Exposing transgenderism for what it is: A lie

Exposing transgenderism for what it is: A lie

By

Kara Dansky

September 21, 2022 06:00 AM

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/exposing-transgenderism-for-what-it-is-a-lie

There is a lot of talk in America today about “transgender rights.” News outlets talk about “transgender athletes ,” “transgender prisoners ,” and “transgender students .” Our society is steeped in debate about so-called transgenderism. However, I see very few people asking the question, “What does ‘transgender’ mean?” or “What exactly is ‘trans?’”

The crux of the matter is this: People across the political spectrum have been persuaded to accept that there is a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant and that this category of people is called “transgender” (or simply “trans”). Democrats on the whole support “rights for ‘transgender people,’” and Republicans on the whole oppose allowing sex-confused people to hijack sex-specific spaces. But regardless of whether or not a person supports or opposes “rights for ‘transgender people,’” that person probably believes that there is such a category of people.

But there isn’t. “Trans” is a lie. It is a lie as big as the lie that the emperor is wearing clothes. He isn’t wearing clothes. He’s naked. He’s just too arrogant to acknowledge it, and everyone around him is too cowed to say so.

To understand how transgenderism became so entrenched in our society despite its obvious distortions, one must first understand the philosophy from which it began. Starting in the 1970s, a group of people in academia started talking about postmodernism — a new philosophical and political movement that dismissed claims to objective fact and reason. It objected to the idea that anything could be grounded in material reality. One of its main proponents was Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who taught for a while at the University of California, Berkeley. Foucault was also, incidentally, a known pedophile who advocated the abolition of age-of-consent laws. For Foucault, age was just a construct, which meant that adults should be permitted to have sexual relationships with children.

Out of postmodernism came “queer theory,” the idea that biological sex is a social construct. Queer theorists in the 1990s argued from their ivory towers that the material reality of sex doesn’t exist and that it is a social construction meant to oppress. However, the “queer” theorists understood that if they tried to persuade ordinary people that sex isn’t real, they would have been (rightly) ridiculed and ignored. So they invented a new term: “transgender.” This term does exactly what it was intended to do — it persuades ordinary people that the material reality of biological sex isn’t real or, at least, that it doesn’t matter.

There very well may be people who sincerely suffer from what the DSM refers to as “gender dysphoria.” But it does not follow that it makes sense or is healthy for a society to allow people to “identify as” a gender different from their sex. In fact, doing so will only create more confusion and anxiety in those who are very often mentally vulnerable to begin with.

And before anyone asks, I am not a political conservative. I have always been a staunch leftist and, for as long as I can remember, a feminist. I registered as a Democrat the day I turned 18 years old, and I am still a registered Democrat (though I spent a short time as a registered member of the Green Party).

Some have pointed the blame at feminists for the rise of gender ideology. But that’s not a fair accusation. Actual feminists fight for the liberation of women and girls, by which we mean female human beings. Feminists aren’t confused about the category of human beings for whose liberation we fight. We are not confused about the category of people whose voting rights suffragists fought for (at great peril to their own safety). We are not confused about the category of people who are subjected to the horrific offense of female genital mutilation. (The word is right there.) When feminists complain about male violence against women, we aren’t confused about what the words “male” and “women” mean. Feminists didn’t create this “trans” monster. And we are more than willing to work with anyone, even those with whom we might generally disagree, to protect the sex-based rights of women.

The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, for example, of which I serve as president, works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout U.S. law and society. We are nonpartisan and work with women across the political spectrum who agree with the principles outlined in the declaration. (We are also not shy about our support for abortion as a sex-based right for women and girls.)

Because of our opposition to gender ideology and the harms that it is doing to women, we are often smeared by the Left as traitors to progressivism. However, we are not the ones who abandoned progressive values. That crime belongs to the gender ideologues who are pushing an ideology that is politically regressive in every way. Indeed, “transgenderism” destroys the equality that women have achieved and actually enshrines harmful sex stereotypes in law, medicine, academia, and throughout all of society.

But that is exactly the goal of gender ideology: to take over our institutions and destroy from within any truth that grounds us to material reality, including biological sex. The entire edifice of “trans” is being driven by a vicious industry whose aim is to literally obliterate the reality of sex. This industry is a loose conglomeration of Big Tech, Big Pharma, medical supply companies, legacy media, and government agencies. I realize this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. This industry operates out in the open, from renowned children’s hospitals to legacy newsrooms to the White House itself.

Thankfully, more and more people are willing to speak up about this ideology and the damage it is doing to our society. But the only way we win this battle is if we push back as boldly and aggressively as the gender activists who pushed this on us in the first place. We have to tell the truth: “Transgenderism” isn’t real. “Gender identity” is a fake concept. The “transgender” emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

Kara Dansky is the president of the U.S.  chapter  of Women's Declaration International and the author of the   book  "The Abolition of Sex: How the 'Transgender' Agenda Harms Women and Girls." She has a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Follow her on  Twitter  and  Facebook  and subscribe to her  Substack .

IRISH SAVANT: A puzzling question answered

A puzzling question answered

Posted by By Savant June 10, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=2195

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this chimpout on the NY subway whereby women were terrorised by a wildin’ jogger. Horrified commentators demanded to know why “real men” on the train didn’t come to their assistance. Even Douglas Murray took the opportunity to blast ‘demasculinised’ men for their inactivity. Now that’s a bit strange coming from Douglas, being as he is a poofter of some renown. But he was but one part of a horrified chorus asking broadly the same question.

Well as luck would have I think I can be of help here. For a start the number of real men has declined significantly, a fact supported by the collapse of male testosterone levels in America by a staggering 30% since 1980. Whether or not Serena Williams took it all is irrelevant, the fact is that today’s male is on average a much-reduced specimen in terms of, well, toxic masculinity, compared to his counterpart of forty years ago. By the way I’ve written extensively on this phenomenon in the old blog and am certain that the decline was masterminded as a byproduct of Agenda 2030.

