Indoctrinating An Entire School System in PC Racism

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Seattle Public Schools recently held a racially charged teacher-training session that convicted US schools of committing “spirit murder” against black kids and demanded that white teachers “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”

According to whistleblower documents from the session that I’ve reviewed, the trainers began by claiming that teachers are colonizers of “the ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish People.” Later: “The United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved black people’s work.” The image of a black-power fist removed any lingering hope that the presentation might involve a modicum of nuance.

Organizers identified themselves by gender pronouns and race. For example, one speaker was identified as “He/Him, White.” It has become commonplace in academia and corporate settings to list gender pronouns, but this was perhaps the first example of an institution promoting workplace race-labeling. (The district didn’t reply to my request for comment.)

The main message: White teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege in our society” because of their “possession of white skin.” To atone, they must self-consciously reject their “whiteness” and become dedicated “anti-racist educator[s].”

Any resistance, no matter how well-argued or factually grounded, was dismissed as a reflex of white teachers’ “lizard-brain,” which makes them “afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism or any kind of ‘ism.’ ”

In the most disturbing portion, teachers discussed “spirit murder.” Schools, according to “abolitionist” pedagogue Bettina Love, who invented the concept, “murder the souls of black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-black, state-sanctioned violence.”

What’s the goal here? Simply put, to transform Seattle schools into activist organizations.

At the conclusion of the training, teachers had to explain how they will practice “anti-racist pedagogy,” address the “social-justice movements taking place” and become “anti-racist outside the classroom.” They were told to divide the world into “enemies, allies and accomplices” and work toward the “abolition” of whiteness. They must, in other words, abandon the illusion of neutral teaching standards and get in the trenches of race-based activism.

Unfortunately, this kind of training is not an aberration — but a reflection of deep ideological currents within Seattle Public Schools and the wider teacher-training industrial complex. In recent years, the district has rapidly expanded its Department of Racial Equity Advancement and deployed “racial-equity teams” in dozens of neighborhood schools. The stated goal is to “advance educational racial equity,” but in practice, these programs often serve to introduce, perpetuate and enforce a specific ideological agenda and a new racial hierarchy.

This is a tragedy for students. Seattle public schools have been closed to on-campus learning since the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. In September, the school district reported that fewer than half of students attended any of the school’s remote-learning offerings, with even worse attendance rates for minorities. Rather than address this crisis, which has doubtlessly expanded racial disparities, the district prioritized “white-privilege” training for teachers.

Unless there is a change of course, this new orthodoxy — gradually replacing academics with activism — will yield an educational disaster. School districts will aggregate students on the basis of identity and subordinate traditional learning to the latest fads from woke academe. When those inevitably fail, desperate teachers and administrators will be tempted to drop the old “three Rs” (reading, writing, arithmetic) in favor of the new: racism, racism and racism.

In this sense, the educational woke regime mirrors the corporate one in function: All this ideological garment-rending and chest-beating serves to disguise the social and material failures of institutions. Teachers can ostentatiously “bankrupt their privilege” in front of their colleagues, but it will do nothing for third-graders who are struggling to read or graduating high-school seniors who can’t solve a single algebra problem or compose a legible sentence.

Sadly, if past is precedent, the racial fever gripping Seattle schools will soon spread to the nation.

Christopher Rufo, Discovery Institute

Who is to Blame for Black Poverty ?

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

We’re all familiar with the cycle of poverty in Black urban neighborhoods that Democrat politicians have run for decades. Everybody assumes it’s because Democrats are so wedded to their policies, they keep throwing good money after bad. Maybe that’s not the problem, though. Maybe Black Democrat politicians don’t want to help these areas, and the citizens in those areas don’t actually want to be helped.

“Diversity” and “inclusion” are two of the most often heard buzzwords in our lives these days, with a heavy helping coming from the media, of course. Tucker Carlson addressed the subject very well recently in an opinion piece where he discussed diversity versus the meritocracy, using Biden’s recently-announced cabinet selections to make his case. The evident theme for Joe Biden’s picks has nothing to do with whether his picks are actually qualified for their postings. Rather, that must check off the appropriate victim identity group box: female, Black, Hispanic, gay, trans, or (Jackpot!) a combination of two or more, where being a black Hispanic lesbian is the pinnacle of the victim hierarchy.

In particular, I noted in the public remarks made by soon-to-be repeat offender against our economy, Janet Yellen, that a big part of her focus as Fed Chair is to address economic inequality, wage inequality, food insecurity, poverty — all seemingly benevolent causes until you peel back the onion just slightly and realize that she’s not talking about these things in the scope of helping everyone, regardless of race. No, she’s specifically talking about “communities of color.” Just so we’re clear, a group of people is going to receive different (preferential) treatment based solely on the color of their skin. I’m pretty sure that’s called racism.

Yellen goes on to say that she also wants to provide more opportunities for people of color, because, she says in so many words, these opportunities are denied to people of color. She specifically states that opportunities are denied, so I must ask the question: Who exactly is doing the denying?

If we look at the largest areas of concentration of Black people, which would be the large urban centers of New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit, just to name a few (and I’m not even crossing the Mississippi!), those areas presumably contain large numbers of black-owned businesses or at least Black people who would like to start a business . . . you know, they’d like to, but they’re being denied the opportunity. (I think we all know the subtext when someone is saying that “people of color” are being allegedly mistreated, the alleged mistreatment is at the hands of Evil White Conservatives.)

So, again, who is doing this denying? All of the major cities that I just listed, and dozens more just like them across the country, have been run for decades by Democrat mayors and city councils, with assistance from Democrat Congressmen on both a state and federal level. One must therefore assume that these same people in charge are also very influential regarding who receives economic opportunities or assistance, right? Thus, this horrible denying is being done, in fact, by the very people now crying about the fact that the denying is happening!

As usual, it takes mental gymnastics on an Olympic level to reconcile leftist thinking. Democrats have had control of these cities for decades and what have their policies brought their “people of color?” Misery, poverty, violence, and addiction. Obama and Biden had eight years, with two of those eight having the benefit of both houses of Congress on their side, but they didn’t come up with any miracle salve to soothe the troubles of the inner cities. What on earth would lead us to believe that this will be any different under Biden and Harris?

Or is it more practical and pragmatic if we believe that, via Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is the correct one: These so-called leaders in Democrat-run enclaves have no real interest in helping their constituents pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty. For decades, Democrats have had their faithful Black voters right where they want them; namely, poor and dependent on the government. We give you stuff, you vote for us. That’s the unspoken agreement. But when a true leader finally comes around who has a plan and the political will to do something to help these communities — like Kimberly Klacik in the Baltimore Congressional district formerly ruled by the late Elijah Cummings — she receives a paltry 28% of the vote. Now the always useless 10-year Congressional veteran Kweisi Mfume has Cummings’s old job and somehow those precious opportunities are still being denied.

I’ve already established solid evidence that Democrat politicians — even and especially Black Democrat politicians — have little to no interest in helping their Black constituents. But there is another side to that coin. The evidence seems to show that Black people themselves appear to not want to be helped. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. So, are Black voters in these areas insane? They keep voting for the likes of Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters, and Kweisi Mfume, but expect these serial grifters to suddenly start working for them.

In my eyes, that puts the blame squarely on both parties, the politicians and the voters who keep sending them back to their offices. Is it because the way things stand now, those voters are cozily wrapped up in their blanket of victimhood? Is it so comfy in there receiving their government subsistence handouts that they can’t be bothered to get out and do something about it? Is the alternative to this abusive, co-dependent relationship — personal responsibility, hard work, and entrepreneurialism — just too difficult to face?

My prediction for all of these cities that I’ve mentioned, and any other Democrat-run major cities around the country, is that if a Biden/Harris ticket sets up shop in the White House, in four years’ time those cities will look much the same as they do now, except with four more years’ worth of decay, addiction, and violent crime. But those citizens can comfort themselves that they still have someone else to blame for their problems.

H.P. Smith, American Thinker

Opponents of Liberty Remain Misguided Sore Winners

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

The 2020 presidential election has been the most divisive in many people’s living memory. Not only has there been the anger and fury over whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden should occupy the White House come January 20, 2021, there have been concerns and controversy about whether democracy itself is under attack in America.It is the competitive market economy that offers the “inclusiveness” and “diversity” that “Progressives” insist they want.
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One indication of people’s concerns about this latest presidential election was the number of those who believed that the outcome was of serious national concern. For instance, for more than 20 years, the Pew Research Center has asked prospective voters whether “it really mattered” who was going to win in an upcoming presidential election. Back in 2000, 50 percent of such prospective voters said the outcome of that year’s presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore “mattered,” while 47 percent said that things would be pretty much the same, regardless of who won.

Presidential Election Outcomes Increasingly Matter to Voters

In the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections, Pew Research tells us, the differences on voters’ views of the possible outcomes were greater, with those considering the result “mattering” being in the 60s percentage range and those who thought it would all be the same were mostly in the 30s percentage range. In the 2016 presidential race, those considering that the outcome mattered increased to 74 percent, and those saying it did not really matter falling to 22 percent. But in the 2020 contest for the White House, Pew Research says that 83 percent of the voters said the result would matter, while only 16 percent replied that it would be all the same.

