Critical race theory is a victimization cult

The New Neo Posted on by

Indeed.

Actually – beware of all theories that contain the word “critical.”

I’ve also been thinking lately that we’ve come a long way since 2008 in Obama’s program to fundamentally transform America, haven’t we? He kept it purposely vague, but remember when what a lot of voters thought he meant was that he’d bring us together, healing divisions? Despite the indications that he was actually a person with a strong leftist agenda that he was semi-hiding, a lot of people simply wanted to believe in him and therefore did believe in him.

And in particular, remember when Obama’s close and long relationship with the America-hating Reverend Wright (“white folks greed runs a world in need”) was revealed? In 2008 Obama felt he had to distance himself from Wright in order to win the election. But now, twelve years later, Reverend Wright looks relatively sedate. A candidate running in 2020 in the present atmosphere wouldn’t need to repudiate a relationship with Wright. On the contrary, it would be a feature, not a bug.

And we should listen to Fauci’s prognostications why?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think at this point, his guess is as good as ours.

But I also think these recent remarks Fauci made yesterday are interesting (his remarks in italics, and then my responses):

—Clearly we are not in total control right now.

When on earth are we ever “in total control” – except maybe for the very few diseases that have been eradicated from the face of the earth, such as smallpox? Even a disease like measles, dangerous when I was young but now very controllable with the vaccine, is not totally under control. Is total control any sort of reasonable standard for a relatively new infectious disease? Of course not. So don’t talk that way. Continue reading →

Advice for those in academia

The New Neo Posted on by

Please read this thread.

I doubt it would work everywhere, but it’s well worth contemplating. And it may only be possible for people with tenure, or those who have the ability to find work elsewhere. Whether it would work in a business setting I have no idea.

Here’s the original thread on Twitter, complete with responses. Some are supportive, and some are most certainly not. I suspect the authors of the latter have already been through the re-education camps.

It seems to me…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that all the Republicans have to do for their campaign ads is to show photos or videos of arson and mayhem in blue cities, and add a slogan such as “This is what you’ll get if you vote for Democrats.”

CHOP gets chopped and CHAZ gets chastized: I guess the crocodile coming to Durkan’s house was a bridge too far

The New Neo Posted on by

Killings weren’t enough to get Durkan to give the order to take back CHOP. It was only when “protestors” came to Durkan’s house and scared her family that she clamped down on CHOP. Her excuse was the murders in the fake “autonomous” zone, but the timing makes that reason suspect.

And just as we always thought, it was relatively easy. All it took was some mayoral resolve – and some police.

It’s a funny thing about police. It seems that sometimes even leftists want them around. And after you insult them and abandon them and keep them from controlling the mob – sometimes they’ll still protect you from the mob.

One of the most frustrating things about this entire debacle is that I suspect the forces of chaos are not really that numerous, nor are their foot soldiers in Antifa and the rest all that brave. But if the mayors and governors and city council members and DAs in liberal cities are using them for their own purposes and therefore failing to fight them, the mobs become bolder and more destructive.

That’s not rocket science. I’m not an expert on police work, to say the least. It’s just common sense, apparently becoming more uncommon every day, as America has a nervous breakdown and its enemies celebrate in glee.

[NOTE: That’s not to say the mob won’t be back to try more mayhem in Seattle. They most likely will. They know the leadership is very very very weak. But they may have learned not to threaten Durkan personally next time.]

The Democrats believe they have checkmated Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe they have.

But maybe they haven’t.

For a few weeks now, ever since Trump threatened to send troops to stop the riots and Senator Cotton backed him up, and the entire left, Democratic Party, and MSM (but I repeat myself) yelled “Tyrants!,” I’ve been thinking along the lines that commenter “Barry Meislin” describes quite well here:

…[I]t is an attempt to finally force Trump out of office.

To finally finish the Democrats’ war against Trump and his administration.

To finally finish the coup against Trump that ran aground when the Russia hoax couldn’t live up to its intended result (though it certainly did plant, with the able assistance of the MSCM, the requisite vicious dragon’s teeth amongst the public).

To finally finish the failed effort to drive him out of office after several blatantly specious if vituperative and vociferous impeachment attempts.

To finally finish off the job Obama began in 2016 (vis a vis Trump, but way before 2016, vis a vis the country, which according to Obama was to be fundamentally transformed, and was certainly on that path, except for Trump’s “disruptive” appearance on the scene).

