Communism is a “hoax”. It is designed to hijack you. Just like Jussie Smollet.

How Communism Created Jussie Smollett

The direct line from Angela Davis to Jussie’s race hoax. Milo is author.

Praise be to Jussie Smollett for making Black History Month the success we were all hoping for. By now, you’ll have heard about the appalling fraud he perpetrated against the American popular consciousness, a hate crime hoax at once so audacious and so laughably obvious that it represents the apotheosis of a genre I’ve been cataloguing for fun for the last half-decade. Other people have knitting or Sudoku; I keep a tally of progressive hoaxes. Dorky, I admit.

But what you probably don’t know is that Smollett isn’t just the exemplum perfectum of social justice and its insatiable appetite for lurid horror stories, real or imagined. He’s something more: The inevitable, gruesome, twenty-first century millennial product of a radical communist household. And this biographical revelation explains almost everything about how he looks at the world, and what led him to self-immolate in the way he did.

Intellectual history consists largely of showing who was talking to whom and tracing the effects of influential thinkers’ and activists’ ideas. Guess what? You can draw a straight line, through real people, from Herbert Marcuse to Jussie Smollett. It turns out that his mom was, and remains, best friends with Marcuse disciple Angela Davis, the Communist Party candidate for Vice President in 1980 and 1984.

And by Communist, we of course mean “Russia-backed”—not in the speculative wet-dream-CNN-Trump-scandal sense of being backed by Russia, but in the actual, bought-and-paid-for-by-red-devils sense of the phrase.

Angela Davis’s candidacy for Kremlin-funded communists disappears and reappears from her Wikipedia entry all the time. You never know if it’ll be there on a given day. Perhaps that’s because Davis is now somewhat embarrassed by her past as a Communist Party member. Not because it was dangerous and insane, you understand, but because it wasn’t extreme enough. In 2009, she laughed and sneered as she told the head of the NAACP that she really struggled over whether to join the Communist Party because she considered it “so conservative … I wanted to do something more interesting and radical.”

Davis wistfully added that she still sometimes imagined “the possibility of moving beyond the democratic socialist arrangement.” In the same interview, she explained how she was followed by the FBI from the age of six, and taught by her Communist Party parents never to speak to the authorities. Who headed the Communist Party when Davis was six, and died a couple of months after her ninth birthday? That would be Josef Stalin.

Davis was a fan of Jim “Kool-Aid Killer” Jones and hated Solzhenitsyn’s fellow dissidents in Russia. Progressives are regularly mystified when her pathological hatred of Israel presents her with hurdles to professional advancement and various gongs. Needless to say, Davis is now making a living on the diversity circuit on college campuses. These days she’s a professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, in something called—I kid you not—the “History of Consciousness Department.” She’s also, naturally, a former director of the university’s Feminist Studies department. That’s when she’s not hosting the Smollett family for lunch on Mother’s Day.

Communism isn’t the threat it used to be, despite the best efforts of a few ludicrous Democrat congresswomen. Maybe because it’s hard for North Korea to field a powerful enough army when all they have to eat is grass. But its ideological descendent, third-wave feminism, is busy tearing apart American society. I’ll get in trouble with everyone editing this magazine and just about everyone reading it for saying so, but feminism, the social incarnation of Marxist thought, is way more deadly than communism.

When Marxism became comprehensively discredited as an economic system after the Cold War, its fans in the academy began looking for ways the oppressor/oppressed dynamic might be put to use elsewhere. They discovered there was an almost inexhaustible supply of imaginary social problems that could be examined through that lens. Thus women, minorities, gays and other supposedly marginalized groups were handed victimhood scripts with which to fight their “oppressors.”

No matter the complexities of individual circumstance, the oppressors were always the same: white Western heterosexual male Christian capitalists – just coincidentally the same people economic Marxism had tried and failed to conquer. Hence the birth of what even the Left-wing Atlantic has described as contemporary victimhood chic.

Today’s social justice loonies almost make you wistful for the days of the old hard Left. At least those guys enjoyed a drink and a laugh. Their offspring, the so-called “red diaper babies,” aren’t beyond saving. The most famous one of all is our own David Horowitz. But they do need intervention, lest their parents’ communism metastasize into something even worse. Assuming it’s not already too late.

As Allan Bloom writes in The Closing of the American Mind, feminism has destroyed classic texts far more comprehensively than any previous theoretical lens, because it tears down the great books’ heroes and heaps scorn on their erotic bonds with the women who love them. And as we’ve seen from the last decade of wage gap mythology and moral panics about campus rape culture, driving the sexes apart destroys entire civilizations far more effectively and irrevocably than furious Marxist literature and a few barmy communist activists.

Stripping society of the very idea of virtuous manhood and heroic masculine ideals is just about the only sure-fire route to unraveling everything good about that society, which is why modern feminism and bog-standard Marxism still exist in intricate symbiosis. Communism agitates for control of the means of production. But feminism demands control of the means of reproduction—a far more powerful resource. Communism merely wants to turn women in to workers, but feminism tells them that motherhood is beneath them. Marxists hate success, but feminists hate life itself.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jussie Smollett’s father, who died in 2014 after a long battle with cancer, doesn’t play a very influential role in the story of his early life, and that Smollett, who was raised “in the orbit of the Black Panthers,” therefore turned out to be a gay crypto-communist. Nor that his family, all of whom lent their voices to the self-destructive and ultimately pointless Black Lives Matter movement, moved into roles in the entertainment industry with heavy social-justice overtones.

Little is known about Smollett’s father, a Russian-Polish Jew, but if he too was cozy with the Bobby Rush-Fred Hampton Chicago Panthers—the New York Times is too coy to tell us in its admiring profile of the family—then his father was cozying up to an organization with roots in a notoriously violent street gang called the Blackstone Rangers. What we do know is that the largest presence in young Jussie’s life was his mother and her female friends, women like Angela Davis. Jussie lists Panther founders Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Julian Bond as some of his mother’s closest intimates.

Smollett’s a very specific kind of homosexual sociopath I recognize from the mirror—I mean, from my years on the gay scene. He’d be first in line to join the SS or the KGB (the latter, probably), because he loves the sexy uniforms and he doesn’t give a shit about other human beings. If he’d learned from a strong, positive masculine role model the heroic manly virtues of courage, integrity, resilience, honesty, hard work, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility, he would never in a million years have considered the slimy, disreputable and pathetically transparent maneuver with which he ended his career.

No one talks enough about the damage overbearing, misandrist mothers and delinquent or weak fathers do to children, but it’s there for all to see in America’s great maladies: gangs, runaway gayness and Gender Studies. Each stem from a twisted understanding, or an absence, of responsibly channeled manliness. The reason black boys in America do so poorly, even relative to black girls, isn’t racism—otherwise you’d have to explain why boys are on the receiving end of it when girls aren’t—but the lack of dads in their lives.

Marxist feminism’s systematic expulsion of masculinity from the realm of aspirational values produces grotesque results. Feminism votes men into irrelevance and degradation, scorning fatherhood, depriving children of male role models as they unwind the protective institutions of civil society. Women have been subverting the labor market for decades, which hurts both sexes. This is particularly the case in the entertainment industry, where compensation is pegged to successful attention-seeking. That’s a girl thing: Men are supposed to compete on skill.

Jussie Smollett wanted more money, but he didn’t know how to compete for it honorably, because his understanding of the jobs marketplace was distorted by both feminism and communism. Rather than go for a big-paying movie role, or brush up his acting or singing, he decided to cast himself as a victim of oppressive forces. That’s a direct product of the communist-infused social justice milieu in which he was reared.

Jordan Peterson discusses the necessity of rough and tumble play. Really cool observations about boys, fathers and growing up.

Here is a fun photo when i was your age, ski racing at Pico Vermont. That is Todd Schneider and his father (our Coach). I look just like Brig.

Eric and I have followed similar paths- through Academia and Finance. He has a very interesting theory. I wish I could discuss with you. So much in here.

The Theory of Geometric Unity is an attempt by Eric Weinstein to produce a unified field theory by recovering the different, seemingly incompatible geometries of fundamental physics from a general structure with minimal assumptions. On April 1, 2020, Eric prepared for release a video of his 2013 Oxford lecture on Geometric Unity as a special episode of The Portal Podcast.

Eric has set April 1 as a new tradition, a day on which we are encouraged to say heretical things that we truly believe, in good faith, without fear of retribution from our employers, institutions, or communities. In this spirit, Eric released the latest draft of his Geometric Unity manuscript on April 1, 2021.

Brig, Soren Reidar – Are you a sucker? are you naive to your schoolteachers?

“Anti-Racist” Education Is Neither

Well-meaning Americans are being suckered into an illiberal political cabal.

