When Black Is White - The Closing Of The American Mind

Mary de Bennett watched the Argentina-England FIFA World Cup Final and said she and everyone she knew was against Argentina - a racist country which eliminated diversity with the landing of European settlers. 

 

Of course they conveniently forget that Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands - also World Cup contenders - were international slavers and responsible for transplanting the African diaspora in the New World.  If sports allegiance is to be based on presumed racial oppression, than these countries should fall under the same shadow of opprobrium and hate.  

 

Worse even than this historical hypocrisy is moral blindness, refusing to see, acknowledges, and accept that  Africans and African origin Europeans and Americans dominate world sports.  The American NBA, WNBA, and NFL - professional basketball and football leagues - are overwhelmingly black.  Olympic events - especially the short distance events - 100, 200 hundred yard dashes and hurdles - are dominated by black athletes.   

Small countries like Jamaica can field teams that successfully challenge much larger ones.  France's FIFA World Cup team is almost all African origin players. There can be only one logical explanation - individuals of African origin are genetically predisposed to athletic success. 

How can American progressives not at least consider the possibility that these criteria which determined the very nature of the black diaspora were correct; that it is not a coincidence that black athletes dominate no matter the sport? 

Mary de Bennett was one of these deliberately myopic individuals.  She was neither dumb nor unschooled.  Yet despite the evidence as plain as the nose on her face, she rejected it and said that it was a product of schooled, inherent white racism.  Black American basketball players, oppressed by the white man and deprived of country clubs and suburban fields could only play basketball on nasty, netless courts.  It was their perseverance, and cultural context which produced them, not genetics.

And what of the American football SEC where black players excel to an unheralded degree, their talents honed and developed on the same fields as their white brothers. 

The list, the examples, and the evidence progressives say are insurmountable - there is something more than culture, environment, and circumstance involved; and progressives not only have not looked at the issue but have determined not to look at it; for to do so would be to label them as racist. 

'To assume that blacks are genetically predisposed to athletic preeminence is heinous and racist'.  End of story.  Facts, evidence, logic are left at the door. Yet why is this conclusion so rejected? One dominant characteristic does not ipso facto exclude others. There is no reason why athletic ability and intelligence cannot coexist. 

There was recently a study of Ethiopian highlanders from which most champion distance runners come.  Ethiopian children born and brought up in Ethiopia were compared with Ethiopian children borne and brought up in Europe and the results were informative - both children showed the essential lung capacity and oxygen blood carrying capacity critical to long distance running 

 

The obvious was proven - there was something up with these Horn of Africa runners; and by extension the relationship with genetic physical disposition and performance was proven.  

American swimmers - white by and large - have a particular body type, the long torso and arms needed to propel them efficiently through the water.  The African body type so essential to running - well developed, large, and strong thighs and buttocks - is of no use in the pool. 

Again Mary de Bennett refused to consider the obvious. She refused to accept the fact that polar ice was increasing not decreasing, that geophysical data showed little or no sea level rises and no unexpected increase in Atlantic hurricanes or Midwest tornadoes. 

So what is it about the liberal mind that refuses to at least consider evidence that might counter or contradict their progressive assumptions?  What makes the liberal so fearful of even looking at data coming from the poles showing increasing, not decreasing ice? Or the actual costs of electric cars, considering ethics (child labor), environment (lithium and rare earth mining, and coal-fired electricity production), toxic waste disposal costs, etc.? Or the bio-physiological absurdity of the gender spectrum and the assumption that sexuality is a choice? Or that Israel is genocidal?

Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 long before the cancel culture of today in which he warned of progressive 1984 groupthink and mind control - a viral epidemic of assumption and presumption over logic and objectivity.  He could not have been more prescient.  The American Left has campaigned on a platform of ideals - what a compassionate, diverse, loving, uncontentious world would be like - without a whit of evidence that such utopian illusions could ever become reality - and have done their best to cloture all argument against the fallacious premise. 

 

In a country founded on the principles of the Enlightenment - logic, analysis, exegesis, and conclusion - how could such an airy, fantastical program have been devised let alone promoted?

Professor Arturo Schwartz of Cornell has offered an explanation.  In an article in Science he wrote this:

Hope and optimism are keystones of the American condition.  We are a country of hopefuls. What after all is the ethos of opportunity, the conviction that one's condition however dire, need not remain so if not hope? Such belief in possibilities, even improbable ones, is at the heart of American liberalism. Progressives have conflated the hoped for results of unerring, absolute conviction with secular action; but in so doing marshalled a monumental suspension of disbelief. If we say it often enough and with conviction, it must be true

Mary de Bennett looked at the inner city slums of Washington DC and did not see a teeming, uninhibited, tribal ghetto - dysfunctional, crime-ridden, and insular - but the expression of African American identity and the emergence of soul despite white oppression. 

