Liberal Journalist Goes to Border to See if Trump Is Right, What He Finds Out Shocks Everyone

Liberals are going to flip out when they see this story- hell, they flip out when they see anything I write and that makes me very happy!

It turns out that most people at the border WANT Trump’s wall built! That’s right folks, and these aren’t just Republicans! “Hispanic, Anglo, Democratic, Republican, uncommitted, clueless, whatever- they want the WALL!

Esquire sent a journalist to Texas with orders to survey the people living along the border and ask them what they think needs to be done to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, Mike Opelka at TheBlaze reports.

The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jay Fielden, recently appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to explain what happened when Esquire sent what host Joe Scarborough referred to as a “liberal journalist” to the Texas-Mexico border. Fielden said he instructed the reporter to “go down there with no preconceived notions, just an empty notebook.”

Fielden, a former Texan, explained the assignment was to drive or walk the 800-mile border and “talk to whoever you see and let them tell us what’s really going on and whether we need a wall,” he told Scarborough and his panel.

“They said, ‘Build the wall,’” Fielden said, adding, “Most of those Hispanics are first-generation and they see it as unfair,” he said. “I think they feel, as one guy said, ‘Get in line.’”

“Most of those Hispanics are first-generation and they see it as unfair, that they came over the legal way, became citizens, and now they’re having to compete for jobs with those coming across the border on a daily basis,” explained Fielden.

So there you go! We will NEVER have a secure border if Hillary becomes president. But we will have the biggest wall and our Border Patrol will have the state of the art equipment and the green light to deport these illegals when Trump becomes president!

The solution is simple- Elect TRUMP!

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“Systemic racism” is emotional semantics

“Systemic racism” and its semantic cohort “white supremacy” are very emotional names for numbers we don’t know how to change, but we are trying. Nor are these hyperbolic concepts new. They were popular fifty years ago and coined earlier than that. Despite their sound, they do not imply that people are racist.

When you look at how these terms are used, they invariably refer to unhappy statistics. The typical case is one where the fraction for a specific racial minority is either much higher or much lower than it is for whites. The fraction of blacks in the prison population for example, or among the homeless, is much higher than in the general population. The fraction in executive positions is considerably lower in many industries.

The numbers are well known and there have been many programs to try to change them. The bad numbers for minorities are called systemic racism. The corresponding good numbers for whites are derisively called white supremacy. This is hyperbolic semantics, not science. There is nothing new here excepts the names and the anger they evoke.

Note too that these problems do not exist because people are racist. They are system problems that reflect system features. That these problems can be easily made to go away is far from clear, given that we have been working on them for many years.

Systemic racism is also called institutional racism. Wikipedia has a long article, with lots of history, here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

For example, the slogan “Defund the police” has a long history and can mean a wide variety of changes. It is not a call for specific action. Nor is it necessarily an accusation of individual racism in police departments. The basic idea is that funding social programs will supposedly do more to reduce crime than the presence of a police department does. There is a similar theory regarding prisons. Calling this racism is misleading at best; it is actually meaningless.

For some history, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police

Kamala Harris talks constantly about so-called systemic racial injustices, but never says what this nebulous term means. Ironically some of the popular complaints that fall under this term involve systems she has been a leader in, especially the criminal justice system. Does ex-prosecutor Harris think we should defund the prosecutors?

All we really have are these unhappy numbers, plus a lot of programs that did not work, followed by even more untested theories about why the numbers exist and what to do about them. They do not require that anyone is a racist, because these numbers may not be due to deliberate racially motivated actions.

Marching and shouting are not solutions. They are not even calls for action, although the marchers and shouters may not know this. They probably do not know about all the research, all the programs, and the myriad proposals for new programs that already exist. Saying angrily that things have to change is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion.

In particular, the Democrats have not announced any surprising new plans here. They, and Kamala Harris in particular, are just shouting “systemic racism” to try to get votes. They have no new plans to end these unhappy numbers. This is a cruel hoax indeed.

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The Trouble With Marxism

Marx even hated his own mother

Among the many questions I’ve received in doing interviews about my new book, “The Devil and Karl Marx,” one has been particularly interesting and unexpected: What does Marx have to do with today’s statue movement? That is, the movement storming streets and towns with chains and spray paint vandalizing and tearing down statues.

Those targeted are, of course, no longer just statues of Confederate generals; we’re way beyond that. They now include Union generals who defeated the Confederacy (i.e., Ulysses S. Grant), no less than Abraham Lincoln, even black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (try to figure out that one), and everyone from Washington and Jefferson to Francis Scott Key and Teddy Roosevelt.

