Cultivating The Mystique Of The Forbidden

NYTimes  |  To the alt-right, of course, being red-pilled means abandoning liberalism as a lie. It means treating one’s own prejudices as intuitions rather than distortions to be overcome. The act of doing this — casting off socially acceptable values in favor of those that were once unthinkable — creates the edgy energy that has, of late, attracted Kanye West. (West’s sojourn on the alt-right has been facilitated in part by Candace Owens, a conspiracy-minded African-American conservative who created the website Red Pill Black.)

Because the red pill experience is so intense, progressives should think about how to counter dynamics that can make banal right wing beliefs seem like seductive secret knowledge. Attempts at simply repressing bad ideas don’t seem to be working.

To be clear: I don’t think the members of the alt-right or the Intellectual Dark Web — which overlap in places but are quite different — are repressed. The latter regularly appear on television; write for the op-ed pages of leading newspapers, including this one; publish best-selling books; and give speeches to large crowds. They haven’t been blackballed like Colin Kaepernick, who lost his football career for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. No state has passed laws denying government contracts to critics of political correctness; such measures are only for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

But online life creates an illusion of left-wing excess and hegemony that barely exists in the real world, at least outside of a few collegiate enclaves. Consider, for example, how an online mob turned a Utah teenager who wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom into a national news story. The sanctimony and censoriousness of the social justice internet is like a machine for producing red pills. It makes people think it’s daring to, say, acknowledge that men and women are different, or pick on immigrants, or praise the president of the United States.

The leftist writer Angela Nagle captured this phenomenon in her 2017 book about the alt-right, “Kill All Normies.” Long before the alt-right “bubbled up to the surface of college campuses, and even Twitter and YouTube,” she wrote, it developed in opposition “to its enemy online culture of the new identity politics typified by platforms like Tumblr.”

Countering right-wing movements that thrive on transgression is a challenge. One of the terrifying things about Trump’s victory is that it appeared to put the fundamental assumptions underlying pluralistic liberal democracy up for debate, opening an aperture for poisonous bigotry to seep into the mainstream. In California, a man named Patrick Little, who said he was inspired by Trump, is running for U.S. Senate on a platform of removing Jews from power; in one recent state poll 18 percent of respondents supported him. On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Juan Pablo Andrade, an adviser to the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, praised the Nazis at a Turning Point USA conference. (Owens, West’s new friend, is Turning Point’s communications director.)

It’s a natural response — and, in some cases, the right response — to try to hold the line against political reaction, to shame people who espouse shameful ideas. But shame is a politically volatile emotion, and easily turns into toxic resentment. It should not be overused. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between ideas that deserve a serious response, and those that should be only mocked and scorned. I do know that people on the right benefit immensely when they can cultivate the mystique of the forbidden.

In February, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has garnered a cultlike following, asked, in an interview with Vice, “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” To him, the Me Too movement called into question coed offices, a fundamental fact of modern life, because “things are deteriorating very rapidly at the moment in terms of the relationships between men and women.”

Having to contend with this question fills me with despair. I would like to say: It’s 2018 and women’s place in public life is not up for debate! But to be honest, I think it is. Trump is president. Everywhere you look, the ugliest and most illiberal ideas are gaining purchase. Refusing to take them seriously won’t make them go away. (As it happens, I’m participating in a debate with Peterson next week in Toronto.)

"This is America. Don’t catch me slipping, now."

medium |  Don’t catch me slipping. There’s always a way to make Black people’s suffering seem like our own fault, no matter how targeted or deliberate the attacks against us are. If you get got, it’s because you and your people got caught slipping. There’s a reason headlines make it seem like cops’ bullets fire themselves. Even their guns get the benefit of the doubt; Black people shot full of holes don’t.

The narrative that Black America is solely responsible for all the violence it suffers is centuries-old and extremely resilient. This is where Kanye West’s statements about slavery being a choice find their roots. It’s more palatable to blame the victims than force the perpetrators to take a posture of forgiveness, and this upside-down world is what Black Americans have to negotiate without losing their minds. As he dances through the frame, Glover goes from grimacing to grinning in split seconds, from brutal violence to almost shucking and jiving. He skillfully navigates the madness and chaos unfolding behind him. At the end, he’s sweaty, wide-eyed, and running for his life.

This is America, where Blackness is pathologized and capitalism warps ghastly incentives even further. Black people in America have been selected to be the lowest rung, the exploited class upon which the nation’s wealth is built. It’s no accident that Black entertainment has become one of the primary vehicles for masking this reality. There’s a reason the gaudy exhibitions of “new Black money” are reliably programmed.

When the choir raises their voices to sing, “Grandma told me, ‘Get your money, Black man!’” I can’t tell if it’s a cry for reparations or a call to dive headfirst into the rapacious, winner-take-all capitalism of America’s streets and boardrooms. And while I’m not convinced that this uncertainty isn’t deliberate (a slippery way of not alienating anyone), that tension is at the heart of the truth Glover is telling. Survival demands that Black people participate in an immoral, capitalist system that brutalizes them, and justice demands the wealth built on the backs of our stolen ancestors be returned to us. We try to achieve both and end up accomplishing neither.

As Goes Blackness - The Parable

thisisinsider |  Like much of Glover's work, "This is America" is cryptic and loaded with shocking imagery and metaphor. The track's tone swerves from happy-go-lucky psalmic readings to more alarming verses. In typical Glover fashion, he dismissed close readings of his work in an interview at the Met Gala Monday night. 

