I did not vote for Trump last time, but I will this time, because the Democratic Party has turned against civilization.
A clear sign that both candidates—and both major parties—have betrayed liberty is that both parties unequivocally want the government to continue requiring health insurance for pre-existing conditions. Just a decade ago, half the country understood that insurance for pre-existing conditions is a contradiction in terms—like providing a life insurance policy for someone’s already-deceased spouse, or fire insurance for a house already burned down. If offered voluntarily, health coverage for pre-existing conditions is not insurance, but charity. If required by the government, such coverage is coercion. Now that coverage for pre-existing conditions is required by government, healthcare in America is socialist—not socialized, but socialist. And both major political parties—even including Ted Cruz, a former advocate of liberty (or so I thought)—are for it.
We are witnessing yet another expression of socialist medicine. Somehow, incredibly, American governments are in charge of responding to the Covid pandemic! Elected officials, appointed bureaucrats, and legislatures have decided who works (and worships and plays and protests) and who does not. They have disbursed trillions of dollars in handouts, issued (self-contradictory) medical guidance, and—most incredibly of all—managed the research, production, and distribution of medical technology ranging from masks to vaccines. In a crisis, American society has fallen to its level of 21st-century training: socialism.
Therefore, no matter who wins the election, what remains of American freedom will be in serious jeopardy. Nevertheless, on just about every issue, Biden and the Democrats are more anti-freedom than Trump and the Republicans.
The Democrats, by their own words on many occasions, are the greater threat to the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the independence of the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and the Constitution in toto.
On numerous issues ranging from Covid to energy, Biden claims that he has a plan, whereas Trump does not. Keep this in mind: The politician who claims to be the one with a plan for society is the villain. Recall these great words:
The dilemma is not between automatic forces and planned action. It is between the democratic process of the market, in which every individual has his share, and the exclusive rule of a dictatorial body. Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner’s own plan for the plans of his fellow men. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
— Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, 1947, available online.
Here is another reason to vote for Trump: It is imperative that criminal investigations of the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration and the deep state, Joe Biden, and Rep. Ilhan Omar continue. We must not let these people get away with murder—of our republic.
As everyone now knows, virtually all Republicans love America (not that love without explicit understanding is enough to preserve freedom), and most Democrats hate America. It’s been that way at least since the presidential race of 2004. But now it’s obvious. The Democrats who do love America are waking up and wondering whether they should remain Democrats. Many Democrats now believe America was founded on slavery and racism. They oppose capitalism, the true foundation of America. They believe that it is America that has to change to be like some other country—Sweden or South Africa or China or some imagined communist utopia, or some tribe of primitives. Republicans who demonstrate or protest always carry American flags. Democrats never do, except to burn them. (See also my article, Judeo-Christian Conservatives Are Today’s Main Defenders of Western Civilization.)
Trump has lived in a time with freedom in decline, and with authoritarian welfare-statism in ascendancy. He does not seem educated in the principles of freedom (or the principles of principles), from thinkers such as John Locke and America’s founders. He seems to have accepted, second-handledly, modern authoritarian welfare-statism—with a remnant of freedom—as the metaphysical given, and he tries to optimize within that framework. But within that framework, he looks at the world first-handedly, draws his own conclusions, and sticks to them in action. He saw hordes of young, fit Muslim men streaming into Europe, and he knew that was bad for Europe. He saw other countries taking advantage of the generosity of America, and he knew that was wrong. He saw crippling regulation of American industry, especially regarding energy, and knew that was wrong. He saw the demands of the green movement, and knew they were absurd. He saw the Covid lockdowns, and knew the cure (socialism) was worse than the disease.
Now we come to the main reason I will vote for Trump and against every Democrat. Trump saw critical race theory in our government bureaucracy and government-run schools, and knew it was evil. And he took action.
On September 4, the Trump administration released a remarkably astute and courageous memorandum, which read in part as follows:
The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions. Accordingly, to that end, the Office of Management and Budget will shortly issue more detailed guidance on implementing the President’s directive. In the meantime, all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions.
On September 17, in another remarkable statement, President Trump denounced critical race theory in American public schools as well (link added):
As many of you testified today, the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.
The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.
Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.
The narratives about America being pushed by the far-left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries — because both groups want to see America weakened, derided, and totally diminished.
Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families.
No Democrat would ever approve of such a statement. As everyone knows, all Democratic officials and operatives either tolerate or endorse this Leftist ideology. As just one example, Kamala Harris (who would succeed Biden when he fails to serve a full term as president) promoted a fund to bail out rioters, including some charged with murder.
To grasp how widespread, mainstream, and radical this evil ideology has become among Democrats, consider the following. The National Education Association (NEA) is the main national union of teachers in America, with roughly three million members. NEA, dominated by the Democratic Party and other Leftist groups, has an elaborate website called Edjustice. This site in turn has an elaborate sub-site called Black Lives Matter at School. On the Resources page of this site are links to an elaborate external site also entitled Black Lives Matter at School. The homepage of this site has only about 200 words. Here are the last 32:
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love eachother and support eachother.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
~Assata Shakur
The line, “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” is of course a reference to The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, which famously ends as follows:
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Assata Shakur, a.k.a. Joanne Chesimard, is a former Black Panther and leader of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted of murdering a state trooper, then escaped from prison, and is now holed up in Cuba, which she praises.
Here are quotations from her book, Assata: An Autobiography:
P. 203:
One of the most important things the Black Panther party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors.”P. 220–222
Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out. It wasn’t easy reading, but i was glad i did it. It opened up my horizons a hell of a lot. I didn’t relate to them as the great white fathers or like some kind of gods, like some of the white revolutionaries did. As far as i was concerned, they were two dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored.
The Curriculum page on the Black Lives Matter at School site links to a Google drive. From that drive, I downloaded more than three gigabytes, zipped, of teaching materials for pre-K through high school. Here are just two of the themes that start in pre-kindergarten:
– Queer Affirming, Trans Affirming, and Collective Value.
– Intergenerational, Black Families, and Black Villages.
The Suggested Readings for Early Childhood Teachers include a link to numerous books celebrating the Black Panthers. One of those books is Assata: An Autobiography, quoted above.
In all the materials I perused on this drive, there was no mention that these ideas are controversial or to be considered alongside contrary ideas. The communism/racism/LGBT advocacy of Assata Shakur et al. is presented as the unquestioned framework for the entire curriculum. (See also my blog post, Leftism, Racism, Death.)
This is the ideology that Biden, along with his fellow Democrats, implicitly endorses when he proclaims in the headline of a political ad from this week,
Black lives matter. No president should be afraid to say it.
How is it possible that communism infused with racism (that is, Nazism with a new, anti-white color palette) is taking over America?
James Lindsay, coauthor of the book Cynical Theories and creator of the New Discourses website, is one of the most knowledgeable and articulate opponents of this new ideology, which Lindsay calls “critical social justice,” or “critical race theory,” or “wokeness” for short. Lindsay describes himself politically as leaning Left, but he also is an explicit advocate of objectivity. Cynical Theories, which I am currently reading, and New Discourses are excellent sources for understanding wokeness. I particularly recommend these links from New Discourses:
Saying No to Critical Race Theory
No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why.
In Cynical Theories, Lindsay and coauthor Helen Pluckrose describe a fascinating “mutation” of postmodernism into what they call “applied postmodernism.” They write that
the antirealism and nihilistic despair of postmodernism wasn’t working and couldn’t produce change. The correction to this problem required grasping upon something both radically actionable and real, and [postmodern] Theory and activism therefore started to coalesce on a new idea in parallel to Descartes’ most famous meditation. For him, the ability to think implied existence—that something must be real. For the activist-scholars of the 1980s, the suffering associated with oppression implied the existence of something that could suffer and a mechanism by which that suffering can occur. “I think, therefore I am” was given new life under the axiomatic acceptance of new existential bedrock: “I experience oppression, therefore I am … and so are dominance and oppression.”
[Pluckrose, Helen; Lindsay, James A. (2020, Cynical Theories. Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.]
In addition to Descartes, German philosophers Kant and Hegel—the main philosophers underlying Marxism and Nazism—can readily be seen to be foundational to this theory. The postmoderns were post-Kantian subjectivists who attacked reason and therefore all knowledge. Then came a new strain of Hegelianism to pick up the pieces, with a new claim of what reality really is and a new method of “thinking” to replace the discredited method of logic. This new “woke” method consists of identifying (that is, inventing) the oppression which must exist because ones feels what must be it.