However let us assume the presence of one ‘real man’ in the carriage. Let us further assume that this real man has his head screwed on. That being the case he’ll be well aware that rescuing the damsel in distress places him in a no-win situation. For a start, this being NY he will, as a law-abiding citizen, be unarmed. The same constraint does not apply to the guy chimping out. So by intervening he runs the serious risk of being knifed or shot. He also knows that were he to somehow disable the attacker he’d be in a heap of trouble. You see the attacker is black and the white knight will inevitably be White. You won’t get black passengers preventing a brutha’ havin’ his way with a White beetch. Can you just imagines what a black Affirmative Action DA, advised by slimy lawyers (whose names end in “stein” or “berg”) would do with that? The rescuer knows: The perp will walk while he finds himself up on a charge of “excessive force with racist overtones”. It will be classed as “White vigilantism” and nothing – nothing – scares the effete urban nation-wreckers more than that. Quite likely the perp would not alone walk but get compensation while the white knight gets fined or even jailed. And what of the victim’s gratitude? Don’t take that for granted. The unfathomable convolutions of the female mind are such that she’d likely turn on the rescuer and side with her attacker. Just ask any man who has intervened in a case of domestic violence if you doubt me.

Any would-be rescuer would also wonder why the new empowered woman would need help from a man. A White man at that. Remember the lady who claimed she needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle? We’re all equal now. You asked for equality sister and this is what it’s like. Chivalry is dead, sisters, and feminism killed it. Which in itself raises the question as to why the women in the carriage also stood by during the attack. Why didn’t the equal sisters do their sisterly duty in the face of such gross toxic masculinity? It’s a good question and the only conclusion we can draw is that strong empowered independent women want the benefits of equality but not the downsides. Which is why you see so few women working as miners or block-layers.

1950s America

In the final analysis pervasive societal decay underlies this dismal spectacle. In 1950s America that jogger would have been taken down in the blink of an eye. But that was then, this is now. In the USA and indeed in most White countries what had hitherto been socially cohesive societies are no longer socially cohesive or even societies in any meaningful sense. There is no longer a ‘we’ – instead there’s a fractious, atomised mutually-hostile collection of races and cultures with the core population driven into imminent minority status, discriminated against in terms of employment, education, law enforcement and freedom of expression while their heritage gets endlessly trashed by the political, media and academic establishments. And of course berated for their ‘White privilege’ (once known as ‘working for a living’) which when you unpack it means being held responsible for the acts of your ancestors by blacks who accept no responsibility even for the acts of their own children!

Yet they are forced to sustain a vast and rapidly-growing parasitic welfare class which gets goaded by the nation-wreckers into believing that they are in fact the victims of their unwitting benefactors. Everything is now upside-down, subject to Satanic Inversion. Men become women, women are men, depravity is celebrated, art and music become travesties of their previous forms, maths and science are ‘racist’ because blacks can’t master them. How can Whites, White men in particular, invest themselves in such an abomination? But by withdrawing they are unwittingly hastening national suicide, or more accurately national murder, the murderers being a people who have themselves never fitted in anywhere and whose only real threat comes from a cohesive resistance of blood-and-soil-bound heritage Americans.

So sorry ladies. You asked – and voted – for this. No longer our struggle.

 

Has Putin Inadvertently Defeated Woke, Reversed West's Civilizational Decline?

 

 

Has Putin Inadvertently Defeated Woke, Reversed West's Civilizational Decline?

Edward Dutton

03/04/2022

Earlier by Edward Dutton: Are We In The Winter of America? Will There Be A Spring?

Every cloud has a silver lining. When, in response to the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian government announced that no male aged 18-60 would be permitted to leave the country because they were to be conscripted, nobody in the West, it seems, asked: “What do you mean ‘male’? How are you defining it? Does it include ‘transmen’?” Perhaps the usual Twitter alphabet mob did ask this, but it wasn’t amplified by being reported in the Anglosphere Main Stream Media—because, all of a sudden, there was a war. Life was serious and such self-indulgent, decadent concerns were no longer considered important. Is this a Trend?

Of course, a few virtue-signallers have complained about the “racial” aspect to some of the reporting. But, significantly, this seems to be limited to America. Thus the Washington Post noted the “racist” language, criticizing the way in which

…ITV News correspondent Lucy Watson reported from a train station in Kyiv that the “unthinkable” had happened to the people of Ukraine. “This is not a developing Third-World nation,’ she said. “This is Europe.”

[‘They seem so like us’: In depicting Ukraine’s plight, some in media use offensive comparisons, February 27, 2022]

But in Britain, where the war is far closer and more real, nobody cares anymore. WaPo was citing  the BBC allowing a Ukrainian deputy prosecutor to stress that what was happening in his country should be seen as crucial in the UK because there are: “European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed, children being killed every day.”

There was no apology for his “racist language.” And if anyone did complain, the BBC didn’t highlight it.

People who once claimed that that the West was selfish and national borders and free speech should be abolished were now proclaiming the sacrosanct nature of national borders, that every “people” has a right to their own land, that the “democratic” West with its “free speech” needed to be preserved.

Part of this was simply Machiavellian opportunism. But for many people, I suspect, a deeper shift had occurred.

I have written before about how civilizations follow seasonal cycles and about how, based on numerous measures, we are in decline. But the invasion of Ukraine, while of course terrible for the Ukrainian people, could, counter-intuitively, be “good for the West.” It could potentially slow down Western decline via a kind of Silver Age.   

How could this be? How could anything positive come of the suffering of the Ukrainians, in which innocent children have been killed by Russians bombs? [The faces of some of those killed in Ukraine as Russia's attack rages on, ITV, March 3, 2022]

Well, most obviously: Wokeness is an anti-rational, emotionally-driven force and this war has already begun to neuter it.

According to the “Hierarchy of Needs” concept developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow, humans, first and more foremost, require their physiological needs—food, water, shelter—to be met. Only once these are met are they able to start worrying about personal safety, employment and property. And only once these are met do they have the time left over to be concerned about even higher needs, such as status, respect and recognition.

Following this logic, the decadence of the late twentieth and especially the early twenty-first century can be partly explained in terms of almost everyone’s basic needs on the hierarchy being met, or having been met in their key developmental years, so that they are blithely unconcerned about them.