"I just wanted to make a good song," Glover told E!. "Like something that people could play on Fourth of Julys." 

Directed by his frequent "Atlanta" collaborator Hiro Murai and choreographed by Sherrie Silver, the music video touches on gun violence, the precarious state of black bodies in the US, and how we've historically used entertainment to distract us from pervasive cultural and political problems. But the music video's iconoclastic images and many layers deserve close examination to fully parse. 

Here are 24 things you may have missed.  Twitter moments.

Brand Consumption Coalitions: As Goes Blackness...,

LATimes |  West, however, has yet to face such industry reprisals. He has even posed with a grinning Universal Music Group head Lucian Grainge and influential hip-hop executive Lyor Cohen while wearing his MAGA hat. As an established artist with a huge multi-platinum back catalog, extensive production credits and his own GOOD Music label, West is perhaps less sensitive to fiscal concerns than other artists.

Adidas, the company that distributes his incredibly popular Yeezy apparel line, is standing behind him but made it clear that there are "some comments [the company] doesn't support."

And when it came time to record her first new music in six years, pop diva Christina Aguilera called West. He produced a handful of records on her upcoming album, including new single "Accelerate," which was released amid the furor.

"I've always been a huge fan of Kanye … Outside of, you know, his controversial aspects," she told Billboard in a recent interview. "I just think he's a great artist and musicmaker and beatmaker. The artists that he chooses to pluck from different walks of life are so interesting."

The recent backlash has been driven by fans who took his statements as a personal affront.

"This is a person who has spoken a lot about race over the years and in some very eloquent ways. The dramatic reversal of it all feels like it's more about power or … something else," said Justin Simien, creator of "Dear White People," a Netflix series adapted from his 2014 film of the same name that explores race and identity among a group of black college students.

At 34, Simien is part of a generation of West's core following — those entering adulthood when the Chicago rapper debuted with 2004's "The College Dropout," a potent offering that veered away from gangster posturing in favor of thoughtful observations on family, sexuality, religion, education, prejudice and wealth.

Disappointed fans have a few ways to voice their opinions. One, of course, is on West's own favored platform. The day he voiced his latest support of Trump, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar and Drake were among those who hit 'unfollow' on Twitter.

West is one of the most successful touring acts today. More than 97,000 fans attended his sold-out six-night 2016 stint at the Forum for his "Saint Pablo" tour.

That tour, however, was derailed in San Jose after West said: "I didn't vote, but if I did, I would have voted for Trump," prompting fans to boo and hurl expletives at him. He later nixed over 20 dates and was reportedly in treatment for mental health and addiction issues.

Similarly, his Adidas clout is considerable. The company's Adidas Originals division (which releases West's popular Yeezy sneakers) touted revenues up 45% for the period when he released "Life of Pablo" in conjunction with a new season of apparel.

The controversy, at least, has proven beneficial to West's "dragon brother," the president.

Kanye West Wants Freedom...,

theatlantic |  What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.

It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

Good, Phukkem, Go Play That Degenerate ___________ Some Place Else

theatlantic |  Last week, Larry Moneta, Duke’s vice president of student affairs, stopped into his regular coffee shop in the student center, Joe Van Gogh, for a hot tea and a vegan muffin. The business was streaming music on Spotify, per usual, and as the university administrator stood waiting in line, “Get Paid” by Young Dolph happened to be playing. Its endlessly repeated refrain is “Get paid, young nigga, get paid.”

Durham’s alt-weekly, Indy Week, recounts what happened next:

Britni Brown, who was manning the register, was in charge of the playlist that day... Moneta, a white man, told Brown, an African-American woman, that the song was inappropriate. “The words, ‘I’ll eff you upside down,’ are inappropriate,” Moneta said, according to Brown. (Those exact lyrics are not in the song, though it has plenty of f-bombs.)

“Yes, of course,” Brown said. She says she shut the song off immediately. She grabbed him a vegan muffin and offered it free of charge. “No,” Brown recalls Moneta saying. “Ring me up for it.” Brown says she offered again, apologizing for the offense the song had caused. “You need me to ring me up for it right now,” Moneta insisted.

...Kevin Simmons, the other barista on duty, was busy making drinks. Simmons had worked there for three months and was up for his ninety-day review the next week. While pulling shots of espresso, he noticed a man who was upset with Brown. “Harassing is definitely the word I would use,” Simmons says. “He was verbally harassing her.” Simmons did not hear what Moneta or Brown said specifically, but he noticed Brown hastily turning off the music and apologizing profusely.

If that’s where the matter ended, this would be the sort of story that happens all the time in the United States but is seldom discussed: a patron feels righteously entitled in interaction with low-wage service worker, lashing out in a manner that is needlessly harsh and glaringly uncharitable, while the low-wage service worker is unfailingly polite and doing her level-best to be accommodating.

But that is not where it ended.

Instead, Moneta, a college administrator playing to type, escalated the matter by needlessly injecting it into his institution’s bureaucracy. If you’ve been wondering what Duke’s burgeoning numbers of administrators do all day, here’s a look at a priority two chose: Moneta called Robert Coffey, Duke’s director of dining services, telling him that while at a coffee shop that contracts with the university, he heard an inappropriate song playing.

