An open letter to the National Association of Medical Examiners
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing this letter on this blog because I have been banned from our professional mailing list for one month following my post critical of Black Lives Matter/Antifa. More important, I know that were I to respond once the temporary ban is over, the ban would be made permanent. So I will respond here.
Note that in the following post, the sections are collapsed. To view the entire section, click on “Show more.”
Aside from the issue of the inappropriate attack on me that this banning represents, it’s important to understand that the issues here are extraordinarily important for Medical Examiners, and represents a real threat to our practice. Because this is a long post, if you want to skip to that, go to point 5.
Within the context of the attacks made on the Minneapolis office after the release of the George Floyd autopsy report, there was a mention of “white supremacy.” Another person spoke up and said the he or she was not a white supremacist. I noted that, according to the people who are criticizing the ME office, he or she certainly was.
Since it is against the NAME rules to quote emails directly, I will paraphrase the points I made:
1) According to these folk, all white people are white supremacists/racists. They exist only in three forms:
a) Those who deny they are white supremacists
a) Those who recognize it and are happy with it
c) Those who recognize it and are appropriately self-loathing
2) This kind of blood libel is identical to the kind of attacks made against Jews in Nazi Germany. I referred to an oncoming Kristallnacht (which if I may note, was surprisingly prescient considering statements and actions of movement leaders since I was banned for saying it).
3) I noted the orthodox Christian tradition that God is not a respecter of race, quoting St. Paul in that “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
I noted that the position in #3 is rejected and considered a racist statement by the Progressive orthodoxy.
I noted that the current Chief Medical Examiner in Minneapolis will probably be the last in that position for a generation.
For this I was banned, with the statement that I had broken multiple rules, though not stating which rules they were. Since there is nothing personal here, and there were no personal insults, I can only conclude that the “multiple” rules I broke were a proscription on political speech and that on religious speech. It should be noted that the proscription on political speech is supposedly not applied in cases where it is directly relevant to our practice, nor, supposedly is religious speech. Unless, it seems, it triggers the leadership.
After my banning, there was a celebration of my cancellation by some of the Progressive members of NAME. It is telling that the complaint was not that I was incorrect, but that I was insensitive and “minimized” white supremacy. Another complaint was that the orthodox Christian position ignores important differences between people by making them all the same in front of God. That is anathema to modern Progressive segregationists.
In separate posts I will address the anti-religious bigotry now being enforced on the mailinglist, the dismissal of the value of open discourse, and the persecution of conservatives in the profession, and provide some suggestions to conservative and modernist people involved in medicolegal death investigation, and how we can survive in a work environment that is becoming overtly hostile.
1. I did not “minimize” white supremacy, I pointed out the definition used by the group we were discussing.
During the Two Minutes Hate that celebrated my denunciation in absentia on the NAME-L, it was claimed that I was “insensitive” in “minimizing” white supremacy. That is a false accusation. The difference is that I have bothered to read the Antifa and BLM literature, I’ve been to some of the Antifa sites, and I’ve talked to some of the people who have been doing intel on them. I merely pointed out what BLM/Antifa are saying. I was not “belittling” or “mocking” white supremacy, I was reporting what the people who are at this very moment threatening violence to medical examiner offices are saying. Those threats will only get worse in the future.
I will get into the peculiar definitions used by the intersectionalists below, but I want to make this point straight up. I was merely using the definitions used by the people we were discussing in the context of the attacks on the Minneapolis office.
2. BLM/Antifa is founded upon and relies on violent communists at its base.
The core of BLM/Antifa is nothing more (and certainly nothing less) than a Jacobin/Maoist movement. They have the same goals, use the same terminology, and use the same tactics. These tactics have not changed since the 18th century with the rise of the Jacobins and Montagnards.
Let’s start by looking at who is at the bottom of this movement. Black Lives Matter gets its tax-decuctable status through Thousand Currents, a Marxist organization that has a convicted terrorist on its board. Show More According to an investigative report by the Capital Research Center, the Black Lives Matter organization, officially known as “BLM Global Network Foundation,” is a fiscally-sponsored project of left-wing organization Thousand Currents. Fiscal sponsorship simply means that a non-profit organization, in this case Thousand Currents, offers its legal and tax-exempt status to one of its “projects,” in this case Black Lives Matter, which engages in activities related to the non-profit organization’s mission. As my colleague Robert Stilson explains here, BLM Global Network Foundation has been a fiscally sponsored project of Thousand Currents, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, since 2016. That means the BLM group, which runs the BlackLivesMatter.com website, does not have its own IRS tax-exempt status but is operating as a “project” of an organization that does. In the case of 501(c)(3) fiscally sponsored projects, this allows tax-deductible donations to be made to the project. The
Board of Directors of Thousand Currents, which has now been scrubbed
from its website but is archived here, includes Susan Rosenberg, who
was a member of the Weather Underground and the May 19th
Communist Organization (M19) and was imprisoned for 16 years for
terrorist bombings until pardoned by President Clinton. Rosenberg and another M19 member, Tim Blunk, were arrested in November 1984 in Cherry Hill, NJ, in front of a storage unit containing 740 pounds of unstable dynamite stolen from a Texas construction firm four years earlier. Rosenberg was also wanted in connection with the 1981 Brink’s robbery. She was never charged in those crimes. Show Less
Fundamentally, BLM gets its tax-deductible status through Thousand Currents.
