{"id":92229,"date":"2017-06-03T18:18:23","date_gmt":"2017-06-03T22:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=92229"},"modified":"2017-06-03T22:41:25","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T02:41:25","slug":"black-lies-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/black-lies-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Lies Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just the other day, speaking at a conference, I had the nasty experience of having my opinions waved away as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the voice of white privilege.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d First time for me. I found this experience pretty hilarious for a couple of reasons. First, the topic for the meeting was a book by an African American author whom I knew at Drew University years ago. I was passed over for a permanent position there, while this man, who had a Sunday Schooler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grasp of biblical criticism, was essentially an Affirmative Action hire. (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had the same thing happen at Montclair State College when they hired an African fellow to teach Islam, which he knew nothing about.) White privilege, you say? What white privilege? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say somebody else had the privilege.<\/p>\n

Every one of the conference attendees was African American, matching the composition of the host church, the Universal Truth Center. You should have heard the wholesale gasping when I referred to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the disastrous Black Lives Matter movement, based on lies.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the second bit of irony. The group holding the meeting was a New Thought<\/a> organization. The central tenet of New Thought (which I discuss quite sympathetically in my book Top Secret<\/a>) is a kind of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153mind over matter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d doctrine, that the universe is malleable, subject to change and reshaping in accordance with the directions, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153affirmations,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of human beings. New Thought is predicated on Pantheism: every individual is inherently and essentially divine. So is the universe. And one part can influence the others. New Thought is cousin to Christian Science and shares its faith that one can think away illness. God can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be ill, so we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be either unless we buy into the illusion that we are not God and can be sick. I suspect the illusion is on the wrong foot here. It presupposes the Division Fallacy: if something is true of the larger whole it must be equally true of every individual part of it. If America is a wealthy nation, it follows that I personally must be rich, right? Wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

…the Left has successfully used the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Law of Attraction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to manifest an ugly race-hate climate that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist until they conjured it into being by insisting it was real. And it became real.<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At any rate, New Thought believers hold that one may \u00e2\u20ac\u0153creatively visualize\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a desired outcome and thereby \u00e2\u20ac\u0153manifest\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it in reality. There is a psychological wisdom in\u00c2\u00a0this attitude, but even New Thought folks tacitly admit it is not automatically or always successful. They have a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153booby prize\u00e2\u20ac\u009d back-up excuse when it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work, precisely parallel to the cold-comfort rationalization employed by Pentecostals: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You will definitely be healed if you claim healing from God!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Then, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh, uh, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still not healed? Er, you must not have had enough faith! Yeah, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the ticket!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d New Thought gurus and channelers will tell you that your affirmations did not actually fail. Perish the thought. No, it must be that Source, God, the Universe, Oprah or whoever had something better in mind for you. Maybe so, but if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had that in mind at the start, it would have sapped the absolute confidence you were told you needed.<\/p>\n

Okay, here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the irony \u00e2\u20ac\u0153manifested\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at the conference the other day. The Black Lives Matter movement is a case where it does work. It is all based on a traditional Leftist tactic employed by Mussolini and others, the useful, potent myth that will motivate the crowds better than some equivocal, ambiguous facts. You know Al Gore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s schlockumentary title, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An Inconvenient Truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Well, this is the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153convenient untruth.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If it were true, boy, would it get people stirred up to act! So let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s say it is true! Black Lives Matter is founded squarely upon debunked lies about the death of a worthless thug, as if he had been gunned down by a white cop while raising his hands in surrender. He wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. In addition, the endlessly repeated narrative about police being on a hunt for young black men is sheer nonsense, refuted again and again by stubborn statistics.\u00c2\u00a0(See Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops<\/a><\/em> and Are Cops Racist?<\/a><\/em> That is, if facts matter to you more than unsubstantiated propaganda.)<\/p>\n

I call it the Trayvon Martyr Syndrome. It is a wider phenomenon, and a particularly nefarious one. There had been substantial progress in putting racism behind us in America, thanks to the courage of great reformers and real martyrs like Dr. King. But the Obama administration (advised by Al Charlatan) cynically fomented race hate for cheap political advantage and set us back years in race relations. Who knows why? Well, the Left has successfully used the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Law of Attraction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to manifest an ugly race-hate climate that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist until they conjured it into being by insisting it was real. And it became real. Their cop-hatred and obnoxious demonstrations, invading restaurants and rebuking diners for imagined racism and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153white privilege,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had the predictable result: they had goaded the objects of their wrath into the very antagonism they had accused them of.<\/p>\n

Or consider the tendency to defend black hooligans and criminals simply because they are fellow blacks, as if to call one a criminal amounts to indicting all African Americans. The most idiotic example of this must surely be a black Leftist official in Baltimore claiming that to call anyone a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thug\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is racist. Uh, you mean because there is an inherent link between \u00e2\u20ac\u0153black\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thug\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Who except you is saying that? It is you who are inviting the rest of us to think so!<\/p>\n