So the head of dining services called Robbie Roberts, the owner of Joe Van Gogh, who relies on income from Duke University. Now back to the alt-weekly, which somehow got audio of the meeting between the two baristas who were there during the incident and Joe Van Gogh’s human-resources manager:

Apres Moi Le Deluge - Do The Rich Think They Have An Escape Plan?

therealnews |  And the role of finance in deciding who gets to run as a heck of a lot more powerful than any Russians.

RANA FOROOHAR: Yeah. That’s, that’s absolutely true.

PAUL JAY: So very dangerous times. And now we haven’t even talked about in this whole conversation the issue of climate change. There was a time in ’07-’08 when even finance seemed to get what a danger this was. Then the crash comes. And now it’s, like, it’s not even on the political agenda.

RANA FOROOHAR: Well, you know, the only, I would argue the only reason finance cared about climate change in ’07-’08 is that we were having an oil boom. And whenever oil prices go up, finance gets more interested in green technologies because they suddenly seem to make sense economically. If you think about wind, you know, I don’t know the exact figures, but wind power, say, costing, you know, the equivalent of $40 a barrel of oil, or whatever the equivalent would be. Those technologies become more cost effective as the price of oil soars. And so that’s why you saw a lot of interest. But then when oil, which is very cyclical, right, very volatile, when it tanks you see all the money flow out of the sector, out of the clean energy sector. And I expect that’s how it would be now.

It’s too bad, because, you know, we haven’t really talked about what are the alternatives to this financial, financialized capitalism. One of the kind of amazing, like, duh, low-hanging fruit things that we could do is have a green stimulus program. Joe Stiglitz has talked about this, many others have talked about it. It would be the easiest, quickest, smartest way to actually create some real growth in the economy, transition off of fossil fuels. You know, just, just implementing the best technologies available today in all homes and schools, institutions, would create so many jobs and so much growth that it could really help jumpstart the economy in a true ground-up way.

PAUL JAY: There’s no better example of the complete irrationality of this system that that would even make Wall Street money. I mean, capitalists would make money out of a new green economy. But the politics of it is you’re going to have to take on the Koch brothers. There’s a lot of money being made now in war. I should say getting ready for war, and wars. And as rational as that is, and it wouldn’t even be anti-capitalist. Like, you could have a big green economy. People could make money out of it.

RANA FOROOHAR: And in fact, China—

PAUL JAY: You can, you can, and China’s to some extent doing it.

RANA FOROOHAR: China’s, is starting to try and do this. I mean, I have a lot of, you know, issues with China, policy-wise. But one thing that they’ve been very smart on is making these green technologies, green batteries, solar panels, wind, making these strategic sectors and really connecting the dots between workers, businesses, funders, job creators, et cetera.

PAUL JAY: So get into the heads of these people who are making these decisions.

RANA FOROOHAR: Do I have to?

PAUL JAY: They have kids. They have grandkids. They got to live in this world. I know they’re making an orgy level of money. But they’ve made it. And I know I’m not suggesting that there’s ever an end of wanting to make money. I’ve asked people who have ridiculous amounts of money, why are you still trying to make more money? And it comes down to because that’s who I am, and what else am I going to do. I mean, there’s some that decide to start giving it away and do philanthropy. And, but even then are still very concerned about making more and making more. But more importantly, how do, do you ask, how do these people go home at night and not be concerned about climate crisis, and war, and financial meltdown? How do we not worry about that?

RANA FOROOHAR: You know, I think it’s, it’s a worry that if it exists, it gets kind of tucked in the back pocket some, somewhere. One thing I’ve been hearing from a lot of very wealthy people these days, since the election, actually, is that they all have escape plans. You know, I mean, there was a very interesting story, actually, in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos who I knew, actually, when he was a reporter in China. And he covered the ways in which rich people are buying up ranches in New Zealand and creating bunkers in the Bahamas, or wherever they’re going, thinking that they’re somehow going to be able to avoid the apocalypse when it comes. There’s actually a business that operates in New York. It’s a boat that will come, you can apparently pre-buy, this sounds like the biggest scam in history to me, but you can pre-buy tickets if there’s some political crisis or some danger moment, and they’ll come and pick you up and whisk you up the Hudson.

Now, you know, which rich people think there’s going to be their seat waiting when there’s a real problem, I don’t know. But I think that that that goes to this idea that the wealthy have come to believe, frankly like, you know, the French, perhaps, in the 18th century that—

What Is The Purpose Of Food-Powered Make-Work?

evonomics |  There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

Donald Glover's Succinct Annihilation Of Rhyming, Posing, America....,

NewYorker |  The video, which was released online as Glover performed the track on live television, turned the single into a pessimistic statement on American entertainment—both the making and consumption of it. As such, the artist inculpates himself. In the video, Glover is shirtless and his teeth gleam. He plays a kind of deleterious tramp, all instinct, skitting around an airy parking hangar. Dance is its own language; the choreographer for the video, Sherrie Silver, has taught Glover to contort his body in a manner that induces memories of the grotesque theatre of jigging and cake-walking. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience. Glover strikes a pose, and then, in time for the rhythm drop, shoots a black man in the head from behind.

