(The following essay is excerpted from the book:
Notes from the 3rd Rail: Civilization in the Crosshairs
Part 1
Last
year (2016) marked the 5oth anniversary of China’s Cultural
Revolution. Mao Zedong’s attempt to purge China of any and all vestiges of
capitalist bourgeoisie contamination resulted in over one million dead and
countless others brutalized, tortured, and humiliated. Millions were banished
from their homes and communities. Those that weren’t killed were sent to
“reeducation camps.” Children informed on their teachers and snitched on their
parents. There are claims of the proscribed actually being eaten, with body
parts distributed according to party rank.
Mao’s revolutionary fervor
turned a nation against itself.
Confucianism, ancient cultural traditions, the very glue of the
civilization, were all transmogrified into evils to be cast off. We look back
today in amazement that such a self-destructive zeitgeist could take hold of an
entire nation—the world’s largest, in fact.
It’s widely acknowledged that
the U.S. is more polarized now than during the Vietnam War era. Then, the
conservative side of the cultural divide coined “Silent Majority” to identify
themselves and their cause: “We
disapprove of your attacks on our values, particularly our patriotism. We are
proud of our country. It is, after all, the greatest nation on earth—and by the
way we just saved Europe in WWII.”
The next generation “boomers,”
the demographic “baby boom” bubble arising from the soldier boys coming home to
their sweethearts, apparently saw little value in that accomplishment. The
children of the “greatest generation” instead rebelled against the material
success their parents sacrificed so much to gain, and created a
“counterculture” that rejected many of society’s normal values in the process.
They mocked the “materialism,” the “consumerism,” the “tick-tacky” tract houses
in the suburbs, the “plastic” lifestyles—all those accoutrements of a middle
class that were the envy of the world, one never seen before and perhaps never
to be seen again.
As they moved into adulthood
the boomers brought their new values with them to inculcate the brave new world
they would shape with their new superior moral clarity: tolerance, diversity, inclusion,
multiculturalism, and moral relativism. The first target of their crusading
zeal was the academic-educational complex. Finding little resistance, the Left
took over the colleges and universities. From the safety of the classroom and
the faculty lounge they indoctrinated their charges who in turn marched,
diplomas in hand, into the streets, into the boardrooms of media and
entertainment conglomerates, offices of government and private enterprise
alike—and later their own classrooms—transforming our culture into one barely
recognizable to their parents.
The first tremors of this
bifurcation of cultural norms were heard in the 1990s. The term “Culture War”
was coined in 1991
. Since then the battle lines have calcified. The Democratic Party wholly
embraces the new “progressive” cultural values—which should now be acknowledged
as the cultural norms. The Republican
Party plays reluctant host to the conservative
faction by default—though it is by no means uniformly wedded to traditional values.
Republicans are also divided along the Culture War’s Maginot Line. This
conflict within the Republican Party is the main reason why two parties are no
longer sufficient to accommodate the full spectrum of the political landscape. Democrats
from the Bernie Sanders “progressive” faction oppose capitalism and especially
globalization, and argue similarly that their
party is too ideologically constrained. It seems at least three political parties are necessary to represent a
fuller spectrum of the political and cultural values held by Americans in the
new century.
* * * * *
Are we in a “Culture War”? If so, it is a cultural civil war—as we are fighting against ourselves. So, is America
engaged in a cultural civil war? I question the use of tense. The war is over.
The Left has won. On every contentious social issue they have emerged
victorious. Abortion and homosexual marriage were among the most virulently
contested issues. But the Left has prevailed in these two theaters, as they
have in virtually all the others.
What has happened over the last
half-century is better described as a revolution.
Cultural norms that have existed—not just in modern times, not just since WWII,
not just since the nation’s founding… but those that evolved over the course of
centuries of western civilization itself—have been rudely upended and in many
cases figuratively turned on their head.
The political struggle to
reverse and correct what has happened is thus nothing less than a counter-revolution. We have just passed
through our own “cultural revolution.”
Our “reeducation camps” are our very schools and universities, from
whence emanates the new zeitgeist. Henceforth I will refer to our sixties-initiated cultural
revolution as the Cultural
Revolution.
* *
* * *
Mary Anne Case, a professor
from the University of Chicago’s Law School recently appeared on an NPR news
magazine program. She took issue with a letter to incoming
freshmen penned by the school’s Dean of Students John Ellison. In it, he
denounced the concepts of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” as violating the
school’s “commitment to academic freedom.”
Ms. Case criticized the use of those words as “jargon.” She argued that
protecting students from freedom of expression that are “hostile,” for example rescinding a speaking invitation to a
Ben Shapiro, Condi Rice or even Ayaan Hirsi Ali, can be better expressed
“without using politically loaded terms such as ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe
spaces.’”
I am reminded of the first time
I heard the expression “politically correct.” It was during the 1980s at a
meeting of a left-wing “peace” group. Before the term was used mockingly in the
pejorative, it was coined by leftists themselves to praise socio-political behavior and/or action that they deemed…
correct.
Now
that the politically correct groupthink that dominates our college campuses is finally
exposed to ridicule, we are seeing the same reaction. “Trigger warnings”
continue to be listed in course syllabi, and “safe spaces” are still promoted
as selling points to potential students. Damage control, as exhibited by Prof.
