, CRT is a reactionary doctrine that would reverse the Enlightenment and take us back to an era of tribalism and clans, set at each others throats.

Keeping the United States together, a nation of 330 million with diverse ideas and backgrounds is not easy. CRT is not only designed to make it harder to keep our country together but it is opposed to the idea of "neutral processes". Neutral process is the idea that our government institutions and judicial processes will strive to have processes that work equally for all parties. It means that no actions or elections are irreversible or should be events posing an existential threat to any American citizen. In reality, no processes are perfect, or perfectly neutral, but being able to assure some basic level of adherence to these processes is essential in the trust needed to maintain a democratic republic.

CRT rejects the concept of neutral processes, believing that all institutions are based on racial group-centered power hierarchies and that is all there is. There are no real ideas as such, there are no differing individual perspectives. The only question is who is on top of the hierarchy and those are top are entitled to wield power in any way they believe is justified. It is why if CRT advocates control our culture they would have no hesitation in banning any dissenting views, openly endorsing repression. My principles when I was a liberal democrat and today include freedom of speech freedom of conscience, and due process and equality under the law. It turns out that for many who professed the same beliefs it was merely a tactical move. An America where CRT holds sway in government and our institutions will be transformed into an unrecognizable country.

Or, as Frank Hebert wrote in Children of Dune:

When I am Weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom because that is according to my principles.

And, once again, in a Biden Administration these actions will be immediately reversed. My guess is Biden does not understand what CRT really is, but those around him surely do, as will the thousands of Democrats appointed to political positions in the Federal bureaucracy in a Biden administration, and the progressive trained judges appointed by Biden (or Harris).

As a palette cleanser let's close with the UK Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, blasting CRT.

The EO is titled, Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.  In the preamble, after discussing the creed expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the sentiments of President Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr regarding equality and the worth of the individual, it goes on to say:

Today, however, many people are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual. This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.

This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world. Although presented as new and revolutionary, they resurrect the discredited notions of the nineteenth century’s apologists for slavery who, like President Lincoln’s rival Stephen A. Douglas, maintained that our government “was made on the white basis” “by white men, for the benefit of white men.” Our Founding documents rejected these racialized views of America, which were soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War. Yet they are now being repackaged and sold as cutting-edge insights. They are designed to divide us and to prevent us from uniting as one people in pursuit of one common destiny for our great country.

It then cites several recent examples of training in this pernicious doctrine:

Training materials from Argonne National Laboratories, a Federal entity, stated that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America” and described statements like “color blindness” and the “meritocracy” as “actions of bias.”

Materials from Sandia National Laboratories, also a Federal entity, for non-minority males stated that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white male[s],” and asked those present to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.

A Smithsonian Institution museum graphic recently claimed that concepts like “[o]bjective, rational linear thinking,” “[h]ard work” being “the key to success,” the “nuclear family,” and belief in a single god are not values that unite Americans of all races but are instead “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.” The museum also stated that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear.”

The preamble concludes:

Therefore, it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce or in the Uniformed Services, and not to allow grant funds to be used for these purposes. In addition, Federal contractors will not be permitted to inculcate such views in their employees.

Banned are nine types of "divisive concepts":

(1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; 

(2) the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist; 

(3) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; 

(4) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; 

(5) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; 

(6) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; 

(7) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; 

(8) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or

(9) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race. The term “divisive concepts” also includes any other form of race or sex stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating. 

"Race or sex stereotyping" is defined as:

. . . ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of his or her race or sex.

"Race or sex scapegoating" is defined as:

. . . assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex. It similarly encompasses any claim that, consciously or unconsciously, and by virtue of his or her race or sex, members of any race are inherently racist or are inherently inclined to oppress others, or that members of a sex are inherently sexist or inclined to oppress others.

The EO also directs the Attorney General to:

. . .  continue to assess the extent to which workplace training that teaches the divisive concepts set forth in section 2(a) of this order may contribute to a hostile work environment and give rise to potential liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . .

What Free Speech Depends On

Excellent point by Greg Lukianoff, CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

"We kid ourselves if we believe our legal freedoms will survive if our free speech culture is undermined by the institutions entrusted to educate future citizens, leaders, lawyers, and judges."

With Woke ideology dominating our educational institutions we are well on the way there which is why dismantling their power base is so important.  Being a lawyer by training I am well acquainted with the de-evolution of law schools into social justice factories where the right result, as defined by Progressive ideology, is more important than the neutral application of legal principles I learned.  Part of that package is a devaluation of rights of free speech, free conscience and access to equal protection under the laws if they are claimed by the "wrong" people.  It is why the philosophy of the "living constitution" is so attractive to identitarians, because it unmoors the document from any attempt to connect it to the political thought of the late 18th century men who wrote and ratified it and makes judges into just another legislative branch in which they rule based upon policy preferences.