A moment ago, the victim had been strumming a guitar. Glover carefully places the gun on a lush pillow held out for him by an eager school-aged black child. The awful syncopation of murder and music recalls Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” from 2016, in which footage of a police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back corresponds to a climax in Kanye West’s “Ultra Light Beam.” This is what it’s like, Glover’s video seems to say, to be black in America—at any given time, vulnerable to joy or to destruction. When his character is not dancing, he is killing. The camera amiably follows Glover and a new set of companions, a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren doing the gwara gwara, and then a slew of viral dances. The reprieve ends abruptly when, in another room, Glover is passed another gun, a rifle this time, and murders the members of a black choir. The ten actors fall down in a gruesome heap, reminding us of the night we got word that a young white man had killed a gathering of black worshippers at a church in Charleston. And then Glover is dancing again—this time, with cars burning and police chaos beyond him. The song ends with an eerie melody from Young Thug, who is almost-singing, “You just a big dawg, yeah / I kennelled him in the back yard, yeah.” At the video’s end, Glover is running for his life, the police gaining on him. I’ve been watching it on a loop.

BostonGlobe |  Diving down into the pop-culture id, Glover plays games with the politics of racial personae, the ways they can be appropriated and reappropriated by a racist culture, and the traps into which a trapped people can fall. He casts himself as the swaggering bad boy here, conjuring a centuries-long history of black male image, self-image, used image. 

The body movements and facial contortions reach back to the mother country, through Jim Crow and Juba and America’s sorry legacy of minstrelsy, through Alvin Ailey and “Thriller” and modern street dance — the dance is many-sided, many-streamed, lethal; it’s beautiful and grotesque. The machine-gunning of a gospel choir and Gambino’s crotch-grabbing, his lyrics sardonically boasting “Grandma told me, Get your money, black man” all taunt rap culture’s obsession with machismo, material success, and the glorification of gun violence — memes that are then taken up, reified, and reiterated both by black audiences and by a panicked, powerful white mainstream anxious to define and diminish.

Taken as a whole, “This Is America” functions as a double-edged machete, slicing into a divided culture’s twinned illusions and acknowledging the cartoon as a further form of bondage. Jim Crow mutates into Bad Mutha, burns the culture down, dances across its ashes, and still he ends up running for his life down a dark alley, pursued by an out-of-focus white mob. For a black audience (I’m assuming) it’s a familiar story, and Glover only connects the dots in fresh, unholy ways. For white viewers, those who have the comfort of rarely, if ever, being uncomfortable in their skins in public, this is history written with a different kind of lightning.

The response to this dead-serious work of satire has been exactly what it should be, confused and conversational, struggling toward clarity. In the words of one Twitter onlooker, “Donald Glover is doing what Kanye [West] thinks he’s doing.” (Arguments ensued.) Justin Simien, the writer-director whose wonderful Netflix show “Dear White People” parses the conundrums of black college life with wry empathy, weighed in with an epic interpretive “love letter” to “This Is America.” A white reader would learn a great deal by simply going online and reading the multiplicity of black responses to this video.

When BeeDeeism Hoists Itself By Its Own Little Petard...,

theburningplatform |  A famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects is “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Even after all these years, it turns up in comment sections and social media. It is a good line to have in mind when thinking about who is actually ruling over us. In America, our elites have spent a very long time convincing us that there are no elites. The fact is though, every society has an elite and it is usually a stable, semi-permanent one. The people in charge tend to stay in charge.

Here’s an interesting bit of data that underscores the stability of a nation’s elites. In the 16th century, the Spanish conquered the area that is now Guatemala. The Spanish were not settlers like the English, so a local Spanish elite came into rule over the conquered people, who were often used as slaves in mining and agriculture. Since 1531, 22 families have controlled Guatemala’s economy, politics and culture. Another 26 families have served as a secondary elite, often marrying into the core elite.

The result is one percent of the population, descendants of the Conquistadors, has controlled the country for over 400 years. This dominance has been locked in by a set of marriage rules, that created a self-perpetuating marriage strategy. For example, both the bride and groom had to bring a certain amount of wealth into the marriage. The result was both families would negotiate marriages much in the same way it was done in medieval Europe. These rules have their roots in the Siete Partidas, that dates to the 13th century.

Of course, elite families marrying one another is not a new idea, but it is more than just wealthy families using marriage to solidify alliances. There is a biological factor to it. The people in the elite got there originally by having elite cognitive skills. Modern elites like to throw around the term meritocracy, but they know biology counts for a lot. It’s why you don’t often see a member of the elite marrying one of the servants. Arnold learned that lesson. The one on the left is from the maid, while those on the right are with a Kennedy.

Creating Racism: Psychiatry's Betrayal

cchr |  Is racism alive today?

In the United States, African-American and Hispanic children in predominantly white school districts are classified as “learning disabled” more often than whites. This leads to millions of minority children being hooked onto prescribed mind-altering drugs—some more potent than cocaine—to “treat” this “mental disorder.” And yet, with early reading instruction, the number of students so classified could be reduced by up to 70 percent.

African-Americans and Hispanics are also significantly over-represented in US prisons.

In Britain, black men are ten times more likely than white men to be diagnosed as “schizophrenic,” and more likely to be prescribed and given higher doses of powerful psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs. They are also more likely to receive electroshock treatment (over 400 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain to control or alter a person’s behavior) and to be subjected to physical and chemical restraints.

Around the world, racial minority groups continue to come under assault. The effects are obvious: poverty, broken families, ruined youth, and even genocide (deliberate destruction of a race or culture). No matter how loud the pleadings or sincere the efforts of our religious leaders, our politicians and our teachers, racism just seems to persist.

Yes, racism persists. But why? Rather than struggle unsuccessfully with the answer to this question, there is a better question to ask. Who?