3. BLM/Antifa’s fundamental ideology is that of violent Marxist revolution.
The fundamental mistake of people thinking about BLM/Antifa is that it is an organization primarily oriented towards racial reconciliation. Nothing could be further from the truth. I will discuss their particular view of “whiteness” in a bit, but it’s important first to understand that “race” and racial issues as conventionally defined plays a very small part of this. The purpose of all of this is to divide us in order to foment revolution. Here is a statement by a young lady who lived through exactly this process in Yugoslavia, which resulted in the Bosnian war — a similar goal to that of BLM/Antifa. Show More As
one founder of BLM noted:
“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of,
ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is
build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk…” The basic goal of this organization is the complete destruction of society in order to rebuild it from scratch. It includes the destruction of capitalism, of private property, of religious faith, and of the nuclear family. No civic institution, tradition, or force outside of the state can be allowed. It should be noted that the destruction of the nuclear family is a basic Marxist principle, based on 19th century ideas of “family” as a bourgeois business unit. As noted in Socialist World in its discussion of BLM:
Black Panther leader Fred Hampton summed it up: “You don’t
fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.
We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you
fight capitalism with socialism.” Today the world is different. There
has been a black President of the US, the most powerful capitalist
country on the planet, and many major corporations have, for example,
declared their solidarity with the BLM movement. The fundamentals
remain the same, however. Racism is intrinsic to capitalism. Capitalism is a blind, unplanned system driven by maximizing
the profits of a few and based on the exploitation of the majority.
Today, according to Oxfam, the richest 85 people on earth have more
wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population. They
include one black African, although white men predominate. Their role in society, however, does not stem primarily from
their colour. They are part of a tiny super-wealthy ruling elite
whose interests are completely tied to an inherently racist
capitalist system.
“Black Lives Matter and other organizations build a strong
critique and understanding of racism and white supremacy and sexism
and homophobia, transphobia, but we have to have as much hatred or
vitriol against capitalism,” said Ratcliff. “Until we start
to see capitalism [is] just as nefarious as white supremacy, we will
always be struggling.” The
fundamental approach of the BLM/Antifa movement is exactly that
advocated by Robespierre, Stalin,
Mao Zedong,
and Pol Pot. The socialist/anarchist
ideal is that everything in the existing system is so permeated by
evil that the only way to solve the problem is to destroy everything
and start over. Of greater import, it is necessary to destroy all
knowledge of the
previous system to keep it from contaminating the present. Because
history defines the future, in order to have a new future, you must
destroy the past. As George Orwell (who is now on the cancel-culture chopping block himself – since he, above all must be silenced) noted in his book 1984:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street
building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the
process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has
stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party
is always right. In
the French Revolution, this was accomplished by restarting the
calendar at year 0, decimalization
and renaming all of the days
of the week, redefinition of
the months, removing
Christian holidays, exile of priests, nationalization of church
property and defining a state sponsored atheistic religion called the
Cult of Reason (shortly replaced by the new mandatory “Cult of the
Supreme Being” at the insistence of Robespierre). In
the Cultural Revolution under Mao, the purpose was to wash away the
“Four Olds,” – old customs, old ideas, old habits, and old
culture. This meant renaming all the streets and buildings,
destroying statues, changing the definitions and meanings of words,
tearing down classical architecture, attacking
intellectuals, destruction of books and art, banning genealogy,
banning “Western” art such as opera and ballet,
etc. in order to “sweep away the old demons” that held back the
communist utopia.
The same thing occurred in Pol Pot’s Communist Cambodia, known as
the Killing Fields. People know that Pol Pot’s regime engaged in a
systematic genocide of all professional people – academics,
doctors, engineers, etc. But most don’t understand why. These
people embodied the old way of doing things, and the only way to
truly start over is to wipe the slate clean. Hence their death. Pol
Pot, a student of Mao and supported by him, noted “If you want
to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots,” which
justified mass destruction of culture, and execution of families.
The same process characterized Stalin’s Soviet Union, and even the
Socialist revolution in Mexico. This hatred of the past is not
limited solely to socialists and communists, of course. It is the
foundation of most cultural revolutions (and what distinguishes
cultural from political revolutions). Hence the actions of the
Taliban and ISIS/ISIL.
This idea of the destruction of the current system is not
evolutionary or reformative. It means to engage in complete
destruction. This is why it is not enough to tear down statues of
Confederate soldiers, or rename bases named after Confederate
Generals. The statues of abolitionists must be destroyed or else
people might remember that there were good things about the ancien
regime. Thus, it is necessary to destroy Lincoln and even Frederick
Douglass. In the cultural revolution, there can be no authority
outside of the state, hence the need to destroy churches, intimidate
churchgoers, and when given authority, bulldoze churches and mosques,
forcibly destroy religious culture, and if necessary, kill entire
populations in order to remove the contamination of their culture.
Hence the desecration and burning of churches, and destruction of
religious statues and beheading and defacement of representations of
the Virgin Mary. Because that’s what black folk do? I don’t
think so. It’s what socialists do. And Black Lives Matter, derived in part from the work of a white Russian-American Marxist, is an example of this. Show Less
4. BLM/Antifa perverts the definition of “race,” “white,” “black,” “racism”, “white supremacy”, etc to fit this Marxist agenda.