Days before the Fourth of July, the famed KIPP charter schools announced they’d be abandoning their longtime slogan: “Work Hard, Be Nice.” In a statement, KIPP’s leaders said they were dumping the decades-old slogan because “Working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism.”

KIPP lamented that the mantra encourages students to be “compliant and submissive” and “supports the illusion of meritocracy.” The missive closed by declaring that the slogan was at odds with KIPP’s goal: “Schools that are actively anti-racist.”

Slogans change from time to time—that in itself is fairly unremarkable. But KIPP’s stated reasoning puzzled many. “I have interviewed hundreds of teachers, students and staffers at KIPP since 2001,” wrote education columnist Jay Matthews at the Washington Post. “This is the first time I have heard any of them criticize the slogan.” Indeed, one might question why a four-word mantra should be burdened with having to “dismantle systemic racism” or how the nation’s largest charter school network decided working hard and being nice were at odds with its educational vision.

The answer lies with KIPP’s stated desire to be “actively anti-racist.” This summer, the tragic legacy of American racism came to the fore. This has created propitious, historic opportunities to confront real societal challenges. Yet “anti-racism,” for all its high-minded claims and surface appeal, proves to be, on close examination, a farrago of reductive dogmatism, coercion, and anti-intellectual zealotry that’s remarkably unconcerned with either improving schooling or ameliorating prejudice.

There’s a tragic bait-and-switch at work. Americans who care passionately about equality and justice have been dragooned into advancing an incoherent, illiberal agenda. Aspiring anti-racists are mounting a misguided assault on the very mores and habits of mind that undergird liberty, equality, and healthy communities.

Reasonable readers may regard such assertions with skepticism. How can “anti-racist” education be anything but healthy? After all, it’s self-evident that we want students to reject racism. The simple answer is that the doctrine of “anti-racism” doesn’t offer what’s promised on the tin.

The label “anti-racism” is wildly deceiving — a crude bit of rhetorical flim-flammery, akin to when Jim Crow Southerners rechristened the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” No, a more fitting sobriquet for the movement that marches under the banner of “anti-racist education” is “anti-educational authoritarianism.” This is a strong statement, but one we believe we can support.

The Reach of Anti-Racist Education

The racial turmoil and civil unrest that has swept the nation since the police killing of George Floyd in May has helped make a star out of Robin DiAngelo, author of the 2018 bestseller, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Aided along by gushing interviews on outlets such as the “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon and “CBS This Morning,” DiAngelo has become a must-have speaker for colleges, foundations, and corporate giants, pocketing five-figure fees for diversity seminars where she teaches that “White identity is inherently racist.” As DiAngelo, who is white, told a packed San Francisco crowd last July, “Internalized white superiority is seeping out of my pores.”

If this summer made a star of DiAngelo, it turned Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi into America’s race guru. Kendi, named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People of 2020,” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016 for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. No one has done more to popularize “anti-racism” than Kendi, thanks largely to the success of two more recent works: Antiracist Baby, a 24-page picture book released in summer 2020, and 2019’s mega-hit, How To Be An Antiracist.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist became education’s Talmudic source on matters of race. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which bills itself as “the only national museum devoted exclusively” to educating the public on matters of race, features Kendi’s book on its “Talking about Race” resource page for teachers. Cornell, UC Berkeley, and a large complement of major universities featured it on their summer reading lists. It’s ubiquitous on the “suggested reading” lists shared by foundations, advocacy groups, and professional education organizations. Even the National Park Service offers materials to help high school teachers leadguided readings of How To Be An Antiracist. Kendi earns top dollar for more personal sessions: In August, Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools had Kendi headline their “Racial Truth and Reconciliation Week,” paying $20,000 for a 45-minute virtual presentation and a 15-minute Q&A. 

It’s safe to say that nothing in education today has the same cache as being, in the words of KIPP, “actively anti-racist.” Writing in Education Week this February, Bettina Love, professor at the University of Georgia, winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, former Hiphop Fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute, and co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, declared that “active anti-racism” is “the most important step” teachers can take. “Anti-racist teaching is not a teaching approach or method,” Love instructs, “it is a way of life.”

And it’s a pretty prescriptive way of life, to boot. Love, for instance, has called for the “replacement of watered-down and Eurocentric materials from educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.” The superintendent of New York’s East Harlem Scholars Academies took to Education Week to instruct “white teachers” not to talk about the individual accomplishments of black Americans, because to do so is to “teach students that ‘really good, really successful’ Black folks are exempt from racist structures.”

Perhaps the best-known anti-racist curriculum was born from the New York Times Magazine’s factually challenged “1619 Project,” which has been skewered by a series of accomplished scholars for inaccuracies, omissions, and misrepresentations. The 1619 Project, launched in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, spawned “The 1619 Project Curriculum,” which seeks “to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date.” The curriculum has been embraced as a resource by states and major districts, with the Pulitzer Center reporting last year that the materials have already made their way into more than 3,500 classrooms. 

A Poison, Not A Palliative

It’s easy to appreciate anti-racist education’s eager reception. Calls to reject racism, promote equality, and expand opportunity transcend ideological divides and resonate with Americans of all stripes. If there’s anything that should help bind together a fractured nation, it’s extending justice and providing opportunity to all of America’s youth. After all, what focused the nation’s concern in the first place  was the fact that most Americans believe the police killing of George Floyd or the murder of Ahmaud Arbery to be part of a long line of tragedies with too many antecedents.

We should address America’s troubled legacy on race and the inequities of state violence. And schools and colleges obviously have a crucial role to play in helping students make sense of these thorny issues. Yet, for all this, much of what passes for anti-racist education is a poisonous exercise in caricature and rank bigotry, with troubling consequences for prosaic educational activities like teacher training, grading, and research.

Take, for instance, the anti-racist materials that schools are using to train their K-12 teachers. The materials used by the Denver Public Schools teach educators that “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective,” distinguishing between “good/bad” and “right/wrong,” and valuing an “emphasis on being polite” are all distinctive characteristics of white culture. The same is true of the “individualist” mindset that “if something is going to get done right, I have to do it.” In Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, the Dismantling Racism Workbook used to train teachers this summer highlighted “15 Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” including a weird admixture of positive and negative stereotypes, including “perfectionism,” “progress is bigger, more,” “right to comfort,” and “defensiveness.”

Anti-racists also want to end traditional grading practices, which they deem “profoundly discriminatory.” Cornelius Minor, a leading “Grading Equity Advocate,” is an author and speaker who has worked with Columbia Teachers College and the International Literacy Association. He seeks to dismantle “pernicious” grading practices, such as teachers reserving A’s for students who demonstrate understanding of the subject matter. This, he explains, is because one “cannot separate grading practices” from “the history of classism, sexism, racism, and ableism in the United States.” To Minor, a teacher’s inability to perceive a student’s knowledge is evidence of the teacher’s racism, not the student’s ignorance. While Minor is fuzzy regarding the remedies, he is sure that teachers must abandon problematic ideologies such as expecting that students “should know” things.

When it comes to facilitating tough discussions about race, a favored practice among anti-racist educators is, ironically, to sort students and staff by race. These “affinity groups” typically involve one group for black participants, a second for “non-black people of color,” and a third for white participants. Such racially determined groupings are regularly utilized at universities, by Teach For America, and even in high schools. Without a hint of irony, Teach For America makes this exercise in apartheid part of its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” training for new teachers. Absent is any acknowledgment by these self-avowed anti-racists that they’re resurrecting practices that would’ve been applauded in the Jim Crow south.

As for higher education, by now it’s all too plain that colleges and universities are willing to let ideological zealots squelch free inquiry. This fall, the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education issued a “Joint Statement in Support of Anti-Racist Education,” endorsed by 16 scientific societies, which instructed that researchers “must stand against the notion that systemic racism does not exist.” Issue settled, discussion over. While the document left unsaid what should happen to a scholar inclined to question the decree, experience has taught that they can anticipate everything from public intimidation to formal investigation and discipline.

In 2017, for example, Duke Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths resigned after facing university punishment for criticizing university-sponsored racial-sensitivity training. In 2018, Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley spent months being secretly investigated by his university’s diversity office for publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly article positing that colonialism had positive consequences as well as negative ones. This July, hundreds of members of the Princeton community signed a faculty statement demanding that the university create an “internal committee” of the “actively anti-racist” to supervise teaching, research, hiring, and university practices. One classics professor, Joshua Katz, wrote of his refusal to sign the letter, only to be immediately denounced by his department and the university president.

