The very premise of "the 1619 project"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve

I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.

The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.

This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits.  (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.)  It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it.  The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it).  It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities.  What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?

Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research.  For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA?  Is the DNA defined by the Constitution?  Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good?  Of course not.  There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land.  What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."

This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness.  It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding.  Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly).  It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day.  (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative).  Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap.  It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied.  And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap.  And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan.   (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory."  CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue.  If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments.  How is all this not obvious ffs?)

Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery?  Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant?  What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment?  Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy.  What's more or truly fundamental?

Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery?  That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different.  But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element.  But again, how does one avoid triviality here?

After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed.  No one disputes this.

But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim?  If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form.  But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century).  That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what?  In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended.  (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years.  Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)

Maybe I've missed something here.  As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so.  But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.)  And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists).  (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond .  How can capitalism as such be brutal?  What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital?  Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition?  If so, I must have missed them doing so.  Are markets inherently brutal?  If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?)  They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected).  Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.

That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system.  Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.

In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.

Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children?  Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process.  And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources?  From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there.  They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?

And where does the NYT go from here?  Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next?  Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model?  (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)

What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters.  It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually.  That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.

I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist.  But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright.  That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again."  It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville.  (How could they not deliberately omit the context?  The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all.  Fucking liars, plain and simple.)  And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars.  And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors?  How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?

More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes.  (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned.  It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]).  It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems.  I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.

[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe.  (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.)  In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...).  (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith?  Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.)  As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other.  A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production).  I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving.  Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.'  (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]

Some good stuff

I have (of course) noticed that many of my posts of late have been political-polemical.  Here are some positives:

Coleman Hughes, black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia, making any number of eminently admissible arguments about race issues which it appears (here come the polemics again...) the American left is neither prepared nor has the good faith to take on.  If he's right, then the American left has been shitting the bed for long enough that even a single undergrad philosopher can run circles around them, more or less.  Nothing that I've seen in the comments sections of his articles (I went through the entirety of the comments for this one, just to see...) would suggest that the American left has much in the way of rebuttals that would make any reasonable and duly informed person think that the American left has anything like a monopoly on good arguments on race issues.  (Much as with the Trump-Clinton election, the American left would have you think that it's some kind of knock-down, not-even-a-close-call argument in favor of the leftist viewpoint on this and a wide range of other issues.)  I did google 'criticism rebuttal response to coleman hughes' and the search returned all of one result of any usefulness, also a thoroughly admissible entry into the discussion.  However...

In the course of reading a number of Hughes-related posts, I encountered this article, "Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility," by Glenn Loury, and it is about as thoughtful and humane an article as I've ever seen on the subject of America's Racial Problem.  But it is most certainly not a leftist article - and it's the kind of article that I would be surprised to find the left having the courage, integrity, honor, good faith, etc., to take on (which would require admitting that the left, by narrowing its focus to only certain causal factors, has been shitting the bed for decades).  So basically it's either-or: Either Hughes and Loury (and numerous other often-black conservatives who've studied and written about this topic indepth) have eminently admissible arguments, in which case the American left has been shitting the bed, Or the American left's MO has been reasonable, normal, dialectically accountable, honorable, etc.  Take your pick.

Hughes and Loury are, in effect, throwing down the glove to issue this challenge: "Okay, leftists, let's do talk about the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and ongoing systemic injustices.  And you, lefties - you get to address the problem of the sky-high rate of single-parent families in the black community.  Deal?"  Concerted silence/evasion in the face of this offer/challenge is what I expect from the American left.  (Implicitly contained in the challenge is what I've alluded to above: that the American left acknowledge how badly it's been shitting the bed and make a hearty effort to prevent further bed-shitting.  I don't expect that to be forthcoming any time soon, i.e., I would be rather surprised - pleasantly so - if that were to happen.)

On to another positive, without the polemical implications this time (except those pertaining to the ecologically oblivious/their enablers...):

I recently read The River Why by David James Duncan, which I spotted on a home bookshelf.  It's both fun and thought-provoking, and made an impression that books rarely do for me.  (A few other titles of lasting interest for me: Mises, Socialism; Letters of Ayn Rand and The Romantic Manifesto; Norton, Personal Destinies; Nozick, The Examined Life; Rasmussen and Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature; Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment.)  Then again, I'm not especially well-read when it comes to books and I'm not a particularly fast reader; for building my reading list I have to use my sense of quality/importance over the pursuit of quantity.  As for The River Why, one might get a good sense of its qualities from the goodreads users' reviews.  I just wanted, at the least, to provide a pointer in its direction (just in case I kick the bucket before the next blog posting, etc.).

Black conservative Larry Elder on Trump

To state the essential: for "progressives"/Dems/leftists to ignore what Elder is saying here (8/23/2019) is for them to be intellectually dishonest.

It's a sad thing that Elder even had to go through the motions to explain all this.  It's really just common sense.  The "progressives" should have known all this stuff already, if they really were about putting forth intellectual effort to understand ideas different from theirs, rather than being all full of hubris.

Question: do "progressives" routinely ignore black conservatives such as Elder because "black conservative" simply doesn't compute for them and therefore they regard such things as an aberration or anomaly?  If not, then what else would explain why "progressives" routinely ignore them?