How does one wrap this agenda in the flag of race? By relabeling everything as race.
One of the biggest problems with the baizuo, particularly upper middle class white females, who respond with a moral panic every time race is mentioned is that they aren’t using words in the same way that the BLM/Antifa group is using it. “Race” and “White” and “Black” are terms of art in that community that are directly related to conventional meaning, but also have a distinct ideological meaning.
The BLM/Antifa community use “white” the way that the Nazi’s used “Jew.” It denotes both a biological race (to whatever degree race has biological meaning), but more importantly has an overweening cultural and values meaning. To the Nazis, “Jewish science” not only meant that science was dominated by Jews, but also that there was a particular scientific viewpoint that was championed by Jews – that of an atheistic reductionist mechanical universe. Hence, the Nazi rejection of Einstein’s relativity (at least until late in the war). Similarly, the Soviet Union under Stalin rejected the idea of the scientific method and “capitalist” science, and embraced “socialist” science – which gave rise to Lysenkoism and famine. Orthodox geneticists in the Soviet Union were jailed and killed. Modern genetics was not allowed to be taught in the Soviet Union until the 1960s. Show More BLM/Antifa use the term “white” in exactly the same way. It is certainly a race, and when an intersectionalists state that “Some white people may have to die” they mean it in exactly the same way that the Nazis meant it when speaking about Jews. But more important, “white” is defined as the “white” value system – that of individualism, civil liberties, objective truth, the “white” concept of fair play, honor, religion, all of it. The concept of “white supremacy” in that context has little to do with the color of one’s skin, but everything to do with the content of one’s values. A person who believes in “God and country” who is a conventional Christian, who believes in the American ideas of individual liberty and freedom is a “white supremacist” regardless of any beliefs about skin color. Coleman Hughes notes that this redefinition of racism used by modern intersectionalists is distinct from that of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and is something that those civil rights leaders explicity warned against. This
hatred of “whiteness” is absolutely and ontologically necessary,
since BLM/Antifa largely define themselves in opposition
to whiteness. This is key, because it means that without
demonization of the other, there is no basis for their existence.
This is also a repeated pattern in history. For instance, Pinochet’s
Argentina was notorious for its torture and “disappearing” of its
citizens. None of it was necessary in any absolute sense; when
Pinochet took power he was generally supported. However, in order
justify more authoritarian rule, it was necessary to create an enemy.
So, the regime arrested and tortured people who were insufficiently
supportive. This
served two goals. The first goal was to define the relationship of
the regime with the individual. The regime had absolute control over
the individuals body and, by the end of the ordeal, psyche. The
second goal was to create
a resistance movement that would, in turn, justify further
oppression. Without the existence of this resistance movement, the
actions of the regime had no justification. Thus, if it did not
exist, it must be created. The
same thing is true with BLM/Antifa. These organizations exist in
opposition to systemic
whiteness that represents oppression. It is fundamentally impossible
to acknowledge that this system has made progress, or that its ideals
are anything other than oppression. If such an acknowledgment were
to be made, then there would be no justification for the actions
that are being taken. There would be no justification for the
violent overthrow of the system and ensuing carnage. This is why it
is necessary that garage door pulls be nooses, that tree swings be
nooses, that every picture and symbol be interpreted in a way that
makes it oppressive. It’s
why people paint swastikas on their own doors and send themselves
threatening letters. Without this oppression, they have no
self-definition. There can
be no give and take. There can be no compromise. There can be no
reconciliation.
As Anthony Bradley notes in his critique of James Cone and Black
Theology in “Liberating Black Theology: The Bible and Black
Experience,”
Perhaps the most significant tragedy of the victimologist’s
approach… is that it creates separatism. Separatism is a
suspension of moral judgment in the name of racial solidarity that is
an integral part of being culturally black in America today. The
black experience is the starting point and the final authority of
interpreting moral prescriptions, both personally and structurally.
Separatist morality is not a deliberate strategy for accruing power;
rather it is a cultural thought – a tacit conviction that has
imbued the culturally black psyche. Separatism is a direct result of
victimology because whites are viewed in eternal opposition to the
black experience; black America construes itself (albeit in many ways
unintentionally) as a sovereign cultural authority.
Separatism generates a restriction of cultural authority, a
narrowing of intellectual inquiry, and the dilution of moral
judgment. Mainstream American culture, when refracted through
self-righteous indignation in the service of exposing the
inadequacies of the “other” (e.g. white person) rather than
finding a way forward. The perpetual belief in a racial identity
born out of self-loathing and and anxiety often leads to more time
spent inventing reasons to cry racism than working towards changing
social mores and often inhibits movement towards reconciliation and
positive mobility.
… [V]ictimology often perpetuates racial tension. Blacks are
encouraged by one another to “know your history.” The
communicative function of said mantra is not aimed toward knowledge
per se but towards remembering oppression and iniquity so it does not
happen again. The irony of victimology is its tendency towards
revisionist histories and creating and ethos that, a hundred years
ago, would have precluded racial equality. Victimology, in other
words, is perpetuating problems for black America, not solving them.
(page 17) Thus,
racism is not “racism”
in this context as
most modernist people think. “Whiteness” and “white supremacy”
is structure and values (though
again, as I will show later, there’s plenty of frank old-timey
hatred to go around in this movement).