They go as far back as Christopher Columbus and Saint Louis and Saint Junipero Serra, founder of the California missions. They’d rip down Mt. Rushmore if they could. And if you haven’t noticed, even churches have come under attack, with statues of Jesus Christ and his mother hacked and desecrated.

What do these figures have to do with George Floyd or police reform? Well, obviously, nothing. They represent a tearing at the very fabric of our nation, culture, and its social and political order. They strike at the root of this country’s Judeo-Christian foundation. They literally seek to tear down.

And alas, it’s there that the comparison to Karl Marx is apt, regardless of whether those tearing down could even spell the words “Communist Manifesto.”

The goal of Marx and the Marxist project from the outset was one of fundamental transformation, of pursuing permanent revolution and unrestrained criticism of everything. Marx’s ideas were so radical, and so (as Marx openly conceded) “contrary to the nature of things,” that they inevitably raze the foundation.

Marx, in the “Manifesto,” said that communism represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.” It seeks to “abolish the present state of things.” No small task. In a remarkable statement, he said that communists “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Chew that one over. Marx closed the “Manifesto” with, “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

In a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge, Marx called for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” Imagine.

Marx was particularly fond of a line from Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust”: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” If you know what Goethe’s “Faust” was about, and who Mephistopheles was (a devil/demon), then you know that’s a rather chilling thought from Marx.

Marx—in his essay declaring religion the “opium of the people,” the “heart of a heartless world,” and the “soul of soulless conditions”—said that “the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.” In that essay, he used the word “criticism” 29 times.

Beyond ruthless criticism for Marx, there was ruthless abolition. The word “abolition” is omnipresent in his writings.

As Marx biographer Robert Payne noted, the word almost seems to jump off every page of the “Manifesto.” “And after he has ‘abolished’ property, family, and nations, and all existing societies, Marx shows little interest in creating a new society on the ruins of the old,” observed Payne. “He had written in a poem to Jenny [his future wife] that he would throw a gauntlet at the world, and watch it crumble. Comforted by her love, he would wander through the kingdom of ruins, his words glowing with action, his heart like the heart of God. The ‘Communist Manifesto’ was the gauntlet he threw at the world.”

It was indeed. And it wasn’t merely the “Manifesto.” A key focus of my book is Marx’s genuinely hellacious poetry and plays, which display a savage obsession with the dark side. He wrote of suicide pacts, pacts with the devil, “Hellish vapors,” of the “Prince of Darkness” selling a “blood-dark sword [that] shall stab unerringly within thy soul,” of “Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well, My soul, once true to God, Is Chosen for Hell,” and of violence, vengeance, flames, rage, death, despair, and destruction.

Epoch Times Photo
“The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration” by Paul Kengor. (Tan Books)
In one of his most unsettling writings, a play called “Oulanem,” which two Marx biographers (Robert Payne and Richard Wurmbrand) say is a sacrilegious inversion of the holy name “Manuelo” or “Emmanuel,” the principal character, who serves as a sort of mock Creator, rises and declares of the world: “I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind” and “I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.”

Payne, who was a respected British professor of literature, interpreted it this way: “Oulanem was Marx as judge and executioner.”

Marx’s defenders want to frame the likes of Lenin and Stalin and other tyrants as aberrations of Marxism, as the nasty totalitarians seeking to annihilate the old order. In fact, they were merely following Marx, the ultimate revolutionary and rebel. Marx wanted to burn down the house long before Lenin and Stalin were even born.

In an interview with Dennis Prager regarding “The Devil and Karl Marx,” Prager kept coming back to those lines from Marx in my book. Lines such as, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” He told me, “It’s just pure nihilism.”

It is indeed.

And again, not a single revolutionary standing with torches aside a statue in this or that town need quote Karl Marx in the process. They need not be a Marxist. Marx, however, would approve of them in this sense: As he said at the close of the “Manifesto,” communists support “every revolutionary movement” that goes against the existing social and political order.

So long as today’s revolutionaries are seeking that purpose, Marx would surely approve. They exhibit, whether they know it or not, common cause with Marx’s desire to tear down.

SOURCE






Tracing the dangerous rise and rise of woke warriors

At last comes an attempt to explain the extraordinary origins of the cultural revolution of our times — the onslaught against the liberal order by woke crusaders waging a zero-sum struggle in the cause of racial, sexual, gender, disability and other identities across our institutions.

For many Australians the new culture seems to have erupted from outside their experience — almost from another planet — yet its momentum is immense and it is winning acceptance among leaders, public servants, corporations, schools, not-for-profits and most notably in our universities.