And so the current collusion between Democratic politicians in the House and Senate, in the governorships and municipalities—and needless to say, in the media—to encourage mayhem, to wreak destruction, to promote discord, to sow division, to hold the country hostage to its ends-justify-the-means policy of violence and subversion, has reached its peak.

Here I beg to differ. I’m not so sure it’s reached its peak, as I wrote about a month ago (and please read the whole thing):

The 60s radicals were relative amateurs. These people, less so, at least in terms of organization. And we have not yet seen the worst of it, of that I am convinced.

I hope I’m wrong. But it’s something like a fireworks display. At first, there are pauses between the explosions, and some are smaller and some larger. But towards the finale, they come fast and furious and the reverberations are huge.

And we’re still more than five [now four] months from that finale. Did I say “finale”? If somehow Trump manages to get elected, I believe that the left’s resultant fury will be even greater and the fireworks will be greater, as well.

Back to Barry’s comment [emphasis mine]:

And they will continue to encourage this policy of destruction and violence so as to show—to prove—their Truth: that Trump, “Mr. MAGA” himself, cannot protect the country, can neither defend the country nor its institutions nor its citizens; is totally helpless against those who wish him gone and seek “to disappear” him.

(And if the country has to be rent asunder to “prove” this inalienable Truth, then so be it.)

And should Trump attempt to defend against the onslaught, then he will be excoriated as a tyrant, a fascist, trying to prevent violently, to eradicate(!) lawful public “protest”—trying to wipe out an American right, a HUMAN right. Trying to trample the US Constitution by calling up the military against “his own people”.

Yes, like the fascist they’ve already determined he is, which they’ve been repeating since Day 1 “ad infinitum”, “ad nauseum”.

And so they believe they have him in their elegant trap (almost as exquisite as Obama-gate but not quite as “transparent”).

They have him in their vise. He cannot escape. This time he will not be able to extricate himself from their “patriotic” clutches.

He can watch helplessly as America burns. Or he can try defend the country, to end the destruction, in which case he will no doubt be subjected to another impeachment circus by those who insist on showing us just why they must be trusted with power.

Since for the Democratic Party and its MSCM comrades in destruction—destruction of truth, destruction of individuals, destruction of the country—this entire devilishly wrought policy is, they are firmly convinced, formidably successful politics, awesome in its conception, pitch perfect in its implementation, so drunk are they on their own virtue, so inebriated are they with their sense of values, so enamored are they of their perversity, so deluded are they regarding the rightness of their mission and the utter necessity of their success.

(I highlighted the word “virtue” because it was a big part of Robespierre’s justification for the Reign of Terror; please see this.)

So Barry Meislin has described what I meant by “checkmate.” For those who don’t play chess, here’s what the term signifies:

Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is a game position in chess and other chess-like games in which a player’s king is in check (threatened with capture) and there is no way to avoid the threat. Checkmating the opponent wins the game.

In chess, the king is never captured—the player loses as soon as their king is checkmated. In formal games, most players resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated. It is usually considered bad etiquette to continue playing in a completely hopeless position…

The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase “shah mat” which means “the King is helpless”…[S]heikh is the Arabic word for the monarch. Players would announce “Sheikh” when the king was in check. “Mat” is an Arabic adjective for dead “helpless”, or “defeated”. So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate.

There is little question in my mind that this is what explains some otherwise inexplicable moves by the left, in particular by mayors of blue cities that are being ravaged by violence. After all, even a leftist mayor probably doesn’t want his or her tax base to leave the city – mayors know that’s the only way to keep the benefits flowing. But I believe the mayors are bargaining that the flight will only have just begun by November and that it will be temporary, and that once the goal of total Democratic victory is reached (presidency, and both houses of Congress if possible), order can be restored in their cities and people will relax, thinking the Democrats have the answers.

That’s the plan. And we may not even be finished with the chess moves on the board – neither the left’s nor Trump’s (many Republicans just seem to be observing right now rather than playing).

But life is not chess. In chess, you can clearly see when a king is in checkmate. Right now, the MSM is busy writing article after article saying Trump is finished, washed up, about to quit, sure to lose, all of the above. The polls that are released may or may not be accurate, but either way they’re yet another method of getting across the message that Trump is kaput (and also an “insurance policy” so that on the remote chance he wins, they will start off by saying it’s because of fraud). But none of it means that Trump is actually in checkmate right now. We can’t see the positions of the pieces on the board all that clearly, and neither can they.

