Anti-Racist Hysteria: A Never-Ending Story

When George Floyd was killed, the entire western world was united in defeating racism. Corporations pledged to combat it and they hired diversity officers to make this more likely. The mass outrage was palpable and bled through every column inch, each Twitter post, and the publication declarations of every Tom, Dick and Prince Harry denounced the evils of intolerance, bigotry, and racism. Promising, you might think if we lived in another time. But we live in an increasingly radicalised world and cut a little over a year post-Floyd and we find almost millions of dollars’ worth of rioting damage, thousands of dead and wounded, and hundreds and counting of gutted police forces. It has become clear that the world wasn’t primed for a positive push against discrimination, and instead, after decades of extreme post-Marxist ideologies pushed by a radical activist class, the Western world is embroiled in a full-frontal, bloody, and damaging war of ideas between the activists, who control the media and the language, and the defenders of Liberalism.

BLM Ideas Matter. Less police = more crime.

The mainstream media, deranged by over three years of Trump, gave up its position as arbiter of truth and became mouthpieces for the extreme activist class. There is no greater symbol of this than the Orwellian double-speak of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Posts’ ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ moniker, a newspaper which called the leader of ISIL Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar, a paper which has a whole page dedicated to BLM activism, and which now regularly runs headlines such as ‘Calling food “exotic” reinforces xenophobia and racism,’ as it did on 8^th July 2021. The rot extends to most mainstream left-leaning media, who have gone full Woke, such as the New York Times fired editors and others felt compelled to leave a toxic work environment. Now the roost is ruled by Woke activists like Nicole Hannah Jones, who attempt to re-write history and promote the neo-Marxist call to arms.

                                                                                         The whole world is problematic

Claims that ‘whiteness is evil’ haven’t yet been made so cavalierly on the BBC, you find them more commonly on media such as race grifters like Mehdi Hasan on his MSNBC show the peacock, “white supremacy is on the rise,” despite recent FBI statistics which clearly show the opposite to be the case. Hasan claimed too on his popular show that not only have the mainstream media been “too white for too long,” but that England has been too. Further still, the MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, among a whole host of lies and deceptions, says things like anyone defending the white policeman who shot Makiyah Bryant is motivated by racism. Let’s ignore the facts that Bryant was actively attempting to stab (another black girl) with a large knife at the time. It doesn’t matter: if you support the officer, you’re a white supremacist. Or look now at media commentator and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill on his show claimed that "all white people are connected to racism”. These sentiments are now becoming increasingly comment, more flagrant and more in keeping with the moral panic of the Red Scare or anti-Jewish hysteria of the 1930s in Nazi Germany, with its all-too-familiar ending. Now even people usually opposed to Woke mobs like Thomas Chatterton Williams, hopped on board the moral outrage bandwagon. He condemned the residuum of society while he was at it – the British white working class. For a middle-class black male from the richest society on earth, an easy target.

                                                           Moral mobs can even affect the typically anti-Woke

And now we have a continued moral panic, a new furore, whipped up by the media’s attempt to serve Theory to the masses. After a football season long of Woke gesturing of footballers taking the knee before every game and continuing into the Euros 2020 (taking place in 2021), the Euros ends with a renewal of the rush to avert the dangers of racism lurking behind every crevice of British society. There is only one problem with the accounts of racism. Of all the accounts – the “vile abuse” as condemned by Prince William, and a who’s who list of other celebrities and public figures, turns out to be mostly from spambots and fake, burner accounts. According to a SEMrush analysis of racist comments and emojis posted in the hours after the match, there appeared to be coming mostly from India and the Middle East. Of the slew of supposed racial abuse, only one person has been identified, an employee of Savills, a real estate company. BBC Newsnight reported that a total of – wait for it – five UK accounts posted racist abuse to one of the three players in question. That’s right: five. 31.1 million people watched the game live and five UK accounts sent racist abuse. This is the moral emergency the media and the morally enlightened amongst us tell us must be addressed as a matter of national urgency.  

Non-UK based racist abuse

The UK’s Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel, however, was inundated with racist abuse, and a betting man would put his money on her receiving more than five racist messages from UK-based accounts. She was a target because she opposed taking the knee, after Woke footballer Tyrone Mings posted the following on Twitter “you don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ “then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens”. The Marxist Left – confused deliberately or otherwise about the scale of the problem, then use this cynically to push their divisive agenda, enabled by ignorant foot soldiers like Mings. This cynical ploy is a flagrant excuse to push the divisive Woke agenda in opposition to all reason, proportion and evidence required to make sensible policy decisions in a grown-up society.

                                                              Racist abuse directed at the Home Secretary Priti Patel

Like an immune system overreacting to benign foreign bodies and having an allergic reaction, our whole country – a country that is not racist – is not undergoing this process, the process of a moral panic, a healthy body becoming diseased from a virus-engineered hypersensitivity reaction. Friends of mine, decent people too, because of the furore and moral panic, have been cast under this same, deeply divisive spell– and it’s what it is; a pernicious fantasy. It’s heartening to see the degree of support for these players, who should not be blamed for missing a penalty kick, and who are even more devastated than their mostly adoring fans, who are proud of their performance in getting the country closer to major silverware in a football competition for the first time in 55 years. But this is the panic that will now prompt a wave protests, violence and insidious measures by the Woke corporations, universities and institutions in our societies.

Despite the Woke activists repudiation of science, we must look at this permormative drama rationally, using the available evidence at our disposal. Saka, Rashford and Sterling. Pages and pages of messages of support of love, solidarity, and administrations -millions upon millions of likes, comments and supporting statements overall. Almost every message is written I’ve seen from football personalities after the game has expressed solidarity with the players. You could spend a lifetime compiling all the messages of support.