What is the meaning of this cultural revolution? Where did it come from?

Like all revolutions it began with a body of ideas that fermented over decades, but there is no doubting the purpose of these ideas — the dismantling of universal liberalism based on respect for each person regardless of identity. On display in Australia, North America and Britain is a common occurrence in history, where in good faith influential leaders and institutional decision-makers are implementing policies without understanding their origins or ultimate purpose as propounded by their intellectual originators.

This is where Helen Pluckrose, a liberal political and cultural writer living in England, and James A. Lindsay, a mathematician and founder of New Discourses, based in Tennessee, come into the picture. They were two of three authors of the Grievance Studies Hoax from 2017 where they submitted bogus and absurd papers to academic journals and were published.

Their aim was to expose the intellectual bankruptcy underpinning the cultural revolution and how far its woke crusaders had departed from science, reason and genuine scholarship. This now becomes a bigger, more serious project, with their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, published in the US and released in Australia next week.

“The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers,” they argue. “Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism.”

Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, psychologist and public intellectual, said of the book that it “exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture”. This book is not for the faint-hearted. It seeks to explain where these ideas came from. It should be read by every institutional leader and executive so they understand the ideological goals that lie beneath the policies they are implementing.

The authors trace the academic origins and evolution of each element in the intellectual revolution: postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectionality, disability and fat studies, and social justice scholarship and thought. The central organising principle of the revolution assumes that humans are defined by a series of identities and that “every interaction, utterance and cultural artefact” slots into a power dynamic where everybody is the oppressed or an oppressor.

Their thesis is the revolution has its origins in postmodernism from the 1960s that saw the individual as a product of culturally constructed knowledge. From this point, there were two leaps forward — the second phase (roughly 1990 to 2010) when the ideas began to be applied and the decisive third phase (from 2010) when Social Justice Theory was asserted as a body of fundamental truth.

The authors say: “Theory has become increasingly confident and clear about its beliefs and goals. We can see its impact on the world in their attacks on science and reason.” The result is a “complete conviction that knowledge is constructed in the service of power which is rooted in identity”.

They write: “Therefore, in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence — present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them.”

Society is seen as simplistically divided into dominant and marginalised identities. But there is one identity largely missing — economic class. It is barely mentioned unless tied into another identity or “intersectionality”. It is, therefore, the authors say, “no surprise that many working class and poor people often feel profoundly alienated from today’s left”.

The cultural revolution is seen by many old-fashioned Marxists as a bourgeois idea. There is one certainty — the more progressives accept this identity-based revolution driven by upper-middle-class scholars and activists, the more the centre-left of politics will splinter.

The foundation of Social Justice scholarship is concern “with what is said, what is believed, what is assumed, what is taught, what is conveyed and what biases are imported”. This means the lived experiences, the emotions and cultural traditions of minority groups must be recognised as “knowledges” and gain status or superiority over reason and evidence-based knowledge.

The authors say: “We find ourselves faced with the continuing dismantlement of categories like knowledge and belief, reason and emotion, and men and women, and with increasing pressures to censor our language in accordance with The Truth According to Social Justice.”

Their chapter on race captures the dilemma. Through the work of many academics Critical Race Theory has developed, arising from the idea of “positionality” — that one’s position in society as determined by group identity dictates how one understands the world and is understood by the world. Hence the dictum that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational” and is the “everyday experience of people of colour” and that “racism is present everywhere and always”.

Pluckrose and Lindsay write of the consequences of Critical Race Theory: “We are told that racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that racism is ‘prejudice plus power’, therefore, only white people can be racist. We are informed that only people of colour can talk about racism, that white people need to just listen.

“We hear that not seeing people in terms of their race (being colour-blind) is, in fact, racist and an attempt to ignore the pervasive racism that dominates society and perpetuates white privilege.”

The influential reader Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic says the Theory “tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it”. The scholarship has its mission of social transformation. Racism, of course, does exist. Where it exists, it is a scourge on society.

But to the extent that Critical Race Theory prevails — to the extent that universities, bureaucracies, institutions and decision-makers accept this doctrine — then examples of racism will expand indefinitely since this is what the Theory dictates. The Theory asks not “Did racism occur?” but rather “How did racism manifest in that situation?” Once this becomes the question, then all organisations are vulnerable to racism accusations.

Because racism is everywhere — from football to business to the arts — Theory demands the task is to reveal its endless forms, and a new layer of managers and inclusion officials are appointed to institutions around the country to do just that.