Education as Reeducation

In short, KIPP’s bizarre decision to abandon its “Work Hard, Be Nice” motto is part and parcel of the broad push for anti-racist education. Implicit in all of this is the cartoonish conviction that values such as hard work, niceness, or subject knowledge can somehow be racially proprietary. It’s as insipid as it is insulting when anti-racist Glenn Singleton, president of the racial-sensitivity training outfit Courageous Conversation, tells the New York Times Magazine that “scientific, linear thinking” and “cause and effect” are among the “hallmark[s] of whiteness.” Across Africa and Asia, air-traffic controllers and cardiovascular surgeons put a lot of faith in things such as “linear thinking” and “cause and effect.” When they do so, are they practicing “whiteness”?

Anti-racist caricatures only make sense if one sticks to generalizations and abstractions. In the real world, for instance, surveys show that black parents in the U.S. are a bit more likely than white parents to think it’s important to teach their kids traits such as “hard work” and “persistence.” The truth is, any drawling Mississippi legislator who suggested that there was something uniquely “white” about objectivity or hard work would be rightly condemned as a racist anachronism. It’s a remarkable notion of anti-racism that assigns widely admired human characteristics to a single race—and then suggests that those who disagree are the bigots!

In service of this troubling doctrine, anti-racists have developed an equally troubling vision of education that unabashedly regards schools as places of ideological conditioning. Take Bettina Love, who asserts, “We need therapists who specialize in the healing of teachers and the undoing of Whiteness in education.” If any teachers are reluctant to be “healed,” Love tells her acolytes to make sure they’re “boycotting” and “calling out” those who resist. Among the many reforms that the KIPP charter schools adopted this summer was requiring that hires pledge their “commitment to anti-racism” as “a condition of employment.” Boycotts, “calling out,” loyalty oaths: These are the norms not of liberal education, but of bare-knuckle political activism.

Students have embraced this spirit of cultural revolution. As The New York Times approvingly reported this summer, students have “repurposed large meme accounts, set up Google Docs and anonymous pages on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, and wielded their personal followings to hold friends and classmates accountable” for wrongthink. Similarly, “Black At” Instagram accounts have become a popular forum for allegations of campus racism. Purportedly “racist” acts include complaints that a “professor didn’t remember my name,” that classmates didn’t connect with a student on LinkedIn, that a professor nominated the student for an “activism” award, and that a student failed to use the term “white supremacy” in a law school discussion of Loving v. Virginia.

Since anti-racist dogma holds that anything and everything can be racist, it frequently exhibits a penchant for labeling both sides of an issue “racist,” leaving aspiring anti-racists without recourse to a reliable moral compass. For instance, while high academic expectations represent the racist imposition of “white” values, anti-racists also point out that low expectations constitute a racist refusal to believe in black students. As one former Teach For America corps member explains, TFA training taught that teachers couldn’t expect families to provide school resources for their (mostly low-income) students, that such an expectation was a matter of imposing privileged “white” norms. However, when she mentioned how disruptive it was to have to continually hand paper and pencils out to students, she was upbraided for not expecting more of students of color. Being strict was racist; so was being lax.

These kinds of catch-22’s can leave impassioned educators floundering. This July, the Washington Post presented the saga of Christine Tell, a Tulsa teacher, and her journey into anti-racism. When the preschool where she taught was accused of being a “whites only school” based on website photos, Tell suggested creating a scholarship program. Her anti-racist allies, who’d insisted something had to be done, quickly denounced the idea of such scholarships as racist. The story recounts Tell’s repeated offerings to anti-racism and the rejection of each, in turn, as more racism. In the end, asked if her efforts would “make life better for anyone in the black community,” Tell said she was unsure, allowing “she couldn’t be certain because she wasn’t certain of anything.” This, of course, is the point. If every act is racist, the only recourse is to stop asking questions and just pledge “allyship” to the endless, amorphous anti-racist agenda.

The eerie echoes of Orwell’s 1984 are hard to miss. In that novel’s closing moments, a shattered Winston, the rebellious protagonist who had once insisted that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four,” is reduced to zealously asserting that 2 + 2 = 5 if the Ministry of Love says so. At times, anti-racist excess shades over into the literally Orwellian, such as when Brooklyn College professor of math education Laurie Rubel insists that declaring “2 + 2 = 4” is nothing more than “white supremacist patriarchy.”

Consider the case of poor Matthew Mayhew. This fall, Ohio State’s William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor of Educational Administration penned a heartfelt paean cheering the return to college football as a much-needed salve for the stresses of COVID-19 and political division. Mayhew celebrated football’s “bipartisan” appeal, the ability of players to speak up for social change, and the way in which football’s civic rituals encourage Americans to “respect” one another.

Five days later, an anguished Mayhew recanted it all. He apologized for his “uninformed and disconnected whiteness,” for putting “the onus of responsibility for democratic healing on Black communities whose very lives are in danger every single day,” and for his belief that “the Black community” would “benefit from ideals they can’t access.” Like a broken victim in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, Mayhew closed by confessing that he can no longer trust his moral compass but will seek to develop one via an arduous course of “antiracist learning” that “center[s] the question: What can I do to unlearn patterns that hurt and harm Black communities and other communities of color?” 

Anti-racist education isn’t educational in any sense that accords with the liberal scientific or philosophical tradition. That’s no great surprise, given that what anti-racists mean by “education” is something more typically understood as indoctrination. Schools and colleges are places where those who may have harbored divergent thoughts are intellectually hobbled and coerced into compliance.

A Truly Anti-Liberal Doctrine

Behind the fine-sounding platitudes that constitute anti-racism’s public face is a morass of incoherent toxicity that’s far more radical than is generally understood. There’s a duplicitous shell game at work: Well-meaning Americans who care about racial inequality and state violence may wind up embracing anti-racist education without realizing they’re endorsing a host of troubling claims about history, reality, logic, race, and individual motivations.

Seeing themselves as enlightened champions of justice, anti-racists have embraced a series of beliefs which are held to be sacred and unquestionable. There is no room for competing hypotheses or views. On the contrary, the simple failure to embrace anti-racist doctrine marks a person or an idea as, ipso facto, racist.

Ibram X. Kendi, for example, starts from the premise that racism is caused not by prejudice but by policy. “Racist policy,” in his phrasing, begets “racist ideas,” not the other way around. And, because racism is not caused by individual animus, it’s a matter of group outcomes: Any statistically measurable disparity between racial groups is always, without exception, the product of racism (except when it’s not, as in the case of professional sports).

Kendi adds to this his central contention that everything in the world—every action, idea, thought, and policy—is either “racist” or “anti-racist.” “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” he writes in How to Be an Antiracist. “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” Not only is racism all-encompassing, it also makes unceasing demands: All “racist” disparities demand an anti-racist response. Thus, Kendi’s “anti-racism” rejects the very idea that something can exist outside his racial frame. There is no opting out, only confession: “Only racists say they’re not racist,” he explains.

Robin DiAngelo, too, promotes an anti-racism that is both all-encompassing and infallible. “White identity is inherently racist,” she writes in White Fragility. “A positive white identity is an impossible goal.” She combines this charge with her concept of “white fragility” — her mendacious term for an individual’s impulse to defend his or her character from charges of racism. Since all white people are inherently racist, DiAngelo teaches that any effort to dispute that fact is evidence of “white fragility” and, thus, a reaffirmation of one’s innate racism.

In this way anti-racism stacks the deck against those who would interrogate its premises with logic or evidence. Such efforts are deemed disqualifying, prima facie evidence of the disputant’s fragility and racism. It bears repeating: Any doctrine that treats disagreement as evidence of moral turpitude is more suitable to the gulag than to the schools and colleges of a free nation.

And yet anti-racists explicitly reject rational debate and persuasion. As Kendi explains in How to Be an Antiracist, “I had to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds.” Kendi concludes that, “Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy” but “it is a suicidal strategy.” This is why, he writes, teachers must “literally teach their students antiracist ideas”—because anything else “is to effectively allow their students to be educated to be racist.”

Of course, abandoning persuasion and argument also enables anti-racists to ignore their own doctrinal inconsistencies. While anti-racists argue that statistical disparities between racial groups are proof of racism, for instance, they also preach that cause and effect, scientific thinking, and “Western” mathematics are the poisonous handmaidens of white supremacy. If numerical group disparities are the measure of racism, how can anti-racists rely on purportedly racist analytic tools and methods to reveal those disparities?

Similarly, anti-racists teach that there is one proper way to look at the world—that only anti-racism reveals the oppressive realities of American life—even as they declare “objectivity” a myth. “DiAngelo,” Daniel Bergner records in a lengthy profile for New York Times Magazine, “likes to ask, paraphrasing the philosopher Lorraine Code: ‘From whose subjectivity does the ideal of objectivity come?’” Kendi, too, declares objectivity “dead.” And in defending her factually challenged handiwork, Nikole Hannah-Jones, head of the 1619 Project explained, “The 1619 Project explicitly denies objectivity.” 

