The Slow Pravdaization of Our Press

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

From the O.C. Register:

In legal news, CNN recently settled what is being described as a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High school student Nick Sandmann over its false and misleading coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that left viewers with the impression that the teenager and his pals were being racist provocateurs.

Turns out that Sandmann’s group had been taunted with racially charged, profane rants by the Black Hebrew Israelites. 

...Thanks to Google and shoddy memories, Sandmann will forever be known as the racist kid who harassed a Native American elder, even though there’s absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.

What could push 'the most trusted name in news' to commit such eye-wateringly expensive folly, all in the name of a narrative?

It's a question worth asking. We invite you to have a look at this piece from a few years back, in the hope that you will find it enlightening.

[Re-post, original post here.]

The Slow Sovietization of the West

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

The circular firing squad has finally come for leftist cultural icon J.K. Rowling. Her tweet heard round the world:

Sex is not real, it would appear, to a large number of the twitterati, who promptly dogpiled Ms. Rowling whilst lamenting their now-ruined childhoods:

To understand how such a surreal sequence of events can in fact be unfolding, we offer this piece of research from a few years back. We hope you find it illuminating.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Being A Progressive, Yesterday: Embracing Eugenics

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

[Re-post, original post here.]

It is one of our vanities to imagine that if we'd been born in centuries past, we alone would have stood up against the rampant injustices of the age (slavery, colonialism, religious persecution, etc.) instead of going with the flow like most people did.  Unlike others, we're in no way molded by our era--our righteousness is ageless. (The host's tut-tutting in this otherwise fascinating podcast on slavery is but one example.)

Another point of view is that those of a progressive bent in 2012, had they magically existed in 1912, would have likely followed the leftist causes du jour.  Ditto conservatives.  So what was the progressive doctrine in 1912 that today's liberal can be fairly sure he'd have fervently believed and agitated for?

Eugenics.

Darwin's 1859 work landed in the Western conscience like a rock heaved into a pond.  Nothing would ever be the same.  The idea that such social ills as insanity, mental retardation, and psychopathy were heritable began to seep into the popular mind.  One reason was Francis Galton (cousin of Darwin), who coined the term 'eugenics' and wrote tirelessly about it for decades.

Many in the late 19th century had an almost childlike faith that science could solve humanity's woes.  And it was thought then that some of humanity's woes were:

• The retarded and insane, a burden on the private and public purse, were having retarded and insane children.
• The stupid and dysfunctional poor were having many more children than the intelligent and functional rich.
• (In the U.S:) South and East European immigrants, less intelligent and functional, were hurting the racial stock of the country.

The word 'dysgenics' was coined in 1915 by British physician Caleb Saleeby.  Biologist Julian Huxley, founding member of World Wildlife Fund and first director of UNESCO, described the threat thusly:

In the first of these [addresses to the British Eugenics Society] he reaffirmed that natural selection had become greatly relaxed in contemporary civilizations, noting that “the elimination of natural selection is largely, though of course by no means wholly, rendered inoperative by medicine, charity, and the social services” and that dysgenic fertility was leading to “the tendency to degradation of the germ plasm, ” the result of which will be that “humanity will gradually destroy itself from within, will decay in its very core and essence, if this slow but insidious relentless process is not checked.  (1)

Being a Progressive, Yesterday: Race

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Votes for women-- white women only, please

'The Conservative is afraid of the future,' goes the old trope, 'and the Progressive is afraid of the past.'

What the Progressive especially fears is his own past—that is, his fellow travelers of yesteryear. As Joe Biden is learning, what passed for 'leftist thought' 30 or 40 or 100 years ago can turn a modern-day liberal's ears scarlet. We hope you find this stroll down memory lane as fascinating as we did.

*     *     *

[Re-post, original post here.]

Slate ran a series a few years back, 'Liberal Creationism,' after the brouhaha over James Watson's remark that Afros were less intelligent than other groups.  In this prescient piece, the author warns that many of the old 'racialist' tropes are likely to soon be proved true, and that the average progressive should mentally steel himself for it:

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. 

