Truth itself, not just history, is being “canceled” in America. It’s become a cliché that we live in a post-truth world. The situation is actually worse. We now live in a world in which truth and lies are almost perfectly inverted, so that lies pass for truth, while truth is denounced or mocked in a fashion that would have shocked even Orwell.
This is made easier by the fact that at all levels, education in the U.S. has collapsed. Completely and totally. It exists institutionally. It does not exist intellectually. The only people presently getting real educations are those being homeschooled.
Consider what’s happened since May 25, the day George Floyd died. His death was filmed with police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. In a social media saturated society, what is filmed and uploaded to the Internet is real. Protests turned to riots, which tore through major cities destroying businesses that survived the Covid-19 lockdowns. While civic authorities did little or nothing, a clearly planned and orchestrated movement of “cancelling” history arose, its “woke” foot soldiers pulling down statues and vandalizing historical monuments. It is now possible that neither the Confederate carving on Stone Mountain, Ga., nor even Mount Rushmore, will survive the apostles of “woke.”
Significant is the fact that among the statues taken down was that of General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant fought for the Union, not the Confederacy. Also pulled down was a Madison, Wisc. statue of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg, who gave his life fighting slavery. The statue was decapitated and hurled into a nearby lake. This bespeaks either of the mass historical illiteracy of the “woke” brigade, or their intent to erase all U.S. history of whatever sort, like an insane cross between the Party of Orwell’s 1984 and Communist China’s Maoists.
Removing truths of history opens the door to lies politically useful in the present.
Two salient facts about George Floyd’s death are worth noting. First, there isn’t the slightest reason for thinking Floyd died because of his race. It is true enough that Chauvin, in jail charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, had a track record of abuse, but he seems to have been an equal opportunity abuser, with whites as well as blacks having lodged complaints against him. But that brings me to my second and far more alarming point:
Medical evidence does not support the claim, repeated endlessly by mainstream media and simply assumed on the streets of America’s now-rended cities, that Chauvin murdered Floyd, that Floyd died because of Chauvin’s knee on his neck.
The medical examiner’s report on Floyd’s death shows that he died from a fatal dose of Fentanyl. He had other drugs in his system, a lethal cocktail.
One of the effects of an overdose of Fentanyl is to slow and even stop breathing, which matches Floyd’s recorded complaint exactly.
Mainstream media has completely ignored the medical examiner’s report. It doesn’t fit the official leftist narrative. Down the truth memory hole, therefore. Up with a lie.
Just to note: I am as critical as anyone of police brutality. I, too, fell for the official line until the medical report on what actually killed George Floyd came to my attention (thanks to Paul Craig Roberts). Derek Chauvin’s doesn’t fit my idea of a nice guy. I doubt I’d want to be alone in an elevator with him. But that’s neither here nor there. He has a Constitutional right to a fair trial. Having been tried and convicted in mass and social media, one wonders if there can be even the slightest hope of this. When his case comes up, will the medical report be introduced as part of the defense’s evidence? I’m not a lawyer, but would it not be a blatant miscarriage of justice if this report were ruled inadmissible for some reason? (A “second autopsy report” supposedly done at the request of Floyd’s family appears to be a media fabrication.)
Exonerating Chauvin assumes a jury can be found that hasn’t been poisoned by incessant media bleating about how Chauvin “murdered” Floyd. Is there a jury in the country that would be able to put evidence ahead of official narratives — at risk to themselves, since they could face intimidation and threats. Or just be filled with a distraught sense of the social consequences of a non-guilty verdict.
This last should be clear to anyone who recalls what happened when the four police officers in the Rodney King case were exonerated back in the early 1990s. Given that race relations are worse today than they were then, and the culture is more nihilistic generally, I think it safe to say that if Derek Chauvin is found innocent, rioters (not “peaceful protesters”) in many cities will again explode into an orgy of violence and destruction.
Assuming, of course, the country isn’t already under martial law or some equivalent. I fully expect riots to burst forth should Trump be given a second term in November.
Speaking of whom, in our context of lies and truth being inverted: for the past four years, articles far too numerous to link to individually have called Trump a fascist (ora “proto-fascist,” whatever that is). These people don’t appear to know what fascism is. Historically, fascism is the merging of state and corporate power in a nationalistic narrative. Except for this last, fascism is what Trumpism was rebelling against.
Substitute globalism for nationalism, and you have the brand of fascism that globalists were furthering without much opposition until the last decade. A powerful and very wealthy elite has been merging corporate and state power for the past 70 years, working to dominate the world’s populations economically and militarily.