The truth is we will not fully understand racism until we recognize that two largely unsuspected groups are actively and deceptively fostering racism throughout the world. The legacy of these groups includes such large-scale tragedies as the Nazi Holocaust, South Africa’s apartheid and today, the widespread disabling of millions of schoolchildren with harmful, addictive drugs. These groups are psychiatry and psychology.

In 1983, a World Health Organization report stated, “…in no other medical field in South Africa is the contempt of the person, cultivated by racism, more concisely portrayed than in psychiatry.”

Professor of Community Psychiatry, Dr. S. P. Sashidharan, stated, “Psychiatry comes closest to the police…in pursuing practices and procedures that…discriminate against minority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom.”

Dr. Karen Wren and Professor Paul Boyle of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, concluded that the role of scientific racism in psychiatry throughout Europe is well established historically and continues today.

Since 1969, CCHR has worked in the field of human rights and mental health reform, and has investigated the racist influence of the “mental health” professions on the Nazi Holocaust, apartheid, the cultural assault of the Australian Aboriginal people, New Zealand Maoris and Native American Indians, and the current discrimination against Blacks across the world.

Psychiatry and psychology’s racist ideologies continue to light the fires of racism locally and internationally to this day.

This report is designed to raise awareness among individuals about this harmful influence. Not only can racism be defeated, but it must be, if man is to live in true harmony.

Weaponized Autism: Fin d'Siecle Programmer's Stone

melmagazine |  We know that people on the spectrum can exhibit remarkable mental gifts in addition to their difficulties; Asperger syndrome has been associated with superior IQs that reach up to the “genius” threshold (4chan trolls use “aspie” and “autist” interchangeably). In practice, weaponized autism is best understood as a perversion of these hidden advantages. Think, for example, of the keen pattern recognition that underlies musical talent repurposed for doxxing efforts: Among the more “successful” deployments of weaponized autism, in the alt-right’s view, was a collective attempt to identify an antifa demonstrator who assaulted several of their own with a bike lock at a Berkeley rally this past April.

As Berkeleyside reported, “the amateur detectives” of 4chan’s /pol/ board went about “matching up his perceived height and hairline with photos of people at a previous rally and on social media,” ultimately claiming that Eric Clanton, a former professor at Diablo Valley College, was the assailant in question. Arrested and charged in May, Clanton faces a preliminary hearing this week, and has condemned the Berkeley PD for relying on the conjecture of random assholes. “My case threatens to set a new standard in which rightwing extremists can select targets for repression and have police enthusiastically and forcefully pursue them,” he wrote in a statement.

The denizens of /pol/, meanwhile, are terribly proud of their work, and fellow Trump boosters have used their platforms to applaud it. Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called it a new form of “facial recognition,” as if it were in any way forensic, and lent credence to another dubious victory for the forces of weaponized autism: supposed coordination with the Russian government to take out ISIS camps in Syria. 4chan users are now routinely deconstructing raw videos of terrorist training sites and the like to make estimations about where they are, then sending those findings to the Russian Ministry of Defense’s Twitter account. There is zero reason to believe, as Posobiec and others contend, that 4chan has ever “called in an airstrike,” nor that Russia even bothered to look at the meager “intel” offered, yet the aggrandizing myth persists.

Since “autistic” has become a catchall idiom on 4chan, the self-defined mentality of anyone willing to spend time reading and contributing to the site, it’s impossible to know how many users are diagnosed with the condition, or could be, or earnestly believe that it correlates to their own experience, regardless of professional medical opinion. They tend to assume, at any rate, that autistic personalities are readily drawn to the board as introverted, societal misfits in search of connection. The badge of “autist” conveys the dueling attitudes of pride and loathing at work in troll communities: They may be considered and sometimes feel like failures offline — stereotyped as sexless, jobless and immature — but this is because they are different, transgressive, in a sense better, elevated from the realm of polite, neurotypical normies. Their handicap is a virtue.

Normotic Illness Culture: Programming the Social Validation Feedback Loop

CounterPunch |  Sitting alone in my room watching videos on Youtube, hearing sounds from across the hall of my roommate watching Netflix, the obvious point occurs to me that a key element of the demonic genius of late capitalism is to enforce a crushing passiveness on the populace. With social atomization comes collective passiveness—and with collective passiveness comes social atomization. The product (and cause) of this vicious circle is the dying society of the present, in which despair can seem to be the prevailing condition. With an opioid epidemic raging and, more generally, mental illness affecting 50 percent of Americans at some point in their lifetime, it’s clear that the late-capitalist evisceration of civil society has also eviscerated, on a broad scale, the individual’s sense of self-worth. We have become atoms, windowless monads buffeted by bureaucracies, desperately seeking entertainment as a tonic for our angst and ennui.

The old formula of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott is as relevant as it always will be: “It is creative apperception more than anything that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” If so many have come to feel alienated from life itself, that is largely because they don’t feel creative, free, or active.......

 

Noam Chomsky, in the tradition of Marx, is fond of saying that technology is “neutral,”neither beneficent nor baleful in itself but only in the context of particular social relations, but I’m inclined to think television is a partial exception to that dictum. I recall the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which, while sitting in front of a TV, Calvin says, “I try to make television-watching a complete forfeiture of experience. Notice how I keep my jaw slack, so my mouth hangs open. I try not to swallow either, so I drool, and I keep my eyes half-focused, so I don’t use any muscles at all. I take a passive entertainment and extend the passivity to my entire being. I wallow in my lack of participation and response. I’m utterly inert.” Where before one might have socialized outside, gone to a play, or discussed grievances with fellow workers and strategized over how to resolve them, now one could stay at home and watch a passively entertaining sitcom that imbued one with the proper values of consumerism, wealth accumulation, status-consciousness, objectification of women, subordination to authority, lack of interest in politics, and other “bourgeois virtues.” The more one cultivated a relationship with the television, the less one cultivated relationships with people—or with one’s creative capacities, which “more than anything else make the individual feel that life is worth living.”