                          Anti-racist hysteria. The whole country supports the players.

We need greater accountability and transparency to identify hateful speech when it does occur online so that it can be diagnosed, discouraged, and called out. A system of identity verification on social media can help with this. But we cannot continue represented the actions of some individuals (perhaps aided by pernicious overseas actor’s intent on sewing division) to be represented at the views of a nation, or something endemic to the culture of a society. For this reason, we stand with the England players, whatever race, and oppose the Marxist activist class sewing division and with the forces of reason, rationality, Liberalism and progress.

In Defence of Liberalism

A response to my friend Amy

 

This is a response to my long-time friend’s response to my original article entitled ‘Why it’s Your Patriotic Duty to Boo the Knee,’ published on my blog here on 9^th June 2021. You can find Amy’s response here.

My goal in this letter isn’t to convince Amy on every point of substance, as this isn’t how minds are changed or how argument advances, anyway, but rather to highlight what is at stake in these kinds of conversations. This back-and-forth isn’t just a disagreement between two people whose intuitions differ at the level of policy, it’s a discussion about the foundational principle upon all other innovations in society are allowed to flourish – Liberalism -, a body of knowledge internalised in our institutions which undergirds everything else in society, including the freedom to have this conversation and the technology on which to exchange ideas. To challenge Liberalism, as proponents of critical theory seek to do is synonyms with arguing for the benefits of broomsticks over bagless vacuum cleaners, or favouring loincloths over sportswear, or preferring to dismantle our transportation infrastructure and installing troughs for horses along our motorways. It’s even worse than this in fact because an attack on Liberalism isn’t just an attack on cleaning, clothing, and commuting, it’s an attack on everything which makes life worth living.

Liberalism - the knowledge upon which our societies are based

I’ll return to Liberalism briefly before summing up, but first I should clear up confusion in your response to my article, which is this: ‘Big l Liberalism’ is not the same as ‘small l liberalism’. Liberalism (big L) is the body of knowledge invented by the British 17^th-century enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson and emerged from the tradition of the jurisprudence of the common law. It stands for “organic, slow, half-conscious growth and an acknowledgement that progress advancing by diagnosing mistakes of the past, and that human reason alone cannot deliberately shape its own future,” in the words of the political philosopher Friedman Hayek¹. The other kind of liberalism (small l) is the type you were referring to in your response, that of political liberalism, namely being ‘on the left’, rather than ‘on the right’. It is, of course, entirely possible for a scientist to hold views from across the political spectrum. It is even possible for a scientist to have illiberal views (big L), like a BLM-supporting critical theory-loving scientist who wants to dismantle the structures of oppression, including those apparent oppressional structures defining his profession. But this scientist’s ability to do his job and to hold one view in a community of ideas, free from the ever-present threat of violence, is only possible due to the system within which he exists, that of big L Liberalism.

With that in mind, I’m going to argue to that BLM should be vehemently opposed because the theory which informs its activities and organisers, critical race theory, is antithetical to the Liberal project, by nature, and in practice. I’ll make this case by touching on three main areas discussed in your response to my original article: the meaning of taking a knee, politics in sport, and historical revisionism. I’ll then circle back for some final comments on the importance of preserving Liberalism.

Kneeling as a gesture was given a new lease of life as an act of protest was 're-imagined’ by Kaepernick, to use some of the Woke buzzwordery of the day, from an act of gesticulation or subordination to one of protest. Kaepernick was clear why he has taken the knee: “I’m not going to stand for a flag that oppresses black people and people of colour… there are bodies on the streets,” he said². “I learnt early on in fighting against systematic oppression, dehumanisation and colonisation³.” BLM, unsurprisingly, adopted the gesture wholesale to be used in marches, public demonstrations and vigils of all flavours and types. People are motivated to kneel for a multitude of reasons. Some are card-carrying Marxists.  Others may be Marxist in spirit but will stop short of action jeopardising their nice house and running water. Others kneel because they want to oppose racism, they felt they were doing a morally virtuous thing. They like the new religion-like tribe, and despite understanding the first thing about Marxism, postmodernism or critical theory, they inadvertently cheerlead its ideas.

Colin Kaepernick, kneeling at an American football game in 2016

Superimposed on these motivations are societal incentive structures which help promote kneeling or pro-BLM activism. These include the effects of social contagion, turbo-charged by social media. It also includes the consequences of ‘a spiral of silence,’ mentioned in my original article, whereby even majority views can be persuaded into silence by a minority view due to the fear of isolation and social castigation with being tone deaf⁴. This is particularly pertinent because of the societal taboo which was hard-won against racism. As a result, many people, in the face of insinuations of racism should they not show the qualifying level of support, are passively coerced into quietude.

 Here it is worth noting that you accused me of harbouring a “multitude of other potentially harmful views,” for my description of BLM’s spread as being “birthed from BLM’s hoary vagina.” Now, while I admit this certainly isn’t the most elegant of metaphors ever dreamed up from my silly brainbox, it was written for comedic effect and was not a commentary on anything outside of the disdain I have for BLM as an organisation. But in this accusation, you appear to be proving my point that critics of BLM regularly face insinuations of ulterior motives, and the whiff of racism in the views of the outspoken BLM activist minority, platformed by the media class, is enough of a stench to empty the room and send one swiftly home from work with a termination of contract.

