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Thursday, September 07, 2023

The Separation Of Reality And State

 ... its consequences are playing out across the country right now. Dig this mind-blowing talk by NYC Mayor Adams.

Wow. Here's what it looked like yesterday night along the border.

Christopher Rufo's outstanding book, America's Cultural Revolution, has helped me see the origins of this madness. He derives the pedigree of the progressives going from that gibbering, UCSD, 60s radical, Herbert Marcuse, to today. I had always thought the connections seemed forced until I read that book. I then realized that my own worldview has a lineage that goes back thousands of years. The idea that the modern progressive's goes back a few decades isn't actually unbelievable.

Here are two applicable quotes for how Mayor Adams and his ignorant theoreticians got us into this mess. The first describes how the leaders of the black liberation movement of the 1970s realized that they were never going to get poor, urban blacks to rise up and fight the cops. When they discovered the black, urban poor wanted more cops in their neighborhoods, they didn't change their theories, they just ditched the black, urban poor.

But he was playing a different game than his contemporaries: Bell had seen the limitations of the Left’s militant turn in the 1970s and wanted to bring the fight out of the streets and into the faculty lounge. The black lumpenproletariat had revealed the ultimate impotence of Third World–style revolution. The superior gambit, Bell understood, was to rationalize those ideas and carry them through the elite institutions.

Theory and ideology trumped reality. Here's another quote describing the mindset of the modern progressives. 

For all of their faults, Davis, Cleaver, and black revolutionaries at least grappled with and appealed to the black lumpenproletariat. The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them like lepers—the lumpen class is nowhere to be found in their work, except as symbolic justification for their abstractions. 

This is where the critical race theorists reach the final impasse. Their program has become a form of empty professional-class aestheticism, designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for alleviating real miseries or governing a nation.

And that's where Mayor Davis is today. The progressives own all of this. They own academia, they own the newsmedia, they own entertainment, they own the education industry and they have significant political power nationally. They are made up of super-smart people who discarded reality because it didn't agree with their theories. 

The reason it looks like they no longer care about the working poor, or any of the other poor, for that matter, is that they don't care about the poor. When the poor, urban blacks wouldn't shoot the pigs, they became useless to the super smart set and were discarded along with their useless, so-called "reality." And here we are, with a class of Elites who deliberately discarded data that didn't align with their radical ideology.

One of the most un-self-aware moments of Mayor Adams speech is where he says that the people in that room are some of the most educated and knowledgeable people around. 

That's true in theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice.

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