Majorityrights News > Category: Hermeneutics

JF Gariepy provided a decent analysis of this situation, but the Youtube video was taken down. When and if I find it on Bitchute or elsewhere, I’ll put it up. In the meantime, there are several articles - click image for a Yahoo article introducing the story - about Claudia Conway’s puerile rebellion and wish to be emancipated from her parents. Now, regarding Gariepy’s account…

Though Gariepy claims to be thinking independently in his terminological deployment, the discourse parameters he follows are within the altercast box prescribed by Jewish interests and serving them; as ever, a caveat thus in regard to Gariepy’s use of the term “The Left” and its “characterizations;” while this usage and characterology is fairly true when looked upon as a Marxist Internationalist or Cultural Marxist Left, assailing White national, group and personal boundaries, absent the delimiting working hypotheses of the White Ethnonational Left, viz., unionization to structure accountability and gauge correctivity for Whites, Gariepy’s advice is more free floating (and, he admits, nihilistic) than it should be - providing feedback looking toward the more objective facts irrespective of our subjective and relative interests, but lacking the radical orientating context without the centering calibration of White Left Ethnonationalism’s relative, systemic interests.

Michigan governor signs order calling racism a public health crisis

The Hill 5 Aug 2020:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) signed an executive order on Wednesday, officially declaring racism a public health crisis.

In an effort to “elevate Black voices,” the order also mandates that a state advisory council centered around Black leadership be created. Additionally, Whitmer wants the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to have all state employees complete implicit bias training in an effort to “make health equity a major goal.”

“We must confront systemic racism head on so we can create a more equitable and just Michigan,” Whitmer said in a statement. “This is not about one party or person. I hope we can continue to work towards building a more inclusive and unbiased state that works for everyone.”

— Michigan State Police (@MichStatePolice) August 5, 2020

Michigan isn’t the first state to declare racism a public health crisis; Colorado and Wisconsin have done so recently as well. On a more local level, municipalities in 19 states have taken similar steps, including California, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Many of the declarations come after the American Public Health Association (APHA) declared systemic racism a public health crisis at the beginning of June — shortly after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, a Black man.

Floyd’s death regalvanized the Black Lives Matter movement and spurred nationwide protests that have been happening for most of the summer.

Moreover, health experts have found that COVID-19 has affected the U.S.‘s communities of color at disproportionate rate.

According to The Detroit News, Black Americans account for roughly 27 percent of the confirmed cases and nearly 40 percent of its deaths, although Michigan is only 14 percent Black overall.

Michigan has 84,050 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 6,219 deaths.

Therefore, she should order the borders closed and social distancing boundaries to be put into full effect.

__________________________________________

Anti-Racism is Cartesian.

It is anti social classification and discrimination accordingly. It is not innocent, it is prejudiced. It is prejudice against prejudice; it is hurting and it is killing people.

It is also no less true, nor contradictory of the first statement to say that anti-racism is a Jewish construct.

It is a prohibition, especially for White people, but really for any non-Jewish people from rendering social classifications and discrimination accordingly in order to maintain those classifications (prohibited, even if those classificatory discriminations are just, humane, and warranted on the basis of well reasoned patterns of human ecology).

If I understand correctly, Pete Townshend is rendering a similar account through his Rock Opera “Tommy”... the story of a traumatized boy, Tommy, who reacts with selective mutism (also deafness and blindness in “Tommy’s” case).

Anyway, “Tommy” came right to mind when listening to Rose Kitten’s true story of childhood trauma and the resulting selective mutism that she overcame.

The Who - Tommy, Can You Hear Me?

The Absolute State of Britain, on Mike Enoch’s TRS network.

If you are able to articulate public relations manipulation so well, how did you wind up altercast?

27 July 2020:

The Absolute State Of Britain #62: The Kosher Sausage-Roll (With MORGOTH)

Morgoth (136:14): I’ve done a few videos on this where the government and every relationship to public relations departments that they use to manage the public mood.

In The Home Office, you can even see The Home Office website, they call it the nudge strategy; and what they mean is that first they’ve got contingency plans for everything that can happen; and then they’ve also got PR departments which roll out PR campaigns in order to get the people thinking the way that they want, so that the population is like being permanently managed by the government itself via these PR departments; and they call it the nudge…

..and nudging people in “the right way” so all those tick-tock videos from the pandemic I mean it’s fascinating because…it, I feel like a fucking guinea pig because we’ve just been in the full lock-down thing .. it’s easing up a bit now; and then it’s as if we’ve been like…you get whiplash where you’re whisked into this now, this whole Black Lives Matter thing…just one straight after the other and I’m like you think that I’m, I, are we like a mouse in a proper maze here.