The current four liberal Supreme Court justices look like moderates compared to the wave of lower Federal Court judges installed during the Obama Administration who've been marinated in the identitarian Progressive philosophy of law and who do not support the free speech culture we operated under for much of the 20th century,

The Present Danger

In his new newsletter, Andrew Sullivan, a liberal recently purged from New York Magazine for insufficient Wokeness, provides the best short explanation of the theory threatening liberal democracy.  It's in the form of a review of the soon to be released book by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories.

It is worth reading every word of Sullivan's piece The Roots Of Wokeness.  Some excerpts:

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining.

We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.

After all, the core truth of our condition, this theory argues, is that we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss.

And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

Truth is always and only a function of power. So, for example, science has no claim on objective truth, because science itself is a cultural construct, created out of power differentials, set up by white cis straight males. And the systems of thought that white cis straight men have historically set up—like liberalism itself—perpetuate themselves, and are passed along unwittingly by people who simply respond to the incentives and traditions of thought that make up the entire power-system, without being aware of it.

What matters is a diversity of identities that can all express the same idea: that liberalism is a con-job. Which is why almost every NYT op-ed now and almost every left-leaning magazine reads exactly alike.

Becoming “woke” to these power dynamics alters your perspective of reality. And so our unprecedentedly multicultural, and multiracial democracy is now described as a mere front for “white supremacy"

The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. 

The fight against Wokeness will not be easy as it has infiltrated many of our institutions in academia, government, media and the corporate world.  While I'd been aware of these pernicious doctrine in higher education until recently I'd not realized the extent it has become part of K-12 education in recent years.  Rooting it, and its practictioners, out of these institutions is essential, particularly in education, and we will face much resistance.

Your Future 4: It's Never Good Enough

New York Times classical music critic: "blind auditions" put into place in the classical music world during the 1970s to ensure musicians were selected on merit, not on race, gender or ethnicity, should be banned because orchestras are not still not diverse enough and, as a remedy, quotas instituted based on race, gender and ethnicity.

The Real Cost

While coordinating its messaging about "mostly peaceful protests" in the wake of George Floyd's death, the media has deliberately ignored the massive destruction of livelihoods and the continuing violence (including large increases in shootings) ignited in its aftermath.  It has "privileged" the narrative of white and black radicals over that of the suffering of so many of our fellow Americans in those communities most impacted by the protests.

Progressive writer Michael Tracey has been traveling the country, documenting the impact of the "peaceful protests" in cities and towns nationwide with articles, interviews and photos on his twitter feed and in this article from Medium.  He finds the scale of destruction and the impact on lives to be truly terrible and only being covered in some local outlets while being suppressed by the national media. For his efforts he is being denounced by other progressives.  From Medium:

We are now approaching the two-month mark since the riots that erupted across the United States in late May and early June. There is a reasonable argument to be made that these riots were unprecedented in U.S. history — or at the very least, since the 1960s. Yet if one surveyed the national media today, you’d barely even know anything happened. Nor would you likely be aware that those who bore the brunt of the destruction — largely minorities whose sensibilities don’t fit into any neatly-delineated ideological category — are still acutely suffering from the fallout.

So many of the people I’ve encountered across the country were perfectly happy to talk about their experiences in the last two months, although many did not want to go on-record for understandable reasons. Still, there would be plenty of fodder here for heart-felt retrospective specials on CNN or in the New York Times magazine about the impact of these historic riots — and yet no such coverage has been forthcoming. It’s quite a puzzle.

Of the dozens and dozens of randomly-selected black Americans that I have so far spoken to across the United States, only two expressed what one might call a “positive” view of the riots, and they were both young men. Everyone else I have encountered is unabashedly scornful of rioting, and many even express apprehensions about the basic logic of a movement referred to as “Black Lives Matter,” which incongruously appears to them to have caused increased suffering in their predominantly black neighborhoods.

Once again the most vulnerable in our society are paying the price but apparently one acceptable to white and black radicals.   The media, academics, NGOs and their wealthy funders don't care either.  As Kevin Williamson noted in a June 17 column, The Revolution Comforts The Comfortable:

There is no revolution in these United States by the poor and the excluded against the rich and the powerful. Instead, there is a civil war among certain members of the broad affluent class against the adjacent affluent cohorts. There is no hatred in this world quite like the hatred of a $100,000-a-year man for a $200,000-a-year man, except maybe the hatred of a $200,000-a-year man for a $200,002-a-year man.

It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. 

George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white.

Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds.  

And meanwhile the lives documented by Tracey have been altered, in some cases irrevocably and none of the insane ravings of the Woke will change that. 

The Woke Temple

I've been recommending James Lindsay's New Discourses for those interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the perverse world of academic Critical Race Theory and Social Justice, but realize his work and that of his collaborators can be quite dense at times, simply because the theories they are trying to explain are so bizarre and illogical sounding to sane people.

For a shorter course I suggest the twitter account of The Woke Temple, which conveys an accurate sense of the distorted thinking these damaged people are using to inflict on our society.  Woke Temple uses a lot of graphics and you may be tempted to think they are parodies of Wokeness but they are all sourced to the actual literature.