As a result, we have seen the rise of an increasingly self-indulgent society in which more and more people are ravenously concerned about status, power, and being respected. In its most extreme and Narcissistic form, this involves people being accepted as unique and able to define who they are, to the extent of telling you what pronoun they prefer.

When basics needs are met, these issues become important, contributing to a kind of runaway individualism where we are constantly concerned about offending against people’s—apparently sacrosanct—desires for absolute respect.

Plunge us into a situation of war, however, and these needs are suddenly unimportant. Worse than unimportant, they are divisive and selfish in a context in which we must surely pull together if we wish to survive.

Thus, in a context of war we would expect Woke concerns to be increasingly ignored and even for the people who voice them to be suppressed. Anxiety also elevates our most primal instincts, such as belief in God and ethnocentrism. as I discussed in my 2012 book Islam: An Evolutionary Perspective. So we would expect these to suddenly seem more “acceptable,” just as the ITV news reporter cited by WaPo found without even thinking about it.  

In turn, the suppression of Wokeness—of extreme self-absorption, where feelings are put above truth—will make us more balanced in terms of what Moral Foundations Theory calls the Five Moral Foundations: in-group loyalty, sanctity, obedience to authority, equality and harm avoidance.

Humans are concerned with all of these Foundations because they are, from an evolutionary point of view, pack animals (hence the first three Foundations), but they also need to survive as individuals in an internally competitive pack (hence the latter two). Since the 1960s, we have become ever more concerned with individualizing values, these being the values of Leftists, according to psychologists. The specter of war will push us to the Right, meaning more of a balance and thus a greater concern with truth [Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations, by J. Graham et al., Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 2009].

Furthermore, the specter of war means that, by definition, we are competing with another group. This means that innovation starts to become far more important than “feelings.” This, in turn, means that we should start to become more tolerant of the genius-type. As I have explored in my recent book Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma, and Being Born Prematurely, this is the highly creative thinker who tends to be high in autism traits and even psychopathology (poor rule following, no regard for the feelings of others). This contributes to him being both “offensive” and also highly creative, because he “thinks outside the box” and doesn’t care about offending against convention.

Consistent with this prediction, per capita major innovation—in other words, per capita genius—began to decline in around 1870, seemingly as average intelligence began to decline, and also as individualistic values gradually began to rise as the world became easier and easier.

However, there is some evidence that this decline went into reverse from about 1945. Per capita major innovation increased until the 1960s, before reverting to the previous decline [A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation, by J. Huebner, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2005].

The Cold War would be a reasonable explanation for this. It artificially recreated something of the conditions of “Group Selection” that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution, whereby groups competed with each other for limited resources and triumphed through a combination of optimum group-orientation and intelligence, including the optimum level geniuses, leading to selection across time for these traits, as I also explore in my book.

Two groups faced each other in a perilous war, so they suppressed individualism (more than they otherwise would have done), focused more on innovation (partly to defeat the enemy) and thus, briefly, reversed the process of civilizational decline.

Thus, in a very roundabout and indirect way, Putin’s war may save, or, rather, may slow down, the decline of, the West—just as the Cold War did.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Or should that be “Every threatened mushroom cloud…”?

Edward Dutton (email him | Tweet him) is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, Łódź, Poland.  You can see him on his Jolly Heretic video channels on YouTube and Bitchute.

 

 

 

Is The “Hate Group” Concept A Legitimate Intellectual Concept Or Nothing More Than A Weapon Of Cultural Marxist Hegemony?

Is The “Hate Group” Concept A Legitimate Intellectual Concept Or Nothing More Than A Weapon Of Cultural Marxist Hegemony?

 

June 17, 2019/26 Comments/in Featured Articles /by Amalric de Droevig

I attempted to criticize the “hate group” concept on Wikipedia, by adding a section doing just that to its “hate group” article. The top editors over there would have none of it. Wikipedia’s editors are so left-wing, they think the SPLC is a neutral, apolitical organization, if you can believe it. Wikipedia, a supposedly unbiased and independent online encyclopedia and information source, has unfortunately become a mouthpiece for the Cultural Marxist US power class.

Here is what I wrote, and what they subsequently scrubbed from the internet:

==Criticism of the hate group concept==

            

The “hate group” concept has come under fire in recent years from academics and intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum, but especially the political right. Like “hate speech”, “hate group” is a concept not traditionally recognized by American courts and the American legal system.[i] Nevertheless, outside of the American legal context, the concept is widely accepted and employed.

Many critics of the term argue that the demographic divisions (racial groups, whole religions) the term attempts to insulate from group criticism are arbitrarily or ideologically selected. For example, why aren’t lesser political groups (atheist organizations, for example) or smaller religious denominations (scientologists, for example) equally protected by the label and the stigma surrounding it? 

Thus, instead of protecting the powerless, the term seems to insulate from criticism those populations with sufficient numbers, power and prominence to command protection. 

After all, any number of randomly selected demographic categories could be deemed above group criticism or political opposition, yet few are. Why do certain groups seem to be so much more worthy of the term’s protections? In sum, the term appears to place arbitrary or ideology-laden restrictions on speech and activism, in defiance of the liberal democratic tradition, which asserts that all ideologies, movements, groups, and religions are fair game for philosophical critique and peaceful opposition.[ii] [iii] [iv]

THE INVENTION OF THE TERM

Other critics of the term argue that the label is not only arbitrary, but selectively applied.[v] Some well-known champions of the term are even on record admitting as such. Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the SPLC, the organization that basically invented the term “hate group”, conceded this years ago. In a 2009 interview, he stated that the “hate group” label is not uniformly applied, because the SPLC is by no means apolitical, but is instead a fundamentally leftist organization that does battle with radical groups on the political right in an effort to “destroy them” (his words), and that it is sometimes very much guilty of focusing on the political right, while roundly ignoring bad actors on the political left which engage in the self-same tactics and employ the self-same incendiary language as supposed “hate groups”.[vi] 
Some believe this political bias is driven partly by perverse economic incentives, that the SPLC chooses to focus its ire and its activism on right-wing groups and activities because that is how it appeals to its donor base and funds its massive war chest, which totaled upwards of half a billion dollars in 2018.[vii] Nevertheless, many believe that an anti-right bias is not something unique to the SPLC’s hate monitoring and classification system, but instead something that inheres in the term itself, which is to say the very concept of “hate group” is rooted in, steeped in, and defined by the ideals of the political left, and is thus partisan by nature and design.
 -------

Some have argued that virtually any political organization could potentially meet the standard definition of the term, given its breadth.[viii] For example, a cadre of left-leaning academics that regularly publishes papers criticizing “White privilege” or “White fragility”, could easily be understood to be expressing hatred toward, exhibiting animus toward, or even dehumanizing Whites, as a race. 