 I work at a university in South Korea which has less Woke penetration than the UK, but I suspect, for fear of being introduced to a brown-shirted ‘equity officer,' I might think twice about discussing this topic. And it's not hard to see why: people like having jobs and being not cancelled. They like not being called racists, either explicitly or by way of hallway whispers, water-cooler talk or tweet storms. So, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind clarifying this if only to unload the weight of evidence from the side of the scale which seems to be tipping the favour of the argument advanced here.

   BLM protestors shouting down a diner in Washington DC

Besides the fear of challenging BLM, and the motivations of those consciously or unconsciously further critical theories, the Marxist meme takes another hit of the crack pipe with every kneel at a football game, every column inch of media coverage and every corporate letter of solidarity. You don’t have to believe in the existence of seasonal flu to be a carrier and spreader of seasonal flu, the virus can spread through the population regardless of the epistemology of the flesh body it's carried around in. This was also very much the case with Soviet propaganda  technique known as the ‘Firehouse of Falsehoods’ which concealed lies among half-truths and ejected it with such bamboozling regularity and precision that separating facts from ‘alternative facts’ became all but impossible⁵. So, although I know it was added for the funnies, Trippier and Henderson standing on a soapbox reading Das Capital is the strawiest of strawmen, for very good people can spread very bad ideas, should the incentives so aligned to do so. I will concede that the Henderson and Trippier metaphor is true in two ways, however. Firstly, bad ideas are often spread by a society’s weaker players (those without the knowledge of how to perform better) just like Hendo, and bad ideas are often intruding into places they have no business being in, like on the far-left side of society’s pitch, in our universities, much like Tripps. (If this makes no sense to you, Dear Reader, please see: England Vs. Croatia, Euro 2020).

Let’s move on to our second of our topics, politics and sport. You make the case for politics belonging in sport because “politics is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time," and therefore “politics and football should [not my italics] be dancing a very sultry and intimate rumba”. Here, you do appear to be advocating the personal epistemology of every drunk uncle irritating his long-suffering extended family at a BBQ, with his outmoded political views, spouted from the tongue and shot from the hip whenever the mood suits. But besides this point, there are two main problems with the delicate politics-sporting rumba you describe. The first problem is that it’s deeply unpopular. Admittedly, this isn’t a knockdown argument against anything. There have been plenty of political gestures throughout history which have been unpopular and subsequently proven right; we only have to look as look at the activism of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes, morally heroic civil rights campaigners like MLK, or LGBT activists like Peter Tatchell, all of whom had great successes from sustained activism at times when the bulk of society opposed them.

But a majority not wanting something isn't to be sniffed at either, and it’s clear that the majority of fans don’t want overt political messages shoved down their throats at football matches.  Footballers should have the freedom to choose to kneel, and fans should be free to boo it. In some ways, it is just as simple as putting pineapple on your pizza. Some believe it should be there, and others feel sick to their stomach at the mere thought of it (I happen to be in this camp). However, we should ask ourselves how ‘free’ this ‘free choice' is if pizza companies, advertisers, the media and universities all believe that people should have pineapple on their pizza, and tell you regularly using the full force of their institutional megaphone. Moreover, if your pizza comes already loaded with pineapple, you can pick it off, but it’s not the same as having a pineapple-less pizza, and why should you have to pick it off? Now replace the pineapple with a laxative or rat poison to witness the full scale of the problem.

Pineapple pizza: not for everyone

The second problem of politics in sport is that the performative tedium is entirely subject to the faddish revolutionary whims of the day. Applying your argument, there is nothing to stop a political alternative from coming along and impinging, to whatever degree it decides best, on something that otherwise imbues regular people's lives with meaning. Let’s illuminate this with an allegory.

 Suppose that instead of the viral spread of CRT through society, the vegetarian cause proliferated instead, prompted by a seed incident, a viral video showing a carnivore murdering a vegetarian in broad daylight. The video shakes the world and leads to an outpouring of support for vegetarians. The execution prompts protests, demonstrations, riots, the death of both and civilians, and it causes millions of dollars of economic damage and destroys the properties and businesses of many vegetarians themselves. Corporations, perhaps sensing an opportunity, jump on board and dedicate a large part of their marketing budget to oppose violence against vegetarians everywhere. They put out statements condemning it and vow, in solidarity with People of Vegetables, to opposing all mistreatment of them from now on. The media too run wall-to-wall coverage of events and invite experts who speak of a society that at its core is fundamentally oppressing vegetarians.

As a result, children’s books are written to educate children on there about how to carnivore privilege. Bestselling books entitled ‘Carnivore Fragility’ and ‘How To Be an Anti-Meatist,’ ask readers to analyse the complex interplay between their dietary status and those of a historically oppressed diet and notions such as the 'carnivore collective,’ ‘the carnivore voice,’ ‘the carnivore worldview,’ and ‘the carnivore experience’ all need to be defined and problematised, in what becomes a hugely lucrative multi-million dollar cottage industry.

This allegory is of course facetious in an important way: there has been no historical repression of vegetarians by carnivores, nor is there repression of vegetarians by carnivores today, as there was once subjugation of black people. The world would be a very different place if society one day decided that everything of importance in the world is borne from the interaction of the dominant oppressor class, the carnivore, and the repressed underclass, the vegetarian. The story’s purpose though is to flesh out (pun intended) how easy it would be to assert this should these arbitrary categories become pertinent to a section of society. If anti-carnivorism did become the mainstream view, how could you oppose it? History, in your view, “is not fixed, unchallengeable and immutable,” after all, so would one have any place to stand to oppose the repression of vegetarianism as defined by Critical Diet Theory? Indeed, if we can only interpret history “through stories which have been repurposed, repackaged and retold,” how can we have the grounds to make any meaningful claims to knowledge? Spoiler alert: we can’t.

