I think what Trump wants here is balance. From what I have heard the museum can’t even mention Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity without implying he had the time for such activity because his slaves did all the work around his property. Nobody has ever said we shouldn’t talk about slavery or any other imperfection in our history, but when the scales are tipped heavily towards finding fault with everything…we become a self loathing culture and country. Look at the British and the rest of the Europeans. They hate themselves so much and their history. A country can’t survive and stay cohesive if it is ashamed of it’s history.
Agreed. There's nothing wrong with trying to portray a balanced view of history. But it's just that - balanced. No country is perfect but the U.S. is a great place to live which is why so many immigrants come here every year. Ben Franklin only owned a few slaves and later changed his views and became opposed to slavery. The fact that he owned slaves is not the most important thing about it.
Oh, balance. Look, I'm sure (I'll await correction) that the ADL didn't demand that The Spirit of St. Louis be labeled as the single engine plane that well-known isolationist and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic blah blah blah. The Smithsonian should be about facts. Facts about what's on display.
What gets me is the suicide angle of this. When Rudyard Kipling visited Washington, he and the then Undersecretary of the Navy, his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, used to visit the Smithsonian. Let Kipling tell the rest, from his autobiography:
"The Smithsonian, specially on the ethnological side, was a pleasant place to browse in. Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind. This wonder I used to explain to Theodore Roosevelt, who made the glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals."
Of course there are two sides to history, but unless this country walks in a vain show and has confidence in its own past, then it's doomed to a future with Kommissar of Education I. Kendi telling it what it can and cannot say.
Besides, Michelle says museums intimidate black people, so why should they care?
I spent some time in Charlevoix MI this week, an up-north summer town on Lake Michigan. It used to be quite lily-white. But now I found black people working in some of the shops.
Ben Franklin did have a few household slaves, but he would eventually become a staunch anti-slavery activist and pamphleteer. Alas, unlike the Pennsylvania Quakers, he did not make the personal sacrifice and manumit the slaves he owned. Any study of American slavery is incomplete that does not mention the Quakers and their willingness to accept often great financial losses in furtherance of their high moral ideals. Not only did they give up without compensation often valuable slave holdings, but many felt an obligation to train their freed slaves in farming or skilled crafts so they could earn a living once freed. See on this Leon Higinbotham, In the Matter of Color.
Worse. There is never any discussion that Massachusetts freed all slaves before any place in the world when it did so on July 8, 1783 -- and Massachusetts had similar geography and population to Haiti -- it wasn't a tiny place. There is no discussion about similar early efforts in Vermont, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. There is no discussion that Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. There is no discussion that most of the world still had slavery in 1865 and it took relatively large places like Brazil (1888) the Ottoman Empire (1924) and Saudi Arabia (1962) much longer to fee their slaves. And there is zero discussion about the utter brutality of the Arab slave trade and that the vast majority of slaves taken by Europeans to the Americans were taken by the Spanish and Portuguese -- very few White people consider themselves to be Hispanic.
For some reason (probably the fact that Communism basically won the long game in the United States) instead of the truth, evil lies like the 1619 project and genocidal rhetoric like eliminating Whiteness is popular and goes unpunished even though it is clearly both fraud and theft from people -- and most of those people like Trump, DeSantis, Reagan & JFK don't have ancestors who owned slaves -- in contrast to Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries who all do.
"There is no discussion that Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya."
Black slavery in Libya was reintroduced by the USA, under Israeli orders.
"the vast majority of slaves taken by Europeans to the Americans were taken by the Spanish and Portuguese -- very few White people consider themselves to be Hispanic."
The Spanish and Portuguese are generally considered to be white, surely?
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you say. I don't think African slavery in the Americas is placed in the historical context enough.
No, of course, not. Perhaps influenced by or in consultation with, but driven by? That's overheated hyperbole.
This is the claim I responded to:
"Black slavery in Libya was reintroduced by the USA, under Israeli orders."
This is preposterous and deranged. Also, it removes the agency and responsibility of the actual actors, as if they were forced against their will to sell and acquire slaves. And there is zero proof of this, except for the ridiculous claim that by closing their border Israel somehow "forced" Libyans to become slavers.
You sound like a Jew hater and conspiracy theorist.
Vermont didn't abolish slavery. Slavery was prohibited by the initial settlers of the area, which included two black families. It wasn't Vermont though, it was the New Hampshire Grants, and also claimed by New York's royal governor.
The 1619 project is not a pack of evil lies. It is a smattering of accurate articles, a mile wide and an inch deep, telling us nothing new, with a few ribbons of blatant lies tied around it by the initiator. The main lie is that those who started the American Revolution were afraid the British government was going to take away their slaves. On the contrary, both Tories and Whig liberals in Britain were up to their neck in the slave trade, and wanted to sell more.
There would be no 1619 project once you establish the fact that Massachusetts freed all slaves and abolished slavery in 1783 which was 54 years before Great Britain abolished slavery.
That would be irrelevant to the premise of the 1619 project, by about 164 years. I know Hannah-Jones puts great stock in Britain's abolitionist bona fides, which were indeed late in the game, and in their own way as hypocritical as Thomas Jefferson's. But 1619 was a long time before Massachusetts abolished slavery. That didn't happen in one fell stroke. There were court cases in individual suits, but those didn't instantly free everyone. It would be reasonable to say that by 1790 slavery was pretty much gone from Massachusetts -- but if someone came up with an exception to that, I wouldn't be surprised.
The default position of the world in 1619 was slavery. The United States via Massachusetts on July 8, 1783, changed that default position as every slave was freed on that date and slavery was outlawed (Vermont -- and much smaller place in population -- passed legislation outlawing slavery in 1777 -- but there were still slaves in Vermont in 1783).
The next place in the world that freed slaves was Haiti ending slavery in 1804 -- but the freed slaves had terrible conditions and the manner of ending slavery was extremely unnecessarily brutal.
So, the 1619 project is a total fraud. When one discusses slavery in the year 1619., one would note that slavery existed everywhere.
When one notes Black African slavery in 2025, one would note that it still goes on in Mauritania and Libya.
In short, any attack on the foundation of this country somehow tying it to slavery is an intentional total lie. It isn't a half-truth, it is a vicious lie.
You inadvertently pointed out another common lie about Thomas Jefferson (though indirectly).
Sally Hemings had children who were related to Thomas Jefferson's uncle Peter Jefferson. Due to that situation, it is taught as a fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children when that prospect is neither proven but would be highly unlikely given the other local Jefferson family members.
Thomas Jefferson was 55 when Hemings first child was born. The likelihood that a 55 year old (up to 65 year old) in that era was fertile and capable and desirous of frequent sex when he is in a position of power is very low.
Jefferson's brother Randolph Jefferson was only 43 when the first child was born. He had a reputation of recklessness and he openly socialized with slaves which Thomas did not. It is also possible that one of Randolph's sons fathered children with Sally Hemings. In short, there were over a dozen local Jefferson men who could have fathered the children.
Yet, this unproven unlikely speculative point about Thomas is taught as gospel -- mainly to damage the founding of this country. Furthermore, Jefferson is criticized for not freeing all of his slaves when the law made it difficult for him to do so -- that is due to his debts Virginia law did not simply allow him to free slaves.
The 1619 project is a total fraud. There is no truth to any of it. Out of contexts factual points do not make a truth.
Kinda sorta. It was a very slow, gradual process, often involving 28 years of servitude before emancipation. There were many slaves held in Pennsylvania for a couple of decades after 1800. (Similarly, the last slave who remained in that condition for life in Connecticut died in 1848).
In New York things collapsed by about 1809. The writing was on the wall, and a lot of people owning title to slaves cut deals for emancipation in three to five years, in exchange for good work up until then.
Nor is this history complete without recognizing that for much of the 17th and 18th century, many Quakers did own slaves. Paul Robeson's mother is descended from Cyrus Bustill, whose Quaker master begat him on his mother, who was said Quaker's chattel property. He wasn't an exception. Quakers did great work on the Underground Railroad, but on the whole they were late-comers. John Woolman had to remonstrate with his master (that is, his employer for wage labor on an annual contract) about writing a contract for sale of slaves. Woolman also wrote in his diary "My master bought some Scotch servants and brought them to Mt. Holly to sell."
Workers should be treated justly of course, but work is not slavery. Quoth Voltaire: "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” I happen to agree with this.
So did the Wobblies. Their songs deride capitalists in language amazingly similar to 1970s politicians railing about welfare queens. Work is not slavery -- slavery is about how work and workers are controlled and compensated.
Meanwhile on X today, respectable moderate conservative types like David harsanyi and Phil magnets are calling you out as a far right racist for writing about Camp of the Saints, in response to your latest free press feature on the radical right. And they think you’re a radical for opposing what’s happening in England.
Phil Magness has done good work in being among the first to take a wrecking ball to some aspects of the 1619 Project. If he really was calling out Rod for what you said (which, by the way, the tweet you linked to doesn't really say that) then he's being a blockhead or guilty of reading a few posts or tweets by Rod out of context. Still, Magness is right in calling Camp of the Saints trash.
Camp of the Saints turned out to be very prescient "trash". We are seeing it played out in Europe IRL as we speak. Except that IIRC the migrant convoy in COTS only involved a million or so refugees....
"The 1619 Project view of the Pilgrimage would have required us to understand that time period as about nothing other than the enslavement of black people."
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
To the leftists, not "centering" slavery in any discussion of American or regional American history is to legitimize slavery, to betray racism. Thus, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, all that came before the Civil War - slavery and racism is the main story of that entire time.
No.
It was an undeniable aspect of that history, a profound influence on that history, part of the broader cloth. But it is not the entirety of the cloth.
But woke exhibits are only partially about rewriting history. They're also about controlling the present and future by trying to shame those who, frankly, had nothing to do with slavery.
The left wants to make my teenaged white children somehow culpable for slavery, somehow morally responsible. Because if they are morally responsible, then certainly they must genuflect before the (descendants of) the victims of slavery. They must compensate those (descendants of) victims; they must grovel before them.
Again: No.
So the left doesn't "get" it not just because they always assume themselves to be on the "right side of history," but because the narrative reinforces their power. It's not about portraying slavery in a manner that's historically accurate - it's about portraying slavery in a manner that allows the left to use the issue as a club, a trump card, now and forever.
White liberals have a proprietary interest in black pain and suffering, whether past or present. They see it as a moral credential (they care about black people more than white conservatives do) and they use it as a political cudgel and a way to morally browbeat their political opponents. It is a manipulative weaponization of guilt and shame, designed to help them feel virtuous and superior to those OTHER whites. This also explains their unhinged hatred for black people who don't play the victim role, like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. So much of modern liberalism is rooted in white guilt and white saviorism. They will nurture and save black people—whether they like it or not!
I'd endorse this a hundred percent if you'd let me add that not only white liberals but what used to be called the civil rights establishment has a proprietary interest in black pain and suffering.
Any political activist group, whether of Left or Right, has an interest in perpetuating the woes they oppose so as to stay in business-- and if necessary, they will find a new Cause should the old one be resolved.
Exactly. And they hate America. They have to constantly talk about it to destroy social trust and use that to increase their own power. When social trust goes away then things get more chaotic and violent. People will want a powerful government to protect them and that benefits the Left.