While the Florida “hanging chads” of 2000 and the Supreme Court’s decision to find in favor of George W. Bush over Al Gore made the legitimacy of the election’s outcome suspect for many Democrats, nothing compares to 2016 and 2020. For the last four years, a good part of the anger and disregard for Donald Trump as president has been due to not only his personality and policies, but the fact that many of those in the Democratic Party and on “the left” in general were sure that “the Russians” had interfered and somehow rigged the outcome for Trump’s victory. Otherwise, how could you explain “him” winning?

Were there really that many “deplorables” in America? Besides, Hillary Clinton won 3 million more of the popular votes than Trump in 2016, so if not for that “undemocratic” Electoral College, the “real winner” would have been in the White House. There can be little doubt that if the November 3, 2020 presidential election outcome had been, again, a Trump victory due to the Electoral College in the face of a popular vote majority for Biden, there would have been many violent and destructive demonstrations and riots across the United States.

As it is, Biden received 81.2 million votes, with Trump getting 74.2 million votes, or a bit more than 52 percent of the popular vote to Trump’s almost 48 percent; both were historically the highest numbers for any Democrat or Republican running for the presidency. And in the Electoral College, Biden won 306 to 232. Now, of course, the shoe is on the other foot, with Trump and many Republicans insisting that “voter fraud,” especially with so many write-in ballots and believed “irregularities” in this season of the coronavirus, has illegitimately given Joe Biden the White House.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Sore Winner Who Distrusts Talk of Liberty

But in spite of Joe Biden’s clear win over Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, some “Progressives” remain sore and poor winners. A perfect example is economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who is a professor at Columbia University. In a recent opinion piece on “A Chance to Repair the Cracks in Our Democracy,” in The New York Times (December 8, 2020), Stiglitz insists that it is not enough that Donald Trump refuses to accept his defeat and gracefully accept Biden as his successor. It is that others in the Republican Party declare that in terms of political values, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

The latter quote was taken by Stiglitz from a tweet written by Utah Senator Mike Lee, while he was watching the vice-presidential debate in October between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. Senator Lee also tweeted, “Government is the official use of coercive force – nothing more and nothing less. The Constitution protects us by limiting the use of government force.”

This shocks Professor Stiglitz to no end. The idea that something is of greater political value other than “democracy” itself convinces him that the foundations of America are being threatened. Said Stiglitz: “If people like Senator Lee have their way, and we turn our backs on democracy, then our lives and our conception of the United States as a bastion of popular representation and respect for human rights will change forever.”

If democracy is not politically an end in itself, not the defining institutional characteristic of a free society, then in Stiglitz’s view there is in the air “the sour odor of Hitler’s Brown Shirts.” In addition, in his eyes, the failure of achieving the social and economic policy goals that he desires, due to resistance and opposition in the congressional process, means “transforming a virtuous system of checks and balances into one of gridlock and confrontation.”

In other words, “the system” is a failure if he does not get his policy way. Why? Because the use of “gridlock” by those who hold policy views differing from his implies an unwillingness to “confront head on, our intertwined racial, ethnic and economic inequalities.” Stiglitz insists that a majority of Americans “have expressed their belief in universal access to health care, better access to education, higher minimum wages, tighter gun controls and so on.” To oppose the implementation and imposition of such policies on everyone in the country demonstrates a willingness to resort to a variety of “anti-democratic policies.”

Stiglitz’s Peculiar Views on “Court Packing”

Among these anti-democratic policies, Stiglitz states, is the Republicans “packing the Supreme Court.” This is the height of chutzpah on his part. The three appointments to the Supreme Court during Trump’s presidency have all followed the Constitutional and congressional rules and procedures for nomination and Senatorial approval. As a citizen and a voter, I have not always agreed with past nominations and appointments to the Supreme Court, though, undoubtedly for ideological and political reasons different from Stiglitz’s dislikes.

But I’ve never considered it a nefarious, deceitful maneuver of “packing” the Court with those holding views different than my own about individual rights, private property, and Constitutional restraint. I have feared for court decisions they might make, but unless you want to jettison the Constitutional procedures, the person in the White House and the majority party in the Senate pretty much determine who gets nominated and appointed to the Supreme Court. Those are the rules of the game, for better or worse.

On the other hand, whose preferred presidential candidate in this year’s election cycle refused to directly answer whether or not as president he would attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices over and beyond the traditional nine, if Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed by the Senate as a justice to the Court? That the voters really did not have the right to know, and he would only decide after finding out whether or not he had won the White House. Now we are waiting to know Biden’s view on this until after the runoff elections in Georgia for two seats that will determine which party holds a majority in the Senate in January 2021.

Press Freedom and State’s Rights Have Been Alive and Well

Another absurdity in Professor Stiglitz’s article is his assertion that the last four years has supposedly “made us aware of just how exquisitely fragile our institutions – such as those ensuring equality, political freedom, a quality Civil Service, a free and active press and the rule of law – are.” If the last four years have demonstrated anything, it is just how strong and effective our political institutions remain in the face of a president who has been disagreed with and hated by so many in the country.

True to the spirit and letter of the American federalist system, attempts by the government in Washington, D.C. to impose policies and practices on state and local governments that they have found unacceptable and politically unpalatable have been opposed, resisted, and defeated by the actions of state governments and through court cases brought to limit or prevent federal government overreach.

Indeed, Democrats and “Progressives” who have long sneered at and pooh-poohed talk of “state’s rights” for decades suddenly rediscovered their value and use. In fact, the arguments made in defense of state-level autonomy from Washington sometimes have almost sounded like the words of that “unmentionable” 19^th century state’s rights advocate, John C. Calhoun! Why, in one major “blue state,” some even spoke of the possibility of secession from the Union with Trump in the White House. Of course, that was a Democrat Party position for many in the South in 1860 and 1861, as I recall.

Also, Professor Stiglitz must live in some alternate universe when he suggests that the Trump presidency has threatened the freedom and independence of the press and social media. Trump had huffed and puffed at the press, calling them names, accusing them of “fake news,” rudely ridiculed particular reporters at presidential press conferences, and told them to stay out of his business of “running the country.” Under the secure protection of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the press has responded to his personality and his policies with criticism, contempt, and “fact checking” to challenge him on almost everything – without one reporter arrested and imprisoned or one news outlet shut down by federal agents. (See my article, “Presidential Hubris: ‘Let Me Run the Country,’” and, “The U.S. Revives the Personal State,” and “The Imperial Presidency Embodies Political and Economic Hubris”.)

The Constitution Has Well Served Trump’s Opposition

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were instituted by those much-maligned Founding Fathers precisely to assure the checks and balances and restraints on the national government’s power when a president is as unpopular as Trump has been in various social and political quarters, so as to preserve the autonomy of the state and local governments and their citizens from what they may consider arbitrary and “authoritarian” policies from “above.”

In other words, the American system has worked, separate from whether someone is “for” or “against” much of what Donald Trump has attempted to implement during his four-year term in office. If the Republican Party retains majority control of the Senate after the Georgia runoff elections in early January, “the system” will again work in limiting a new president of the United States from imposing a blanket set of policies that others in the country may not fully agree with or want.

Praising “Democracy” as Long as It’s Policies You Desire

But what is most disturbing in Joseph Stiglitz’s piece is not only the disregard but clear contempt for those who even speak of individual liberty, private property, economic freedom and constitutionally restrained government. How dare there be any barriers to “the majority” from having its way with social and economic policy! “They” want socialized health care, “they” want government fully funded higher education, “they” want a $15 an hour minimum wage, “they” want redistribution of income and wealth for purposes of a certain conception of economic “equality” and “justice.” And, damn it, to deny the majority what it wants is the end to “democracy” in America, and the arrival of Nazi stormtroopers down Pennsylvania Avenue.

What if the majority wanted to shut down The New York Times and The Washington Post? What if the majority wanted to reinstate Jim Crow laws? What if the majority wanted to impose a mandatory course curriculum on Professor Stiglitz’s economics classes at Columbia University that he would be required to teach?

Why cannot the majority have their way on these matters as much as those that Professor Stiglitz would like to see imposed on a dissenting minority, presuming that a majority of voters actually want these things – if they have been more fully informed of all the costs and trade-offs and unintended consequences that may be forthcoming from their implementation? It would be “the will of the people.” Right? Would it not threaten “America” if it were not allowed?

The fact is, a majority can be just as tyrannical as a minority possessing political power and authority within a country. Numbers do not make something right or wrong, in itself. And Professor Stiglitz knows this because he would be no doubt – and rightly – shocked and opposed to any majority (or its elected political representatives) attempting to impose bans on newspapers, enforce mandatory segregation, or command a professor in a classroom about how and what he was to teach.

American Principle of Individual Liberty and Self-Ownership

So what and how shall it be decided what a political majority may do to a minority and what it may not? Possibly Professor Stiglitz would reply that a benchmark might be “social justice,” especially since he particularly refers in his article to overcoming racial, ethnic and economic inequalities. But there is more than one meaning and understanding to “equality” and more than one reason why individuals may experience unequal outcomes in various aspects of life.