Likewise, a feminist activist organization that regularly criticizes the putative prevailing culture of the patriarchy or the toxicity of masculinity, might also be said to be a “hate group”, according to the accepted definition of the term, given its willingness to insult an entire sex. 

Occupy Wall Street might also have been labeled a “hate group” on account of its open disdain for financial executives and oligarchs, who its members so endearingly labeled “banksters”. Unsurprisingly, however, Occupy Wall Street was never labeled a “hate group” by the pundit class or society at large, and none of the hypothetical groups would be labeled as such, because groups like these—that is those with the “right” values, residing on the “correct” side of the political spectrum—are rarely, if ever, described this way by the press or the powers that be.



There is therefore concern in many circles that the label is being surreptitiously employed as an illiberal and antidemocratic backdoor contrivance by various powerful entities in the West to sideline political viewpoints and democratic movements that powerful oligarchs and interest groups dislike. 
A wide array of commentators on the right have pointed out that organizations that share the leftist views and values of the United States Federal Government and its corporate accessories, especially on hot button issues like race, sex, and sexual orientation, are essentially completely insulated from the pejorative appellation, “hate group.”

We find a curious analogue to this structural bias for “hate group” designations in the “terror” designation process by the U.S. State Department. 
For example, “state sponsors of terrorism” are almost invariably nations which stand in the way of United States geopolitical dominance, or which have poor diplomatic or economic relations with the U.S. After all, a vast amount of terrorism is committed by the U.S. government and her allies. 
Moreover, a vast amount of resources and weapons which find their way into the hands of terrorist groups worldwide originate in the U.S. and nations allied with the U.S.,[ix] and are built by weapons manufacturers intimately connected to the U.S. government and the governments of its closest allies.[x] 
Alas, however, those allies (Israel, UK, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) are basically never deemed state sponsors of terror, and the press never accuses entities deep in our own government of sponsoring terror either. 
Thus, being an actual state sponsor of terror seems to be an insufficient condition to land a nation on the State Department’s list. It seems that a nation must also have the wrong politics, values, leaders, or foreign policy to earn such a designation.
Similarly, only those domestic political groups which possess the “wrong” values, worldviews, or politics seem to be worthy of the “hate group” label, despite the fact that many other political groups, if not most political groups, could be fairly or accurately described as such. 
 In some cases, as with Syria and Iran today, and Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, a strong argument could be made that being an actual sponsor of terror is not even necessary to land one on the “state sponsor of terror” list, and that the process is wholly political/geopolitical in character, having nothing whatsoever to do with the actual policies of such governments regarding terrorism. 
Ergo, the process of designating nations state sponsors of terror, is, in fact, subordinated entirely to the political aims and interests of U.S. elites and is thus perfectly divorced from anything resembling reality. 

Likewise, a cynic might argue that the very purpose of the “hate group” label is to delegitimize perfectly legitimate dissident political organizations in the eyes of ordinary people, thus rendering “hate groups” not so much a major source of state-sponsored repression, as many in the U.S. power structure are fond of alleging, but instead a major target of state-sponsored and quasi-state-sponsored (read: corporate and NGO) repression.

Other problems exist with the standard definition as well. How much organization is required for a a group of people to constitute a “group” in the first place? 
Are largely disorganized, right-wing dissident networks on the internet (men’s rights activists, for example) “hate groups”, or even “groups” at all, in any meaningful sense? 
Moreover, at what point does a comedy troupe that mocks and degrades conservatives, Christians, or “podunk” middle Americans constitute a “hate group”? 
What if its members don’t really even consider themselves a political organization? 
Furthermore, at what point do persistent attacks on a nation or an ethnic group constitute “hate”? 
At what point does a baseless or overblown conspiracy theory about Russian meddling in a United States presidential election constitute bigoted, anti-Russian hysteria or anti-Russian “hate speech”? 
Indeed, in the run-up to armed conflict, governments the world over almost always spearhead massive propaganda campaigns against the enemy (jihadists in the current War on Terror, Germans in World Wars I and II). Is it proper to understand all war propaganda efforts then as state-orchestrated “campaigns of hate”?

Additionally, how does one measure the amount of “hate” within a group or within the hearts of its members? 
How much vitriol must be spewed by a person for his/her speech to be “hate speech”? 
How much coarse or degrading language must a group employ for it to be a “hate group”? 
Is not what constitutes offensive or hateful language a fundamentally subjective determination? 
Furthermore, how much extralegal violence must a group engage in to earn the title? 
What if a group has never engaged in or so much as advocated for extralegal violence of any sort, like Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance? Taylor’s principled unwillingness to endorse extralegal violence, no matter the circumstances, did not spare American Renaissance from being placed on the SPLC’s 2015 list of “active hate groups”.[xi]

A lack of any clear or quantifiable criteria for classifying groups as “hate groups” makes the concept particularly problematic. 
When a concept is sufficiently amorphous it can be slapped on almost anyone with little effort or objection. Moreover, once such a label has been attached to you or your organization by someone with apparent expertise or authority, such a designation can be very difficult to shed, as claims of vague, highly subjective content are virtually impossible to prove or refute. 

Indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of political concepts, as distinguished from intellectual ones. Such concepts are fuzzy by design, because if they weren’t, they would have very little use to the powerful. They can only exist as concepts insofar as they avoid all intellectual rigor and scrutiny. 