It is much worse than you wrote. The United States was actually the first place in the world to outlaw and free slaves -- See Massachusetts July 8, 1783 (not taught). Very few White people and White ethnic groups owned slaves (not taught). Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Libya and Mauritania (not taught). Well after our Civil War slavery was still practiced in most of the world (not taught). Slaves were freed in Brazil in 1888, the Ottoman Empire 1924, Ethiopia 1944, Saudi Arabia 1962 (not taught). Politicians whose ancestors were slaveholders include Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker & Hakeem Jeffries versus politicians whose ancestors were not slaveholders include Trump, DeSantis, Reagan & JFK (not taught). And, maybe even the most disgusting thing, the Arab slave trade and treatment of Black Africans is not taught. Thus, we are a society where a light skinned Estonian American might be beaten half to death for the behavior of Portuguese and Arab slave traders who share no DNA connection with the unfortunately White victim of racial violence.
Great Britain was the dominant power in the slave trade at the time the war of independence began, and the revolution made slavery controversial for the first time in history.
The Amis de Noirs. But nobody paid attention to them. You continually seek to have history in neat little boxes, whereas in fact it flows, and there are preponderances, not 100 percent transformations. There was a Quaker society in London that passed a resolution against "the crime of man-stealing" around 1660, but, it had no impact on the propensity of Quakers in America to purchase and own slaves. What the American Revolution did was to make slavery and abolition serious political controversies. The French Revolution caught up in 1794 when the National Assembly banned slavery in all French possessions -- after which Toussaint Louverture made common cause with French military authorities and turned on the Spanish, then the British, eventually becoming commander in chief of all forces of the Republican in St. Domingue. The first time William Wilberforce introduced a measure to abolish the slave trade in parliament was in the mid-1780s, and it got all of 16 votes, because both Tories and Whigs either had investments in the Indies, or in shipping companies, or represented port cities substantially dependent on the slave trade.
They were among the highest nobility at Versailles. During the Revolution slavery was abolished, though that had no effect in the colonies outside France and Napoleon later restored it.
All movements begin small and then grow larger. Antislavery sentiment in the UK and its colonies was once a rather avant garde matter too.
Boy are you confused. When the republic (not the monarchy) got around to abolished slavery, it applied ONLY in the colonies, because that is where slaves were being shipped. There was little use for them in France. A handful of nobility can be, and were, easily ignored by those actually making policy and collecting bribes from profitable merchants.
So, a punishment should exist to a current White person whose ancestors were from Eastern Europe for the actions of a minority of the Southern Population of the United States in the era of the 1850s because they "look bad"?
It's not just that, it's the fact that anti-black racism was used to keep poorer non-slaveholding whites in line. After all, if blacks were inferior, those poor whites would always have someone to look down on.
It's not that museums/the Smithsonian teach the reality of slavery and racism. It's when they imply that it's the whole cloth - that there can be no positive achievements in American history because slavery and racism poisoned everything.
While teaching all the horrors of slavery, and its inherent contradiction to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, plus the fact that it became much worse after 1800, any honest account would also teach that the American Revolution made slavery controversial on a large political scale for the first time in human history. It was the revolution that gave rise to states prohibiting slavery, inspired the manumission of tens of thousands, greatly increasing the "free colored" population, and created a serious question that could only be answered by either abolishing slavery, or doubling down on the claim that "they're not really people."
When they teach the "horrors of slavery" they omit the Arab slave trade and omit the fact that Massachusetts freed slaves before any place on the world. They also omit the fact that Black Africans are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. So, the "horrors of slavery" is used to attack the United States' foundation and White people as a racial group.
There were some unique features. Slavery has been endemic to human history, so selling slaves to trans-Atlantic merchant ships was just a standard business practice, not a vast conspiracy to invent a new practice. Slavery in North America became much worse after about 1800. First, those who wanted to keep slave under the banner "all men are created equal" had to double down on, distill, amplify, the tacit assumption that dark skinned people were naturally meant to be slaves. After Gabriel's Rebellion, a slew of new laws prohibited voluntary emancipation, teaching slaves to read and write, etc. (A literate slave became a considerable liability once newspapers were full of rhetoric about universal liberty).
Distribution is also important. A small number owned the majority of slaves, in concentrations of 50-300 or so. Most of that one third you reference owned one or three or five, and their conditions of life could be reasonable good to absolutely terrible depending on who held title. (Small holders can be mean, miserly, nasty, and avaricious too.) George Washington Carver's mother was the only slave owned by a family in Missouri. She and her infant son were stolen (you can steal a slave just like you can steal cattle or horses). The family managed to recover him, not her, and raised him. But that too was atypical. Your figure of one third sounds a bit high -- what is your source for that? I assume you must mean one third of "white" families in states permitting slavery, since the non-slave-state "white" population was much larger and would have dwarfed that fraction.
When I say "family" I mean exactly that-- I am not referencing the number of individuals who held legal title to a slave (that would be about 10%). But if your father, grandfather or brother owned slave(s)* you would definitely have a vested interest in the peculiar institution and your politics would usually be aligned accordingly.
* Women could be slave owners too, as Martha Washington was.
You are apparently either lacking competency in the English language, or you are intoxicated on something as you are arguing about things I never said or implied.
Right -- I consider your point to be completely racist.
First, all White people aren't the same. That is a point you completely missed. That is, in 1860, zero percent of White Quaker families in Pennsylvania and White Famine Catholic Irish in Massachusetts owned slaves in 1860.
Second, if you want to broadly use "family" ownership of slaves, that would make about 12% of Black families owning slaves and about 20% of American Indians families owning slaves.
Third, we typically, in a non-communist society, don't have family guilt or accolades for the behavior of a relative. If your father has a child, he pays child support or is entitled to custody, not you. If you father buys an expensive sports car, that is not your car. If your father is a member of an exclusive club, you do not get to enjoy the benefits of his expensive and exclusive membership because he is your relative. If your father commits a crime, you do not go to jail.
I understand your North Korean-type view. I find it horrifying.
So, no matter how you slice it, a small minority of White people, Black people, and American Indians owned slaves. Some White groups who live here today had virtually no people in the US in 1860 from some ethnicities, so many White ethnic groups have a lower percentage of Black slave ownership than Black Americans and US American Indians.
I direct your attention to the Solzhenitsyn poem Prussian nights which depicts a brutal rape to death of a Polish girl by Soviet Troops for looking German. I direct your further attention to the Khmer Rouge deciding that people who wore glasses were oppressors deserving of death. I direct your attention to Tiffany Cross' comparing Mike McDaniel to a slave owner, based on his appearance, as a matter of justifying him being compared to a slave master in his decision making concerning his quarterback Tua.
WTF the indeed. I did nothing of the sort. I did not post about "Ownership" at all until someone else wanted to go deeper into the stats, and in no way whatsoever did I classify all white people as anything at all. Where are you getting this? Am I addressing a poorly vetted AI bot? Someone with a substance abuse problem? A person with fading cognitive ability? A troll intent on disrupting this blog?
The Smithsonian kerfuffle reminds me of the Desantis "Don't Say Gay" kerfuffle of a few years ago, when Gov Ron decided he wanted to remove Gender Theory from public schools.
Every liberal I know shrieked in unison about what an evil bigot DeSantis was and how Trans children would die (!) unless they felt "represented" in school and every angry rant ended with the same crescendo: Why do Republicans CARE SO MUCH about Trans children!??
Luckily I go back a long way with my friends and thus could tell them: We were taught Gender Theory in college decades ago, the Gender Studies political program (the erasure of the mammalian sex binary as it's an oppressive social construct) has been clearly stated and is certainly no sort of conservative/right wing concoction; and also, What did you people think when you started campaigning for child sex changes and drag queens in school libraries? It never crossed your mind that some people/parents would object!? (Of course this changed no one's mind, but it at least shut them up.)
I think the root of these issues (Progs instituting a radical program then being shocked and appalled when people disagree) is that politics has replaced religion for many liberals (and for ALL Leftists) and thus they are incapable of rationally discussing anything having to do with one of their sacred victim groups and their sacred narrative—an Oppressed Other walking a Via Dolorosa, brutalized and stigmatized by bigots, who now need to be centered and rewarded (the last shall be first), who all good people know to worship and atone toward (more or less).
This is why liberals get very tense and angry when any of their sacred narratives are challenged—it reeks too much of blasphemy to them. Also, liberals consider themselves a community of the morally Elect (is tres Puritan), so there is no chance of compromising here and no chance of them being open to alternative perspectives. NPR is Mass for gentry liberals, and no one challenges sacred dogma or invites heretics up onto the altar during Mass.
More like Northern Ireland, if kinetic at all, but so far everything’s metaphorical. More likely, a series of legal, advertising and funding struggles. Strategic forces like nuclear weapons are utterly irrelevant in such situations. 1970s thinking.
The point is the demonization going on and the resulting carelessness about the welfare of one’s neighbors of a different tribe.
My Thirty Years’ War comparison, or perhaps (I hope) metaphor, is to the belief structures that have locked the minds of the participants in the struggle.
No, I do not expect to see the Battle of the White Mountain. Yes, I expect to see sharp use of the legal system, ongoing hatred and mistrust, occasional localized or terroristic violence of the late-60s Weather Underground style, if any.
Talk of nuclear war in this context is idle. We aren’t talking about nation states or the proto-versions of such entities as we saw in the 17th century. What we DO see are fundamental differences in thinking and belief.
Religious pluralism is probably a vain hope. The problem is that religions are only recognized as such once they’re no longer growing , active faiths.
Yes, yes, yes. The zealotry and evangelizing of the sacred tenets our progressive moral superiors hold while simultaneously rejecting anything that remotely resembles a difference of opinion remind me of my Dad’s admonition: “Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.”
Yes, Judith Butler has been around for a long time. This stuff was solidifying when I was in graduate school in English literature in the 1980s. Back then, the basic texts of Derrida and Foucault were still being absorbed by graduate students and were not yet part of standard course offerings or even used much in literary theory courses. But the graduate students absorbed them intensely. By 1990, this stuff had entered much of the graduate seminar world and was beginning to make itself known among the more enterprising undergraduates. The 1990s were the decade in which the social sciences and the legal education system picked it up.
The press finally heard about it by around 2010 or so.
I was a Lit major in the 80s at a snooty liberal arts college and by my last year (1990) the course listings were starting to show things like "Deconstruction" and of course applying the "Marxist lens". I took one look at these texts and it felt like I'd bought a nice TV, brought it home, then threw it in the garbage while devoting hours of study to the instruction manual. Why would anyone read this dreary theory when there was the rich buffet of literature to experience and enjoy!? At the time I just ignored it as more pretentious crap and had no clue that it would one day conquer the world.
I was in graduate school in the ‘90s when I first ran across critical theory, which was included as part of my required coursework. Ignoramus that I was, I thought it was merely a collection of fringe ideas that had no place in the real world, one more thing to debate in the classroom and that was that. I wish I had known better. Pretentious crap indeed.
I feel so blessed that I was able to get a great education and begin a lieflong love of Lit before the political parasites gnawed through the Humanities. I think at the root of it is the anxiety feel about reading and discussing complex works, it's hard to say anything interesting and original, and much easier to say something stupid. People seem to often get uncomfortable encountering art, which is why it's easier to attach political handles and debate "politics" instead of things like language, style, story. This also gives you more opportunites to socially signal and to pursue agendas for career advancement. The Crit Theory takeover of art is when profs and "theorists" replaced art and artists as the central focus of culture. I think of it as a palace coup led by eunuchs.
