GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

In my previous post, I discussed two forms of rebellion against the victimocracy: the anti-SJW strategy of the blog Vox Populi (by Vox Day) and American white nationalists. I thought afterward that I might be giving the impression, without intending to, that Vox Day was himself a white nationalist. So, then I got curious—aside from his asymmetrical anti-SJW warfare, what does Vox Day think of nationalism, white nationalism, and, of course (where all such questions lead), the Jews?

He is a realist on all such questions—nationalism is on the rise, which means that multiculturalism is a failure, which further means the Jews, who were the first beneficiaries of the loosening of the insistence upon ethnic homogeneity in European cultures, and then (a disproportionate number, acting explicitly as Jews) agents advancing an ever more thorough loosening, will have no place in national communities that will with good reason blame them for undermining their national cohesion and culture (and will, furthermore, be filled with brand new minorities who hate the Jews far more than, at least in America and the UK, the Anglo majority ever did—minorities whose immigration, once again, Jewish political activism was instrumental in accelerating). This process is well underway in Europe, where it is already widely conceded that the Jews have no future, but Vox thinks it is happening more slowly in the US as well. Vox declares himself pro-Jew and pro-Israel, and by his lights (and my own) I grant that—he is telling Jews the truth, including the truth that demonizing all critical comments about Jews and Israel as “antisemitic” long ago entered the time of diminishing returns. He admires Israel, its self-reliance and unapologetic self-defense, and strongly encourages Jews to move there. He is a libertarian, which also means that his discussion of social groups is generally qualified phrases like “a large majority of Americans will reasonably, if not completely accurately, see…”—that is, he tends to speak through large scale probabilities and decisions made through mimetic contagion in the heat of events, rather than of Jews, Europeans, Muslims, or anyone else as “objective” groups with “essences.” His discourse is, as one would expect, cleansed of victimary hand-wringing—if you (a Jew or anyone else) don’t like what people say about you here, then leave—it’s insane to think you can regulate the speech and thought of others. That will just make them hate you more (people have a right to hate, and to say they hate, whomever they like). He’s no Holocaust denier, but he also gives the Holocaust no weight in considering ethical questions of contemporary politics. He assumes it is obvious that people would prefer to live amongst people who look, believe, speak, and act more or less like themselves, and can be expected to be welcoming to others only under very limited conditions. (I should also say he doesn’t pay any particular attention to Jews—I had to do a search on the blog to gather together his scattered posts discussing Jews, Israel and antisemitism.) I suspect he would qualify as a white nationalist, but I don’t recall him adopting the label—at the very least, he must accept them as fellow fighters against the SJWs.

All this confirms my conclusions in the previous post: this is what genuinely post-victimary discourse looks like. If you don’t like it, you’re better off making your peace with the victimary. I like it, so it presents no difficulties for me. It is a language that draws upon evolutionary thought, von Mises’s “praxeology” (simplistically put, the application of free market principles to all human activity), game theory and military strategy. The abstract principles of liberalism and democracy and Judeo-Christian morality barely figure at all. Of course all this misses something, including the reason why Western society has installed the incredibly dysfunctional victimary software in the first place. (It’s not because of the diabolical cleverness of the Jews.) Mainstream Western society has lived in terror of antisemitism for 70 years because antisemitism was projected back to the origin of a war of such cataclysmic dimensions that we would not (so we assume) survive another like it. Of course, this means that the fear of antisemitism, and victimary thinking far more so, is essentially a cargo cult. We really have no reason to believe that more frank discussions of racial differences and hostilities, or freer expression of preferences for one group over others, would lead to some terrible global catastrophe. But human culture as a whole is a bit of a cargo cult—the communal destruction envisaged in the mimetic crisis we hypothesize at the origin of humanity wasn’t going to happen either. But some cargo cults are better than others—more generative of lasting peace (perhaps the crisis they imagine is more plausible). Vox Day refers regularly to (and prides himself on his mastery of) “logic” and “dialectic,” which seem to be foundations for him—a guarantee of social order. He would include, I assume, the libertarian insistence on reciprocal respect for private property. Of course, such things are part of any civilized order, but by themselves they generate hierarchies that the less logical and less or unpropertied will feel no obligation to respect. Nor are they much of a basis for the nationalism that Vox seems to consider intrinsic to human nature. It may be less multiculturalism than democracy and popular rule that must deemed a failure.

