#race equity

[asg-stuff]

Neiman employs a particularly effective metaphor, that of "compounding unearned advantage" to demonstrate how racial and gender advantages amass at an exponential rate, creating more profound inequities over time. This analogy builds on the Racial Equity Institute's framework of "unearned advantage," which "carries less baggage and is less loaded than 'privilege.'" (via 'Rich White Men' reinforces the argument that inequality harms us all | NPR)

See also Unearned Advantage: What to Make of "Privilege"?

[somerandomg33k]

Race Equity

Ah yes, Race. One the subjects that the USA is "great on." /sarcasm And the Democrats has a section on Racial Equity in their Party Platform. And yes, the other will be way worse. But let me react to this section none the less.

Here is my latest YouTube Video.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djeIVcCEwCc

[samwisethewitch]

TW: This post contains explicit discussions of white supremacy and the alt-right, including mentions of racism and antisemitism.

One of my most impactful recent library reads was Sisters In Hate by Seyward Darby, and I want to take a moment to encourage other white Americans to check it out as we prepare for next years' presidential election and all the shit it's going to kick up.

Sisters In Hate is a book about the role of women in American white supremacist movements and specifically in the alt-right. Darby does a really excellent job of showing just how critical white women are to these hate movements. The book also gives us a detailed look at what radicalization looks like and how that process can be different for different genders.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which follows a real woman through her radicalization into the alt-right. I especially want to draw Tumblr's attention to the story of Ayla, a self-proclaimed "polyamorous, raw foodist-vegan, feminist, pagan" whose radicalization started in college with natural living and homebirth and ended with her running a popular tradwife blog and speaking at the Unite the Right rally.

I think a lot of leftists and liberals feel that we're too smart, or too educated, or too savvy to fall for white supremacist recruitment schemes. We are not. Intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning people are radicalized every day. Some of them are less overtly hateful, like your college friend who starts voting Republican in their 30s. Some of them are like Ayla, and their radicalization takes them all the way to the other end of the political spectrum until they're openly and genuinely calling for a white ethnostate with the same passion they once used to advocate for feminism, racial equity, and queer rights. And we need to remember that any one of us intelligent, college-educated, left-leaning white folks could be in her position, which is why it's so important to learn about radicalization tactics so we can recognize and resist them.

I'm not gonna lie -- this book is hard to read. The text contains racial slurs, white supremacist rhetoric, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. All of this is condemned by the author, but Darby doesn't shy away from showing just how vile this movement is. I had to take a lot of breaks from this book and read it over several weeks, but I'm very glad I did because I feel like I needed this information.

White supremacist recruitment efforts are going to pick up in the next year, especially if Tr*mp is the Republican nominee for president. Stay informed and stay ready.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TODAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Robin's definition of conservativism has enormous explanatory power and I'm always finding fresh ways in which it clarifies my understand of events in the world: a conservative is someone who believes that a minority of people were born to rule, and that everyone else was born to follow their rules, and that the world is in harmony when the born rulers are in charge.

This definition unifies the otherwise very odd grab-bag of ideologies that we identify with conservativism: a Christian Dominionist believes in the rule of Christians over others; a "men's rights advocate" thinks men should rule over women; a US imperialist thinks America should rule over the world; a white nationalist thinks white people should rule over racialized people; a libertarian believes in bosses dominating workers and a Hindu nationalist believes in Hindu domination over Muslims.

These people all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people are ordained to rule, and that any "artificial" attempt to overturn the "natural" order throws society into chaos. This is the entire basis of the panic over DEI, and the brainless reflex to blame the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster on the possibility that someone had been unjustly promoted to ship's captain due to their membership in a disfavored racial group or gender.

This definition is also useful because it cleanly cleaves progressives from conservatives. If conservatives think there's a natural order in which the few dominate the many, progressivism is a belief in pluralism and inclusion, the idea that disparate perspectives and experiences all have something to contribute to society. Progressives see a world in which only a small number of people rise to public life, rarified professions, and cultural prominence and assume that this is terrible waste of the talents and contributions of people whose accidents of birth keep them from participating in the same way.

This is why progressives are committed to class mobility, broad access to education, and active programs to bring traditionally underrepresented groups into arenas that once excluded them. The "some are born to rule, and most to be ruled over" conservative credo rejects this as not just wrong, but dangerous, the kind of thing that leads to bridges being demolished by cargo ships.

The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on.

The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Arguably the most potent symbol of this struggle is the fight over homes. The New Deal offered (some) working people a twofold path to prosperity: subsidized home-ownership and strong labor protections. This insulated (mostly white) workers from the two most potent threats to working peoples' lives and wellbeing: the cruel boss and the greedy landlord.