Anti-racists go on to make a full-throated argument for cultural relativism. “To be an antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals,” writes Kendi. This is rank sophistry. If anti-racists really viewed all cultures as equally valid, and not subject to judgment “by the arbitrary standard of any single culture,” they’d have no basis for claiming that the U.S. is a “racist” nation or that apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow-era South was any worse than any other, more tolerant culture. More to the point, if you “deny objectivity,” then what grounds have you to say that racism is indeed a thing that should be opposed? As Ravi Zacharias once put it: “In some cultures they love their neighbors; in other cultures, they eat them. Do you have any preference?” According to anti-racism, you cannot. There is no value, educational or otherwise, in a doctrine whose principles, when taken at face value, reject the very basis of its existence.

These incongruities may help explain why anti-racists take refuge in opacity. Indeed, the high priests of anti-racism concede they have trouble being clear about what they have in mind. In a staggeringly tone-deaf and ultimately quite revealing passage, Kendi admits that he, the patron saint of anti-racism, in the book he titled How to Be an Antiracist, has trouble explaining his doctrine to the unconverted:

I struggle to concretely explain what ‘institutional racism’ means to the Middle Eastern small businessman, the Black service worker, the White teacher, the Latinx nurse, the Asian factory worker, and the Native store clerk who do not take the courses on racism, do not read the books on racism, do not go to the lectures on racism, do not watch the specials on racism, do not listen to the podcasts on racism, do not attend the rallies against racism.

But the appeal of opacity becomes evident when anti-racists do stumble into moments of clarity. DiAngelo astonishingly asserts in chapter one of White Fragility, “I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism. I can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism. I can get through a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.” Each line of this is ludicrous. It’s more accurate to say that it’s virtually impossible to complete a single year of graduate school or teacher education without engaging in such discussions. (DiAngelo, a professor in an education school which offers 9 different classes on race and houses 17 faculty members specializing in “equity studies,” assuredly knows this.) Setting aside race-infused law school orientations, it’s unimaginable that a law student could avoid the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board, or the vast archives of American law that address issues of race. 

The Work of Cranks

The fundamental unseriousness of anti-racist education is not an accident; it is, too often, the product of unserious thought. For illustrative purposes, we’ll stick to Kendi, the avatar of the anti-racist movement. In his memoir, Kendi recounts different moments along his journey of intellectual self-discovery, including debates had with his college roommate, Clarence, at Florida A&M University. In one such passage, Kendi recounts a day in 2002 when he approached Clarence having “finally figured White people out.”:

“They are aliens,” I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That’s why they are so intent on White supremacy. That’s why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens.”

Clarence listened, face expressionless. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m dead serious. This explains slavery and colonization. This explains why the Bush family is so evil. This explains why Whites don’t give a damn. This explains why they hate us so damn much. They are aliens!”

In a nod to the obvious, Kendi describes his younger self as “intensely gullible, liable to believe anything, a believer more than a thinker.” A careful reader may wonder whether that continues to apply.

Kendi notes, for instance, that, at various times, he has endorsed Michael Bradley’s theory in The Iceman Inheritance (which posits “that the White race’s ruthlessness is the product of its upbringing in the Ice Age”) and Afrocentric psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing’s notion of biological determinism (which holds that, because whites are a global minority, they are filled with a “profound sense of numerical inadequacy and color inferiority” and an “uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression”).

Kendi’s enthusiasm for crackpot musings has been undimmed by his rise to international acclaim. In a cover story for the September issue of The Atlantic, the tenured history professor wrote, “The motto of the United States is E pluribus unum—‘Out of many, one.’ The ‘one’ is the president.” Wrong on two counts. The national motto is, in fact, “In God we trust.” More importantly, the “one” is not the president but the union of thirteen colonies forming a single nation.

Kendi has recently argued for the adoption of an “antiracist amendment” to the U.S. Constitution that would make “racist ideas by public officials” unconstitutional. Of course, given that Kendi has flagged particular views on taxation, pot legalization, private healthcare, school testing, and more as “racist,” this would gut the First Amendment’s free speech protections (Kendi appears untroubled by this possibility). The fact that such a figure is regarded as anti-racist education’s oracle, and not a fringe mediocrity, is telling.

Where’s the Pushback?

Foundations and media outlets, which might be expected to provide some due diligence and scrutiny, have instead leapt aboard the anti-racism bandwagon. In June, Facebook committed “$10 million to anti-racism groups” while the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative issued “A Note to Our Grant Partners” pointing to the “systemic racism that is the defining fault line of our country” and making clear that grantees needed to “name and better address how racial injustice perpetuates disparities and inequities.” In August, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave Kendi $10 million to endow his new Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. In September, Andrew W. Mellon gave $15 million to Rutgers, whose English faculty had just declared an anti-racist war on “academic English,” for a new Institute on the Study of Global Racial Justice.

Chalkbeat, which bills itself as providing “essential education reporting across America,” committed in its “Pledge to Readers” to add “antiracism to the list of core values that guide our work.” Chalkbeat quoted Kendi’s doctrine that “it is not enough to be ‘not racist.’ We must be antiracist.” Wary readers were right to be dubious of the assurance that’s Chalkbeat “commitment to telling the truth without consideration of ideology or advocacy has not changed.”

The mainstream media has exhibited similar enthusiasm. The New York Times, of course, has invested enormous resources and reputation in the 1619 Project, which claims that the U.S. was founded as a “slavocracy,” and has heavily promoted its anti-racist “Nice White Parents” podcast. In reporting on this fall’s school closings, the Washington Post has compared pandemic pods to school segregation and cites pods as an example of “opportunity hoarding,” while the Times has judged that such efforts “perpetuate racial inequities rooted in white supremacy.”

Even if funders and the media are on the bandwagon, why has there been so little pushback from advocates, scholars, and public officials? There are several reasons.

For many years, skeptics just never took this stuff that seriously. It’s hard to blame them for that. When a movement’s iconic thinkers say they think white people are aliens, offer arguments that wouldn’t impress a high school debater, and openly preach reeducation and authoritarian dogma, it can all seem pretty risible. And even as this zealotry spread from little-observed corners of academe into Hollywood and the elite media, attempts to raise cautions were still generally regarded as hysterical overreactions.

More importantly, there just hasn’t been much incentive for those on the center-Left or center-Right to speak up. Legitimate issues of educational equity exist, and serious people don’t want to give the impression of dismissing them. But there is a darker undercurrent here, too. As John McWhorter has reported in the Atlantic, center-Left scholars report that they are “afraid to broach these topics,” are “too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure,” and fear colleagues who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights.”

Meanwhile, even those educators and advocates concerned about anti-racist excesses have been all too conscious that speaking up can be a career-killer. Many were left cowed by events at Ascend Public Charter Schools in 2019, when longtime CEO Steven Wilson, a former Harvard instructor and champion of progressive discipline reform, was bizarrely attacked as a racist and forced from his post after writing that schools must seek to provide “all students the knowledge and faculties of mind that had once only been afforded the elite.” As Fordham Institute scholar Robert Pondiscio observed in 2016, “Reformers are routinely pilloried as racists and bigots if they deviate from narrowly cast views on race, gender, income inequality, and other elements of the social justice agenda.”

Forfeiting a Propitious Moment

This has been a particularly unfortunate time for the rise of toxic “anti-racist” dogma. It’s a moment when most Americans, regardless of race, are open to changes that would help low-income, black, and brown children. And, yet, this is the moment when the language of equality is being co-opted by those engaged in Orwellian crusades and mystic doublethink.

Anti-racism’s disdain for practical remedies seems geared to derail more serious efforts to improve education. That’s a tragedy. After all, there are real institutional forces restricting opportunity, especially for black and brown children, that must be addressed. Too many of these children attend schools that are chaotic, short on mentoring and support, characterized by low expectations, and home to too much mediocre instruction. Meanwhile, residential attendance zones can lock black and Latino families out of good schools and degree-based hiring locks many out of good jobs for which they might be otherwise qualified. Efforts to address these challenges are vital, but they’re impeded rather than aided by those calling for Maoist cultural revolution.

While much of 21st-century education reform has sought to address inequality, these efforts have not delivered on their promise. We must do better when it comes to exploring how to best revamp school-based policing, better prepare teachers, promote sound reading instruction, embrace high expectations for all students, provide all students with access to advanced courses and essential supports, and give every family the chance to choose a safe, effective school. We should ensure that school discipline treats all students fairly and that American history and civics tell our nation’s whole story. We should do away with “legacy admissions” at tax-exempt and public colleges and end those degree requirements that arbitrarily restrict access to good jobs.

And yet, this ambitious and intensely practical to-do list is tangential to the anti-racist agenda. In the end, instead, much of anti-racism’s educational project turns out to be a strange, sophomoric assault on civilization itself.