There’s no need to pronounce or speculate on any of that, or to expect this or that pioneer into the thickets of the post-victimary to have all the answers. Insofar as we (that is, myself, and anyone else who wants to join in) consider the victimocracy a suicidal cargo cult, we must roll the dice. We can’t imagine that the post-victimary will be a restoration. We can’t yet imagine what open discussion of inter- and intra-group differences will look like, with all the biological, anthropological and historical knowledge now in, and with all the interventionist political and therapeutic technologies coming into, our possession. But I, at least, prefer finding out to the alternative.

Here’s the trick: you need a term of anathematization, like “racism.” You start with some act, group or individual that is rejected virtually unanimously (like the Holocaust and Nazis, or lynching and the KKK) and you attach the term to that. Once the anathematizing term is in place, you turn it into a shell game: “racism” becomes the shell that we keep finding the pea under, with the pea being some act, group or individual that was never considered racist before, but can be by analogy to what we have all already agreed to call “racist.” Convincing people of the analogy might seem difficult, but it really isn’t if we consider the long term. Of course there will be many failures—analogical constructions will be rejected, ignored, and ridiculed. But things can only move in one direction. Insofar as our common rejection of “racism” has elevated us morally and protected us from some violent cataclysm (like a civil war) we can never raise the threshold for “racism”—we can only lower it, as new antagonisms that are “like” the ones we have transcended will generate the needed analogies.

In that case, it is clear that the only way of breaking up the victimocratic order is by neutralizing the power of anathematization at its root. It is impossible to argue about what should really count as “racism,” as if we were establishing a proper system of weights and measures—each participant in the argument can only locate a moment in history where his preferred definition was prevalent. The term itself is tied to whatever danger it warded off, and its use will continue to correspond to whatever danger is felt, or simulated. Many people on the right wish to polarize the term and throw it back in the face of the victimary left, e.g., by referring to blacks as being on the Democratic “plantation,” or to the left’s atrocious treatment of “dissidents” from victimary groups. It’s worthwhile trying all kinds of things, but that approach seems to me more likely to entrench the term of anathematization that, as I have pointed out, is unidirectional. To put it bluntly, the victimary will not be destroyed until the response of the vast majority of people to charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., is, simply: “I don’t care.” The way there will not be comfortable to people whose cut off date for the use of “racism” and related terms falls somewhere between 1960-1984 (the latter date marking the birth of the Rainbow Coalition and a new racialization of politics).

It’s worth considering these matters now because resistance to the victimary is starting to take shape. Quite a few contemporary pundits, of varying ideological affiliations, have attributed Donald Trump’s popularity to the emergence of a white nationalism in American politics (modeled on anti-immigrant political parties in Europe), even while acknowledging that this is not Trump’s intention. There is a fairly intellectually powerful white nationalist politics that I do think is starting to take a more public form, in part in response to Trump’s very explicit and forceful repudiation of our bipartisan pieties about immigration. You can find this politics in places like the VDARE website and the online magazine Taki’s, and elsewhere, no doubt. A white nationalist position, or, at least, a white privileging position, is articulated very forcefully by writers like Steven Sailer, John Derbyshire and, most prominently, Ann Coulter. Their arguments for privileging a white America are, in fact, far more thought out than the arguments for continued high immigration levels and, more generally, “diversity.” They have been displaying (and far more lucidly) a Trump-like bluntness on questions of ethnic group interests, race and crime, race and intelligence, and much else, for many years now. There is no doubt that their response to being called “racist” would be “I don’t care.” And, after years of attacks on normal Americans (attacks that have intensified throughout the Obama administration, at an increasing rate) simply for being white, it seems to me inevitable that people will feel they have no choice but to counter-attack on the same basis. The logic will be that your attack on me just for my whiteness exposes you as a loser, parasite, terrorist, and so on. A very simple and easily learned and sustained logic.

Meanwhile, I have just come across a science fiction writer and blogger called “Vox Day” (his blog is Vox Populi) who has written a war manual for combatants in the victimary wars, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. From what I’ve seen (for example, The SJW Attack Survival Guide, an excerpt from the book, available on the website), it is very good. He outlines the stages of the SJW attack, and lays out a plan of defense. If you are subject to a SJW attack, don’t apologize and don’t resign. Force them, whenever possible, into a prolonged administrative and/or legal process to purge you and don’t give them any ammunition. Find ways to expose and undermine your attackers. All excellent advice, sure to be put to use more and more often. And there is a simple principle to base such counter-attacks on (this is me, but it seems to me that both Vox Day and the white nationalists make similar assumptions): the principle of difference. There are differences between social groups, including racial ones; there are differences between men and women; there are differences between same sex attraction and opposite sex attraction; there are myriad individual and group differences in terms of capability and effort. We cannot know in advance what ramifications these differences should have when it comes to ethics, politics, esthetics, and social and economic institutions. The victimary antagonist (the SJW) must deny all these differences, or at least their relevance (other than as signs of victimization) and attack any expression of them; they must be forced to issue this denial explicitly and repeatedly, in the face of the most recalcitrant evidence and the most disturbing events; if they concede difference, one must pursue them through all the consequences of that concession. The counter-attacks should be personalized: how would you advise your daughter to behave at a frat party? Which neighborhoods would you prefer to live in, or walk through on a pleasant evening? Etc.