But the neoliberal era dispensed with labor rights, leaving the descendants of those lucky workers with just one tool for securing their American dream: home-ownership. As wages stagnated, your home – so essential to your ability to simply live – became your most important asset first, and a home second. So long as property values rose – and property taxes didn't – your home could be the backstop for debt-fueled consumption that filled the gap left by stagnating wages. Liquidating your family home might someday provide for your retirement, your kids' college loans and your emergency medical bills.

For conservatives who want to restore Gilded Age class rule, this was a very canny move. It pitted lucky workers with homes against their unlucky brethren – the more housing supply there was, the less your house was worth. The more protections tenants had, the less your house was worth. The more equitably municipal services (like schools) were distributed, the less your house was worth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

And now that the long game is over, they're coming for your house. It started with the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 financial crisis, first under GW Bush, but then in earnest under Obama, who accepted the advice of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who insisted that homeowners should be liquidated to "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

Then there are scams like "We Buy Ugly Houses," a nationwide mass-fraud outfit that steals houses out from under elderly, vulnerable and desperate people:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The more we lose our houses, the more single-family homes Wall Street gets to snap up and convert into slum properties, aslosh with a toxic stew of black mold, junk fees and eviction threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Now there's a new way for finance barons the steal our houses out from under us – or rather, a very old way that had lain dormant since the last time child labor was legal – "tax lien investing."

Across the country, counties and cities have programs that allow investment funds to buy up overdue tax-bills from homeowners in financial hardship. These "investors" are entitled to be paid the missing property taxes, and if the homeowner can't afford to make that payment, the "investor" gets to kick them out of their homes and take possession of them, for a tiny fraction of their value.

As Andrew Kahrl writes for The American Prospect, tax lien investing was common in the 19th century, until the fundamental ugliness of the business made it unattractive even to the robber barons of the day:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-26-investing-in-distress-tax-liens/

The "tax sharks" of Chicago and New York were deemed "too merciless" by their peers. One exec who got out of the business compared it to "picking pennies off a dead man’s eyes." The very idea of outsourcing municipal tax collection to merciless debt-hounds fell aroused public ire.

Today – as the conservative project to restore the "natural" order of the ruled and the ruled-over builds momentum – tax lien investing is attracting some of America's most rapacious investors – and they're making a killing. In Chicago, Alden Capital just spent a measly $1.75m to acquire the tax liens on 600 family homes in Cook County. They now get to charge escalating fees and penalties and usurious interest to those unlucky homeowners. Any homeowner that can't pay loses their home.

The first targets for tax-lien investing are the people who were the last people to benefit from the New Deal and its successors: Black and Latino families, elderly and disabled people and others who got the smallest share of America's experiment in shared prosperity are the first to lose the small slice of the American dream that they were grudgingly given.

This is the very definition of "structural racism." Redlining meant that families of color were shut out of the federal loan guarantees that benefited white workers. Rather than building intergenerational wealth, these families were forced to rent (building some other family's intergenerational wealth), and had a harder time saving for downpayments. That meant that they went into homeownership with "nontraditional" or "nonconforming" mortgages with higher interest rates and penalties, which made them more vulnerable to economic volatility, and thus more likely to fall behind on their taxes. Now that they're delinquent on their property taxes, they're in hock to a private equity fund that's charging them even more to live in their family home, and the second they fail to pay, they'll be evicted, rendered homeless and dispossessed of all the equity they built in their (former) home.

It's very on-brand for Alden Capital to be destroying the lives of Chicagoans. Alden is most notorious for buying up and destroying America's most beloved newspapers. It was Alden who bought up the Chicago Tribune, gutted its workforce, sold off its iconic downtown tower, and moved its few remaining reporters to an outer suburban, windowless brick building "the size of a Chipotle":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Before the ghastly hotel baroness Leona Helmsley went to prison for tax evasion, she famously said, "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." Helmsley wasn't wrong – she was just a little ahead of schedule. As Propublica's IRS Files taught us, America's 400 richest people pay less tax than you do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

When billionaires don't pay their taxes, they get to buy sports franchises. When poor people don't pay their taxes, billionaires get to steal their houses after paying the local government an insultingly small amount of money.

It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/26/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lois Beckett at The Guardian:

Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities. The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.

Researchers from UCLA, UT Austin, UC Riverside and American University surveyed 467 public school superintendents across 46 US states, asking them about the direct and indirect costs of dealing with these volatile campaigns. Those costs included everything from out-of-pocket payments to hire to lawyers or additional security, to the staff member hours devoted to responding to disinformation on social media, addressing parent concerns and replying to voluminous public records requests focused on the district’s teachings on racism, gender and sexuality. The campaigns that focused on public schools’ policies about transgender students often included lurid false claims about schools trying to change students’ gender or “indoctrinating” them into becoming gay. This disinformation sparked harassment and threats against individual teachers, school board members and administrators, with some of the fury coming from within local communities, and even more angry calls, emails and social media posts flooding in from conservative media viewers across the country.