I'm 56 and constantly amazed at how different works affect me differently depending upon my age and life, ie. things I loved when younger I no longer do and vice versa.
This thread makes me feel like I've come home -- intellectually, at least.
I'm just between CP and CTW in age, and had a very similar experience in higher ed -- undergrad English major, then graduate study in religion -- spanning the mid-to-late 80s.
My undergrad SLC's English department was -- consciously or unconsciously, I never really knew -- extremely wise in essentially banning the use of secondary literature until majors reached just a few upper-level classes. So I had years reading primary texts only, for which I'm still grateful.
Things were different at my Big 10 grad program, though. I soon became accustomed to the glazed eyes and slack jaws of my intellectually-enslaved peers (and professors) as they bowed before the theorist du jour. I remember at one point a fairly remote star in the Pomo firmament deigned to shed the light of her subaltern presence upon my department (it was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, IIRC). My peers quivered with anticipation and excitement. Her talk was forgettable -- at least I've forgotten it entirely.
Anyway, thanks for the many excellent posts in this thread.
You see that in other humanities such as history among others. In a country like the U.S., which is still a young country compared to much of the rest of the world, the major events have all been discussed. So unless someone can unearth new information that dramatically changes the way those topics are viewed, then you have to play language games and embrace radical theories to have something to talk about.
The worst part about all of the "postmodern" and critical theory stuff isn't that we were exposed to it, it's that it was simply passed on as truth. My PhD work was in education (at a state university), and I was in a class of 12 people, 9 of whom shouldn't have been in a master's program, much less a research PhD.
They learned enough critical theory to be able to parrot the language without any real understanding of it (a sweet lady, actually pretty traditional personally, described herself as a "post-structural feminist"; when I asked her to define that for me, should could not, beyond more jargon), and they drank deeply from the font without any critique at all.
I think all of them graduated with PhDs (with dissertations such as "Latinx experience on the path to superintendency," etc), and are now school counselors and administrators. And that's what scariest to me. What used to be locked away in obscure graduate programs is now the guiding philosophy of the vast majority of our K-12 public "educators."
Ideology makes people feel smart, safe and provides a sense of belonging. It's much easier than thinking and acting for yourself. Crit Theory is a product that represents the will-to-power of our educated class, once installed they ascend from being mere teachers and become gurus, priests and political commissars. It's sort of a cult combined with a jobs program.
Also, the fact that the media lied and said that there either was no critical theory or it was entirely confined to colleges. Meanwhile, newly minted SJWs emerge from college and go into administration, HR, schools, etc. to contaminate those places with their insane doctrines.
I studied some of it in undergrad and grad school and thought a lot of it, and especially Derrida and Foucault, was utter nonsense. I've never understood the adulation that professors shower on those frauds and their contemporaries.
For anxious ambitious academic types Derrida and Foucault etc are social signifiers and represent Guild jargon, meaning a way for those "in the know" to group together and look down on those not blessed with their radical wisdom. It is utter nonsense dressed up in fancy abstruse jargon, designed for nothing but posing.
It’s because it opened up a whole new world for disciplines like Literature to actually say and do new stuff. Only so many new translations or commentaries you can do on the relatively static literary canon before it seems like everything worth doing and saying has been done before, but when Foucault and Derrida came along it opened up a whole new world of analysis that must have felt like a huge opportunity at the time. Plus it allows you to say a whole lot without saying anything at all, while also sounding super smart.
This is well-observed. The advent of each odious metastasis of 'critical theory' -- deconstruction, feminist theory, postmodernism, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, and on and on -- essentially 'reset' the canon: every novel and poem and play was reopened to 'fresh' analysis from this previously-unscaled critical vantage point. You could make a career of it if you could just get to a major work first, swinging your little critical hammer vigorously to try to knock it down to the base level of your tribe of envious whiners.
Perhaps so. But personally, I don’t see the point in all the commentaries. After a while, if a work has been covered by enough people, it’s time to move on to something else. It’s the same with endless reboots. Your point makes sense. I walked away from Derrida and Foucault, among others, convinced that they had nothing important to say.
I remember a Yale English professor that I read about in NYT in the 80s who taught deconstruction. I think it was about Milton, and what Milton wrote about Eve was actually the opposite of what he meant about Eve. Or something.
I had had some philosophical background in Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger, which fed into Derrida. Derrida starts with phenomenology, basically. There is some “there” there, in other words, but you’re resoundingly right about the role of that stuff socially in English departments. I was a perpetrator before I reformed.
In retrospect, I think a big difference bw me and my classmates and most of my teachers is that I came from a working-class background, so college was really my first time exposed to the study of serious literature. I was there to be read and learn great works, to grapple w them etc, and then suddenly there was this political invasion where the first purpose of reading became "interrogating texts" and "rectifying historical injustice".
It reeked of pretension and dishonesty, esp when I looked around and saw that most of the devotees of critical readings were rich kids, but then again that might make more sense ;)
Little did I know that a post-Marxist post-Christian faith was in the process of being born that would some day become the official ideology of the Western liberal class. Once you realize professors have replaced priests, it all seems much more clear.
In my 1979-83 undergraduate program, literature was central. No one discussed Derrida or Foucault much then. I’d run across them by accident at the bookstore. But they weren’t part of any coursework or even the conversation among my fellow undergrads. (We had a negligible graduate program at my college). But once I got to grad school the following years, oh boy, if you were into theory, that was where it was. Only time in my life I’ve been part of a “cool” crowd. Soured on it all by 1986, though.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by P. Friere, textbook in my sophomore English lit course at a state university. It wasn’t just graduate courses, or the 7 Sisters, and it began in undergrad courses a long time ago.
There's a lot of analogies to ideology and religion as you call the sacred narratives of leftists and I think they're apt. I'd offer another analogy: mental illness and specifically being delusional. When you're delusional you don't know that your thinking isn't reality based--by definition. You think your delusional and false view of the world is accurate and cannot see the real world through your mental illness. Getting a delusional person to see reality or to see that they are delusional requires a lot of help, effort, support and even strong medicines (for psychotic delusions like schizophrenics face). I think the left over the past 20+ years has gone deeper and deeper into delusion. They don't see it. They can't see it. Attacking one of the tenants of their delusions (e.g., men can be women; the U.S. was founded in 1619) provokes radical resistance because their distance from reality is so far now that they can't see or imagine the real world. There's no way back excepting some seriously strong medicine.
Our thinking classes have given themselves an ideological lobotomy. There is no hope and no way out for the current batch, any change will have to come from future generations.
“I think the root of these issues (Progs instituting a radical program then being shocked and appalled when people disagree) is that politics has replaced religion for many liberals (and for ALL Leftists) and thus they are incapable of rationally discussing anything having to do with one of their sacred victim groups and their sacred narrative”
Yup. It’s a faith claiming to be the one and only reality, and only heretics and apostates would question the value of its beliefs or try to analyze its claims logically. I, at least, can understand why an atheist or a non-Christian would be skeptical of the virgin birth and the resurrection. I know my beliefs are religious in nature and not something that can be proven by scientific principles and statistics. The woke don’t understand the inherently religious nature of their beliefs, which I think is why they get so extremely threatened by skeptics and dissenters.
Western liberals (of all stripes) are so reflexively dismissive of religion and so convinced that they reside at the apex of human wisdom that they are completely blind to the sacred and all the different ways it can manifest. These are the kind of people who could gather around a statue of George Floyd, kneel in atonement and pray for a world of Equality and Justice—and still imagine themselves as secular individuals who reside on a higher plane than their ancestors.
Ironically this makes them much more susceptible to all the modern televangelists of the Social Justice faith and all sorts of moral entrepreneurs, who know that people can be manipulated by guilt and shame and the desire for higher meaning and purpose.
And yes, this is why "they get so extremely threatened by skeptics and dissenters"—it's hard and uncomfortable for anyone to defend a sacred belief, but even harder when you refuse to admit that's what it is.
Rod is too kind. After 60+ years of dealing with leftists, I've concluded that nearly all of them are morally, spiritually, and intellectually bankrupt, hopeless in other words, and so I've written them off. They perfectly exemplify Nietszche's Will to Power, rather than the Will to Truth. It is a waste of time to read their drivel and listen to their nonsense; reality is much more interesting and important. We have to move on and rebuild society without them, or rather, in spite of them. The interview with Hannah Jones and the bacon incident demonstrate the situation well. Once in a while one of them sees the light, like Naomi Wolf, but only after being cancelled for her position on the Covid vaccine. Jim Kunstler came around a while back, though he was always a classic liberal who actually believed in truth rather than the Will to Power. Trump's critique of the Smithsonian is on target and an excellent first step, as is his criticism of the universities. A lot of damage has been done, and it will take decades to right the ship, I'm afraid. But we must start somewhere.
I agree that they like those things, but they want power to force their views on everyone else. Without that forcing, few would accept them. You see that with the LBGT+ business, the gender business, the green energy, etc.
The reason they have influence is that we live in a world where meaning is spread thin. Leftists can convince people because they provide the people with the meaning they are otherwise deprived of.
Nietzsche himself was more than Will to Power (a book he didn't finish before going nuts). If only Derrida and Foucault had aped his respect for history, the individual and Truth we might have avoided their destruction.
I agree but that's not the fundamental problem with Derrida and Foucault. Their progressive ideology--deconstructionism--suffers from one overarching problem. Jacques Derrida’s famous “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is self-referential and therefore, given its meaning, self-refuting—a fact that seems lost on all of those who profess to believe it. The inability to perceive this disqualfies Derrida and his ilk from any claim to truth.
Yes, of course. Somehow the progressives don't want to believe this. They prefer what Zubiri terms "the Will to the truth of ideas", which is belief in one's own ideas about reality rather than proceeding the other way around. We see this in their desire to make reality conform to their pet theories about it.
Well, that's pragmatism, which is just utilitarianism on steroids. As an undergraduate I was put off by a philosophy professor whom I adored who actually employed the phrase "truth value". That's giving it away pretty quick, don't you think?
It's worse than pragmatism. Pragmatism at least believes that what works is true. The left's ideas don't even work, so they're a couple of rungs below Bentham. I agree that "truth value" is a red flag.
OMG I'm trapped in a white man's body! At least that's what I thought after I read the "White Culture" poster. It's not all wrong, but it's not all right either. I does sound an awful lot like...ummm...you know who's behind all this. In total it's inconsistent with Jesus' teachings so I would like to be considered separately. Experience tells me that's unlikely, it's a direct lesson in sinners saluting sinners. It's predicated upon a dual-split mind, which I have, fortunately, completely lost. I shall pray for their redemption.
My mom grew up in Flint, Michigan during the Great Depression. Her family was so poor they didn’t even have a bathroom in the house. Because she was the youngest of four girls, my mom’s “bedroom” was the living room couch. Because her dad worked the early shift at the GM plant, the first thing my mom saw every morning when she woke up was her dad, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading his Bible. My mom also had a cousin that got drunk and robbed a bank. Which story do you think I tell my kids? Culture is created through the stories we tell about ourselves.
I actually happen to think that Molly Jong Fast is mostly correct. The Democrats do need to take a genuinely populist turn, because that’s what the country wants. I personally still believe that if they’d nominated Bernie instead of Hillary in 2016, they would have won.
Mamdani and AOC are/were defined by running against deeply establishment figures. AOC even briefly tried, with the rest of the squad, to become a left-wing version of the Freedom Caucus before Pelosi (the alpha female to end all alpha females) put them in their places like Cesar Millan.