It’s somehow about how we react and how the population is managed because you know what….

Because here’s the thing and I’ve never seen the kind of individualists like Spike take this on. But the problem that you have (I know it’s a joke, but), in theory, we’re a liberal society and that’s supposed to be made up of a mass of individuals who are all able to get to the truth and formulate their own opinions and then they will vote for the party on that [knowledge] and so on and so on…that’ll be how they view the world.

The problem is, if you’re then in the business of managing, macro-managing the entire population, and we’re seeing that right now with Black Lives Matter, then what does that actually say about your individualistic society?

Because what’s happened is, they’re not able to get to any kind of truth, they’re not able to formulate any kind of opinions because all the information that they’re being fed is bullshit and according to a larger agenda.

So this kind of makes a complete mockery out of the individualist because what are you basing all of this on?

And you can see the results of it. I mean, we spoke about it all night here - the middle chunk, who are the most conformist will all, at the individual level, think of themselves as being individuals who make up their own minds.

And yet they agree with the government PR campaigns. It’s not even a conspiracy. All of these different PR companies have got flashy websites and when you go on the websites they’re all like a bunch of millennial bug-men, with target-charts; and all of that kind of thing.. all right out in the open… they’re just managing the public mood…. and to me, it’s this really dire critique of the liberal society; where everybody is an individual who makes up their own mind, because they’re obviously not.

[...]

Yuro (200:56): “See ya Kyle” (a “funny” way of saying “Seig Heil”, because we all think that’s such a cool salutation, don’t we?).

Now, “The Absolute State of Britain” airs over at Mike Enoch’s TRS Network - which I have long recognized as the main distribution outlet for the kosher marketing campaign devised to take White reaction against neo-conservatism, PC and increasing Jewish power and influence circa 2008, and to direct (nudge) it into a revised (((paleoconservatism))) 2.0 called the Alt-Right (now dissident right/ or neither left nor right as “increasingly meaningless terms” or third positionism) against a characterology of the left.

That is, they were nudging the reaction to stay on the right (anti social, stigmatic, disruptive and divisive of organizational power) and providing voice to White reaction, alt-right tents among the tentosphere (Christians, Nazis, the scientistic, the nutty conspiracy theorists and yet another tent for right wing Jews as proposed allies) if they went along and manifested some anti-social stigma, maintained identity as right wing reaction against hyperbolic inernationalist/anti-nationalist Marxist and Cultural Marxist (anti-White) organization/ coalitions characterized as “THE” Left, characterized as didactically repulsive and absurd so that Whites didn’t get the idea of White Left Ethnonationalism and its concept of broad unionization to delimit and protect the bounds of White people - because then they’d begin to organize their power and set sights on the pervasive pattern of kosher folks who naturally advocated for liberal scabbing of their borders and bounds as a rule; and then they’d look up and see who was on top, fucking them over: Kosher folks in 7-9 power niches in tandem with White right wing elitist sell outs, purity spiralists and Liberals taking the license, licentiousness offered them in the disordered circumstance of their borders and bounds having been flung wide open.

I have elaborated in many places about how and what it means to be right wing and liberal (objectivism at its base as an excuse with ever narrowing, “more pure” warrant as its source of power; minimizing accountability to borders and bounds of one’s people, indebtedness and responsibility thereof) and why the kosher folks want Whites to maintain that identity. Also, a characterology of “The Left” with all the absurdities of the exaggerated abuses of group organization, individual agency and activism, associated even at its base, organizational essence, as something only for anti-Whites.

...a dozen memes perhaps (red pills, normies, optics cucking, social justice warriors, etc) provided by some NY PR firm and placed in the portfolio of a Mike Enoch to deliver to the goyim with an instruction, “Be as anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler as you need.” ...“call your show the ‘Daily Shoah’ and make ‘oven’ jokes… you’ll establish the ‘vanguard’ and tell people that the ‘normies’ don’t understand like we do, nor do the ‘optics cucks’, so for the most part we’ll have to wink and nod, knowing that “our Uncle” (Enoch literally refers to Hitler that way in the show below) had it all right, but they won’t understand, so keep it cool, “See Kyle!” (lol) until enough of them are ‘red pilled’, especially given the ‘lefties’ out there, who might not want us to deny ‘the holahoax’....you know how unreasonable and anti free speech THE LEFT is.”

