The Problem of ‘Racist Facts’

Posted on | January 29, 2017 | 1 Comment

More than a decade ago, the first time some left-wing scumbag tagged me with the “white supremacist” label, I was both insulted and amused. The obvious question — which no liberal ever seems to ask — is this: “What does ‘white supremacist’ mean?” Historically, this term is associated with those who defended Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, and so the term is obsolete as a matter of political science. Anyone who supposes, at this late date, that America could feasibly reinstate segregation or any similar regime is a deluded fool. Even more deluded are Neo-Nazis, who believe they can stage a putsch and institute a 21st-century racial totalitarianism. Neo-Nazis are auto-marginalizing, for the simple and obvious reason that the American people overwhelmingly agree with Jake in The Blues Brothers: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”

 

My Dad was wounded within an inch of his life fighting Nazis in World War II, and irresponsible smear merchants (hello, Max Blumenthal) who thought they could get away with impugning my character in this fashion have been repeatedly exposed as frauds and liars. Friends who actually know me (as the fun-loving, gregarious human being I am) were stunned when, in 2009, a certain despicable lizard tried to recycle those smears, after he previously tried to defame Pamela Geller as a crypto-fascist.

Another problem with the phrase “white supremacist,” beyond its use by the Left as a crude pejorative slur, is that insofar as it has any meaning in the 21st century, it can only describe an adherent of a theory. One must ignore a lot of historical facts in order to embrace such a theory, and thus I am not a “white supremacist” for the same basic reason I reject feminism, another ideology based on counter-factual theory. We must live in the world as it actually is, rather than attempting to “reform” the world according to some intellectual theory of how the world should be, and this rejection of ideological schemes is equally applicable to Marxism, feminism, “white supremacy” or Keynesian economics. Think of all of the wicked mischief Americans have endured the past 15 or 20 years because of George Soros and his warped interpretation of Karl Popper’s “open society” theory. Popper is not to blame for Soros any more than pickup artists (PUAs) are to blame for Elliot Rodger, but the fact is that Soros is a fanatic devoted to an ideological theory, and it is this error — a preference for theory over facts — which makes Soros such a menace.

As I’ve stated before, in politics I am a conservative, in economics I am an Austrian, and in religion I am a Calvinist. All of these are reputable schools of thought, with many able defenders, which spares me the labor of always having to explain myself. Being an adherent of certain fundamental principles also prevents me from being tossed around like a feather on the wind by every controversy that comes along. My basic modus operandi, based on a simple logic, is to figure out what side of the issue the Left is on, and get on the other side. You can seldom go wrong in politics by betting against the prevailing beliefs of the New York Times.

All of that is preamble to something Steve Sailer linked at his blog Friday, a research paper by Florida State University psychology graduate student Bo Winegard and two of his associates, entitled “Human Biological and Psychological Diversity.” Winegard and his colleagues could be fairly described as disciples of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology thesis, members of a school of thought known as evolutionary psychology. A professor of biology at Harvard University, Wilson applied Darwinian theory rigorously to the problem of human social behavior, and his 1975 book was highly influential. Unfortunately, the arbiters of political correctness in academia (who have long embraced Darwinism as a justification of atheism) were willing to ignore even this eminent scientist’s work because it did not wholly confirm their own left-wing biases.

Darwin is only useful to the Left insofar as evolution can be used by degenerates as a weapon to attack Christian morality, but when Darwinian theory is made the basis of arguments the Left doesn’t like, we find reputable researchers condemned as crypto-Nazis merely for going wherever the facts about human nature may lead them. We may suppose that Winegard, et al., know the risks involved in their argument:

Many evolutionary psychologists have asserted that there is a panhuman nature, a species typical psychological structure that is invariant across human populations. Although many social scientists dispute the basic assumptions of evolutionary psychology, they seem widely to agree with this hypothesis. Psychological differences among human populations (demes, ethnic groups, races) are almost always attributed to cultural and sociological forces in the relevant literatures. However, there are strong reasons to suspect that the hypothesis of a panhuman nature is incorrect. . . . It is likely that humans also evolved slightly different psychological traits as a response to different selection pressures in different environments and niches. One possible example is the high intelligence of the Ashkenazi Jewish people. Frank discussions of such differences among human groups have provoked strong ethical concerns in the past. We understand those ethical concerns and believe that it is important to address them. However, we also believe that the benefits of discussing possible human population differences outweigh the costs.