The vast majority of these people running around calling everybody
white supremacists are themselves white. Only approximately 17% of
the people tearing down statues and burning buildings are black.
This is primarily a white Marxist movement that has hijacked racial
issues as a pretext. Of course, there are others who are involved –
those who mistakenly see this as a rather conventional protest
movement, true anti-white bigots such as this BLM founder, and those
who are attempting to exploit the movement for their benefit. This is the face of Antifa/BLM – a privileged upper middle class white girl lecturing a black cop, and the cop responding with scripture.
And these: Or this — a white Antifa/BLM protester lecturing a black physician on how he is more black than she is. Consider what happened recently in Seattle (a city, by the way, named after a Suquamish leader and slave owner) , where white city employees were segregated and taught to hate “white” values. Here is a partial list of “white supremacy:” “Individualism” is racist. Intellectualism is “racist.” “Objectivity” is racist. We are all “complicit” to some degree. All
white people are white supremacists – if they aren’t acting like
it today, they will tomorrow. Any white person who does not admit to
being a white supremacist is in denial:
BLM/Antifa-type intersectionalists have a hierarchy of race that
would make a Nazi genealogist green with envy. Are you Jewish?
Arab? They’ve got you classified: Then
there’s that evil “white” concept of “cause and effect,”
the white supremacist notions
of rational thought and metrics, and the truly evil idea of
“competition”:
Similarly, here’s another federal document put out by the
Smithsonian: Show Less
This abstraction of “white” to mean anything that is western — including belief in objective truth, undermines the fundamental basis of our work as Medical Examiners. It is “western imperialism ” to argue that 2+2 = 4. As one BLM proponent notes:
This gives sophistry a bad name. Apologists for this retreat into blather about numbering systems and partial counting in innumerate cultures. But 2+2=4, even if you say it as 10+10=100 in base 2. A rose by any other name is white supremacy.
Once again, this was seen by Orwell in 1984:
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
He noted that this was also a property of Nazi Germany:
Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. … The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.
That is the fundamental position of BLM/Antifa. Scientific method and objective truth are the tools of white supremacy.
Objective truth does not exist. Everything must be in service of the narrative. Here’s a wonderful example of a young lady educated in the world of intersectionality arguing that whether or not a box contains an even versus odd number of objects is just a matter of narrative:
(There’s an introductory ad to click through. It’s a long video and you can skip most of it. You should be taken to 1:53:00. If you don’t go there directly, skip to it – it’s pretty mind-numbing to listen to these guys talk if you are not into discussions about postmodernism. The payoff is at 2:13:30. The commentator sounds like he’s saying “That’s straight Fookoh” He’s referring Paul-Michel Foucalt, one of the founders of the postmodernist movement – in case you don’t recognize it.)
It is extraordinarily important that you listen to this segment of this video. This is the core of the attack of BLM/Antifa/intersectional postmodernism on modernist approaches to Medical Examiner work. But NAME will ban you if you mention it.
These documents about “white values” could have just as easily been written by the KKK. It’s “white” culture that values the scientific method, objective truth, individual achievement, hard work, the nuclear family and Christianity. Black folk, according to BLM/Antifa, reject these ideals. Because they are white. BLM and KKK have the very same attitude regarding African-Americans with respect to these issues. The only difference is whether or not they think it’s a good thing. It is no accident that it was possible to submit Mein Kampf for publication in a social justice journal and have it accepted. The current version of Mein Kampf for social justice warriors, “White Fragilility” notes that the only hope for a white person is to “strive to be less white.” (See also here. ) Show More
According to this group, the only way to destroy “white supremacy”
is to destroy western civilization. Or, as Mark Bray wrote in
“Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook” in 2017,
“The only long-term solution to the fascist menace is to
undermine its pillars of strength in society grounded not only in
white supremacy but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy,
nationalism, transphobia, class rule, and many others.”