The upshot is obvious: Australia along with other nations is seen as a more racist country. As Critical Race Theory takes hold, this trend will only intensify. Any individual who fights against the Theory is deemed by the Theory to be racist anyway and will be condemned as racist by activists or the diversity police.

Social Justice Theory, therefore, in the contemporary sense has broken decisively from the various human rights and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s whose aim was to remove discrimination and bigotry and seek to enshrine all individuals in the liberal order. It is easy to assert the failure of this goal but equally easy to overlook the progress that has been made.

Central to the authors’ thesis is the pivotal distinction between Social Justice Theory and genuine social justice as a legitimate philosophy seeking a fairer social order. Many well-intentioned people give up resisting Social Justice Theory fearing they will be branded and punished since it is not easy to defend universal liberal respect for all individuals against those pressing identity politics and claiming to represent social justice. Many liberals, having never before faced these arguments, are incapable of resisting the tide.

The authors examine the impact of Kimberle Crenshaw, the prime architect of intersectionality, the idea that people can be marginalised in multiple ways — by gender, race, sex and other dimensions — seeing her 1991 essay Mapping the Margins as a turning point in elevating identity politics over liberal universalism.

Writing nearly 30 years ago, Crenshaw saw identity politics “as a source of strength” for African-Americans, gays and lesbians but recognised it was “in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice”. The authors see intersectionality as “the seed that would germinate as Social Justice scholarship some 20 years later”.

They say it “does the same thing over and over again: look for the power imbalances, bigotry and biases that it assumes must be present” and assumes that, in every situation, some form of theoretical prejudice exists. In this sense liberal individualism — treating people the same regardless of identity — is seen as “at best, a naivety about the reality of a deeply prejudiced society and at worst, a wilful refusal to acknowledge that we live in that kind of society”.

One of the myths the authors tackle is the frequent claim that individuals who lose their jobs or standing because of woke doctrines represent only a minor problem for society. Many people ask: it’s no big deal, why are we getting so excited? The answer, the authors point out, is that while less than 10 per cent of the population probably espouse these theories, such ideas are becoming dominant across institutions. People leave universities as believers in Social Justice Theory and move into the public and private sectors becoming part of the mission statements of institutions pledging to change their organisational culture. Referring to the situation in Britain, the authors say equity, diversity and inclusion officers are spreading nearly everywhere — schools and universities, the police, large private sector companies, the civil service and local authorities. In Britain “more than 50 per cent of universities restrict speech especially certain views of religion and trans identity”.

Indeed, once universities open the door to Social Justice scholarship and ethics they “completely displace reliable and rigorous scholarship into issues of social justice by condemning all other approaches as complicit with systemic bigotry and thus unthinkable — or, in practice, unpublishable and punishable”.

In a remark relevant to Australia the authors made the general comment: “It is perhaps not surprising that large corporations have caved in so easily to Social Justice pressure. Their overriding goal is, after all, to make money, not to uphold liberal values.” Since most consumers and voters in Western countries support the general idea of social justice — and don’t know the difference between social justice and Social Justice Theory — submission is the easier route.

Meanwhile social justice activists are astute in targeting cultural opinion leaders, often from the left, seeking their compliance; witness incidents involving Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Hart, Matt Damon, Martina Navratilova and J K Rowling.

The future is already here: jobs being filled on the basis of identity, indeed, even being advertised on the basis of identity; demands that actors play characters only from their own identity group; writers being forbidden to “speak into” the oppression of others; and just this week, from Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts defined content rules for films — story content must reflect and feature under-represented groups based on identity politics — so expect more pressure on books, movies, plays and paintings.

The authors, aware they will face a ferocious backlash, make clear they believe in gender, racial and LGBT equality. Nor do they seek to attack universities and scholarship in general. But they offer a devastating indictment of Social Justice Theory.

Indeed, it is guaranteed to accentuate a backlash from right-wing populists. The Theory is getting traction now when times are tough, when liberalism and democracy seem tired — and there is truth enough in this. The power of Social Justice Theory is that it derives from an interpretation of human nature and a theory of society. Radical new ideas appeal, that’s part of the human condition. They always have, but as the authors say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Humans are susceptible to utopianism, a big theory that looks good on paper, even if it is authoritarian, fundamentalist and hostile to human nature. The authors say bad theories look good on paper and terrible in practice, witness communism. Yet the journey to such realisation is often decades long. The authors call Social Justice “a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail and which could do tremendous damage in the process”. Their central message shines through the book: “Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another.”

How long before this central truth is recognised?

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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