The Absolute State Of Britain #61: Black Riots Matter (With MIKE ENOCH)

Meanwhile we’ve got other tents working the other right wing reactionary angles to direct them against our characterology of “The Left”. We’ve got the Christian tents to keep the goyim yoked under Noahide law.

We’ve got Keith Preston to help them, e.g., Todd Lewis and Right Ruminations to maintain the left as the demon.

Where audience turns for something else, we’ve got a tent for people who say “neither left nor right” so that Whites don’t get any idea of the organizational power of White Left Ethnonationalism.

And if they begin to get the idea, we can subvert it with another tent to appeal to newbies with “Third Positionism”..served up by useful idiots Keith Woods (with Cultured Thug, who was singing the virtues of third positionism, Hitler and Mussolini with Richard Spencer et al, the day before Spencer’s channel got taken down), Thamster, Jefferson Lee and Eric Striker (Mike Enoch there to help, of course), promoting it to provide a back door and means to maneuver our people by exploiting its no account, non socially corrective rigid reaction against our social systemic homeostasis/ self corrective, self governing autonomy (specifically subverted by introducing to this left cover, an option for Christianity, or the rational blindness of scientism and objectivism, which dovetails with Hitler adulation).

To shore up this reactionary position against the left, cooler heads will be directed from that horror show back to the home base Gottfried tent where it all started for good old fashioned paleoconservatism; and now that Richard Spencer took the nudge a bit too far at Mike Enoch’s prompting, we have the still edgy, but not too edgy new paleocon, Nick Fuentes, to retain the Christian, Noahide jurisdictional yoke.

....yielding the paleocon torch to the cookie monster, Nick Fuentes..

AmericanExperimentMN 30 July 2020

Center of the American Experiment welcomes Heather Mac Donald to answer one of today’s most important questions: are the police racist?

The Truth About Crime, Race, and Policing in America

Warning: Third Positionism and its vulnerability with a backdoor for entryism and manipulation for its no-account foolishness.

Interventions: GOP, The Enemy of the People

DanielS:

Thamster engaged in terrible strawman misrepresentations of what is being done with pragmatism, describing it as “mere” pragmatism, and the “post modern” mere choice of identity: viz the original practicality of moral concerns is not mutually exclusive to depth of concerns nor even their idealization, sacralization and inspiration, inbornness and non-negotiableness. ....while Christianity has had great practical utility from its onset: for our enemies as a red caping of our moral order.

Thamster WitNat
Highlighted reply
Thamster WitNat

44 minutes ago (edited)
lol strawman, hardly. You are the one misrepresenting here.

I was referring to a tendency for many in the “dissident right” (if we want to go with that as a broad term) to engage in the question of religion by stating we need to either find one or create one more conducive to our politics. Packaged with that is the idea that religion serves as a survival mechanism where you pick and choose aspects of them suited to that end. The reason for this view of religion? A pragmatic concern with constructing one more in line with our politics. In other words, reducing religious truth to our own political interests. That is hardly a genuine answer to the problem but its a common one I see in these circles. Pragmatic because the question of truth is decided on by its practical implications over its absolute commitments. I am not talking about PRAGMATISM as a philosphy, I am talking about the pragmatic aim of this view in a general sense. Obviously stating that religion can have practical concerns as well as sacralization and ideaization that is non-negotiable is completely beside the point.

I also never said the postmodern “mere” choice of identity” I said this view of religion plays (broadly) within the framework of postmodernism that fascists are seemingly opposed to. Of course, for that to make sense, you would have to agree with me that the bulk of postmodernism is a continuation of modernism even if it began as a critique of it. I have expounded this view elsewhere.

Daniel Sienkiewicz
Daniel Sienkiewicz
14 minutes ago (edited)

​@Thamster WitNat

“lol strawman, hardly. You are the one misrepresenting here.

I was referring to a tendency for many in the “dissident right” (if we want to go with that as a broad term) to engage in the question of religion by stating we need to either find one or create one more conducive to our politics.”