Television is the perfect technology for a mature capitalist society, and has surely been of inestimable value in keeping the population relatively passive and obedient—distracted, idle, incurious, separated yet conformist. Doubtless in a different kind of society it could have a somewhat more elevated potential—programming could be more edifying, devoted to issues of history, philosophy, art, culture, science—but in our own society, in which institutions monomaniacally fixated on accumulating profit and discouraging critical thought (because it’s dangerous) have control of it, the outcome is predictable. The average American watches about five hours of TV a day, while 60 percent of Americans have subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Sixty-five percent of homes have three or more TV sets.

Movie-watching, too, is an inherently passive pastime. Theodor Adorno remarked, “Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before.” To sit in a movie theater (or at home) with the lights out, watching electronic images flit by, hearing blaring noises from huge surround-sound speakers, is to experience a kind of sensory overload while being almost totally inactive. And then the experience is over and you rub your eyes and try to become active and whole again. It’s different from watching a play, where the performers are present in front of you, the art is enacted right there organically and on a proper human scale, there is no sensory overload, no artificial splicing together of fleeting images, no glamorous cinematic alienation from your own mundane life.

Since the 1990s, of course, electronic media have exploded to the point of utterly dominating our lives. For example, 65 percent of U.S. households include someone who plays video games regularly. Over three-quarters of Americans own a smartphone, which, from anecdotal observation, we know tends to occupy an immense portion of their time. The same proportion has broadband internet service at home, and 70 percent of Americans use social media. As an arch-traditionalist, I look askance at all this newfangled electronic technology (even as I use it constantly). It seems to me that electronic mediation of human relationships, and of life itself, is inherently alienating and destructive, insofar as it atomizes or isolates. There’s something anti-humanistic about having one’s life be determined by algorithms (algorithms invented and deployed, in many cases, by private corporations). And the effects on mental functioning are by no means benign: studies have confirmed the obvious, that “the internet may give you an addict’s brain,” “you may feel more lonely and jealous,” and “memory problems may be more likely” (apparently because of information overload). Such problems manifest a passive and isolated mode of experience.

But this is the mode of experience of neoliberalism, i.e., hyper-capitalism. After the upsurge of protest in the 1960s and early ’70s against the corporatist regime of centrist liberalism, the most reactionary sectors of big business launched a massive counterattack to destroy organized labor and the whole New Deal system, which was eating into their profits and encouraging popular unrest. The counterattack continues in 2018, and, as we know, has been wildly successful. The union membership rate in the private sector is a mere 6.5 percent, a little less than it was on the eve of the Great Depression, and the U.S. spends much less on social welfare than comparable OECD countries. Such facts have had predictable effects on the cohesiveness of the social fabric.

Sorry Feed - Neoliberal Negroes in Choppa Suits Are Harmful Parasites

ineteconomics |  LP: How does the neoliberal turn manifest in black megachurches like those led by popular ministers like T.D. James and Creflo Dollar?

LS: Even when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive and running the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, there were different tendencies within black churches. Some, while not necessarily supporting the Jim Crow regime, definitely kind of acquiesced to it and were not interested in having their churchgoers be involved in anti-racist politics. At the same time, you had people using the church to connect to a really radical critique of capitalism and white supremacy. 

In the 70s and into the 80s, this radical-to-left tendency is becoming less and less important in black churches. What you see instead is the growth of churches that use the Bible as a kind of self-help guide and promote the prosperity gospel, which holds that if you follow the Bible, you will become not only spiritually but materially wealthy. The flip side is that if you don’t follow the Bible, you’ll become poor. So somebody like Creflo Dollar [founder of the World Changers Church International based in College Park, Georgia] argues that you’re poor because you don’t have the right mindset. That’s naturalizing poverty. 

Related is the growth of black megachurches with as many as 10,000 or even 20,000 members. They have their own community development corporations. Some of them actually look like corporations in their design and require a significant outlay of capital in order to operate. So even if they are not proposing the whole prosperity gospel, they have to propose some aspect of it in order to exist. 

LP: It seems burdensome that in addition to paying taxes, churchgoers end up funding social services through tithing.

LS: States and local governments are now outsourcing some of their social service provisions to churches. This is problematic for several reasons. One is because of the important distinction between church and state. It’s all too likely that a church would use the resources to proselytize instead of provide services. Also, churches provide a function of spiritual guidance – they aren’t bureaucracies. People who work in churches don’t know how to deal with poverty or public housing provisions.

We wouldn’t expect a charity to fund NASA: the scale of the challenge is something that no private entity could actually fulfill. Well, it’s the same with social service provision. When people pay their tithe, the resources might really go to social services instead of lining somebody’s pocket, but those services are nowhere near what’s needed to deal with inequality. In a way, it demobilizes people when you connect this to the rhetoric that suggests that people are poor because of their own choices, it makes it more difficult for people to organize not just for more social services, but to get at structural dynamics. 

LP: What does it take to challenge the neoliberal turn? What have we learned about what’s effective and what’s not?