Case’s appearance on NPR, is now necessary only because enough outsiders have
been exposed to the lunacy perpetrated by the “diversity” regimes running these
asylums. To wit, a University of Chicago Law School professor now compelled to
publicly classify “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as “jargon,” in the hope
of reassuring the world that our colleges and universities have not gone
completely bonkers.
* *
* * *
There’s no difficulty in
recognizing political correctness when we see it—which is virtually everywhere.
A terrorist in an instructional video is portrayed as anything but a
middle-eastern Muslim. A political campaign manager expresses his dismay that
the names of the latest terrorist shooter, and the reporter announcing it,
weren’t reversed.
Every television political drama from Designated
Survivor to The West Wing. The 6
o’clock news catches a child running up to embrace a returning female soldier
while her doting husband looks on with admiration. The New York Times chooses a gay couple to feature in an article about
a sinking skyscraper in San Francisco to represent the disaffected tenants, just so they can show a mature gay couple in
a photo and use the words “his husband” in the first sentence. A
politician crafts a photo-op carefully selecting people of the correct
“identities” for the backdrop.
And it’s not just the Left that
employs political correctness. To counter the stereotype of being a refuge for
white-male conspiracy theorists, the NRA will look for a woman or an
African-American to make their case in a television commercial. Likewise a pro-charter
schools ballot initiative will seek a person of color to advertise their cause
to counter the implication that charter schools are just another manifestation
of “white flight.”
The
goal is to place people into roles in which their group identity (sex, race,
religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation) is underrepresented in real life. A
college career advising center displays pamphlets on “non-traditional” careers
to pursue. Women are encouraged to enter automotive technology or policing and
firefighting. Men are encouraged to enter nursing and human services. No one
thinks to ask, “Why?”
* *
* * *
I am reminded of Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart’s famous explanation of pornography: “I know it when I
see it.” We recognize pornography
because of its intent: it’s designed to sexually stimulate. Likewise we
recognize political correctness when we see it because it is always used to
produce an outcome favored by the Left.
Ninety-nine percent of
political correctness is identity politics. Any political issue not directly
related to conflict between groups that has a clear left-right dichotomy
accounts for the remainder, things such as renewable energy, global warning and
animal rights. The Cultural Revolution is implicitly defined by political
correctness. In order to understand the Cultural Revolution we have to
understand political correctness.
Only in the past several years
have we seen the term proactively co-opted by Republicans and used as a cudgel
against its practitioners. Dr. Ben Carson was one of the first conservative
protagonists to recognize and publicize its virulent and deadly nature, most famously
with President Obama sitting only a few feet away at the President’s Prayer
Breakfast in 2013. When Carson entered the presidential
sweepstakes in 2015 he made it a cornerstone of his stump speeches. His
competitors began cautiously peppering their own talking points with references
to it—though treading cautiously, wary of possible voter repercussions.
But the
repeated, though usually mild, criticisms of political correctness by several
of the Republican presidential hopefuls did
constitute a major breakthrough to those of us anxious to see the nation roused
to its senses. Predictably, only FoxNews
among the major TV media outlets gave this “new” narrative any substantial air
time. We watch with amusement as the rest of the mainstream news media continue
to ignore it. Seriously, how can Chris Matthews or David Gregory conduct a
discussion on political correctness? They are charter members of the
politically correct elite! How is it possible to criticize political
correctness when it provides the framework for your worldview? One could just
as easily imagine a Mafia Don complaining about being shortchanged on a
restaurant tab.
* *
* * * *
James Davison Hunter, Culture
Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic
Books, 1991).
In a speech that will live in
infamy delivered to an adoring crowd at an LGBT gala fundraiser in Manhattan this
year,
presidential Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton identified half of Trump’s
supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” She then specified in no uncertain
terms what she meant: “The sexists… the racists… the homophobic… the xenophobic…
the Islamophobic.”
The following weekend on Meet the Press those comments were described
by one of the (liberal) panelists as “politically incorrect.”
But these very words—the ’isms and ’ophobias—are the very watchwords of political
correctness. When used by liberal politicians and pundits they are an
instruction to stop thinking: “Do not
listen to anything that person has to say; banish them from our moral universe.
We have done the thinking for you.”
According to this worldview, if
you prefer to see pretty women in your television programs—that’s sexist. If you perceive affirmative
action as a liberal’s idea of “good” discrimination, and thus oppose it on
principle, you are racist. If your
mind recoils at the thought of a weepy toddler clutching his teddy bear,
creeping to his parents’ bedroom for comfort after a scary dream, and opening
the door to discover his ‘dads’ engaged in anal sex, you’re a homophobe. If you believe the government
has a responsibility to control immigration with a secure border, subject to
robust and strictly enforced laws, you may be a xenophobe. If you fear Islamic terrorism, or disagree with
President Obama and Hillary Clinton that ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam,” (after
all, “Islam has been woven into the fabric of country since our founding”), you
suffer from Islamophobia.
Is it any wonder that Hillary’s
“deplorables” responded overnight with “Proud to be Deplorable” T-shirts and
Facebook memes? Hillary has unwittingly attacked mainstream America.