In the American political tradition, the most fundamental notion of equality refers to “equality before the law.” That is, each and every person is seen as possessing the same individual rights to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property, with privileges and favors for none, including those holding political office and their agents and representatives. For the Founding Fathers, the presumption was that every individual possesses such “rights” by their nature as a human being, regardless of time and place and circumstance.

The American founding principles include and are inseparable from the idea of property rights. Why? Because the most fundamental property right is in your own person. If Professor Stiglitz were to start rolling his eyes when confronted with such an idea, then I would ask him whether or not a woman has a right to control her own body, including being safe and protected against rape, and allowed to make her own decision as to whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. On what political-philosophical premise may not a majority prevent her from having an abortion, if not that most fundamental one that she “owns” herself, holds a “property right” in herself?

Does a woman not have a right to say “No” to a sexual advance that is unwanted by her, that any sexual intimacy may only be morally and legally allowed when it is between two consenting adults? That is, on the basis of freedom of association and voluntary, mutual agreement? This means that even if a majority of men in a social setting voted to have sex with her, she cannot be forced or compelled to accept the “democratic” decision.

If the principle is true in this type of situation, then I would argue that it holds in all other social and political settings and circumstances. Each of us has a right to determine our own goals and purposes, select the means available to us that we consider to be most efficacious and likely to bring about the desired result, with any and all human interactions with others to further our peaceful and personal purposes occurring only on the basis of voluntary agreement and mutual consent concerning the terms of association and trade.

Follow through with this idea – I would say this ideal – of human liberty and there are no political justifications for the type of “social justice” goals concerning government-supplied health care, government-funded higher education, government-imposed legal minimum wages, or government-coerced redistributions of wealth. Why? Because none of them can be done without an unjustifiable government “taking” of that which may be the honestly and peacefully earned financial and physical property acquired through the gains from trade in a free marketplace.

The only issue of “justice” in this matter is whether or not the larger or lesser earned income and accumulated wealth a person has, has been acquired through peaceful voluntary trade and exchange, or through force and fraud in dealings with others, including through the political processes of interventionist and welfare statist policies. (See my article, “Don’t Confuse Free Markets with the Interventionist State”.)

A Classical Liberal vs. an Unlimited Democracy

But what of “democracy?” Democracy is a political mechanism or method for determining how individuals will be chosen to hold political offices for specified periods of time. As the old phrase says, it replaces bullets with the ballot box. But while the democratic procedure determines how and for how long a person will be elected into political office – rather than shooting his way into power – it does not tell us, per se, what that government is to do, regardless of who is holding a political position.

That is defined implicitly or explicitly through the political principles underlying an unwritten or written constitution under which a government and a society operates. The constitutional order that Joseph Stiglitz rejects is the classical liberal one upon which the American political order was founded. Its grounding is in liberty, that word that he seems to be contemptuous of, believing that it means unfairness and injustice. Why? Because it does not guarantee social and economic outcomes that he prefers to the ones that emerge from the voluntary interactions and associations both within and outside of the free, competitive marketplace.

“Democracy” is the magic word that is used to represent all that he would like to do in social engineering society in the shapes and relationships that he prefers and considers good and right. Suppose that this last presidential election had gone the other way. Suppose that Trump had received the 81.2 million votes and Biden had won the 74.2 million votes, instead. And the Electoral College had gone for Trump, as well. Would Professor Stiglitz be shouting “Hosanna,” the will of the people had spoken, and all is right with the world? That the majority of Americans were on the “right side of history?”

Somehow, I just don’t think so. He probably would be insisting that this showed how poisoned the American people had been by four years of Trump, that the “reactionary,” racist and sexist forces had duped a majority of voters. It would show just how “sick” the country really is. In reality Donald Trump is a product of the interventionist-welfare state that has long replaced a truly liberal market system in the United States. He is one version of the “activist” government order that Professor Stiglitz wants more of, to overcome what he sees as the ills of society. (See my article, “Donald Trump is the Corrupt Creation of America’s Bankrupt Politics”.)

The Liberal Market Order Offers Inclusiveness and Diversity

What is also missing from Joseph Stiglitz’s worldview is the understanding that it is the liberal free market order – however imperfectly and incompletely existing – that has raised humanity up from poverty over the last two hundred years, that has offered multitudes of hundreds of millions, now billions, of people in the world opportunities and standards of living unimaginable in the pre-capitalist world of political privilege, position, and status; that has done far more to create an appreciation, desire, and a reality of human rights, respect, and dignity than any socialist or interventionist arrangement could ever imagine and has ever done. (See my article, “The Rise of Capitalism and the Dignity of Labor”.)

It is the competitive market economy that offers the “inclusiveness” and “diversity” that “Progressives” insist they want, precisely because of the market’s “democratic pluralism” of offerings and opportunities through multitudes of demands and desires satisfied simultaneously and continuously, rather than the coerced “winner takes all” outcomes of increasingly unrestrained political democracy that requires and imposes primarily one set of social and economic policy preferences on everyone based on the outcomes of elections. (See my articles, “Clarity on Diversity and Pluralism” and “The Market Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism”.)

Be assured that when the interventionist-welfare state policies are intensified and made more intrusive into the social and economic fabric of American society, and when, over time, it brings about more corruption, privilege, stagnation, and social hostility, the Joseph Stiglitz’s of the world likely will not admit that the cause has been the political paternalism and social engineering for which they so much never stop yearning.

No. They will, once again, insist that it is all due to the free market capitalist system that their own policies will have continued to undermine, subvert, and, indeed, to have eliminated at the end of the day. The last thing that they can admit is that they are the anti-freedom and real anti-democratic forces that will leave America far worse. (See my book, For a New Liberalism [2019])

This article was originally published at The American Institute for Economic Research.

This post was written by: Richard M. Ebeling

Dr. Richard M. Ebeling is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).

COVID Fascism Continues

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Heroin overdoses in San Francisco far outnumber COVID deaths. Yet there’s NO discussion whatsoever of the harmful effects of lockdowns; only the real or exaggerated harmful effects of COVID. COVID fascists are not concerned with “public safety.” No mistake of this magnitude could have been innocent. We are witnessing, in real time, the murder of human civilization.

And in Seattle, the city government prepares to legalize theft and looting — whenever the government feels the guilty party is too poor NOT to steal or loot. Wow. Marxism is here. It’s no longer just ideology: IT’S REALITY. In Seattle, you can now violate property rights if you offer an entirely subjective claim to poverty. Theft is OK, if you’re poor. Under a one-party commanded by a George Soros/Zuckerberg/Bill Gates cabal and Kamala Harris, you had better believe it’s coming to your town or neighborhood next.

And in other news … Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, has been caught going to her family’s elite beach resort for a big Thanksgiving party after she shamed her fellow Americans for even THINKING of getting together. We have created an aristocracy of pull and arrogance in this country that makes the British royalty of 1776 look Jeffersonian in comparison. People like Birx are disgusting parasites who should be defunded, if not criminally prosecuted. I will never dignify them with obedience.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Women Are Human shares with our readers the following excerpts from Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Continue reading Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire | Women Are Human.Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published by Regnery Publishing. This book corresponds with Shrier’s piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “When Your Daughter Defies Biology,” published on January 6, 2019. She has written about attempts to silence and suppress her work in “Amazon Enforces Trans Orthodoxy” and, more recently, in “Does the ACLU Want to Ban My Book?.” For Shrier’s most recent work, see her piece for Newsweek titled “A British Court Breaks Gender Fever,” in which she discusses the recent, groundbreaking case involving Keira Bell. For the YouTube video and corresponding transcript of Shrier’s conversation with Benjamin A. Boyce about Irreversible Damage, see “What’s the Matter with Girls Today?,” posted at Uncommon Ground Media. By Abigail Shrier

This is a story Americans need to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over-relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups. To tell the story of these adolescent girls, I conducted nearly two hundred interviews and spoke to over four dozen families of adolescents. I have relied in part on parent accounts. Since traditional dysphoria begins in early childhood and has long been marked by a “persistent, insistent, and consistent”1 sense of a child’s discomfort in his body (not something a young child can hide) parents are often in the best position to know whether the passionate dysphoria of adolescence began in early childhood. They are in the best position to know, in other words, whether the distress afflicting so many teenage girls represents traditional gender dysphoria or a different phenomenon altogether. Parents cannot entirely be trusted to know how their adolescents feel about their transgender identities or the new lives forged in its name. But parents can report the facts of their kids’ academic or professional standing, their financial stability, and family formation or lack thereof, and even, sometimes, their social successes and failures. Are these transgender-identified adolescents still in school, or did they drop out? Do they maintain contact with old friends? Do they speak to any family members at all? Are they building toward a future with a romantic partner? Are they engaged in subsistence living on wages from the local coffee shop? I do not pretend to capture these adolescents’ whole stories, much less the fullness of the transgender experience. Transgender success stories are everywhere told and celebrated. They march under the banner of civil rights. They promise to breach the next cultural frontier, to shatter one more basis of human division. But the phenomenon sweeping teenage girls is different. It originates not in traditional gender dysphoria but in videos found on the internet. It represents mimicry inspired by internet gurus, a pledge taken with girlfriends—hands and breath held, eyes squeezed shut. For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging. As one transgender adolescent, “Kyle,” put it to me: “Arguably, the internet is half the reason I had the courage to come out. Chase Ross—a YouTuber. I was twelve. I followed him religiously.” This is the story of the American family—decent, loving, hardworking, and kind. It wants to do the right thing. But it finds itself set in a society that increasingly regards parents as obstacles, bigots, and dupes. We cheer as teenage girls with no history of dysphoria steep themselves in a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet. Peers and therapists and teachers and internet heroes egg these girls on. But here, the cost of so much youthful indiscretion is not a piercing or tattoo. It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of the population will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower. * * *