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. ... You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

The proof is at this point hard to ignore, even if thought leaders are doing their level best to conceal it. As blogger JayMan asks from atop his mountain of scientific data, How much hard evidence do you need?  It is likely that in the next several years some lab finding will 'clinch' the question once and for all, pushing HBD into the mainstream as it has germ theory or heliocentrism.

Microbes and Planets: The skeptics had to be convinced

At that point, what is a sincere progressive to do?  The notion of cognitive or behavioral differences between ethnic groups is, for him, deeply repugnant.

One is tempted to hand him the same 'deal with it' doled out by his ilk to those who found the monkey-to-man mythos unpalatable:

But it may be more kind to invite such folks to spend some time with their own forebears--the Progressives of the late 19th / early 20th centuries.  People who like themselves were born with a desire to make the world a better place, but who unlike themselves did not shy away from the realities of human biodiversity.

So who is this creature, the Progressive?  What did he once believe and may believe again?

Widening Circle of Empathy: The Final Frontier

Sic Transit Gloria Homo Albus

The town of Székesfehérvár, Hungary--a thousand-year-old city home to the original royal court--just applied for the coveted 'European Capital of Culture.' The video they submitted was turned down flat by the E.U. jury. The reason?

(Video at link) 

'There are too many happy white people and crosses, and not enough migrants.' … One of the European Union’s experts said with astonishment: 'This is the propaganda film for white Christian Europe; everyone is white, happy and dancing in the streets.'

Just a few months later, the soccer World Cup final pitted France against Croatia. Before the match, France's Anti-Defamation League posted:

'France's team, multi-colored, multi-ethnic, goes head to head with a Croatian team that's distressingly uniform.  Knowing Croatia's history, no surprise. Balkan-centric, nostalgic for an era which worshiped only brute strength, they play a soccer that is bland, colorless, flavorless…

'France will win—she's already won! She unites, welcomes, understands. … Let's keep fighting so that our Republic's values stay on top, even if—against all odds—we lose.'

Hungary 'too white,' Croatia 'colorless'… Whence this race-obsessed rhetoric? 

Steven Pinker has written at length about the 'widening circle of empathy.'  We at TWCS believe that it has four phases, and that certain Western countries have now entered the fourth and terminal phase: the desire for self-replacement.

On what do we base this claim?

And if true, where does it come from? How do we know when it's approaching? Is there anything we can do to stop it?

The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa

We shall save you from yourselves

The film The Black Panther has been taking Hollywood by storm. Progressives in particular are excited:

The film is set in Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced country in East Africa which was never colonized. For people of African descent, the kingdom of Wakanda finally brings a searing question—what if the colonists hadn’t arrived and Africa had been allowed to develop unencumbered by international influence?—to the big screen.

Africa unchained

Is it true? Would an un-colonized Africa have given the world an advanced, high-tech utopia?

We at TWCS are not so sure. 

Two generations after colonialism ended, alarmed that Africa seemed to be sinking rather than swimming, Tony Blair gathered a 17-person commission to examine the question:

One more commission for Africa

When former colonies across the globe began in the 1960s to prepare themselves for independence, nobody was that worried about Africa. The anxiety was all for Asia. 

That was barely four decades ago. Today Africa is the poorest region in the world. Half of the population live on less than one dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling. People live, on average, to the age of just 46. 

… Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating. Why has it fallen so far behind?

Optimism 

African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response. … Africa requires a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once.  

Investing for economic growth means rebuilding African health and education systems, many of which are now on the point of collapse.

From the World Food Conference in 1974, at which Henry Kissinger declared 'In ten years no child shall go to bed hungry,' to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which vowed to end world hunger by 2015, Westerners have long been wringing their hands over this continent.

A Wakandian renaissance?  On the contrary, it seems the further colonialism recedes into the past, the more desperate Africa's situation becomes. 

Fifty years after independence, then, Tony Blair, Bob Geldof et al. have in effect produced a 464-page manifesto calling for...