These words, “sexist, racist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobe,” are the very passwords into the cultural left’s zeitgeist. Using such words is a very clever tactic. Destroy
your opponent’s legitimacy by defining him as suffering from an irrational fear
of your particular self-identification or deviancy.
The Left use the words
“diversity” and “inclusive” to establish the moral high ground from which to
launch attacks on retrograde “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” etc., Americans.
Thus they stand in defense of the helpless victims of the various ‘isms and ‘ophobias. Diversity is also a device to justify a hiring or
admission decision based on something other than merit—plausible deniability
for rejecting the most qualified applicant. As employer non-discrimination clauses
grow to absurd lengths, the same goal could be more easily met by specifying
the one group it is okay to
discriminate against, the one group not identified in any list of the
“oppressed,” the one group not in the “Obama Coalition”: white non-Hispanic
males… oh, and now, Asians.
In the identity politics
sweepstakes, a scorecard is needed to make correct hiring and school admission
decisions.
Identity Politics Scorecard
|
Black
|
+1
|
White
|
-1
|
Hispanic
|
+1
|
Asian
|
-1
|
Female
|
+1
|
Male
|
-1
|
LGBT
|
+1
|
Heterosexual
|
-1
|
non-Judeo-Christian
|
+1
|
By this
tally, I am a “negative-three-fer.” As a college applicant I would need an SAT
score 320 points higher than an African-American
to gain acceptance to a private university.
As a job applicant I would be passed over by any female, black, or homosexual
candidates that otherwise satisfied the minimum job requirements—especially in
academia.
* * * * *
Is
there a driving philosophy behind political correctness?
The guiding principle behind
political correctness appears to be an omnipresent and abiding fear that things
should not be as they are— that something has gone horribly wrong. “Social engineering”
is required to redress the wrongs inflicted on a hapless humanity by … Nature? Why should women have their
career aspirations handicapped by the burdens of childbearing? Why not men? Who
ordained that men are more likely to pursue athletics and physically demanding
work? Ph.Ds. in STEM fields should be distributed equally between the sexes as
well as among the races. The fact that this is not so is proof of sexist and
racist social constructs and “privileges.”
Some have tried to decode political
correctness by tracing it back to an academic artifice of the sixties known as
“Deconstruction,” attributed to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
His ideas of meaning and words in language were extended into the socio-political
sphere in the 1980s.
Others trace it back further to
the “Critical Theory” philosophy developed at the Frankfurt School, an
institute founded in 1923 to advance Marxism in Germany. Critical Theory seeks
to confront the social, historical and ideological forces and structures
inherent in our pathological, unreconstructed (along Marxist lines) societies.
The Institute was closed by Hitler in 1933 and forced to relocate, finding
fertile ground at New York’s Columbia University. It’s believed that much of
the leftist turn in academia in the U.S. can be attributed directly to this
transplanting.
There is no doubt that today’s
identity politics and political correctness owe a debt to the Frankfurt
School’s Critical Theory as well as to Derrida’s Deconstructionism, but are they
the sine qua non? When Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton concocts a new
government initiative to address racial iniquities, are they really consulting
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals? Is
the feminist deconstruction of third-person pronouns into gender-neutral ones
really all a communist plot?
C’mon.
Regardless of its origins, political correctness is a movement that now has a
life of its own. It no longer matters which historical antecedents you prefer to
cite or whom you wish to blame. Today’s social justice warriors aren’t thinking
about Karl Marx or the roots of Critical Theory, they’re busy transforming
their personal spheres of influence and landscaping our world, one binary-gender
challenging pronoun at a time.
* * * * *
In practice, decisions based on
political correctness require choosing the unfamiliar or underrepresented over
the expected and conventional—or, dare I say it?—normal. Jobs requiring physical strength are traditionally
dominated by men. Soldiering, policing, firefighting, construction. Under
today’s diversity regimes, the physically weaker sex must be encouraged to fill
these positions. Why? Because. In fields where nurturing, patience and empathy
are at a premium, traits traditionally associated with women (for good reason),
men are encouraged to apply.
Regarding race, the new
paradigm is not a strict reversal of norms.
Anything dominated by whites should be incentivized for people of color.
However, there are no inducements for whites in any field dominated by
African-Americans. There is no affirmative action policy for the NBA or NFL.
These are all examples of
identity politics point-scoring. Black favored over white.
“LGBT” preferred over heterosexual. Female trumps male (except in U.S. presidential
elections). Muslim before Christian (embarrassingly evident in refugee
immigration policy).
Is there a pattern here? Is there a grand design behind this, or is it simply
random mass insanity?
Cultural
self-othering
Social scientists describe the
process of “othering” as: the
human tendency to believe that the group (race, religion, ethnicity, culture,
gender, country, sexual orientation etc.) that they are a part of is inherently
the “right” way to be human. This often results in hostility towards those not part
of a group, as they can be seen as a threat or liability that is detrimental to
the group's existence, creating an “us vs. them” mentality.
We in the West are undergoing a
cultural self-othering. Our culture
is “othering” itself! This is the
unifying principal underlying political correctness that afflicts not just the
U.S., but Western Europe. A culture turning against itself. Is this where
civilizations go to die... like reality show Survivor “tribal councils” of attrition: the fittest eliminated after
their contributions deemed no longer essential; their advantages outweighed by
the threat they pose to the collective mediocrity of the remaining group?