In researching this transgender craze, I spoke with over four dozen parents. Again and again, I heard a variant on, “My daughter is seventeen, but if you met her, you’d think she was fourteen.” Many of the adolescent girls who fall for the transgender craze lead upper-middle-class, Gen Z lives. Carefully tended by those for whom “parent” is an active verb, even a life’s work, they are often stellar students. Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. They’ve never smoked a cigarette; they don’t ever drink. They’ve also never been sexually active. Many have never had a kiss—with boy or girl. According to Sasha Ayad, a therapist whose practice is largely devoted to trans-identifying adolescents, many have never masturbated. Their bodies are a mystery to them, their deepest desires under-explored and largely unknown. But they are in pain—lots of it. They are anxious and depressed. They are awkward and afraid. Like the infant that learns to avoid the edge of a bed,2 they sense a dangerous chasm lies between the unsteady girls they are and the glamorous women social media tells them they should be. Bridging the gap feels hopeless. The internet never gives them a day—or even an hour—of reprieve. They want to feel the highs and lows of teenage romance, but most of their life occurs on the iPhone. They try cutting. They dabble in anorexia. Parents rush them to psychiatrists who supply medications to pad their moods like so much cotton batting, which helps—unless feeling something is the point. Where is all the raucous fun that should, by right, be theirs? They’ve heard their parents’ stories; they’ve seen the movies. That epic road trip is hard to recreate when few of your friends drive and parents prefer it that way. They could go to the mall, if it hadn’t closed down, and if teenagers still went to the mall (they don’t). Local environs can’t begin to compare with the labyrinthine corridors, ingeniously customized, supplied by their phones. A decade ago, if it ever occurred to you that female-to-male transsexuals existed, you might have thought of Hilary Swank’s portrayal of Teena Brandon in the 1999 biopic Boys Don’t Cry. Swank’s characterization is captivating. Teena Brandon renames herself “Brandon Teena,” chases girls, swigs beer, and joyrides through rural Nebraska dressed as a boy, and mostly passing as one. Brandon chases a strikingly conservative vision of happiness. What Brandon wants is to find the right girl, win her, marry her, make her happy. You spend the entire movie hoping like hell she’ll succeed. The abuse Brandon heroically endures, the knowledge that no one in her place and time is likely to offer the kindness or acceptance Brandon craves, the devastating certainty that this story can only end in tragedy—all of it registers in the viewer’s clenched gut. The adolescent girls currently identifying as transgender have almost nothing in common with this picture. They don’t want to ‘pass’—not really. They typically reject the boy-girl dichotomy that Brandon Teena took for granted. They make little effort to adopt the stereotypical habits of men: They rarely buy a weight set, watch football, or ogle girls. If they cover themselves with tattoos, they prefer feminine ones—flowers or cartoon animals, the kind that mark them as something besides stereotypically male; they want to be seen as ‘queer,’ definitely not as ‘cis men.’ They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination. Only 12 percent of natal females who identify as transgender have undergone or even desire phalloplasty.3 They have no plans to obtain the male appendage that most people would consider a defining feature of manhood. As Sasha Ayad put it to me, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.’” * * *

In 2016, Lisa Littman, ob-gyn turned public health researcher and mother of two, was scrolling through social media when she noticed a statistical peculiarity: several adolescents, most of them girls, from her small town in Rhode Island had come out as transgender—all from within the same friend group. “With the first two announcements, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s great,’” Dr. Littman said, a light New Jersey accent tweaking her vowels. Then came announcements three, four, five, and six. Dr. Littman knew almost nothing about gender dysphoria—her research interests had been confined to reproductive health: abortion stigma and contraception. But she knew enough to recognize that the numbers were much higher than extant prevalence data would have predicted. “I studied epidemiology . . . and when you see numbers that greatly exceed your expectations, it’s worth it to look at what might be causing it. Maybe it’s a difference of how you’re counting. It could be a lot of things. But you know, those were high numbers.” In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation ‘transgender.’ Between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries.4 In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments.5 In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.6 Dr. Littman’s curiosity snagged on the social media posts she’d seen. Why would a psychological ailment that had been almost exclusively the province of boys suddenly befall teenage girls? And why would the incidence of gender dysphoria be so much higher in friend clusters? Maybe she had missed something. She immersed herself in the scientific literature on gender dysphoria. She needed to understand the nature, presentation, and common treatment of this disorder. Dr. Littman began preparing a study of her own, gathering data from parents of trans-identifying adolescents who had had no childhood history of gender dysphoria. The lack of childhood history was critical; as we have seen, traditional gender dysphoria typically begins in early childhood. That was true especially for the small number of natal girls who presented with it.7 Dr. Littman wanted to know whether what she was seeing was a new variant on an old affliction or something else entirely. She assembled 256 detailed parent reports and analyzed the data. Her results astonished her. Two patterns stood out: First, the clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—“out of the blue”8—had done so after a period of prolonged social media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls’ friend groups was more than seventy times the expected rate.9 Why? Dr. Littman knew that a spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls might be explained by one of several causes. Increased societal acceptance of LGBTQ members might have allowed teenagers who would have been reluctant to ‘come out’ in earlier eras to do so today, for example. But this did not explain why transgender identification was sharply clustered in friend groups. Perhaps people with gender dysphoria naturally gravitated toward one another? Then again, the rates were so high, the age of onset had increased from preschool-aged to adolescence, and the sex ratio had flipped. The atypical nature of this dysphoria—occurring in adolescents with no childhood history of it—nudged Dr. Littman toward a hypothesis everyone else had overlooked: peer contagion. Dr. Littman gave this atypical expression of gender dysphoria a name: “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (“ROGD”). * * *

There is nothing particularly outlandish in feeling discomfort in one’s own body or in suspecting that one might feel better in another. There are so many things about our physical forms that cause us distress and regret. We lug around bodies we would never have chosen. Anyone who has ever had the unpleasant sensation of looking in the mirror and being startled by the age of the woman staring back—the blanching, the slack, the lines that stole their way in while you slept—is well acquainted with our bodies’ ability to confuse and shock and disappoint. For those with gender dysphoria, this unpleasantness must be excruciating, and we should expect mental health professionals to be respectful of it, sympathetic to those who bear it, and understanding of their pain—even perhaps by supporting medical transition. I have spoken to several transgender adults who are living good, productive lives, in stable relationships and flourishing in their careers. I believe there are instances in which gender-dysphoric people have been helped by gender transition. But the new ‘affirmative-care’ standard of mental health professionals is a different matter entirely. It surpasses sympathy and leaps straight to demanding that mental health professionals adopt their patients’ beliefs of being in the ‘wrong body.’ Affirmative therapy compels therapists to endorse a falsehood: not that a teenage girl feels more comfortable presenting as a boy—but that she actually is a boy. This is not a subtle distinction, and it isn’t just a matter of humoring a patient. The whole course of appropriate treatment hinges on whether doctors view the patient as a biological girl suffering mental distress or a boy in a girl’s body. But the ‘affirmative-care’ standard, which chooses between these diagnoses before the patient is even examined, has been adopted by nearly every medical accrediting organization. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Pediatric Endocrine Society have all endorsed ‘gender-affirming care’ as the standard for treating patients who self-identify as ‘transgender’ or self-diagnose as ‘gender-dysphoric.’ As the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards, consulted by nearly every field of medicine, advise, “Health professionals can assist gender-dysphoric individuals with affirming their gender identity, exploring different options for expressing that identity, and making decisions about medical treatment options for alleviating dysphoria.”1Notice whose medical judgment is in the driver’s seat. Hint: it isn’t the doctor’s. “Why should activists, many of them biological men, grown men, why should they have anything to say about the mental and physical healthcare offered to young girls? This is truly an issue. People like to say, about abortion: ‘Well, that’s about a woman and her body; she’s the only one who can have any say over her body.’ And people feel different ways about that; some people point out that, look, it’s not just her body, there’s another life at stake. Other people disagree; they say that it is fundamentally about her body. But, in this example, it is entirely about a young girl’s body. So, the question is: Why are so many activists able to shut down discussions about young girls’ bodies?” – Abigail Shrier * * *