...the re-colonization of Africa. 

On what do we base this claim?

Progressives: the New Race Realists

I will save you from your people

One hundred years ago, progressives referred to people of color as 'backward races,' 'degenerate and unprogressive,' 'non-adults.' Today's leftists, of course, believe no such thing. They think all humans are equal, as they tell us at every available opportunity.

Don't they?

Careful: TWCS is noticing a sea change.

The rhetoric and the actions emanating from the left as of late show that they have perhaps taken a U-turn—a salutary one.  People of Color, they are now saying, in fact have little agency, are near-prisoners of their instincts, and thus can't be held to the same standards as other ethnies.

 Take up the Leftist's burden

In other words, today's progressives have become de facto race realists.

On what do we base such a claim?

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Cold Hard Facts

Have we arrived?

Why, one may ask, have so many leftists gone ballistic over a short stoppage on immigration from 7 terror-prone states?  

Via Steve Sailer

Crowds are mobbing airports. Pundits, movie stars, sports players, foreign heads of state, all lifting their voices in horror….

As though such a banal, oft-practiced, and sensible measure were some kind of crime against humanity.

Headlines courtesy of Breitbart News

It is a question worth asking. An alien arriving from another planet might think Trump had just announced he was planning to rain down bombs on these countries for years. (Thus confusing Trump with his predecessor.) Such country-specific migration blocks are nothing new, and have been a favorite of Democrat presidents from Obama to Carter to old FDR himself. Yet our current hysteria continues unabated.

Agitated Hollywoodians won't take this lying down

One can't be blamed for feeling as though one has arrived at Saint Anthony's 1700-year-old prophecy. Truly, has the whole world gone mad?

Though we're hard at work on our next piece, we're taking a quick break to provide a few links to those seeking some facts and data in the midst of this planetary pants-soiling. 

Some may wonder:

The Past is a Real-Talking Country

California recently scrapped plans for a 'John Wayne Day' when his 1971 race-realist comments on Afro-Americans came to light:

High plains realtalker

'We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.'

At the same time, Princeton students are demanding the Woodrow Wilson School be re-named, U. of Missouri is petitioning to remove Thomas Jefferson's statue, and San Fran's School Board president has even said he'll re-name every school bearing the title of a slave owner.

It is surely any people's right to wipe out the names of past heroes who ruffle current mores. We've seen Stalin and Lenin statues come crashing down in Eastern Bloc countries since the wall fell.

But Stalin and Lenin were proper génocidaires who oversaw the repression, imprisonment, torture, and death of tens of millions. Washington and Jefferson were founders of their nation who, uncontroversially in their time and place, owned slaves.

Good-bye, Enver Hoxha; Albania, 1991

But even if one were to convince them that slaveholding was not controversial in those days, this John Wayne dust-up opens a whole new can of worms. Are California's civic leaders even dimly aware of the kind of realtalk in which nearly all our prominent men of yesteryear engaged?  We fear they are not. 

May we gently remind them that When an out-group seemed to under-perform, or over-perform, or just act differently, people noticed.  

And commented.

Such was the way of the world--and still is, in most of the world. Only ethnic NW Euros seem to have caught the disease that pushes them to sing the praises of 'diversity' while at the same time loudly claiming we're all exactly the same.

The multiculturalist's conundrum: 

Why can't we be different yet exactly the same? 

As more and more decisions must be made about naming holidays, schools, bridges, airports, highways, erecting and demolishing statues... How shall our civic leaders be expected to cope? If they start subjecting each historical figure to the 'didn't say anything that offends me today' test, they are in for some sore and cruel disappointment.

We at TWCS would very much like to help them. First, by acquainting them with the fact that the past was, indeed, a real-talking country, as the quotations we are about to share will show. 

Another Californian realtalker 

Second, by helping them step into their ancestors' shoes, in order to pick out what is simple observation of difference (as painful as that may be for us to hear today), and what is real bigotry.  