                                   A facetious story of vegetarians fighting back against their historic oppressors, the carnivores which                 reveals an important truth: facts matter.

The crucial point to be made here though isn’t about what constitutes ‘political’ or how much ‘political’ should sexy-dance with ‘non-political,’ it goes deeper than that. It’s deeper than that because critical theory touches everything, by design. All we need to do is replace the word ‘politics’ in your earlier statement about the ‘intimate rumba’ with ‘critical theory,’ to illustrate the point: “critical theory [emphasis added] is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time;” therefore “critical theory [emphasis added] and football should [not my italics] be dancing a very sultry and intimate rumba.” You can do the same with the phrases ‘racial injustice,’ ‘systematic oppression’ ‘the violence of inequity,’ or any other Woke jargon of your choice, and you begin to see that the rumba you’re advocating is not a mutualistic ensemble between two willing dancers, but the last dance of a madman holding a ballroom dancer at gunpoint.

This brings us to the final pernicious way totalitarian theories spread, by historical revisionism. History, in your view, “is not something that we can treat as an observable science,” but rather a “complex tapestry of beliefs” that can and should be retold to sit the prevailing tastes of the day. And while I agree that the emphasis we give to stories, including the decision to teach certain histories, is culturally dependent to an extent, this caveat does not reach into the heart of a historic truth itself. Erroneous information can be discarded through backwards triangulation, detailed source analysis, text translation, the geological and archaeological record, and the principle of parsimony, among other methods, to get to the closest approximation of truth allowable with limited information. In this sense, a statement either has historicity, or it doesn’t. It’s either supported by the weight of evidence, or it isn’t. Either Jesus rose from the dead in Jerusalem in 36 A.D., or he didn’t. Either the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 or it wasn’t. Either racism was at the heart of the founding of the United States, or it's a pernicious lie.

This postmodern stance gives us the monstrosity of the 1619 project which I'm alluding to; a dishonest project created by New York Times magazine which aims to “reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at its centre⁶,” and which has already infiltrated the Chicago school system and that of Buffalo, New York⁷. These outlandish claim, that Americans only revolted against the British to preserve slavery, (a claim made by Nicole Hannah Jones who is still employed by the NY Times), was not made by historians but by critical theorists. Slavery is described as the reason for the cruelty of the criminal justice system, the lack of universal healthcare, and the brutality of American capitalism, despite the fact that in the case of the former, that mass incarceration began in the 1970s, 100 years after the abolishment of slavery.

Nicole Hannah Jones of the New York Times Magazine, originator of the discredited 1619 project

This is not an honest attempt to educate, but a product of Theory’s attempt to view the world only in hues of black and white. One of the authors, as highlighted by Coleman Hughes (who happens to be black), Matthew Desmond wrote “when a mid-level manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns of an Excel spreadsheet, they’re repeating business procedures whose roots and procedures twist back to slave labour camps⁸.” Excel spreadsheets are rooted in slavery because some slaveowners used rows and columns to tabulate the profits of slave labour. When one rubbishes the importance of historicity, excel spreadsheets become racist. I wonder if this will give you pause the next time you pull up your balance sheet? It shouldn’t.

This historical revisionism is part of a wider revolution. To date, more than one hundred statues in the USA have already been toppled in the last year alone, including states of well-known Nazis. Mahatma Gandhi in Davis, California and even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York⁹. The toppling and destruction of relics and artefacts, like the desecration of Churchill and Colston is a hallmark of cultural revolutions, such as the big one in China¹⁰ or smaller ones like the destruction of irreplaceable cultural relics in Palmyra and Bamiyan, by ISIL^11. These represent a kind of hardware update that seeks to eliminate any iconography inconsistent with the software running on the regimes data processor.  Is this the kind of retelling of history you have in mind?

Spot the difference. From left to right, the destruction of ancient artefacts at the hands of ISIL in Palmyra, Syria, the destruction of a statue of Gandhi in California, USA, and  the destruction of Buddhist statues in the Chinese Cultural Revolution,

Socialism is an entirely respectable way of being in a Liberal system, but critical theory isn’t, because, unlike socialism or conservatism, critical theory opposes the very system which platforms it, opposing, as it does, logic, rationality, argument, justice, merit and the rule of law.  You can either be a socialist or a critical theorist, but you cannot be both. It’s not possible to be a socialist on a Monday (a political leaning I am very sympathetic to), and then put your pronouns and power fist in your bio, don your Lenin hat on a Tuesday and behave as if there’s no contradiction. As we’ve discovered, it’s possible to advance critical theory without being a critical theorist (by kneeling, supporting BLM, protesting etc). This isn’t an enviable position to be in because it speaks to a large degree of ignorance about the theory itself. So which one is it Amy, socialist, critical theorist or a hammer and sickle wearing Schrodinger’s cat combination of the two?

Liberalism was an innovation of civilisational import. Before Liberalism, disputes were settled by violence, societies operated according to codes of honour, rather than the rule of law. Going back further, tribal violence involved the raiding of rival clans, murder, rape, pillaging, child sex slaves, and much more. Gifting the state a monopoly on violence was an innovation because it removed the logic of violence by installing a deterrent in something bigger and stronger than any individual and incentivising individuals away from wanton violence and into surviving in a complex social stratum. As Steven Pinker put it in ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature,’ “Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed…the court, basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons, but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces¹²”.

Liberalism holds within its plentiful bosom the hushed and dignified acknowledgement that knowledge can be found in the whole, rather than the individual. It is a system as described by the political thinker Benjamin Constant as the système de principes, an overarching system on which everything else – government action, law, legislation – is based; an ideal that according to Friedrich Hayek in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ “will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle and that “although we must strive to improve our institutions, we can never aim to remark them as a whole¹³."