In this respect it isn’t the dingbat campus “socialism” these figures embrace that’s important; rather, it’s the willingness to transgress the bounds of establishment orthodoxy and offer genuine and sometimes radical critiques of the status quo, and policy prescriptions to go with them, that go beyond the establishment’s fake boundaries. The country has been, is, and will for the foreseeable future remain in a very anti-establishment mood. If you’re running for office in a contested election and hope to win, you have to take that into account or you’re probably going to lose.
None of this is an endorsement of Mamdani’s policy proposals, or AOC’s. It’s an endorsement of their style and approach to politics. The Democrats should run anti-establishment populists everywhere they can (with their populist critiques appropriate to where they’re running, so making room for Dan Osborns and Sherrod Browns in red states, for example). They won’t do this, because if it was too successful the party establishment would be in danger of losing control of their own party, but that’s what would actually cure the Democratic malaise and make them competitive again.
The problem is that many of their views aren't anti-establishment anymore but the norm now. For example, many of the culture views the Left expounds are accepted by the society at large so those are anti-establishment. The problem is that both parties will nominate someone that talks a good talk and then inevitably sells out to the rich.
It's hard to fault the young for their zeal for trust fund socialist Mamdani. They're in debt, will never own a home, and are stuck in dead-end jobs (if they're working at all). Suddenly, socialism, with its promise of free groceries and healthcare, seems like a good thing.
Agreed. As I said in a reply to a different comment, socialism continues to find adherents who resonate with its class based message. It is true that the rich have too much power and wealth. The solution I believe in is one part charity and one part that the rich need to pay higher taxes. If they don't do these things, then class resentment grows. The problems with socialism is that it contradicts basic human nature and that those in charge will use it to further their own power.
As I repeat like a parrot, they had a chance for at least centrist populism with Jim Webb in 2016, but they ostracized him from the field of candidates and Trump got in.
So sorry…before I wrote my response I should have done a “land acknowledgment”. I was in my house and it sits on what used to be the Crazy Bear tribe’s land. They lived in peace of course. They never fought other tribes, took slaves, or did anything bad. Just living off the land and asking all the animals first if they could hunt them. Okay glad that’s out of the way.
Every square inch of land on the face of the earth is stolen land -- most of it several times over. The area of Wisconsin and Minnesota the Ojibwa occupied is land they chased the Lakota out of after getting guns from French fur traders. The Lakota went west, and displaced the Shoshone from the Powder River Country.
Seems like a distinction without a difference. If the conquerors do not displace the conquered, but merely settled down as the new overlords to enjoy the taxes and tithes, then there would be a distinction.
You're right that the land is stolen, which makes it a usable word, but there is a distinction, in that "conquered" is a more specific term which describes a specific human behavior. For example, one can rob people of money, jewelry, possessions, etc, but it would make no sense to call it "conquered money;" it's "stolen money." When the word conquered is used, a precise, historically common activity is being described.
Rod what i continue to value is your spot on postings. i laud your praises to friends and family but sadly find most want to continue to live in their bubble. you are role model as well. having come through the fire, you major in credibility, are fair, honest, no less, in spite of your vulnerability. I admire and value you for those reasons as a human and as a writer.
Rod, the historian and Islam scholar/critic Raymond Ibrahim posted a short (10 min.) video last December on the slavery question in direct response to Rep. Jasmine Crockett's comments promoting DEI as being necessary to redress white slave trade of blacks from Africa. It covers a lot of historical background and is very level-headed: https://youtu.be/0pJwL0Gt7JQ?si=UP4KnhXb27APdnzF
Too bad the Pilgramage was canceled. I do think you and your niece were wrong. Instead of making a public issue, that was a case that should have been handled with more tact and care. Leadership should have been approached privately. Local black churches should have been involved. Aspects about black culture could have been brought in, making it truly inclusive.
Making a public issue was a classic "unintended consequences of good intentions" that liberals are famoud for doing.
Not sure whether I’d have gone about dealing with this mess exactly as you suggest, but this is on the mark. I don’t applaud niece Hannah for heading efforts to hold the Pilgrimage hostage to her ‘change or die’ activism. There’s been much damage done by young people, and not-so-young people, who destroy local traditions without wisdom or guidance from those who should’ve spoken firmly- and then said, “no, I don’t ‘support’ you,” when necessary.
"How far can these idiots push people before they’ve had enough?"
The problem, of course, is just stating, "We've had enough" will not stop them. I see no path other than violence that will stop them. Do we have the will? Not yet.
This is unfortunately the answer. I don't know when, but sometime in the near future, the end will be reached and issues will be settled with violence once social trust has declined so far.
NPR focusing on journalistic integrity and actually questioning the left wing narrative? I'm not surprised at all they didn't do that and instead interviewed that fraud Nikole Hannah-Jones. All of the culture war issues of the past several decades involves the Left changing something to appease their activists and then people on the right and some independents complaining and wanting it to go back to the way things were. With Trump's win in 2024, left wing ideas are finally receiving some pushback and it can't come soon enough. While slavery should be discussed, I agree with Trump that there isn't enough positivity. When he was younger, that's how things work. Culture largely focused on the fact that America was a great country but imperfect. This creates a higher trust society since people will always be more willing to fight for a country they believe is good. While we should be allowed to criticize, too much today focuses only on the negative.
It is important that any museum depicting slavery actually tell the full truth -- as uncomfortable as it is now. So, if you discuss slavery you really ought to point out that Massachusetts was the first place on the planet that both made slavery illegal and immediately freed slaves when it did so on July 8, 1783. This is probably taught in exactly zero schools outside of Massachusetts (which still celebrates emancipation day).
You also need to point out that Black Africans are still in 2025 enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. You need to point out that aside from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Pennsylvania began freeing slaves way before the rest of the world.
You also need to contrast the slave trade in the United States which was tame compared to the brutal Arab slave trade. You need to point out that the Civil War ended in the US in 1865, but slavery at that point still existed in most of the world and note that Brazil ended it in 1888, the Ottoman Empire in 1924, Ethiopia in 1944 and Saudi Arabia in 1962.
You need to point out that very few White Americans owned slaves -- and the uncomfortable fact is that Black Americans and American Indians also owned Black slaves.
You also need to point out that very few White ethnic groups owned slaves in the United States. That is probably 95% of all White slaveholders were British Protestant, French, or Dutch. There were probably nearly zero Estonian, Romanian, Serb, Sorb, Slovakian etc etc slave holders since we had virtually zero people of those ethnicities in the USA in 1865.
You would also have to point out that people who "look good" (like Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, & Hakeem Jeffries) frequently have ancestors who owned Black slaves or were Confederate Soldiers (or both). And people who "look bad", like Trump, JFK, DeSantis & Reagan have no Confederate Solider Ancestors or ancestors who owned Black slaves.
In essence, the slavery narrative has been weaponized against the foundation of this country (and is completely unsupported by any historical evidence) and is weaponized against random people in today's America who "look bad" because they look White.
It should have been a wakeup call that this extremist hate ensnared Coach Mike McDaniel twice.
First, McDaniel replaced a darker coach of the Dolphins Brian Flores. This was chalked up to anti-black racism even though Flores has no ancestors who were slaves in America, were subject to the one drop rule, or subjected to Jim Crow and McDaniel is descended from Black American slaves (though he has comparatively light skin).
Then, again, McDaniel was compared to a slave master by a reporter named Tiffany Cross regarding his decisions concerning quarterback Tua's playing decisions. The problem was Tua was a Samoan and had zero ancestors who were enslaved and brought to the United States and who were subjected to Jim Crow.
So, visceral hate based on appearance unfounded on any history is the majority cultural position found in most of our museums, educational institutions, governmental organizations, big business, media and the entertainment industry.
This is really no different than the Khmer Rouge supporting the murder of those who wore glasses as oppressors despite the obvious point that someone might have been wearing glasses because (1) they were a servant, (2) a relief organization or Lions Club international organization might have given the glasses to a poor needy person, (3) the glasses could have been found in the dump or handed down.
The lies about the United States and the visceral hate of people and willingness to lie about people's ancestors needs to stop before further violence, theft, and hatred occurs.
OK, but you want to know the full full truth? The West is the only society in human history to establish a polity without slavery. Slavery is the default position of humanity, as we're about to find out.
There's no reason for slavery at all in the age of robotics-- the machines are our slaves. (Of course if Frank Herbert was a prophet not just a scifi writer then we eventually become theirs)
Slavery was banned in the old Northwest Territories (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin) in 1787, by act of Congress. A pity Congress didn't (maybe couldn't) ban slavery in all territories. Restricting it to the East Coast states would have prevented the Civil War and hastened it total abolition.
I think what Trump wants here is balance. From what I have heard the museum can’t even mention Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity without implying he had the time for such activity because his slaves did all the work around his property. Nobody has ever said we shouldn’t talk about slavery or any other imperfection in our history, but when the scales are tipped heavily towards finding fault with everything…we become a self loathing culture and country. Look at the British and the rest of the Europeans. They hate themselves so much and their history. A country can’t survive and stay cohesive if it is ashamed of it’s history.
Agreed. There's nothing wrong with trying to portray a balanced view of history. But it's just that - balanced. No country is perfect but the U.S. is a great place to live which is why so many immigrants come here every year. Ben Franklin only owned a few slaves and later changed his views and became opposed to slavery. The fact that he owned slaves is not the most important thing about it.
Oh, balance. Look, I'm sure (I'll await correction) that the ADL didn't demand that The Spirit of St. Louis be labeled as the single engine plane that well-known isolationist and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic blah blah blah. The Smithsonian should be about facts. Facts about what's on display.
What gets me is the suicide angle of this. When Rudyard Kipling visited Washington, he and the then Undersecretary of the Navy, his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, used to visit the Smithsonian. Let Kipling tell the rest, from his autobiography:
"The Smithsonian, specially on the ethnological side, was a pleasant place to browse in. Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind. This wonder I used to explain to Theodore Roosevelt, who made the glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals."
Of course there are two sides to history, but unless this country walks in a vain show and has confidence in its own past, then it's doomed to a future with Kommissar of Education I. Kendi telling it what it can and cannot say.
Besides, Michelle says museums intimidate black people, so why should they care?
Parks intimidate blacks as well, I suppose. From Yellowstone to the Appalachian Trail.
More and more Blacks on the Appalachian Trail.
Good. They should get more exercise.
I was out in Utah a few years back, doing the national park thing. I saw lots of people but only two of them were black.
I spent some time in Charlevoix MI this week, an up-north summer town on Lake Michigan. It used to be quite lily-white. But now I found black people working in some of the shops.
I was just going to say that what we need is comprehensive presentation, not a balance of opinions.
Ben Franklin did have a few household slaves, but he would eventually become a staunch anti-slavery activist and pamphleteer. Alas, unlike the Pennsylvania Quakers, he did not make the personal sacrifice and manumit the slaves he owned. Any study of American slavery is incomplete that does not mention the Quakers and their willingness to accept often great financial losses in furtherance of their high moral ideals. Not only did they give up without compensation often valuable slave holdings, but many felt an obligation to train their freed slaves in farming or skilled crafts so they could earn a living once freed. See on this Leon Higinbotham, In the Matter of Color.