The “flexibility” in their definitions is precisely what makes them so useful as instruments of power. Though everybody is actually guilty, the only people charged are whoever those with authority choose to charge, and since nobody is innocent, nobody can prove themselves innocent, and since nobody can prove themselves innocent, every charge is equivalent to a conviction. Political concepts cannot survive real scrutiny because they are generally ill-defined and logically inconsistent. Nevertheless, they do not need to be consistent, nor do they need to be well-defined, to survive as political concepts. The natural soil of political concepts is power, not truth.

The stakes are that much higher and the risks that much greater when highly political organizations such as the SPLC and the ADL are coaching and working alongside powerful law enforcement entities, as is definitely the case. 

Law enforcement is not supposed to be politically or ideologically driven. Membership in a “hate group” could form the basis for “hate crime” prosecutions by local authorities, or for the targeting of “hate” organizations for state surveillance. 
This problematic label, combined with a lack of any sympathy for such groups among the general public, create the risk that members of such groups could be targeted by local police, prosecuted selectively and unfairly by district attorneys, punished excessively by judges or magistrates, or otherwise crushed by the state on account of their political beliefs, with no repercussions for those doing the oppressing, bringing to mind totalitarian states of yore, where “enemies of the state” (also usually political dissidents) were targeted by state and quasi-state actors for persecution, imprisonment, or worse.[xii] 

Some believe a number of Western nations are already very much there,[xiii] [xiv] but many who don’t are still understandably concerned that terms like “hate speech” and “hate group” are stepping stones to such a place. 
Given the European Union’s willingness to use state power to crush political dissent of a supposedly hateful nature (an incredibly vague concept),[xv][xvi] and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s recent call to create a stasi-esque “hate and bias” database to carefully catalog instances of supposed “hate” within Michigan, even if those instances don’t constitute actual crimes,[xvii] there is ample reason to be gravely concerned.
 
Moreover, these are but the threats emanating from the state itself. As Big Tech censorship, well-funded left-wing boycott campaigns, and willfully discriminatory corporate policies have shown, the “hate group” and “hate speech” labels are used on a fairly large scale in the private sphere as well, as a pretext to marginalize, silence, disemploy, Blacklist, and even deny essential services to those with the “wrong” ideas or associations.[xviii] [xix] 

What’s more, violent left-wing paramilitary organizations like Antifa and "By Any Means Necessary" have shown themselves quite willing to use these labels as justifications to engage in mob violence against innocent civilians, in many cases specifically to deny those civilians the free exercise of their essential rights and liberties.[xx] [xxi] As such, the threats to ordinary Westerners in large measure arising from these labels are by no means confined to state action.

Various social critics have also criticized the usefulness of the label. Some contend it amounts to little more than a slur or an ad hominem attack, and as such constitutes an informal logical fallacy. 

In a similar vein, many insist that if one disagrees with another’s speech or another’s politics, there is no reason whatsoever to use a demeaning, tendentious label such as “hate speech” or “hate group” to describe such speech or such a group. 

The liberal tradition prescribes civilly stating one’s reasoned disagreement with such speech or such politics, not slapping some silly propaganda label on ideas or parties, so that one doesn’t have to actually grapple with what is being claimed or represented. 
Katie Herzog, over at The Stranger, contends that the “hate speech” label in particular, is used not to encourage debate or understanding, but as an underhanded attempt to arrest all dialogue, debate, and inquiry.[xxii] 
As such, both terms are both implicitly authoritarian, not to mention fundamentally illiberal and anti-intellectual, in that they are meant to advance a political agenda rather than describe the world as it really is.[xxiii] 
Given that these concepts are often used to delegitimize dissident groups, and lay the foundation for persecuting, prosecuting, and materially harming people on account of mere speech and association, both essential human rights, some also therefore view the concepts as fundamentally totalitarian in nature or effect.[xxiv]

Others view the ideological foundations of these concepts, and especially the way such concepts manifest themselves in real-world sociopolitical contexts, as fundamentally Marxist or Cultural Marxist in character. 

One’s license to use crass and harsh language against out-group members seems to reflect the prevailing views on the modern left regarding “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes/groups almost perfectly. The more allegedly powerful and oppressive is the group you speak for, the more worthy are you of censorship, contempt, and maltreatment by those with power. What’s more, the dynamics of the situation seem inherently paradoxical. Why are all of these supposedly powerful groups unable to defend themselves or advance their interests through peaceful advocacy? They are so powerful, they are voiceless, it would seem! Indeed, this seems to be a broader problem with Marxist and crypto-Marxist justifications for censorship. Groups that are truly powerful are not easy to silence. Thus, by the time you are able to silence the supposedly powerful, it is sort of self-evident that they are not really so powerful any longer, and if the supposedly oppressed are so weak and so marginalized, why are their interests so well-guarded by the censors and the powers that be?
Many proponents of “hate speech” restrictions and the forceful disbanding of supposed “hate groups” have also been known to contend that “hate speech” causes intergroup violence, genocide, and other like atrocities. Nevertheless, there is simply no evidence for this in the scientific literature. 
Not only is a society’s toleration of radical political speech and expression, including but not limited to “hate speech”, essential for the proper functioning of democracy, the liberty to express oneself openly in a society is also strongly negatively correlated with the adverse outcomes aforementioned (genocide, interethnic and interreligious strife, etc.). 
The most oppressive regimes on Earth (Saudi Arabia, North Korea) are certainly not known for their enthusiastic support for freedom of expression after all.