Thus we have a movement of people who “interpret” their feelings and then “protest” to the world, “I am oppressed,” instead of saying to themselves, “I have failed.” And they trade on the hardship of others from past generations, who shared their skin color or genital type or “sexual preference” and who really were oppressed. And then there are the “allies” of the “oppressed”—allies who, having rejected reason, are desperate to make believe they have a new, better (woke) method of thinking.
For testimony of young individuals who have somewhat awakened from their wokeness, see these links:
Lucy Kross Wallace on Her Descent Into (and Escape From) Social-Justice Extremism
Lindsay cites a famous expression from critical theorist Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In the same article, Lindsay notes that critical theorist Alison Bailey includes reason and logic in those “master’s tools.” This line of thinking is the source of the table that appeared on the Smithsonian website this past summer, decrying “the scientific method” (including “objective, rational linear thinking” and “cause and effect relationships”), “individualism,” “independence,” “hard work,” and “planning for the future” as expressions of “whiteness.”
Imagine telling an individual to reject these virtues and then to blame white people for his failure. That is the battle cry of evil echoed by today’s mainstream Leftists.
Going hand-in-hand with the woke rejection of reason is the rejection of the entity that reasons: the individual. Again following Hegel, it is groups (such as Blacks, with a capital “B,” and Whites, with a capital “W”), not individuals, that are really real. In short, the woke are collectivists as well as subjectivists.
For the past several months, the two most celebrated intellectuals of the woke movement have been Robin Diangelo, author of White Privilege, and Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist. Both of these books were in the top ten for several months on Amazon, which promoted them heavily, although the books have fallen off in sales in the past few weeks.
In a 2006 academic article, Diangelo reveals the influence of Kant and Hegel in her subjectivism and collectivism when she writes,
But there is no objective, neutral reality. Human objectivity is not actually possible, but as long as we construct the world as if it is, and then ascribe it only to ourselves, we keep White experience and people centered and people of color in the margins.
…
Seeing ourselves as individuals erases our history and hides the way in which wealth has accumulated over generations and benefits us, as a group, today. Further, being an individual is a privilege only afforded to White people. By focusing on ourselves as individuals, Whites are able to conceptualize the racist patterns in our behavior as “just our personality” and not connected to intergroup dynamics.
[Diangelo, Robin. (2006). “My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege.” Multicultural Perspectives. 8: 51-56.]
The title of Diangelo’s article illustrates the kinship between wokeness and Marxism (sharing the ancestry of Kant and Hegel): Race, like economic class, is considered an oppressed group. Diangelo claims that even though she was born into a low economic class, she was still privileged because she is white.
Kendi’s writing reveals that the woke take an assist also from the egalitarians. Kendi begins a short article in Politico as follows:
To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.
Thus, Kendi’s method discovers racism, now and forever, whenever whites statistically are wealthier than blacks—presumably even if woke blacks follow the woke guidance of rejecting “objective, rational linear thinking,” “cause and effect relationships”, “individualism,” “independence,” “hard work,” and “planning for the future.” Kendi would enforce this anti-racist amendment by having bureaucratic “formally trained experts on racism” (that is, woke folks) “empowered with disciplinary tools.”
Presumably, Kendi would be one to produce these “formally trained experts on racism”; the CEO of Twitter recently donated $10 million to Kendi’s research center at Boston University.
I have not read Kendi’s bestselling book, but here is a passage from Chapter 12, entitled “Class” (p. 163):
To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body. The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical as the White-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same.
[Also see the same passage here.]
If we combine this passage with Kendi’s statement about a constitutional amendment, we reach the following inference that Kendi must advocate: Americans should pass an anti-capitalist amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The following passage from Biden.com, (hat tip to Ben Weingarten) indicates that Biden agrees with Kendi:
We need a comprehensive agenda for communities of color with ambition that matches the scale of the challenge and with recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities. We need proactive anti-discrimination detection and enforcement. On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.
By the way, this passage is from a document entitled “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.” Evidently, a vote for Biden is not only a vote for Harris, but also a vote for Sanders.