Worse. There is never any discussion that Massachusetts freed all slaves before any place in the world when it did so on July 8, 1783 -- and Massachusetts had similar geography and population to Haiti -- it wasn't a tiny place. There is no discussion about similar early efforts in Vermont, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. There is no discussion that Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. There is no discussion that most of the world still had slavery in 1865 and it took relatively large places like Brazil (1888) the Ottoman Empire (1924) and Saudi Arabia (1962) much longer to fee their slaves. And there is zero discussion about the utter brutality of the Arab slave trade and that the vast majority of slaves taken by Europeans to the Americans were taken by the Spanish and Portuguese -- very few White people consider themselves to be Hispanic.
For some reason (probably the fact that Communism basically won the long game in the United States) instead of the truth, evil lies like the 1619 project and genocidal rhetoric like eliminating Whiteness is popular and goes unpunished even though it is clearly both fraud and theft from people -- and most of those people like Trump, DeSantis, Reagan & JFK don't have ancestors who owned slaves -- in contrast to Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries who all do.
"There is no discussion that Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya."
Black slavery in Libya was reintroduced by the USA, under Israeli orders.
"the vast majority of slaves taken by Europeans to the Americans were taken by the Spanish and Portuguese -- very few White people consider themselves to be Hispanic."
The Spanish and Portuguese are generally considered to be white, surely?
Otherwise, I agree with a lot of what you say. I don't think African slavery in the Americas is placed in the historical context enough.
The Spanish and Portuguese invented the concept of "white."
"under Israeli orders" !?!?!?
lolol
I knew it was all the Jews' fault!
So you don't think US interventions in the Middle East are driven largely by Israeli interests?
No, of course, not. Perhaps influenced by or in consultation with, but driven by? That's overheated hyperbole.
This is the claim I responded to:
"Black slavery in Libya was reintroduced by the USA, under Israeli orders."
This is preposterous and deranged. Also, it removes the agency and responsibility of the actual actors, as if they were forced against their will to sell and acquire slaves. And there is zero proof of this, except for the ridiculous claim that by closing their border Israel somehow "forced" Libyans to become slavers.
You sound like a Jew hater and conspiracy theorist.
BLAME THE JEWS! The Arabs have no moral agency; they are merely the puppets of the Zionists!!!
Vermont didn't abolish slavery. Slavery was prohibited by the initial settlers of the area, which included two black families. It wasn't Vermont though, it was the New Hampshire Grants, and also claimed by New York's royal governor.
The 1619 project is not a pack of evil lies. It is a smattering of accurate articles, a mile wide and an inch deep, telling us nothing new, with a few ribbons of blatant lies tied around it by the initiator. The main lie is that those who started the American Revolution were afraid the British government was going to take away their slaves. On the contrary, both Tories and Whig liberals in Britain were up to their neck in the slave trade, and wanted to sell more.
There would be no 1619 project once you establish the fact that Massachusetts freed all slaves and abolished slavery in 1783 which was 54 years before Great Britain abolished slavery.
That would be irrelevant to the premise of the 1619 project, by about 164 years. I know Hannah-Jones puts great stock in Britain's abolitionist bona fides, which were indeed late in the game, and in their own way as hypocritical as Thomas Jefferson's. But 1619 was a long time before Massachusetts abolished slavery. That didn't happen in one fell stroke. There were court cases in individual suits, but those didn't instantly free everyone. It would be reasonable to say that by 1790 slavery was pretty much gone from Massachusetts -- but if someone came up with an exception to that, I wouldn't be surprised.
The default position of the world in 1619 was slavery. The United States via Massachusetts on July 8, 1783, changed that default position as every slave was freed on that date and slavery was outlawed (Vermont -- and much smaller place in population -- passed legislation outlawing slavery in 1777 -- but there were still slaves in Vermont in 1783).
The next place in the world that freed slaves was Haiti ending slavery in 1804 -- but the freed slaves had terrible conditions and the manner of ending slavery was extremely unnecessarily brutal.
So, the 1619 project is a total fraud. When one discusses slavery in the year 1619., one would note that slavery existed everywhere.
When one notes Black African slavery in 2025, one would note that it still goes on in Mauritania and Libya.
In short, any attack on the foundation of this country somehow tying it to slavery is an intentional total lie. It isn't a half-truth, it is a vicious lie.
You inadvertently pointed out another common lie about Thomas Jefferson (though indirectly).
Sally Hemings had children who were related to Thomas Jefferson's uncle Peter Jefferson. Due to that situation, it is taught as a fact that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children when that prospect is neither proven but would be highly unlikely given the other local Jefferson family members.
Thomas Jefferson was 55 when Hemings first child was born. The likelihood that a 55 year old (up to 65 year old) in that era was fertile and capable and desirous of frequent sex when he is in a position of power is very low.
Jefferson's brother Randolph Jefferson was only 43 when the first child was born. He had a reputation of recklessness and he openly socialized with slaves which Thomas did not. It is also possible that one of Randolph's sons fathered children with Sally Hemings. In short, there were over a dozen local Jefferson men who could have fathered the children.
Yet, this unproven unlikely speculative point about Thomas is taught as gospel -- mainly to damage the founding of this country. Furthermore, Jefferson is criticized for not freeing all of his slaves when the law made it difficult for him to do so -- that is due to his debts Virginia law did not simply allow him to free slaves.
The 1619 project is a total fraud. There is no truth to any of it. Out of contexts factual points do not make a truth.
Slavery was abolished in Pensylvania in 1780.
Kinda sorta. It was a very slow, gradual process, often involving 28 years of servitude before emancipation. There were many slaves held in Pennsylvania for a couple of decades after 1800. (Similarly, the last slave who remained in that condition for life in Connecticut died in 1848).
The same is true of New York and New Jersey.
In New York things collapsed by about 1809. The writing was on the wall, and a lot of people owning title to slaves cut deals for emancipation in three to five years, in exchange for good work up until then.
The first place to outlaw slavery and immediately free all slaves (on the planet) was Massachusetts on July 8, 1783.
Maybe, if you consider that Vermont never allowed slavery in the first place so it had none to free.
Nor is this history complete without recognizing that for much of the 17th and 18th century, many Quakers did own slaves. Paul Robeson's mother is descended from Cyrus Bustill, whose Quaker master begat him on his mother, who was said Quaker's chattel property. He wasn't an exception. Quakers did great work on the Underground Railroad, but on the whole they were late-comers. John Woolman had to remonstrate with his master (that is, his employer for wage labor on an annual contract) about writing a contract for sale of slaves. Woolman also wrote in his diary "My master bought some Scotch servants and brought them to Mt. Holly to sell."
Hmm, if Franklin needed slaves to become a tinkerer how did Thomas Edison manage in the years after the Civil War?
The Wobblies didn't call it wage slavery for nothing.
Workers should be treated justly of course, but work is not slavery. Quoth Voltaire: "Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” I happen to agree with this.
So did the Wobblies. Their songs deride capitalists in language amazingly similar to 1970s politicians railing about welfare queens. Work is not slavery -- slavery is about how work and workers are controlled and compensated.
Trump, with deeply Luddite leanings, wants things his own way, or rather how he imagines Things Used To Be.
Meanwhile on X today, respectable moderate conservative types like David harsanyi and Phil magnets are calling you out as a far right racist for writing about Camp of the Saints, in response to your latest free press feature on the radical right. And they think you’re a radical for opposing what’s happening in England.
https://x.com/PhilWMagness/status/1958251451488329912
Maybe we should all just embrace the Bible, proclaim the colorblind word of God, and stop helping secular lefties like bari Weiss gatekeep everything
They must be clueless idiots who refuse to notice what is happening in England and the rest of Europe.
Phil Magness has done good work in being among the first to take a wrecking ball to some aspects of the 1619 Project. If he really was calling out Rod for what you said (which, by the way, the tweet you linked to doesn't really say that) then he's being a blockhead or guilty of reading a few posts or tweets by Rod out of context. Still, Magness is right in calling Camp of the Saints trash.
Camp of the Saints turned out to be very prescient "trash". We are seeing it played out in Europe IRL as we speak. Except that IIRC the migrant convoy in COTS only involved a million or so refugees....
Turgid but a great novel.
"The 1619 Project view of the Pilgrimage would have required us to understand that time period as about nothing other than the enslavement of black people."
Ding ding ding we have a winner!
To the leftists, not "centering" slavery in any discussion of American or regional American history is to legitimize slavery, to betray racism. Thus, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, all that came before the Civil War - slavery and racism is the main story of that entire time.
No.
It was an undeniable aspect of that history, a profound influence on that history, part of the broader cloth. But it is not the entirety of the cloth.
But woke exhibits are only partially about rewriting history. They're also about controlling the present and future by trying to shame those who, frankly, had nothing to do with slavery.
The left wants to make my teenaged white children somehow culpable for slavery, somehow morally responsible. Because if they are morally responsible, then certainly they must genuflect before the (descendants of) the victims of slavery. They must compensate those (descendants of) victims; they must grovel before them.
Again: No.
So the left doesn't "get" it not just because they always assume themselves to be on the "right side of history," but because the narrative reinforces their power. It's not about portraying slavery in a manner that's historically accurate - it's about portraying slavery in a manner that allows the left to use the issue as a club, a trump card, now and forever.
White liberals have a proprietary interest in black pain and suffering, whether past or present. They see it as a moral credential (they care about black people more than white conservatives do) and they use it as a political cudgel and a way to morally browbeat their political opponents. It is a manipulative weaponization of guilt and shame, designed to help them feel virtuous and superior to those OTHER whites. This also explains their unhinged hatred for black people who don't play the victim role, like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. So much of modern liberalism is rooted in white guilt and white saviorism. They will nurture and save black people—whether they like it or not!
I'd endorse this a hundred percent if you'd let me add that not only white liberals but what used to be called the civil rights establishment has a proprietary interest in black pain and suffering.
Any political activist group, whether of Left or Right, has an interest in perpetuating the woes they oppose so as to stay in business-- and if necessary, they will find a new Cause should the old one be resolved.
Its an intellectual variation on Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. Not an exact analogy, analogies are never exact, but pretty close.
Exactly. And they hate America. They have to constantly talk about it to destroy social trust and use that to increase their own power. When social trust goes away then things get more chaotic and violent. People will want a powerful government to protect them and that benefits the Left.
It is much worse than you wrote. The United States was actually the first place in the world to outlaw and free slaves -- See Massachusetts July 8, 1783 (not taught). Very few White people and White ethnic groups owned slaves (not taught). Black Africans in 2025 are still enslaved in Libya and Mauritania (not taught). Well after our Civil War slavery was still practiced in most of the world (not taught). Slaves were freed in Brazil in 1888, the Ottoman Empire 1924, Ethiopia 1944, Saudi Arabia 1962 (not taught). Politicians whose ancestors were slaveholders include Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker & Hakeem Jeffries versus politicians whose ancestors were not slaveholders include Trump, DeSantis, Reagan & JFK (not taught). And, maybe even the most disgusting thing, the Arab slave trade and treatment of Black Africans is not taught. Thus, we are a society where a light skinned Estonian American might be beaten half to death for the behavior of Portuguese and Arab slave traders who share no DNA connection with the unfortunately White victim of racial violence.
Great Britain was the dominant power in the slave trade at the time the war of independence began, and the revolution made slavery controversial for the first time in history.
https://www.1776inlivingcolor.org/posts/great-britain-was-the-dominant-power-in-the-slave-trade
There were abolitionist societies among the aristocrats in France at the time.