LS: Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about a wrong-headed approach that posits that the reason we have gains is because of leaders like him who spoke to power and as a result were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of folks in the South and the North to overturn the Jim Crow regime.

If you really look at the history, what you find instead is really deep organizing. What that charismatic leadership cannot do is build deep, enduring institutions to build the political capacity of regular folks. These institutions tend to have at least some modicum of democratic accountability. With the charismatic leadership model, there’s the idea that everything the leader says is correct. There are very few ways to hold them accountable or even create debate about strategies or tactics. But in a robust model of organizing, people can actually create conditions to lead themselves and engage in making decisions, whether we’re talking about labor issues, racial inequality, or #MeToo and gender inequality. 

Communications NATO: Psychological Defense of the Status Quo

defenseone |  Fending off disinformation will get even harder when a new Russian news outlet launches in the United States this month. Going by the unwieldy name of “USA Really. Wake Up Americans,” this private counterpart to the Russian government’s RT is owned by the media company RIA FAN, which previously resided at the St. Petersburg “troll factory” the Internet Research Agency.

“Why do we even allow RT to broadcast in our countries?” asked Ilves. Why, indeed. But as “USA Really” shows, even if EU or NATO member states collectively revoked RT’s broadcasting licenses, Russian disinformation would not go away. The EU is trying to provide some sort of coordinated response. According to an April 26 statement, the European Commission will introduce a Code of Practice for online platforms; it will, for example, require the platforms to be transparent about political advertising and to identify and close fake accounts (“bots”). The EU also runs the three-year-old East StratCom Task Force.

That’s an excellent start, but it’s dwarfed by Russia’s massive and highly sophisticated information operations. Though the East StratCom Task Force does a valiant job documenting mostly Russian disinformation, it consists of only 14 people. In a new report on Russian disinformation campaigns, the RAND Corporation advises governments to increase their populations’ media literacy. That’s a laudable goal, but a long-term one. So who will go head-to-head with Sergey Lavrov, the way NATO would confront, say, Russia’s armed forces if they made aggressive moves? And what if other countries or entities (say, ISIS at its zenith) attack us with propaganda campaigns? We can’t hang the job on our own news media. “You can’t press news organizations into the service of the nation,” noted Prof. Robert Picard, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

And yet our citizens consider disinformation a serious threat. In a Eurobarometer poll conducted in March, 83 percent of EU citizens called fake news a problem for democracy. NATO has proven that a defense alliance can withstand severe military threats, but because today’s national security threats no longer involve only armed forces, our defense most be more wide-ranging too. Indeed, earlier this year Sweden announced that it will establish an Agency for Psychological Defense.

What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation — call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart. (And militarily non-aligned countries such as Sweden and Finland could join too.)

Democracy is Dangerous to the Powerful

truthdig |  Let’s face it: Democracy is dangerous to the powerful who rely on big money, institutional leverage and mass media to work their will. The insurgencies of this decade against economic injustice—embodied in the Occupy movement and then Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—are potentially dire threats to the established unjust order.

For those determined to retain their positions in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party hierarchy, democracy within the party sounds truly scary. And inauthenticity of the party—and its corresponding heavy losses of seats from state legislatures to Capitol Hill during the last 10 years—don’t seem nearly as worrisome to Democratic elites as the prospect that upsurges of grass-roots activities might remove them from their privileged quarters.

As Sanders told a New York Times Magazine reporter in early 2017: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Twenty-five years ago, the so-called New Democrats were triumphant. Today, their political heirs are eager to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its name. At stake is whether democracy will have a chance to function.

A fundamental battle for democracy is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates to the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate them entirely. That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party committee meeting next week and then be decided by the full Democratic National Committee before the end of this summer.

To understand the Democratic Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to know how we got here.

Racialized Variant of Marx’s Reserve Army of the Unemployed

nakedcapitalism |  Back to NAFTA (North American Free-Trade Agreement) for a moment: imagine yourself working a line job at an auto factory with a family, a mortgage and kids to raise. One day in 1995 the boss comes forward with three displaced Mexican immigrants in tow to tell you that they have been offered your job at one-third of your wages as other factories are being closed to be reopened with ‘new’ workers in Mexico. This type of manufactured economic ‘competition’ breeds social divisions even without Bill Clinton railingagainst ‘criminal aliens.’

This isn’t to understate the social iniquity of institutional racism. But it is to question the liberal / progressive canard that working class racists have any material bearing on its existence or persistence. Racial animosity certainly exists— four hundred years of white terrorism against blacks is historical fact. But as argued below, capitalism can cause institutional racism outside of racial animosity.  And the ‘deplorables’ canard is especially offensive given the role of liberal economists in engineering the economic facts that racism and xenophobia are being exploited to explain.

In the current era, when NAFTA was passed, Mexico was floodedwith American industrial corn. Its lower cost destroyed the peasant economy in Mexico by rendering locally grown corn ‘uncompetitive.’ This cut the peasants whose livelihoods depended on selling their corn out of the cash economy. Millions of suddenly ‘freed’ peasants went to work in maquiladoras or fled North in search of work as undocumented workers. Without racial or national animosity, NAFTA created a new sub-class of industrial labor.

In the context of labor coerced through manufactured circumstances (work for us or starve) and control of government by the industries doing the employing, the idea of market wages is nonsense. And therein lies the point. The ‘free-market’ way to entice labor is to pay the wage that people are willing to work for— without coercion. The ‘capital accumulation’ theory behind NAFTA— that sacrifice is required to accumulate the capital that makes capitalism function, (1) begs the question: function for whom and (2) was also used to justify slavery.