After all, it’s hardly the case that “white” culture is uniquely math-obsessed or analytic. Around the globe, air traffic controllers who supervise flying steel, surgeons who handle human hearts, or architects whose bridges resist gravity’s pull tend to value precision, objectivity, and rationality. This is true in Alabama and Angola, without regard to race, nationality, or cultural background. That such traits are more visible in the U.S. than in less developed nations is not racist; it’s an acknowledgment that modern economies value certain things more than do less advanced economies.

Unless the anti-racists want to reject the fruits of 21st-century transportation, health care, and food distribution, they really do need to explain how they would have us continue to enjoy the benefits of civilization while rejecting the habits of mind that make them possible.   

There are real problems to solve. Unfortunately, anti-racist education doesn’t help address them. The truth is that “anti-racist” education isn’t interested in anything so small as educational improvement. The aim is cultural revolution in the name of an illiberal doctrine that poses a mortal threat to schools and colleges. Anti-racism’s hostility to reason, rejection of civilizational virtue, and labeling of skepticism as blasphemy represent an assault on the very soul of liberal education. Americans of goodwill must reject “anti-racist” education and its vision of anti-educational authoritarianism.

Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.

That is is how Dr. Feynman got so smart. Like you, and your papa. Just be smarter tomorrow, than you are today. Everday is an adventure. Love Papa.

Brig, Soren and Reidar- I know you want to be great, and not play the role of a victim. Victim-seeking people will try to tear you down, so it is worth understanding why they act this way. Steer clear of these “Victim-ology” people.

The Evolutionary Advantages of Playing Victim

written by Cory Clark

Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings.

Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.

Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.

Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia created a victim-signaling scale that measures how frequently people tell others of the disadvantages, challenges, and misfortunes they suffer. Those who scored higher on this victim-signaling scale were found to be more likely to virtue-signal—to outwardly display signs of virtuous moral character—while simultaneously placing less importance on their own moral identity. In other words, victim signalers were more interested in looking morally good but less interested in being morally good than those who less frequently signal their victimhood.

In one study, participants who scored higher on virtuous victim signaling (the combination of victim signaling and virtue signaling) were, on average, more likely to lie and cheat in a coin-flip task in order to earn a bonus payment. In another study, participants were asked to imagine a scenario involving a colleague (with whom they were in competition) in which “something felt off,” even though the colleague behaved in a genial manner. Highly virtuous victim signalers were more likely to interpret this ambiguous behavior as discriminatory, and to make accusations about mistreatment from the colleague that were never described in the scenario.

In several of these studies, the researchers controlled for the internalization of morally virtuous traits (i.e., actually prioritizing virtue) and demographic variables that might be associated with increased vulnerability to true victimhood. The persistence of statistically significant effects suggests that there may be a personality type that—independent of one’s actual experience of real victimhood or internalization of real virtue—drives individuals to signal virtuous victimhood as a means to extract resources from others.

Consistent with this theory, other recent work indicates that victimhood, or the enduring feeling that the self is a victim, may be a stable personality trait. This personality trait is characterized by a need for others to acknowledge and empathize with one’s victimhood, feelings of moral superiority, and a lack of empathy for others’ suffering. This personality trait was found to be relatively stable across time and relationship contexts, and was associated with higher perceived severity of received offenses, holding grudges, vengefulness, entitlement to behave immorally, rumination, distrust, neuroticism, and attribution of negative qualities to others.

Together, these findings suggest that claims of victimhood may be caused not only by objective states of suffering, but also by the characteristics of the people making claims of victimhood. While we may not be able to control such traits in others, it is useful to examine some of the environmental factors that incentivize the expression of grievances.

In general, people reward victimhood signaling. For example, one study found that participants reported greater willingness to donate to a GoFundMe page for a young woman in need of college tuition when she also mentioned her difficult upbringing, as compared to a control case in which no extra details of past suffering were provided. In many cases, such a result is morally desirable: We want people to help those who have suffered and who are in greater need. However, when it is known that people can attain benefits by projecting certain biographical information, opportunists may be incentivized to exaggerate or falsely signal their own troubles. Just as people may fake competence to attain status and benefits (e.g., by doping in sports, or using one’s smartphone during pub trivia), and fake morality to attain a good reputation (e.g., by behaving better in public contexts than in private situations), they may fake victimhood to get undeserved sympathy and compensation.

It’s also important to remember that many claims of victimhood are made to strangers online, especially through social media or fundraising sites. This can increase the reach and effectiveness of insincere claims because they are directed toward strangers who have no basis for investigating (or even entertaining) suspicions of fake victimhood, except on pain of appearing callous.

When a person knowingly wrongs someone in his or her family, circle of friends, community, or professional orbit, they often are willing to make amends, and so victims can often appeal directly to transgressors for recompense. Even if a transgressor has little remorse, nearby others (such as friends and family) aware of the harm are often willing to provide sympathy and assistance. Third-party appeals to strangers, on the other hand, are perhaps especially prone to falsehood, because the soliciting party is appealing to individuals who don’t know their circumstances or character. This certainly doesn’t mean that all (or even most) appeals of this nature are fake—only that this will be the preferred strategy of those whose claims have been rejected (or would likely be rejected) by those who have the most information.

Nearly all people experience disadvantage or mistreatment at some point in their life. Many quietly and humbly work through these challenges on their own or with the help of close friends and family. Only a minority will turn every slight into an opportunity to seek sympathy, status, and redress from strangers. If eventually discovered, they can suffer catastrophic reputational damage, or even go to jail. But in the short term, at least, this group can receive more benefits, with less effort, than the former.

None of this means there are no genuine victims or that we should not care for and provide assistance to victims when we can. On the contrary, one reason it is worth reflecting on the system of incentives we create is precisely that there are genuine victims: Habitual, false victim signalers deplete available resources for genuine victims, dupe trusting others into misallocating their resources, and can initiate a dysfunctional cycle of competitive victimhood within society more broadly. For example, research has shown that people ramp up their own status as victims of discrimination when they are accused of discriminating against others or even when they are merely characterized as being relatively advantaged.

This phenomenon may help explain why it is common for people to believe that they are getting the short end of the stick in many situations. For example, in a nationally representative poll of Americans, roughly 65 percent of adults expressed at least moderate agreement with the proposition that the system works against people like them. And roughly 55 percent of respondents at least moderately agreed with the proposition that they rarely get what they deserve in life. Most people seem to think that the status quo is generally unfair to them. And the habits of perceiving oneself as a victim, and victimhood signaling to others, are mostly unrelated to political ideology. As with so many sources of intergroup conflict, this is not a “them” problem, but a people problem.

Historically, our ancestors may have been better able to discern habitual or false victim signalers from those in true need. We lived in smaller communities where we tended to know what was happening, and to whom—and so those who deceived others were at higher risk of getting caught.

In modern, affluent societies, by contrast, people can signal their difficult-to-verify suffering to thousands or more strangers online. Although genuine victims may benefit in such environments (because they can spread awareness of their plight, and solicit support, on a large scale), manipulative individuals inevitably will use the same mass-broadcast tools to extract resources and possibly even initiate a cycle of competitive victimhood that infects everyone. Those who most vociferously declare their victimhood to others may often be villains instead.

Cory Clark is a social psychologist at University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @ImHardcory.

This is the beginning of Lenin’s famous work “What is to be done”

Freedom from Criticism

That is exactly what your mother demands. Notice it? you are unallowable to criticize her- or point out the obvious things. I could not even show photograph that you were smallest kids in your class. She slaughtered me for me. Same behavior as Lenin. You don’t even detect that it is a criticism to her. Just like Lenin. The most absurd things can disturb her.

She say nice utopian things like Lenin- then slaughters you. You mother behaves exactly like a Marxist/Leninist.

Brig, Soren and Reidar-

Lenin was the most murderous person in entire 20th century, causing more than 100 million people to die.

If you think Socialism is neutral, or even perhaps okay. Start doing some research. You don’t want to be one of the 100 million corpses… and that is what Socialism brings.

by Gary Saul Morson

On the pernicious legacy of Vladimir Lenin.

—Vyacheslav Molotov, the only senior official to work for both Lenin and Stalin, when asked to compare them.

Lenin “in general” loved people but . . . his love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.

—Maxim Gorky

When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.

—Lenin

Beyond Doctrine

An old Soviet joke poses the question: What was the most important world-historical event of the year 1875? Answer: Lenin was five years old.