While those on the dissident right may have a superficial idea as to the process of religion, I’m gathering that I did not misrepresent your argument, as I am satisfied that a religion, as any moral ordering, has practical matters negotiated between people at its origin.

The difference between an authentic religiosity as opposed to an affectation adopted or imposed (as in the case of Christianity) is that it emerges out of the concern to connect and hold to account a group’s systemic relations (you know the etymology re-ligia). Whereas Christianity tethers us to Noahide law, an affectation of kosher imposition, jurisdiction and expropriation.

“Packaged with that is the idea that religion serves as a survival mechanism where you pick and choose aspects of them suited to that end.”

You don’t pick and choose what has survival value to your people, but you do sacralize what is crucial and make taboo what is harmful.

“The reason for this view of religion? A pragmatic concern with constructing one more in line with our politics. In other words, reducing religious truth to our own political interests.”

In this argument you are relying too much on the word “mere”, which is the strawman element….“mere” pragmatism, “mere” politics, “mere” construction.

“That is hardly a genuine answer to the problem but its a common one I see in these circles.”

Obviously I am not going to defend people in the “dissident right” and your point is well taken regarding the adoption of Orthodox Christianity and probably in regard to some of their larpish attempts to represent pagan religions.

But the recognition of the need for a religion, to facilitate our group pattern on a semi transcendent level, beyond the unworthiness of some of our people and the imperfection of the rest of us, is necessary for many reasons, not least of which is to carry us beyond cynicism for the fact of our imperfection (to say the least).

“Pragmatic because the question of truth is decided on by its practical implications over its absolute commitments. I am not talking about PRAGMATISM as a philosphy, I am talking about the pragmatic aim of this view in a general sense.”

Let me call attention to Kant’s use of the word “practical” when discussing the topic of morality.

I’ll cop to a bit of No-true-Scotsmanning here when I suggest that it is furthermore practical to have ideals and aesthetic inspiration.

The purpose of this exercise is to relocate our agency in the service of our interests; that we can have hope to re-establish a moral order which centers the biological interest of our species. ...not so much to defend pragmatic philosophy, commendable though it is: Hilary Putnam, “the great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible.”

“Obviously stating that religion can have practical concerns as well as sacralization and ideaization that is non-negotiable is completely beside the point.”

...well, if your point is to say that people on the dissident right are prone to retain the liberal idea of shopping around, picking and choosing, yes, good point, among the several reasons that you are interesting to listen to…..

But if your point is to criticize post modern philosophy and pragmatism as they should be understood in underpinning White interests, then not besides the point.

“I also never said the postmodern “mere” choice of identity” I said this view of religion plays (broadly) within the framework of postmodernism that fascists are seemingly opposed to.”

Ok, fair enough point - If - if their understanding of postmodernity is the hyper-relative, dada deconstructionist, ironically adopted situational nonsense that its been red caped for Whites as being what “post modernity” truly is. Then agreed.

“Of course, for that to make sense, you would have to agree with me that the bulk of postmodernism is a continuation of modernism even if it began as a critique of it. I have expounded this view elsewhere.”

Not exactly. Post modern philosophy as it is misrepresented is really a continuation of modernity, its late stage fallout - misrepresented as “post modernity” since the antagonists to our interests do not want us to understand the accurate purpose of post modern performance requirements as it would facilitate our systemic survival as opposed to the ravages of modernity, its arbitrary experimentalism in promise that change necessarily leads to progress, and as opposed to maintaining traditions, where they are anachronistic and no longer serviceable..

And conversely, to be able to invoke the best of modern advance and tradition without the pangs of self loathing for the appearance of lacking modern sophistication, but mostly, to be able to protect our inherited forms,  the maintained organization of which requires that post modernity be properly understood: hence why it is that our adversaries have perpetuated the hyper relative misrepresentation: they want to keep us disorganized.

Paleoconservatism as “Cultural Controlled Opposition” in response to Neo-Conservatism and its Clean Break Memo.

They typically come across as your best asset. If you recognize it for what it is and keep it on the radar screen as such, not getting caught up, controlled opposition can have its utility as they are often funded to provide valuable resource, typically enlisting intelligent people and allowing them fine and clear articulation of some important information for WN. Nick Fuentes nicely articulates Israeli Operation Clean Break, a.k.a., “Project for a New America Century.”