Here's your mini-course:


<

White Fragility says:

Racism is occurring in this interaction. [p80]

The doctor has a “deeply internalized sense of superiority to Blacks that he is unaware of or can’t admit”. [p1]

“Anti-Blackness is the foundation of his identity as a white person”. [p90]

🤔🤨😩😠😡🤢🤮🤮🤮 https://t.co/FCEKEmBjuF

— The Woke Temple (@WokeTemple) July 27, 2020

Worst of all, they don't know the history of baseball!


uh-oh!


An argumentative technique used over and over again by the Woke:

The New Leninists

Woke progressive thought, Social Justice, and Critical Race Theory are related to traditional Marxism and communism but they are not quite the same thing.  Marxism is purely materialistic and while elements of the current movement are also, the Woke are primarily focused on achieving the cultural hegemony first championed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who originated the concept of "the march through the institutions".   Unlike Marxism, with its class focus, the current movement uses race (with other strains emphasizing gender) for its societal analytical purposes.  In that regard the current moment in America is as if the Weather Underground terrorists of the 1970s, who advocated violent revolution, justified the murder of Robert Kennedy because he voted to sell military jets to the Jews in Israel, and celebrated the Manson murders, were now running the New York Times and the Democratic Party.  The Weathermen split from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) because they rejected the traditional Marxist class analysis, instead placing their hopes on an alliance with revolutionary black groups (for more on the Weathermen read The Company You Keep).

However, both movements share a disdain for democratic institutions that allow for a variety of viewpoints and permit the possibility of the dominant viewpoint being changed by the electoral process.

I was struck by this common viewpoint when recently reading the testimony of Daniel Tobin, Faculty Member, China Studies, National Intelligence University (NIU) to U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on March 13, 2020.  The NIU was formerly known as the National Defense Intelligence College and the Joint Military Intelligence College, and is a federally chartered research university in Bethesda, Maryland.  The Commission was created by Congress and its members are appointed by the Senate and House of Representatives majority and minority members.

Tobin's testimony is valuable and insightful regarding the long-term aims of the current regime in Beijing and it has certainly influenced my thinking.  His analysis is quite different from what is normally seen and demonstrates an unusual and in-depth acquaintance with party documents often not examined by Westerners.

In the context of our current American crisis, it was this passage that demonstrated common themes in the views of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Woke Progressives.  Just substitute the references to "class" with those of "race", if you are Woke make inoperative the references to "scientific" since that is a concept linked to White Supremacy, and share the horror both movements share regarding any dissent.

To begin, the Party's values, rooted in Marxism-Leninism, offer a view of politics incompatible with values of the United States and its allies.  In the Free World today, we see individual people as ends and believe liberty is worth prioritizing, even if it makes political decisions more difficult and costly and even if at times works against our collective security.

Leninism, by contrast, makes individuals into means toward the achievement of collective ends.  For Beijing, as for Lenin, collective material welfare ("common prosperity" in the Party's contemporary official lexicon) rather than political freedom is the criteria by which it judges success.

Lenin saw democratic institutions as mere tools of oppressive class interests and the democratic process as a mask for the class interests of the group in power.  He advocated instead rule by a single Party governing on the basis of its scientific deduction of the laws of history.

Beijing today continues to argue that the Party, representing the Chinese people's interests as a whole, is a bulwark against the particular interests that capture the political process in liberal democracies.  For the Party's leaders, the dictatorship remains justified by the need to repress the enemies of the Chinese people's collective interests.  Worse, since Leninism defines the Party's ideas and decisions as "scientific" and "correct", for Beijing dissent is not the legitimate expression of individual interests or those of a specific sub-group but rather sabotage of the Party's collective, nation-building effort.  It is not political participation but state subversion.

The difference between the CCP and the Woke is that the CCP uses a very structured planning process that gets into the details of implementation and execution of policy.  It is extremely disciplined.  Woke on the other hand, is very good, because of its origins, in deconstructing reason and institutions, but is incoherent as a consistent ideological path to the future, and resists detailed planning, relying instead on sloganeering as its end point.

Should the CCP and Woke ever come into conflict, the former, with its discipline, planning, and ruthlessness, will prevail.

Rhetorical Tricks: It's Always About America

Recent events have prompted me to go back and republish some pieces I wrote several years ago that relate to our current crisis.  This is from five years ago when I noticed President Obama using a rhetorical trick that, until then, I'd only seen employed in the academic world and which turns out to be a precursor to today's Woke speech.  It's no accident - at Harvard Law School Obama was friends with Professor Derrick Bell, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, the plague now spreading hate and divisiveness in today's America.

The trick is designed to disable the reasoning ability of those not familiar with history or the world outside of the United States.  It is designed to make the listener dumber.  It's simple really - when speaking of America’s ills, ignore the broader global context, so the audience remains focused on America’s sins. but when confronted with the ills of another country, always be sure to refer to what you characterize as similar ills in America. That way, no matter what, the focus remains America’s ills.

Here are the two examples that caught my eye back in 2015 (with some slight edits).