The point of the joke, of course, is that the Soviets virtually deified Lenin. Criticism of him was routinely referred to as “blasphemy,” while icon corners in homes and institutions were replaced by “Lenin corners.” Lenin museums sprung up everywhere, and institutions of every kind took his name. In addition to Leningrad, there were cities named Leninsk (in Kazakhstan), Leninogorsk (in Tatarstan), Leninaul (in Dagestan), Leninakan (in Armenia), Leninkend, Leninavan, and at least four different Leninabads. On a visit to the Caucasus I remember being surprised at seeing Mayakovsky’s famous verses about Lenin inscribed on a mountaintop: “Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live!” The famous mausoleum where his body is preserved served as the regime’s most sacred shrine.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/696122211&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true

As we approach the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, understanding him grows ever more important. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Leninist ways of thinking continue to spread, especially among Western radicals who have never read a word of Lenin. This essay is not just about Lenin, and not just Leninism, the official philosophy of the ussr, but also the very style of thought that Lenin pioneered. Call it Leninthink.

Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. He invented a form of government we have come to call totalitarian, which rejected in principle the idea of any private sphere outside of state control. To establish this power, he invented the one-party state, a term that would previously have seemed self-contradictory since a party was, by definition, a part. An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.

Stephen Pinker has recently argued that the world has been getting less bloodthirsty. The Mongols, after all, destroyed entire cities. But the Mongols murdered other people; what is new, and uniquely horrible about the Soviets and their successors, is that they directed their fury at their own people. The Russian empire lost more people in World War I than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.

Numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place to be, and the nkvd was constantly arresting its own members—a practice that was also true of its predecessor, the Cheka, which Lenin founded almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup.

nkvd interrogators who suspected they were to be arrested often committed suicide since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. They had practiced exquisite forms of torture and humiliation on prisoners—and on prisoners’ colleagues, friends, and families. “Member of a family of a traitor to the fatherland” was itself a criminal category, and whole camps were set up for wives of “enemies of the people.” Never before had such practices defined a state.

For good reason, many have traced these practices to Lenin’s doctrines. In his view, Marx’s greatest contribution was not the idea of the class struggle but “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” He argued that a revolutionary Party must be composed entirely of professional revolutionaries, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia and subject to absolute discipline, with a readiness to do literally anything the leadership demanded.

These and other disastrous Leninist ideas derived from a specific Leninist way of thinking, and that is what this essay focuses on. I know this way of thinking in my bones. I am myself a pink diaper baby and I remember being taught this way of thinking, taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Memoirs of many ex-Communists, from David Horowitz to Richard Wright, confirm that, more than doctrines, it was the Leninist style of thought that defined the difference between an insider and an outsider. And that way of thought is very much with us.

Who Whom?

Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.

—Lenin’s instructions to authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918

Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum. To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose. Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of “profiteering” or “speculation” (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant “bagmen” selling produce were shot.

To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom.

Basic books on negotiation teach that you can often do better than split the difference, since people have different concerns. Both sides can come out ahead—but not for the Soviets, whose negotiating stance John F. Kennedy once paraphrased as: what’s mine is mine; and what’s yours is negotiable. For us, the word “politics” means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor. Of course, one might simply be insane. Long before Brezhnev began incarcerating dissidents in madhouses, Lenin was so appalled that his foreign minister, Boris Chicherin, recommended an unnecessary concession to American loan negotiators, that he pronounced him mad—not metaphorically—and demanded he be forcibly committed. “We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium.”

Such thinking automatically favors extreme solutions. If there is one sort of person Lenin truly hated more than any other, it is—to use some of his more printable adjectives—the squishy, squeamish, spineless, dull-witted liberal reformer. In philosophical issues, too, there can never be a middle ground. If you are not a materialist in precisely Lenin’s interpretation, you are an idealist, and idealism is simply disguised religion supporting the bourgeoisie. The following statement from his most famous book, What Is to Be Done?, is typical (the italics are Lenin’s): “The only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.” There is either rule by the bourgeoisie or dictatorship of the proletariat: “Every solution that offers a middle path is a deception . . . or an expression of the dull-wittedness of the petty-bourgeois democrats.”

Contrary to the wishes even of other Bolsheviks, Lenin categorically rejected the idea of a broad socialist coalition government. He was immensely relieved when the short-lived coalition with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries collapsed. Immediately after seizing power he declared the left-liberal Kadets “outside the law,” leading to the lynching of two of their ex-ministers in a Petersburg Hospital. He would soon arrest Mensheviks and the most numerous group of radicals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, famed for countless assassinations of tsarist officials. We think of show trials as Stalinist, but Lenin staged a show trial of Socialist Revolutionary leaders in 1922.

Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary.

By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary. That squishy formulation suggests that other solutions would be preferable. But for Lenin maximal violence was the default position. He was constantly rebuking subordinates for not using enough force, for restraining mobs from lynchings, and for hesitating to shoot randomly chosen hostages.

One could almost say that force had a mystical attraction for Lenin. He had workers drafted into a labor army where any shirking or lateness was punished by sentence to a concentration camp. Yes, Bolsheviks used the term concentration camp from the start, and did so with pride. Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:

The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”

Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Kołakowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer (vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.”

Lenin worked by a principle of anti-empathy, and this approach was to define Soviet ethics. I know of no other society, except those modeled on the one Lenin created, where schoolchildren were taught that mercy, kindness, and pity are vices. After all, these feelings might lead one to hesitate shooting a class enemy or denouncing one’s parents. The word “conscience” went out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (in the sense of Marxist-Leninist ideological consciousness). During Stalin’s great purges a culture of denunciation reigned, but it was Lenin who taught “A good communist is also a good Chekist.”

The Abbey of Thélème

Aspecial logic governs the Leninist approach to morality, legality, and rights. In his famous address to the Youth Leagues, Lenin complains that bourgeois thinkers have slanderously denied that Bolsheviks have any ethics. In fact,

We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is a deception . . . . We say that morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. . . . That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle.

When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.

In short, Bolshevik morality holds that whatever contributes to Bolshevik success is moral, whatever hinders it is immoral.

Imagine someone saying: “my detractors claim I have no morals, but that is sheer slander. On the contrary, I have a very strict moral code, from which I never deviate: look out for number 1.” We might reply: the whole point of a moral code is to restrain you from acting only out of self-interest. Morality begins with number 2. A moral code that says you must do what you regard as your self-interest is no moral code at all. The same is true for a code that says the Communist Party is morally bound to do whatever it regards as in its interest.

Rabelais’s pleasure-seeking utopia, the Abbey of Thélème, was governed, like all abbeys, by a rule. In this case, however, the rule was an anti-rule: Fay çe que vouldras, “Do as you wish!” People were to be restrained from yielding to any restraints. Ever since, such self-canceling imperatives have been called Thelemite commands.

Bolshevik legality was also Thelemite. If by law one means a code that binds the state as well as the individual, specifies what is and is not permitted, and eliminates arbitrariness, then Lenin entirely rejected law as “bourgeois.” He expressed utter contempt for the principles “no crime without law” and “no punishment without a crime.” Recall that he defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as rule based entirely on force absolutely unrestrained by any law. His more naïve followers imagined that rule by sheer terror would cease when Bolshevik hold on power was secure, or when the New Economic Policy relaxed restrictions on trade, but Lenin made a point of disillusioning them. “It is the biggest mistake to think that nep will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror,” he wrote. When D. I. Kursky, People’s Commissariat of Justice, was formulating the first Soviet legal code, Lenin demanded that terror and arbitrary use of power be written into the code itself! “The law should not abolish terror,” he insisted. “It should be substantiated and legalized in principle, without evasion or embellishment.”

So far as I know, never before had the law prescribed lawlessness. Do as you wish, or else. Lenin had ascribed the fall of the Paris Commune to the failure to eliminate all law, and so the Soviet state was absolutely forbidden from exercising any restraint on arbitrary use of power. Indeed, officials were punished for such restraint, which Lenin called impermissible slackness and Stalin would deem lack of vigilance.

The same logic applied to rights. On paper, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed more rights than any other state in the world. I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the ussr had absolute freedom of speech—so long as they did not lie. I recalled this curious concept of freedom when a student defended complete freedom of speech except for hate speech—and hate speech included anything he disagreed with. Whatever did not seem hateful was actually a “dog-whistle.”

As far back as 1919, Soviet parlance distinguished between purely formal law and what was called “the material determination of the crime.” A crime was not an action or omission specified in the formal code, because every “socially dangerous” act (or omission) was automatically criminal. Article 1 of the Civil Code of October 31, 1922 laid down that civil rights “are protected by the law unless they are exercised in contradiction to their social and economic purposes.” Like the “material” definition of crime, the concept of “purposefulness” (tselesoobraznost’) created a system of Thelemite rights: the state was absolutely prohibited from interfering with your rights unless it wanted to.

Leninspeak

Lenin’s language, no less than his ethics, served as a model, taught in Soviet schools and recommended in books with titles like Lenin’s Language and On Lenin’s Polemical Art. In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.” Nikolay Valentinov, a Bolshevik who knew Lenin well before becoming disillusioned, reports him saying: “There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in!”

When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as “renegades” from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky—who cites Lenin—to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.”