In addition to the financial costs of responding to these targeted campaigns, the study revealed other dynamics, the researchers said. “The attack on public officials as pedophiles was one I heard again and again, from people across extremely different parts of the country: rural, urban, suburban. It speaks to the way that this really is a nationalized conflict campaign,” said John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the study. The frequency with which both school board members and school superintendents were “being called out as sexual predators – it was really frightening”, Rogers said. Superintendents from across the country told the researchers how these culture battles had affected their schools, and cut into resources they would have preferred to spend on education.

[...] While disagreement, debate and dealing with angry parents are a normal part of local public school administration, the researchers noted, the political campaigns that schools have faced in recent years have been anything but normal. Many of them have been driven by “a small number of active individuals on social media or at school board meetings”, and fueled by misinformation. The school-focused campaigns, which started with claims that elementary and middle schools were harming white students by teaching critical race theory and later shifted to attacks on schools’ policies for transgender students, were nationally organized, with “common talking points” that could be traced back to conservative foundations and rightwing legal organizations, and were intensely amplified by rightwing media coverage, Rogers said.

Public schools across the US burned up nearly $3.2BN worth of money fending off right-wing culture war items such as book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, anti-student inclusion, and anti-racial equity policies.

See Also:

The Advocate: U.S. public schools lost $3.2 billion fighting conservative culture wars: report

[buttacake80]

I hope this isn’t offensive but as someone who is trying to learn about American politics and English being my fourth language some terms can get a bit confusing to me and everyone around me struggles with the same way.

what does being a liberal mean? As in are you a trump or harris supporter? Or more neutral?

Not an offensive question. Actually quite complex.

Here in the US, we have two primary parties. The Republicans and the Democrats.

At one time in our history, there were other parties. We have smaller parties, but none of them have held a majority or even a significant minority. And, to further complicate things, these two primary parties flipped ideologies. It's confusing and would need its own post.

So, I will start this from 1980 forward.

The Republicans existed as the conservative party that represented small government, low taxes, and a strong defense.

However, the Republican Party was taken over by the "Make America Great Again" movement, pushing the party to an extreme right since 2012 (prior to MAGA, it was the Tea Party movement).

The Democratic Party exists as the liberal party that advocates for more social spending, more corporate taxation, climate change advocacy, and a smaller defense budget.

Donald Trump identifies as Republican, but he does not represent traditional Republican values.

Kamala Harris was the Democratic Party candidate.

I am a proud Harris supporter.

Both parties support capitalism.

I would fall more to the left than most liberals, but I would not identify as a leftist. Leftists are anti-capitalists.

Capitalism ran rampant, leading to this oligarchy that includes Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. The billionaires do not want to be taxed. They do not support the unionization of workers, and they would like more deregulation in order to further enrich themselves.

They bought a candidate: Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump's MAGA base is racist and xenophobic.

75% of our population identifies as white. This number actually includes Hispanics. If we remove non-Hispanic whites, the number drops to 60%.

13% identify as Black

7% identify as Asian

3% mixed race

1% Native American

And the remaining 1% is several small ethnic identities such as Pacific Islanders.

The white American population remains the overwhelming majority, but since the 80s, the far right has been pushing a narrative that white folk were going to become the minority and treated as horribly as the white folk have treated minorities.

Furthermore, a large segment of our population identifies as Christian. They have pushed a false narrative that this is a Christian nation when it has never been such. So, for the last 25 years, an ultra conservative Christian Nationalist movement has also taken hold of the Republican Party.

Trump used white folk's fears of being replaced to secure another term in office. In addition, here in the US, Black women have been vilified because we are the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party. We hold most of the graduate degrees here in the US. We are the most educated demographic.

We are not a monolith, but they view us as one. A lot of white folks resent Black women, so they could not stomach having a Black woman as the Nation's "boss".

So, they voted to maintain white supremacy.

I hope that's easy to understand.

[relaxedstyles]

Ari stops the victimhood cold.

[aqueerpolysocialist]

Solidarity with my comrades in the US fighting against this vile legislation. I've made sure to share this with all my UK based drag contacts but don't have any direct US contacts so please do share this and make sure everyone who can get involved knows that the union is there for them.

Link to the tweet: https://twitter.com/ActorsEquity/status/1631743221322620929?t=Dc9Rvnyxlr9ZNQUuh6U_uQ&s=19

[odinsblog]

I have been very critical at the way that media has helped legitimize what essentially is a propaganda campaign. We need to call that what it is.