Let’s take a preliminary look
at each of Hillary’s “deplorables”—the cultural left’s toxic ‘isms and ‘ophobias, before they are further explored in the essays.
* * * * *
“The sexists …”
Feminist provocateur Alison
Bechdel coined the “Bechdel Test” in 1985 to rate movies according to a
feminist litmus test.
The three criteria for a movie passing the test are:
(1)
it has to have at least two women in it, who have names, and
(2)
talk to each other, about
(3) something besides a man.
But the actual trend in film
and television with respect to gender has an entirely different complexion than
that which causes Ms. Bechdel such angst. Feminists target “gender stereotypes”
in the popular culture. Gender roles are being intentionally reversed. The
strong, silent male lead has been replaced with the “strong,” often emotionally
detached, female lead. The Hunger Games,
Gravity, The Force Awakens. In each there must be a doting, weaker,
man-in-waiting—or two of them in competition for the heroine (“hero?”). Speaking
of heroines, feminists have convinced Hollywood that using the female
genderized form of “actor” is sexist. “Actresses” no longer exist. Now there
can no longer be any binary distinction; there are only “actors”—male, female,
or presumably any of the other 31 flavors of “gender.”
Unfortunately, it is not just
the male hero’s traditional manly virtues of strength, integrity, independence
and his familial roles of builder and protector that have been transplanted to
female roles. Often today’s female lead exhibits one or more of the baser
traits usually associated with men: callousness, brutality, licentiousness,
sociopathy and selfishness, and particularly sexual aggressiveness coupled with
cavalier treatment of bed partners. Even James Bond displayed tenderness to his
many sexual conquests. Today’s “strong woman” lead is often not so encumbered. “Do me hard… and there’s the door. I don’t
do cuddling.”
Alison Bechdel may think she
has seized upon a clever example of how our culture undervalues women, but the
transformation of the entertainment industry under the prescriptions of
feminism is far more pervasive and insidious.
Social critic Billy Taylor has
countered with the Taylor Test, to
rate the suitability of movies that don’t
pander to politically correct feminist gender “corrections” as described above.
Taylor
Test
(1) A movie passes if it has a
positive portrayal of a father—and the mother is also an existing, active
character in the story.
(2) An action/comic book movie
is approved if it doesn't have a token scene where the lead female—unarmed and
single-handedly—beats up a team of armed men, demonstrating superior martial
prowess to the male main character/hero.
To clarify and underscore (1),
he adds: “There are movies with
positive father figures, but try to find one where he isn't essentially just a
surrogate mother—i.e., the mother in the story has died or is nonexistent for
some other reason.”
When the delusional feminist
narratives of female superior physical prowess are repeated often enough, they
are eventually believed. Until, that is, some intrepid researcher finds funding
to study the correlation between police fatalities—both cops and perps—and female
police officers.
* * * * *
The drumbeat of victim-feminism
is never-ending. There must be an unwritten rule at NPR that a morning’s news isn’t complete without at least one story
highlighting female empowerment triumphing over some manifestation of
patriarchal oppression, or some other aspect of female victimization.
One of feminism’s more
successful political memes has been the “war on women.” It is repeatedly used to bludgeon male
politicians and to specifically target the Republican Party. Once “war on
women” is invoked the offender is immediately put on the defensive by a news
media culture that reflexively panders to any claims of female victimization.
But the myth of a war on women
is a fallacy of ginormous proportions. This egregious lie is in fact the exact
opposite of the truth. Logic counters: It is impossible for there to be a war
on women. Why? Because a war on men
has been waging for decades, and if there was also a war on women, there is a
war on everyone. This renders any “war on women” narrative nonsensical.
That there is a war on men,
however, is indisputable once the politically correct blinders are taken off.
Choose any domain: school, family, the workplace, the legal system. All are now
arguably dominions of female empowerment. The “feminist jurisprudence” that
proliferates throughout civil and criminal law arms a woman with the legal weapons
to destroy a man, and virtually guarantees it in the gladiatorial arena of
family law. (Refer to “Getting to ‘No’”.)
Feminism’s two highest
priorities are the “freedom to choose,” i.e., the right to kill their unborn
babies, and the promotion of sexual deviancy (aka “sexual freedom”). The line
between pop culture and pornography is blurring. Before too long it will
disappear altogether. Pop culture idols Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian, adored
by millions of teens and tweeners, have both made explicit pornographic videos,
freely available to anyone with an internet connection. It’s no wonder that
“making a sex tape” is now a rite of passage for many young women. Compare with
its counterpart of past generations: losing one’s virginity.
Having already achieved the
goal of economic control over men via draconian child support laws and full
legal ownership of the “means of reproduction,” the ultimate objective of
overthrowing “the patriarchy” is exposed. The dismantling of the biological
nuclear family, the basic building-block of society and the bedrock of
civilization itself, may prove to be the ultimate act of the West’s
self-othering.
We see the first fruits of the
feminist War on Fatherhood in our African-American communities where two-thirds
of black children are raised without their fathers. This leads us directly to …
* * * * *
“The
racists …”
The Black Lives Matter (BLM)
narrative holds that police use deadly force disproportionately
with blacks because their lives are disposable —specifically, of less value
than whites’. But the facts show that blacks are not killed by police in
disproportionate numbers. Furthermore, the implied “racist” police are just as
likely to be black or Hispanic.