Lenin’s language, no less than his ethics, served as a model, taught in Soviet schools and recommended in books with titles like Lenin’s Language and On Lenin’s Polemical Art.

Compulsive underlining, name calling, and personal invective hardly exhaust the ways in which Lenin’s prose assaults the reader. He does not just advance a claim, he insists that it is absolutely certain and, for good measure, says the same thing again in other words. It is absolutely certain, beyond any possible doubt, perfectly clear to anyone not dull-witted. Any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie can only be short-lived, he explains: “This is beyond doubt. Hence the absolute necessity of a separate . . . strictly class party of Social Democrats. . . . All this is beyond the slightest possible doubt.” Nothing is true unless it is absolutely, indubitably so; if a position is wrong, it is entirely and irredeemably so; if something must be done, it must be done “immediately, without delay”; Party representatives are to make “no concessions whatsoever.” Under Lenin’s direction the Party demanded “the dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another” (italics mine). It was not enough just to shoot kulaks summarily, they had “to be shot on the spot without trial,” a phrase that in one brief decree he managed to use in each of its six numbered commands before concluding: “This order is to be carried out strictly, mercilessly.” You’d think that was clear enough already.

No concessions, compromises, exceptions, or acts of leniency; everything must be totally uniform, absolutely the same, unqualifiedly unqualified. At one point he claims that the views of Marx and Engels are “completely identical,” as if they might have been incompletely identical.

Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed. In his attack on the epistemology of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, for instance, every argument contrary to dialectical materialism is rejected for that reason alone. Valentinov, who saw Lenin frequently when he was crafting this treatise, reports that Lenin at most glanced through their works for a few hours. It was easy enough to attribute to them views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.

Valentinov was appalled that both Lenin and Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist, insisted that there was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong—and what was wrong served the enemy and so was criminal. He quotes Lenin:

Marxism is a monolithic conception of the world, it does not tolerate dilution and vulgarization by means of various insertions and additions. Plekhanov once said to me about a critic of Marxism . . . : “First, let’s stick the convict’s badge on him, and then after that we’ll examine his case.” And I think we must stick the “convict’s badge” on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don’t go on to examine his case. That’s how every sound revolutionary should react. When you see a stinking heap on the road you don’t have to poke around in it to see what it is. Your nose tells you it’s shit, and you give it a wide berth.

“Lenin’s words took my breath away,” Valentinov recalls. I had the same reaction when I first heard a student explain that a view had to be wrong simply because it was voiced on Fox News.

Opponents objected that Lenin lied without compunction, and it is easy to find quotations in which he says—as he did to the Bolshevik leader Karl Radek—“Who told you a historian has to establish the truth?” Yes, we are contradicting what we said before, he told Radek, and when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will. Orwell caught this aspect of Leninism: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

And yet the concept of “lying,” if one stops there, does not reach the heart of the matter. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy remarks that, contrary to appearances, the hero was not a toady. Rather, he “was attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light.” A toady decides to toady, but Ivan Ilyich had no need to make such a decision. In much the same way, a true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” but a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.

Western scholars who missed this aspect of Leninism made significant errors. For example, they estimated the size of the Soviet economy by assuming that official figures were distorted and made appropriate adjustments. But as Robert Conquest pointed out, “they were not distorted, they were invented.” The Soviets did not find out the truth and then exaggerate; they often did not know the truth themselves. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith hears that fifty million pairs of boots were produced that year and reflects that, for all he knows, no boots at all were produced. Orwell, who never studied the Soviet economy, grasped a point that escaped experts because he understood Leninthink.

Partyness

Lenin did not just invent a new kind of party, he also laid the basis for what would come to be known in official parlance as “partiinost’,” literally Partyness, in the sense of Party-mindedness. Arthur Koestler understood part of partiinost’ when he described a Communist confessing to fantastic crimes because loyalty to the Party trumped everything else. If the Party needed one to confess to spying for the Poles, Japanese, and Germans at the same time, while conspiring with Trotsky to murder Stalin and spread typhus among pigs—all while one was already in prison—a true, party-minded Bolshevik would do so.

In his celebrated “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” the nineteenth-century terrorist Sergei Nechaev—whose story inspired Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed—writes that a true revolutionary “has no interests, no habits, no property, not even a name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution.” Nechaev and his contemporary Pyotr Tkachov established a particular tradition of revolutionaries, to which Lenin traced his lineage. The true Party member cares for nothing but the Party. It is his family, his community, his church. And according to Marxism-Leninism, everything it did was guaranteed to be correct.

Trotsky, forced to reverse one of his positions to conform to the Party line, explained:

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. . . . [I]f the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I will support the consequences of the decision to the end.

Even this much-quoted statement does not get partiinost’ quite right, since, immediately after affirming that history guarantees the Party’s infallibility, Trotsky speaks of supporting the Party even when it is wrong. His ally, the prominent Bolshevik Yuri Pyatakov, did better. When Valentinov happened to meet Pyatakov in Paris, he reproached him for cowardice in renouncing his former Trotskyite views. Pyatakov replied by explaining the Leninist concept of the Party:

According to Lenin, the Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political, and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a Party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things which no other collective of men could achieve. . . . A real Communist . . . [is] a man who was raised by the Party and had absorbed its spirit deeply enough to become a miracle man.

Pyatakov grasped Lenin’s idea that coercion is not a last resort but the first principle of Party action. Changing human nature, producing boundless prosperity, overcoming death itself: all these miracles could be achieved because the Party was the first organization ever to pursue coercion without limits. In one treatise Stalin corrects the widespread notion that the laws of nature are not binding on Bolsheviks, and it is not hard to see how this kind of thinking took root. And, given an essentially mystical faith in coercion, it is not hard to see how imaginative forms of torture became routine in Soviet justice.

Pyatakov drew significant conclusions from this concept of the Party:

For such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, “the Party,” to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the Party—that is the test of a true Bolshevik.

There could be no life for him outside the ranks of the Party, and he would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it. In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party.

Did Orwell have this statement in mind when O’Brien gets Winston Smith to believe that twice two is five? In 1936 Pyatakov asked the Party secretariat to censure him for not having revealed his wife’s Trotskyite connections. To prove his partiinost’, he offered to testify against her and then, after her condemnation, shoot her. Pyatakov was himself shot.

The Nature of Leninist Belief

Partyness does not entail merely affirming that black is white but actually believing it. The wisest specialists on Bolshevik thinking have wondered: What does it mean to believe—truly believe—what one does not believe?

Many former Communists describe their belated recognition that experienced Party members do not seem to believe what they profess. In his memoir American Hunger, much of which is devoted to his experiences in the American Communist Party, Richard Wright describes how he would point out that the Party sometimes acted contrary to its convictions, or in the name of helping black people, actually hurt them. What most amazed Wright was that he usually could get no explanation for such actions at all. “You don’t understand,” he was constantly told. And the very fact that he asked such questions proved that he didn’t. It gradually dawned on him that the Party takes stances not because it cares about them—although it may—but because it is useful for the Party to do so.

The wisest specialists on Bolshevik thinking have wondered: What does it mean to believe—truly believe—what one does not believe?

Doing so may help recruit new members, as its stance on race had gotten Wright to join. But after a while a shrewd member learned, without having been explicitly told, that loyalty belonged not to an issue, not even to justice broadly conceived, but to the Party itself. Issues would be raised or dismissed as needed.

My mother left the American Communist Party in 1939 in response to the Hitler–Stalin pact, but her friends who remained were able, like Pyatakov, to turn on a dime. One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.

When it suddenly dawned on them that issues were pretexts, Wright and some others like him faced a choice. Usually, however, there was no sudden realization and so no choice was required. I speak from memory now. What happens is something like this: when a criticism of the true ideology is advanced, or when embarrassing facts come out, everyone learns a particular answer. One neither believes nor disbelieves the answer; one demonstrates one’s loyalty by saying it. It is interesting to be present when the answer is still being rehearsed. Gradually, one acquires a little mental library of such canned answers, and the use of them signals to others in the know that you are one of them. If this process took place often enough in childhood, the moment of decision lies in the remote past, if it ever happened at all. For those who joined as adults, there is social pressure to accept one more explanation. Imagine not accepting today’s charge against Trump or Chick-fil-A. Why stop now? Wright is unusual in that for him the process became acute and demanded he address it.

In his history of Marxism, Kołakowski explains some puzzling aspects of Bolshevik practice in these terms. Everyone understands why Bolsheviks shot liberals, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Trotskyites. But what, he asks, was the point of turning the same fury on the Party itself, especially on its most loyal, Stalinists, who accepted Leninist-Stalinist ideology without question? Kołakowski observes that it is precisely the loyalty to the ideology that was the problem.