The outcome depends in part on the players, but it also depends (unlike in chess) on the observers, the American voting public. Will they be fooled by all of this? Will they actually believe that it’s all Trump’s fault, and that Biden (or his carefully-selected approved-identity-group Veep) and the Democrats are the answer? Or will they see through it? Will they notice that it’s in red states and red cities that there’s no turmoil and no upheaval?

I recently spoke with a friend who lives in New York City, who said that people are starting to leave – to sell their homes and buy elsewhere. So some are voting with their feet, as we used to say in the bad old days of the Sixties. Will they carry their Democrat voting habits with them? Or have they been mugged by reality?

It depends, in the end, on the American people. Doesn’t it always?

Happy 90th Birthday Thomas Sowell – our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is Thomas Sowell’s 90th birthday, and I want to wish him a happy one.

Sowell may also be happy today that he’s been retired for several years, because chronicling our current mess is not fun, although I would dearly love to read or hear what he has to say about it. For many decades, Sowell was one of the most brilliant, clearest, no-nonsense voices in America, although it was mostly the right who listened to him.

Thomas Sowell was also the writer who influenced me most during my political change. Until I read his books about seventeen years ago (I think the first one I encountered may have been The Vision of the Anointed, but another extremely important one for me was The Quest for Cosmic Justice), I just had a vague and growing dissatisfaction with the left, the Democrats, and especially the press. I had no framework in which to place those perceptions, no overview that made sense of them. Sowell provided that. I had no sooner read just a few pages of his thoughts when I breathed a sigh of relief. At last! Someone who made sense. And to think, he’d already been writing for many years at that point and I’d never before heard of him.

I’ve read many of his books since, including his autobiography. Sowell is what used to be called a rugged individualist. He went his own way, and didn’t suffer fools gladly. His work should be known by so many more people than it is. I hope he’s doing well, and I want to thank him from the bottom of my heart.

Here’s some vintage Sowell from 1995. Enjoy:

ADDENDUM: I just discovered that Thomas Sowell gave an interview yesterday to Mark Levin, discussing his new book (new book – at 90!) entitled Charter Schools and Their Enemies. He’s concentrating on education reform at the moment, which seems the heart of the matter. Here’s the entire program on YouTube; the interview with Sowell begins at 1:09:31 and goes till the end. Like virtually everything Sowell writes or says, it’s of great interest. And Sowell sounds as sharp as ever. But I want to highlight the part where, towards the end, Levin tells Sowell of Sowell’s influence on his life and his thinking:

White Fragility

The New Neo Posted on by

People are susceptible to hucksters. And so we have a newly-popularized cult of racism masquerading as anti-racism, and one of its most bizarre examples is a book called White Fragility. Not only does it lump white people together in a unitary group, but it labels them as inherently weak. Maybe author DiAngelo has a point, though – anyone who would buy the thesis of her book is, at the very least, weak in the head.

I could not care less what this woman calls me – which would be “racist,” since that’s what she calls white people who reject her theory (although if you actually looked at me, I might be physically indistinguishable from many people nowadays labeled as “brown”). But I do care that her book has become extremely popular – number one on Amazon at the moment.

How can so many people buy (literally and figuratively) such destructive and reprehensible stupidity? And yet DiAngelo has been getting good money for years already, offering companies and schools the benefit of her “wisdom” in workshops in the field. Apparently, the need to self-flagellate is strong. And the effects of workshops like that and books like this are obvious.

Matt Taibbi has quite a bit to say about it:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

This is the swill that a great many Americans seem to want to swallow. And to be brainwashed by – although at the moment 15% of the Amazon reviews of the book are one-star, it’s not enough.

Perhaps a lot of people are buying it without reading it, as a badge of wokeness and humility (buying a book is easier than getting down on one knee).

This is part of the group identity politics that has poisoned our culture in the last couple of decades and is the main card in the deck of the Democrats, and apparently a very effective one. And for DiAngelo, it’s been a very lucrative one, proving once again that no one ever went broke underestimating the American public.