You can read the whole thing in PDF format. Because I am neither much interested in theory nor qualified to discuss this paper in terms of science, I will not attempt to summarize the arguments made by Winegard and his colleagues. Being a father of six children, however, I can testify to my own observation that certain psychological traits tend to be passed along from parents to their children, and I think any parent who pays attention would agree that the acorn seldom falls far from the tree. Of course, every child has two parents, and one obvious way we can affect the traits of our offspring is by seeking mates who exhibit traits we find desirable.

 

My wife sometimes gets angry when I say that it was her excellent character and temperament which appealed to me as much as her high cheekbones and beautiful smile, but when a man chooses a wife — “Me Tarzan, you Jane” — he certainly ought to be conscious of such matters. What kind of mother will she be? How will her hereditary traits combine with his traits to create a the hybrid offspring of the next generation? Just yesterday my 18-year-old son remarked about the circumstantial fluke by which his mother and I met, a seemingly random coincidence to which he owes his own existence. As a Calvinist, of course, I don’t believe in coincidences, and so our children must consider themselves indebted to the grace of God for their lives, and also for their parents.

We have heard a lot recently about Planned Parenthood, but there is a popular saying among evangelical Christians, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.” Man proposes and God disposes. What some people call luck or fate, the Christian must accept as divine will.

Poll: How do Americans feel about
Obamacare and Planned Parenthood?

Is the question how Americans do feel, or how they should feel? We know that the Democrat Party and the liberal media (but I repeat myself) want people to approve of abortion and socialized medicine, but what would people think about these topics if it were not for the media’s constant partisan cheerleading for the atheistic Culture of Death?

Well, I didn’t wake up this morning with a plan to preach a sermon, but rather to call attention to what is most important in this research paper by Bo Winegard and his colleagues, i.e., whether the discussion of “slightly different psychological traits” among human population groups should be silenced because of “strong ethical concerns.”

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, 1770

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1786

America was not founded by men who were afraid of facts. The attempt to stifle “free argument and debate” in academia and journalism must be seen as what it is, a dishonest effort to disarm the truth by cowards who fear that the facts will contradict their political theories. What is called political correctness is in fact Cultural Marxism. The subversive intellectual Left seeks to impose on America the ideology whose failure produced the collapse of the Soviet Union. Much as the Stalinist regime imposed Lysenkoism on the captive peoples of the U.S.S.R., our soi-disant “progressive” academic elite has spent the past three decades attempting to impose its own counterfactual theories which, of course, are closely akin to the doomed ideas that produced such catastrophic results under Stalin, Mao, Castro and other Marxist-Leninist dictators.

The Soviet regime persisted more than 70 years in its deadly errors, and it is only with the collusion of their sympathizers in the elite media that the academic Left has been able to carry on its anti-truth project since the 1980s. America needs glasnost and perestroika in our education system if we are to rescue our civilization from its enemies:

Ticketholders to a Milo Yiannopoulos speech at the University of Colorado-Boulder received an anonymous message Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the event.
“We know who you are, tonight we will know your faces,” the email threatened those who planned to hear the controversial alt-right provocateur. “The identities of attendees will be released to the public on a list of known Neo-Nazi sympathizers. We do not tolerate fascists.”

Professor Glenn Reynolds: “No, you are fascists.” Actually, professor, they aren’t fascists, they’re Stalinists (or Maoists, maybe) because this kind of totalitarian bullying in academia nowadays is entirely a project of the radical Left, and ought to be called by its correct name. The very fact that fans of a gay libertarian like Milo are being labeled “fascists” and “Neo-Nazis” tells us that neo-Stalinists are operating from the same playbook that led to the 1930s Moscow show trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, et al. America is in no danger of a 21st-century holocaust; rather, we are witnessing a latter-day Yezhovshchina in the fields of education, journalism and popular culture. The perpetrators of this Red Terror on our university campuses are the intellectual heirs of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, and the fact that most American college students wouldn’t recognize any of those names is evidence of how effectively the commissars of Cultural Marxism have enforced their dictatorship in academia. Even as Stalin was liquidating the leadership of the Communist Party and the Red Army, his American henchmen in the CPUSA were promoting a “Popular Front” against fascism, a propaganda campaign which ended abruptly in August 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and Stalin became Hitler’s ally in the destruction of Poland. A year later, one of Stalin’s agents murdered Leon Trotsky, who led the Red Army during the Bolshevik Revolution but whom Stalin purged, exiled and demonized after Lenin’s death in 1924.