We know the actors. The actors are very explicit. They don't camouflage what they're doing.

In fact, one of the biggest actors, of course, Chris Rufo, regularly goes on Twitter and says, this is what we're going to do. He said he was going to turn critical race theory into a term that made white Americans think about indoctrination, their white children being treated as the oppressor. I mean, he lays it out, and then he lays out his strategy, which is we keep pushing this until we get some mainstream media to pick it up, and then the rest of mainstream media feels that they have to now pick it up or it will look like they're being biased.

So these folks have studied, I think, really the flaws in media and have exploited it. So what happens is this desire to be ‘balanced’ then actually means we obfuscate the truth.

The first thing we should have done as journalists is said, okay, show me in a classroom where this is happening.

Provide evidence that this is happening.

Let's define what Critical Race Theory is, and what it isn't.

And instead, we allowed bad faith actors to really define the terms in a way that I think has been very harmful because that's how propaganda works.

Attempted bans were against 1619 specifically. Then they came back with critical race theory. Now, of course, they're coming back with DEI and we just keep making kind of those same mistakes again and again.

I also just want to add that when we think about something like critical race theory, when we think about what should and shouldn't be taught in the classroom, part of what we did as a failure media is to ask what is the role of an education? And is it wrong to teach a theory? Is it wrong to teach things that every parent wouldn't agree with?

I mean, that is actually the role of an education.

—Nikole Hannah-Jones: The Attack on Black History

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

This is a guest post by Jake Mackey, a professor of classics at a liberal arts college in California and co-founder of Free Black Thought. He has two prior guest posts here: Living by virtuous lies: On the "racism" of the SAT and White Doctors Kill Black Babies: Dubious Science and Anti-Racist Medicine (co-authored with David Gilbert).

-

[ Depicts a scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials, but widely acknowledged as a metaphor for 1950s McCarthyism. Giles was accused of witchcraft but refused to plead either guilty or not guilty because his heirs could then be deprived of his considerable estate. As Giley is being pressed by the weight of massive stones, he is repeatedly urged to enter a plea. His response: “More weight.” It eventually killed him. Amusing side note, Lee writing here. I played Giles Corey in my high school play. ]

-

I am 53 years old. The last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.

By: Jake Mackey

Published: Dec 18, 2024

Noam Dworman, host of the Comedy Cellar Podcast, put it this way: If—

“the general atmosphere of fear that we lived through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely���if all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader, that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country.”

But the author of all this change was not a particular leader. It was the left.

It was a society-wide culture of left-authoritarian intolerance, not a fascist leader, that made me watch my words like a hawk in my classroom for half a decade.

It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.

It was not a fascist leader but fear of intolerant leftists among my colleagues that made me censor myself, as a yet-untenured faculty member, when I was asked to report on my findings about the efficacy—which is nil or worse—of diversity training. It was fear of my leftist colleagues that made me bite my tongue and not speak out when I was asked to sign a statement containing a defamatory lie about a student who had in fact made hateful comments about Asians in a private text message, but had not, as we were asked to affirm with our signatures, threatened violence. (I did not sign, but shamefully I did not defend this vulnerable 19-year-old against faculty lies.)

It was not a fascist leader but fear of a pile-on from the left that compelled a colleague and me to humble ourselves before 18-year-olds with a public apology when a small group of students held our jointly taught class hostage for 30 minutes, tearfully accusing us of traumatizing them by showing a brief scene from a film about war, The Thin Red Line, in order to illustrate a point that St. Augustine makes in his Confessions about the evil in the human heart.

We later learned that the majority of the students had disagreed with their peers’ performative accusation of “harm” and had resented their hijacking of the class with transparently nonsensical accusations. However, the sensible majority of students were as terrified of their peers as we were, and of their peers’ capacity to destroy them for even imaginary infractions, and so they had held their tongues as the grotesque event unfolded. (Worth noting here: I think the vast majority of students, and faculty and administrators, too, are reasonable people who were intimidated into silence by socially distributed authoritarianism, just as I was, over the past years. More on this dynamic below.)

Nor were my colleague and I unique among faculty on my campus. No, it was not a fascist leader but fear of attack from the grassroots left that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others. Professors were afraid to tell any but their most trusted colleagues about how students had stood up in class to denounce them for ideological apostasy or to accuse them of "traumatizing" or "harming" them by teaching basic scientific facts. Professors were afraid to show a “triggering” image, or to fail to teach a given subject from the now-mandatory ideological perspective of Afropessimism. Professors were afraid to teach historical or literary material, unobjectionable until seemingly just the week before, that was now deemed inherently "white supremacist."