The Amis de Noirs. But nobody paid attention to them. You continually seek to have history in neat little boxes, whereas in fact it flows, and there are preponderances, not 100 percent transformations. There was a Quaker society in London that passed a resolution against "the crime of man-stealing" around 1660, but, it had no impact on the propensity of Quakers in America to purchase and own slaves. What the American Revolution did was to make slavery and abolition serious political controversies. The French Revolution caught up in 1794 when the National Assembly banned slavery in all French possessions -- after which Toussaint Louverture made common cause with French military authorities and turned on the Spanish, then the British, eventually becoming commander in chief of all forces of the Republican in St. Domingue. The first time William Wilberforce introduced a measure to abolish the slave trade in parliament was in the mid-1780s, and it got all of 16 votes, because both Tories and Whigs either had investments in the Indies, or in shipping companies, or represented port cities substantially dependent on the slave trade.
Re: But nobody paid attention to them.
They were among the highest nobility at Versailles. During the Revolution slavery was abolished, though that had no effect in the colonies outside France and Napoleon later restored it.
All movements begin small and then grow larger. Antislavery sentiment in the UK and its colonies was once a rather avant garde matter too.
Boy are you confused. When the republic (not the monarchy) got around to abolished slavery, it applied ONLY in the colonies, because that is where slaves were being shipped. There was little use for them in France. A handful of nobility can be, and were, easily ignored by those actually making policy and collecting bribes from profitable merchants.
Re: Very few White people and White ethnic groups owned slaves (not taught).
Define "few". In 1860 about one third of the white population belonged to slave-holding families-- a minority yes, but not an insignificant one.
That sounds unlikely for the country as a whole . That might be true of the South and border states .
Yes I meant the South. Sorry I did not make that explicitly clear
When I thought about it, I figured that’s what you meant.
So, a punishment should exist to a current White person whose ancestors were from Eastern Europe for the actions of a minority of the Southern Population of the United States in the era of the 1850s because they "look bad"?
Another WTF the moment. Where did I say anything about any sort of punishment for anyone?
Argue with me if you like, but drop the strawman crap. Among the online behaviors I loathe is the putting of words into my mouths that I never said.
It's not just that, it's the fact that anti-black racism was used to keep poorer non-slaveholding whites in line. After all, if blacks were inferior, those poor whites would always have someone to look down on.
It's not that museums/the Smithsonian teach the reality of slavery and racism. It's when they imply that it's the whole cloth - that there can be no positive achievements in American history because slavery and racism poisoned everything.
While teaching all the horrors of slavery, and its inherent contradiction to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, plus the fact that it became much worse after 1800, any honest account would also teach that the American Revolution made slavery controversial on a large political scale for the first time in human history. It was the revolution that gave rise to states prohibiting slavery, inspired the manumission of tens of thousands, greatly increasing the "free colored" population, and created a serious question that could only be answered by either abolishing slavery, or doubling down on the claim that "they're not really people."
When they teach the "horrors of slavery" they omit the Arab slave trade and omit the fact that Massachusetts freed slaves before any place on the world. They also omit the fact that Black Africans are still enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. So, the "horrors of slavery" is used to attack the United States' foundation and White people as a racial group.
There were some unique features. Slavery has been endemic to human history, so selling slaves to trans-Atlantic merchant ships was just a standard business practice, not a vast conspiracy to invent a new practice. Slavery in North America became much worse after about 1800. First, those who wanted to keep slave under the banner "all men are created equal" had to double down on, distill, amplify, the tacit assumption that dark skinned people were naturally meant to be slaves. After Gabriel's Rebellion, a slew of new laws prohibited voluntary emancipation, teaching slaves to read and write, etc. (A literate slave became a considerable liability once newspapers were full of rhetoric about universal liberty).
Distribution is also important. A small number owned the majority of slaves, in concentrations of 50-300 or so. Most of that one third you reference owned one or three or five, and their conditions of life could be reasonable good to absolutely terrible depending on who held title. (Small holders can be mean, miserly, nasty, and avaricious too.) George Washington Carver's mother was the only slave owned by a family in Missouri. She and her infant son were stolen (you can steal a slave just like you can steal cattle or horses). The family managed to recover him, not her, and raised him. But that too was atypical. Your figure of one third sounds a bit high -- what is your source for that? I assume you must mean one third of "white" families in states permitting slavery, since the non-slave-state "white" population was much larger and would have dwarfed that fraction.
When I say "family" I mean exactly that-- I am not referencing the number of individuals who held legal title to a slave (that would be about 10%). But if your father, grandfather or brother owned slave(s)* you would definitely have a vested interest in the peculiar institution and your politics would usually be aligned accordingly.
* Women could be slave owners too, as Martha Washington was.
Your are 100% right. If your grandparent commits a crime, you should feel the punishment.
You are apparently either lacking competency in the English language, or you are intoxicated on something as you are arguing about things I never said or implied.
Stop it. Now.
You still haven't provided a source for the fraction one third. What you have provided is an rationalization for how it might be a reasonable figure.
Right -- I consider your point to be completely racist.
First, all White people aren't the same. That is a point you completely missed. That is, in 1860, zero percent of White Quaker families in Pennsylvania and White Famine Catholic Irish in Massachusetts owned slaves in 1860.
Second, if you want to broadly use "family" ownership of slaves, that would make about 12% of Black families owning slaves and about 20% of American Indians families owning slaves.
Third, we typically, in a non-communist society, don't have family guilt or accolades for the behavior of a relative. If your father has a child, he pays child support or is entitled to custody, not you. If you father buys an expensive sports car, that is not your car. If your father is a member of an exclusive club, you do not get to enjoy the benefits of his expensive and exclusive membership because he is your relative. If your father commits a crime, you do not go to jail.
I understand your North Korean-type view. I find it horrifying.
So, no matter how you slice it, a small minority of White people, Black people, and American Indians owned slaves. Some White groups who live here today had virtually no people in the US in 1860 from some ethnicities, so many White ethnic groups have a lower percentage of Black slave ownership than Black Americans and US American Indians.
I direct your attention to the Solzhenitsyn poem Prussian nights which depicts a brutal rape to death of a Polish girl by Soviet Troops for looking German. I direct your further attention to the Khmer Rouge deciding that people who wore glasses were oppressors deserving of death. I direct your attention to Tiffany Cross' comparing Mike McDaniel to a slave owner, based on his appearance, as a matter of justifying him being compared to a slave master in his decision making concerning his quarterback Tua.
Re: I consider your point to be completely racist.
Fort that I nominate you for the WTF of the year.
Ave atque vale.
You exaggerated White slave ownership and classified all Whites as the same. That is textbook racism.
WTF the indeed. I did nothing of the sort. I did not post about "Ownership" at all until someone else wanted to go deeper into the stats, and in no way whatsoever did I classify all white people as anything at all. Where are you getting this? Am I addressing a poorly vetted AI bot? Someone with a substance abuse problem? A person with fading cognitive ability? A troll intent on disrupting this blog?
I didn't take your statement to be racist, but he did provide some useful reference points which have some bearing on your original claim.
The Smithsonian kerfuffle reminds me of the Desantis "Don't Say Gay" kerfuffle of a few years ago, when Gov Ron decided he wanted to remove Gender Theory from public schools.
Every liberal I know shrieked in unison about what an evil bigot DeSantis was and how Trans children would die (!) unless they felt "represented" in school and every angry rant ended with the same crescendo: Why do Republicans CARE SO MUCH about Trans children!??
Luckily I go back a long way with my friends and thus could tell them: We were taught Gender Theory in college decades ago, the Gender Studies political program (the erasure of the mammalian sex binary as it's an oppressive social construct) has been clearly stated and is certainly no sort of conservative/right wing concoction; and also, What did you people think when you started campaigning for child sex changes and drag queens in school libraries? It never crossed your mind that some people/parents would object!? (Of course this changed no one's mind, but it at least shut them up.)
I think the root of these issues (Progs instituting a radical program then being shocked and appalled when people disagree) is that politics has replaced religion for many liberals (and for ALL Leftists) and thus they are incapable of rationally discussing anything having to do with one of their sacred victim groups and their sacred narrative—an Oppressed Other walking a Via Dolorosa, brutalized and stigmatized by bigots, who now need to be centered and rewarded (the last shall be first), who all good people know to worship and atone toward (more or less).
This is why liberals get very tense and angry when any of their sacred narratives are challenged—it reeks too much of blasphemy to them. Also, liberals consider themselves a community of the morally Elect (is tres Puritan), so there is no chance of compromising here and no chance of them being open to alternative perspectives. NPR is Mass for gentry liberals, and no one challenges sacred dogma or invites heretics up onto the altar during Mass.
They’re asking for a Thirty Years’ War.
They’re getting one. We’ve been in a bloodless civil war since we elected Trump in 2016.
A Thirty Wars with nuclear warheads will be the death of us all. Just say No.
More like Northern Ireland, if kinetic at all, but so far everything’s metaphorical. More likely, a series of legal, advertising and funding struggles. Strategic forces like nuclear weapons are utterly irrelevant in such situations. 1970s thinking.
The point is the demonization going on and the resulting carelessness about the welfare of one’s neighbors of a different tribe.
If you think it's guaranteed that the nukes will always sleep in their silos, well, you may be very surprised someday.
My Thirty Years’ War comparison, or perhaps (I hope) metaphor, is to the belief structures that have locked the minds of the participants in the struggle.
No, I do not expect to see the Battle of the White Mountain. Yes, I expect to see sharp use of the legal system, ongoing hatred and mistrust, occasional localized or terroristic violence of the late-60s Weather Underground style, if any.
Talk of nuclear war in this context is idle. We aren’t talking about nation states or the proto-versions of such entities as we saw in the 17th century. What we DO see are fundamental differences in thinking and belief.
Religious pluralism is probably a vain hope. The problem is that religions are only recognized as such once they’re no longer growing , active faiths.
I do acknowledge a nonzero chance of nuclear war, at all times. But not over internecine cultural matters.
Yes, yes, yes. The zealotry and evangelizing of the sacred tenets our progressive moral superiors hold while simultaneously rejecting anything that remotely resembles a difference of opinion remind me of my Dad’s admonition: “Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.”
Yes, Judith Butler has been around for a long time. This stuff was solidifying when I was in graduate school in English literature in the 1980s. Back then, the basic texts of Derrida and Foucault were still being absorbed by graduate students and were not yet part of standard course offerings or even used much in literary theory courses. But the graduate students absorbed them intensely. By 1990, this stuff had entered much of the graduate seminar world and was beginning to make itself known among the more enterprising undergraduates. The 1990s were the decade in which the social sciences and the legal education system picked it up.
The press finally heard about it by around 2010 or so.
I was a Lit major in the 80s at a snooty liberal arts college and by my last year (1990) the course listings were starting to show things like "Deconstruction" and of course applying the "Marxist lens". I took one look at these texts and it felt like I'd bought a nice TV, brought it home, then threw it in the garbage while devoting hours of study to the instruction manual. Why would anyone read this dreary theory when there was the rich buffet of literature to experience and enjoy!? At the time I just ignored it as more pretentious crap and had no clue that it would one day conquer the world.
I was in graduate school in the ‘90s when I first ran across critical theory, which was included as part of my required coursework. Ignoramus that I was, I thought it was merely a collection of fringe ideas that had no place in the real world, one more thing to debate in the classroom and that was that. I wish I had known better. Pretentious crap indeed.