A crude analogy would be to set the CEOs of major corporations on life rafts in the middle of the ocean and let them ‘compete’ with one another for bread to eat. A ‘market’ would have been created for bread, so how is this not ‘free-market economics?’ These CEOs could be dubbed a ‘criminal flotilla’ intent on invading the U.S. and political talking points could be traded regarding whether or not they are actually human. As with NAFTA, few, if any, would likely volunteer for the privilege. This is how ‘natural’ the economics behind NAFTA are.

By the time NAFTA was fully implemented the powers-that-be behind its central policies busied themselves creating racialized explanationsof Mexican immigration to the U.S. In their telling, NAFTA had nothing to do with the millions of Mexicans leaving Mexico for the U.S. or for the rapidly declining fortunes of American workers who suddenly faced competition for their paychecks from people willing to work for whatever they could get. ‘Criminals’ and ‘freeloaders’ were coming for American jobs went the carefully-crafted storyline.

The actual engineers of NAFTA were corporate lobbyists, ‘free-market’ economists, industrialist-friendly Republicans and Wall Street-friendly Democrats. There wasn’t a working class racist, a ‘deplorable,’ to be found amongst those crafting these policies of mass economic displacement. Liberal / progressive champions Paul Krugman and Bill Clinton were enthusiastic supporters of NAFTA and ‘free-trade.’ Paul Krugman, in particular, rode herd over critics of so-called free trade claiming superior knowledge. And Bill Clinton decries Trumpian xenophobia while being one of its major causes.

Of current relevance: (1) different classes of workers were created and placed in competition with one another to benefit a tiny ruling elite, (2) the interests of this elite were / are centered around pecuniary and political gain, (3) after implementation racialized explanations were put forward in lieu of the original economic explanations used to sell these programs and (4) these explanations followed the creation of the racialized ‘facts’ they were conceived to explain. The temporal sequence is important— mass immigration from Mexico and the destruction of the American working class were well-underway before racialized explanations were put forward to explain it.

What bearing does this have on institutional racism and its causes? The neo-colonial economic model is about coercing labor apart from whatever racial and / or national animosity might exist. American industries could have offered market wages to the Mexican peasants that NAFTA targeted until they agreed to work for them— this is the way that labor ‘markets’ work. But instead they chose to ‘free’ several million people from subsistence economies to compete with previously displaced Mexican labor and American industrial workers with the result that wages were lowered all around.

The argument was made at the time, and is still made today, that ‘everyone’ benefits from massively disrupting the lives of millions of people with trade agreements. Theoretical proof is put forward in terms of dollars / pesos of GDP gained. Left out is that the Mexican peasant economy wasn’t monetized and therefore its loss wasn’t counted. Even on its own terms NAFTA was a loser. And imposing these outcomes from above makes them profoundly anti-democratic. In other words, even if the outcomes were as promised, the decisions were made by its largest beneficiaries, not those whose lives were disrupted.

Having Upgraded His Wardrobe and Paid in Full - Jordan Peterson's 15 Minutes Nearly Over...,

WaPo |  The world is wretched with weak men. Slouchers, slackers, chumps, low-status dudes who have amassed a crumpled pile of inferior habits and made the world a messier place. 

Or so Jordan Peterson will tell you. But fear not, the doctor is here to help, preaching his thoroughly footnoted gospel of order and discipline, one rule at a time — in a popular book, in lectures far from his ivory tower roost and, most potently, on YouTube.

The man of the moment, the self-proclaimed “professor against political correctness,” sits in his Manhattan hotel aerie before another sold-out talk based on his best-selling “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The University of Toronto clinical psychologist also sold out his date at Washington’s Warner Theatre on Friday, so he’ll return next month to lecture there again. Plenty of men are listening. Even Kanye West, who amid his still-unspooling existential crisis on Twitter, shared an image of his computer screen, on which a tab for a Peterson video was visible. 

Peterson elicits nearly every opinion except indifference. “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, calling him “a young William F. Buckley.” Critics, and there are plenty, raise serious doubts.

“He takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality. It feels like a dressed-up version of misogyny,” says Gary Barker, a developmental psychologist who has studied ways to promote gender equality and violence prevention. “The scary part is it doesn’t provoke men to be better but to live with this inequality and get what you can out of it.”

Peterson rails against victimhood and “radical left-wing identity politics.” He’s an opponent of regulated equality and a skeptic of the notion of male or white “privilege.” Like many thought leaders who flirted with socialism in their youth, Peterson crusades against anything that he thinks smacks of Marxist tendencies and groupthink, which means a lot of inveighing against “postmodernist” scholars, who are probably a bigger nuisance at faculty confabs than in the lives of his fans.

Trump In Dallas Tomorrow...,

abcnews |  President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will both speak at the National Rifle Association convention in Dallas on Friday.

A White House official said Monday that Trump will attend the group's annual meeting. Trump has been a strong supporter of the NRA and enjoyed their backing in his 2016 campaign. Pence had already been scheduled to address the group.

After a deadly shooting in February at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump suggested he was open to new gun control measures. He held a meeting with senators, declaring that he would stand up to the gun lobby and calling for a "comprehensive" bill.

But Trump later backpedaled from those sweeping statements, offering a more limited plan. After he advocated increasing the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon to 21, Trump tweeted there was "not much political support" for the idea.