[Addendum 9/2: The same group of leftists/"progs" who routinely ignore black conservatives are also typically the same group of folks who routinely and with much hubris and nastiness assume that philosophers don't take Rand seriously - in which case any philosopher who does can be treated as an aberration or anomaly.  What other excuse do they have for routinely ignoring - indeed, seeming to bend over backwards to ignore - the professional philosophers who think there is value there in Rand?  These professors go through years of training, publishing, etc., and then the "progs" take a dump all over them on the basis of nothing.  I'd give these "progs" a lot more leeway and benefit of the doubt, character-wise, if it were not for all their hubris, which is one thing I cannot abide, especially when there are indisputable facts out there, not exactly unavailable to the curious, that refute their bold yet ignorant claims and assumptions.  (They value pleasure over truth.  In the past I, for one, have taken pleasure in bashing Marx and Marxism, but my experience with Rand-bashers tells me that maybe a lot of that Marx/ism-bashing is based in strawmen or other forms of intellectual laziness.  And so I am extending the benefit of the doubt far enough to reserve further comment on Marx until I've gone through the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx [which I anticipate, based on experience with the Handbooks, to be roughly on par with taking a graduate-level course].  (As philosophers go, it would appear that there are at least a dozen or so larger fish to fry, however; the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel seem to have greater impact on philosophers to the present day; see how many articles are devoted to the biggest names at the SEP, for instance.  [Plato, Aristotle and Kant are the ones with at least a dozen articles there, making them solid candidates for biggest fish to fry.])  The closest thing to an Oxford Handbook on Rand right now would be the Blackwell Companion, in publication for 3.5 years now but - as I should have predicted back then, because the phenomenon here is like clockwork - no word yet from the bashers on what they think of it, since they have routinely bent over backwards to ignore the existence of such things.  I don't think it's a matter of its current price, either; at least if they knew about it they would know it's priced highly.  But they don't know about the other, non-pricey, secondary Rand literature listed in the bibliography of the Rand SEP entry, either, much less all the free courses at ARI Campus.  The water is there and the horses refuse to drink and yet they still keep up with the bashing.  (I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, nor do I expect to ever do so.  It's just not where doing one's homework on Rand leads, as the body of secondary Rand literature makes plain.  The bashers might routinely intimidate college freshmen on reddit who express an interest in Rand, but they're not going to make a dent in Salmieri et al.)  It's not unlike bashing the idea of free will without knowing at least the controversies and subject matter one might encounter in the Oxford Handbook of Free Will [which I need to get to...], the bulk of the contributors to which are philosophy professors rather than neuroscientists [who qua such won't provide answers or methods that philosophers have the tools to deliver on this topic].)  The fact that "progs" don't engage in any serious way with black conservatives, at the very time they scream and cry racism about everything in America, speaks volumes in itself.  I'm not impressed with these creatures in the least, and they need philosophy boot camp ASAFP to clean up their acts.  At least then they'd learn about the vice of hubris.  Once again: if leftists/"progs" are so smart, why aren't they pushing philosophy education (for which there are numerous readily find-able and promising leads in this here blog]?]

[Addendum #2: Huemer takes the present-day 'SJW' culture to task for its rampant dishonesty, disregard for truth, etc.  Hint: the dishonesty and disregard for truth is pervasive when it comes to pretty much any topic that crowd talks about these days, whether the subject is racial and gender equality, or whether it's capitalism, Trump, Rand, etc.  What makes it particularly ugly is how academics/scholars, whose very job it is to combat such dishonesty, partake in large numbers in the dishonesty without remorse (as Huemer explains) and with the silent complicity of the other academics/scholars.  How can the entire education system not be poisoned with this mentality when the kind of crap Huemer discusses occurs there so much and with such impunity?]

CNN: "Trump's Racist Tweets"

Part of Trump's appeal comes from people's disgust with what he calls Fake News.  He has said things to the effect that "the fake news is the enemy of the people."  What do the fake-news outlets do in response, as if they were on Trump's payroll and going out of their way to prove his point?  They twist his words into: Trump considers the free press his enemy.

I've written before about CNN's outright, undiluted fakery when it came to Trump's "very fine people" comment on the Charlottesville incident, deliberately (how could it not be?) ripped from its context in which he was referring to (supposed) non-white-supremacists who were there to protest the removal of statues.  As far as I'm concerned, this and numerous other incidents lead me by cognitive necessity and sanity to discount, doubt or disbelieve things that I see asserted on a network such as CNN.  CNN has made it rather abundantly clear - especially after Trump's becoming president - that in its political coverage it is in the business of advocacy and not reporting.

Here is perhaps the most obvious case in point to date:

Now, Trump's tweet about the "Squad" of leftist freshman (freshwoman?) Congresswomen contained plenty of inflammatory language but the language the left/Dems/"progressives" and their media allies seized upon to the exclusion of everything else, including Trump's original point about loving one's country, was his "go back to the countries they came from" language.  Now, there's a case to be made that this "go back to where you came from" language is racist in content (whether it is in intention) but here's the thing: there's controversy here.  Trump's point - I assume his own perspective is relevant here as to what his point was - is something about the "squad" not being sufficiently loving of America.  This makes it a matter of controversy, interpretation and opinion whether it is appropriate to refer to the entirety of the tweet as racist.

If you don't see this as a matter of interpretation and opinion, then there's no point in my trying to reason with you further here.  As a matter of indisputable fact, today's leftists/Dems and much of the rest of the country are not in agreement on what constitutes racism, racist speech, hate speech, and the like.  This is precisely why the left's cult-like chants of "Trump's racism" are so ineffective and fall on so many deaf ears.  The un-deaf-ears they fall on tend to react in terms of how idiotic and ill-supported the chants are.  The whole process here feeds into a vicious escalating cycle: The left calls Trump (and a lot of other things/people) racist, that leads the opposition to be increasingly disgusted with the left, which increases the likelihood that the left will react with more charges of racism, and on it goes.  Observers from outside of this vicious cycle might note just what a stupid and indeed vicious cycle this is, just more of the same "politics as usual" (except it really isn't; the political situation in the USA today can be likened to a Red/Blue Cold War, when this hasn't been the case in the past; I'll just refer you to many blog entries of mine under the "leftist losers" tag for which "side" I think is way more at fault for this phenomenon, and I've grown tired of commenting on all the new examples that illustrate my point, the essential trend having been overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly established in any honest and thoughtful reader's mind).  (The only issue here is just how intellectually bankrupt the non-left is, compared to the left.)

Now, it's one thing for activists, pundits, and opposing politicians to call Trump a racist or to claim that he says racist things.  That's all fair game in politics and their arguments and credibility should be assessed on their merits.

It's another thing for a purported news outlet to throw the term "racism/racist" around the way the activists/pundits/politicians.  Given that it's pretty obvious that people in the country don't agree on what persons or statements merit being called racist, a news outlet should be extra-careful about how it respects and reflects such a difference of opinion/interpretation.  The charge of racism is itself toxic enough that a news outlet needs to take cognizance of this.

CNN has determined that it's a matter of fact that Trump's tweet is racist.

How can the producers of CNN hold such an opinion honestly?  And if they don't know well enough to know that such an opinion cannot be held honestly, that points to a different set of problems.  I'm going on the assumption here that CNN's producers know better.  They might try to rationalize their editorial decisions on the grounds that this is a matter of fact, that in the age of Trump matters of opinion need to be treated in some cases as matters of fact, that truth needs to be spoken to power, etc.  But that's a piss-poor rationalization, because of the simple confusion of fact and opinion/interpretation.