Research by Jacob Mchangama and Rasmus Andersen finds that only in the most closed and repressed societies, does loosening up speech restrictions lead to a slight uptick in intergroup violence, civil discord and unrest. 
In the vast majority of cases, reducing speech restrictions and minimizing censorship reduces interethnic and interreligious violence, social unrest, and like adverse outcomes.[xxv] 
What’s more, there is absolutely no reason to believe that restricting freedom of expression fosters tolerance or social cohesion. 
A 2017 study out of the European Journal of Political Research finds that countermeasures like “hate speech” restrictions, which are intended to constrain radical right politics, paradoxically appear to actually fuel right-wing extremist violence.[xxvi] 
Not only do such laws not achieve their stated goals, they actually exacerbate existing intergroup tensions, deepen perceived grievances, and further polarize societies. 
Israeli scholar Amichai Magen has argued that one of the reasons for this is that political freedom, especially freedom of speech, allows grievances to be voiced before they boil over and turn violent.[xxvii] 
Gordan Danning, author at Quillette, argues that although “hate speech” by powerful officials or elites, may, in rare cases, facilitate the carrying out of major atrocities, in that it can incite violence and aid coordination efforts by brutally repressive regimes, this threat does not extend downward. 
When speech reaches the coordination phase amongst lesser, non-state entities, it is not mere “hate speech” at that point, but a criminal or terrorist conspiracy, and as such, is better addressed by counter-terror operations, rather than content-based speech restrictions. 
Danning contends that there is no evidence to suggest that permitting “hate speech” by ordinary persons in everyday contexts, has any effect whatsoever on violence of this nature. 
For that reason, placing hate speech restrictions on internet users, artists, or prominent social critics, for example, is horribly misguided. 
What such labels really do is help create excuses for governments and other powerful entities to use allegations of “hate speech” to silence any ideas they dislike, or which might pose a threat to their rule.[xxviii] 
As such, there are not only strong moral and philosophical reasons for rejecting these concepts, but strong practical reasons as well.

Those who cite the National Socialist era as proof that freedom of speech is a particularly dangerous right for a society to protect, especially on account of Adolf Hitler’s uncanny ability to rile the masses via passionate oratory, are ignoring the fact that the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws of its own, and that those laws were enforced regularly and aggressively against NS members and officials.[xxix] 
Not only did those laws not stop them, they arguably aided them, by enabling them to successfully portray themselves as victims of hostile, left-wing, anti-ethnic-German elites. 
Thus, those laws and the public prosecutions arising from them, arguably deepened the divisions in German society, enraged a sizable number of ordinary Germans, provided free publicity to Nazi leaders, and made a severe right-wing backlash all the more likely.

---

[i]           https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/
[ii]          https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus
[iii]    https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/most-liberal-value-free-speech
[iv]         http://theconversation.com/the-strange-origins-of-the-free-speech-warriors-97631
[v]          https://www.lc.org/newsroom/details/debunking-the-splc-hate-group-myth
[vi]     https://www.utne.com/politics/how-hate-speech-can-hurt-you-intelligence-report
[vii]        https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/southern-poverty-law-center-now-has-half-a-billion-dollars-to-attack-conservatives
[viii]       https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0223/Annual-report-cites-rise-in-hate-groups-but-some-ask-What-is-hate
[ix]         https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-15/weapons-went-cia-isis-less-two-months-new-study-reveals
[x]          https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/21/intel-vets-tell-trump-iran-is-not-top-terror-sponsor/
[xi]            https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/active-hate-groups-united-states-2015
[xii]        http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/dissidents/movement.php
[xiii]       https://reason.com/2018/12/12/james-fields-killed-heather-heyer-becaus/
[xiv]       https://russia-insider.com/en/report-charlottesville-fields-monkey-trial-murder-gets-rocky-start-updated/ri25535
[xv]        https://www.lifezette.com/2017/05/europes-pc-police-armed-with-hate-speech-laws
[xvi]          https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/12/26/lets-make-free-speech-the-great-cause-of-2019/
[xvii]      https://www.michigan.gov/som/0,4669,7-192-26847-490247–,00.html
[xviii]     https://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/08/15/airbnb-ban-White-supremacists/
[xix]          https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/mastercard-activists-cut-off-donations-far-right
[xx]        https://theintercept.com/2016/06/28/White-supremacist-rallies-met-rocks-sacramento-scorn-newcastle/
[xxi]       https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/university-california-berkeley-free-speech-milo-yiannopoulos.html
[xxii]         https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/03/15/25912839/counterpoint-yes-theres-a-free-speech-crisis-and-no-i-wont-shut-up-about-it
[xxiii]       https://reason.com/2015/04/26/the-slow-death-of-free-speech-in-britain/
[xxiv]     https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/censorship_the_true_bigotry.html
[xxv]      http://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/06/11/jacob-mchangama/how-censorship-crosses-borders
[xxvi]     https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/59875
[xxvii]      http://www.cato-unbound.org/2018/06/11/jacob-mchangama/how-censorship-crosses-borders
[xxviii]   https://quillette.com/2018/01/18/hate-speech-not-induce-hatred
[xxix]         https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2015/war-free-expression

The Supremacy of Stupid: How Dumb Ideas about Race Flourish on the Left

The Supremacy of Stupid: How Dumb Ideas about Race Flourish on the Left

August 14, 2019/49 Comments/in Featured Articles, Race /by Tobias Langdon

 

 

An ant is an amazing creature, a marvel of miniaturization and compressed complexity. With only a tiny brain, it absorbs and interprets a flood of data from its myriad sense-organs, navigating a complex and constantly changing world, co-operating and communicating with its nest-mates, collaborating in prodigies of architecture, engineering and logistics. No human robot can even come close to matching the abilities of an ant, let alone at such a minute size and on such a small budget of energy.

Dumb beats clever

But the highly sophisticated ant meets its master in the form of a mindless organism far lower in the evolutionary scale. As I described in “How to Cure a White Zombie,” the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis can subvert the complex nervous system of an ant, turning the ant into a zombified spore-spreader. You can sum up the behaviour of the fungus in two words: sitting and floating. It sits in its victims and then, in the form of spores, floats off to new victims. The behaviour of ants, by contrast, is endlessly subtle and varied. Ant-behaviour has filled entire libraries and fuelled long scientific careers. But the simple fungus beats the complex ant.

The complexity of an ant

Another parasite, the microscopic protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, overcomes an even bigger evolutionary gulf and subverts the even more complex brains of rats and human beings. The fungus and the protozoan have no minds, no consciousness and no purpose but self-propagation. They’re dumb, but they’ve been beating clever for millions of years. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised at the success of stupid ideologies in the world of politics. In competition and warfare, it doesn’t matter how you win: the only criterion of success is, well, success. The fungus and the protozoan are unconscious experts at chemical warfare, because they interfere with the brain-chemistry of their victims. In the world of human politics, parasites and predators interfere with brains by using words and ideas instead.