I feel so blessed that I was able to get a great education and begin a lieflong love of Lit before the political parasites gnawed through the Humanities. I think at the root of it is the anxiety feel about reading and discussing complex works, it's hard to say anything interesting and original, and much easier to say something stupid. People seem to often get uncomfortable encountering art, which is why it's easier to attach political handles and debate "politics" instead of things like language, style, story. This also gives you more opportunites to socially signal and to pursue agendas for career advancement. The Crit Theory takeover of art is when profs and "theorists" replaced art and artists as the central focus of culture. I think of it as a palace coup led by eunuchs.
Very true. I’m 63 now and feel that I’ve only just begun to understand the actual literary works I’ve been reading. If at all.
I'm 56 and constantly amazed at how different works affect me differently depending upon my age and life, ie. things I loved when younger I no longer do and vice versa.
This thread makes me feel like I've come home -- intellectually, at least.
I'm just between CP and CTW in age, and had a very similar experience in higher ed -- undergrad English major, then graduate study in religion -- spanning the mid-to-late 80s.
My undergrad SLC's English department was -- consciously or unconsciously, I never really knew -- extremely wise in essentially banning the use of secondary literature until majors reached just a few upper-level classes. So I had years reading primary texts only, for which I'm still grateful.
Things were different at my Big 10 grad program, though. I soon became accustomed to the glazed eyes and slack jaws of my intellectually-enslaved peers (and professors) as they bowed before the theorist du jour. I remember at one point a fairly remote star in the Pomo firmament deigned to shed the light of her subaltern presence upon my department (it was Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, IIRC). My peers quivered with anticipation and excitement. Her talk was forgettable -- at least I've forgotten it entirely.
Anyway, thanks for the many excellent posts in this thread.
You're welcome!
Spivak! lolol
"Can the Subaltern Ever Shut Up?"
"All theory, my dear boy, is gray,
And green the golden tree of life."
Goethe, Faust Part 1
You see that in other humanities such as history among others. In a country like the U.S., which is still a young country compared to much of the rest of the world, the major events have all been discussed. So unless someone can unearth new information that dramatically changes the way those topics are viewed, then you have to play language games and embrace radical theories to have something to talk about.
The worst part about all of the "postmodern" and critical theory stuff isn't that we were exposed to it, it's that it was simply passed on as truth. My PhD work was in education (at a state university), and I was in a class of 12 people, 9 of whom shouldn't have been in a master's program, much less a research PhD.
They learned enough critical theory to be able to parrot the language without any real understanding of it (a sweet lady, actually pretty traditional personally, described herself as a "post-structural feminist"; when I asked her to define that for me, should could not, beyond more jargon), and they drank deeply from the font without any critique at all.
I think all of them graduated with PhDs (with dissertations such as "Latinx experience on the path to superintendency," etc), and are now school counselors and administrators. And that's what scariest to me. What used to be locked away in obscure graduate programs is now the guiding philosophy of the vast majority of our K-12 public "educators."
Ideology makes people feel smart, safe and provides a sense of belonging. It's much easier than thinking and acting for yourself. Crit Theory is a product that represents the will-to-power of our educated class, once installed they ascend from being mere teachers and become gurus, priests and political commissars. It's sort of a cult combined with a jobs program.
Remember when many cults did sensible things like carpentry and farming? It's kind of unsettling that I feel some nostalgia for those days...
Also, the fact that the media lied and said that there either was no critical theory or it was entirely confined to colleges. Meanwhile, newly minted SJWs emerge from college and go into administration, HR, schools, etc. to contaminate those places with their insane doctrines.
I studied some of it in undergrad and grad school and thought a lot of it, and especially Derrida and Foucault, was utter nonsense. I've never understood the adulation that professors shower on those frauds and their contemporaries.
For anxious ambitious academic types Derrida and Foucault etc are social signifiers and represent Guild jargon, meaning a way for those "in the know" to group together and look down on those not blessed with their radical wisdom. It is utter nonsense dressed up in fancy abstruse jargon, designed for nothing but posing.
It’s because it opened up a whole new world for disciplines like Literature to actually say and do new stuff. Only so many new translations or commentaries you can do on the relatively static literary canon before it seems like everything worth doing and saying has been done before, but when Foucault and Derrida came along it opened up a whole new world of analysis that must have felt like a huge opportunity at the time. Plus it allows you to say a whole lot without saying anything at all, while also sounding super smart.
This is well-observed. The advent of each odious metastasis of 'critical theory' -- deconstruction, feminist theory, postmodernism, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, and on and on -- essentially 'reset' the canon: every novel and poem and play was reopened to 'fresh' analysis from this previously-unscaled critical vantage point. You could make a career of it if you could just get to a major work first, swinging your little critical hammer vigorously to try to knock it down to the base level of your tribe of envious whiners.
Perhaps so. But personally, I don’t see the point in all the commentaries. After a while, if a work has been covered by enough people, it’s time to move on to something else. It’s the same with endless reboots. Your point makes sense. I walked away from Derrida and Foucault, among others, convinced that they had nothing important to say.
By 1990 wasn't "deconstruction" vieux jeu? I dropped out of graduate school in 1976 because I couldn't stand it. Or Harold Bloom's table manners.
By 1990 deconstruction may have been old news at Duke or Yale, but not elsewhere, in my recollection. The virus had only just escaped the lab.
I remember a Yale English professor that I read about in NYT in the 80s who taught deconstruction. I think it was about Milton, and what Milton wrote about Eve was actually the opposite of what he meant about Eve. Or something.
I could a tale unfold that would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood and make thy hair to stand an end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
Ohhhh now I want to know!
Haste me to know ’t, that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge!!
Are you thinking of Stanley Fish, then of Duke?
It was Yale (I lived in a nearby town)
I had had some philosophical background in Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger, which fed into Derrida. Derrida starts with phenomenology, basically. There is some “there” there, in other words, but you’re resoundingly right about the role of that stuff socially in English departments. I was a perpetrator before I reformed.
In retrospect, I think a big difference bw me and my classmates and most of my teachers is that I came from a working-class background, so college was really my first time exposed to the study of serious literature. I was there to be read and learn great works, to grapple w them etc, and then suddenly there was this political invasion where the first purpose of reading became "interrogating texts" and "rectifying historical injustice".
It reeked of pretension and dishonesty, esp when I looked around and saw that most of the devotees of critical readings were rich kids, but then again that might make more sense ;)
Little did I know that a post-Marxist post-Christian faith was in the process of being born that would some day become the official ideology of the Western liberal class. Once you realize professors have replaced priests, it all seems much more clear.
In my 1979-83 undergraduate program, literature was central. No one discussed Derrida or Foucault much then. I’d run across them by accident at the bookstore. But they weren’t part of any coursework or even the conversation among my fellow undergrads. (We had a negligible graduate program at my college). But once I got to grad school the following years, oh boy, if you were into theory, that was where it was. Only time in my life I’ve been part of a “cool” crowd. Soured on it all by 1986, though.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by P. Friere, textbook in my sophomore English lit course at a state university. It wasn’t just graduate courses, or the 7 Sisters, and it began in undergrad courses a long time ago.
Freire.
This sums things up perfectly.
There's a lot of analogies to ideology and religion as you call the sacred narratives of leftists and I think they're apt. I'd offer another analogy: mental illness and specifically being delusional. When you're delusional you don't know that your thinking isn't reality based--by definition. You think your delusional and false view of the world is accurate and cannot see the real world through your mental illness. Getting a delusional person to see reality or to see that they are delusional requires a lot of help, effort, support and even strong medicines (for psychotic delusions like schizophrenics face). I think the left over the past 20+ years has gone deeper and deeper into delusion. They don't see it. They can't see it. Attacking one of the tenants of their delusions (e.g., men can be women; the U.S. was founded in 1619) provokes radical resistance because their distance from reality is so far now that they can't see or imagine the real world. There's no way back excepting some seriously strong medicine.
Our thinking classes have given themselves an ideological lobotomy. There is no hope and no way out for the current batch, any change will have to come from future generations.
“I think the root of these issues (Progs instituting a radical program then being shocked and appalled when people disagree) is that politics has replaced religion for many liberals (and for ALL Leftists) and thus they are incapable of rationally discussing anything having to do with one of their sacred victim groups and their sacred narrative”
Yup. It’s a faith claiming to be the one and only reality, and only heretics and apostates would question the value of its beliefs or try to analyze its claims logically. I, at least, can understand why an atheist or a non-Christian would be skeptical of the virgin birth and the resurrection. I know my beliefs are religious in nature and not something that can be proven by scientific principles and statistics. The woke don’t understand the inherently religious nature of their beliefs, which I think is why they get so extremely threatened by skeptics and dissenters.
Western liberals (of all stripes) are so reflexively dismissive of religion and so convinced that they reside at the apex of human wisdom that they are completely blind to the sacred and all the different ways it can manifest. These are the kind of people who could gather around a statue of George Floyd, kneel in atonement and pray for a world of Equality and Justice—and still imagine themselves as secular individuals who reside on a higher plane than their ancestors.
Ironically this makes them much more susceptible to all the modern televangelists of the Social Justice faith and all sorts of moral entrepreneurs, who know that people can be manipulated by guilt and shame and the desire for higher meaning and purpose.
And yes, this is why "they get so extremely threatened by skeptics and dissenters"—it's hard and uncomfortable for anyone to defend a sacred belief, but even harder when you refuse to admit that's what it is.
Rod is too kind. After 60+ years of dealing with leftists, I've concluded that nearly all of them are morally, spiritually, and intellectually bankrupt, hopeless in other words, and so I've written them off. They perfectly exemplify Nietszche's Will to Power, rather than the Will to Truth. It is a waste of time to read their drivel and listen to their nonsense; reality is much more interesting and important. We have to move on and rebuild society without them, or rather, in spite of them. The interview with Hannah Jones and the bacon incident demonstrate the situation well. Once in a while one of them sees the light, like Naomi Wolf, but only after being cancelled for her position on the Covid vaccine. Jim Kunstler came around a while back, though he was always a classic liberal who actually believed in truth rather than the Will to Power. Trump's critique of the Smithsonian is on target and an excellent first step, as is his criticism of the universities. A lot of damage has been done, and it will take decades to right the ship, I'm afraid. But we must start somewhere.
Most leftists are the furthest thing from Will to Power. At most they are Will to Instant Gratification, followed by Will to Zoloft.
I agree that they like those things, but they want power to force their views on everyone else. Without that forcing, few would accept them. You see that with the LBGT+ business, the gender business, the green energy, etc.
The reason they have influence is that we live in a world where meaning is spread thin. Leftists can convince people because they provide the people with the meaning they are otherwise deprived of.
That’s a smart observation
It's their (secular) religion.
Kinda like Zionism, Vincent.
You and the Jews, Paul. MTG would be proud of you.
They also interpret history through nothing but the lens of power with oppressors and victims all over the place.
Their thinking is basically a socially-accepted conspiracy theory.
Nietzsche himself was more than Will to Power (a book he didn't finish before going nuts). If only Derrida and Foucault had aped his respect for history, the individual and Truth we might have avoided their destruction.
I agree but that's not the fundamental problem with Derrida and Foucault. Their progressive ideology--deconstructionism--suffers from one overarching problem. Jacques Derrida’s famous “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is self-referential and therefore, given its meaning, self-refuting—a fact that seems lost on all of those who profess to believe it. The inability to perceive this disqualfies Derrida and his ilk from any claim to truth.
As Scruton wrote, if someone tells you there is no such thing as truth, then that applies to what he is saying. So don't believe him.