This merging of identarianism and Marxism has profound meaning when
it comes to the idea of individual liberty in view of the fungibility
of truth. Again, to quote Bradley:
…Marxism does not believe in the validity of certain ideal
values, of personality or the ethic of value, or the categorical
imperative, or of moral autonomy as established by the Kantians. The
individual, then, does not only function as a means to an end but
must also view himself as such. The process of traditional ethics,
which calls for each individual to make his own ethical choices,
becomes obsolete. Marxism radically erases the individuality of the
person, even to such an extent that acting in history with the
potential to be productive or unproductive, the person must bow his
will completely to the community and its objectives. (Bradley,
Liberating Black Theology, p 79)
These are the values of BLM/Antifa. This is what NAME banned me for
mentioning. Or, you can listen to this BLM/Antifa leader here. This is how a fake African American can be a leader in this movement. They have abandoned Martin Luther King for Shaun King. Which brings me to the Kristallnacht statement. Happily, King (the latter, not the former) spoke up to make my point. When asked about attacks on churches and religious symbols, he responded: Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down. — Shaun King (@shaunking) June 22, 2020 If only there were a word for destroying windows and icons on the basis of religious hatred. It should surprise no-one that BLM/Antifa has taken pleasure in destroying statues of Jesus, saints, and Virgin Mary, and that church burning and vandalism have skyrocketed. Because Christianity is “white supremacy,” as is Judaism. It’s why they attack black people going to church. It’s why they beat Catholics praying the rosary. It’s why they attack children. It’s why they burn bibles. It’s why they call a missionary who served lepers — and died of leprosy because of it — an example of “white supremacist culture.” It’s why one of their key goals, listed on their website, is the destruction of the nuclear family: Yes, that damned nuclear family is “white supremacy.” As Benjamin Kierstein notes: Over 2,000 years ago, Plato described it in part when he said, “Bad men, when their parents or country have any defects, look on them with malignant joy, and find fault with them and expose and denounce them to others, under the idea that the rest of mankind will be less likely to take themselves to task and accuse them of neglect; and they blame their defects far more than they deserve, in order that the odium which is necessarily incurred by them may be increased.” The anti-christian and antisemitic roots of BLM/Antifa are open for display. Let’s read what some of their leaders have to say: “Whiteness is not humxness,” “in fact, white skin is sub-humxn” “White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual,” “white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves.” “black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.” Or this, by Ignatiev (previously linked):
“Eventually white women can breed out, but my feeling is that if
you are a white male, you should kill yourself now. If you are a
thoughtful person, with a social consciousness who considers himself
white, you will consider suicide.” “Melanin comes with soul, that we
call it soul, we soul brothers and sisters, that’s the melanin that
connects us so the people that don’t have it, are, and I’m going
to say this carefully, are a little less and where the term actually
comes from, and I’m going to bring it back around to Minister
Farrakhan, where they may not have the compassion,.. “When they were sent to the Mountains of Caucasus, they
didn’t have the power of the sun. The sun started to deteriorate
them. So, they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low
self-esteem, they’re acting out of deficiency, so therefore the
only way they can act is evil,” “They have to rob, steal, rape,
kill and fight in order to survive. So these people who didn’t have
what we have, and when I say ‘we,’ I speak of the melinated
people, they had to be savages, they had to be barbaric because
they’re in these Nordic mountains, they’re in these rough
torrential environments, so they’re acting as animals, so they’re
the ones closer to animals, they’re the ones that are actually the
true savages,”
“So I say all that to say the context when we speak of
‘Jewish people,’ white people, Europeans, the Illuminati — they
were doing that as survival tactics to stay on this planet…”
Here is a letter written by Nicole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the “1619 Project” of the New York Times. And now, BLM/Antifa is murdering black men for not supporting their Marxist agenda. Now, I will be the first to admit that I have not immersed my self in black culture. Most of my interactions with African-Americans comes from work, which is a very artificial environment, and church, which attracts a specifically more orthodox and conservative cohort of African-Americans. But at least for the latter, none of them are in the mood to call for the dissolution of the nuclear family and rejection of Christianity. Nor do they, for the most part, want to abandon attempts at reconciliation with a return to segregation, separation, and racial hatred. Nor do they disavow objective truth, science, or personal responsibility. Nor are they incapable of hard work or punctuality. And, of course, many black folk are speaking out against it – though they are called race traitors and tokens for doing it. My impression is that BLM/Antifa does not speak for most folk of any race. But by wrapping their agenda in the flag of race, they are above criticism. NAME believes that they are the voice of African-Americans – and thus we must avoid discussing what they stand for for fear of the moral panic of possible “racism” (however defined).
As Voltaire noted,
“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your
intellect declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice
your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were
people who said to us: “You believe in incomprehensible,
contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to;
now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so.”
Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly any one who has the
power to make you believe absurdities has the power to commit
injustices.” (Questions on Miracles, 11th letter,
1765) The faith in socialism lead to murdering women because they say all lives matter, murdering police and taunting their families as they mourn, and murdering children, all in the name of suppressing “white supremacy.”
This is no different than the tactics of the Nazis in response to
“Jewish science” and “Jewish literature.” As Philip Ball
notes in “Serving the Third Reich,”
Anti-Semitism did not just deprive German physics of some of its
most valuable researchers. It also threatened to prescribe what kind
of physics one could and could not do. For Nazi ideology was not
merely a question of who should be allowed to live and work freely in
the German state—like a virus, it worked its way into the very
fabric of intellectual life. Shortly after the boycott of Jewish
businesses at the start of April 1933, the Nazified German Students
Association declared that literature should be cleansed of the
“un-German spirit”, resulting on 10 May in the ritualistic
burning of tens of thousands of books marred by Jewish
intellectualism. These included works by Sigmund Freud, Bertolt
Brecht, Karl Marx, Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin: books full of
corrupt, unthinkable ideas. Into some of these pyres, baying students
threw the books of Albert Einstein. Substitute “white” for “Jewish” and this should sound just a tad familiar to you. Burning books? What about “decolonializing” them? “White” music? Can’t have that. “White science?” That’s structural racism. Demonizing white scientists? You bet. Denying even that there is such a thing as western civilization (other than to condemn it)? Of course. Suppressing white artists? Bring it on. The methods of this kind of thinking are always the same. Only the targets change. I’m “insensitive” if I mention this, and must be banned. Because attacks on objective truth, scientific method, and rational thought have no impact on Medical Examiner work at all. Show Less
5. This has direct implications for our practice as Medical Examiners.
If you think that Medical Examiners are immune, you are wrong. If you think we should embrace this, you are crazy. If you think we can ignore it, you are suicidal. Show More But
we dare not talk
about it. It’s
“political” and insensitive
and inappropriate
to talk about and has nothing
to do with being an ME. Except
that it threatens our very existence
ME offices are under direct attack by the people who push this
concept, both in terms of
our independence and our ability to make diagnoses at all.
