Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The past is raked over for imperfections as left-modernist ideologues render the most grievance-based interpretation of history imaginable. This wins plaudits from movement leaders on social media, much as youthful Red Guards sought to impress Mao and his commissars with their crusading zeal in destroying Confucius’s tomb or sticking up posters denouncing officials. In 1960s China, these zealots tried to outdo each other by attacking the four “olds”: Old Culture, Old Customs, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. Priceless historic monuments and manuscripts were destroyed in an orgy of vandalism designed to wipe the collective mind clean. Those who observed old customs or read historic poetry, or whose families had been merchants in the Kuomintang era, were deemed bourgeois “capitalist roaders.”

This “year zero” mentality is common among heaven-on-Earth utopian movements and corresponds to a view that people are slates that can be wiped clean and restored to their pristine, blank condition—their souls must be purified. As with the social construction of “racism” and harm, they have a point. Propaganda can alter people’s sense of reality to some degree. But not everyone can ignore the evidence that is before their eyes, which is why the Maoist or Soviet experiments ultimately failed. While social construction can shape people’s ideological beliefs, as we have seen, it is much less effective at altering scientific facts, which hit people between the eyes. Many see through the forced confessions and “struggle sessions” of a regime.

Collective memory and the monuments which sustain it often become the target of perfectionist activists because, in their blank slate view of the world, there is only one dimension to history: oppressor versus oppressed. They believe that in order to create utopia, one must burn the relics which mysteriously—though this is never experimentally proven—reproduce the current order. ISIS’s destruction of Palmyra and Assyrian monuments was driven by a similar desire to, in Olivier Roy’s words, “deculture” Islam of human accretions like shrines and poetry, to strip Islam down to pure, god-given fundamentals unsullied by the hand of man.

In Orwell’s 1984, obliterating the past becomes the first task of the socialist regime:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Substitute “racist” for “bourgeois,” or “white supremacist” for “capitalist roader,” and you find an analogous process of ironing out the particular in favour of the universal. Immanuel Kant’s crooked timber of humanity must be made straight, and the fundamentalist vision of societal perfection imposed on an imperfect past.

The elevation of a principle like anti-racism into a sacred value which cannot be questioned by science means racism becomes impossible to measure, falsify, or bound. Psychologist Nick Haslam’s “concept creep” kicks in, the meaning of “racism,” “hate,” and “harm” expand out of all recognition, and suddenly everything and everyone becomes open to being smeared. Sacred totems like the proletariat or “Black and Indigenous People of Color,” and their demonic “other”—be this “bourgeois” or “white”—have no fixed meaning. As with “racist,” their definitions are fluid and political rather than based in the reality of measurable and statistically-unlikely clusters of values of variables, which is how scientists and ordinary people demarcate terms.

George Orwell captured these puritan dynamics nicely, having witnessed factional socialist madness first-hand in Spain, and the bending of truth in Nazi Germany. In 1984, Orwell outlined the process whereby the meaning of words becomes political rather than scientific:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

In Orwell’s novel, the Party controls our understanding of the past. Today, instead of the top-down English Socialist party and its Ministry of Truth we have a decentred complex system of politically correct thought control. Complex systems like flocks of birds work because all birds obey simple rules for how to position themselves in relation to other birds. All it takes is one bird to react to a predator, and the entire flock shifts. There is no lead bird with a master plan. A spontaneous order arises from uncoordinated actions and is more effective than top-down control because the crowd embodies knowledge no leader can. Markets, for instance, are complex systems which do a much better job of matching supply with demand than top-down command and control. Overseas jihadi terrorism largely operates this way, as a set of rogue actors motivated by a common doctrine and playbook, without central control.

Do Black lives matter to Democrats? As Tim Alberta recently reported, a lot of Black voters think the answer is no. That may explain why the Democrats are blocking the GOP justice reform bill in the Senate: With Black voters already discouraged, Democrats don’t want them to get the idea that Republicans may have something to offer.

Summary of the Tim Alberta piece covered in yesterday’s BidenWatch snipped.

So now comes President Donald Trump — who’s already successfully pushed a criminal-justice reform package, the First Step Act, with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and already issued an executive order limiting police chokeholds and other abusive behavior that won praise even from Van Jones — and the Democrats are terrified that he might deliver a major reform bill in Congress before the election, and they can’t have that. Better that nothing should happen than that Black voters might see Trump as performing where the Democrats — even when they controlled the White House and had a supermajority in Congress — never did.

In the words of Black Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina: “They cannot allow this party to be seen as a party that reaches out to all communities in this nation.”

So Scott’s bill can’t pass. The bill would make lynching a federal crime. It would also place stringent reporting requirements on so-called “no-knock” raids, and tie federal grants to the elimination of police chokeholds like the one that killed George Floyd. It would also use grants to encourage the use of police bodycams.

As Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen put it, If Democrats cared about police reform, they would have advanced Tim Scott’s bill. He called the Democrats’ move “shameful,” and observed: “If Democrats cared about getting something done, they would have allowed the Senate to move forward and sought to amend Scott’s bill on the floor. There was plenty of basis for compromise. Scott’s legislation had already incorporated a number of Democratic proposals.” Yeah, it could do more — I’d favor an end to “qualified immunity” from lawsuits for police officers and other government officials, but I very much doubt that would command a majority, even among Democrats. And the Democrats’ motives are not pure. As Scott notes, they’re ”pure race politics at its worst.”

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

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

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

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

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”

DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech:

One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn’t see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them.