I think that a lot of people buy this book because it’s popular. If everybody thinks it’s great, then it must be, right? It’s that desire to dance in a circle, which has never been one of my desires. So perhaps it’s time for one of my favorite passages from Czech author Milan Kundera’s work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

[NOTE: If you want to familiarize yourself with DiAngelo’s credentials, go here. It reads like a primer of what leftist education hath wrought in recent decades, with leftist jargon galore. She bills herself as offering a “critical racial & social justice education.” A little sampler of her academic background:

I received my PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. I earned tenure at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. Currently I am Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition, I hold two Honorary Doctoral Degrees. My area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.]

Mayor Durkan of Seattle is surprised when the crocodile comes up to her door, opens its mouth, and shows its teeth

The New Neo Posted on by

Be Mayor Durkan fool, be she knave, or be she both?

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant joined a large group of protesters outside the CHOP zone who marched to [Seattle Mayor] Durkan’s house on Sunday afternoon.

You mean, they didn’t respect her property or her privacy?

Of course, perhaps they came to thank her for having been so kind ever since the protests and riots and arson and takeovers began. That would only be fitting.

But no, because:

Durkan said last week that police will begin returning to the East Precinct in the CHOP, although a timeline wasn’t provided.

Ah, so she told them that some day – some fine day – she might actually move to take back the parts of the city that they had commandeered and trashed. How dare she! Who does she think she is, the mayor? Durkan issued this statement:

Seattle has a long tradition of peaceful protest and advocacy for progressive change, and Mayor Durkan strongly supports those rights. Mayor Durkan will continue to listen to leaders in Seattle’s Black community. She is working hard to translate the calls for change into real, tangible systemic changes to policing and all the other systems needed for strong and healthy communities. She has prioritized these as Mayor, with investments in housing, education, youth opportunity, and economic equity. She proposes investing an additional $100 million into the Black community.

Mayor Durkan and her family are in the state program to keep their address confidential because of the death threats mostly related to her work as Seattle’s U.S. Attorney under President Obama. Instead of working to make true change, Councilmember Sawant continues to choose political stunts. Tonight she did so without regard for the safety of the Mayor and her family. The Mayor was not even home – she was working at City Hall. Seattle can and should peacefully demonstrate but should not put families and children at risk.”

Especially the mayor’s family and children. The families and children who happen to live in the Capitol Hill zone, for example? Not so much.

And Mayor Durkan was supposedly protected from this sort of thing, her address kept a secret. I guess it didn’t work, and perhaps Councilmember Sawant was the one to reveal it? How can they be so mean to Mayor Durkan, after all she’s done for them, and all she’s promised to do – like sinking another $100 million into the Black community?

I became curious to learn about Councilmember Sawant, and found her Wiki page quite edifying:

Kshama Sawant , born October 17, 1973), is a socialist politician and economist who serves on the Seattle City Council. She is a member of Socialist Alternative. A former software engineer, Sawant became an economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States from her native India. She ran unsuccessfully for the Washington House of Representatives before winning her seat on the Seattle City Council. She was the first socialist to win a citywide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the school board in 1916.

Ah, a socialist. Who would have thought it?

Her Wiki page also says that although she was originally a software engineer, “After moving to the United States, she was shocked by the level of poverty and decided to abandon software engineering. She pursued studies in economics because of what she described as her own ‘questions of economic inequality’.”

Sawant was raised in Mumbai (you may remember it as Bombay). And yet it was when she moved to the US that she was shocked, shocked by the level of poverty and economic inequality? When I read that, I started to wonder if perhaps there was something I wasn’t remembering about Mumbai and its own poverty and economic inequality. But no – poverty and economic inequality, they name is Mumbai (from 2018):

Mumbai is a city of imbalance. With an estimated wealth of $950 billion, the city is the 12th richest in the world, ranking ahead of major urban centers like Paris and Toronto. Much of this prosperity is due to the combination of a large billionaire population and the presence of India’s oldest, and most prominent, stock exchange.

At the same time, more than half of the city’s population lives in slums, or areas of extreme poverty that often lack access to clean water, electricity, and public transportation. With an estimated 6.5 million people residing in these conditions, Mumbai has the largest slum population of any city in the world.

And in an added little bit of strangeness, Sawant is married to a man (also a socialist) named Calvin Priest. That’s quite an evocative name. Sawant also was the member of the City Council who let the “protestors” into City Hall a while back.