[ Maoist public shaming ]

It was not a fascist leader but a merciless socially distributed grassroots left-authoritarianism that led a senior administrator, a black man, to remark to a small group of us whom he trusted—

“I live in fear that if I say one wrong word, it will be the end of a 30-year career. I worry that I can’t protect my staff if any of them says one wrong word.”

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution enacted by 18-year-olds—before which a department chair, tenured faculty, and college administrators cowered and averted their eyes—that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud the name of a character in an antiracist comic book. Yes, it was a classroom of first-year students—acting with the tacit complicity of an entire college staffed by cowards (whose cowardice was nonetheless rational)—that ended her career for reading a name in a comic book whose entire lesson centered on the evils of racism. They denounced her as a white supremacist in a way that her fledgling career as a professor, which had begun only one semester before, could never recover from.

Off campus, I know an artist whose career and business a left-authoritarian mob, not a fascist leader, attempted to destroy because he did not post a black square, signaling solidarity with BLM, on his company’s social media in 2020.

I know a musician who lost his band and music career merely for revealing that he was reading a book that had been effectively "banned" by a censorious left. His experience of repressive, totalitarian retribution came not from a fascist leader, but from a faceless, intolerant mob.

[ Nazi book burning ]

It was not a fascist leader but fear of a cancelation campaign from the left—as well as fear that many of my colleagues and college administrators would tacitly endorse the campaign out of their own fear of defending me—that led me to issue a groveling apology to a small group of students and faculty for bringing this same musician to my campus, along with Daryl Davis, a musician and anti-Klan activist who has done more to combat the most virulent forms of antiblack racism in America than perhaps anyone since the Civil Rights era, as part of a Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) panel discussion.

[ Lee here. Daryl Davis has, miraculously, by befriending them, gotten over 200 members of the KKK to abandon the group. When they do so, they donate their KKK robes & hoods to him, which he keeps as a kind of trophy. I really wanted to post an image of him with a reformed KKK member in full garb, but because of the very reasons outlined in Jake’s essay, I decided against it. You can follow Daryl on X (formerly Twitter) here and see for yourself; he posts those images regularly. ]

The two musicians got into a spirited but friendly disagreement about the value of BLM’s approach during the FAIR panel discussion. Afterwards, I heard from a senior colleague that some students and faculty who had been peripherally involved with bringing the panel to campus were mortified that their names might be associated with an event in which someone had said something critical of BLM, and that I would do well to issue an apology. Perhaps these students and faculty really could not countenance hearing criticism of BLM. More likely, I suspect, they were motivated by the same terror of cancelation and ostracism that I was. If their peers learned that they had had anything to do with a panel on which BLM was criticized by one of the speakers, they could face social or professional death on our small campus.

I have read of accomplished leaders in the world of arts and literature who lost their positions not because they criticized BLM but because the statement of solidarity with BLM that they published was not strident enough. I have read (and written) of physicians who lost important positions, were subjected to star chamber proceedings, and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely for suggesting that socioeconomic conditions and not the unscientific construct of "implicit bias" were responsible for racial health disparities.

I have read of a liberal, gay Canadian educator, who had served children selflessly for decades, who was quite plausibly driven to suicide after being derided as a racist in front of an audience of 200 of his peers by a DEI trainer in a COVID-era “diversity” Zoom call.

And I could go on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And I still wouldn’t have broached the repressiveness of our response to COVID, in which the government was involved, occasionally recruiting private citizens as instruments of repression!

Socially Distributed Authoritarianism: No Fascist Leader Needed

None of this repressiveness, this authoritarian intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on pain of professional and social destruction—along with the fear that it all generated—was imposed by a fascist leader. No, it was imposed through the distributed channels of a small number of individual agents converging on an ideology that the vast majority of Americans found absurd, and on a set of repressive practices to enforce it on an unwilling populace. It was also imposed—and this is crucial—by the vast majority of individuals and institutions whose rationally self-interested fear of being subjected to these repressive practices made them turn their eyes away, allowing it to happen to those around them and tacitly endorsing it.

And I cannot but include myself in this indictment. So many of us, myself included, behaved like latter-day Peters, thrice denying the Jesuses of our colleagues, friends, and family in order to save our own skins by falsifying all our most dearly held preferences. My own cowardly failure, before 2022, when at last I got tenure and achieved a measure of security, to come to the aid of friends who were being unfairly scapegoated and professionally destroyed will forever be a source of shame for me.

John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty, noted that in cases such as I have described here, “society is itself the tyrant—society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it.” A collective tyrant of this sort—

practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

The risk of lapsing into a “social tyranny,” Mill believed, warranted a kind of prophylaxis that even measures like the First Amendment cannot provide—

Protection…against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

The Tyranny of the Minority and the Spiral of Silence

Mill, it must be noted, is describing here a “tyranny of the majority,” whereas the “woke” social tyranny we have lately lived through and of which we are perhaps now breaking free may better be seen as a “tyranny of the minority.”