Of course, though, the first term of anathematization, in the history of the victimary, was not “racism”—it was “antisemitism.” Certainly there are vast reservoirs of anti-Jewish resentment among the white nationalists, much of which (how much is hard to tell) veers into blatant, occasionally Nazi-style antisemitism. But I will reiterate my previous assertion in this new context: the response to being called an anti-Semite will have to be “I don’t care” (and, of course, many of the anti-Semites one routinely sees on, for example, articles on Yahoo, are already there—indeed, already back in the 80s it was already fairly easy to repel, as crude pro-Israel politics, accusations of antisemitism). This will clearly be a very new terrain, but we sworn enemies of the victimocracy must accept it. Jews are different as well, and so is Israel, and we will not be able to guarantee (why would anyone want to?) that those differences are always “celebrated.” (If I’m wrong about the Jews, show me how—if all you can do is call me antisemitic, I have to assume you can’t…”)

But we hardly know how to think any more outside of a post-Holocaust, civil rights, which is to say an emergent victimary, framework. What is good and what is evil if “racism” is no longer assumed to be the evil pole? I have my answers. Civilization is good, barbarism—well, if not necessarily evil (barbarians have their virtues, there are rules of the game), then to be fought. Discipline and disciplines are good; bureaucracy is, if not evil, then an evil. Converting violent antagonisms into legally adjudicated ones is good—reducing the legal realm to an arena of group vendettas is evil. Converting legally adjudicated antagonisms into economic competition, artistic exploration and leisurely engaged in arguments is good; allowing the legal sphere to colonize public discourse by using it to shut up or coerce your political enemies is evil. That’s for starters, anyway. Perhaps there will be some other answers. At any rate, our terror at any sign of “racism” reflects a primitive state of public life—it operates on the assumption that the only response to noticeable group disparities will be violence. But from whom do we expect that violence, and why? There are group differences, and plenty of differences within groups—there are plenty of ways of blocking scapegoating and demonization without a priori anathematization. The reliance upon anathematization leads to atrophy in our signifying and ethical capacities, which must be regularly refreshed. I certainly see no problem engaging with Steve Sailer who asks why American Jews are so pro-immigration when it comes to America while, as Zionists, supporting Israel’s rather… miserly immigration policy. A very good question! And very answerable—yes, there’s some hypocrisy and group narcissism here, along with some over-reaction to historical traumas resulting from the nativism of the 1920s and the exclusion of refugees from the Holocaust; still America’s dilemmas are not quite Israel’s; but perhaps America’s immigration dilemma is graver than we realized, maybe some reconsideration is in order; maybe even Israel is a model for a new approach to immigration in the US (as Sailer himself, I can’t tell how ironically, sometimes suggests). The question is often posed in a very leading, hostile way (not so much with Sailer, it seems to me), but so what? We’ll find out soon enough if the interlocutor is interested in real answers (and if we are!); if not, if some violence is intended toward us, well, we prepare for that, then, by strengthening the supports of civilization. But we desperately need to widen the sphere of possible discussion, regardless of the risks. The liberal democratic order has become like one of those crab shells taken over by secondary user, so we’re going to need to go shell-less for a while.

Why did Bernie Sanders acquiesce in the commandeering of his recent speech in Seattle by a few Black Lives Matter brats? The BLM actions were clearly unpopular with the crowd, and from the commentary I’ve read since, with otherwise sympathetic leftists reflecting on the event. And yet Sanders surrendered completely and unconditionally, while incorporating BLM rhetoric and personnel into his campaign. It’s hard to see what kind of hard-headed electoral or fundraising calculations could have gone into these decisions; we’re dealing more with the spontaneous obedience to the voice of the sacred.

Why has no conservative politician commented on the utterly disgraceful fact that George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson will obviously never be allowed to return to normal life? It is shameful that two innocent individuals, who did nothing more than defend themselves successfully against criminal assailants, having been vindicated by lengthy and highly publicized judicial processes, are nevertheless treated like internal exiles, condemned to a virtual Siberia. This indicates a deep corruption of political life—a preference for lies over truth. Isn’t it clear that a “rogue” conservative exposing the systematic and specific lies on display in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases would generate the same thrill among tens of millions of Americans as Donald Trump’s unadorned references to the illegal alien crime wave? Yet not a single Republican will expose the racially targeted incitement to riot and attack police officers from the White House on down, and throughout the entire media.