We are, by nature, social animals—as Aristotle once observed. We absorb ideas about ourselves from our surroundings more often than we realize and more deeply than we know. If we attend a school or live in a family in which we are made to feel stupid or told we are, some number of us will come to believe it. If a boy is placed in a school in which the other boys tease him for being gay, he may come to internalize their homophobia. He may turn his anger inward, at himself. All of which is to suggest that social transition is not nothing; it is, in fact, an extremely potent and consequential act. It provides what world-renowned gender psychologist Kenneth Zucker—no fan of affirmative therapy—called an “experiment of nurture” when he spoke to me. It places a child or adolescent in an environment in which the entire school is asked to participate in affirming this child’s identity as the opposite sex. If the adolescent wasn’t entirely convinced of her new identity before the experiment, she may be much more so after it is underway. In fact, a team of Dutch clinician-researchers who pioneered the use of puberty blockers found just that: Social transition is a significant intervention. In a 2011 journal article, they warned that early social transitions proved sticky. Given that girls who had been living as boys for years during childhood “experienced great trouble when they wanted to return to the female gender role,” they cautioned, “We believe that parents and caregivers should fully realize the unpredictability of their child’s psychosexual outcome.”11 Once you’ve been insisting to everyone that you’re one thing, it isn’t easy to announce to all your friends, classmates, acquaintances, teachers, and family that you might have made a mistake and change your mind. “You’re worried about losing face,” Lisa Marchiano explained. “First of all, you’re going to get treated like a traitor to the trans community if you step away, but also you’re going to look like an idiot. Like, you made all these people change your name and pronouns. You were up presenting at school for the Trans Day of Visibility—and now you’re not? Who can do that as a teenager?” So ‘social transition’ and ‘affirmation’ are not without risk—for the patient or for the doctor. It’s worth wondering if a therapist who has adopted wholesale the perceptions of her patients is able to provide them with objective guidance. In the case of gender-dysphoric adolescents, the perception that a teen is ‘born in the wrong body’ is the very reason for seeking therapy in the first place. It is the cause of distress. One would think that if there were any aspect of the patients’ assessment about which a therapist should maintain objective detachment, it would be the nature of the ailment that led the patients to seek therapy in the first place. * * *

Girls are different. They are not defective boys simply because they sometimes fail to be single-mindedly self-interested, especially in the face of their friends’ announced need or genuine suffering. They are possessed of a different set of inclinations and gifts—a whole range of emotions and capacities for understanding that boys, in general, are not. If only we didn’t make them feel so bad about this. Adolescence is especially hard on girls. Effervescent with emotion, they buck and bray like wild horses. Parents might be forgiven for assuming that this can’t be right—that there is something wrong with them. Parents might even be forgiven for wishing to put their daughters on medication to flatten their moods and short-circuit these crazy teenage years. This is the fantasy of inducing a kind of Sleeping Beauty coma until your daughter is ready to awaken, calm and refreshed, having arrived gracefully at womanhood. (In fact, writing this book made me wonder if that wasn’t the actual origin of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and so many similar fairy tales: the fond wish to place your unmanageable teenage girl in a brief coma.) Except that it isn’t possible. A young woman’s unruly emotions in her teenage years—the whirlwind fury and self-doubt of female adolescence—may be a feature, not a flaw. That doesn’t mean a parent shouldn’t set boundaries or punish bad behavior. But absent a serious mental health problem, neither should a parent strive to banish all her daughter’s ups and downs. Your teenage girl may be driving you crazy. Though this be madness, there is method in it. She may just be beta testing. She’s flexing her muscles, discovering the power and extent of an intellectual and emotional prowess that will enable her to be the most compassionate of parents and supportive of friends. Women feel things deeply. We empathize. For good reason, when asked to identify their best friend, most men name their wives; most women name another woman.12 Soldiers write home to mom. And in the dead of night, small children cry out for one person. A woman’s emotional life is her strength. A key task of her adolescence must be to learn not to let it overwhelm her. A key task to maturity is to learn not to let it fade away. We need to stop regarding men as the measure of all things—the language they use, the kind of careers they pursue, the apparent selfishness of which we are so endlessly envious. We blame men for this obsession, but really, it is our doing.

Excerpted from Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier, pp. xxiii-xxiv, 6-8, 25-27, 98-99, 114-115, 216-217.

True Learning Starts With Real Mentorship

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

DEC 21, 2020Shannon Watkins

There’s a chasm between the purpose of a liberal arts education and how many colleges and universities actually operate. Throughout academia, excessive value is placed on efficiency, research publications, and prestige—things that are, at best, ancillary to a liberal education’s central purpose of growing in wisdom and pursuing truth.

Consequently, instead of focusing on nurturing students’ intellectual and moral development, much of the modern academy functions as a business that sells a product (credentials) to consumers (students), with professors dedicating most of their time to pursuing their own narrow research interests.

Many professors are content with this arrangement. And why wouldn’t they be?

Higher education’s current structure doesn’t incentivize professors to be excellent and attentive teachers. Instead, academics’ job stability and professional prestige is much more dependent on producing a steady output of “original” research than on mentoring students—no matter how obscure or arcane their subject of inquiry might be.

Some professors, however, prefer academic settings that prioritize teaching over research. One such professor is Zena Hitz, a classical philosopher at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. She is the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, which came out in May 2020.

On November 17, Hitz was a guest speaker at an online event co-sponsored by Duke University’s Arete Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and by Yale University’s Elm Institute. The Elm Institute’s scholar-in-residence, Peter Wicks, moderated the conversation.

Wicks began the event by asking Hitz to elaborate on her conception of the “intellectual life.” In response, Hitz said that the intellectual life is about thinking, pondering, reading, contemplating—using one’s mind—for its own sake. In other words, the act of learning is “something grand or lofty” and intrinsically worthwhile, not merely a means to an end.

Unlike many scholars, Hitz experienced two very different models of education in her academic formation. Her experiences prompted her to think deeply about the nature of the intellectual life and how the modern-day academy often inhibits its development.

As an undergraduate, Hitz attended St. John’s College (where she now teaches). St. John’s is a “great books” college where students’ education is dedicated to reading a common curriculum of the great works of the Western canon, as well as studying language, science, mathematics, and music. There, professors are called “tutors” and their primary role is to help facilitate students’ understanding of the material.

According to the college’s website, “there are no large classes, teaching assistants, or introductory lectures; conversation among students and faculty is the heart of every class at St. John’s.”

Hitz recounted how St. John’s nurtured the love of learning and reading that she’d had throughout her childhood, “but in a much more strict way.” The education she received at the college helped her develop good intellectual habits such as persevering through difficult readings and asking a lot of questions.

She concluded that schools like St. John’s foster true learning by placing a heavy emphasis on mentorship and student-led inquiry.

After graduating, Hitz studied classics and philosophy at Cambridge University and the University of Chicago, and completed her PhD at Princeton University. She later went on to teach at McGill University, Auburn University, and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Unfortunately, Hitz found that St. John’s student-centered and intellectually rigorous approach to education was somewhat of an anomaly in the higher ed landscape.

At the other universities, for example, there were significant pressures on professors to dedicate the bulk of their time to resume-building, not working with students.

On the one hand, Hitz said she enjoyed her professional training as a philosopher because it allowed her to delve deeper into her field. Yet, at the same time, she disliked how she became a part of an institution that didn’t seem to sufficiently value “learning for its own sake.”

Hitz said that her work as a scholar seemed to be more about climbing the “professional status ladder” and appearing impressive, instead of earnestly engaging in “that core human activity of seeking to learn and understand for its own sake.” She admitted that she became so wrapped up in achieving professional prestige that she started to forget about the fundamental questions that drew her to the profession in the first place.

Hitz also expressed dissatisfaction with the large class sizes she encountered at several universities, explaining that “the large lecture hall was not suited to the type of learning that I had received as an undergraduate, that [I wanted to] pass on to my students:”

Most of what I was doing was [condensing] knowledge into bullet points and spitting them out. And when students spat them back to me I would give them either a B+ or A- depending on how well they did it.

To Hitz, teaching students in that fashion didn’t seem conducive to a genuine intellectual life—for either the instructor or the students. Somewhat disillusioned, she left academia for a period of time. But after a few years, she came back and began teaching at St. John’s College.Higher education’s current structure doesn’t incentivize professors to be excellent and attentive teachers.

Although St. John’s provided Hitz with the rich intellectual atmosphere that she craved, she emphasized that it isn’t the only institution where one can receive a meaningful education. She noted that there are other “safe havens” in the university community, such as some small liberal arts colleges, that facilitate intellectual development and are outside of the “achievement machine” built into many universities.

Another “safe haven” Hitz pointed to was the co-host of the event, the Elm Institute. Located near Yale University, the Elm Institute is “an intellectual and cultural venture dedicated to examining and cultivating the ideas, values, and practices that sustain flourishing societies.”

As for mainline colleges and universities, Hitz noted that not all hope is lost. She said that “there’s tons of real learning” that’s offered in universities, it’s just that it’s “hidden and hard to find.”