Genrikh Yagoda (left), Nikolai Yezhov (center) and Lavrenti Beria (right).

While most of my longtime readers are familiar with this history, today’s college students have almost no knowledge of what the Soviet Union was, and what kind of evils were perpetrated by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and this vast ignorance is no accident. The truth about Communist evil has been deliberately excluded from the public-school curriculum, because the education system is staffed by left-wing apparatchiks who are committed to indoctrinating American children with an anti-capitalist/anti-Christian belief system. This means that most American youth are as misinformed about 20th-century history as the idiots who label Milo’s fans “fascists” and “Neo-Nazis.”

“There are a lot of things feminists in general know to be true, but there are also a lot of specific things that queer feminists know to be true, perhaps better than most, when it comes to the feminist movement. In fact, there’s an entire set of theories — a sub-movement, so to speak — devoted to what’s known as ‘queer feminism,’ or the ‘radical opposition to patriarchy.’ And indeed, speaking from experience as a queer feminist myself, I find that many queer feminists often take topics within the movement into consideration in a way that some straight feminists may not — intersectionality, for example.”
— Maya M., “7 Things Queer Feminists Know To Be True,” Bustle.com, July 5, 2016

The Queering of Feminism in academia is one of the more bizarre consequences of this neo-Stalinism on university campuses. When a student at Vanderbilt University (annual tuition $45,610) writes about “Heterocentric Perpetuation of Rape Culture” — and, we must presume, Takeydra Jones got an “A” for that effort — we can conclude that our education system is not teaching facts, but is instead engaged in a project of ideological indoctrination. And when the proponents of Queer Feminism have taken over nominally Catholic schools like Marquette University, we understand that this kind of indoctrination is prevalent throughout academia. A Georgetown professor harasses a Muslim woman who voted for Trump, students at Yale are traumatized by the election results, a Rutgers University professor is sent to a mental ward after his bizarre Twitter rant, and left-wingers are rioting whenever Milo Yiannopoulos arrives on campus. Such are the symptoms of a systemic madness caused by the hegemony of counterfactual theory in our institutions of higher education. Students no longer believe in “free argument and debate,” but are instead totalitarian fanatics devoted to the cult doctrines of “social justice,” where facts and logic are condemned as weapons of the capitalist imperialist heteropatriarchy.

Feminism: A Synonym for Insanity pic.twitter.com/rSAqzxZPNc

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 29, 2017

What I have called a War Against Human Nature was especially apparent in the bizarre antics of feminists during the long and ultimate doomed campaign to elect Hillary Clinton, but it was also evident in the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement. Any experienced political observer could see that this was simply a partisan project by Democrats who sought to mobilize racial hatred against whites as part of the overall Clinton campaign strategy. (Hillary herself endorsed “Black Lives Matter” even after the movement had inspired riots and assassinations of police.)

Even if we can see the strings of the partisan puppeteers who manipulate their media marionettes to promote such propaganda, the fact remains that many people don’t understand this political puppet show, and believe exactly what they have been taught to believe. They will not read anything which contradicts the liberal media narrative, and it is in vain that we recommend to them books like Heather Mac Donald’s The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, or K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.’s The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. No factual argument can cause the leftist to doubt his own ideology. The cult followers who died at Jonestown were no less fanatical than today’s young “progressives.”

This is the problem that confronts Bo Winegard and his colleagues. No matter how sound their theoretical arguments, or how respectable their sources (the bibliography of their paper is five pages long), there is no chance that the ideologues in academia will cede to Winegard, et al., “the benefits of discussing possible human population differences.”

Facts? The academic Left screams, “No! Facts are racist!”

If America’s future requires the faculty of Yale and Harvard to see the light, we are doomed beyond all hope of redemption. The only way liberty can prevail is because God is always on the side of truth.

Pray hard, my friends, and then pray harder.

 

 

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