According to Heather McDonald
writing for the Wall Street Journal:
Four recent studies show that if there is a
bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites … Officers’ use of lethal force following an
arrest for a violent felony is more than twice the rate for whites as for black
arrestees, according to one study. Another study showed that officers were
three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed whites.
On the rare occasion that BLM
is held to scrutiny by news pundits—or, even rarer, politicians—the
counter-argument invariably used is that the number of African-Americans killed
by police is miniscule compared to the number killed in inner cities like
Chicago, by criminals. The gotcha question then posed to BLM is:
“Since the overwhelming majority of victims of inner-city violence are
African-American, why do you ignore this
violence against blacks?”
It is an odd way to argue, as
the same crime data can be used to point out the obvious: that blacks commit a hugely disproportionate amount
of killings and violent crime nationwide overall. The shocking numbers of
blacks killed in inner cities are not being killed by roving bands of white
punks from the suburbs. They are killing each other. Time magazine somberly reports that 40% of deaths at the hands of
law enforcement are black men—“though they make up only 6% of the U.S.
population...” Peculiarly absent is the far more significant
fact that this same 6% of the population is responsible for almost 40% of the
nation’s murders.
The raw crime data (not
statistically sampled) compiled by the FBI can be examined—to ends that would
never be tolerated by CNN or The New York Times—to produce stats
showing that the BLM black victimization narrative is a fallacy of ginormous proportions.
The
2010 census provides the following estimates for the U.S. population in 2015:
- Non-Hispanic
whites were 63.9% of the estimated population.
- Non-Hispanic
blacks were 12.3% of the estimated population.
FBI
crime data (again, raw data) reveals there were 6,137
single-victim/single-offender murders in 2015.
For 112 of these (1.8%) the offender’s race is listed as unknown. If we crunch
the numbers relative to the remaining 98.2% (6,025) of the known-identity
single-victim/single-offender murders in 2015 we arrive at the following murder
statistics:
- Non-Hispanic
whites committed 48.1% (2,897).
- Non-Hispanic
blacks committed 48.7% (2,934).
Blacks committed more total
murders than whites even though the white population is 5.2 times the size of
the black population. This means blacks commit more than five times as many
murders as whites, in proportion to their populations. A little over twelve
percent of the population is responsible for almost half the nation’s homicides
(single victim-single offender).
If the numbers are broken down further
by sex they produce a staggering indictment of black men. Black males commit
38.2% of the total murders, yet they make up only 6% of the population. Black men are committing murder at a rate 6.4
times their proportion of the population.
(Note: The reason
single-offender/single-victim data are used is because the data for all murders (15,326 in 2015)
has a very high percentage of “unknown” offenders: 31.2% (4,787). Presumably
many or most of these are unsolved murders—which is a scary thought. But more importantly this number is
comparable in size to the raw numbers for murders known to be committed by
whites (4,636) and blacks (5,620), rendering any statistical comparisons
essentially meaningless.)
It is indefensible that these
facts about black violence are completely ignored while the nation is
self-flagellating over the supposed persecution of young black males. In our inner cities the police are dealing
with a deadly subpopulation. These young black males, usually bereft of a
nurturing home environment with mother and
father present, are often a hair-trigger away from lethal combustion. Of course
there are going to be incidents where police officers react with fatal force due
to rational fears.
The sad truth is that the
African-American community in the inner cities is largely a broken one. Norms
of civil behavior and moral conduct, including the simple intrinsic value of
human life, have fled from the predominately African-American inner cities like
Chicago and Detroit along with whites. The riots in Baltimore, Ferguson,
Louisville and Charlotte revealed to television audiences nationwide the stark
reality of a broken African-American culture. Looting, trashing and burning
down their own neighborhoods, with callous disregard for the merchants who
invest their fortunes to service the needs of these communities, these miscreants
are stoking the fires of racial animus BLM is ostensibly trying to stamp out.
The statistics of social
pathologies in black communities are legion. In the U.S. two out of three
African-American children are raised without a father in the home.
In 2004, 8.4 percent of black males age 25 to 29 were in prison.
One in six black men have been incarcerated since 2001.
On any given day, 30% of black males between 20 and 29 are “involved” in the
criminal justice system. The dreary list is endless. The cause isn’t
poverty. It’s not lack of “school choice.” Nor is it decades of Democratic
Party local governance. And it’s not a racist criminal justice system that
treats blacks disproportionally harsher. It is the direct result of the
breakdown of the nuclear family with a male bread-winner, specifically, the
absence of fathers. Men are socialized within the family unit. This isn’t
rocket science. What has happened to the African-American communities in the
last several decades should set off alarm bells for everyone supposedly
concerned about “social justice” as well as public safety.