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that President Obama made the following remarks during what it refers to as comedian Mark Maron’s “WTF” podcast:

The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.

Reading the remainder of the Times article reveals no reference by the President to the rest of the world. Since my purpose is not to debate the accuracy of the President’s assertion (I agree the U.S. has a continuing legacy from slavery, but disagree with much of his analysis) but to discuss context, it would seem that in fairness, as well as enhancing our understanding, he should be mentioning the legacy of slavery that all of us carry around the world - it is distinctly not unique to America.

President Obama's purposeful distortion is just another form of American Exceptionalism - America as uniquely evil.

What is unique to American and England was that the impetus for ending racial slavery came from Anglo-Saxon Christians beginning in the late 18th century, not from anywhere else in the world.

Every country in the Western Hemisphere imported African slaves (imports into the colonies that became the U.S. and into the U.S. until Congress banned the import of slaves in 1808 are less than 4% of the total), Spain, Portugal, France and Britain prospered from the slave trade, the Arab world imported millions of African slaves, African rulers sold fellow Africans for that purpose, and slavery outside of the African context existed in most societies for thousands of years.  For a more nuanced and sophisticated view we recommend reading The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law In The American Hemisphere by Robert J Cottrol (2013), a fascinating comparative study and here's a recent speech by someone else who's spoken more thoughtfully about the subject.  In other words, America does have problems in this area, but they are problems we share with much of the global community.  As Cottrol points out, in some instances we've dealt with them more successfully than others, in some respects not, but it would seem that, in the President's phrase it's "still part of" much of the world's DNA.

Moreover the reference to DNA constitutes a modern day version of a blood libel by the President (no surprise, since Critical Race Theory is based on a blood libel), marking those who have played no role in slavery or its legacy but remain tainted because of their birth.

Now, let’s look at the flip side; the interview the President gave last month to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic on the nuclear deal with Iran. Goldberg, who is very sympathetic to the President, presses him on the Iranian regime’s anti-semitism because to Goldberg it indicates they are irrational in their decision making. To expand on Goldberg's point - he is saying that when a regime's leaders are fixated not just on the destruction of the State of Israel, but go around leading chants of "Death to the Jews!"; alternatively deny the Holocaust, then turn around and say Hitler gave the Jews what they deserved; and seriously believe in a global Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, they tend not to confine their irrational thought processes to that one issue; more importantly it may mean they just don't think using the same calculus about risk that we do.

The President airily rejects this, saying “Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival” and then goes on to point out that, after all:

"there were deep strains of anti-Semitism in this country"

In that remark the President equates the Iranian regime, with its bizarre core beliefs about Jews, with his own country which provided a refuge for more than 2 million Russian Jews fleeing Czarist oppression, including  my paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents (my grandfather immediately after arriving enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving in the Philippines), and whose first President wrote the magnificent letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. 
A moment's thought reveals the inane nature of the President's remark.

It is very cleverly done. As with all these types of statements there is an element of truth. There was, and still is, some anti-semitism in America but to equate it with Iran you have to be incapable of making the type of distinctions that thoughtful individuals who know history and are capable of self-reflection do all the time, or at least used to be able to make.  It appears that the purpose of the 21st century educational system is to leave students incapable of making the distinctions that were once the mark of an educated person.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a successful strategy.

What the technique does is turn the argument inward, always forcing examination of America and, for those who object, bogging them down in time-consuming arguments about why those employing the trick are wrong and diverting them from discussing the core proposition.

When you see this rhetorical trick deployed by the Woke, don't fall for it.

Read It And Weep And Then Fight Back

"[Critical Race Theory] is evil.  It plays on people’s best nature; it takes good people and twists them to its purpose." 

 - James Lindsay, Progressive, operator of New Discourses, author, with Helen Pluckrose, of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody (to be published next month), and crusader against Critical Race Theory, which if unchecked, will destroy liberal democracy because of its authoritarian nature.

I am writing so much on this topic because the Woke have created the greatest threat to the United States since the Civil War.  They either control or have intimidated many of our nation's leading institutions and have the functional support of one of our major political parties as they ramage through the streets of American cities and drive anyone who opposes them from the media, educational institutions and jobs.

This is not about police brutality and dealing with the vestiges of racism.  That's a useful discussion.

Instead we are under assault by race hustlers, grifters, haters, those bent on revenge, academic theorists of the left, and nihilists, all of whom hate America and everything it has ever stood for and manipulating the feelings of good people who do not understand the goal is revolution, not reform.

Here's a taste of what is going on:

As I've been saying a while it is difficult to tell the difference between white nationalist and Woke progressives.

Memes. Seattle white supremacists. pic.twitter.com/0rZqY9QG1I

— James Lindsay, recolonizing the West (@ConceptualJames) July 25, 2020

Cecilia Loving, chief diversity and inclusion officer of the New York City Fire Department defends a decision to kick Lt. Daniel McWilliams — one of three firefighters in the iconic 9/11 Ground Zero flag-raising photo — off a color-guard procession so it would be all-black.