What I find even more odd
is seeing the EC patting itself on the back for starting to have a
conversation about race – though it was me who did it, and I got
canceled
for it.
The
Karenwaffe in NAME were
“appalled” by my post.
Fine. Let’s pretend everything is great – until the Maoists
come for the rest of the big city offices like
they are coming for some
already and
then you
can try to find out what the hell they are talking about – though
everyone
will be afraid to speak
out loud by then. The
interesting thing is that these Maoists hate liberals
even more than they hate me. I am an enemy, but you are a traitor.
Never forget this little bit
of Antifa/BLM
literature: I’m
sure they mean it in the best possible way, though.
But
remember, the Bolsheviks first went after the Mensheviks. The
Montgnards went after the Girandins. The Nazis cleaned up the SA
when they were no longer of use. And BLM/Antifa will take care of
their white middle class liberals when they are no longer of use.
The
BLM/Antifa attack on the Medical Examiner community is more than just
threatening to kill Medical Examiners who don’t make the right
diagnoses or burn down offices that make diagnoses that don’t
support their narrative. It’s much more dangerous and invasive
than that.
As many will remember, just under a decade ago, there burst on the
scene a number of “cognitive scientists,” who, with the aid of
members of the legal community such as the Innocence Project, decided
that the forensic science community should address the “crisis”
of “cognitive bias” in forensic pathology. The issue arose full
fledged with coordinated attacks on our profession, to the point of
having a plenary session at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
with the theme of attacking forensic pathology practice – and
without even inviting a forensic pathologist to speak, until the
section complained and demanded a voice (a role admirably filled Dr.
Andy Baker).
Over the ensuing 10 years, it became clear that the “crisis” of
“cognitive bias” actually had nothing to do with error rates, or
mistakes made on the basis of bias, or any of the traditional metrics
of defining this as a significant problem. Every time we pushed for
some sort of demonstration that this was a problem that resulted in
significant error, nothing was provided. Instead, the crisis of
cognitive bias was asserted on a purely theoretical basis. When
pushed, those who shouted the loudest played the dissembling game of
“if you don’t agree that it’s a crisis, then you are claiming
it doesn’t exist.” Then, finally, proponents explicitly stated
that this had nothing to do with error and nothing to do with
traditional “science” of cognitive science. Instead, it had to
do with the fact that this consortium of interests did not believe it
was the role of forensic pathologists to practice traditional
diagnosis. Instead, that role should be taken by others, and
forensic pathologists should only provide data for diagnoses to be
made by lawyers, laymen and other stakeholders.
All of this dissembling about “cognitive science” was a scam that
allowed people with a social engineering agendas to push those
agendas using the terms and implied authority of “science,” but
had no true “scientific” basis at all.
The same kind of process, though much more malignant, is the
BLM/Antifa scam. They are using accusations of structural white
supremacy in an attempt to destroy the civil basis our work as
medical examiners, and insert Soviet and Maoist-style political
determinations. By wrapping a Jacobite/Maoist agenda in the false
flag of race, they become above criticism. But their proposition is
much worse, and much more dangerous, because they are attacking the
very idea of objective truth. BLM/Antifa explicitly want to replace
modernist ideas of objective truth with the idea that “truth”
exists only in service to an agenda. It is the old Soviet science of
Lysenko. The BLM/Antifa hatred for “white” science is no
different than the old Nazi distaste for “Jewish” science.
It’s no accident that “implicit” bias is a part of the mandate of the new Diversity Committee that NAME is establishing. It’s the same attack wrapped in a different flag. Only this time we are going to embrace it, and cancel anybody who questions it. Already, Medical Examiners are making public statements that we should edit our reports to serve social agendas. And NAME is fine with that. And when the next pretext for violence occurs, we will again be paralyzed by moral panic and give them whatever they want. Nothing
to see here, folks. Don’t be insensitive. Shut up and accept it.
Objective truth is a dead issue. The
only true morality is inoffensiveness, and we must always bow to
those who are offended. As
Dostoevsky wrote in the Brothers Karamazov:
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to
himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he
cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses
all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he
ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without
love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to
bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to
himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than
any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense,
isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he
has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make
it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a
molehill–he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take
offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great
pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.” When a Medical Examiner is finally killed, or an office burned to the ground, at least NAME will be able to comfort itself with the fact that it squashed possibly offensive speech, and was able to get out a position paper on second autopsies. Because the real problem here is Mike Baden. Show Less
6. Why I’m stepping back.
One respondent was kind enough to send me his post directly. I am including my response to him below, somewhat redacted for anonymity and clarity. I will never be able to post it to NAME-L because it talks about how my faith informs what I wrote. I can’t post it, not just because I am temporarily banned, but because the very mention of why I believe what I believe causes the heads of the anti-christian bigots on the list to explode; they will demand my permanent cancellation. There’s no place for my kind of thinking there any more.