Public opinion and electoral advantage clearly cede to victimary imperatives. But there is still the relation between the two. The Leftist agrees with the goals of BLM but still believes that if you go to see a speaker you should be allowed to see the speaker (he rejects some of the “means” of BLM); the conservative politician knows very well the fraud attempted in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases and knows that there is near unanimity on the right to defend oneself, but on some level feels he doesn’t want to “touch” this. It looks like cognitive dissonance, but that’s only if we translate what is an imperative into a declarative: very few people actually believe that black bodies are maimed from birth to death, in all of their worldly relations, by white supremacy, or that being disappointed in your child’s same sex attractions makes you the moral equivalent of a member of a KKK lynch mob, and yet on a level deeper than “opinions” a substantial majority of Americans act as if they do believe such things.

As originary thinkers, we shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding this. Those who repeat the originary event through ritual don’t know and can’t say why they do so, but eventually they arrive at explanatory myths and other discourses. But the explanations don’t affect the ritual—they just reconcile two domains within the mind. And we have our hypothesis regarding what the originary event in this case is: the Holocaust. All victimary actions are ritual re-enactments of—what, exactly? The answer to this question is very difficult, because all kinds of declaratives suggest themselves, but must be wrong by virtue of being declaratives; only performatives, with a declarative component but also a promissory one, can provide adequate answers. There are so many different features of the Holocaust that might have made it the signal event it became; and there might be all kinds of other events that constellate around or are triggered by the Holocaust, thereby explaining its centrality. We have no grounds for assuming that a uniquely terrible event will have commensurate moral consequences.

My view is that we must see the effects of the Holocaust in its revelation, not in its intrinsic character (although, of course, much of its intrinsic character likely comes through in its revelation; even more, much of its intrinsic character may lie in its “revealability”). An act that we have nothing to do with does not transform us morally—a brutal murder by a psychopath confirms our moral assumptions, it does not cause us to reflect upon them. Unless something about the act renders us complicit—if that psychopath lived among us, for example, giving off signs of his psychopathy that we ignored because he was respectable and pleasant company in other respects. In that case, the discovery of the true life he led can become revelatory.

The Holocaust made its “spectators” complicit on several levels. Those who didn’t know could have and should have—the Nazis hid their crimes, but crimes so massive can only be hid from those who don’t really want to see them. Those who knew and could have helped didn’t, and for reasons that “verified” the Nazi’s own war logic: the governments of America and other countries in a position to rescue Jews or interfere with the extermination process didn’t want it to look like they were fighting a war for the Jews, thereby accepting (or assuming their populations accepted) to a great extent the Nazi’s claim that this was a Jewish-inspired war. It follows that we didn’t help the Jews because we were different from the Nazis in degree, not kind. Finally, and I think most importantly, the mobilization of the entire industrial economy in the slaughter revealed a moral bankruptcy at the heart of modernity: nothing in being a conscientious doctor, engineer, bureaucrat, worker, professor, good middle class citizen, etc., would enable one to resist recruitment into atrocities.

The victimary, then, is a pre-emptive resistance to such complicity. It is a refusal of “spectatorship,” thereby re-enacting the rare refusals to participate scattered throughout the Holocaust, embodied first of all in the always tenuous and never believed in time testimony to the ongoing event. But victimary thinking enacts this resistance and refusal as a resentment of firstness: Nazism’s extremities are just the extension of the striving for pre-eminence among nations, among firms in the economy, among ideological and religious claims, and so on. (This is the mythic, discursive, dimension of victimary thinking.) This is why victimary thinking ultimately comes full circle to antisemitism. There is a moral bankruptcy constitutive of modernity, and it is on display in the Holocaust, but this moral bankruptcy involves an abandonment of the work of differentiation in favor of the faith in generating endless equivalences. Differentiation is the work of spinning off distinctions from the fundamental sacred/profane distinction: distinctions between good and bad, noble and base, worthy and unworthy, beautiful and ugly, and so on. But just inheriting and reproducing these distinctions is itself a sign of moral exhaustion. The distinctions themselves can only be the result of new modes of deferral and discipline that generate new spaces and objects of attention. But the victimary version of events represented the democratic path of least resistance: one can always imagine resolving a conflict by making people equal in some new way.