The economist Glenn Loury—writing in the Journal of Free Black Thought, the periodical of an organization some friends and I founded in 2020 to fight burgeoning woke racism and the tacit suppression in our public discourse of black viewpoint diversity—describes how a minority can exert tyrannical power over a majority:

German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined a term that describes this phenomenon: the “Spiral of Silence.” In a spiral of silence, when holding a certain view entails a stigma, then, for fear of being seen as having that view, most people stay silent. Thus, the masses believe they are alone or in a small minority of people with the stigmatized view, when in fact they are indeed in the majority, one of the masses. In progressive-controlled areas of our society today, we are suffering from a spiral of silence…. [...] Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence.

The spiral of silence, with its “voluntary limitation of one’s own speech,” is the dynamic by means of which a “woke” tiny minority (estimated to constitute a mere 8% of the population) succeeded in enforcing the social tyranny of the past few years.

Crucially, for the majority of us to have stayed silent all this time, we had to submit ourselves to self-surveillance and self-censorship. The terrorizing spectacle of sudden, arbitrary cancelations, played out on the internet and on campuses, served a panopticon-like function, assuring us that we are always being watched, always subject to discipline. As Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it”—

assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.

Over the last few years, there was no need for a state apparatus of totalitarian control. Instead, each of us internalized the constraints on our speech and behavior that the “woke” wished to impose. Knowing that our own social media posts and others’ smartphone video recordings of us were always being uploaded to the “non-corporal” cloud, and in fear of personal and professional destruction, we self-monitored and self-regulated ourselves into a spiral of silence that left only extreme voices free to fill the void, until it came to seem like those were the only voices that had ever sounded.

Now, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there was an entire class of people who genuinely never entered a spiral of silence, who never felt the need to falsify their preferences, who never experienced so much as a moment of fear of their neighbors, students, colleagues, or acquaintances, who sincerely never were discomfited by episodes of mob-led retribution and cancelation such as I've described here. My theory is that (1) some of these were people who worked and lived in places and occupations blessedly removed from the haunts of the knowledge-economy elites who spearhead “social justice” persecutions, so they simply didn’t encounter the phenomenon; (2) some of these were people who observed somewhat ruefully what was happening to their friends, colleagues, and neighbors, and felt, with a sigh, that it was unfortunate, but rationalized it as a few eggs getting broken in order to make a beautiful omelet of social justice; and finally (3) some of these were people whose own ideology so effortlessly mirrored that of the dominant social configuration that they simply never experienced a moment of cognitive friction.

This latter group comprises the “woke,” whether narcissistic, sadistic, witch-hunting activists or merely complacent fellow travelers. I would posit that many people in this “woke” group have not, for the most part, antecedently and independently arrived at "woke" ideology on their own. The true fire of conversion and fanaticism burns in only a rare few. Rather, for most wokists, their minds are such as to spontaneously and uncritically conform themselves to whatever virtuous lie we are collectively supposed to believe or endorse in any given week—from abolishing slave-patrol policing in America, to mass graves of Indians in Canada, to human biology having no bearing on a person's sex or gender. This group has been, and appears to remain, in the grip of an ongoing mass delusion.

Moreover, this group is by and large the class of people that I fully expect to tell me in the comments that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right-wing lie. Some of these people will also make a faulty inference from this essay and assume that I am a hardcore right-winger. In a classic case of the whataboutism fallacy, they will ask, Well, what about the Republicans?, and they'll accuse me of carrying water for a right wing that is supposedly far more repressive than any leftist or Democrat could ever aspire to be.

Even more incoherently, some people from this group will say that my supposed experience of intolerance (which they doubt ever really happened) is in any event exactly what a bigot should expect (and therefore it’s good that it happened). If I have views that it was impossible for me to express on campus over the past years, that is just and good, for their very rejection entails that my views must have been beyond the pale, and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk. On this view, people like those whose destruction I have chronicled here merely met with a social opprobrium that was symmetrical with their sins. Case closed.

These inferences and accusations are, of course, not only false but also logically fallacious, even if—alas—it has not been uncommon to hear them over the past 4 and more years. The simple truth is that I can be angry about left-wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right-wing repressiveness, as indeed I am. I have spoken out on Twitter/X against Florida's repression of speech, for example, and against the crushing of pro-Palestinian speech on some campuses, and just recently I shared my fear, which I think is not unfounded, that Trump may end up invoking the Insurrection Act.