“Unfortunately, it’s sort of a matter of luck and hearsay as to how you find your way into those pockets, but they’re there,” she said.

In conclusion, Hitz offered a few recommendations on how colleges and universities can be more faithful to their educational mission. First, she said it would be wise for universities to shift away from their over-emphasis on research and focus more on teaching and interacting with students. One way institutions can do this is by incentivizing good teaching, such as offering more teaching awards.

Furthermore, Hitz stressed that teachers need to model the intellectual habits they want to see their students develop. She believes that the most important thing professors can model for their students is to learn in front of them, in the classroom—to “model learning, not just expertise.”

“To share with your students the questions that, to you, feel open, so that they can see that not everything is sound bites and slogans and digestible pieces—bullet-points for the Powerpoint presentation,” she said. In addition, they should model “a certain kind of seriousness, a commitment to certain kinds of ideals.”

Doing so, in Hitz’ view, won’t only benefit students, it will enrich professors’ own intellectual life and academic pursuits.

Shannon Watkins is senior writer at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Omar, Tlaib & AOC Demand Facebook Remove 100% of ‘Anti-Muslim Content

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Two of the most notorious bigots in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that he “eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from Facebook”.

The three-page letter signed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as well as 28 other left-wing House members, spends a great deal of time demanding the removal of what it calls “anti-Muslim content” without ever specifically defining it. That’s convenient considering Omar and Tlaib’s own history of racism and antisemitism, and support for the sorts of Islamic bigotry and violence that groups like CAIR, which supports the letter, have become known for.

The letter spotlights one violent incident, but then goes on to call for a ban on “anti-Muslim content”, “anti-Muslim animus”, “anti-Muslim bigotry”, and finally, “anti-Muslim content and organizing” on the platform, without ever explaining what exactly they want to ban.

Considering the letter’s call for, “100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content”, the safe assumption would be that they want to ban everything critical of Islam.

That’s a disturbing attack on the First Amendment coming from 30 House members.

Democrats have repeatedly pressured Facebook and other social media companies to remove speech they politically disapprove of, whether by President Trump or other conservatives, eroding the thin line between private companies acting on their own initiative and government officials conspiring to violate the First Amendment by banning certain kinds of political speech.

After multiple hearings, legal proposals, and legislative threats, it’s no longer possible to view Facebook’s censorship of political speech as anything other than government censorship. When enough pressure by government officials has been applied to a company to censor certain kinds of speech, the company’s decision to censor speech becomes government censorship.

30 House members would now like Facebook to censor criticism of Islam and political protests against Islamic terrorism. One of the few examples of anti-Muslim content in the House letter was a political protest against the Islamic Society of North America’s 2019 conference.

That was the conference which included an appearance by two Democrat presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro, whose forum was moderated by Salam Al-Marayati, the head of MPAC, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah. Also participating in a round table at the conference was Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who has defended the Islamic mandate to kill gay people.

This is the sort of information that AOC, Omar, and 28 other House Democrats, want banned.

House Democrats trying to shut down protests targeting their own candidates is a blatant violation of the First Amendment which was meant to prevent exactly that kind of thing.

And the party of social justice wants to stop Americans from protesting against an Imam who says things like, ”Brothers and sisters, you know what the punishment is, if a man is found with another man? The Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one to whom it is done to, kill them both.” What happens when ‘anti-Muslim content’ meets anti-gay content?

The 30 House Democrats don’t want to talk about any of this which is why their letter doesn’t.

Even Omar and Tlaib can’t quite openly call for blasphemy regulations for social media, but they conveniently leave terms like “anti-Muslim content” undefined and then demand that Facebook outsource the suppression protocols to “senior staff focused on anti-Muslim bigotry issues” backed by diversity training on “civil rights issues and common words, phrases, tropes or visuals used by hate actors to dehumanize and demonize Muslims”.

And if that’s not enough, there’s an independent third-party review of Facebook’s compliance.

CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups would be brought in to define what “anti-Muslim content” is and then senior staff, approved of by CAIR and its allies, would set moderation policies to suppress “tropes” used by “hate actors” like Jihad, Sharia, Taqiyya, and terrorism.

Cartoons of Mohammed, mentions of blasphemy, hate, and terrorism would all be censored.

It’s not hard to spot what sort of content they’re after.

The House Democrat blasphemy and terror letter has been endorsed by CAIR and the Islamic Networks Group, but beyond these traditional Islamist groups, it has the backing of pro-terror groups like Code Pink and JVP, and assorted anti-war organizations. These groups are less concerned with blasphemy, but very focused on preventing America from fighting terrorists.

CAIR had demanded the removal of Mohammed’s image from the Supreme Court, and more recently compared magazines publishing cartoons of Mohammed to ISIS. A board member of the Muslim Brotherhood group had insisted that, “[t]he right to free speech is not absolute.”

The Founding Fathers and the Constitution disagreed.

The letter also cites a Muslim Advocates report which listed examples of “anti-Muslim content” that they wanted Facebook to censor that included President Trump’s call for a ban on migration from Islamic terror nations, and a Trump campaign ad which described AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley as socialists who had made “anti-Israel, anti-American, and pro-terrorist remarks”.

AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and other Democrats have signed a letter demanding that Facebook censor political speech critical of them. That’s a grotesque assault on the First Amendment.

Another example of “anti-Muslim content” from the Muslim Advocates report was an Israeli Facebook user who had written negatively about Omar, Trudeau, and Corbyn.

Omar responded to this by ranting that “foreign interference – whether by individuals or governments – is still a grave threat to our democracy” and that “malicious actors operating in a foreign country, Israel”, were “spreading misinformation and hate speech to influence elections in the United States.” Even though there’s no evidence that elections were actually influenced.

But, once again, the kind of “anti-Muslim content” that Omar and her political allies seem to want to ban involves criticism of her and of them. The “grave threat” here is coming from Rep. Omar.

The letter claims that its signers also want Facebook to remove “any hate content directed at a religious or ethnic group”, but Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the letter’s signers, has been the House’s worst offender, tweeting antisemitic content, including her infamous “Benjamins” tweet.

If House Democrats were serious about removing hate, they would have removed Rep. Omar.

Facebook already engages in extensive monitoring and censorship. This isn’t about taking down bigotry, but about removing political speech and content that Islamists consider blasphemous. It’s also about suppressing the political organizations that combat Islamist hate and violence.

It’s no coincidence that the type of political speech that Omar, Tlaib, Carson, and other House members want to censor casts a negative light on their own political alliances with Islamists, their bigotry, and their ugly views. And they would like Facebook to do the censoring for them.

The more Democrat officials lay out the kind of censorship they would like internet platforms to perform, the more the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech becomes a dead letter. And this letter, signed by 30 House Democrats, is a new threat to our freedom of speech.

America does not have blasphemy laws. And politicians are not allowed to ban speech they don’t like. The letter to Facebook makes it more urgent than ever that our elected officials find ways to protect the marketplace of ideas from political censorship by Democrats and Facebook.

Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield

A Higher Principle for Libertarianism

Posted on December 21, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Libertarians tend to have two special character traits.
First, we’re a bit contrarian. We stand alone, if we must.
Second, we’re logically consistent. We cannot stand hypocrisy.
In our quest for intellectual consistency, we seek principles. In human action, we seek moral consistency. In other words, we seek to live by those principles.
Our principles guide us. They help us sort out tough situations before all the data arrives. Here are some of the more common principles libertarians live by…

The Self-Ownership Principle: Each person owns themselves. If someone else owns you, you’re a slave.

Zero Aggression Principle: It is always wrong to initiate force to achieve a social or political goal.

Law of Equal Liberty: Each person is free to do what he or she wills, so long as they don’t infringe on the equal freedom of another.

Natural Law: The Creator endows each person with rights, at birth, so we must all respect those rights in others (see: The Declaration of Independence)

Maybe your preferred principle is not listed here. But chances are, that principle, as well as the ones listed above, are…
Personally chosen statements of behavior.
In other words, these principles represent your values. You selected them as an expression of your ethics. Since you chose them, you also enforce them. But we all slip sometimes. Hopefully, you’re forgiving of yourself in those moments where you don’t live up to values.
Likewise, when others around you do not embrace and abide by them, those principles are non-binding.
But there is a “higher principle” for society. It’s higher because it can be repeatedly observed in nature. It’s the Principle of Human Respect…
Human happiness, harmony, and prosperity diminish when a person experiences violence, theft, or fraud.
This principle, unlike the others, has an “If X, then Y” relationship.
In other words, when violence is used to achieve a personal, social, or political goal, the socially desirable benefits of human happiness, social peace, and/or wealth decline. You can test that proposition.
Let’s be clear, each of the principles listed above is wonderful. But the Principle of Human Respect identifies a “cause and effect” relationship that is as consistent and observable as gravity.
Nearly all political philosophies resort to coercive force to achieve their Utopias. Libertarians uniquely recognize that it’s wrong, on both an individual and a political level, to use threats backed by violence to pursue your (conservative or progressive) goals. Only the Principle of Human Respect explains why we’d be happier and more at peace if everyone lived by any of the libertarian “principles.”
———-
Jim Babka is the Editor-at-Large for Advocates for Self-Government and the co-creator of the Zero Aggression Project.