Now - and it would sure be nice if this could go without saying, but these days the toxicity levels are too high - there are clear-cut cases of racism and they could be factually reported as such.  But in the case of Trump there is simply too much there that's ambiguous and controversial.  I (for one) am not convinced that Trump is a racist, much less that his anti-Squad tweet was racist.  And no amount of cult-like "if you deny Trump is a racist that makes you a racist" argument from intimidation - basically an attempt to coerce agreement from a mind that hasn't been swayed by the arguments - is going to sway me from that.

CNN's dishonest editorializing-as-news seems premised on the notion advanced all over the place by leftists nowadays that there isn't controversy here, that it is a matter of established fact that Trump is a a racist, and that those who don't see it as they do are part of the (racism) problem.  This mentality sounds more like that of a cult than of a group of people ready and willing to engage in a good-faith, mutual-understanding dialogue with those they disagree with.  This cult-like mentality becomes more obviously nasty and destructive if it is adopted by a purported news organization.  It not only destroys or diminishes their credibility on this subject, but on everything else (at least when it comes to political coverage).

It's not even so much an issue of what appears on CNN per se, but of the time slots in which the editorializing (masquerading as news) appears.  It's one thing for Don Lemon in his opinion-show time slot to call Trump a racist.  (At that time slot Lemon is opposite Laura Ingraham on Fox.  I don't find myself devoting my valuable time to watching much of either show in that time slot.)  At least Don Lemon's show, or shows during his time slot, are marked clearly enough as opinion programming.   But it's another thing for "Trump's Racist Tweet" to appear in the CNN headline banner during The Lead with Jake Tapper, which represents itself as a harder news program.  (Am I wrong?)  And this is hardly one defining incident; it's just one that came up readily via the usual internet searching after seeing "racist tweet" all over CNN's headlines for days (so it wasn't hard to find a visual example with those very words).

Is it safe to say, then, that the credibility of CNN's political coverage is pretty much as shot as MSDNC's?  I mean, I don't even bother with MSDNC here because their bias is so obvious and the intellectual quality of their punditry so low.  But CNN still touts itself as "the most trusted name in news."  (I don't think so.  This isn't the previous generation's CNN.)  And none of this is to excuse the problems one could readily point to on Fox News (or, what doesn't appear on Fox given its selection of topics and facts to cover/report, a selectivity exercised by the other two as well).

Given all this, it strikes me as reasonable to say that when CNN has a banner saying or implying Trump is a racist, it is engaging in the very sort of Fake News of which the president speaks.  If there's one thing that Trump speaks about with credibility, it's how dishonest and biased the media coverage is.  But the reason Trump speaks about this with credibility, when he speaks about so many other things without so much credibility, is that this is pretty much a no-brainer that anyone can see (anyone, that is, whose cognitive and critical faculties aren't destroyed in a cult-like fashion).  So when a regular CNN-viewer manages selectively to notice all the examples of bias on Fox but then doesn't see the problem with CNN, we're not talking about an honest opposition to Trump here; it's bias and fake news/narrative combined toxically with hubris.  But one naturally expects better from the CNN producers than from the rank-and-file CNN viewers; so what's the CNN producers' excuse?

So, is Trump a racist?

You're a statesman? Speak with wisdom, then, or STFU.

If anything distinguishes a full-time philosopher from an ordinary civilian, it's the degree of imagination and skepticism a philosopher applies to putative truth-claims.

Let's say, for instance, I test the strongest, most thoughtful representative of the Trump-bashing Democrat/left/"progressive" opposition with the following "offer" of exchange:

I concede that Trump is a racist, and you concede that the Trump-bashing Democrat/left/"progressive" opposition is intellectually bankrupt.

Fair exchange?

I'm not sure, because I'd be "exchanging" a certainty with overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence in its support for a mere probability or likelihood with a contentious body of evidence.

What's more, I don't expect to get such a concession of intellectual bankruptcy from even the "best," most responsive-to-evidence advocate of the Democrat/left/"progressive" segment of the electorate.  If they haven't figured it out by now, with all the evidence available, what will get them to concede what I take to be a certainty given all the evidence available to anyone who does his homework?

The very same Dem/left/"progressive" crowd, even its "best" representatives, are dismissive toward Ayn Rand, a towering neo-Aristotelian genius, and their attitude isn't just dismissive: it is grounded in an ideological hubris, arrogance, smugness, conceit, complacency, and a demonstrable ignorance of what Rand said and meant.  So when they savagely attack such an unknown ideal hidden under a strawman, do I expect much of anything better when they're going after lower-hanging fruit like Trump?

I regard it as a certainty that the left/Dems/"progs" are the boy who cried racism, and in doing so squandered their credibility and displayed their intellectual bankruptcy.

I'll now imaginatively reframe this topic, by ordering putative truth-claims in degrees of likelihood, plausibility, reasonableness, and so forth.  The basic idea being something that I may have gleaned from reading the Oxford Handbook of David Hume more than anything else I gleaned from it: beliefs or probability assessments should be proportional to the evidence.  (I take it that classical realism, a philosophical expression of common sense about the laws of nature independent of our experience of them, is not, for Hume, supported in principle by any of that experiential evidence.  His common sense is, as I understand it, pragmatic rather than involving "metaphysical" commitments about real mind-independent laws, entities. etc.  Different can of worms for another time...)

Now, not everyone has the same evidence-set.  Not everyone has done all the same body of homework.  But any careful observer of this blog knows that when I make a bold or controversial-sounding claim, I document it thoroughly with links or a process of independent reasoning.  So this is my personal assessment based on the homework I've done, which you the reader may not possess.  I don't expect you to accept that Rand is a towering neo-Aristotelian genius without having done the inductive homework necessary to recognize that fact.  (This is one way of stating Rand's distinction between the objective and the intrinsic.  That something is true doesn't automatically and immediately oblige someone who hasn't done the necessary cognitive processing to accept it as true.  Truth doesn't passively imprint on the human mind, as is the position of the authoritarian 'intrinsicist.'  But if an exhaustive and overwhelming inductive process supports an affirmation of it, then it is objectively true.)