Ultimately the blame for the
dire state of the inner city black communities must rest upon the principals
themselves. However, the secondary cause, the one that guarantees its
insolubility, is the response of the white liberal establishment. By
reinforcing the sense of victimization in the black community ostensibly to
conscious and unconscious “institutional racism,” they effectively prevent
blacks from owning responsibility for their actions and choices. As long as “racist policing” and “white
privilege” can be blamed, why look at the relationship between fatherless households
and gang violence? The message to African-Americans from the white liberal
elites in the New York Times
editorial office and the ivory towers of academia is that they are victims of
institutional racism. Exhibit A: almost universal support among the liberal
elites for Black Lives Matter.
Black violence matters. Unfortunately, we can expect politicians to
continue to pretend it doesn’t exist, but we should demand more from
responsible social scientists (what few there are). Alas… a cursory google
search on “black violence causes” reveals the extent to which social scientists
will go to avoid assigning blame where it belongs. Here are some of the
“causes”:
- legacy
of slavery
- poverty
- public
housing
- joblessness
- failing
schools
Following the Baltimore riot in
April 2015, a video went viral of a black mother publicly assaulting her son
after she recognized him as one of the rioters from the TV news reports. Cable
news talking heads roundly applauded her. FoxNews court jester Greg Gutfeld
cheerfully suggested to his The Five
co-hosts that she be acclaimed “mom of the year.” But take off the PC blinders and a different
truth emerges. Sure, few people would argue with the “ass-whooping” for what he
did—but does anyone seriously think that this instance of corporal punishment
was an isolated event? Does anyone even bother to wonder, ‘Where’s the
dad?” Not to suggest that this boy would
not have joined the rioting if only his dad was in the home—though it might’ve
positively affected the probabilities of same. But a single-parent maternal
household is a severely stressed one.
Here’s the sensible take-away: This boy has probably been beaten by this
“mother of the year” throughout his entire young life. Violence has probably
been a lifelong companion largely because it has been modeled for him by his
mother. The African-American culture is one with more than its share of
violence, and it is evident in practically every aspect of it. Rap and hip-hop
music is stylistically confrontational and assaultive; readily displaying in
its musicality the belligerent nature of African-American social habits. (Refer
to “Janay Rice and the Domestic Violence Narrative,”)
White liberal elites pander to
the aggressive and even criminal popular black cultural memes. Witness Susan
Sarandon and Tim Robbins boogieing to “It’s hard out here for a pimp,” at the
2006 Oscars when it won the award for Best Original Song.
Contrary to all logic, such endorsement by whites of the baser elements of
black culture is no longer welcomed—it’s attacked as “cultural appropriation.”
African-American college students are demanding—believe it or not—to be
segregated from whites to protect their cultural integrity. And colleges across
the nation are actually accommodating these requests, introducing segregated
dorms to alleviate the sensitive feelings of black students for whom the
overall white, systemic racist culture on campus is just too… oppressive.
Pandering
to the false myth of black victimization and its corollary, the campaign
against “white privilege,” is just one more example of our cultural implosion.
Our great national heritage built from the founding principles of European
colonialists is regularly pilloried by academics, its virtues replaced with the
cults of multiculturalism and victimology.
Eschewing
the role of fatherlessness as the chief cause of social pathology in black communities
can rightly be blamed on feminism. To admit that children, especially black
boys, suffer immeasurably without the father role model, is to admit the fraud
inherent in the feminist myth of single-motherhood and the disposability of men. And that, of course, could never be
countenanced. Go to “the sexists…” Rinse and repeat.
* * * * *
“The homophobic …”
A bakery in Portland, Oregon is
harassed, fined and eventually driven out of business because their Christian
owners wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. Sweet Cakes by Melissa closed its doors
in September, 2016 after being fined $135,000.
A similar case with a Lakewood,
CO bakery, Masterpiece Cake Shop, is
being appealed to the Supreme Court after the state’s highest court refused to
hear the appeal.
An individual who believes they
were born the wrong sex demands the right to be publicly accommodated according
to his/her “true” “gender.” A nationwide campaign ensues to end the concept of
male and female—i.e., “binary-sexed”—bathrooms.
The movement for “LGBT” rights
is the latest of the cultural left’s seemingly never ending social justice
movements. But I make no distinction between the LGBT movement and feminism—the
former is the love-child of the latter, and would not exist without it.
Destabilizing the biological nuclear family, the atomic unit of civil society,
by attacking its weakest link, fatherhood, was always a prerequisite for a
successful homosexual movement. There would be no gay marriage,
“gender-neutral” bathrooms, or disfiguring of the English language by legal
force if not for the “women’s liberation” movement. “Pro-feminist” males (in
this instance it is appropriate to eschew “men” in favor of “males”) in the
movement are only too happy to play subordinate roles to women as a further
demonstration of their defiance of the masculine role inflicted upon them by
Nature. As would be expected, the overwhelming number of gay married couples
establishing families with children are lesbian.
The
rise of feminism in a culture directly correlates with declining birth rates
for a multitude of reasons. In Massachusetts, the birthplace of gay marriage in
the U.S., homosexuals now account for 40 percent of all adoptions. The state
agency that oversees adoptions, DCF (Department of Children & Families;
formerly the notorious DSS), proactively promotes homosexuality. In 2006 they
selected a gay (male) couple as Parents
of The Year. Recently they issued new guidelines asserting they are now "setting new expectations; we are
weeding out some of the ... destructive behaviors that are occurring,"
regarding foster parents who hold “traditional values.”