Although Nick’s Paleoconservatism is not what most people consider to be classic controlled opposition, make no mistake. While we are tossing around the word “culture” of late, adding “cultural capitalism” and “cultural nationalism” on the radar screen with cultural Marxism, it can be said quite accurately that Paleoconservatism is a “cultural controlled opposition”.... a bit softer and more flexible perhaps than classic, but undoubtedly allowing the enemies of European peoples to act on key points.

The Great Awokening and the Second American Revolution.

by Eric Kauffmann for Quillette.com 22 June 2020:
       

Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.

According to multiple surveys, the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting. First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement’s unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors’ radical slogan, “defund the police,” an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to a “Ferguson Effect” of police reducing their presence in these areas.

Meanwhile Trump is polling well down after the riots, having dropped 2.5 points to Biden since Floyd’s death on May 25th. Trump’s repeated mistruths, unstatesmanlike behaviour and nepotistic employment of family members may have eroded the truth-based environment to such an extent that evidence-free shifts in issue position become increasingly easy. His sinking popularity tarnishes issue positions associated with his presidency, even when they are backed by the weight of evidence—as with the idea that indiscriminate police brutality rather than racism accounts for violence against unarmed blacks. The power of corporate and celebrity endorsement, magnified by “trendy” social media herding, has resulted in unusually high approval among whites for the activities of the rioters. This is an important departure from what occurred during, for example, the late 60s race riots, 1992 Rodney King riots, or even the 2014 Ferguson riots.

Statues, memory, and the social construction of harm

Progressive scholars are fond of emphasizing the socially-constructed nature of perceived reality. This is overstated, of course. Human minds are not blank slates. Gender can’t be readily reconstructed to make males dominate the caring professions and females the majority of ditch-diggers. Similarly, Americans can’t easily be convinced they are actually Russians.

But you don’t need to follow social construction to its postmodernist extreme to acknowledge that social construction does play a role in how we perceive the world. To a partial extent, there really is a “social construction of reality,” as Berger and Luckmann put it. Psychological research, for example, shows that flagging certain issues repeatedly, or framing them in particular ways, affects attitudes and feelings.

Let me interject here to make a correction in Kaufmann’s assessment of the abuse of social constructionism. The agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated [and I am sure that “progressive scholars” like to do that], but this would be an abuse of social constructionism indeed. As I like to emphasize, there are three important aspects to proper deployment of social constructionism: 1) The more literal, for example, as in people constructing a building together. 2) The metaphoric, for example, “a couple and a village socially constructing a child together”...or the social (re)construction of the narrative of a people’s history and 3) Post Hoc attribution as to how more brute facts come to count - e.g., fact, ‘my cousin was hit by lightning and killed’ but now there is a negotiation (social construction) as to whether the lightning strike was an act of god or triggered by events of physics; whether he has gone to heaven or is now just worm food, up for beatification or a good riddance, etc. ...is there something to be done to prevent lightning strikes or not?

...and poignantly, the fact of immigration, to be treated like a force of nature, a flow (as our enemies might like us to passively accept it), something that just happens? or rather an egregious social policy instantiated by hostile and irresponsible elites?

For Kaufmann to say that “social constructionism is overstated” is not accurate then. He might say with accuracy, that the agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated where it might attempt to say that it can make just whatever it likes of brute facts. But then that is neither particularly social nor anti-Cartesian indeed, but rather solipsistic, violating the corrective raison d’être of social constructionism and its means to harness social accountability.

Besides a red caping for the sake of Jewish interests, to dissuade Whites from this vital instrument (viz. for Whites to organize as a group), I believe much of the abuse of social constructionism has to do with the university being in the big business of selling talk and undergraduates being the paying customers that can be lured into liberal tenured professors’ language games by appealing to them with an “empowering” sense of overstated agency and liberal activism.

That correction at hand, back to Kauffmann

What society chooses to focus on and care about, the emotions it feels, the objects it sacralizes, the boundaries between groups, vary a lot across time and place. For instance, choosing not to shake someone’s hand is offensive in Western culture, but not in Japan, where a bow is the common greeting. Leaving food on one’s plate is treated as an insult in Japan, but not in the West. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning show that in Western elite culture in 1800, as in violent inner-city neighborhoods today, insults were treated as violence, which can only be avenged by physical violence. But for most of us, who haven’t been inculcated into a touchy honor culture, verbal slights don’t carry the same emotional punch. We either ignore them or respond with a counter-insult. As the sociology of emotions tells us, the way societies and individuals emotionally respond to words is, to an important degree, socially constructed.