We propose five categories of historical realtalk (some of which overlap in our quotes):

• Banal my-group preference
• The More Able remarking upon the Less Able
• The Less Able remarking upon the More Able
• Us remarking upon the otherness of Them
• True bigotry

We focus on two out-groups with whom ethnic Europeans have long been in contact: Sub-Saharan Africans and Jews.


So which kinds of old-style realtalk can our city fathers forgive, and which should have them tearing down statues?

Why Do Progressives Get Religion?

 Toronto Children's Choir welcomes Arab refugees, December 2015

(Part II of two) 

We recently took up John McWhorter's assertion that Anti-Racism / Multiculturalism has become a religion. We found many ways in which the argument holds up--clear evidence of dogma, holy writ, acts of piety, fighting heresy, etc.

But a deeper question is, Why? What is it about the progressive mind that makes it so vulnerable to this type of extreme out-group empathy?

 
The proposed reasons are many. Today we offer up a selection that may help us better grasp what we're dealing with when faced with a fervent Multiculturalist who seems immune to all fact and logic.

Out-group empathy gone haywire 

When Progressives Get Religion

Progressive passion play

(Part one of two)

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter penned an essay last year which he defended on CNN:

In 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.

Far-fetched?

For those who insist that religion must include a divine being, not so fast. Communism scholar Peter Sperlich:

Supernaturalism and specific deities are common, but not essential elements of religious systems.  ... Several indisputably “traditional religions” have managed to function perfectly well without specific deities; for example, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Jainism.

... If the chief characteristic of a religion is the belief in the reality of an unseen, it matters not whether this unobservable entity is a specific deity, the “spirit of history,” or the “laws of nature.” (1)

 
But psychology tells us that the conservative is far more apt to traditional religious belief than the progressive. So is McWhorter just blowing smoke?  

As it happens, he is not the first to test the waters of leftist ideology-cum-religion. The 20th century's greatest progressive idea, Communism, has been intriguing scholars for the last 100 years for its likeness to spiritual belief. The millions of pages written on the subject have taught us this if nothing else: The leftist, in his own way, seems just as prone to religious thinking as the rightist.

So to test McWhorter's assertion, let us take a deeper look at how the progressive has succumbed to the religious aspects of both Communism and Multiculturalism. Are there any real parallels? And what can this tell us about the pitfalls to which the leftist mind is vulnerable?

Reacting to Spree Killings, Progressively

[Please excuse this brief detour; we are still hard at work on our 'Re-colonization' series.]

Of the many things Progressives are known for, number one is being on the right side of history.

So in the wake of this latest U.S. spree killing, we turn to our leading leftist voices to help us make sense of the madness.

Having studied their recent corpus on the question of the spree-killer-for-a-cause, we believe we've found some progressive principles to light our way.


I. Do not make generalizations about his group

Being a Progressive, Yesterday: Race

Progressive-era labor unions were a mighty white affair

Slate ran a series a few years back, 'Liberal Creationism,' after the brouhaha over James Watson's remark that Afros were less intelligent than other groups.  In this prescient piece, the author warns that many of the old 'racialist' tropes are likely to soon be proved true, and that the average progressive should mentally steel himself for it:

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. 

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. ... You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

The proof is at this point hard to ignore, even if thought leaders are doing their level best to conceal it. As blogger JayMan asks from atop his mountain of scientific data, How much hard evidence do you need?  It is likely that in the next several years some lab finding will 'clinch' the question once and for all, pushing HBD into the mainstream as it has germ theory or heliocentrism.

Microbes and Planets: The skeptics had to be convinced

At that point, what is a sincere progressive to do?  The notion of cognitive or behavioral differences between ethnic groups is, for him, deeply repugnant.

One is tempted to hand him the same 'deal with it' doled out by his ilk to those who found the monkey-to-man mythos unpalatable:

But it may be more kind to invite such folks to spend some time with their own forebears--the Progressives of the late 19th / early 20th centuries.  People who like themselves were born with a desire to make the world a better place, but who unlike themselves did not shy away from the realities of human biodiversity.

So who is this creature, the Progressive?  What did he once believe and may believe again?