Is it
any wonder that Russia banned U.S. adoptions of its orphans in 2012?[24]
Recognizing that the promotion
of homosexuality to children—largely as a consequence of the legalization of
gay marriage and adoption—is one of the last wheels to fall off in our descent
into social and moral chaos, we can exercise our imaginations to speculate on
what leavings of normalcy remain to be jettisoned. Polygamy and pedophilia come
immediately to mind.
* * * * *
The political successes of the
gay rights movement rest largely upon the principle that human rights should
never be subject to a popular vote, the so-called “tyranny of the majority”
argument. That is, without any safety check, democracy allows a majority of citizens
to effectively disenfranchise a segment of the population that is in disfavor
for some reason or another. Sounds reasonable. What could be worse than the
majority of the people voting in some law that targets a selected minority?
A lot.
Try a tyranny of the minority.
This is when a minority segment of the population imposes an alien set of
values on the majority, enforced with new rules. And this is what we have
today, one more expression of self-othering. One more poisoned fruit from the
tree of political correctness. A striking example is the disfigurement of the
English language with thirty-one flavors of new personal pronouns, and
imposition of criminal sanctions for noncompliance with same, coupled with
bizarre rules for bathrooms, all to accommodate the mental illness of the teeny-tiniest
fraction of the population.
Meanwhile, not resting on their
laurels, our brahmins of normalcy in the APA continually float trial balloons
to normalize adult-child sexual relationships.
Eventually, those that oppose it will be branded with another scarlet letter,
another toxic “ism” or “ophobia” and cast into Hillary’s basket
of deplorables. “Pedophobic,” perhaps?
Word to
the wise: A people that can be convinced that procreation isn’t a prerequisite
for any rational definition of marriage can be convinced of anything.
* * * * *
“The xenophobic … the Islamophobic …”
Turning to religious
“deplorables,” our Christian heritage is regularly under attack by cultural
leftists. When addressing the deadly toll on innocent human life due to ISIS
and Islamic jihadism (or in his words, “global terror”), President Obama rarely
mentions Christian victims. But he takes great care to offer accommodation to
the sensibilities of Muslims. (Refer to “The Beginning of Wisdom is to Call
Things by Their Right Names, Mr. President”.) In our brave new multicultural
world, religions other than Christianity and Judaism are given special
preference. One atheist’s contrived injury is sufficient to prevent a town hall
Christmas Nativity display, while Muslims are increasingly accorded special public
privileges, from prayer rooms to halal meals.
Proponents of embracing Muslim
immigrants and refugees argue it is un-American—even unconstitutional—to oppose
it (“That’s not who we are”—Obama, Hillary, Merkel, any progressive leader,
take your pick). Their claim rests on one of the Left’s tenets of political
correctness: the “commitment to diversity.”
But freedom of religion under the First Amendment, freedom from
discriminatory treatment due to one’s religion, is guaranteed to U.S. citizens. Not Syrian or Somali
refugees. Edward Erler, political
science professor at CSU San Bernadino, handily destroys these spurious
arguments:
Rights and liberties exist only in separate and
independent nations; they are the exclusive preserve of the nation-state.
Constitutional government only succeeds in the nation-state, where the just
powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.
With respect to the commitment to
diversity, the tolerance of those who are willing to tolerate you does not earn
you much credit—it doesn’t require much of a commitment or sacrifice. If,
however, you are willing to tolerate those who are pledged to kill you and
destroy your way of life, tolerance represents a genuine commitment.
Only such a deadly commitment confirms that tolerance is the highest value in a
universe of otherwise equal values. Only such a deadly commitment signals a
nation’s single-minded devotion to tolerance as the highest value by its
willingness to sacrifice its sovereignty as proof of its commitment.
The common-sense citizen is forgiven for
thinking this train of thought insane. But what other explanation could there
be for the insistence of so many of our political leaders on risking the
nation’s security—in light of what we see in Europe, one might even say their
willingness to commit national suicide—by admitting refugees without regard to
their hostility to our way of life and their wish to destroy us as a nation?
I have often said that the
West’s embrace of Islam is the crowning achievement of political correctness.
We reject Christianity, a religion that certainly has its share of historical
atrocities, but has evolved over the centuries along with secular humanism to
the point where its good vastly outweighs any remaining defects. Gone are the
days of the Inquisition, the burning of witches, the slaughter of infidels. The
last Crusade ended in 1350. There are no Christian “Holy Wars.” No western
nation imposes Christianity on its people. The sole Christian theocracy is a
tiny vestige of the Holy Roman Empire, Vatican City in Rome, 0.17 sq. miles
with a population of 840.
Yet the leftists that dominate
the marketplace of social politics in the West have no problem embracing a
religion that is the very antithesis of their own moral relativist cultural
norms, one that promotes rules and punishments that are literally medieval. How
is it possible for someone to champion her daughter’s lesbian marriage, endorse
a campaign to destroy a business because its Christian owners won’t bake a cake
for a gay wedding, yet passionately defends the “religion of peace” that,
today, enacts the death penalty for homosexuality, among other atrocities too
numerous and ghastly to mention?
