Saturday, January 23, 2021

Joe Biden: Unifier or Divider?

Joe Biden’s inaugural address was dominated by calls for unity.  But this seems naïve or even disingenuous to me, as the divide between Americans seems impossible to bridge.  Our division now goes beyond the traditional stuff of politics—e.g., the tax code, how to reduce the national debt, the foreign policy best for America, etc.—to include things like abolishing the police, allocating voting rights based on race, and even attacking the nuclear family.

Given this state of affairs, on what could Americans possibly unite?  We can’t even agree on who is to blame for the Wuhan Virus (or what it should be called), and the Left even wants to strangle the most American of our fundamental values: free speech.  In today’s environment, I find the once insightful words of the late Christopher Hitches to be less insightful than they are obvious:

If you say you're a unifier, you expect and usually get applause. I'm a divider. Politics is division by definition, if there was no disagreement there would be no politics. The illusion of unity isn't worth having, and is anyways unattainable.

But to make matters even worse, Joe Biden might actually be dividing the nation even further while disingenuously acting under the banner of unification.  How?  Paradoxically, he could be doing it by waging a new, seemingly unobjectionable war.

Specifically, Biden told the nation that there is a wave of “white supremacy” that “we must confront and we will defeat.”  My first reaction was that, to really unite us as Americans, we should be waging war on something outside of America—and there is plenty from which to choose.  Then, my second thought was this: this new war on “white supremacy,” even if domestic in nature, is at least something that 99 percent of Americans can unite over.  But my next thought was, wait, if 99 percent of Americans are already in agreement, is there really a war to be waged here?

After all, white supremacists aren’t in any positions of power or authority.  Our nation’s elite power centers of Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the Corporate Media, along with the politically connected teacher unions and academia, are already off-the-scale to the Left and worked and donated mightily to elect Biden.  So any attempts by any white supremacists to discriminate or cause any type of actual harm would be immediately evident and swiftly crushed, particularly in today’s hyper-vigilant cancel culture—a hyper-sensitive and intolerant culture where you can lose your job not only for your own political speech but also for what your associates may believe or say.

So what, exactly is Biden going to target in this new war on “white supremacy”?  Unfortunately, there is a recurring scam at work here that Americans need to be aware of.  It’s carried out in four simple steps:

  1. Pick a word, term, or phrase.  It has to be either really positive (like “truth”) or really negative (like “white supremacy”) so that it invokes the same strong, gut reaction—whether positive or negative—from nearly everyone.
  2. Align yourself with or against that term and demand that everyone else do the same.  If you’ve picked a good term, this will be an easy task.  For example, we all know that “white supremacy” is bad, even evil.  Everyone will instinctively jump on board. 
  3. Next—and here’s the creative part—redefine that term in ways that have nothing to do with its original meaning but are consistent with your true, underlying objectives.
  4. If anyone questions your new definition, brand them as being anti-[positive term] or pro-[negative term].  In the political context, this may also include labeling them stupid, racist, dangerous, and even a threat to democracy itself.  In today’s age of one-line political zingers (both intentional and unintentional) the more hyperbole you can whip-up the better.  The goal is to maximize the level of faux outrage and the number of re-tweets.

This tactic is not just for politics.  I’ve previously written about how Wisconsin prosecutors use this wordplay strategy in a non-political context to obtain their objectives of lowering the burden of proof and winning convictions by aligning themselves with, and then redefining, “truth.”  (You can read about this prosecutorial ploy, carried out with the help of Wisconsin judges and the state jury instruction committee, in this article.)   But it is a very popular political strategy as well, and right now the Left is using it to great effect with negative words and terms such as “misinformation,” “racist,” and especially “white supremacy.”

Here’s how.  When jumping on board Biden’s war on “white supremacy,” you probably defined the word in your head similar to the way the dictionary defines it: “the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular black or Jewish people.”  That’s why this particular “war” not only seems just, but also seems like something that could “unite” America, as almost zero percent of Americans are white supremacists.  But if that’s your definition, you’d be wrong.  Instead, you just fell victim to steps 1 and 2 of the ploy.  Now that the Left has your buy-in, it moves on to steps 3 and 4, starting with redefining the term.