So let me move on to why I have dropped my participation in committees and why I will no longer be a highly active NAME member. Some of you have written me and said you valued my contributions in the past. That is important to me, and it is gratifying. However, with the growing cancel culture in the United States and the increasing appeal of Maoist Cultural Revolution tactics, the authoritarian approach by the EC, and the demands that people like me be canceled will only increase. There is no place for me in a woke NAME. I, like Bill Rodriquez, am a perfect target because I will not pretend to values I do not have. I have no desire to end up being completely canceled, so my only choice is to draw back.
Unfortunately, the cancel culture will only become more demanding in the next few years, not less, and will do its best to make life unbearable for individualists like me (after all, individualism is the hallmark of white supremacy). In a society where the cancel culture mob is searching tweets that are decades old looking for something to be outraged at, people like me simply have to hide to survive. Years ago, I had to delete most of my blog posts. I will eventually have to delete activities on my website (including this post) that will increase my exposure to woke vandals who spend their time attacking sites such as mine (and I am already attacked seriously about 10 times a day). That includes the NAME-related activities. No matter how much you try to appease them, it will never be enough. As WOPR discovered in War Games, “The only winning move is not to play.”
To the group at large, I have enjoyed working with you all, and I will always value the interactions I have had with you. I consider you dear friends, however much we disagree on the threat of Maoism and identarian tribalism. But it is clear that the culture at NAME has changed – I am not particularly different than I was 20 years ago, but the NAME culture certainly is. It is simply not safe for a person like me. If I continue there’s a good chance I’ll lose more than the privilege of doing so. I can lose my house, my livelihood, and my health. And it’s just not worth it. I’m not angry, though I am certainly saddened and disappointed – but that’s different. And if we ever have a chance to get together for a beer, I’d love to do it. So, this isn’t a divorce; it’s a, what do they call it in Hollywood? “Conscious uncoupling.”
Please don’t think that I am rejecting you personally in doing this. It’s a matter of attention focus. There is a profound book written by Winifred Gallagher called “Rapt,” that talks about it (for a review, see here). She points out that one’s life is built around what one pays attention to. The world is chaotic and hits us with much more information than we can process. We deal with that by selectively filtering that input, and building a world view and our experience from what we decide to focus on. In a different work, she sums it up as: Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time. People often ask me how I can do all the things I do. The answer is that I manage my attention as much as I do my time.
I have in the past chosen to spend a part of that resource to the benefit (I hope) of NAME and my profession. And I think that this has contributed both to the profession and to the quality of my life. But now, neither condition can hold, because the conditions upon which the profession will accept my labor demands that it be done in a way that degrades the quality of my life, and that my attention be more focused on what I can say or do without censure rather than what I can say or do to accomplish good. I cannot spend the precious resource of my free time in an activity that will only accept it if I place myself in intellectual, spiritual, and emotional shackles. As Jesus told us: If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. So I shall, for the moment, leave this town. Perhaps God will lead me to return, perhaps not.
And that’s fine. I’m at the end of my career. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still guardedly optimistic about the future – for a decent summary that is close to my view, see this piece on “Remodernism”, though I warn you that there’s some badthink in it. But for now, it’s time that someone with a world view more valued by NAME takes my place else I become a distraction. I am sure that somewhere among the baizuo who cheered my cancellation will be someone who can deal with issues in a way that is more emotionally in tune with the times, and whose opinions you will not find so appalling. And you better listen to them, because we don’t do the tolerance thing around here any more. Good luck to you all, and be careful what you say.
billo
My response to the respondent who shared his letter with me: Show More Dr.
<name redacted>,
You
misapprehend my statement. I understand how this is possible, so let
me respond directly.
First,
I did not call 80-90% of the listserv white supremacists. What I did
was criticize critical race theory, which states it.
I’ll
tell you what, I’ll treat you as an individual, deserving individual
respect, and I’ll assume you do the same to me. It turns out that not
all black folk are all the same, and not all white folk are all the
same. It is my preference that people talk as individuals, not as
representatives of some identity group.
So,
let’s look at what I said. I wrote in the context of the BLM/Antifa
movement. This is a specific subset of folk, and, in fact, represent
a small minority of the African-American community and the white
community. In particular, they represent a specific militant
anti-theist Maoist/Leninist political movement that wraps it’s
primarily political agenda in the flag of racial justice. This group
has strong support among the Progressive left and Academe (though I
repeat myself) representing a convergence of intersectional racial
theory, critical race theory, and primarily Maoist communist theory.
This is particularly notable if you look at Antifa, which consists
primarily of upper-middle-class whites who, in my opinion, are using
and perverting BLM for their purpose.
This
leads to two points I want to emphasize.
The
first is that these are a very small minority of both
African-Americans and European-Americans. Because I am a
theologically conservative Christian, my personal interactions with
African-Americans are primarily related to faith-based activities.
The particular subset of African-Americans that I spend time with is
not particularly sympathetic to the anti-christian agenda of the
Maoist/Leninist activists, who hold faith in contempt. My personal
experience, and it may well not be generalizable, is that the
“disease” of racial and other identarian conflicts are
often best “treated” by finding things that we hold in
common. My black friends and I differ on many things, but we hold our
faith in common, and from that, we can gain better understanding of
each other. Similarly, I have other friends of color who share bonds
of loyalty to the country. It is certainly true that the United
States has not fulfilled its promise to African-Americans, but those
African-Americans who recognize that the *ideals* of the country,
while not achieved, do work in that direction again find a common
ground with me.
