In response to the the Duke Women’s (apologies, to any non-binary members) Volleyball faux racism incident at BYU and this substack piece highlighting media response to it a few thoughts:
As the piece notes, the major media first takes were rife with reminders of America’s “ineradicable stain” and the “lack of progress” made in eradicating it. Unmentioned in these accounts was the curious fact that all participants in the story were privileged (possibly ultra-privileged) BIPOC people, from the Duke player to her politician godmother in Texas who publicized the story on social media to her father, a top level DC bureaucrat at ATF, not to mention the politicians, celebrities and media who picked up and amplified the story.
This is life in the Republic of Fear, in which those who disagree are becoming the underground in an occupied country. In this republic, the stated purpose of the administrative power of government and all of our institutions is to create a “safe atmosphere” for racial, sexual and gender minorities and in doing so continue to eradicate the ineradicable (or as the CRT crowd would have it “do the work” that can never really be completed). The mission to create safe social spaces (eliminate fear) in the name of anti-racism has become the single largest force driving racist behavior in our social life today. Racist in the inversion of MLK’s famous dictum, judging people by the color of their skin (and now gender) instead of the content of their character. The cast of characters in this story exemplifies this behavior perfectly:
The governor of Utah played his part in calling out “racist a-holes” thereby establishing his bona fides as an anti-racist ally racist asshole (ARARA) and the aforementioned participants played theirs as Oppressed BIPOC/LGBTQ+ racist assholes (for brevity, ORAs).
The Republic of Fear operates by mobilizing fear, hate and punishment all of which were on display in this incident. The faux fear of the ORAs was used to marshal the hatred of other ORAs (e.g., Lebron James) and ARARAs such as the governor and media figures who opined at almost operatic levels of bathos and stagecraft. Hatred generated punishment in the form of cancelled games, banished fans and repeated calls to do more.
The problem with the never-ending quest to eradicate the ineradicable – besides the oxymoronic futility of the project – is that it has become a perpetual motion machine producing a social dynamic that will never end until the people who control the levers of power in society change their ideology or are changed. The fear and hate engendered by this dynamic drive so much of contemporary social life – HR policies, government regulations, social interactions – that they are virtually inescapable. Even when events such as the Duke-BYU volleyball racial slur incident are exposed as false, the work goes on, as witnessed by the NY Times follow-up described in the substack (it ends stating that BYU is only 1% minority). The work must continue, the Fear, Hate and Punishment (FHP) must be maintained, like the CO2 level in a greenhouse, until the next incident can be manufactured. Lives, social credit, political power and lots of money, are at stake.
The current campaign is comparable to other open-ended quests, some admirable, some less so, that were fused with a political class will to power, such as Reconstruction post Civil War, anticommunism in the Cold War period, or the later Wars on Poverty and Drugs. Today’s anti-Violent Domestic Extremist (VDE) campaign of the Political Class and Biden Administration in some ways mirrors the 1950s McCarthy period. The problem in the case of anti-racism and anti-domestic extremism is on the supply side. The actual incidence and number of targeted transgressors is so small as to require manufacture of faux incidents and violators such as the BYU case.
More ominously, as is now being reported based on internal whistleblower accounts, the FBI has marshalled a massive effort since the beginning of the Biden administration to inflate the number of DVE cases it is following by establishing quotas for such cases, reclassifying other types of investigations, and secretly working with Facebook to obtain “anti-government or anti-authority” posts (Facebook spied on private messages of Americans who questioned 2020 election (nypost.com)
In concert, the Federal police and surveillance authority has recently been raiding and harassing Trump and Trump-aligned political actors. There is growing evidence of the FBI creating VDE incidents such as the 2020 Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping case. The central event of the entire VDE narrative, January 6, 2021, is shrouded in a non-stop gaslighting by the regime in an attempt to do two things: promote Fear, Hate and Punishment AND cover up any involvement by the administrative state in instigating or inflaming the events.
The question never posed to the regime is the one often asked during the Iraq war by critics of then President Bush: what’s the “exit strategy”? As we saw, there wasn’t one and that is a tell: when a quest or campaign is waged to maintain political, social and economic power, it can never end, at least not by consent of those conducting and benefiting from it. A means for “unplugging” the perpetual motion machine must be found and utilized by those who see it for the danger it is to a constitutional republic and the individual rights and rule of law guaranteed by that Republic’s founding. As the old joke had it, “the beatings will continue until morale improves”; we can now add “or until the opposition capitulates”. Or, we take the lash out of their hands.