First, the statements in the order they occur to me:

The American Left is intellectually bankrupt

Capitalism is far superior to socialism, morally and economically

Trump is a racist

Trump has a casual relation to the truth

Trump is less worse than the American Left

Ayn Rand is a towering genius

Aristotle is a better philosopher overall than Rand

Chris Cuomo is CNN's most thoughtful host

The current American political conversation is a shitshow

Philosophical education would solve a huge number of American and human problems

Trump is an equal-opportunity offender

Trump says a lot of racially insensitive and inflammatory things

Trump hasn't shown in action that he is, as he claims, the least racist person you'd meet

Trump inspires confidence in his policymaking abilities

Religion or politics without philosophy is a recipe for disaster

The sun will rise tomorrow

Mind is to body as form is to matter, rendering substance dualism defunct

We have free will, i.e., some broad range of behavior is ultimately up to us as agents (we have moral responsibility)

Moral responsibility and free will mean exactly the same thing

There is structural racism in America

The American Left cries racism so much that its credibility is shot

The American Left has a heightened sensitivity to racial and other injustice

Roughly half of Trump supporters are deplorable and/or irredeemable

CBP agents told detainees to drink from toilets

AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Trump's

AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's

Noam Chomsky's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's

Climate change is a serious problem requiring drastic action and soon

Artificial Intelligence will direct us to climate-change solutions

Now, the statements ordered approximately according to plausibility-to-this-here-homework-doer using basic copy-and-move tools:

The sun will rise tomorrow

Philosophical education would solve a huge number of American and human problems

Capitalism is far superior to socialism, morally and economically

We have free will, i.e., some broad range of behavior is ultimately up to us as agents (we have moral responsibility)

Religion or politics without philosophy is a recipe for disaster

Aristotle is a better philosopher overall than Rand

The American Left is intellectually bankrupt

The American Left cries racism so much that its credibility is shot

Ayn Rand is a towering genius

Trump has a casual relation to the truth

The current American political conversation is a shitshow

There is structural racism in America

Trump is less worse than the American Left

Chris Cuomo is CNN's most thoughtful host

Trump is an equal-opportunity offender

Mind is to body as form is to matter, rendering substance dualism defunct

Climate change is a serious problem requiring drastic action and soon

Artificial Intelligence will direct us to climate-change solutions

Trump inspires confidence in his policymaking abilities

Trump says a lot of racially insensitive and inflammatory things

Trump hasn't shown in action that he is, as he claims, the least racist person you'd ever meet

The American Left has a heightened sensitivity to racial and other injustice

Trump is a racist

CBP agents told detainees to drink from toilets

Moral responsibility and free will mean exactly the same thing

AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Trump's

Roughly half of Trump supporters are deplorable and/or irredeemable

Noam Chomsky's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's

AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's

So, yeah, I could affirm Trump is a racist but only if I were to affirm everything else on the list that appears before that.  And if I've done my homework, then I'm basically right about the Dems/left which means they're the ones who haven't done their homework before spouting or implying any number of truth-claims (including the patently ridiculous one about AOC being morally and intellectually superior to Rand - but that's what their intellectually bankruptcy has them committed to by implication if not explicit affirmation).

So where does it go from here?  The way I see it, either I have the Dems/left/"progs" dead to rights on their near-astronomical levels of hubris, or I just haven't done my homework thoroughly enough.  So, we're basically either an an impasse, or the Dems/left/"progs" need to clean up their act, big time, and they can start with taking in and digesting the second item on the second, plausibility-ordered list above (which I can state with a very high degree of confidence they have not undertaken, not yet anyway).  Implied in any number of high-plausibility things said above is that the American Right also needs to clean up its act (starting with item #2, again), although their hubris levels aren't nearly as triggering.

The way I see it, everything about this, based on everything produced to date in this blog, only stands to reason.  I need to get around (when?) to the Oxford Handbook of Free Will to be more confident that I've done requisite homework in that area, hence the "ambivalence" above about free-will-related statements.  (I'm more confident there is free will than that I know what exactly free will involves.  Am I a free-will libertarian or some kind of compatiblist, or is that a false dichotomy?  Still too busy working my way through the Oxford Handbook of Capitalism to focus my attention on all that right now.  And do I get to the Free Will handbook before getting to the Spinoza and newly-published Karl Marx ones?  I still haven't figured out the perfect research program yet, but I'm trying to via some kind of inductive process of elimination. Meanwhile, what are lefty Trump/Rand-bashers focusing their intellectual energies on?)

[Addendum: This country cannot have a rational conversation about racism or who is a racist when there is not common agreement on what is racism.  The "side" that has cried racism umpteen times does not agree with the other "side" about this, nor do I think (based on countless observations at this point) that the "side" that has cried racism umpteen times is prepared and willing to have a good faith dialogue with the other "side."  The former is too filled with hubris and is too insulated in its own epistemic and values bubble.  "He calls Mexicans rapists" or "His proposed border wall is racist" or "He calls black athletes sons of bitches" or "He said white supremacists are very fine people" is shitty so-called evidence revealing more about the thought processes of the "evidence"-mongers than anything; it doesn't matter if they come up with stronger examples, because they degrade standards of evidence when including the far-weaker ones (and treat them as obviously good evidence, no less).  Observe what they considered good evidence when they recklessly and unaccountably smeared Kavanaugh.  Etc. (etc. etc....)  There is (I believe) structural racism in the country, that it is more extensive than the Right is willing to acknowledge but much less extensive and pervasive than the Left keeps crying, and the Left is guilty of ignoring the perspective of black conservatives like Sowell et al.  The Left squanders credibility by bitching and whining all the time about how unfair things are, and with its reverse-racism of identity politics and race-based university admissions discrimination.  And how they go out of their way to avoid good faith dialogue with the opposition destroys their credibility the most.  Their narratives are ludicrous.  Just get them to address the arguments and positions of Ayn Rand with a strong Rand-defender present and watch them turn into basket cases, which I absolutely guarantee they do and will.]

[Addendum #2: This video makes a good point!  Would that the MAGA-bashers also get the message therein?  Or: how about if everyone wises up, ffs already?  [Addendum to addendum: this was the next video in my feed.  It seems like it's on the right track but at the end Prager says that good people overcome their feelings with the right values.  An Aristotelian phronimos (virtuous/wise person) doesn't experience a conflict between feelings and values.  What Prager is speaking of isn't virtue proper but continence.]]

[Addendum #3: What if the American Left considers it a worthwhile "exchange" to blow all its credibility by crying racism so much if they get a polity more sensitive to racial injustice in return?  But it's a rather unfortunate and unnecessary "exchange," innit?  Once all that credibility gets blown on this topic, what about the next important/urgent topic that arises?  And what if they've already blown their credibility on these other topics as well (which they have)?]

#BlackLivesMatter, #EqualPay and the Anthem

The athletes disrespecting the flag and country during the National Anthem should do better than Trump.  Instead of sowing further division and sending all kinds of the wrong message (and Kaepernick and by extension Nike definitely crossed over the line with the Betsy Ross flag thing without even so much as a word of dialogue with flag- and country-lovers - roughly as shameful and disgraceful as Google's rebuttal-by-firing of James Damore[*]), they should use their creative powers to both respect the flag and send their message.