The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s [*internationalist left ergo liberal-modernist] offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.

Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed [liberal internationalist] left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions.

Suddenly, an entire Orwellian world opens up: place names, history books, statues, buildings. When you’re equipped with the anti-racist hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. In this brave new world, it doesn’t matter whether a symbol like the Rhodes Scholarship has acquired a completely different meaning, or whether a statue has become a symbol of something completely different. All must be levelled to bring forth utopia.

What has occurred across the West, especially in the English-speaking world, is a steady [liberal internationalist] left-modernist march through the institutions. Beginning in the 1960s, former radicals entered universities and the media, capturing the meaning-producing machines of society. Once boomers became the establishment in the 1990s, the ethos of institutions started to shift. For good and ill, equality and diversity rose up the priority list. As these ideas filtered through Schools of Education and into the K-12 curriculum, older ideas of patriotism faded and the new critical theory perspective began to replace it. Sixty three percent of millennials (aged 22–37) now agree that “America is a racist country,” nearly half say it is “more racist than other countries” and 60 percent that it is a sexist country. Older generations are less radical, but 40–50 percent of boomers and Gen Xers agree with these statements, reflecting the long march of the [Internationalist Marxist] Left through American culture.

The deculturation of America

In order to find out how willing liberal Americans are to jettison the country’s cultural identity, I decided, on May 7th, to ask what I thought were outlandish questions—almost to the point of inflicting a Sokal Squared-style hoax on survey respondents. The answers I received amazed me. I then repeated the exercise on June 15th, after the George Floyd killing and subsequent protests to see whether things had gotten even crazier. It turns out they have.

After the preface, “To what extent do you think that the following should be done to address structural barriers to race and gender equality in America,” I presented 16 statements that an amalgamated sample of 870 American respondents could agree or disagree with. The sample is not representative of the American population—I used the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic survey platforms that thousands of academics use. Respondents on these platforms lean young, liberal, and white. But as this is precisely the group I wished to study, this is not a major limitation. Indeed, I have removed conservatives and centrists to focus only on liberals. Liberals are defined as those who rate themselves as a one “very liberal” or two “liberal” on a five-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The liberal sample, consisting of 414 people, was 86 percent white and 53 percent male. Forty percent of liberals identified as “very liberal” and the other 60 percent as just “liberal.”

Responses ranged on a seven-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” I’ve simplified the seven categories into a binary agree-versus-disagree score. Those who scored a four—“neither agree nor disagree”—were dropped from the analysis, permitting me to gauge where the balance of committed opinion lies.

Here is what I asked people to agree or disagree with:

1. Rebalance the history taught in schools until its voices and subjects reflect the demographics of the population and heritage of Native people and citizens of color.

2. Move, after public consultation, to a new American anthem that better reflects our diversity as a people

3. Rename our cities and towns until they match the demographics of the population

4. Rebalance the art shown in museums across the country until an analysis of content shows that it reflects the demography of the population and perspective of Native people and citizens of color

5. Move, after an open public process, to a new name for our country that better reflects the contributions of Native Americans and our diversity as a people

6. Rename our states until they better reflect the heritage of Native people and citizens of color

7. Gradually replace many older public buildings with new structures that don’t perpetuate a Eurocentric order, until a more representative public space is achieved

8. Respectfully remove the monument to four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and repression of women and minorities

9. Allow our public parks to return to their natural state, before a European sense of order was imposed upon them

10. Move, after public consultation, to a new American flag that better reflects our diversity as a people

11. Consider adopting a new national language, that will be forged from the immigrant and Native linguistic diversity of this country’s past

12. Remove existing statues of white men from public spaces until the stock of statues matches the demographics of the population

13. Gently remodel the statue of liberty to make it better reflect the diversity of America

14. Rename our streets and neighbourhoods until they match the demographics of the population

15. Move, after public consultation, to a new American constitution that better reflects our diversity as a people

16. Begin changing the layout of our cities, towns, and highways, moving away from the grid system to follow the more natural trails originally used by Native people