By the way, although these people call themselves “socialists,” I think that is a euphemism and/or a scmokescreen. To most Americans, that word may conjure up the arrangement in a country like Sweden (which isn’t even socialist these days, but that’s not the point). In other words, a mostly-democratic welfare state. But I see no indication that that’s what Sawant and the others have in mind. They are as ruthless as Bolsheviks or Robespierre, and they will do whatever they need to do if they deem it necessary and they ever have the power.

Still another example – as if any more were needed – of why we have police

The New Neo Posted on by

Consider the alternative: vigilante “justice”.

Those who think otherwise are either fools or knaves or both – that is, stupid or evil or both.

At some point – perhaps after the police are gone or totally corrupt and corrupted – people may reflect back on how it used to be in the days when police were trained to avoid unnecessary killings, and when although such killings occurred they were exceedingly rare considering the number of times police encountered violent, resistant people.

Police work isn’t easy, and that’s the understatement of the year. Police will sometimes make errors. Some police will do even worse; they will be corrupt or racist or stupid or any number of other things. But considering how tough the job is, and how many police there are, that number is extremely small. Without them, we are back to a state of nature. And the nature is the state described by Hobbes, not Rousseau.

One of the best courses I ever took was one that made me read both Hobbes and Rousseau in tandem. I think it was in college. It might have been in high school.

Hobbes wrote in 1651:

…Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best-known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state humankind would be in, were it not for political community:

“In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In such a state, people fear death and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to obtain them. So, in order to avoid it, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society.

The social contract has been broken, or at least is in the process of being broken. For a long time we have stood on the shoulders of giants, the great thinkers of Western Civilization. But now apparently we are tired and seem intent on jumping off.

“Enough is enough” – and so what?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article that’s well worth reading. Towards the end the author says that if you think that things have gone too far – that wokeness has become “a danger to the traditional American understanding of civic law and liberty” – you need to do more than say it, and more than vote in November:

But obviously, voting in November is no real response at all. If “enough” is truly enough, then simply resolving to take the trouble to cast a vote in November seems wholly inadequate to countering the excesses of the Left. Donald Trump can’t stop this. Only the citizens who have had “enough” can do it. Voting isn’t enough.

My friend from Texas was right to ask me: “Adam, have you reached your [breaking] point? What are your public actions?” Well, of course, I vote. My writing—essays like the one you’re reading—are one way that I try to combat the zealots. As a teacher, I don’t adopt any “antiracist pedagogies.” But I do teach the tradition of Western thought, and I stress that taking this tradition seriously will equip my students with the most effective means of fighting racism. I speak out on campus—when I feel that doing so might be effective. I give some money to organizations that I believe might effectively counter the Left’s assault on America. I could probably do more though. And you probably can, too.

When you’ve answered Lindsey’s question (if you can answer it—and if you can’t, you’re with the mob on the road to Utopia, come hell or high water—probably the former) ask yourself the next question: “Well? What am I going to do about it?” A friend on my chat (referring to my comments) cautioned the others, saying to be wary of people suggesting you must do X, Y, or Z. I’m not asking anyone to do X, Y, or Z.

If you have had “enough,” I’m asking that you do something. Ask yourself: given my own gifts and my own limitations, how can I contribute? For all of us, this will require some sacrifice. This means you also have to consider what, specifically, you are willing and able to sacrifice. But if you’re unwilling to sacrifice anything—if you’re unwilling to respond in any way other than casting a ballot—then it doesn’t matter what you say: you haven’t had enough.

I know what I do, although it feels inadequate: I write for public consumption, and I’ve been doing it for over 15 years for many many hours a day. During past elections, I’ve done some phone-banking, which I found a waste of time. I did a little demonstrating about ten years ago. I used to do a lot of talking to people I knew, trying to persuade, but that did nothing except frustrate me. However, I’ve been taking that up again lately, although I’m not at all sure if it will have any better effect this go-round.

I have said before, and I’ll say again: whether or not Trump is elected in 2020, the problem is huge and will remain huge. This is indeed, as that linked article says, about a lot more than this election. Sometimes I think that if the election is lost, the forces of the left will have won. Sometimes I think they have already won. And sometimes I think that’s just my tendency to pessimism, and that it is an attitude that must be fought against with great vigor.