[*] - This particularly ugly episode in "woke social justice" history has me believing with at least 98% confidence that Rectenwald has these anti-dialogue cultists dead to rights.  I cannot abide these aspiring mini-Maos; disgusting creatures.  I won't even touch the trans issue with a ten foot pole given the rampant toxicity/radioactivity there I've seen just on surface inspection.  If an entity like Google fucks up as badly as it did with Damore, ... .  Good-faith arguments create a "hostile work environment"?  What planet are these creatures on?  Do I want to know?  I'll prioritize my knowing elsewhere, thanks.]

Just an idea that came up on the spur of the moment:  Arm up to heart, with #EQUALPAY in big letters on the visible portion of the arm.  If that doesn't work, push the envelope a little more.  Shirt with both the flag and EQUAL PAY on it, perhaps?  Something, anything other than kneeling or whatever as though the rest of us are supposed to just understand and go along (and the more lightning-fast, the better?).

Don't destroy your credibility by wearing socks depicting cops as pigs.  Don't destroy your credibility by demanding that shoes with the American flag be recalled on the manifestly dubious grands that they might "cause hurt."  (And shame on Bozo O'Rourke, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand and other even-lesser lights among the Dimocrat candidates for supporting Nike in their dickhead decision.)

Make it unmistakably clear that ending police brutality and equal pay (the real kind, not the one demanded by ignorant Dims who throw around bullshitted-up pay stats like so many worse-than-damned-lies) are American causes that all of us - the best within us - can and should get behind.

What ever gave these Dem/Dimwits the idea that infantile antics during the Anthem was a worthy way to protest injustice?  Can you imagine athletes in, say, the '70s or '80s pulling this kind of shit?  No.  There was still respect and civility on the left back then.

Don't give a president doing dickhead moves a victory on this.  Because not respecting the flag/country is also a dickhead move.  Trump has a trump card here: the American flag and what it stands for.

Speaking of which, what on earth happened to the social-justice left over the last 50 years, I wonder:

MLK in Selma, AL (1964)

Obama in Selma (2014)

(Checkmate, Democrats.)

[Also, do not miss the previous posting which ties into this one.  Bunch of un-wisdom-loving dickheads all around.]

Make Presidents Great Again

or: What Would Marcus Aurelius Tweet?

The first four presidents of the United States - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison - were philosophical people.  They loved, cherished, and pursued (and may even have attained to some extent) wisdom.  (The American Philosophical Society [APS] of which they were members was co-founded by Ben Franklin; let's call the aforementioned the Big Five of the American Founding.)  It's not a stretch to say that had America's founding generation not been of the intellectual and moral caliber that they were - had they not been the sort of people who would found or become members of a philosophical society - America probably wouldn't be the great nation it has been.

Unfortunately, their legacy has been squandered, to the point that we have the shitshow of today.  Having an uncouth, unread man as president - elected mainly on the promise of taking on the (intellectually bankrupt and therefore) corrupt swamp that is D.C. - is but a symptom of the problem (that swamp being the bigger one).

Trump tweets out this demonstrably ignorant troll-post earlier today.  The Democrats, who've cried racism umpteen times before, are reeled in yet again; they just can't help themselves and perhaps Trump knows this is how they would react.  (It's so predictable at this point.  Call a shithole country a shithole country, and that's immediately, automatically, incontrovertibly racist and you'd better go along with that instant determination, you deplorable white-supremacy enabler, you.)  This, right after the Dems had an intra-party, short-attention-span news-cycle rift when AOC pulled the race card on the race-card-pulling Nancy Peloser; obviously, they refuse to learn a fucking thing.

This is a shitshow stuff, not a rational and intelligent conversation.

So to get down to the essential/fundamental issue here:

Trump doesn't need to be a Marcus Aurelius to govern wisely.  Aurelius is so unique a historical figure as to be well-known (among those with a clue, i.e., not shitshow-participants...) as both a statesman and a philosopher.  His Meditations are considered to be important and significant contributions to the Western philosophical canon, an accomplishment not known among any other statesman I can think of.  The likes of Jefferson (who served as president of the United States at the same time he served as president of the APS) were indeed philosopher-statesmen, just not known to be significant contributors to the philosophical canon.  The natural-rights doctrine Jefferson was drawing on for the Declaration of Independence originates with John Locke, a top-10-ish Western-canon philosopher.

Nor, given the specializations involved, should we expect a statesman to be a significant contributor to the philosophical canon.  But we have good reason to expect that a statesman should be wise and wisdom-loving.  Whatever his strengths, Trump doesn't show himself to be this, not in any consistent or integrated sense.  Instead of troll-tweeting at 4 a.m., how about he spend 10-15 minutes actually reading from the Meditations and learn a thing or two about wise governance and living.  He says time and time again he knows more about X than the years-long experts in X know - an implausible claim on its face given the necessary time invested for specialized expertise.  It's demonstrably implausible when he says and tweets out things that neither a Jefferson nor a Marcus Aurelius would say/tweet.  (Checkmate, Trump?)

The linked leads are all over this blog for how America (and the rest of the world for that matter) can be transformed to unprecedented greatness via philosophical education, beginning at a young age.  I'm tired of linking them every post.  Look in the subject tags/labels below for more direct leads.  We can make American presidents great again, but it requires making the American citizenry more wise and/or wisdom-loving.