Truth and lies inverted….
As with Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate.
And speaking further of truth and lies inverted on the domestic front….
White privilege? Systemic racism? White supremacy? Black Lives Matter actually doing something to ensure that black lives indeed do matter?
Lisa Bender, president of the Minneapolis City Council following its decision by vote to defund the Police Department (I’m not joking), stated that the ability to call the police “comes from a place of privilege.” She told the Twitter verse:
If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?
The capacity to call the police is now indicative of “white supremacy,” not the legal right of a taxpayer of whatever color. This is where Minneapolis is now, and as we’ll see below, this is where the U.S. is heading.
You now live in the United States of Identity Politics — the New Tribalism — which views everything through the lens of a dominant narrative about race in America. According to this narrative, all whites are beneficiaries of systemic racism and white privilege, while all black people are victims of the system’s structural violence.
The first thing to note is that in the U.S. of I.P., white people are less safe, including from the law itself. Consider just three recent cases (of many we could cite).
A woman named Tara Durant driving a vehicle in Fredericksburg, Virginia with her child found herself accidentally amidst of one of these “peaceful protests.” She feared for their safety as a Black Lives Matter mob blocked her way, then climbed on her car and screamed obscenities at her daughter who was terrified and crying. An increasingly scared Durant called 911 for help and was told by the operator to “call up city hall” because police would not respond to a “sanctioned event.”
Fabricated claims surfaced that Durant had tried to run people over. No video evidence of the allegation appeared. As the incident drew public scrutiny, the mayor apologized — to the rioters!
White people are thus being abandoned by their city and local governments. Their lives don’t matter!
This, of course, is a recipe for violence when whites decide to pick up firearms and see to their own defense, as did the couple in St. Louis when rioters broke through a gate and crossed over their property. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who were responding to threats, have had to face mainstream media demonizing as “the face of political resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement” (Chris Cuomo’s exact words) which McCloskey promptly denied being as he valiantly stood up to the left-leaning Cuomo’s badgering.
Yet as Tara Durant realized during the aftermath of her incident, if whites try to defend themselves out of fear for their lives, they increasingly risk running afoul the law in a system run by intimidated white liberals and thus falling to mob rule.
Because white people are now racist by definition, regardless of who starts and escalates confrontations.
Black Lives Matter has done nothing to bring substance to that phrase. In Chicago during the final weekend in June, 17 black men, women, and children were killed, and 47 injured, in drive-and walk-by shootings; in one case, a one-year-old was killed along with his mother as a gunman opened fire into the vehicle she was driving. All killers were black. No whites were involved.
Well over a hundred black people died violently in the month of June alone. One reason is that police have stood down out of fear for their jobs and lives, as they’ve faced threats and had to deal with physical assault and being shot at since May 25.
Black Lives Matter is manifestly not about black lives but political posturing and scheming.
Truth and lies inverted.
In another recent case (warning: language) in Oakland, Calif., a black woman and her teenage daughter escalated a verbal conflict that began when she accused a pregnant white woman of bumping her daughter at a restaurant exit. Outside on the sidewalk, and after dealing with screamed obscenities and anti-white insults, the woman and her husband got in their vehicle and started to back up. The black woman then banged on its rear. That was when the woman grabbed a firearm, got out, and ordered the woman to “Get the f*** away! Back the f*** up!”
Jillian Wuestenberg and her husband Eric (both licensed gun owners) were later arrested and are being prosecuted for felony assault. He has been fired from his job as a Veterans coordinator at Oakland University. Their firearms have been taken, leaving them defenseless, and they could face four years in prison!
Fortunately, there are organizations—always on the margins today — who still care about truth and appealing for the charges against the Wuestenbergs to be dropped as they were manifestly not the aggressors.
We read more and more about “Karens.” I had to look it up: Karen is “pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way….”
Angry? In the case just noted, I would have been angry, too (I doubt I would have pulled out a gun). Privilege? There’s that word again.
I am seeing “Karens” filmed every couple of days, then having their lives turned upside down with today’s total social media saturation and left-leaning reportages.
Imagine what would happen if a group of conservative white journalists decided to issue reports on the aggressive behaviors of the “Talekias” of the world (that being the first name of the black woman who provoked the confrontation with Jillian and Eric Wuestenberg). Such imaginings will help you grasp the Orwellian inversions of truth and lies we are talking about here — and indeed, began to see decades ago when race and gender preferences were equated with equal opportunity in the eyes of the courts and the law.