Loving said it’s okay to replace a white member with an African-American to “uplift our identities and our separate ethnicities in order to instill a sense of pride and community and support for one another.”

The New York Times and its readers have been delusional for four years in calling Donald Trump a fascist and projecting all of their authoritarian visions onto a fictional version of the Trump administration.  There are many repellent things about Trump but he is not a fascist and many of his worst remarks make him sound like a Woke progressive (see What Would Otter Do?)

The @nytimes editor's note on my op-ed: we won't publish "needlessly harsh" or "incendiary" pieces.

The @nytimes today: POTUS using federal law enforcement to protect federal property is just like Hitler. pic.twitter.com/DXgfXDwQzX

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 25, 2020

For years I underestimated the impact of what I saw as silly theories being taught to college students.  I was wrong.  And now I find out that over the past decade these same hateful and divisive theories have infiltrated K-12 education.

I was sent this letter from Chinese immigrant parents, written to the ungrateful Chinese-American students at Yale calling their parents and the broader Chinese-American people "anti-Black racists." They stand with the American people, not the ungrateful revolutionaries. pic.twitter.com/YfKi6AcMPr

— James Lindsay, recolonizing the West (@ConceptualJames) July 25, 2020

Letter from Seattle Chief of Police informing residents that due to the actions of the City Council the police can no longer protect their property from the rioters who have been supported by that same City Council.  In Woke America, you are on your own.

I am a mom, a public defender, an elected public-school council member and a City Council candidate. But at a city Department of Education anti-bias training, I was instructed to refer to myself as a “white woman” — as if my whole life reduces to my race.

Those who oppose this ideology are shunned and humiliated, even as it does nothing to actually improve our broken schools.

Though facing severe budget cuts, the DOE has spent more than $6 million for the training, which defines qualities such as “worship of the written word,” “individualism” and “objectivity” as “white-supremacy culture.”

Read on. 

7/
Namely, that social speech policing is always an attempt to win a debate using social power to marginalize your opponent rather then attempting to persuade people by engaging with the substance of the disagreement.
Cancel culture is a 21st century implementation of this.

— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) July 24, 2020

 

The California State University system is requiring their half a million students to take at least one course in ethnic studies or social justice—the system’s new established religion. https://t.co/LMp7k2h2Eq

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 24, 2020

 

When I taught at Princeton, every Rawlsian blathered on about liberalism’s essence boiling down to, “reasonable people can disagree.” Even while every department in the humanities and social sciences worked ceaselessly to make sure everyone had the same view about everything. https://t.co/pRoFGpR4uc

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) July 23, 2020

On police defunding.  The consequences, more crime and violence impacting minorities disproportionately, are actually intended by its proponents.

Caldwell on defunding the police: pic.twitter.com/MbUZFN9lgQ

— RE-OPEN THE SIZZLERS (@CaesarSalad99) July 23, 2020

"Nice" white parents are the problem with public education.  In related news, KIPP Academies, a respected charter school network has dropped its motto of "Work Hard. Be Nice." because of its association with white supremacy.  Little did we know!  And, by the way, it is a myth public schools have been defunded in recent decades.

To understand what’s wrong with our public education system, you have to look at what’s arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents. Listen to the trailer for “Nice White Parents,” a new series from @serial, brought to you by @nytimes. https://t.co/ljXOFNOZFO

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 23, 2020

How patronizing!

This is straight-up tragic. The “anti-racism” sweeping institutions still ends up rendering black people as somehow different, other, unable to meet even basic standards. Ralph Ellison weeps.

“Rutgers English Department to deemphasize traditional grammar” https://t.co/5DUaKKcRW1

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) July 22, 2020

Glenn Loury on how Ta-Nehisi Coates provides guilty liberal elites the words they need whilst our discourse around race refuses to address the suffering and deaths of thousands of Black people every year

It is a morally reprehensible situation and he gets rightly heated pic.twitter.com/uVQjI3F8nI

— Ash Parks (@TheRealAshParks) July 14, 2020

So much of what you see under cover of "Black Lives Matter" is "black lives matter except for black cops, unborn black children, black crime victims, and black schoolchildren."

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) July 19, 2020

DiAngelo is not only a racist, she's a grifter.

According to Robin DiAngelo, "'rationalism' is a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered."

If you think rationalism is a white trait, you are a racist.

The author of the bestselling book in the country is a racist.https://t.co/yJ16xevMQD

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) July 18, 2020

Heh.

Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally https://t.co/pCpagerf7v

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 17, 2020

Well, it is a good thing to have some ambition in life.

Protest organizer claims their mission is the “abolition of the United States as we know it”

pic.twitter.com/HHj90FyReT

— ELIJAH RIOT (@ElijahSchaffer) July 18, 2020

Multifactoral causation?  Nah, that's white privilege.  Tweet from African American professor at historically black university.

What if culture and training, effort, genes, and prejudice ALL play a role in where you end up in life?