In the short term, the only genuine resistance to the victimary is exposure of its Big Lies. In the long term, that resistance must entail restoring a civilization of differentiation through dialogue and performativity. The short term is part of the long term insofar as the most direct and intuitive way of exposing the Big Lies is through constant, unflappable questioning. I suggested in a recent post a line of questioning regarding the abolition of differentiations in the field of sexuality. More pertinent here is the question, what is “race”? This is surely an even less comfortable question than the ones regarding gender and sexuality; it is the ur-question of the victimary; or rather, the ur-forbidden question. But all the talk of racism and white supremacy can’t avoid attributing all kinds of characteristics to whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc., even if those characteristics are deemed to be “constructed.” The main tenet of victimary thinking on race is that the only characteristics to be attributed to whites qua whites are undesirable ones but, of course, in any attribution of the undesirable we can read the resentment towards something desired and envied. We don’t need to get into discussions of IQ scores and the relative achievements of different civilizations (although far be it from me to recommend holding back on such topics—why, indeed, must one be bothered if there do turn out to be all kinds of group differences in capabilities? What is assumed about our capacity for self-discipline here?): the differences posited within the victimary itself already give us plenty to work with. If, for example, for Ta-Nehisi Coates blackness is real, grounded in the aesthetics of the body and the ethics of solidarity, while whiteness is fake, imaginary, constructed, parasitical on blackness (I am working with Christopher Caldwell’s reading of Coates in the Weekly Standard), well, ok—but, far from this fabricated racial identity being a kind of “blood-sucking subhumanity,” isn’t the inventive transcendence of the immediate and empirical dimensions of group belonging the prime marker of an unparalleled civilization predicated upon the never certain, never completed, ever adventurous differentiation of the human from the natural? Deconstruction might be quite conservative now that it is the victimary that is most insistent upon unquestioned closure.

Anyone, even in the riskiest situations, can do at least a little of this. All that is necessary is a deferral of the Big Lie, a refusal, which can be gentle, subtle, apparently befuddled, to sign onto it. Sure, a man can really be a woman (I’ve heard about those brain scans that make the science settled), one might say, but, in that case, what does it mean to “really be a woman”? What does that man who wants it imagine it to be? Can you run down for me the different ways American blacks, Haitian blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Pakistani- Americans, Koreans, Lebanese, Palestinians, Chinese, and the Hmong are all constructed racially in America (in the South, in the Northwest…), how those constructions change, and what role the groups in question have regarding their own and each other’s construction? Let them talk about it all—all kinds of things are bound to slip outside of victimary categories. One might see this as a return to the Socratic roots of Western civilization: what do you mean by…

One final point. I have become convinced that, despite all the complications and difficulties it entails, the only anti-victimary response to same sex marriage is, indeed, the privatization of marriage. Here, of all the victimary fronts, without the givens of the state, the victimary argument collapses. For the supporter of SSM, marriage literally becomes nothing without the state. But the same holds to varying degrees across the board. Victimary thinkers are fundamentally incapable of imagining how the oppressions and, to use a term of Gans’s, “discriminatory ontologies,” they see at work would be remedied or even properly identified without assuming the state as omnipotent arbiter (this is what makes it the quintessential anti-imperial imperial mode of thought). But they must be made to imagine it. There is no more productive line of questioning at this point than to ask, let’s say everything you say about race in America is true—now, if we left these groups to their own devices, without the deux ex machine of the civil rights establishment, how would it all play out? The question—if you could get any victimocrats to play along (but, anyway, in public spaces you are never really doing any of this for the victimocrats themselves)—will utterly confound them. Would they still exist as groups? In what senses? What would sources of conflicts be, and what rules of engagement would be created? What would be sources of strength and weakness in the different groups? How would different forms of belonging criss-cross each other? How would reciprocal constructions proceed without some legally defined (and still to be redefined) concept of “equality” in the background? Victimary thinking will not be able to sustain the discussion—we would find ourselves in another place. We would weaken, even a little, the hold of one of the Big Lies. It is this persistent questioning, committed to the civilizational work of extending and deepening differentiations, that can bring an end to the victimary. Sometimes, say in confronting a twitter mob, you’ll only get one question in—best to make sure it’s a good, perplexing one. As with all things, it’s a question of practice. And, when possible, this approach can get ratcheted up into much more confrontational postures.

A little kerfuffle in a tiny corner of the art/literary world seems to me to bear some significance worth exploring. The conceptual writer Vanessa Place has been removed from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs committee for refereeing the panel presentations for the 2016 AWP Convention. This is as a result of her latest project, which is the gradual tweeting of the entirety of Gone With the Wind, on a Twitter page with a picture of Hattie McDaniel (the “Mamie” of the film version) and an image from the cover of a sheet of music for a late 19th century “coon song” on it. Place’s removal was the result of a petition initiated by AWP members, on the grounds that her project was racist and caused pain to people of color (henceforth “POC”).