Public School Enrollments Down as Parents Start Noticing Liberal Propaganda

Posted on December 20, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

In the age of COVID, parents are taking a stand against public school identity politics and indoctrination by removing their kids.

December 19, 2020 (FRC Action) — With school shutdowns, logistical complexities with online classes, and rampant uncertainty due to the coronavirus, it’s been a monumentally difficult year for students, their parents, and teachers. But there has been a silver lining in all of this: more and more parents are having their eyes opened to the leftist agenda that has embedded itself in many of our nation’s public schools.

Just last week, a school board in Fairfax County in northern Virginia unanimously decided to remove the names of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason from the city’s elementary and high schools, despite the fact that the local community is strongly in favor of keeping the names.

Now, parents are taking a stand against public school identity politics and indoctrination by removing their kids and finding better alternatives like private schools and homeschooling. In fact, over the past year, the Fairfax County school system has seen a 5 percent drop in enrollment, which means that nearly 9,000 students will no longer be exposed to the leftist propaganda and sexualization that has run rampant.

Yesterday, Maria Keffler, Co-founder of the Arlington Parent Coalition and Partner and Media Representative at Partners for Ethical Care joined Tony on “Washington Watch” to discuss the growing dissatisfaction among parents with educational establishments that are failing to educate and striving to indoctrinate.

“I think more parents are starting to wake up to it and see what’s going on,” she said. “Arlington Public Schools is down about 3,000 students from what was expected this year. I think that is one of the silver linings of the coronavirus — that parents are seeing what’s going on and they’re not happy about it and they shouldn’t be.”

The question is, will public schools begin to listen to the concerns of parents when their tax revenue falls due to declining enrollment? The answer appears to be “no.”

“The school boards are simply not concerned,” Keffler observed. “They’re simply not concerned with the student’s needs. They’re not concerned with the parents’ concerns. In Fairfax County, in 2018, they voted to add the LGBTQ curriculum to the Fairfax County Family Life Education Curriculum. They received 941 emails against approving that curriculum, only 192 for. And they just went right ahead and did it. They’re not listening to parents.”

Not only are public schools not listening to the concerns of parents, they are also failing in their primary duty: education. “Students are falling off the radar,” Keffler pointed out. “Students are falling behind … As long ago as 2015, Pew Research said among developed nations, the U.S. ranks 24th on science and reading and 39th in math. But it’s not new that the public schools are failing — [they’ve] been failing for a while.”

And when taxpayer dollars are being ineffectively used, it’s time to redirect the money elsewhere. “I think we do need school choice,” Keffler said. “I think parents need to have the money that the federal government gives to public schools to go with the child. If the parents take the child to a private school, to homeschool, to a military school — that money needs to go with the students.”

Keffler also underscored another enormously concerning trend in public schools: the violation of the First Amendment free speech rights of students and teachers. “I just received from [an] Arlington County teacher the new guidelines for transgender students. And what really disturbed me is a clause in there that says that students or teachers who refuse to comply [with] policies such as enforced pronouns and deceiving parents about their own children’s sexuality and their gender ID will be disciplined.”

But despite all of these disturbing trends and coronavirus shutdowns, parents should take heart. The multitude of educational choices and resources that are available continue to expand and grow. “Homeschooling has had a big boom this year,” Keffler noted. “The HSLDA, the Home School Legal Defense Association, has written and talked about the thousands and thousands of parents who’ve been calling them for assistance.” She went on to describe the success she has had in homeschooling her own three children.

Clearly, it’s time to rethink public education. “[The public school system is] a monopoly,” Keffler said. “Parents don’t have another choice and you don’t negotiate with a monopoly. You have to break a monopoly. And the only way we’re going to break the public school monopoly is by taking away their students.”

Individualism and the Industrial Revolution

Posted on December 20, 2020 by theartfuldilettante

Liberals stressed the importance of the individual. The 19th-century liberals already considered the development of the individual the most important thing. “Individual and individualism” was the progressive and liberal slogan. Reactionaries had already attacked this position at the beginning of the 19th century.

The rationalists and liberals of the 18th century pointed out that what was needed was good laws. Ancient customs that could not be justified by rationality should be abandoned. The only justification for a law was whether or not it was liable to promote the public social welfare. In many countries the liberals and rationalists asked for written constitutions, the codification of laws, and for new laws which would permit the development of the faculties of every individual.

A reaction to this idea developed, especially in Germany where the jurist and legal historian Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779–1861) was active. Savigny declared that laws cannot be written by men; laws are developed in some mystical way by the soul of the whole unit. It isn’t the individual that thinks—it is the nation or a social entity which uses the individual only for the expression of its own thoughts. This idea was very much emphasized by Marx and the Marxists. In this regard the Marxists were not followers of Hegel, whose main idea of historical evolution was an evolution toward freedom of the individual.

From the viewpoint of Marx and Engels, the individual was a negligible thing in the eyes of the nation. Marx and Engels denied that the individual played a role in historical evolution. According to them, history goes its own way. The material productive forces go their own way, developing independently of the wills of individuals. And historical events come with the inevitability of a law of nature. The material productive forces work like a director in an opera; they must have a substitute available in case of a problem, as the opera director must have a substitute if the singer gets sick. According to this idea, Napoleon and Dante, for instance, were unimportant—if they had not appeared to take their own special place in history, someone else would have appeared on stage to fill their shoes.

To understand certain words, you must understand the German language. From the 17th century on, considerable effort was spent in fighting the use of Latin words and in eliminating them from the German language. In many cases a foreign word remained although there was also a German expression with the same meaning. The two words began as synonyms, but in the course of history, they acquired different meanings. For instance, take the word Umwälzung, the literal German translation of the Latin word revolution. In the Latin word there was no sense of fighting. Thus, there evolved two meanings for the word “revolution”—one by violence, and the other meaning a gradual revolution like the “Industrial Revolution.” However, Marx uses the German word Revolution not only for violent revolutions such as the French or Russian revolutions, but also for the gradual Industrial Revolution.

Incidentally, the term Industrial Revolution was introduced by Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883). Marxists say that “What furthers the overthrow of capitalism is not revolution—look at the Industrial Revolution.”

Marx assigned a special meaning to slavery, serfdom, and other systems of bondage. It was necessary, he said, for the workers to be free in order for the exploiter to exploit them. This idea came from the interpretation he gave to the situation of the feudal lord who had to care for his workers even when they weren’t working. Marx interpreted the liberal changes that developed as freeing the exploiter of the responsibility for the lives of the workers. Marx didn’t see that the liberal movement was directed at the abolition of inequality under law, as between serf and lord.

Karl Marx believed that capital accumulation was an obstacle. In his eyes, the only explanation for wealth accumulation was that somebody had robbed somebody else. For Karl Marx the whole Industrial Revolution simply consisted of the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists. According to him, the situation of the workers became worse with the coming of capitalism. The difference between their situation and that of slaves and serfs was only that the capitalist had no obligation to care for workers who were no longer exploitable, while the lord was bound to care for slaves and serfs. This is another of the insoluble contradictions in the Marxian system. Yet it is accepted by many economists today without realizing of what this contradiction consists.

According to Marx, capitalism is a necessary and inevitable stage in the history of mankind leading men from primitive conditions to the millennium of socialism. If capitalism is a necessary and inevitable step on the road to socialism, then one cannot consistently claim, from the point of view of Marx, that what the capitalist does is ethically and morally bad. Therefore, why does Marx attack the capitalists?

Marx says part of production is appropriated by the capitalists and withheld from the workers. According to Marx, this is very bad. The consequence is that the workers are no longer in a position to consume the whole production produced. A part of what they have produced, therefore, remains unconsumed; there is “underconsumption.” For this reason, because there is underconsumption, economic depressions occur regularly. This is the Marxian underconsumption theory of depressions. Yet Marx contradicts this theory elsewhere.

Marxian writers do not explain why production proceeds from simpler to more and more complicated methods.

Nor did Marx mention the following fact: About 1700, the population of Great Britain was about 5.5 million; by the middle of 1700, the population was 6.5 million, about 500,000 of whom were simply destitute. The whole economic system had produced a “surplus” population. The surplus population problem appeared earlier in Great Britain than on continental Europe. This happened, first of all, because Great Britain was an island and so was not subject to invasion by foreign armies, which helped to reduce the populations in Europe. The wars in Great Britain were civil wars, which were bad, but they stopped. And then this outlet for the surplus population disappeared, so the numbers of surplus people grew. In Europe the situation was different; for one thing, the opportunity to work in agriculture was more favorable than in England.

The old economic system in England couldn’t cope with the surplus population. The surplus people were mostly very bad people—beggars and robbers and thieves and prostitutes. They were supported by various institutions, the poor laws,1 and the charity of the communities. Some were impressed into the army and navy for service abroad. There were also superfluous people in agriculture. The existing system of guilds and other monopolies in the processing industries made the expansion of industry impossible.