***Incoherent shrieking begins...people start fighting at random...society collapses***

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) July 18, 2020

A progressive journalist exposing the media scam reporting the riots and protests were "mostly peaceful".  In reality they had devastating consequences for the lives and livelihoods of those in minority communities.  Read on.

More crap from Robin DiAngelo.

See I know that most people are not going to make it to page 149 of this cursed book to discover this nugget: a positive white identity is an impossible goal. Would you believe this if I wasn’t showing you pictures? #WhiteFragility pic.twitter.com/RPcV3chGBu

— Karlyn Borysenko - on Parler/Minds/Gab @Karlyn (@DrKarlynB) July 17, 2020

Yet another Progressive weighs in to object:

The portion of people who view their race as defining them declined a lot during the 20th century, coinciding with a big decline in implicit and explicit bias. These folks really looked at that and said we want to crank it up again?

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 17, 2020

 

Destroy The Four Olds

A decade ago a friend in China gave me a bound volume called "Red Memory" containing posters from the Cultural Revolution (for background read We Thought Mao Was Doing A Wonderful Thing).  The introduction contained this sentence:

"We hope that such crazy and flimflam years will never come again"!

They have come again in China and they are on the verge of coming here.

From Laudator Temporis Acti (Praiser of Times Past)

Guo Jian et al., Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006), pp. 70-72:

DESTROY THE FOUR OLDS (po sijiu). This campaign was initiated by Red Guards in August 1966 aiming to sweep away all "old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits" (hence "Four Olds") in Chinese society. Endorsed by the Cultural Revolution faction of the central leadership, the campaign resulted in unprecedented damage to the nation's historical landmarks, valuable artifacts, and other material witnesses of culture and civilization and claimed thousands of innocent lives nationwide—1,772 in the city of Beijing alone.

The phrase "old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits" as a pejorative reference to all traditions—Chinese or foreign—that were deemed nonproletarian from the viewpoint of the Culture Revolution ideology first appeared in a 1 June 1966 People's Daily editorial entitled "Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits." Lin Biao used the phrase in his speech at the mass rally of 18 August and called on Red Guards to wage war against the Four Olds. As a prelude to Lin's battle cry, an ultimatum had already been drafted by Red Guards at Beijing No. 2 Middle School on the night of 17 August, declaring war on barbershops, tailor shops, photo studios, and used book stores. On the day after the mass rally, Beijing's Red Guards took to the streets and started to smash street signs and name boards for shops, restaurants, schools, factories, and hospitals and replace them with new labels. Chang'an (meaning "eternal peace") Avenue in the center of the city, for instance, was renamed East-Is-Red Avenue, and Beijing Union Hospital, which was established by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1921, now became Anti-Imperialism Hospital. Red Guards made speeches, distributed pamphlets, and put out posters on the streets that dismissed various fashions in hair and dress, stylized photos, pointed boots, and high-heeled shoes as evidence of bourgeois lifestyle. They would stop passers-by whose appearance was unacceptable and humiliate them by shaving their hair, cutting open their trousers, or knocking off their shoe heels. The official endorsement of such actions in two Peoples Daily editorials on 23 August helped to spread the fire of the anti-Four Olds campaign across the country and prompted Red Guards to move further to raid churches, temples, theaters, libraries, and historic sites, causing irretrievable damage. During the raid upon the historic Confucian Homestead, Confucian Temple, and Confucian Cemetery, for instance, more than 1,000 tombs and stone tablets were destroyed or damaged, and more than 2,700 volumes of ancient books and 900 scrolls of calligraphy and paintings were set afire. Across the country, countless books that were deemed "old" were burned, especially those in school libraries.

During the campaign to destroy the Four Olds, violence against innocent people escalated. On 23 August, a group of Beijing Red Guards shepherded several dozen writers, artists, and government officials from the Municipal Cultural Bureau to what used to be the National Academy of imperial China, where a huge pile of theater props and costumes, all deemed "old," was burning. The Red Guards ordered their victims to kneel down around the fire and beat them so hard with belts and theatrical props that several victims lost consciousness. Lao She, a well-known writer and one of the victims of this notorious event, took his own life the next day. Such brutality was widespread during the campaign, especially at the struggle meetings that Red Guards held against their teachers, the so-called black gang members, and the people of the "Black Five Categories." It had become commonplace for Red Guards during the months of August and September to ransack private homes and confiscate personal belongings of the alleged class enemies. Some homes were raided several times by different groups of Red Guards. In Shanghai alone, an estimated 150,000 homes were illegally searched. In the name of sweeping away the Four Olds, the raiders took away not only cultural artifacts that were considered "old," but also currency, bank notes, gold and silver bars, jewelry, and other valuables. At the height of the Destroy the Four Olds campaign, Chairman Mao Zedong continued to hold inspections of millions of Red Guards in Beijing, while Lin Biao, standing by Mao's side at these inspections, continued to praise the Red Guards' attack on the old ways.