Meanwhile, another conceptual artist (one of the best known), Kenneth Goldsmith, has been under attack for the presumed racism of a recent project of his: a public reading of the autopsy conducted by the police medical examiner of Michael Brown, the young man shot in a now globally known incident in Ferguson, Missouri. Here, a new actor enters the scene, a group calling itself the “Mongrel Coalition.” The Mongrel Coalition demands, forcefully and obscurely, immediate “decolonization,” and, with strategic wisdom, chose the soft targets of Place and Goldsmith (as a synecdoche of white dominated innovative literature and art more generally) to denounce the exploitation of black bodies by white aesthetes (“gringpo”): http://gringpo.com. The Mongrel Coalition seems comprised of graduate students; at the very least, they know all the white guilty vulnerabilities of the academic literary elites, and are familiar enough with the discourses of said elites to establish the double bind: one the one hand, innovative literature is formalistic play that ignores and, by implication, is complicit with, the oppression of POC; and, on the other hand, innovative aesthetic devices were invented by POC and stolen (and tamed) by white people. As you can see from the mock titles on the website, the indictment of these cultural black body snatchers is that they want to keep their “white privilege” while (by) gesturing towards an alliance with POC. How would one actually align oneself with POC? Presumably by finding ways of implicating others in that double bind, which keeps you one step ahead of those who might implicate you.

Place, as we can see from her Artist’s Statement in response to the dust-up (https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story) and, no doubt, Goldsmith, want very much to be exemplary leftists and allies of POC (Goldsmith has, in response to the unexpected and vehement criticism of his performance, requested that the transcript and video be suppressed). Place, in particular, sees her project as a kind of performance of White Guilt, in which case she might (but doesn’t seem to) see the ferocious attacks on her as a part of the performance itself—if you volunteer yourself as a scapegoat so as to cleanse the community, you shouldn’t be surprised if others take you up on it. She acknowledges the “cruelty” of what she has done, in iterating a history of cruelty, and so the “cruelty” of the response to her would seem to affirm her intentions. At any rate, if not paralyzed by White Guilt, that’s how she could easily take up the consequences of her action—and then things might actually get interesting.

The kind of conceptual art Place and Goldsmith does is very much in the tradition of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” aimed at transgressing and confusing the boundary between what is art and what is not art. Goldsmith’s previous books have mostly been transcriptions, for example of 24 hours of traffic reporting in New York City, or, more recently, his Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which transcribes reports of JFK’s assassination, RFK’s assassination, John Lennon’s murder, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Columbine massacre, 9/11, and Michael Jackson’s death. Place has done some more “modernist” (surrealist, stream of consciousness) type writing, but quite a bit of transcription as well—of court documents of sexual offense trials, for example. To put it simply, the idea is that if you read these texts within a frame reserved for “literature,” you read them differently, and they resonate in surprising ways.

Whether one enjoys or is interested in conceptual art or not, it is useful to consider why it might be a target for victimary fanatics—especially when it tries to be “politically relevant.” The purpose of conceptual writing is to de-authorize texts, to treat them as floating discourses that no one controls and therefore no one should own (part of the point of Place’s Gone With the Wind project is to bait the Margaret Mitchell estate into a copyright lawsuit)—and in which we are also therefore all implicated—any text is just part of our language, and cannot be contained within the circumscribed fields of authorship, genre, etc. To de-authorize is to de-sacralize, and to de-sacralize, for those invested in that version of the sacred, is to desecrate. For the victimary activist, iterating, without comment, without credit, descriptions of violence done to black bodies, is a desecration of those bodies just as much as drawing an image of Muhammad is a desecration of the prophet for some Muslims. The experience of POC (and, perhaps LGBTETC, as honorary POC, but the Mongrel Coalition doesn’t seem to me so certain about that) is sacred, in other words, and only an authorized priestly caste can perform the rituals sanctifying it. Reading over the website of the Mongrel Coalition, I wouldn’t expect violence from its members—if anything, we can see this as an extremely savvy career move, which is sure to open up publishing and job opportunities (situating it firmly within the tradition of the avant-garde and Romanticism more generally). But the logic has already, and will continue to, seep out into the broader culture, and its implications are violent. If certain modes of experience become sacred, their sacrality can and must be defended with all means necessary, and “argument” will not be a very effective means. Only anathematization will suffice, and anathematization requires the support of various means of intimidation—to defend something sacred to you is to show that you are willing to go to lengths to which those who might desecrate it are unwilling to go. This little incident (from which I’m sure Place and Goldsmith will recover, a bit tarnished, perhaps) is a useful reminder that to engage the victimary is, necessarily, to engage in desecration; indeed, that desecration must be the main means of struggle in the attempt to neutralize the victimary, in particular since if the much desired (by the left) hate crimes legal (and moral) regime is to work, it must rely upon the sacrality of experience (otherwise, how would you know when a Confederate flag is being displayed in a “hateful,” as opposed, say, to a satiric or scholarly, way? Only a POC priest[ess] is duly authorized to tell you). And it is best to understand what that implies. For me, at any rate, the possibilities of conceptual (and procedural) writing and art have just risen a bit in my estimation as potential cultural weaponry.