The re-definition of words, terms, and phrases starts at the universities—our institutions that indoctrinate tomorrow’s social media employees and others who are soon to achieve influence and power.  I am convinced that, much to my own amazement, universities have a tremendous influence on the real world; we therefore cannot ignore—and, to the contrary, should pay very close attention to—even the craziest ideas that emerge from academia.  And if you want to know what’s happening on campus, there’s no better place to turn than The College Fix.  Here, then, are examples, according to universities and their professors, of what is, or is the result or evidence of, “white supremacy”:

  1. Tom Brady.  You may have thought you liked QB12 because he won 6 super bowl rings.  Or, like me, maybe you think you admire him for his work ethic, as I explained in this blog post.  But you’d be wrong.  Instead, as one insightful professor explains, your feelings toward Tom are actually attributable to “the latest wave of white rage and white supremacy.”  In fact, Tom demonstrates “an unconflicted and unapologetic embodiment of upper-class white exceptionality and manly omnipotence.”  Who knew?  Good thing the professors are there to expose such evils and properly indoctrinate the young minds placed in their charge.
  2. Hard work.  Even though I became a Tom Brady fan because of his work ethic, not his super bowl rings, that doesn’t remove him from white supremacy’s long reach.  In fact, things like “hard work” and “self-discipline” are now “taboo in academia.”  As one academic conference taught, even “being on time” is a sign of “white supremacy.”  That is, “the racial narrative of White” includes “making sure you’re not tardy.”  Similarly, “grading and good grammar are examples of white supremacy,” too.  Rutgers University English department apparently adopted this amazing insight, as it announced it will “deemphasize” grammar to help stem the rise of white supremacy and racism.  It seems to me like the English department is risking putting itself out of business.  
  3. The Kardashians.  The Kardashians can’t possibly be affiliated in any way with white supremacy, can they?  That family doesn’t exactly scream “hard work” or “good grammar.”  Instead, they have mastered the celebrity artform of "being well known for being well known."  To most casual viewers they might not even appear to be white—at least not in the evil sense of the word.  Further, aren’t many of the Kardashians dating and even married to black men?  And isn’t one of the Kardashians involved in criminal justice reform for the benefit of black Americans?  Would a white supremacist do those sorts of things?  Once again, your confusion is understandable.  That's why we need professors to explain things to us: “the commercial-enterprise-posing-as-a-family retraces the historical dispossession of Black motherhood, as well as the arrest and theft of African being as Black and brown flesh. Further, through the heteronormative, domestic enterprise of having Black children touched by a white mother—in a country libidinally founded on interracial sexual and rape fantasies—Kim and her family biologically reproduce non-Blackness-as-multiracialized-whiteness.”  Kapish? No?  Well that's part of the plan.  Just go along with it, minion.
  4. The nuclear family.  The Kardashians may have a super-attractive, uncommon ethnic flair about them, but as you just learned in number 3, they’re still white enough to constitute “white mothers” who are doing harm by touching “black children.”  In fact, that’s the deeper problem: the family.  While I am still grateful to this day for having two parents who made me their priority and invested so much hard work in raising me, it turns out that the family structure I thought worked so well is actually racist!  One professor explained: “Part of what I’ve learned is that the white-nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy.”  What to do about it?  If you are “truly committed to fighting white supremacy,” the professor explains, “whites must not reproduce” or do anything that perpetuates whiteness, e.g., they “must not own homes.”  Don’t question it.  You’ve already declared your opposition to white supremacy, haven’t you?  And you’re not as smart as the college professors who define the term, so just nod in agreement.  

Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening in academia—including and especially at our most “elite” institutions.  But it’s enough to demonstrate the point that "white supremacy" ain’t what it used to be or even what the dictionary says it is.  (Similarly, "racism" includes nearly everything, and "disinformation" includes anything the Left disagrees with even if it is objectively true.)  Rather, the academics have redefined "white supremacy" to suit their aggressive and radical political and social agenda.  The question is whether Biden realized this when declaring America’s newest "war" or if he was merely reading a script and, like most Americans, jumped on board without appreciating what’s actually happening.

There’s a good chance that Biden didn’t realize what he was doing.  As Trump once said, “Sleepy Joe doesn’t know he’s alive.”  I hope this is true in this case—in a hyperbolic sense, of course.  I hope Biden’s definition of "white supremacy" is much closer to the dictionary’s definition than it is to the Left’s emerging, all-encompassing definition which is designed not to unite Americans, but to further divide our country along racial lines and make things even worse than they already are. 

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