Yes, of course. Somehow the progressives don't want to believe this. They prefer what Zubiri terms "the Will to the truth of ideas", which is belief in one's own ideas about reality rather than proceeding the other way around. We see this in their desire to make reality conform to their pet theories about it.
Well, that's pragmatism, which is just utilitarianism on steroids. As an undergraduate I was put off by a philosophy professor whom I adored who actually employed the phrase "truth value". That's giving it away pretty quick, don't you think?
It's worse than pragmatism. Pragmatism at least believes that what works is true. The left's ideas don't even work, so they're a couple of rungs below Bentham. I agree that "truth value" is a red flag.
Oh whee.
OMG I'm trapped in a white man's body! At least that's what I thought after I read the "White Culture" poster. It's not all wrong, but it's not all right either. I does sound an awful lot like...ummm...you know who's behind all this. In total it's inconsistent with Jesus' teachings so I would like to be considered separately. Experience tells me that's unlikely, it's a direct lesson in sinners saluting sinners. It's predicated upon a dual-split mind, which I have, fortunately, completely lost. I shall pray for their redemption.
Looks like you had a good time in LA.
Ain't nobody white except lepers and albinos.
Good heavens, the author only had an hour before his flight? Musta been delayed some more.
My mom grew up in Flint, Michigan during the Great Depression. Her family was so poor they didn’t even have a bathroom in the house. Because she was the youngest of four girls, my mom’s “bedroom” was the living room couch. Because her dad worked the early shift at the GM plant, the first thing my mom saw every morning when she woke up was her dad, sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading his Bible. My mom also had a cousin that got drunk and robbed a bank. Which story do you think I tell my kids? Culture is created through the stories we tell about ourselves.
I actually happen to think that Molly Jong Fast is mostly correct. The Democrats do need to take a genuinely populist turn, because that’s what the country wants. I personally still believe that if they’d nominated Bernie instead of Hillary in 2016, they would have won.
Mamdani and AOC are/were defined by running against deeply establishment figures. AOC even briefly tried, with the rest of the squad, to become a left-wing version of the Freedom Caucus before Pelosi (the alpha female to end all alpha females) put them in their places like Cesar Millan.
In this respect it isn’t the dingbat campus “socialism” these figures embrace that’s important; rather, it’s the willingness to transgress the bounds of establishment orthodoxy and offer genuine and sometimes radical critiques of the status quo, and policy prescriptions to go with them, that go beyond the establishment’s fake boundaries. The country has been, is, and will for the foreseeable future remain in a very anti-establishment mood. If you’re running for office in a contested election and hope to win, you have to take that into account or you’re probably going to lose.
None of this is an endorsement of Mamdani’s policy proposals, or AOC’s. It’s an endorsement of their style and approach to politics. The Democrats should run anti-establishment populists everywhere they can (with their populist critiques appropriate to where they’re running, so making room for Dan Osborns and Sherrod Browns in red states, for example). They won’t do this, because if it was too successful the party establishment would be in danger of losing control of their own party, but that’s what would actually cure the Democratic malaise and make them competitive again.
The problem is that many of their views aren't anti-establishment anymore but the norm now. For example, many of the culture views the Left expounds are accepted by the society at large so those are anti-establishment. The problem is that both parties will nominate someone that talks a good talk and then inevitably sells out to the rich.
It's hard to fault the young for their zeal for trust fund socialist Mamdani. They're in debt, will never own a home, and are stuck in dead-end jobs (if they're working at all). Suddenly, socialism, with its promise of free groceries and healthcare, seems like a good thing.
Agreed. As I said in a reply to a different comment, socialism continues to find adherents who resonate with its class based message. It is true that the rich have too much power and wealth. The solution I believe in is one part charity and one part that the rich need to pay higher taxes. If they don't do these things, then class resentment grows. The problems with socialism is that it contradicts basic human nature and that those in charge will use it to further their own power.
As I repeat like a parrot, they had a chance for at least centrist populism with Jim Webb in 2016, but they ostracized him from the field of candidates and Trump got in.
So sorry…before I wrote my response I should have done a “land acknowledgment”. I was in my house and it sits on what used to be the Crazy Bear tribe’s land. They lived in peace of course. They never fought other tribes, took slaves, or did anything bad. Just living off the land and asking all the animals first if they could hunt them. Okay glad that’s out of the way.
"asking all the animals first if they could hunt them"....I need to use this come autumn.
I like how in Denmark the local zoo in Copenhagen is asking people to donate their unwanted pets to feed the captive predators.
I’m surprised PETA hasn’t totally lost their s**t over this & demanded the predator animals become vegan.
Every square inch of land on the face of the earth is stolen land -- most of it several times over. The area of Wisconsin and Minnesota the Ojibwa occupied is land they chased the Lakota out of after getting guns from French fur traders. The Lakota went west, and displaced the Shoshone from the Powder River Country.
"Conquered" is a more accurate word than "stolen" in this sense.
Seems like a distinction without a difference. If the conquerors do not displace the conquered, but merely settled down as the new overlords to enjoy the taxes and tithes, then there would be a distinction.
You're right that the land is stolen, which makes it a usable word, but there is a distinction, in that "conquered" is a more specific term which describes a specific human behavior. For example, one can rob people of money, jewelry, possessions, etc, but it would make no sense to call it "conquered money;" it's "stolen money." When the word conquered is used, a precise, historically common activity is being described.
And when people are making a fuss about "stolen land," its more effective to answer them in the language they employed.
Rod what i continue to value is your spot on postings. i laud your praises to friends and family but sadly find most want to continue to live in their bubble. you are role model as well. having come through the fire, you major in credibility, are fair, honest, no less, in spite of your vulnerability. I admire and value you for those reasons as a human and as a writer.
How kind. Thank you!
Rod, the historian and Islam scholar/critic Raymond Ibrahim posted a short (10 min.) video last December on the slavery question in direct response to Rep. Jasmine Crockett's comments promoting DEI as being necessary to redress white slave trade of blacks from Africa. It covers a lot of historical background and is very level-headed: https://youtu.be/0pJwL0Gt7JQ?si=UP4KnhXb27APdnzF
Raymond Ibrahim is a lightweight historian. He treats medieval sources as the equivalent of newspaper (dateline - the Battle of Bouvines) reports.
Too bad the Pilgramage was canceled. I do think you and your niece were wrong. Instead of making a public issue, that was a case that should have been handled with more tact and care. Leadership should have been approached privately. Local black churches should have been involved. Aspects about black culture could have been brought in, making it truly inclusive.
Making a public issue was a classic "unintended consequences of good intentions" that liberals are famoud for doing.
Not sure whether I’d have gone about dealing with this mess exactly as you suggest, but this is on the mark. I don’t applaud niece Hannah for heading efforts to hold the Pilgrimage hostage to her ‘change or die’ activism. There’s been much damage done by young people, and not-so-young people, who destroy local traditions without wisdom or guidance from those who should’ve spoken firmly- and then said, “no, I don’t ‘support’ you,” when necessary.
"How far can these idiots push people before they’ve had enough?"
The problem, of course, is just stating, "We've had enough" will not stop them. I see no path other than violence that will stop them. Do we have the will? Not yet.
This is unfortunately the answer. I don't know when, but sometime in the near future, the end will be reached and issues will be settled with violence once social trust has declined so far.
That's what we should be trying to circumvent. In Britain they're not so lucky.
NPR focusing on journalistic integrity and actually questioning the left wing narrative? I'm not surprised at all they didn't do that and instead interviewed that fraud Nikole Hannah-Jones. All of the culture war issues of the past several decades involves the Left changing something to appease their activists and then people on the right and some independents complaining and wanting it to go back to the way things were. With Trump's win in 2024, left wing ideas are finally receiving some pushback and it can't come soon enough. While slavery should be discussed, I agree with Trump that there isn't enough positivity. When he was younger, that's how things work. Culture largely focused on the fact that America was a great country but imperfect. This creates a higher trust society since people will always be more willing to fight for a country they believe is good. While we should be allowed to criticize, too much today focuses only on the negative.
It is important that any museum depicting slavery actually tell the full truth -- as uncomfortable as it is now. So, if you discuss slavery you really ought to point out that Massachusetts was the first place on the planet that both made slavery illegal and immediately freed slaves when it did so on July 8, 1783. This is probably taught in exactly zero schools outside of Massachusetts (which still celebrates emancipation day).
You also need to point out that Black Africans are still in 2025 enslaved in Mauritania and Libya. You need to point out that aside from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Pennsylvania began freeing slaves way before the rest of the world.
You also need to contrast the slave trade in the United States which was tame compared to the brutal Arab slave trade. You need to point out that the Civil War ended in the US in 1865, but slavery at that point still existed in most of the world and note that Brazil ended it in 1888, the Ottoman Empire in 1924, Ethiopia in 1944 and Saudi Arabia in 1962.
You need to point out that very few White Americans owned slaves -- and the uncomfortable fact is that Black Americans and American Indians also owned Black slaves.
You also need to point out that very few White ethnic groups owned slaves in the United States. That is probably 95% of all White slaveholders were British Protestant, French, or Dutch. There were probably nearly zero Estonian, Romanian, Serb, Sorb, Slovakian etc etc slave holders since we had virtually zero people of those ethnicities in the USA in 1865.
You would also have to point out that people who "look good" (like Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, & Hakeem Jeffries) frequently have ancestors who owned Black slaves or were Confederate Soldiers (or both). And people who "look bad", like Trump, JFK, DeSantis & Reagan have no Confederate Solider Ancestors or ancestors who owned Black slaves.
In essence, the slavery narrative has been weaponized against the foundation of this country (and is completely unsupported by any historical evidence) and is weaponized against random people in today's America who "look bad" because they look White.
It should have been a wakeup call that this extremist hate ensnared Coach Mike McDaniel twice.
First, McDaniel replaced a darker coach of the Dolphins Brian Flores. This was chalked up to anti-black racism even though Flores has no ancestors who were slaves in America, were subject to the one drop rule, or subjected to Jim Crow and McDaniel is descended from Black American slaves (though he has comparatively light skin).
Then, again, McDaniel was compared to a slave master by a reporter named Tiffany Cross regarding his decisions concerning quarterback Tua's playing decisions. The problem was Tua was a Samoan and had zero ancestors who were enslaved and brought to the United States and who were subjected to Jim Crow.
So, visceral hate based on appearance unfounded on any history is the majority cultural position found in most of our museums, educational institutions, governmental organizations, big business, media and the entertainment industry.
This is really no different than the Khmer Rouge supporting the murder of those who wore glasses as oppressors despite the obvious point that someone might have been wearing glasses because (1) they were a servant, (2) a relief organization or Lions Club international organization might have given the glasses to a poor needy person, (3) the glasses could have been found in the dump or handed down.
The lies about the United States and the visceral hate of people and willingness to lie about people's ancestors needs to stop before further violence, theft, and hatred occurs.
OK, but you want to know the full full truth? The West is the only society in human history to establish a polity without slavery. Slavery is the default position of humanity, as we're about to find out.
100%
There's no reason for slavery at all in the age of robotics-- the machines are our slaves. (Of course if Frank Herbert was a prophet not just a scifi writer then we eventually become theirs)
Slavery was banned in the old Northwest Territories (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin) in 1787, by act of Congress. A pity Congress didn't (maybe couldn't) ban slavery in all territories. Restricting it to the East Coast states would have prevented the Civil War and hastened it total abolition.