In no particular order I list here, not the only lies spread by the Left (far from it!), but the ones that, it seems to me, have attained total coverage, i.e., that guarantee swift, coordinated, thorough and effective responses when questioned:

One: There are no real differences between men and women.
Two: Same sex attraction is as normal as opposite sex attraction.
Three: Blacks are always and only victims of white supremacy.
Four: Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.
Five: Illegal aliens are just American citizens who haven’t yet received the proper documentation.

Any facts contrary to these assertions are evidence of actual oppression or reactionary lies.

With the exception of number four (regarding which the public has far less first hand evidence), the Left is never foolish enough to assert these lies; rather, it just goes ahead and acts as if they are self-evidently true (there is a lesson for us all in that).

We are already beginning to see the extraordinary destruction that must be wrought to civil discourse and civil society to sustain these brazen lies: Christians who believe in traditional marriage must become cynosures of hate, any Islamic group or state marginally less psychotic (“moderate”) than the most demented (“extremist”) is to be empowered, all attempts to defend American borders or preserve the distinction of American citizenship must be dismantled, criminals must be given an ever larger space in which to destroy; even more: anyone who points to health or safety issues resulting from unrestricted migration, who points to actual crime statistics, who directs our attention to longstanding Islamic doctrine and practice, to the benefits offered by one family form over another—that is, anyone pointing to a vast range of obvious truths, which you only have to pay the faintest attention to the real world to see, is evil. Big Lies require All Lies All the Time. The large digital corporations, like Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook (along with many more traditional corporations), are all clearly ready to get on board with a campaign to keep these Big Lies hermetically sealed.

We have not yet begun to see the large scale violence that will be needed to ensure these lies remain the ruling doctrine. But therein lies the only possibility of resisting the victimary perfect storm. There is another compulsive Lie of the Left, which surfaces periodically but which we must call “aspirant,” rather than “Big” because it has not yet prevailed nearly to the extent of the five above: self-defense is the source of violence. This is the argument of the gun control fanatics, and it has been conveyed by the usual furious and grotesque demonization of guns and gun owners (the type of propaganda so successful in installing the other lies). The reason push back against this lie has had considerable success (the right to gun ownership is more firmly established in law than it was 50 years ago, running counter to left wing victories on virtually every other front) is simply the existence of tens of millions of Americans who are determined to maintain their own guns and right to self-defense, forming a compact lobby to help them do so. Still, why has Obama not tried to override gun rights through executive action—isn’t this another area where Congress has failed to act, so he must? I think the only reason is some dim awareness that an attempt at gun confiscation would lead to a blood bath. Still, so what? Does the Left not have the stomach for the massive bloodshed of their enemies? Would they really have a problem with a few more Wacos? On the contrary—they would cheer it on; indeed, there have been indications for years that Obama and his gang would relish the chance for a showdown with some fat target within the bitter clingers community. It must be, then, that they are not sure that they would win, which is to say they are not sure that the men (and occasional woman) with guns under their command would obey the order to use force to take the guns away from those who have them by right (or at least not enough to avoid a fiasco). But if the bodies of armed men (Engels’s excellent description of the state) would hesitate there, perhaps they would hesitate elsewhere. Perhaps they would also refuse to act against thousands of Churches refusing to pay their taxes, against parents whose homeschooling does not conform to new “marriage equality”-friendly NEA dictates, or to enforce millions of dollars in fines against counties and cities refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses, or against local police officers or citizens practicing self-defense framed by mobs, or local authorities and citizens enforcing the border on their own initiative, etc. Slowly at first, for sure, but given the persistence of the dissidents, perhaps over time there will be more refusals—and it might not take many to set in motion a cascade.