Pop-guns against a tank

The ideas can be very stupid ones, but that doesn’t matter. In some ways, stupidity can be an advantage, because stupid-but-simple ideas are easier to transmit than clever-but-complex ones, particularly when the stupid ideas exploit the brain-circuits devoted to morality. For example, the Indian Hindu writer Angela Saini has been spreading some very stupid ideas in her new book Superior: The Return of Race Science (2019). Steve Sailer, James Thompson and Greg Cochran have all pointed out the massive flaws in Saini’s reasoning and the massive gaps in her knowledge, but it’s almost as though they’re using pop-guns against a tank. Superior rolls on regardless.

Ashley Montagu, né Israel Ehrenberg: “Race does not exist, goyim!”

One reason for this is that Angela Saini has morality and goodness on her side. Sailer, Thompson and Cochran are stale pale males, promoting the hateful and horrible idea of inequality between human races. 
Saini is neither stale, pale nor male, and she’s promoting the beautiful idea of equality in the only race there is, the human race. 
In fact, some of Saini’s leftist reviewers have gone even further than denying the existence of separate races. Colin Grant, a Black-Jamaican writer based in the UK, has promoted the concept of what you might call “anti-race,” whereby some human beings are more genetically similar to distant relatives than to close relatives. This is from Grant’s review of Superior in the highly influential leftist magazine the New Statesman:

In writing that is as impassioned as it is elegant, Saini charts how the tide turned against eugenicist thought and research, with Unesco declaring in 1950 [under the guidance of the Jewish anthropologist Ashley Montagu, né Israel Ehrenberg] that all mankind “belongs to the same species, Homo sapiens”. [Editorial note: This meant that “Good had won over evil,” as the Indian Alok Jha comments in yet another approving review of Saini’s book.]
Further, in 1972 a landmark paper by the [Jewish] evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin spelled out that there was greater genetic difference within groups than between them. So, for instance, a black man in Nigeria had more in common genetically with a white man in Scotland than he did with a black man in Tanzania. (Data of prejudice: the uses and abuses of the science of race, The New Statesman, 24th July 2019)

Black science expert Colin Grant at the BBC

Colin Grant has worked since 1991 for the BBC, where he produces “science programmes.” That’s no doubt why he was asked to review Saini’s book for the New Statesman: to other leftists, he’s a Black expert in science. And yet he claims something that is both stupid and scientifically illiterate: that “a black man in Nigeria” can have “more in common genetically with a white man in Scotland” than with “a black man in Tanzania.”

Hymns of the hive

However, this stupid argument isn’t original to Grant: it’s been buzzing in the leftist hive-mind for a long time. In 2012, the Jewish journalist Deborah Orr proclaimed that “Race is a myth” and approvingly quoted the views of a Black soccer player: “Race is not a scientific reality. You could find a tribe in Africa who are genetically closer to Europeans than to an African tribe a hundred miles away.” The words differ, the stupidity remains the same.
Another reviewer of Angela Saini’s book is Gavin Evans, a professor of journalism in the “Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies” at Birkbeck College in London. According to his page at the Guardian, he “has written widely on issues of race, IQ and genetics.” As you’d expect from his academic background, Evans knows about as much about genetics as a fruit-fly knows about deep-sea diving. His review of Saini’s book in the Guardian says this: “Race, like intelligence, is a notoriously slippery concept. Individuals often share more genes with members of other races than with members of their own race.”

Biologically meaningless concepts

Once again someone is claiming that human beings can be more closely related to distant relatives than to close relatives. It’s a ludicrous claim, but you’ll find it made again and again by scientifically illiterate leftists, many of them in positions of great power and cultural influence. 
For yet another example, try Sir David Cannadine, the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University (having previously taught at Columbia and Cambridge) and the General Editor of the Penguin History of Europe and Penguin History of Britain. In his book The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (2013), Cannadine manages to stuff more nonsense on race into fewer words than one would have thought humanly possible:

According to the findings of the Human Genome Project, people of all backgrounds, locations and “races” share more than 99.9 percent of their DNA, and in the case of the remaining 0.1 percent, there is more variation within stereotypical racial groups than between them. This means that 99.9 percent of the genes of a “black” person are the same as those of a “white” person, and that the genes of any “black” person may be more similar to the genes of a “white” person than to another “black” person. Thus understood, race is a biologically meaningless concept, literally no more than skin deep. It is also neither innate nor permanent, for skin colour can change dramatically from one generation to another as a result of mixed-race marriages. (The Undivided Past, ch 5, “Race,” pg 217)

Again, Cannadine is not simply claiming that race doesn’t exist. Like Colin Grant and Gavin Evans, he’s claiming that anti-race exists: an unmixed Black can be more closely related to a White than to another unmixed Black. Let’s take one of these alleged individuals who are more genetically similar to members of another race than to members of their own race. Colin Grant spoke of “a black man in Nigeria” having “more in common genetically” with “a white man in Scotland” than with “a black man in Tanzania.” Nigeria and Tanzania are tropical African countries where languages in the Niger-Congo family are spoken, a good indication that gene flow between these two regions faces no big obstacles.
And where is Scotland? It’s in north-western Europe, separated from both Nigeria and Tanzania by thousands of miles of desert, ocean and mountains. Until recent times, gene flow between Scotland and those two African regions faced huge obstacles. So did other kinds of flow. As you’d expect, Scottish English and Scottish Gaelic have no linguistic kinship with any indigenous language of Nigeria or Tanzania.
Now let’s imagine the family trees of Grant’s three hypothetical men, the two Blacks in Nigeria and Tanzania, and the White in Scotland. You’ll find that at some point – call it time T₁ – the Black from Nigeria and the Black from Tanzania have common ancestors. At another point – call it time T₂ – all three men have common ancestors. But T₁ must be long after T₂. The two Blacks obviously have more recent and more numerous shared ancestors. And what do ancestors do? They transmit genes! So the Nigerian and Tanzanian must share more genes with each other than with the Scottish White, unless genes began mutating in the Nigerian’s line of descent in just such a way as to create more matches with the genes of the Scottish White.