A very intimate rumba: 
a modern take on
Lady Justice and
Lady Liberty enjoying 
each other's company.

Let’s take stock of the arguments put forward then. Firstly, I argued that taking the knee has become a deeply political message which advances critical theory, whether knowingly or unknowingly. I argue, firstly, that politics cosying up to sport is highly unpopular, like an uncouth imposition like a drunk uncle’s political diatribes at a family BBQ, and secondly that when dementor of religious-political opinion is invited into the house of sport (or other domains), you have to host all goblins and ghouls, all radical religions, barmy theories and illiberal creeds. 

I finally argue that your flirtation with postmodernism and the resulting rejection of historicity has the potential to threaten the very fabric of Liberal order itself. So, in this sense, your article not only, like Kyle Walker, covered a lot of ground at speed, but also proved defensively suspect and prone to frequent mishit passes. We must stand up for the oppression, downbeat, downtrodden and marginalised everywhere, of all races and skin tones, and indeed regardless whatever shade of colour we are, and we must do so while at the same time standing up for the greatest invention, we’ve ever had the dumb luck to stumble upon: Liberalism, the project which has given us everything we value, and the giant upon whose shoulders our society's house of cards precariously stands.

 

 

Citations

1.       Hayek, F.A., &  Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty. Reprint, Routledge,

2010, p. 51.

2.       Wyche, S. “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” NFL.Com,

https://www.nfl.com/news/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem-0ap3000000691077 Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

3.       Kesslen, B. “Colin Kaepernick Is Writing a Memoir That Will Answer, ‘Why Did I Do It?’” NBC News,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colin-kaepernick-writing-memoir-will-answer-why-did-i-do-n1136226.   Accessed 16 June 2021.

4.       Neumann-Noelle, E. Spiral of Silence. https://noelle-neumann.de/scientific-

work/spiral-of-silence/. Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

5.       Brendon, P. “Death of Truth: When Propaganda and ‘alternative Facts’ First Gripped the World.” The

Guardian, 11 Mar. 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/11/death-truth-propaganda-alternative-facts-gripped-world. Accessed 16 June 2021.

 

6.       Silverstein, J. “Why We Published The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019. NYTimes.com,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.

7.       Rufo, C. F. “Buffalo Public Schools’ Critical Race Theory Curriculum.” City Journal,

23 Feb. 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical-race-theory-curriculum.

8.       Hughes, C. The 1619 Project and the Legacy of Slavery - [Bonus Partial Episode].

www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98bm64QWTc. Accessed 16 June 2021.

9.       “List of Monuments and Memorials Removed during the George Floyd Protests.” Wikipedia,

14 June 2021. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_monuments_and_memorials_removed_during_the_George_Floyd_protests&oldid=1028582207.

10.   Rohr, H. China’s Destruction of Cultural Sites During the Cultural Revolution - Nspirement.

https://www.nspirement.com/2018/08/26/chinas-destruction-of-cultural-sites-during-the-cultural-revolution2.html. Accessed 16 June 2021.

11.   Williams, A.R. “ISIS Smashes Priceless, Ancient Statues in Iraq.” National Geographic,

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/search. Accessed 16 June 2021

12.   Pinker, S. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin Books,

2012, p. 75.

13.   Hayek, F.A., &  Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty. Reprint, Routledge,

2010, p. 57.

 

Why Booing the Knee is An Act of Patriotism

 

Tyrone Mings and Ben White kneeling for England versus Romania

It's hardly the best optics: a group of mostly white football fans booing a group of kneeling football players, many of them black, football players like Marcus Rashford MBE, a hero by many accounts due to his voluntary community work. Players who, together with their manager Gareth Southgate so adamantly expressed that their kneeling is not a political gesture, but rather a gesture intending to oppose racism in all its forms. Southgate did so eloquently in a letter addressed to England fans, fondly bringing to mind the values bestilled in him by his grandfather. Many players, after all, have been the victims of online racist abuse.

There’s just one problem with this particular narrative, and the problem is this: Black Lives Matter is a political movement whose well-publicised aims include defunding of the police and the destruction of the capitalistic state (among other lesser matters like defunding science and opposing meritocracy and objectivism). Kneeling, although not birthed directly from BLM’s hoary vagina, was -after Kaepernick’s prolonged 5 minutes of fame – hurriedly rushed into their warm and loving embrace, fostered by them, and now deployed, along with the raised fist, as a protest symbol on marches and rallies. Indeed, some BLM supporters are so enthusiastic about kneeling that they invited (hmm no, encouraged, well actually, insisted, in fact, more like intimidated) white pedestrians to kneel and apologise for their original sin of whiteness.

Kneeling like other gestures over the past year is a political message. These political messages include the virtual banners displayed by Sky Sports during their live football matches, the physical BLM banners sprawled across the terraces, and the players wearing ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ on their shirts. These are political symbols supported by a political movement helped by host institutions who have been captured by the movement like a zombie plague and intimidated its opponents into silence. This exact species of silence that CRT’s opponents have fallen into has a name, given to it by social scientists, a ‘spiral of silence'. This is the type of silence whereby a minority group can control the narrative of a larger group, as the smaller group’s narrative spreads and becomes dominant, the larger group keeps schtum through fear of isolation, social castigation, or cancellation. Throw in a touch of intimidation, bullying and harassment, and the context of centuries of actual race-based oppression, and you have the rancid cake baked in our current political oven.