Anyone who believed in the ideology might question the leader’s conformity to it. He might recognize that the Marxist-Leninist Party was acting against Marxism-Leninism as the Party itself defined it; or he might compare Stalin’s statements today with Stalin’s statements yesterday. “The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology,” Kołakowski observes. That might seem strange to Westerners, but, “it is not surprising to anyone who knows a system of this type from within.” All deviations from the Party line, all challenges to the leadership, appealed to official ideology, and so anyone who truly believed the ideology was suspect. “The [great] purge, therefore, was designed to destroy such ideological links as still existed within the party, to convince its members that they had no ideology or loyalty except to the latest orders from on high . . . . Loyalty to Marxist ideology as such is still—[in 1978]—a crime and a source of deviations of all kinds.” The true Leninist did not even believe in Leninism.

The Other Foot

Iknow of no other political ideology that entails such a conception of belief. When I was a young associate professor teaching in a comparative literature department, whose faculty were at each other’s throats, I remarked to one colleague, who called herself a Marxist-Leninist, that it only made things worse when she told obvious falsehoods in departmental meetings. Surely, such unprincipled behavior must bring discredit to your own position, I pleaded.

Her reply brought me back to my childhood. I quote it word-for-word: “You stick to your principles, and I’ll stick to mine.” From a Leninist perspective, a liberal, a Christian, or any type of idealist only ties his hands by refraining from doing whatever works. She meant: we Leninists will win because we know better than to do that. Even Westerners who regard themselves as realists have only taken a few baby steps towards a true Leninist position. They are all the more vulnerable for imagining they have an unclouded view.

The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on.

Recently Attorney General William Barr asked how his critics would have reacted had the fbi secretly interfered with the Obama campaign: “What if the shoe were on the other foot?” From a Leninist perspective, this question demonstrates befuddlement. In his book Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky imagines “the high priests of liberalism” asking how Bolshevik use of arbitrary power differs from tsarist practices. Trotsky sneers:

You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain it to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. . . . Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals . . . . Do you grasp this—distinction? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.

What is reprehensible for them is proper for us, and that’s all there is to it. For a Leninist, the shoe is never on the other foot because he has no other foot.

The Spectrum of Awareness

When I detect Leninist ways of thinking today, people respond: surely you don’t think all those social justice warriors are Leninists! Of course not. The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on. That was the key insight of his tract What Is to Be Done? When Leninism is significant, there will always be a spectrum going from those who really understand, to those who just practice the appropriate responses, to those who are entirely innocent. The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?

There is no space to address such questions here. My point is that they need to be asked.

Gary Saul Morson, the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, co-authored, with Morton Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility (Princeton).

Brig, Soren and Reidar- you will soon learn that money is money. When confidence in money breaks- history is very clear- there will a revolution.

Here is article from Thomas Paine.

I remember a German farmer expressing as much in a few words as the whole subject requires; “money is money, and paper is paper.”

All the invention of man cannot make them otherwise. The alchemist may cease his labors, and the hunter after the philosopher’s stone go to rest, if paper can be metamorphosed into gold and silver, or made to answer the same purpose in all cases.

Gold and silver are the emissions of nature: paper is the emission of art. The value of gold and silver is ascertained by the quantity which nature has made in the earth. We cannot make that quantity more or less than it is, and therefore the value being dependent upon the quantity, depends not on man. Man has no share in making gold or silver; all that his labors and ingenuity can accomplish is, to collect it from the mine, refine it for use and give it an impression, or stamp it into coin.

Its being stamped into coin adds considerably to its convenience but nothing to its value. It has then no more value than it had before. Its value is not in the impression but in itself. Take away the impression and still the same value remains. Alter it as you will, or expose it to any misfortune that can happen, still the value is not diminished. It has a capacity to resist the accidents that destroy other things. It has, therefore, all the requisite qualities that money can have, and is a fit material to make money of — and nothing which has not all those properties can be fit for the purpose of money.

Paper, considered as a material whereof to make money, has none of the requisite qualities in it. It is too plentiful, and too easily come at. It can be had anywhere, and for a trifle.

There are two ways in which I shall consider paper.

The only proper use for paper, in the room of money, is to write promissory notes and obligations of payment in specie upon. A piece of paper, thus written and signed, is worth the sum it is given for, if the person who gives it is able to pay it, because in this case, the law will oblige him. But if he is worth nothing, the paper note is worth nothing. The value, therefore, of such a note, is not in the note itself, for that is but paper and promise, but in the man who is obliged to redeem it with gold or silver.

Paper, circulating in this manner, and for this purpose, continually points to the place and person where, and of whom, the money is to be had, and at last finds its home; and, as it were, unlocks its master’s chest and pays the bearer.

But when an assembly undertakes to issue paper as money, the whole system of safety and certainty is overturned, and property set afloat. Paper notes given and taken between individuals as a promise of payment is one thing, but paper issued by an assembly as money is another thing. It is like putting an apparition in the place of a man; it vanishes with looking at it, and nothing remains but the air.

Money, when considered as the fruit of many years’ industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow’s dowry and children’s portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.

By what power or authority an assembly undertakes to make paper money, is difficult to say. It derives none from the Constitution, for that is silent on the subject. It is one of those things which the people have not delegated, and which, were they at any time assembled together, they would not delegate. It is, therefore, an assumption of power which an assembly is not warranted in, and which may, one day or other, be the means of bringing some of them to punishment.

I shall enumerate some of the evils of paper money and conclude with offering means for preventing them.

One of the evils of paper money is that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect. Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice, and party; and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the morals of the country.

It was horrid to see, and hurtful to recollect, how loose the principles of justice were left, by means of the paper emissions during the war. The experience then had should be a warning to any assembly how they venture to open such a dangerous door again.

As to the romantic, if not hypocritical, tale that a virtuous people need no gold and silver, and that paper will do as well, it requires no other contradiction than the experience we have seen. Though some well-meaning people may be inclined to view it in this light, it is certain that the sharper always talks this language.

There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes.

But why, since the universal customs of the world has established money as the most convenient medium of traffic and commerce, should paper be set up in preference to gold and silver? The productions of nature are surely as innocent as those of art; and in the case of money, are abundantly, if not infinitely, more so. The love of gold and silver may produce covetousness, but covetousness, when not connected with dishonesty, is not properly a vice. It is frugality run to an extreme. But the evils of paper money have no end. Its uncertain and fluctuating value is continually awakening or creating new schemes of deceit. Every principle of justice is put to the rack, and the bond of society dissolved. The suppression, therefore, of paper money might very properly have been put into the act for preventing vice and immorality.

The pretense for paper money has been that there was not a sufficiency of gold and silver. This, so far from being a reason for paper emissions, is a reason against them.

As gold and silver are not the productions of North America, they are, therefore, articles of importation; and if we set up a paper manufactory of money, it amounts, as far as it is able, to prevent the importation of hard money, or to send it out again as fast it comes in; and by following this practice we shall continually banish the specie, till we have none left, and be continuously complaining of the grievance instead of remedying the cause.

Considering gold and silver as articles of importation, there will in time, unless we prevent it by paper emissions, be as much in the country as the occasions of it require, for the same reasons there are as much of other imported articles. But as every yard of cloth manufactured in the country occasions a yard the less to be imported, so it is by money, with this difference, that in the one case we manufacture the thing itself and in the other we do not. We have cloth for cloth, but we have only paper dollars for silver ones.

As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment, it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom — and property no security — where this practice can be acted: and the committee who shall bring in a report for this purpose, or the member who moves for it, and he who seconds it merits impeachment, and sooner or later may expect it.

Of all the various sorts of base coin, paper money is the basest. It has the least intrinsic value of anything that can be put in the place of gold and silver. A hobnail or a piece of wampum far exceeds it. And there would be more propriety in making those articles a legal tender than to make paper so.

It was the issuing base coin, and establishing it as a tender, that was one of the principal means of finally overthrowing the power of the Stuart family in Ireland. The article is worth reciting as it bears such a resemblance to the process practiced in paper money.

Brass and copper of the basest kind, old cannon; broken bells, household utensils were assiduously collected; and from every pound weight of such vile materials, valued at four pence, pieces were coined and circulated to the amount of five pounds normal value. By the first proclamation they were made current in all payments to and from the King and the subjects of the realm, except in duties on the importation of foreign goods, money left in trust, or due by mortgage, bills or bonds; and James promised that when the money should be decried, he would receive it in all payments, or make full satisfaction in gold and silver. The nominal value was afterwards raised by subsequent proclamations, the original restrictions removed, and this base money was ordered to be received in all kinds of payments As brass and copper grew scarce, it was made of still viler materials, of tin and pewter, and old debts of one thousand pounds were discharged by pieces of vile metal amounting to thirty shillings in intrinsic value. (Leland‘s History of Ireland, vol. iv. p. 265.)