Five years on...

An unedited piece from before I had a blog.

January 20, 2021

In America

Blossoming now, after a long gestation, is a virulent and pathologic racism amongst many Americans, black and white and otherwise, cultivated by the Left specifically for the purpose of maintaining a hoped for intractable schism along racial lines in the American public. Its purpose is not dissimilar to that of the divisive identity politics that has been a feature of the political landscape for decades now, and is fraught with some of the same contradictions as different groups’ boundaries either overlap or conflict (TERFs, for instance).

And this effort is by no means universally successful. This point in history is notable for the plethora of media venues from which information can be gathered and while legacy media remains almost exclusively Leftist, nobody can actually control the narrative. That is why the Left campaigns against the First Amendment’s protections of Free Speech.

Listening now to Eric Weinstein’s YouTube video Thoughts on the Science Shutdown, I’m both encouraged that many people see that active racism is on life support from the political quarters that benefit and dismayed that this artificially sustained racial animus can operate so effectively on some populations.

As long as arbitrary distinctions are reinforced there will be spontaneous perceptions of hierarchy hence competitive division. Arbitrary? Racial divisions as arbitrary? Certainly, but this gets to a root of socialist misconception and that is their reliance on a model of social interaction that recognizes only certain monolithic entities (by race, socioeconomic “class,” gender, etc.) and ignores the plethora of individual perspectives and agendas that truly comprise the population. And this broad-brush perspective is of course critical to maintaining a crusade of accusations of collective guilt.

Blacks in America now can become doctors, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, etc., and become quite wealthy. While black unemployment and violent crime may be disproportionate to representation in the population it remains that there are many, if not more, whites who are chronically unemployed or prone to violent crime. Could it not be effective to identify the common problems of lack of job skills and social skills requisite to successfully exist at peace with the rest of society?

It is alarming to consider how ‘modern’ Western Europe was in the 1930s, and yet how parts became arrested by systems, communist and fascist, that espoused a false ‘unity’ through division, first by accusation and then by authoritarian action. National Socialism in Germany sought to present their targets as sub-moral creatures unworthy of even an audience. It effectively dehumanized the targets in the mind of the populace with cringe-worthy falsehoods while stifling communication. Similar efforts are afoot today with the active promotion of a patently mendacious narrative along with the simultaneous deplatforming of dissenting voices.

But there are significant differences. Jews represented less than 1% of Germany’s population when the Nazis began persecuting them and the channels of communication were easily monopolized by authority. The Left seeks to delegitimize a huge part of the United States citizenry and, as noted above, they can’t control the narrative.

Just some thoughts at dawn of the first day of a new American history. We’ll see how it goes.