This
is in contrast to the approach taken by Antifa/BLM, where identarian
tribalism and blood libel are the currency of interaction. It is
*that* group that explicitly holds the opinion that all white folk
are necessarily racist by the mere fact of being white, and that all
white people are white supremacists because of their lack of
rejection of the American ideals. That *is* critical race theory —
that white people are racist no matter what they do. This is a
classic example of blood libel. Hence references to “white”
science, and the rejection of objective truth.
Shelby
Steele, in his book “White Guilt” points out the
difference. He notes that Western Civilization in general, and
Americanism in particular has often failed in achieving the goals and
ideals it has set for itself. It has worked towards those ideals —
in fits and starts, and with movement forwards and backwards — but
those ideals have remained. This has lead to two primary approaches
to dealing with those failures. One approach is to work to make the
American system align more closely with the ideals that it claims to
espouse. The second is to believe that because it has not yet reached
perfection, it is fundamentally flawed. If you take the latter
approach, then everything needs to be burned to the ground.
Traditional morality, faith, traditional beliefs in truth, all of it
must be burned to the ground, and a utopia will arise from the ashes.
This
latter approach is that of BLM/Antifa. I oppose it with every breath
I take. I oppose it because it believes in a secular morality that
does not exist, and because it espouses the classic
socialist/communist belief in the perfectibility of man. Neither of
these beliefs are true — which is why every time it is tried it ends
in mass death. Second,
I do not minimize or reject the concept of white supremacy. Quite the
opposite. I have known Klansmen, I have known members of the Aryan
Brotherhood. For awhile, in my youth, I was a pagan, and got to know
some members of an Odinist group (though I was a Crowleyist at the
time, and thus antithetical). I am probably the only person you know
who has invoked
magick
for the damnation of an Odinist in order to obstruct his spiritual
battle against a black family (this was before I became a committed
Christian, of course). That’s probably nonsensical to you, but was
meaningful to me at the time — though I have abjured such practices
now. In
fact, my perspective is the opposite of yours. Having known real
white supremacists, some of which have openly advocated the death of
African-Americans, I am not only very aware, but profoundly
frightened of them.
I know of at least one who has
denounced me as a race traitor. And that’s really the problem I have
with this bullshit put out by BLM/Antifa. By calling everybody racist
and everybody a white supremacist, they cheapen the term. It’s a
little like feminists who call dirty jokes the equivalent of rape.
Rape is a real and horrible thing. And those feminists who try to
wrap their pet peeves in it don’t really achieve much more than
minimizing the meaning of rape. The same thing is true with the
BLM/Antifa types who go around calling every body a white supremacist
and a fascist. White supremacism and fascism are real and horrible
things — I believe they are Satanic — and when they try to use that
for their identarian political purposes, it is *they* who diminish
it.
Third,
it is absolutely untrue that having a Christian approach to race
relations means that I don’t see the difference between people. In
fact, if you look at the way that Paul and Peter dealt with the
problem it was just the opposite. Let me remind you of the
controversy in the early Church. Christianity began as a cult within
Judaism, and Jewish Christians firmly believed that they should
follow the Laws of Moses. In contrast, Paul as the missionary to the
Gentiles, taught that this was not necessary. When Paul and Peter met
and discussed this, they decided that, in fact, Christianity could
handle both approaches. They basically agreed to disagree, with the
Israelite Christians following the law, and the Gentile Christians
following a different set of rules (following what is called the
Noahide Covenant). While they criticized each other, sometimes
viciously, their ultimate faith in the Christ meant that they could
both maintain their differences and *still* commune as Christians.
Similarly, the Apostle Paul notes that different people have
different attitudes about different things, but are still brought
together in Christ. For instance, in Romans 14, Paul writes:
Accept
the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable
matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but
another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats
everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the
one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for
God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else’s servant?
To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for
the Lord is able to make them stand.
One
person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers
every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own
mind. Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord. Whoever
eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and
whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For
none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for
ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we
die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he
might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.
That
is my philosophy. It does not deny differences, and it does not
minimize them. What is says is that, at least if we want to, we hold
things in common that both transcend and allow those differences, and
permit us fellowship by recognizing that commonality. Of course I
recognize and, in fact, celebrate the differences between people —
the world would be very bland without them.
Fourth,
I never said “get over it,” with respect to the severe
failings of racism in the United States. What I believe is that, if
we focus on what brings us together rather than what separates us, we
can get *through* it, and we can make it better. But the BLM/Antifa
policy of tribalism, balkanism, and identarian cathartic rage is not
the solution. And the blood libel of calling all whites racists and
white supremacists makes the problem worse, not better. God
bless you, <redacted>.
It’s unfortunate that you misrepresented my position on the listserv,
but I know that listserv posts are poor means of communication. We
would likely find that we had much more in common than we have in
opposition. And it is unfortunate that I am not given the opportunity
to defend or explain myself publicly. Interestingly, while I can
write this to you, the leadership will not allow me to post this. It
is clear that the current leadership has been looking for an excuse
to do this, so it’s not surprising (and it’s certainly not your
fault).
But
that being said, I refuse to “take responsibility” for
things that I am not responsible for. I refuse to apologize for
things I have not done. And, most of all, I kneel only before my Lord
Jesus Christ. billo Show Less