In 2011 Robin Wright waxed effusively
over the Arab Spring in the pages of The
Smithsonian:
For Muslims, that history now includes not only Facebook and
Twitter, but also political playwrights, stand-up comics, televangelist sheiks,
feminists and hip-hop musicians …
The youth-inspired
upheavals of the euphoric Arab Spring have stunned Al Qaeda as much as the
autocrats who were ousted. In Egypt and Tunisia, peaceful protests achieved in
days what extremists failed to do in more than a decade.
“Today, Al Qaeda is as significant to
the Islamic world as the Ku Klux Klan is to the Americans—not much at all,”
Ghada Shahbender, an Egyptian poet and activist, told me recently. “They’re
violent, ugly, operate underground and are unacceptable to the majority of
Muslims. They exist, but they’re freaks.”
“Do I look at the Ku Klux Klan and draw
conclusions about America from their behavior? Of course not,” she went on.
“The KKK hasn’t been a story for many years for Americans. Al Qaeda is still a
story, but it is headed in the same direction as the Klan.”
Not if ISIS has anything to say about it.
The Economist now dismisses the grass roots rebellions in Europe against Muslim
immigration as “refugee-phobia.” One
wonders, how many thousands of YouTube
videos of random Muslim violence on the streets of Europe can these people
avoid?
* *
* * *
In the U.S. the rebellion
against political correctness first found expression with the Tea Party, and
now Trumpism. The Trump partisans
make no bones about what they hope for: they want Donald Trump to destroy
establishment politics and with it the Republican Party, and replace the latter
with something more aligned with the commonsense values of “Flyover America’s”
working men and women. But owing to the Demo-publican duopoly’s vise-grip on
electoral politics, it will take a force of nature for one, let alone two, new
political parties to emerge. This is not the case in the European democracies
and the UK, where their parliamentary systems accord greater flexibility.
Demographics is history. And
history has no conscience. As a direct result of the Muslim inundation of
Europe, nationalist populist parties have emerged to challenge the various
social democrat-type parties that have dominated since WW II. The political landscapes in Britain, France,
Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden are all
undergoing seismic changes. Establishment parties now compete, and even
collude, to determine which will emerge to challenge the insurgent
populist-nationalist candidate in the final election. There is no ambiguity
whatsoever as to the cause: their governments have systematically ignored the
realities of (1) the martial nature of political Islam as underscored by global
Islamic jihadist terrorism, and (2) the disastrous effects of the influx of
Muslims who make no attempt to hide their antipathy to the liberal western
values of their host countries nor to restraining themselves from flaunting
their opposition, up to and including violently, as well as sexually,
assaulting native citizens. (On top of that, European governments have imposed a
new, alien set of moral values conjured by feminists and sexual deviants, but I
repeat myself.)
This
willful blindness to what is happening in the streets of their cities has made
the rise of populist-nationalist alternative parties inevitable. From the perspective
of the self-flagellating European “progressives,” the logical, and karmic end
to their misery would be their eventual submission to Islam. Here in the U.S.
we have bought a little more time with the election of Donald Trump.
* *
* * *
In the US we have pop star
Moby, who hopes for a future child to be homosexual (though he himself is not).
In Hamburg, Germany, a City Council member demanding more Muslim immigration
predicts that her city, and country, will be non-German in “20, 30 years,” and
proclaims “This is a good thing!”
The first is an unconscious wish for self-extermination—to rid the planet of
this human pestilence once and for all. The other a semi-conscious, half-baked
desire for cultural suicide.
If political correctness is an
unconscious expression of societal suicide, such a thought contagion most
closely resembles a religion—perhaps a death
cult. Adherence to rigid thought control. Intolerance for heretic, anti-PC
viewpoints. “Othering” of non-believers.
Our colleges and universities
are the temples of political correctness. From them, the poison spreads into
every corner of the polity. They are ideologically closed systems where the
high priests and priestesses that inculcated the progressive “virtues” into
their student vessels are now being excommunicated themselves for being
insufficiently devout. Like Robespierre, they are learning too late that the ever-spinning “moral” compass of social justice
and identity politics takes no prisoners.
Remarks by the President in closing of the summit
on “Countering Violent Extremism,” The
White House, Office of the Press Secretary,
18 February 2015, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/18/remarks-president-closing-summit-countering-violent-extremism>.
Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology, (Original)
Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967,
(English translation) Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976.
Patrick Goodenough, “1,037 Syrian Refugees Admitted in May: Two Christians, 1,035 Muslims,” CNCNews.com, 1 June 2016, <http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/1037-syrian-refugees-admitted-may-two-christians-1035-muslims>.
U.S. Census
Bureau ,
AmericanFactFinder, <https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_15_5YR_DP05&src=pt>
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Criminal
Justice Information Services Division (CJIS),
Expanded Homicide Data Table 6,
2015 FBI crime data,
<https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2015.xls>.
On
Nov. 11, 2015 in Hamburg, Germany, Green Party councilwoman Stefanie von Berg
addressed the city council on an issue regarding immigration and said: “Our society will change. Our city will
change radically. I hold that in 20, 30 years there will no longer be (German)
majorities in our city ...We will live in a city that thrives on having many
different ethnicities; that we have plenty of people and live in a
supercultural society. This is what we will have in the future. And I want to
make it very clear, especially towards those right-wingers: This is a good
thing!”, YouTube video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMDWAaxFnCA>.