Don't Be A Scribbler

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France:

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

via Laudator Temporis Acti

Bad Prediction

"The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in the opinion for the Court in Grutter v Bollinger (June 23, 2003)

We are now 17 years down the road and not only are racial preferences not going away but racial preferences and even segregation appear to be the wave of the future.  Looks more like Diversity Now! Diversity Forever!  Oh, joy.

The Grutter decision upheld by 5-4 (with Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist and Kennedy dissenting) the official admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School that sought to achieve student body diversity.

The concept of "diversity" in school admissions was first introduced at the Supreme Court by the concurring opinion of Justice Lewis Powell in Regents of Univ. of Cal. v Bakke (1978) in which Powell wrote that attaining a diverse student body was the only interest asserted by the university that survived scrutiny.  However, because no other justice joined Powell in his opinion the Courts, as O'Connor expressed it, "have struggled to discern whether Justice Powell’s diversity rationale is binding precedent."  O'Connor, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer, in stating "The Court endorses Justice Powell’s view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions" rendered discussion of the precedential value of Powell's opinion moot.

And with that we were off to the diversity races as academic institutions rapidly established Offices of Diversity & Inclusion to spread the new gospel of Critical Race Theory and suppress any dissenting voices as racists and heretics.

Social Justice Is Not Justice

I'm reposting this piece I published four years ago on this date because, sadly, what I feared has come true and the deluge has arrived in the form of the Woke progressives and Critical Race Theory, a torrent of rage and distortion designed to deny our common humanity and create divisiveness and chaos in American society.

(from LA Times, OJ in center, F Lee Bailey, left, Johnny Cochran, right, Robert Shapiro, rear in profile)

THC recently saw the fine ESPN documentary OJ: Made In America, which he had not intended to watch, but happened to tune in just as the first of the five two-hour episodes began and found riveting.  The film begins with OJ Simpson's college and pro football career, takes us through the racial tensions of Los Angeles during the 1960s, when OJ starred at the University of Southern California, and then covers his successful broadcast and pitchman career after retirement from the NFL, his marriage and separation from Nicole Brown, the murders, the trial and its aftermath.  While worth watching it is also appalling and depressing, as we relive the miscues and errors of the prosecution and LAPD and are exposed to the cynical trial strategy of the race hustlers, a strategy eerily similar to what we see being played out in America right now, and, on that, THC stands with Michael Jordan.

Last week, THC watched the debut of Bill Simmons' new HBO show, Any Given Wednesday (you can watch a segment with Ben Affleck's epic Deflategate rant here).  THC has always enjoyed Simmons' loony mixture of fandom and sportswriting and The Book of Basketball is on his list of Ten Most Enjoyable Books You'll Ever Read.  After last year's bitter breakup with ESPN, which shut down Grantland, his terrific sports and pop culture site, Bill is relaunching himself with the HBO show and a new website, The Ringer (which, so far, falls far short of the standard of excellence he set with Grantland).

At the close of the show, Simmons remarked the OJ documentary, "helped Caucasians finally understand the OJ verdict", which helped crystallize THC's thinking about the documentary as a perfect illustration of the difference between "social justice" and "justice".  They are not related terms; in fact, they lead to opposite results.

As Simmons points out, the documentary does an excellent job placing OJ's career and the trial in the context of America's, and more specifically, Southern California's, history of race relations from the 1960s through Rodney King and the LA riots of 1992, only two years before OJ was charged with murder.  It follows OJ through his deliberate strategy of "deracializing" himself and becoming popular with white America and then his transformation, as part of his defense in the murder trial, into the face of black America, abetted by the taped racist remarks of LA detective, Mark Fuhrman (who is interviewed and treated fairly); a transformation which proved successful in gaining his acquittal.

At the same time, the documentary leaves the viewer in no doubt that OJ Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.  The word "slaughtered" is probably more apt than "murdered", as we are shown photographs of the bodies and taken blow by blow through the killings.

Readers of Bill Simmons realize he likes to opine on race and politics, but the glib, engaging, and sometimes overwrought, fun he has when it comes to sports and athletes, ill-suits him when it comes to more serious issues.  Bill got it half right with his statement, but to capture the full message of the documentary, he should have added, "and it should help African-Americans understand why others were so upset with the OJ verdict".

As Made In America illustrates, OJ's acquittal was an example of social justice; a means by African American jurors to get back for all the historic wrongs of the Los Angeles Police Department.  The acquittal was also an example of failure, when it came to justice for the two murdered people.

Putting "social" in front of "justice" is not just a way of modifying or, in some views, perfecting justice. It is a means of subtracting from the traditional American concept of justice, as a term meant to describe what is owed to each individual, regardless of their standing in society.  Social justice is about, to use a term increasingly common today, privileging groups based upon race, ethnicity, gender, class or any other category favored by advocacy groups (the neutral term applied to Leftist activists) and academia, to the exclusion of justice as it applies to non-privileged individuals.