===
On a completely unrelated topic (heh heh), I watched The Revenant last night, having seen it the first time in its theatrical release a few years back.  On a high-def screen it is visually downright amazing (I remember it looking pretty good on the big screen, but not as crisp as on HD); unsurprisingly it received the Academy Award for best cinematography.  As meaning-of-life filmmaking goes, it's tops.  (I've placed it in the top 10 in my list of favorite films, where meaning-of-life significance is the primary ranking criterion.)  Not just the lead character but a great many of the others had it pretty tough by today's standards.  No cell phones, no google, no transportation system, no amenities we take for granted now.  What a bunch of whining, crybaby/crybully pussies the Dems especially and those they coddle are, huh?  Try getting mauled by a bear and left for dead in the wilderness before coming back and crying institutional racism, and then I might give a fuck how all sense of historical and personal perspective might still manage to be lost.  For me to give a fuck you'd have to do philosophical learning and still manage to come away clueless about how to manage life's unfairness with wisdom, because my give-a-fuck antennae would somehow have missed something big.  Just keep it up, Dems.  With the possible exception of Mayor Pete (and he's still a Democrat?), Trump is still less worse than these hubris-filled, wisdom-avoiding, loathsome leftist losers.  Maybe if the country got around to getting the philosophical education it needs (ffs already) its people would have much fewer problems, much less problems they'd be running to the coercive state to try to solve.  (As The Revenant makes clear, it's not just intellectual perfection a la Aristotle that matters, but also a will to power for which I am sure Nietzsche has plenty to say and display.  Rand may have synthesized these two human-life-components to a considerable extent; ya think?  But with Aristotle and Rand I say that the intellectual-perfection part is the more hierarchically fundamental/explanatory to what makes a choiceworthy life overall; we have to use our intellects to learn about will-to-power as a principle to perfect upon as appropriate to our human/rational constitution.  Shorter run, as portrayed in The Revenant, will-to-power may predominate....)  Ideally, a head of state is at least as wisdom-loving as a Jefferson and, even better, has the capacity to write something like the Medidations from scratch; as historical precedent shows, specialization doesn't preclude it.  (Could a full-time statesman compose the Nicomachean Ethics from scratch?  The Metaphysics?  What exactly is the frontier of possibilities here, hmmm?  One thing's for sure, a much smaller and therefore much less bullshit-oriented public-governance apparatus would leave the statesperson with that much extra time at the margins for art, spirituality and philosophy.)

[Addendum: Lest the race-baiting left/Dem nitwits imply that Making Presidents Great Again means "going back to the days when presidents owned slaves" - and that we'd better share that interpretation lightning quick, or else - they should be reminded, as if they really needed the reminding, that the Presidents and the flag are off-limits from their attempts to remove their presence from American life, whether chipping away at the margins with (e.g.) the Betsy Ross flag or otherwise.  That means Mt. Rushmore stays up with the slaveowners intact.  The left/Dem nitwits, when presented with Aristotle's body of writings, would obsess over his defense of slavery and views about the inferiority of women, and scheme ways to inject their faux-outrage into the conversation whenever possible, and divert the conversation from what's top priority.  Grow the fuck up, Dems/leftists; Trump won in good part because you're loathsome losers who refuse to learn.]

[Addendum #2: Let's grant that Trump's critics are on to something - there's a grain of truth there somewhere - that when Trump tweets that the angry radical quartet of "progressive" Dems, who are also women of color, that they should "go back to where they came from," there's something ugly akin to racism going on here.  [There was something very much like racism, if not downright racist in fact whether intended or not, in his tweet to the effect that a judge of Mexican heritage might be biased against him because of his (Trump's) statements about Mexico and immigration.  For this he was called out by fellow Republicans as having gone too far.]  Dems seem to "recognize" this right away, while Trump's supporters insist there's no dog whistling going on here.  If Trump is dog whistling, he's either not very effective at it - since Trump supporters don't seem to pick up on it - or the dog whistling is all occurring at some kind of subconscious level on both his and his supporters' part.  This latter part is actually a good possibility and should be given some good and careful thought (something that neither side is really equipped for; have you seen the shitshow?).  There is something real to the "woke" claims that structural racism still exists and operates by and large subconsciously.  [I just don't buy into all the whining or the idea that racism is still so embedded that it keeps POC down.  What "keeps POC down" is a combination of factors, not the least of which is left/Dem shitting all over personal responsibility, and shitting on going out and achieving anyway despite the obstacles to be overcome.  Watch and learn from Hidden Figures ffs, and stop being a bunch of fucking whiny blame-shifting coddled pussies.  And start actually listening to black conservatives like Sowell for once.  Want to get into a selective university on a level field of play, disadvantaged minorities?  Then improve your performance and remove all doubt rather than seeking handouts and shackles on others including the highest-performing nonwhite minorities.   Learn some bourgeois values and stop recklessly smearing advocates of bourgeois values as white supremacists while altogether failing to address the argument for bourgeois values, you FUCKING MORE-SCHOOLED-THAN-EDUCATED IVY LEAGUE IDIOTS!]  If it's a racist tweet, it's not exactly obvious how it is so if so much racism these days operates at a subconscious level - and perhaps Trump is exploiting the ambiguities here to get Dems to cry racism again, shove foot in mouth, etc.  But clearly it's triggering to say to people of color to "go back where they came from," and Trump is doing this unaccountably while the opposition cries racism unaccountably.  Can the dialogue be improved, somehow?  Anyway, with tweets like this one Trump is being an anti-constructive dickhead who doesn't possess either the knowledge or temperament or wisdom to heal divisions as opposed to fomenting them further, such fomenting seemingly to no other end than to get the Dems to make asses of themselves, which has the short-run effect of helping his re-election bid but the longer-term effect of making the national conversation more of a shitshow.  Next post: I address the controversy around athletes disrespecting the flag - which is what they're doing - and Trump's stupid, further-division-fomenting, anti-constructive response to those athletes.  What would a Rushmore president do?]

[Addendum #3: Gutfeld wipes the floor with the Democrats with one question: How many racists say to go back to where you came from, fix things there, then come back?  (Not that this excuses Trump's terrible messaging about . . . patriotism, I guess?  But god, the Democrats are pathetic.  One thing Trump has done with this is to draw more attention and scrutiny to the absolutely toxic - Jesse Watters calls them radioactive - "Squad."  The intellectually reckless leftism that created the "Squad" is on the Dems & their ilk.)  (A facebook comment pushing back on Gutfeld's point, which seems reasonable but somehow still strikes me as contentious especially in this context, a 'somehow' which I'll put my finger on in due time: "The racist part is insinuating American citizens aren't American by birth based on the only trait they all share, skin color.")]

Will slavery-reparations debates be intellectually bankrupt?

Or will the debates be informed by articles like this one, from a professor at a highly-ranked philosophy program?

Which only invites the question: on what other subjects could the national debate be improved by input from philosophers?

Is Ta-Nehisi Coates the strongest representative for the pro-reparations argument (for either citing or attacking)?  Wouldn't black people benefit tremendously from their case being put forward most prominently/visibly by a philosopher?  Etc. etc. etc.

Shouldn't black kids be put on a vigorous philosophy for children regimen (along with all the other children of course) so that, when older and in concert, they could make their case most strongly (and know the other side's case just as well, etc.)?