Be all that as it may, there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my "lived experience" of the daily, grinding paranoia and fear that the leftist culture of repression and bullying has created in me and that I have seen it create in students and colleagues, and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about a repressive right, that is in any event far more distant from me because I am not obliged to go to or work in Florida or Texas. In contrast, the society-wide leftist culture of authoritarian tyranny that I have described here has been more or less ubiquitous.

I’m well aware that “wokeness” and its associated “cancel culture” kicked off in the 2010s and began to get really bad ten years ago, around 2015, but I have spoken here only of my own personal experience, which became untenable shortly before 2020.

Moreover, I am well aware that the excesses of the totalitarian left of the last few years can’t compete with the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or Stalinism, or theocratic Islamism (all three of which, by the way, are embraced to one degree or another by the left). Accordingly, I have used “totalitarian” here not in its proper sense, as a system of authoritarian government, but in an extended sense, as a socially enforced leftwing regime of authoritarianism, an attempt by a vocal minority to exert total control over thoughts, speech, and action. The fact that the abuses perpetrated by American leftists against their freedom-loving fellow citizens over the last few years were not acts of a totalitarian government hardly entails that the era was some sort of picnic, and it is telling that people who grew up in totalitarian regimes have seen echoes of what they escaped in the “woke” regime.

Feel free to deny my account of the last 4 years, but I refuse to be gaslit about what I have experienced and seen.

I close with a parting shot from Nevline Nnaji, whose work we have shared and promoted in the Journal of Free Black Thought:

[whitehotharlots]

A quick note re: 2 exciting innovations in Anti-Racist Science

First, there's this piece from CNN titled "Major Hollywood stars press Academy to include Jews in representation and inclusion standards." Low-IQ actors such as Debra Messing and David Schwimmer have requested that the Academy of Motion Pictures begin auditing the number of Jews in their ranks, explaining that refusing to do so might cause people to believe Jews are white, instead of a completely separate racial entity. Very neat!

Second--and this is from a conservative source, sure, but the documents are verifiable--we have some new DEI materials that were taught to employess of the University of Wisconsin health system. These include many of the greatest hits from older DEI materials: it's racist to cry when someone yells at you, it's racist to disagree with a black person about anything, it's racist to say you're not racist, etc etc. But there are two exciting new twists: it's racist to have supported the 1960's Civil Rights movement and it's only possible for anyone to feel comfortable when they're interacting solely with people who "look and think" like themselves.

For years, I have complained that the left's all-consuming obsession with identity has accidentally turned progressives into Bush-era Republicans. Sadly, they have blasted beyond that. These people now have the politics of a fringe 1960's Birch Society candidate who thinks fluoridation causes race mixing. They have been Spiro Agnew-pilled.

This would all be a dumb little thing to snicker at if it were, indeed, confined to tumblr and X studies courses at liberal arts colleges. But it's not. It's absolutely not. It's being normalized in a staggering number of white collar spaces and people can and do face formal discipline for pointing out how utterly fucking insane it is.

Does anyone truly want this? Is this what you marched for in 2020? Is this what your workplaces and schools should look like? Are these the people we truly desire to empower? Because we are barreling toward the point of no return with this stuff.

You gotta stop it with the "golly gee we're just trying to teach folks about racism and slavery" bullshit. That was annoying in 2020; it's outright dangerous now. This is not education. This is not a process of healing. This is an extremely reactionary ideological project that's going to have negative reverberations for decades to come.

[hussyknee]

Not entirely sure how I'm expected to respond when I point out something is white as fuck and the person I'm criticizing goes "I'm literally PoC!!" Okay? Good for you? Get well soon??

I literally live in South Asia, a place still nursing the world's worst colonial hangover. That's like one billion brown people desperately in need of joining Bootlickers Anonymous. If I had to respect the rancid takes of every yahoo that lives here I'd have to drown myself in the sea.

Living in white countries does something odd to diaspora brains. If you call yourself BIPOC in your own head long enough you end up forgetting you're just a garden variety idiot mainlining white supremacy like everyone else.

[us-cj]

Marxism is a social cancer

Learn the Marxist measures of Active Subversion / PSYWAR: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis/Insurgency and Normalization

Yuri Clip:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Spencer Sunshine at The New Republic:

Presidents don’t just wield power directly; they set the mood for the country. It’s not uncommon for their grassroots base to flourish under their administration, as the far right did during Donald Trump’s first term in office. It is less common, however, for that base to remain strong after defeat. But, defying the odds, the MAGA movement continued to flourish under Joe Biden. Now, with Trump returning to the White House, the far right grassroots is barreling into 2025 with plenty of momentum, while their leader both helps set their agenda while sustaining it by crowd-sourcing their conspiracies and lies for his own use.