Consider one more seminal Kantian influence on the woke and therefore on the Democrats. Perhaps the most famous passage from Kant on ethics is the following:
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth … For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
[Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles Of The Metaphysic Of Morals (1785), Translated By Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, First Section: Transition from the Common Rational Knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical (Bartleby.com, 2002, http://www.bartleby.com/32/602.html), paragraph 11.]
The originator of “critical race theory” was Derrick Bell, who was a law professor at Harvard, here introduced by law student Barack Obama. The most famous idea from Bell is his idea of “interest convergence,” which he describes as follows (p. 523):
The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.
[Bell, Jr., Derrick A. (1980), “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma”, Harvard Law Review, 93 (3): 518–533.]
Bell clarifies his meaning of “interest convergence” with the specific case at hand (p. 524):
I contend that the decision in Brown to break with the Court’s long-held position on these issues cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.
In other words, some white people made a decision based on ethics (“the immorality of racial inequality”), and other white people made their decision based on self-interest (“the decision’s value to whites,” “the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation”); and these two motivations, ethics and self-interest, are disjoint. That is, self-interest is something apart from ethics; a person gets no moral credit for an action if he acted in his self-interest. Thus we have the duty ethic of Kant.
Bell then gives examples of self-interested motivations of some whites in the Brown case; here is the final example (p. 525):
Finally, there were whites who realized that the South could make the transition from a rural, plantation society to the sunbelt with all its potential and profit only when it ended its struggle to remain divided by state-sponsored segregation. Thus, segregation was viewed as a barrier to further industrialization in the South.
Bell then summarizes:
Here, as in the abolition of slavery, there were whites for whom recognition of the racial equality principle was sufficient motivation. But, as with abolition, the number who would act on morality alone was insufficient to bring about the desired racial reform.
That is, for Bell and the critical race theorists (including Kendi) who have followed him, there are moral reasons for action, and there are—in contrast—self-interested reasons.
Capitalism is a social system under which every individual has a right to act in his self-interest. That right, in turn, is based on the ethical principle that it is both moral and practical to act rationally in one’s self-interest. Indeed, that principle is the ethical base of the political philosophy of John Locke and the founding of the United States. (See America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, by C. Bradley Thompson.) According to capitalism, it is always in an individual’s self interest to recognize the following:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thus, the virtue of capitalism—the social system that recognizes the harmony of interests among individuals free to trade by mutual consent for mutual benefit—is disqualified by Bell and his fellow critical race theorists by definition. Their premise, in short, is “If it’s a virtue of capitalism, the system of self-interest, then it does not count as a virtue.” Their conclusion that capitalism is devoid of virtue is built in to their Kantian duty-ethic premise.
The other side of their Kantian premise is also revealing: They believe that it is often—indeed, usually—in one’s self-interest to be racist. No wonder they teach blacks to be racists against whites in order to get ahead. And no wonder they teach that social interactions are struggles for power; if interaction for mutual benefit is not possible, then the only possible interactions are to be an oppressor or oppressed.
This ideology—anti-reason, anti-individual, anti-rational self-interest, anti-mutual consent for mutual benefit, anti-civilization—is what Trump is against and the Democrats, including Biden, are for. That is why I am for Trump.
Adapting the phrase “Anti-Nixonite for Nixon” (against McGovern) from Ayn Rand, I am an “Anti-Trumper for Trump.”
* * *
I expect that, by actual number of legitimate votes, Trump will win in a landslide. But I also expect massive voter fraud by the Democrats, because the Left denies the existence of truth itself and so rejects honesty itself. I also expect that the Democratic Party will seek to subvert the nation rather than concede defeat peacefully. And so the outcome of the election is uncertain. It could soon be the end of the American republic. But it won’t be the end of the world.
Thanks to talk radio, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Internet bloggers, and even social media (which the Right has won; that is why the Left is now desperate to silence us), we on the Right–the defenders of individual rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness–now know one another and how to remain in contact with one another. The day Trump leaves office, whether in 2021 or 2025, I expect him (if he is not arrested by Leftist tyrants) to start or acquire a competing social medium that takes away half the American business from Facebook and Twitter overnight. (I would switch from Facebook. I’ve never been on Twitter.)
Whatever happens, the Leftists will eat each other before they can enslave us.
————
See also:
Objectivists and The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
P.S.: In 2016, I voted for Evan McMullin.