BLM at the Emirates Stadium

CRT’s zombie plague spread so quickly through our institutions, in part through the use of a cunning argument called the 'motte-and-bailey' fallacy. This is where an argument or idea is advanced which has two different positions existing simultaneously, side-by-side. The ‘motte’ is the easily defendable position, that black lives matter (lower case), something accepted by almost all reasonable members of the genus Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The ‘bailey’ is the extreme position, Black Lives Matter (uppercase), the political movement. The political movement contains a panoply of ghoulish civilisation-ending disinnovations which if allowed to continue to infect all institutions unopposed, could very well be the end of Western liberal democracy, and which, worrying, will appear to be in the throes of. The motte argument argued by Southgate, the players, ESPN and the media class is that “the players are only kneeling due to personal preference.” This was echoed by the F.A.’s ‘Equity & Inclusion Director,’ necessarily a woman of colour, whose job itself is part of that spread and whose function is to further it. The bailey argument contains all of the disinnovations being implemented inside our schools, universities and institutions.

Even comedy is unfunny now due to wokeism, and that’s according to Chris Rock, someone who knows a thing or two about making the funnies. It’s allowed universities like Yale where professors now talk openly about fantasies of killing white people, companies like Lockheed Martin, the U.S.A.’s largest defence contractor, who send their white employees on missions to ‘deconstruct their white male privilege,’ and facilitated the New York Times opinion editor being fired because he wanted to carry a range of political opinion rather than single woke narratives. Oxford University recently voted to remove a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, Bristolians decided it would be fun to topple a statue of the philanthropist Edward Colston and some Londoners decided to defile Winston Churchill’s statue ‘Churchill was racist’ graffiti. Even the National Trust now considers its primary mission to commission reports to let the public know about its building’s colonial past, rather than its remit to protect Britain’s historic buildings.

Churchill's statue with 'was a racist' daubed on it

So we boo not because we want the players to feel bad, nor because we are a bunch of uneducated, racist hooligans, but because we love our country. We love its history, being built as it has on the soldiers of giants, and on the broken backs of unforgotten soldiers – men of Southgate’s grandfather’s generation - who gave their lives to uphold the ideals of Western liberal democracy, equality for all, and a colour-blind society that cares not about the colour of your skin, but about the content of your character. We boo because we want to stand up for science, stand up for merit, stand up for empiricism and objectivism. We stand up for the principles which have bestowed on us all of the invention and innovation that comfort our lives in the 21st century, including the freedom to discuss toxic ideas such as CRT.

So, the next time the England players take the knee, don’t allow the media class to seduce you into silence with their erroneous ‘motte’ offering. They’re baking you a cake which they’ve pissed in; don’t take a slice. However well-worded Southgate’s letter, it’s still just a piss-take, because it’s a piss-cake. It is our moral duty and obligation to not eat cakes full of piss, just as its out moral duty and obligation to fill our lungs with air and with as much vociferous fortitude as our lung capacity can afford, boo as loudly as humanly possible, and oppose this evil woke ideology starting on the football pitch. So come on, for Queen and country, after 3; 1-2-3... boooooooooooooooo!

A letter to my liberal friends

It’s been quite incredible to see the enormous chasm open up between ‘left’ and ‘right’ this year. I’ve seen nice liberal friends of mine declare themselves in the nice comfortable bed of Black Lives Matter, unflinchingly turn their Instagram squares black, make the black power fist, and blast book covers of ‘White Fragility’ and ‘How to be an Antiracist’ across their social media pages. This is in the context of 100 days of rioting in Portland, widespread violence across most major US cities, billions of dollars of damage, much of the economic activity unrecoverable, and more dead people by BLM/Antifa rioter at the point of writing (20) than all black people killed by police officers in 2019 (19).

You almost couldn’t dream up a more perverse state of affairs: what if all people who think of themselves as well-to-do altruists, suddenly, due to some mass collective hysteria, started supporting the wanton destruction of property, the mindless arson, the lootings, the murder. It’s an extravagant Clockwork Orange themed Halloween party with a Star Wars Imperial March soundtrack, held in a swanky liberal half-mansion, that’s been looted and is currently on fire. It’s almost as if social media has driven us to the point where we’ve all made a gentleman’s handshake to start living in caves and flinging our faeces at each other again. Who needs a functioning health care system? I know a really good woke progressive transgender shaman who is able to treat pancreatitis through the power of performantive post-feminist dance. It’s as if some very large threads of the project of Western liberal democracy just appeared and progressives and liberals everywhere just said ‘go on then, might as well,’ wrapped their little pinky finger around it and gave it a big bloody tug, and kept on tugging. The football's been cancelled so let's throw ourselves into this Maoist revolution stuff instead.

The thing most bonkers about this state of affairs is the accusation that because I’m not jumping on the toxic Black Lives Matter bandwagon that I am therefore a card-carrying member of the ‘far-right’, or ‘alt-right,’ umbrella terms which the mainstream media uses routinely to characterise anyone with opinions outside of the social-justice Overton window. “You think burning down family-owned businesses is wrong? Don’t you know those buildings are symbols of oppression? Nazi Scum! Off Our Streets!” "Do you think it’s wrong to shoot people dead for being Trump supports? Nazi!" "You didn’t bend the knee and raise your fist when the mob asked you to? Nazi!" My liberal chums, I'm afraid to tell you that having even the slightest sympathy for these attacks puts you, the leftist, in the company of any upstanding, card-carrying member of the NSDAP in 1930’s Germany.