Issues and Themes

The far right is currently animated by several themes, many of them interrelated. For several years, demonizing “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) frameworks—which focus on identities, racial and otherwise—was an obsession. But the far right has gradually replaced DEI with “woke,” a vaguer and broader idea which can refer to the vast majority of left-leaning positions and be applied to any number of hot button, culture war topics.

The backlash over gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights continues, with trans issues front-and-center. After Roe v Wade was struck down in 2022, attacks on abortion rights increased. And when Trump was reelected, the slogan “Your Body, My Choice” spread like wildfire after being embraced by far right leaders like Nick Fuentes. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has also increased, particularly as Trump has promised to deport tens of millions. His racist vilification of immigrants was epitomized by his embrace of unfounded rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—who were, for what it’s worth, legal residents—were stealing and eating pets. Finally, completely discredited “race science” theories have returned, often focusing on bogus IQ studies. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has promoted them on his social media platform X, as has Trump, who has blamed violence by immigrants on “bad genes.”

Donald Trump

Donald Trump has different faces: the tax-cutting businessman, the international negotiator—and the authoritarian strongman. Sometimes he embraces different approaches at different times; mostly, though, he is everything at once: A demagogue and a xenophobe who is committing to cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy and who pitches himself as the only man who can keep the country—and the world—safe. Campaign promises have included setting up deportation camps for undocumented immigrants—in what he said would be a “bloody story”—and arresting critics and opponents including Kamala Harris, Mark Zuckerberg, and members of the January 6 House committee. Trump also said he’d consider banning vaccines and claims to have the power to halt congressional budget allocations.

His appointments have also been gifts to his far right base. The start of Trump’s first term was largely characterized by a raft of relatively moderate, establishment favorite picks, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and chief of staff Reince Priebus. Now, the situation is quite different. Stalwart MAGA congressman Matt Gaetz was initially tapped to be attorney general until accusations of sex with underage girls quickly sunk him. Tulsi Gabbard, a sympathizer to dictatorships in Syria and Russia, was picked as his Director of National Intelligence. Arguably the most infamous selection was the appointment of Musk to a proposed advisory commission, DOGE (a reference to a dated internet meme, it stands for the “Department of Government Efficiency”). Musk himself has repeatedly tweeted support for anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and most recently for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far right party many consider crypto-Nazis.

The far right has two wings. One is openly white supremacist, and is vocally opposed to groups like people of color, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people. The other is more moderate in its beliefs; people of color—themselves an increasing part of Trump’s base—are welcome, as are Jews. Both wings overlap in their hatred of “communism” (also a catch-all term for anything to the left of them), embrace of conspiracy theories, contempt for democracy, and desire for traditional social hierarchies.

The white supremacists and their moderate cousins often see-saw in popularity, one rising as the other falls. In recent years, the moderates have swung high. Moms for Liberty, which has focused on banning school library books—especially those with LGBTQ+ content but also ones with pro-diversity or antiracist messages—started 2024 with almost 300 chapters. But their influence has waned as the year went on. The notoriously violent Proud Boys, who played an important role in storming the Capitol four years ago, have faced even tougher times. With their leader Enrique Tarrio serving a twenty-two year sentence for his role in the assault on the Capitol, their scattered chapters now lack cohesion and focus.

One exception is the armed militia movement, which is having a mild revival. Hurt by a massive Facebook deplatforming in 2020, Tess Owen recently observed these groups “have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric” in recent months. Some groups hope to help Trump’s deportation scheme. Conversely, open white supremacists are doing quite well. Active Clubs—white supremacist MMA training gyms—are in full flourish, and have even expanded overseas. While they’ve had limited public activism, observers worry they could soon transform into a fully-fledged fighting force.

A new wave of swastika-waving neo-Nazis has emerged, too. The media-friendly Blood Tribe, who use striking aesthetics and a confrontational approach, were early promoters of the pet-eating rumor. A Columbus, Ohio march by their splinter group Hate Club 1488 grabbed so much attention that even President Biden denounced it. Blood Tribe was only one of three groups that descended on Nashville this year for public events. They were joined by the antisemitic Goyim Defense League, who spent two weeks harassing local residents, as well as Patriot Front, one of the largest U.S. fascist groups. All three groups represent a new, flourishing neo-Nazi movement—one that will likely continue to grow during Trump’s second term.

The New Republic reports on how Donald Trump is building an army of foot soldiers for his far-right agenda.

[commonsensecommentary]

“To live a life convinced that you are alone among implacable enemies instead of being surrounding by potential friends and allies is the surest and shortest pathway to a life filled with paranoia and conflict.” (From my blog archive)

[ghostlypawn]

i lose braincells whenever someone on drag race says nina west was on broadway... baby she was in the non-equity tour...