Tropical Tanzania vs Cauld Caledonia

The odds against that are more than astronomical. It would be like a language in the Niger-Congo family being linguistically closer to Scottish English or Gaelic than to another language in the Niger-Congo family. Blacks in Nigeria and Tanzania live in the tropical, resource-rich environment of Africa, not the cold, resource-poor environment of Scotland. So how on earth could the genes of a Black in Nigeria have evolved to be more similar to those of a White in Scotland than those of a Black in Tanzania?
Colin Grant is making a ludicrous, scientifically illiterate claim. But it won’t affect his career in the slightest. He will continue to make science programmes for the highly influential BBC, just as the journalism professor Gavin Evans will continue to “write widely on issues of race, IQ and genetics.” Grant and Evans are saying what other leftists want to hear: “Race doesn’t exist! Human beings can be more closely related to distant relatives than to close relatives!”

Nonsense is no obstacle

Leftists like Saini, Grant, Evans and Cannadine do not harm their careers by talking nonsense about race. You can only harm your career by talking sense about race, as the Nobel Laureate James Watson proved in 2007 and the social scientist Jason Richwine proved in 2013. Watson and Richwine were punished and deplatformed because the Left do not want to allow free speech on these topics. They know they cannot win the argument. But even as they censor and silence their opponents, they deny that they’re attacking free speech. 
Angela Saini herself has written an article called “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience” for Scientific American. She brings her powers of reasoning to bear on the topic of free speech:

What has started with a gentle creep through the back door of our computers could end, if we’re not careful, with jackboots through the front door of our homes. Populism, ethnic nationalism and neo-Nazism are on the rise worldwide. If we are to prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again, we need to be more vigilant. The public must hold the Internet giants to account, recognize hatred dressed up as scholarship and learn how to marginalize it, and be assiduous in squeezing out pseudoscience from public debate. This is not a free speech issue; it’s about improving the quality and accuracy of information that people see online, and thereby creating a fairer, kinder society. (The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience, Scientific American, 29th July 2019)

“This is not a free speech issue,” claims Angela Saini: it’s about “creating a fairer, kinder society.” She doesn’t have the honesty to admit that she wants to censor science to create a better world. After all, if she were honest about her intentions she might remind people of Stalinism and the biologist Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), who proclaimed the easy malleability of biological forms and claimed that he could revolutionize Soviet agriculture. Lysenko was a bad scientist whose career flourished while good scientists who disagreed with him were sent to death by starvation in the Gulag.

The debate is over, haters

But Angela Saini’s ideas about free speech are no more original than Colin Grant’s ideas about race. Both Saini and Grant are buzzing with the leftist hive-mind. Here’s another leftist, the possibly Jewish Martha Gill, plugging the same line as Saini and pretending that censorship is not censorship:

Free speech advocates also misunderstand the motivation of those who might want to shut down a debate: they see this as a surefire mark of intolerance. But some debates should be shut down. For public dialogue to make any progress, it is important to recognise when a particular debate has been won and leave it there.
Even the most passionate free speech advocate might not wish to reopen the debate into whether women should be tried for witchcraft, or whether ethnic minorities should be allowed to go to university, or whether the Earth is flat. No-platformers are not scared – they simply think certain debates are over. You may disagree, but it does not mean they are against free speech. (Free speech isn’t under threat. It just suits bigots and boors to suggest so, The Guardian, 23rd June 2019)

“It’s not censorship!”: Martha Gill ends the debate

When leftists decide that a debate is over, it’s not censorship when they silence dissenters. It’s just that the debate is over. The supreme leader has spoken! Or rather, the leftist hive-mind has spoken. In effect, Angela Saini and Martha Gill are claiming infallibility for leftist dogma.

Reeling on the ceiling

As many people have pointed out, leftism is a disguised form of religion. But I don’t know any overt religion that is as irrational as leftism or that denies reality so fervently. For another example, look at the transgender concept of the “cotton ceiling.” Some transgender activists claim that it’s bigoted of lesbians to refuse to sleep with “trans women” who still have penises. Here is one of those activists replying to a sceptical feminist:

Trans women are female. When our female-ness and womanhood is denied, as you keep doing repeatedly, that is transphobic and transmisogynist. As I said earlier, all people’s desires are influenced by an intersection of cultural messages that determine those desires. Cultural messages that code trans women’s bodies as male are transphobic, and those messages influence people’s desires. So cis queer women who are attracted to other queer women may not view trans women as viable sexual partners because they have internalized the message that trans women are somehow male.
The comparison to what cis males say also makes no sense. What trans women are saying is that we are women, and thus should be considered women sexually, and thus be considered viable partners for women who are attracted to women. What cis males are saying is that queer women shouldn’t be exclusively attracted to women, which is completely different. (The Cotton Ceiling? Really?, Femonade blog, 13th March 2012)

That’s where the leftist denial of reality and biology ends: in the idea that penises are “coded” as male rather than actually being male. Even some leftists – the TERFs or trans-exclusionary radical feminists – think that this is a step too far (see my article “Power to the Perverts!”). But the same leftists who reject transgender nonsense will accept much more harmful nonsense about race. Transgender activists may be noisy and obnoxious, but they aren’t an existential threat to Western nations. Mass immigration by millions of non-Whites is a huge existential threat to Western nations.

Clever will conquer

And what justifies the presence of those non-Whites and the endless privileges they are granted over their White hosts? 
The supremely stupid ideas promoted by Angela Saini and countless other leftists, that’s what. 
Just as a dumb fungus can beat a clever ant, so a dumb ideology can beat a clever one. But that too is part of reality: truth is not always mighty and truth does not always prevail.
In this case, however, I think truth will prevail. And soon. As genetic analysis becomes ever cheaper and quicker, and our understanding of human evolution ever richer, the truth about racial differences will become ever harder to suppress. Astute leftists like the Jewish geneticist David Reich already know what’s ahead: We will see the supremacy of science, not the supremacy of stupid.