It is easy to see that conservative pundits and politicians have been paralyzed in the past few days, suffering shell shock from the hammer blows of the recent Supreme Court rulings, and reluctantly awakening to the realization that we now live in a different country. The usual proposals—win more elections, go back to court, take back the culture, come up with cleverer appeals to the youth, etc.—all ring hollow and smack of denial. No one knows the next move in the game because all the rules have been suspended. We all know that leftists in power will do whatever they want and no one will stop them. (We also know that much of what they want to do is crazy.) The right is already splintering between those who want to accept the devastation and “move on” (usefully revealing their contempt for their “base”) and those who realize there’s something more at stake here than whether the Republicans gain a few points now that they can avoid the issue of “marriage equality,” while those ready to fight have no unifying program or manifesto. Leftist penetration has been very deep and there are few normal people who would not be loath to surrender at least some part of at least one of the Big Lies that they have bought into. Opinions changed and convictions abandoned after years of resisting and sustaining psychological battering for years (yes, I must be complicit somehow in racism; ok, I guess homosexuals can marry) are the hardest to revisit and reconsider.

So, here’s a minimal proposal. Refuse assent to any of these lies or any of their corollaries (refuse the entire network of lies)—openly if possible, “between the lines” if necessary. Caution is called for—ultimately, the Big Lies are instances of Leftist trolling, that is, laying out bait to get a response they can use to draw their enemies out into the open and make them easy targets. (To ask whether the Left “believes” its own lies is to make a category error—the Left has nothing to do with belief, only with the exposure of the presumably fraudulent beliefs of others—Leftism is OCD, obsessive compulsive debunking, with complete faith deposited in the most tireless and unrelenting debunkers.) Truth bearers will, indeed, become targets—that’s the point of the whole enterprise, as the Left has no real “positive” agenda, no better version of civilization, no model of social order. But people can try to be massive and dispersed targets rather than isolated and concentrated ones, and targets engaged in cultivating the practices of civilization in the face of social disorder. To get their way, the victimo/bureaucrats will have to take children out of their homes, arrest those responsible for the physical defense of vulnerable communities, shut down houses of worship and expropriate businesses, and at each point along the way men who have sworn to uphold the Constitution and who share much with their targets will have to decide if they can really, in good conscience, do that.

This truth bearing approach is the only way to test the weak link of the Left: the likelihood that the demands for enforcing the Big Lies will eventually strain the loyalties of the men with guns (we can easily imagine how many in the military are filled with disgust at the current regime’s alliance with our enemies, how many in the border patrols chafe at the refusal to let them do their job, how angry police must be at the opportunistic race baiting—I don’t know about the FBI or ATF, though). Once upon a time the Left could recruit its own militant cadres, ready to handle weapons, wield clubs, bust up a meeting; they could even set up parallel quasi-state institutions where civil society was weak enough. Other than their dwindling union ranks, form where could they recruit a steady supply of thugs—gay pride parades? (Well, there are historical examples, but the numbers just aren’t there.) They are stuck the forces they have been demoralizing for years. It follows that, more important than taking back the academies or Hollywood or the courts is making sure that the force available to the regime is lacking in the numbers and/or reliability needed to apply effective violence against those who only defend their own right to bear witness to subversive truths. This certainly implies that overt partisan appeals should be to law enforcement, but whether it further means those forces should be joined en masse or, on the contrary, starved of personnel replenishment by people who would rather defend their communities, must be left open for now. Individuals will ultimately have to make up their own minds about that, but, either way, the natural right to self-defense in bearing witness to truths in danger of being lost can be the basic unifying principle around which resistance can gather. And, this, incidentally, is also the only way of ensuring that there will be enough trained, organized and moralized people to fight the Caliphate, when it comes to that. Ultimately, these new centers will have to attract the younger, digital crowd to help construct new economic and security networks—the only way to do that, though, is to allow them to do their jobs in a way that the politicized incompetence of government-linked corporations doesn’t, and that’s more of a long term matter (there are probably quite a few libertarian hacker types, though, just to get things started).

The starting point, though, is constant questioning on the most basic topics whenever we are confronted with the Big Lies—elementary, even childish questioning, which might start to drive the Leftists mad like a buffalo under attack from a swarm of mosquitos. I suggested a few questions a few posts back: what is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? Things which everyone knew without thinking not too long ago, but which raise storms of controversy now. We can add many more questions: what is “law”? What is “government”? What is a “right”? What is “equality”? “Democracy”? “Liberty”? What is a “judge”? In their ferocious deployment of these terms, the Leftists have forgotten that someone might ask, given all that seems to depend on these terms, what sorts of entities, exactly, we are to take them to be, and why? We would be returning to a kind of Socratic naivety (or irony, if that’s your reading of Plato). We might even start a “national conversation.”