Going off the deep end: Sarah Lawrence students smear IHS for "links to hate group"

Linked (ahem) via the Loathsome-Leftist Leiter's blog, a coalition of minority students (not the marginalized conservative student minority, mind you, but ethnic minorities) have made a list of demands of their administrators.  Contained in the list of demands is this:

Reject Funding or Involvement from the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch-Affiliated Organizations
From 2010-2017, Sarah Lawrence accepted $89,500 from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation. Professor Sam Abrams is an alumnus of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University (GMU), of which Charles Koch has served as chairman of the board for almost four decades. The IHS is linked to the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group that proudly “dared go to Charlottesville in August 2017” for the infamous white supremacist demonstration that resulted in the murder of 32-year-old anti-racist protester Heather Heyer. With this company, it is unsurprising that the Koch brothers wield their corporate influence to fight against free speech and progress, as documented by activists including the group Transparent GMU and news publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. The fact that Sarah Lawrence utilizes money from the Charles Koch Foundation, at best, demonstrates a passive condoning of the violent ideology of the Koch brothers and their efforts to maintain the institutionalization of oppression against marginalized people. Accepting such money completely violates SLC’s “progressive” values and displays a gross indifference towards the suffering of marginalized students and faculty. Sarah Lawrence must confront how the presence of Sam Abrams, an anti-queer, misogynist, and racist who actively targets queer people, women, and people of color and is an alumnus of an institute with direct ties to a neo-Confederate hate group, affects the safety and wellbeing of marginalized students. Additionally, Sarah Lawrence will forfeit donations and interactions from the Charles Koch Foundation and never hire alumni from the League of the South-aligned Institute for Human Studies in the future.

So IHS is not just "linked to" a SPLC-designated 'hate group', but also aligned with it, according to these students.

You know, IHS, an organization well-known to libertarians such as myself?  These know-it-all students now want to lump it in with League of the South.  So I did a little investigating, starting with the very link they provided above.  Here's what it says:

LEAGUE OF THE SOUTHAs recently as Spring 2017, the founder of the League of the South Institute and its successor the Abbeville Institute, Donald Livingston, lectured in George Mason University’s economics department as part of an IHS sponsored “Invisible Hand Seminar.”  

The LOS became increasingly militant between being founded in 1994 and being listed as a hate-group in 2000. Livingston served on the IHS Academic Review Committee for a period including 1996-1999. This committee reviews applicants for “Humane Studies” Fellowships, which were originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships,” because they were founded and funded by the (Koch family operated) Claude R. Lambe Foundation. These fellowships were considerable, $18,000 per academic year in 2000 (up from $12,000 in 1999).

LOS founding member Thomas Woods lists himself as the recipient of “two Humane Studies Fellowships and a Claude R. Lambe Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.”
LOS and Mises Institute co-founder, Joseph Stromberg, served many years as an associate editor of the IHS publication, Literature of Liberty. 

Thomas DiLorenzo, was an affiliated scholar at the League of the South Institute, is currently affiliated with their spin-off organization, the Abbeville Institute, and is Mises Institute “faculty.”  DiLorenzo was also a professor in George Mason University’s economics department, and did policy work for Charles Koch’s Cato Institute.

So the nature of the "link" is that certain people who are involved with IHS were also involved with LOS.  If I understand this correctly, if someone does work in some academic area that IHS finds of use for its purpose, but that someone is involved in another, unsavory organization, that means IHS is is thereby "linked" if not "aligned" with the unsavory organization.

Does this sound like a commonsense sort of association to make?

Donald Livingston, the first name listed above, is a Philosophy professor at Emory University.  Whatever views he holds, they're probably no more "out there" than those of another Emory U. Philosophy professor, George Yancy, whom I've discussed before on this blog, and who holds the view that "white America is racist."  Anyway, Livingston disassociated himself from LOS, as mentioned at the very SPLC webpage I linked above:

Within days of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes in New York City and Washington, D.C., [Michael] Hill [LOS's leader] suggested that the attacks were deserved, “the natural fruits of a regime committed to multiculturalism and diversity.” This did not go over well, provoking an exodus of members. Perhaps the most significant blow of all came with the resignation of Donald Livingston as head of the Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History, the “educational arm” of the LOS, which runs workshops and disseminates books and pamphlets. A professor of philosophy at Emory University, Livingston told the Report that he was put off by the group’s racism and other “political baggage.” 

So much for the "link/alignment" between IHS and LOS via Livingston.

How about the next name mentioned, Thomas Woods?  Here's his story about that.  Still think it's all fine and good to "link" him to LOS much less link IHS to LOS via him?

How about Thomas DiLorenzo?  His association with LOS is covered at his wikipedia page.  There is a wiki-footnoted link to an article in which DiLorenzo addresses the LOS topic head-on.  His assessment of LOS is markedly at odds with that of the SPLC; he is very much under the impression, for the various reasons he gives, that "the League of the South advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson."

(Washington and Jefferson are directly and incontrovertibly linked to slavery by being slave owners.  They also managed to be key figures in founding a nation the founding principles of which certify slavery as an abhorrence.  So their record is rather mixed in this regard.  This can hardly mean that praising Washington and Jefferson for their role in the nation's founding, etc., can mean praise for their slave ownership, and it would be ludicrous to "link" someone to praise for slavery by praising these men on other grounds.  But the IHS-LOS "link" looks suspiciously like just such a smeary way of going about things.)

Let's say that SPLC is right that LOS is a hate group and DiLorenzo is wrong that it's an innocuous Washington-and-Jefferson-like group in its stated principles.  That makes DiLorenzo wrong, not a hater or supporter of haters.

The IHS-LOS "link" here strikes me as tenuous and smeary.

Anyway, I also happen to have first-hand experience with IHS, having attended an IHS seminar in 1999 (in Charlottesville, VA, as it happens), and detected not a whiff of racism, white supremacism or any such ugliness.  (The seminar faculty I specifically remember being exposed to were James M. Buchanan, Jeremy Shearmur, and David Schmidtz.)  But what do I know....

Being mainly "associated" myself with the Randian/Objectivist strain of free market or libertarian thought (note: Rand by and large rejected the "libertarian" label for "radical for capitalism"), and hence with Rand's views on racism, I am not intimately familiar with the "Southern" strand that coalesced around Lew Rockwell (and hence Rothbard) and Ron Paul, and the Mises Institute (headquartered in Auburn, AL), but I am aware of the charges against Rockwell and Paul as to racist dog whistles that appeared in Paul's newsletters back in the day.  In that context I'd like to say the following:

Racism in whatever form is fucking idiotic, ugly, vicious, mean, base, evil, obscene, moronic.  There should be no tolerance for it or excusing it.  A real philosopher judges people on the content of their character, i.e., as individuals with moral agency, not on the basis of the other Cs listed on the cover of Kwame Appiah's Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, i.e.: country, color, class, culture, creed.  Whatever these other things say about an individual's identity, they are not fundamental in the way character is.  The most effective route to eradicating racism is moral, i.e., philosophical education, beginning at as young an age as feasible.