Historically, it is a reversal of what might have been called social justice in earlier periods of American history.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, can be fairly characterized as acts of social justice, designed to undo the denial of individual rights to African-Americans by virtue of their race.  In doing so, they did not lead to new acts of individual injustice, in contrast to the "social justice" as it is understood today (perhaps a better word for the modern use of the term is "payback").  Many of those who supported the social justice legislation of the 1960s did so because of their belief in remedying injustice, but now see what is happening in modern America as merely an opportunity for groups to assert social and legal dominance using the rubric of social justice.

We've seen in the past century the fruits of social justice taken to its extremes.  In an early example in the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Union saw millions of kulaks, small rural landowners, denounced as class enemies and robbed, exiled, starved and/or murdered.  Under Soviet theory it did not matter what any individual kulak did or believed; their very inclusion in the designated group made them enemies of the state.  We've seen the pattern repeated over and over again under socialism, communism, and fascism, and it is why social justice is so dangerous a term when it is used, as it is by its advocates today, as a means to deprive individuals of liberty and justice.  If we lose sight of justice, the deluge will follow.

Rushmore

Good movie!

I did not watch President Trump's July 3 speech at Mt Rushmore because I can't stand watching or listening to him.

Then I heard the speech described as "dark and divisive" and defending the Confederate flag.

I thought to myself, why can't we have a President who talks like this instead of Trump?

Our Founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity.  No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America.  And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation.

It was all made possible by the courage of 56 patriots who gathered in Philadelphia 244 years ago and signed the Declaration of Independence.   They enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: “…all men are created equal.”

These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom.  Our Founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights — given [to] us by our Creator in Heaven.  And that which God has given us, we will allow no one, ever, to take away — ever. 

Oh, wait.  That is what Trump said!  After reading the media descriptions I decided I needed to actually read the darn thing and to my surprise it is probably the first speech given by the President with which I agree 100%!

He went on to say:

We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed.  Every child, of every color — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of God.

We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture.

We embrace tolerance, not prejudice.

And he accurately pointed out the danger currently emerging in America, a danger threatening every decent American whatever their race, ethnicity or religion:

The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice.  But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society.  It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance, and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination, and exclusion.

That those in the media and elsewhere who actively promote divisiveness, racial hatred, and intolerance accuse the President of the same is merely a matter of projection for them.  It is what they are all about.

Then I saw Senator Tammy Duckworth state that the Mt Rushmore speech was about "dead traitors" so thinking I'd missed something I went back and reread the speech.  Here are all the people and groups named by the President during the speech (excluding the ones already on Rushmore):

U.S. Grant
Andrew Jackson
Martin Luther King
Frederick Douglass
Wild Bill Hickok
Buffalo Bill Cody
Wright Brothers
Tuskegee Airmen
Harriet Tubman
Clara Barton
Jesse Owens
George Patton
Louis Armstrong
Alan Shepard
Elvis
Mohammed Ali
Walt Whitman
Mark Twain
Irving Berlin
Ella Fitzgerald
Frank Sinatra
Bob Hope

I don't see any traitors?  Do you?

Go read the speech for yourself.

And yesterday the Trump Administration, which I've been repeatedly assured by progressives is racist, conducted the first execution of a federal prisoner in 17 years.  The person executed was a white supremacist.

Only Progressive Lives Matter

I try not to react to everything I see on the internet for fear of becoming THAT GUY.  At first, I was going to ignore this tweet from Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama during his entire presidency, and a long-time friend regarded as his closest confidante.  Because it manages to combine both incredible stupidity, partisanship, ignorance, heartlessness, and contempt for the intelligence of her readers I decided to address it.  Here's the tweet:

From the epicenter to zero deaths. Short term sacrifice saves lives!!! https://t.co/iHJktiPX5p

— Valerie Jarrett (@ValerieJarrett) July 13, 2020

The tweet was written to support the current media narrative that states like New York and New Jersey did everything right regarding covid because they had Democratic governors and states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, which now face rising case counts, did everything wrong because they have Republican governors.

As I've said before, anyone Left or Right trying to score political points in the midst of this pandemic is a fool.  We should all be humbled by the extent to which we don't know and can't predict the course of this virus.  The virus is not interested in our politics.

As to the comparison itself.  The short-term sacrifice Jarrett refers to are the 24,000 dead so far in New York City due to covid (and that includes the single worst decision by any governor so far; Andrew Cuomo's decision to send covid positive patients back to nursing homes, leading to thousands of deaths).

New York City has 8 million people.  Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona combined have 67.5 million and, as of today, 12,700 covid deaths.  To reach the same per capita toll as New York City these four states will have to reach 203,000 deaths and New York will have to avoid a second wave.

To say New York's "short-term sacrifice" was worth it in order to condemn the states progressives dislike is misleading and stupid.  There's also a coldness to it that is morally repulsive - a Only Progressive Lives Matter tone that cheers on covid deaths in red states in order to make progressive governors look better.  At this point, no one can say that New York City "saved lives".  Her tweet is nonsense.  I can only assume Jarrett is completely innumerate or just doesn't care what the facts are and the people who follow her are too lazy and ignorant to do their own fact-checking.

I wish partisans on all sides would just shut up.