It’s as though the left decided to dabble in a little bit of fracking in the heartlands of mainstream political discourse, just on a whim – fracking the fertile soils of reason and civility - and when the subsequent cracking of the earth began to show with the first rounds of rioting and statue desecration, tiptoed their way across the fractured land, all the way leftwards - far far far leftwards, and then resumed drilling as the tectonic plates shifted. As more cities were lit ablaze and more business were destroyed, with the prospect of the complete dissolution of the American project insight, the people that'd already moved just about as far to the left of the political heartlands as possible, decided to inject a heavy stream of water into the mantle of the earth, triggering a catastrophic earthquake which separated them entirely from the mass of people they'd previously lived, worked and occasionally even bathed with. The mass of folk they left behind were now so far to the right that they now all resembled Nazis. 

My dear liberal friends, you’re so embroiled in this mass delusion, the newly political tribeless such as myself and conservatives are the only groups left defending eccentric ideas such as the rule of law, having a functioning police force, and not burning down property and killing people for their political affiliation. How I long for more halcyon times when being on the left meant joining a march with a homemade sign, going vegan, occupying a building for climate justice, or picketing slaughterhouses for animal rights. Now anything other than liking and sharing “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” BLM videos is synonymous with Sieg Heiling.

Usually, I’d have enough confidence in the reasonableness of people to attempt to make their way back to the yawning chasm with now represents ‘the centre’ of political discourse. I’d expect my liberal friends to dust themselves off, knock back a few hangover tablets with some organic sparkling mineral water, and wave goodbye that high horse they’ve been riding on its merry gallop on the dirt path to Hell. Like the ancestors of odd-toed ungulates becoming geographically separated on the Eurasian steppe leading to new species of horsey, we political humans too have diverged onto two geographically isolated islands of information. This barrier, not physical but just as consequential, is so profound that we’re now not even receiving reporting of the other islanders, and when we do it’s so politicised that its only use is to get emotionally riled up, performing some Lord of the Flies-style war dance before planning one’s next midnight raid.

Why did liberals begin destabilising the political centre when we all know liberals hate fracking? Trump derangement syndrome is no doubt partly to blame. But it doesn’t explain the white guilt of liberals who have grown up sheltered in middle-class white liberal neighbourhoods with other white middle-class people who spoke to a black person once in school and who shed a tear watching international cinema. You must be an ally if you shed a tear watching Ttotsi and Hotel Rwanda.

Those of us who grew up poor, in the inner-city, with a diverse and healthy palette of skin tones, don’t fetishise any one shade over any other. Sometimes shades of black and brown are pretty cool, and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes hues of white and yellow are a great compliment, and at other times they’re not. The point is that, unlike in painting, it’s not the colour which counts – it’s the content of one’s character underneath the pigment.

 The shades of a person’s skin is nout but a cloak for the minds and souls that they house; personalities made up of the particular assemblage of talents, charms, quirks and deficiencies, inherited through no free will of their own, and characterised, in all their complexity and nuance, by the term ‘human being’. Those of us, who give priority to one’s spirit not skin, rest comfortably in our colour blindness. We aren’t petrified when we run into a black person on the street and we aren’t deferential to blacks for the sins of whites who lived long time. Black people are not mythological demi-Gods to be feared, revered, respected and hero-worshipped. They’re our equals; people just like us.

My liberal friends, this mass delusion has to stop: it’s time to stick up for the true liberal principles that you ostensibly used to stand for. You’re not racist if you call out bad ideas, and Black Lives Matter the organisation, couldn’t be any more of a terrible idea if it tried to ride a unicycle backwards while blindfolded over a den on hungry lions. Black Lives Matter is an authoritarian, Marxist, narcissistic, vindictive, backwards, regressive, identity-politics-fuelled menace to the fabric of a good, liberal society. They’re the dirty bomb which sends humanity back to the dark ages. It’s time you shake off the feeling of debt you feel through your lack of ever having met someone of a different skin tone, and through your support of acts of violence, have a look at what stares back at you in the mirror: somebody that, like the hyper-liberal student participations of the Stanford experiments, aren’t as benevolent, altruistic and tolerant as you once thought you were.

We're All Jokers Now

It’s heartbreaking, watching a man get his life snuffed out by a heartless, callous, murdering police officer who ruthlessly knelt on an innocent man's neck until dead. It’s as spine-chilling watching a sword-wielding man gets his back broken – literally – while allegedly defending businesses, by a mob of rioters who used stones and skateboards to pulverise him to contorted crippledom, as happened to a man in Dallas, Texas today. It’s harder still to actually be living through these situations: mere pawns in the new era of woke politics, both sides playing out their roles as victim and oppressor, underdog and iron hand, perennially aggrieved and perennially over-empowered; as turn-of-the-century buildings and small business set aflame, the owners of those business -black and white folks alike – shed a tear.                       

Is it possible to stand for non-violence now, when the media drip feeds the public with the victim narrative of an enduring underclass? And when celebrities and social media influencers heroically rise up in support of those destroying their own cities, is it possible to protest peacefully? This sentiment was best put by political commentator Andrew Sullivan. 'The president glorifies police violence; the hard left approves of citizen violence (because of existing institutional 'violence'). Liberal nonviolence? Conservative moderation? So passé.'

With the ruling class doing its best to cling on to power the face of crony capitalism, criminal bankers, corrupt corporations and unfettered financial interventionism after the 2008 crash, the power of the dollar now enters a period of steep decline, a period of inevitable high-inflation, perhaps hyperinflation, and its collapse as a world reserve currency. Trump’s bulldozing political style, his team of ideologues; crooks and hornswogglers, have destroyed political unity, poured salt into the wounds of a divided nation, and highlighted how weak the norms of our institutions really are.