That this speech was held up as the framework for American race relations for more than half a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.

Read the whole thing.

The death of George Floyd, if it had not been caught on video, would have been a two-paragraph story on page fourteen of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Instead, his death was used by numerous political factions to ignite a worldwide firestorm of protests, riots, looting, murders, and wholesale destruction of businesses and neighborhoods. His elevation to sainthood by the left-wing media, left wing politicians, and race baiting hucksters like Al Sharpton has been nothing but a coordinated attempt to further destabilize the country and bring down Trump.

The virtue signaling by corporate CEOs worried about profits, left wing Hollywood egomaniacs, sports figures who think their opinions matter, and the Silicon Valley social media titans of allowable speech, has been a pathetic display of pandering and kneeling before BLM thugs and ANTIFA terrorists.

The last month has been a surreal concoction of lawlessness, battles in the streets, political cowardice, mainstream media malfeasance, and an almost incomprehensible descent into madness. While normals watched events play out on their TVs in disgust and bewilderment, since they were still locked down by politicians who gleefully encouraged protestors (aka rioters) to spread coronavirus, three funerals for George Floyd (JFK got one) somehow devolved into BLM and ANTIFA terrorist activities across the globe.

Then the propaganda machine kicked into high gear peddling a false narrative about systematic racism destroying the country, as weak-kneed white leaders began kissing the feet of Sharpton and his race baiting loyalists. The utter falsity of everything we are seeing, hearing, and being told by “experts”, “journalists”, and politicians is breathtaking in its audacity. But at least the stock market is up.

Our second Civil War is underway, except only one side is fighting. At first, it seemed like the initial protests against police brutality were spontaneous, but it became immediately obvious political operatives used this incident as an opportunity to inflict their Marxist ideology upon the nation, with the support of left wing media outlets and opportunistic Democrat politicians, who saw this as another opportunity to undermine the Trump presidency.

Anyone who questions the narrative is immediately condemned as a racist, with the leftist mob out for blood, figuratively by trying to get them fired, or literally by physically assaulting them and their businesses. When identical protests/riots blossomed in Democrat controlled urban paradises across the U.S. and then in foreign capitals in Europe, it was clear there was big money bankrolling this effort to undermine traditional society and destroy our two hundred and thirty one year culture of liberty and freedom.

Snip.

When the Covid hysteria looked like it was subsiding, with cases, hospitalizations, and deaths declining, all of a sudden we became a racist society requiring every white person in America to kiss the feet of oppressed blacks (black unemployment was at an all-time low prior to the Covid plandemic). White people who never owned slaves had to bow down and apologize to black people who had never been slaves.

Martin Luther King’s dream of living in a nation where people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, had suddenly devolved into a nation where white people were required to beg for forgiveness from self-appointed black debt collectors because a bad cop killed a black felon, high on fentanyl.

The demands of BLM and ANTIFA are incoherent, laughable and designed to never be met. Paying trillions in reparations to people who were never slaves and getting rid of police in the urban ghettos, where black people murder black people at an astounding rate, might be two of the dumbest ideas in the history of ideas. But this fake racism crisis is just another excuse to consolidate power into the hands of the ruling class.

None of what is happening in this country is a bottom-up grassroots effort, but a top-down coordinated attempt to seize power by unelected wealthy men who operate in the shadows. Sadly, the general public doesn’t realize how they are being manipulated by those in control.

BUT:

Having escaped my basement office for a week at the Jersey Shore last week, a semblance of normalcy and reality crept back into my life. Reality is not what you see on the boob tube and on twitter. We are a country of 330 million with approximately 127,000 deaths “with Covid-19”, and 43% of those were from nursing homes. Over 30% were from NYC metropolitan area. Other than a few other Democrat controlled urban havens like Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Philly, the rest of the country has been mildly impacted by this virus. The hysteria is unwarranted.

The corporate media has purposely given the impression the entire country was experiencing rioting and looting. Again, a few thousand paid agitators got to perform on camera for the new reality TV show called Pretend to Destroy America in order to Defeat Donald Trump. Loving a good reality show, Trump has played his part with the bible holding walk through the rioters. Once the ratings for this show began to decline, back to Covid Will Surely Kill You.

Meanwhile, the Jersey Shore was filled with people going to the beach, jogging, bicycling, fishing, eating out, enjoying live bands, and strolling on the boardwalk. There were some mask wearers, but the majority were unmasked. People were friendly and not fearful. The black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and white people all cohabitated on the beaches and boardwalk with no violence, animosity or racial strife. This is because there is no racial strife among normal people not pushing an agenda or attempting to create discontent for a profit.

The vast majority of Americans just want to go about their lives in peace, earning a living, and enjoying their free time with friends and family. But the competing factions within the bigger Deep State umbrella have chosen to use average Americans as pawns in their game of power and rent seeking. The demographics of the protestors, overwhelmingly white, 25 to 50 years old and democrat, either reveals them as having only goal of bringing down Trump or proving their degrees in gender studies has left them with no critical thinking skills.

This piece is more pessimistic overall than I think is warranted. We are still, as Kurt Schlichter pointed out, in an information war, not a kinetic war.

Cops attacked across #NYC &
11 shot in less than 12hrs—including 17-year-old Brandon Hendricks, a stand-out athlete who was killed.

Over the wknd: 18 killed in Chicago, including a 20 month old.

No marches. No trending # for these black lives. This is what liberalism gets you!

— Jesse Lee Peterson (@JLPtalk) June 30, 2020