The sheer absurdity of all this blather about systemic racism was obvious from the fact that white America had elected the first black President!<\/p>\n

But there is such a thing as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153institutional\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153systemic racism.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But Leftists are looking in the wrong place for it. They ought to look in the mirror. For one thing, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the long-time reverse racism of Affirmative Action. The Leftist New Thought strategy was evident here, too. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not aim for equality of opportunity. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s legislate equality of outcomes. Take the short cut. Only it was a short-cut to getting lost. Instead of the hard work of preparing African Americans academically, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just pretend their job candidates are\u00c2\u00a0well-prepared whether they are\u00c2\u00a0or not. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like giving kids participation trophies. It inflates and thus devalues genuine black American achievement. This \u00e2\u20ac\u0153black privilege\u00e2\u20ac\u009d fosters white suspicions that African Americans cannot cut it. Of course they can (and do) if given the opportunity for adequate preparation.<\/p>\n

\"And<\/a><\/p>\n

And whose fault is it that so many aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t? I say it is the condescending policies of Democratic administrations starting with LBJ who frankly admitted his War on Poverty was a scheme to make African Americans (not the word he used, by the way) permanently dependent on the Democratic Party. Welfare has resulted in generation after generation of addiction to poison goodies. It has made the African American husband superfluous as a bread winner and has resulted in an incredibly high rate of out-of-wedlock babies and fatherless families. (It is unfashionable to say this, partly because of feminist-extremist ideology that celebrates such broken family structures.) Check out African-American scholar Shelby Steele\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Male children of such families have no male role models in the home and wind up getting (anti)socialized by street gangs, channeling their burgeoning male energies into predation and savagery, the state of pre-civilization. No wonder they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take school seriously. Lacking discipline at home, they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miraculously start behaving when the school bell rings. Worse yet, they repudiate academic success and ridicule black classmates who do strive for it. They think that to succeed is to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153act white.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Where did they get this idea? From the local Ku Klux Klan chapter? No, from self-appointed African American demagogues like the Reverend Sharpton, who promote the notion that the white society is stacked against them. If you do manage to succeed, you must have bought into the white System, which makes you a race traitor. This is bizarre and perverse thinking, not to mention self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a system of racism all right, but one created by the Left. Again, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a ruinous application of the vaunted Law of Attraction, and it worked. (Take a look at Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America<\/em> <\/a>by John McWhorter, another black scholar.)<\/p>\n

But sometimes Leftist New Thought does not work. The Obama administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s economic and foreign policies were based on an inflexible ideological model of the world, of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153social justice,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d climate change apocalypticism, and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the arc of history,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d forged in Ivy League faculty lounges. The administration steadfastly refused to be confused with the facts. The story is told of Hegel that, after he pontificated on the dialectical unfolding of history, a brave student raised his hand and ventured, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But, Herr Hegel, the facts are otherwise!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The philosopher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s response: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Then so much worse for the facts!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Well, Herr Obama, Herr Sharpton, Herr Holder, the facts are otherwise. And of course sometimes the facts don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like being ignored. Sometimes they bite back.<\/p>\n

I mentioned the similarity between New Thought and Pentecostalism. In fact they often overlap. What happens when one stubbornly insists that things are not what they seem? That what displeases you is a metaphysical phantom or the devil\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lies (choose your idiom)? You sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. You will never be able to see how wrong you are. Your heedless adherence to your precious ideology makes you explain away the destructive results of your socio-political policies or your refusal to treat your illnesses with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153worldly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d medicine. Ad hoc hypotheses pop up to fill the vacuum. The ludicrous becomes plausible if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the last plank you can hang onto to save face for your erroneous notions. Again, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God must have healed you, so, er, you are healed! It just isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t apparent to you because Satan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s counterfeiting the symptoms!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no end to it. So whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s economic policies or faith healing, the result is dangerous fanaticism. Leftist inflexibility, immune to disconfirmation, results in what I call political snake-handling, and the victims don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been bitten.<\/p>\n

Maybe the funniest moment of the conference was when I pointed out that one of President Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite books, which greatly influenced the course of his life and career, is Norman Vincent Peale\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Power of Positive Thinking, a work famously permeated by New Thought principles. I observed that Donald Trump is probably the closest thing to a Christian New Thought president that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll ever get. The uniformly Leftist New Thoughters present at the conference somehow did not rejoice at this remarkable fact. You should have seen the squirming!<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.<\/p>\n

[If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to read the paper I presented that day, see Republicans and Sinners: What Were Jesus’ Political Opinions<\/a><\/em>. It was not this paper, however, that prompted the reactions I have described here, but rather a subsequent series of questions concerning my own political opinions.]<\/p>\n

\"Liar,<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just the other day, speaking at a conference, I had the nasty experience of having my opinions waved away as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the voice of white privilege.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d First time for me. I found this experience pretty hilarious for a couple of reasons. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6734],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}