The crumbling elite rules over an underclass, itself disunited, itself at war. Who are these formidable foes, fighting it out likes ants fighting a spider in a jar shaken up by a spoilt child? Allow me to introduce them. In the red corner,  ‘Poor White People’, aka the ‘The Deplorables’, hailing from somewhere near Charleston, West Virginia, with an unbeaten record of 19 handguns, 6 assault rifles and 1 replica confederate pocket knife, carved by General Lee himself. And in the blue corner, ‘Poor Black People,’ with a record of 12 counts of marijuana possession, 3 violent crimes and 1 judge-signed invitation to the overcrowded state penitentiary. 3…2…1… Let’s get it on! Come on!

White blood and black blood bleeds red alike,
The ruling elite suffers last in this fight.

A shit fucking sandwich

But we have to destroy each other. The economy? Smash it down.
The legacy media? Eviscerate it; it’s fake news. Hillary Clinton? Lock her up. The white man? Shoot him. The black man? Stand on his neck for 9 minutes until dead. Target? Walmart? Smash them both. The workers in there? Smash them too. We saw the fury and outrage by celebrities, by the media, by every right-thinking person, when Jussie Smollett told us a noose was put around his neck by racist goons outside a Subway restaurant – he didn’t eat his 6" that night. It’s hardly surprising what you see when an actual racist act caught on film takes place; we’re left with an untoasted 6" with no sauce or cheese, stuffed full of lettuce, rotten cucumber, misinformation and lies.

The authorities have failed to enforce law and order because cracking down on protestors is bad optics for the world, friends and foes watching on surreptitiously through the cameras of the legacy media and smartphone users posting on Twitter. How dare you prevent those stores from being broken into, smashed and looted; don’t you know a black man was killed last week? The surge in electricity coming from Black Twitter would be enough to short circuit the entire state of Minnesota's power grid.  #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd – just got a 52’ T.V. from a doctor’s surgery. #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd – just burnt down a hospital. #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd – just near killed a man with a sword.

A photo too graphic to post. Here are some run-of-the-mill looters instead.

The woke narrative pervades the humanities departments (as popularised by Jonathan Haidt in ‘The Righteous Mind’), the media, and seemingly the P.R. departments of media companies to the extent that if you don’t believe in the systematic oppression of the black man, you’re not an ally. If you don’t believe in the invidious, guiding hand of the patriarchy, you’re not an ally. If you don’t believe that differential outcomes in education and employment are due to a glass ceiling, you’re not an ally. If you wish to be an ‘ally’ to [insert minority group here], then you have to spend the rest of your mortal existence tweeting supportive hashtags, contriving cloying and sentimental social media posts, and sometimes donning black combat clothes, and breaking the windows, storefronts and –perhaps- bones of your enemies. Gone are the days when blacks and white linked arms peacefully in opposition to white oppression. Here are the days when if you're not apart of the violent 'solution,' you're apart of the non-violent 'problem'.

Black humans and white humans link arms at 'The March on Washington,' The National Mall, Washington, August 28 1963. 

‘Joker’ was released a year too early: a movie perfectly allegorical of our times. An aggrieved mob of MAGA-voting maniacs represent the disillusionment of the white working class, reflective of a loss of power and gruelling impoverishment pervading Middle America. ‘Joker’ though now it seems is also a living, breathing metaphor for America's other underclass; the angry victim-mentality of some black Americans and their extreme Leftist allies, aided by influencers and the media, who have hijacked legitimate protests – from good black and white folk alike  - over the death of George Floyd, and taken the U.S. from punchdrunk empire doing the chicken dance to boxer lying comatose on the canvas. With Uncle Sam unconscious, supine, presumed dead, China peers over its lifeless corpse with curious incredulity and ask: 'how was it not our tyrannical regimes that defeated Uncle Sam and ended the hopes of democracy, liberty and the rule of law?  It's such a curious thing: he managed to knock himself out. Now let's go and crush Hong Kong. Yipee'.

The U.S.A. then is a country in a state of near-collapse, with the actual enemy -of a corrupt elite- and the actual method of fomenting political change -peaceful protest and the ballot booth- in plain sight. Yet despite this, the ruling elite together with the disillusioned underclass have submitted America’s application for a fast-track downgrade from stumbling superpower to decaying corpse nation. Both groups warm themselves on the flames of burning rubber. Both groups dance on the bodies of the innocent who lie blood-soaked in the streets. Both groups plunder family businesses – run by black and white folk alike – and watch as the souls of their own neighbourhoods are ripped out from within them, their peoples' livelihoods destroyed. “Let’s go kill the white folks,” cried a lady in one of the many states burning. “Let’s go kill the white folks,” she repeated. You won’t find that on CNN; only reporters reporting on ‘the mostly peaceful protests,’ as one CNN reporter reported, a building incinerating behind him. 

A 'mostly peaceful protest,' as buildings burn.

We’ve become tired and weary of slow, incremental improvements to society. Nobody cares about the astonishing declines in violence in the past century, the incredible chance of being murdered in your lifetime. Nobody gives a shit about diminishing poverty rates, the civil rights revolution, the women’s rights revolutions, the children’s rights revolution, the gay rights revolutions, the animal rights revolutions. Punch a nazi, grab a pitchfork: we were borne sick, and we need a-healin'. We need to heal it with fire, brimstone and the shattered glass from a hundred shattered shop fronts. We need to heal it with another woke Instagram video or Twitter post from our modern-day prophets. We need to heal it wearing white face paint, a crimson two-piece suit and a green fucking wig because we’re all Jokers now, or we will be just as I can find some more face paint to go fucking loot.
                                                

U.S.A, 2020.