In those precapitalist ages, there was a sharp division between the classes of society who could afford new shoes and new clothes, and those who could not. The processing industries produced by and large for the upper classes. Those who could not afford new clothes wore hand-me-downs. There was then a very considerable trade in secondhand clothes—a trade which disappeared almost completely when modern industry began to produce also for the lower classes. If capitalism had not provided the means of sustenance for these “surplus” people, they would have died from starvation. Smallpox accounted for many deaths in precapitalist times; it has now been practically wiped out. Improvements in medicine are also a product of capitalism.

What Marx called the great catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution was not a catastrophe at all; it brought about a tremendous improvement in the conditions of the people. Many survived who wouldn’t have survived otherwise. It is not true, as Marx said, that the improvements in technology are available only to the exploiters and that the masses are living in a state much worse than on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies! In fact, capitalism made it possible for many persons to survive who wouldn’t have otherwise. And today many people, or most people, live at a much higher standard of living than that at which their ancestors lived 100 or 200 years ago.

During the 18th century, there appeared a number of eminent authors—the best known was Adam Smith (1723–1790)—who pleaded for freedom of trade. And they argued against monopoly, against the guilds, and against privileges given by the king and Parliament. Secondly, some ingenious individuals, almost without any savings and capital, began to organize starving paupers for production, not in factories but outside the factories, and not for the upper classes only. These newly organized producers began to make simple goods precisely for the great masses. This was the great change that took place; this was the Industrial Revolution. And this Industrial Revolution made more food and other goods available so that the population rose. Nobody saw less of what really was going on than Karl Marx. By the eve of the Second World War, the population had increased so much that there were 60 million Englishmen.

You can’t compare the United States with England. The United States began almost as a country of modern capitalism. But we may say by and large that out of eight people living today in the countries of Western civilization, seven are alive only because of the Industrial Revolution. Are you personally sure that you are the one out of eight who would have lived even in the absence of the Industrial Revolution? If you are not sure, stop and consider the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

The interpretation given by Marx to the Industrial Revolution is applied also to the interpretation of the “superstructure.” Marx said the “material productive forces,” the tools and machines, produce the “production relations,” the social structure, property rights, and so forth, which produce the “superstructure,” the philosophy, art, and religion. The “superstructure,” said Marx, depends on the class situation of the individuals, i.e., whether he is a poet, painter, and so on. Marx interpreted everything that happened in the spiritual life of the nation from this point of view. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was called a philosopher of the owners of common stock and bonds. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was called the philosopher of big business. For every change in ideology, for every change in music, art, novel writing, play writing, the Marxians had an immediate interpretation. Every new book was explained by the “superstructure” of that particular day. Every book was assigned an adjective—”bourgeois” or “proletarian.” The bourgeoisie were considered an undifferentiated reactionary mass.

Don’t think it is possible for a man to practice all his life a certain ideology without believing in it. The use of the term “mature capitalism” shows how fully persons, who don’t think of themselves as Marxian in any way, have been influenced by Marx. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, in fact almost all historians, have accepted the Marxian interpretation of the Industrial Revolution.2 The one exception is Ashton.3“Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies! In fact, capitalism made it possible for many persons to survive who wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Karl Marx, in the second part of his career, was not an interventionist; he was in favor of laissez-faire. Because he expected the breakdown of capitalism and the substitution of socialism to come from the full maturity of capitalism, he was in favor of letting capitalism develop. In this regard he was, in his writings and in his books, a supporter of economic freedom.

Marx believed that interventionist measures were unfavorable because they delayed the coming of socialism. Labor unions recommended interventions and, therefore, Marx was opposed to them. Labor unions don’t produce anything anyway and it would have been impossible to raise wage rates if producers had not actually produced more.

Marx claimed interventions hurt the interests of the workers. The German socialists voted against [Otto von] Bismarck’s social reforms that he instituted circa 1881 (Marx died in 1883). And in this country the Communists were against the New Deal. Of course, the real reason for their opposition to the government in power was very different. No opposition party wants to assign so much power to another party. In drafting socialist programs, everybody assumes tacitly that he himself will be the planner or the dictator, or that the planner or dictator will be intellectually completely dependent on him and that the planner or dictator will be his handyman. No one wants to be a single member in the planning scheme of somebody else.

These ideas of planning go back to Plato’s treatise on the form of the commonwealth. Plato was very outspoken. He planned a system ruled exclusively by philosophers. He wanted to eliminate all individual rights and decisions. Nobody should go anywhere, rest, sleep, eat, drink, wash, unless he was told to do so. Plato wanted to reduce persons to the status of pawns in his plan. What is needed is a dictator who appoints a philosopher as a kind of prime minister or president of the central board of production management. The program of all such consistent socialists—Plato and Hitler, for instance—planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.

During the 2,300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas. Not even by Kant. The psychological bias in favor of socialism must be taken into consideration in discussing Marxian ideas. This is not limited to those who call themselves Marxian.

Marxians deny that there is such a thing as the search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone. But they are not consistent in this case either, for they say one of the purposes of the socialist state is to eliminate such a search for knowledge. It is an insult, they say, for persons to study things that are useless.

Now I want to discuss the meaning of the ideological distortion of truths. Class consciousness is not developed in the beginning, but it must inevitably come. Marx developed his doctrine of ideology because he realized he couldn’t answer the criticisms raised against socialism. His answer was, “What you say is not true. It is only ideology. What a man thinks, so long as we do not have a classless society, is necessarily a class ideology—that is, it is based on a false consciousness.” Without any further explanation, Marx assumed that such an ideology was useful to the class and to the members of the class that developed it. Such ideas had for their goal the pursuit of the aims of their class.

Marx and Engels appeared and developed the class ideas of the proletariat. Therefore, from this time on the doctrine of the bourgeoisie is absolutely useless. Perhaps one may say that the bourgeoisie needed this explanation to solve a bad conscience. But why should they have a bad conscience if their existence is necessary? And it is necessary, according to Marxian doctrine, for without the bourgeoisie, capitalism cannot develop. And until capitalism is “mature,” there cannot be any socialism.

According to Marx, bourgeois economics, sometimes called “apologetics for bourgeois production,” aided them, the bourgeoisie. The Marxians could have said that the thought the bourgeoisie gave to this bad bourgeois theory justified, in their eyes, as well as in the eyes of the exploited, the capitalist mode of production, thus making it possible for the system to exist. But this would have been a very un-Marxist explanation. First of all, according to Marxian doctrine, no justification is needed for the bourgeois system of production; the bourgeoisie exploit because it is their business to exploit, just as it is the business of the microbes to exploit. The bourgeoisie don’t need any justification. Their class consciousness shows them that they have to do this; it is the capitalist’s nature to exploit.

A Russian friend of Marx wrote him that the task of the socialists must be to help the bourgeoisie exploit better and Marx replied that that was not necessary. Marx then wrote a short note saying that Russia could reach socialism without going through the capitalist stage. The next morning he must have realized that, if he admitted that one country could skip one of the inevitable stages, this would destroy his whole theory. So he didn’t send the note. Engels, who was not so bright, discovered this piece of paper in the desk of Karl Marx, copied it in his own handwriting, and sent his copy to Vera Zasulich (1849–1919), who was famous in Russia because she had attempted to assassinate the police commissioner in St. Petersburg and been acquitted by the jury—she had a good defense counsel. This woman published Marx’s note, and it became one of the great assets of the Bolshevik Party.

The capitalist system is a system in which promotion is precisely according to merit. If people do not get ahead, there is bitterness in their minds. They are reluctant to admit that they do not advance because of their lack of intelligence. They take their lack of advancement out on society. Many blame society and turn to socialism.

This tendency is especially strong in the ranks of intellectuals. Because professionals treat each other as equals, the less capable professionals consider themselves “superior” to nonprofessionals and feel they deserve more recognition than they receive. Envy plays an important role. There is a philosophical predisposition among persons to be dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs. There is dissatisfaction, also, with political conditions. If you are dissatisfied, you ask what other kind of state can be considered.

Marx had “antitalent”—i.e., a lack of talent. He was influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach, especially by Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. Marx admitted that the exploitation doctrine was taken from an anonymous pamphlet published in the 1820s. His economics were distortions taken over from [David] Ricardo (1772–1823).4

Marx was economically ignorant; he didn’t realize that there can be doubts concerning the best means of production to be applied. The big question is, how shall we use the available scarce factors of production. Marx assumed that what has to be done is obvious. He didn’t realize that the future is always uncertain, that it is the job of every businessman to provide for the unknown future. In the capitalist system, the workers and technologists obey the entrepreneur. Under socialism, they will obey the socialist official. Marx didn’t take into consideration the fact that there is a difference between saying what has to be done and doing what somebody else has said must be done. The socialist state is necessarily a police state.

The withering away of the state was just Marx’s attempt to avoid answering the question about what would happen under socialism. Under socialism, the convicts will know that they are being punished for the benefit of the whole society.

THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE

Keeper of the Flame of the Enlightenment

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Individualism and the Industrial Revolution