(Just as an aside, what parents in their right minds would name their daughter Talekia???)
The Wuestenbergs have to rely on crowdfunding to support their legal defense. Paul Craig Roberts (linked to above) cites William Engdahl’s list of the deep pockets supporting Black Lives Matter: in addition to the George Soros financial octopus, he names the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Ben & Jerry’s, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation (of Hewlett-Packard), the Heinz Foundation, Apple, Disney, Nike.
White privilege?
Where?
Truth and lies inverted.
According to Jordan Peterson, white privilege is a Marxist myth embedded in the postmodernist ideology Identity Politics draws from.
Black Lives Matter’s leaders’ Marxist beliefs have been documented. The organization’s actual goals are not about black lives mattering but removing all impediments to Marxian radical cultural and socioeconomic transformation.
I’ve no doubt Peterson’s in-depth analysis will sail light years over the heads of the far-left groups filling the streets. As I said at the outset, education has collapsed in the U.S., and will probably not recover.
It is important to realize how the truth / lies inversion empowers the extreme left. Leftists have no firm principles. They never have. Social justice is not a principle, it’s an incantation. For leftists, this is about smashing whatever and whoever is in the way of their seizing power. It is about destroying monuments to the past, because such things provide a people with stable reference points.
Conservatives tend to believe in principles. They assume others do as well. This puts them at a disadvantage, especially if they think the other side has “principles,” just different ones, and that “common ground” can be found through “dialogue.”
Leftists, though, have no principles conservatives can make ground with.
It’s a bit like the allegory of sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. Most people are sheep. This is not a pejorative, just the observation that left to themselves, most people are “kind, gentle, productive creatures who hurt one another only be accident … or under extreme provocation.”
A few in any population are wolves. A wolf is not kind and has no qualms about using or hurting the sheep to get what he wants.
The job of the sheepdog is to protect the sheep (and themselves) and “confront the wolves.” Wolvescan’t be talked to, bargained with, reasoned with, or somehow healed of imagined childhood trauma. They can only be separated from, cordoned off, or put down.
The sheepdog usually fails if he tries to convince the sheep of this. It’s too harsh a view of the world. Wolves exist at different levels of power, since power is how they measure their self-worth. If enough well-placed wolves can prevent the sheepdogs from acting, or destroy their motivation, they win. In America 2020, the wolves are out in force, and the sheepdogs have retreated!
The wolves can’t really produce or build anything, though. They can only tear down and destroy.
Therefore I tend to agree with those who believe the U.S. is undergoing a now-irreversible systemic collapse, and that on its way down, civil war may be unavoidable. If anything, we no longer need cultural studies, we need collapse studies.
What is presently unknown is how long it will take for a real sheepdog resistance to Black Lives Matter and other leftist wolves to emerge, as opposed to, e.g., scattered white individuals, provoked sheep, trying to remove BLM street murals and being prosecuted for “hate crimes” in our system of double-standards (it is okay for black leftists to vandalize historical statues but not okay for whites to deface BLM murals appearing on city streets).
A resistance of private sheepdogs is necessary because federal, state, and local governments have effectively dropped the ball, out of fear of being called racists, or white supremacists (most of those in elected office are, of course, sheep).
Kerem Yucel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A resistance who understands they will be demonized in mainstream media and doesn’t care, who are ready to take up arms to protect, by threat of deadly force, malls and businesses in threatened cities, or roads and thoroughfares, or historically-significant carvings such as Mount Rushmore or Stone Mountain, or any number of other historical monuments and other treasures either under attack now or likely to come under attack from the wolves of the far left in the near future.
Sculpted figures of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson ~ Stone Mountain, Georgia
It is important that for the sheepdog, violence is a last resort. Survivalist author Brandon Smith fears (here; then go here) that conservatives will let themselves be baited into responding to leftists with violence. This would play right into the hands of the wolves with real power. He is right to be worried. He understands Hegelian dialectic: crisis, reaction, response. A crisis is fomented; it leads to a reaction and calls to “do something”; elite-sponsored forces move in with the response that was wanted all along.
Therefore if it happens, a civil war between conservatives and leftists on U.S. soil won’t be the real war. That will be between globalist wolves who want a world government, versus those of us, sheep and sheepdogs alike, who want to live out our lives with our families and communities in peace, secure our borders, worship our God, and be left alone — even if we have to remain ever vigilant.
© 2020 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
Written by Steven Yates for News With Views ~ July 10, 2020