This makes me receptive as far as it goes to the voices of minorities who find themselves marginalized in American society.  And I'm also repulsed by voices (on the left or the right, or elsewhere) that seek in some fashion or other to make it about race or other such non-fundamental factors in how we judge or treat people.  And what I "demand" to see from any pro-free-market organization that understands the moral grounds for the free society is an explicit repudiation of racism in whatever form.  The IHS (e.g.) should make it a matter of unequivocal policy that those associating with racist outfits are not welcome to be involved with IHS.

(How to determine whether something or someone counts as a racist is not always easy to determine, but there are commonsense guidelines for that sort of thing.  If someone touts "the achievements of white civilization," they are making a collectivistic rather than individualistic assessment based on skin color when non-skin-color factors serve the explanatory role.  Aristotle's being a student of Plato (who was in turn a student of Socrates) makes for a much better explanation for what contributed to his success as a philosopher, than his supposed skin color.  For instance.  And even if there were incontrovertible scientific evidence of un-erasable differences in IQ between races, what the fuck does that have to do with judging based on moral character?  What the fuck would that have to do with exercising the appropriate form of love (Christian or otherwise) and/or benevolence toward fellow humans (or creatures of God)?  etc.)

Here's how political ideology enters into it: the views espoused by many minority figures in this country these days are infected by thought-viruses of leftism, and so when a 'person of color' says this or that leftism-infused idea about race/class/oppression in America, I am repulsed by the leftist aspect.  I don't love or respect leftists qua leftists; I think they are destructive (whether intentionally or not) to civilized values; when its comes to assessing the merits of Rand's ideas, they are loathsome losers.  When it comes to free market ideas and thinkers, they have an overweening tendency toward intellectually lazy caricatures and smears.  I find their treatment overall of Charles Murray, primarily on the basis of his Bell Curve work, repulsive and vicious.  They fundamentally mischaracterize the capitalist system.  They place far too much emphasis on the political over the philosophical.  Especially the leftists of today go out of their way to decontextualize and assume the worst about any statement coming from a rightist with even vaguely remotely racial connotations; they refuse serious dialogue with rightist opponents about their tendency to ascribe racist views, motivations, biases, and so on to those opponents.  (If there ever were a serious dialogue between Ta-Nehisi Coates and rightists instead of with other leftists only, I haven't detected any evidence of it.)

Even if there is good evidence that President Trump is a racist, the vast majority of the "evidence" they produce is tenuous, decontextualized (e.g., they elide to whom Trump was referring by the "fine people on both sides" during the deadly Charlottesville clash), the-worst-assuming, etc.  (I've already said that there is a low-to-medium probability, on the basis of the solid evidence that's available, that Trump is racist - at minimum in regard to unconscious biases - but to treat it like a slam-dunk no-brainer is to be epistemically negligent, which so many leftists today are.  It's a lot like treating Hillary Clinton as preferable to Trump as some kind of no-brainer, when it isn't.)

So when I say that black leftists are loathsome morons, it's not in virtue of skin color that I say it, but in virtue of their leftism.  And when I say that I find black conservatives (e.g., Candace Owens) to be much more endearing than black leftists, it's because of their conservatism and/or libertarianism.  I find it pathetic how the left, half a century after the Civil Rights movement, engages in mental gymnastics to blame systemic racism predominantly for the gap in socioeconomic status between 'white America' and 'black America' that persists to this day.  How about the failure of leftist social policies to succeed in their intended aims - or, indeed, to be counterproductive to those aims?  How about the fact that it's lefties and Dems who've mostly been in charge of the schools and big cities this whole time?  Leftist ideology by its nature refuses to account for those factors, so they place a lot of explanatory burden on systemic racism.  Perhaps if leftist intellectuals hadn't dropped the ball so fucking badly on the whole socialism thing, they'd have more credibility than what they actually deserve here.

It's due to the influence of those same leftist intellectuals that campus leftists (minorities or otherwise) speak and behave as they do.  Smear the Kochs and IHS?  Sure, it's the sort of thing that leftist intellectuals do, with the complicity of fellow leftist intellectuals.  Smear conservatives who promote 'bourgeois values' as white supremacists, while rejecting dialogue?  Yep.  Hate on capitalism without serious dialogue with its defenders?  That too.  Eschew the need for a diversity of ideas to properly challenge leftist orthodoxy?  Check.  All those "demands" made of Sarah Lawrence's administration?  Emboldened by the example set by the leftist professors, writers, and agitators.

Which is to say, that it's the left as a whole that's been going off the deep end.  What caused this slide into degeneracy?  The failure of leftist ideas to pan out in the real world, combined with a doubling-down by adherents to leftist ideas, combined with an echo-chamber effect.  It's not all that hard to figure out, really.  It's a telltale sign of degeneracy when the left today is debating the alternatives of "democratic socialism" vs. some less extreme ("center-left") variant of "progressive" thought, when the eminently strong libertarian alternative has been around for some decades now (and the wisdom that is contained in conservative thought is likewise being ignored).

(This is not to say that there isn't good evidence of some amount of (ugly, evil) systemic racism, which might even be disentangled from the effects of socioeconomic gaps.  But leftists, who just really can't help themselves, have gone over the top with this theme, flouting common sense.  In fact, the phrase "narcissism of small differences" comes to mind; applied here, it's the idea that if levels of racism were reduced in society to level x, the left would find a way to magnify x in inverse proportion and to increase its demands ever more shrilly for the required corrections.  The idea that racism in America is currently as bad or worse than it was half a century ago isn't something that would be taken seriously, assuming common sense, but could you tell that from the tone of criticism coming from the left nowadays?  Could you tell based on the Sarah Lawrence students' list of demands?  Could you tell that from how lefties/Dems/"progs" comment on what the Trump presidency says about America and/or those who voted for him, as though (again, flouting common sense) it's mainly about racism, xenophobia, etc. - and having nothing to do with how repelled non-leftist Americans are by the leftist/Dem/"prog" alternative in its current form?...)

Besides, if we really are to go down the path that leftists are going down these days, in "linking" mainstream thinkers and organizations with hate groups, what can we make of the "link" between Barack Obama and anti-semitism?