She ignored genetics, history, Biblical wisdom, and common sense and believed in gender choice, the gender spectrum, and the fungibility of sexuality.  She ignored the fact that the illegal immigrants who in the millions overwhelmed the host country, offered nothing except numbers for gerrymandering and saw only a stream of needy refugees, innocent people seeking asylum. 

 Energy self-sufficiency is not a blow to the environment and the planet but the geopolitical means to counter Russian and Chinese hegemony.  Capitalism creates wealth and opportunity, the wealthy do not keep their money under the mattress but invest it to create jobs, build companies, and facilitate economic progress. A muscular foreign policy and the willingness to use force is the Machiavellian lesson of history and not bald adventurism. 

 

Argentina won the World Cup semi-final and a colleague mentioned that their victory was all the more impressive because they had no African players on the squad - a disadvantage impossible to overcome.  Mary howled racism, and suggested that her colleague retract such a baldly prejudiced statement.  Or Norway, he said, the whitest country on earth and the whitest team on the pitch. Shouldn't we be rooting for the clear underdog?

Listening to such passionate ignorance is one thing, but living with it quite another, for the political intensity bled over into other areas.  Racial prejudice, inequality, and white supremacy were at the heart of all evils, and she became a vigilante to out the worst cases of false assumption.  She saw injustice everywhere - a bad marriage was the result of male patriarchy and male oppression.  

The slow integration of Latinos into the American mainstream was the result of white supremacy and capitalist manipulation.  Conservative focus on individual responsibility was nothing more than moral arrogance and hermetic thinking. Philandering was a result of the persistence of the male troglodyte mentality - an unreconstructed remnant of the Paleolithic.  

She was  God awful, a harridan, a compulsive, judgmental, impossible woman; and her husband, tired of her lecturing harangues and increasingly febrile and nonsensical conclusions spent more and more time away from home until finally he sued for divorce.

Mary was shellshocked, unbelieving, and distraught. She had only been telling the truth, pointing out error, opening eyes and ears to the world's problems; but her mind was as closed to the realities of marriage, co-existence, and compatibility as it was to climate change, racial dysfunction, and geopolitics. 

A closed mind is a mind closed to every distinction, to every shade, every nuance.  So addled by political hysteria, who could expect her to be thoughtful, rational, and reasonable regarding her personal life?

The unashamed, unapologetic conservativism of Donald Trump has helped to right the balance.  He from the bully pulpit of the presidency has called out the presumptions and idealistic assumptions of the Left.  Black is black and white is white he said, and the nation began to take down their rainbow lawn signs, speak clearly and distinctly about what they saw, and finally rejected the cant and manufactured premises of the Left. 

 

Vixens, Harridans, And Toxic Femininity - The Sequelae Of Women's Liberation

Much has been made these days of toxic masculinity and how men are congenitally predatory, abusive, and dismissive of women - ogres, troglodytes, prognathous throwbacks to grunting Neanderthals.  Combined with whiteness, toxic masculinity becomes a poisonous potion, a virulent viral plague. Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir only hinted at the ugly nature of men; and it took another generation to fully expose their innate, foul brutality.  Men were now the enemy. 

However, Edward Albee turned the tables in  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf .  Martha is drama's harridan - a brutal, man-hating, vixen - and his George is the weak, sorry victim of her fury.  

There is some hope at the end of the story - they have so flayed each other to the marrow that perhaps there can be a new beginning; but real life's episodes, certainly as brutal and venomous as Albee's will turn out badly. There is no way that a couple with such profound psychological drivers and pitiful weaknesses can possibly go on from such an emotional holocaust. 

Tennessee Williams, whose characters are often timid, shy women looking for love - Alma of Eccentricities of a Nightingale is perhaps the most telling - has also created characters of the very opposite disposition.  Maggie the Cat is a duplicitous, treacherous woman who wants only money, reputation, and dominance but he can't hold back his admiration of this beautiful, stunning example of feminine will. 

Ibsen and Strindberg created strong willful women who despite the strictures of a socially conservative Victorian society bested men at an every turn.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Hilde Wangel, and Laura in The Father are consummate manipulators understanding men's weaknesses and foibles and taking every advantage of them. 

Shakespeare's heroines are cut from the same cloth.  Rosalind, Viola, Portia, the other women of The Comedies tolerate their inferior suitors, make fun of them, and then, as society demands, marries the best they can.

So given this social, emotional, and political ebb and flow why are women still a protected species? The American Left in classic doublespeak has championed women as the superior sex, but demanded protection from naturally predatory, abusive men. Yet Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg have shown that women need no protection and with intelligence, savvy, will, and ambition can get what they want from men. 

 

So why have modern women been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing men they marry? Why have they stayed married despite all signs that point to dissolution and preferred to nag, irritate, and badger instead?

The image of the hag, the badgering, incessantly critical, unhappily married, resentful, unpleasant woman should have been long ago relegated to the archives.  Successful modern day women have either acquired enough financial capital to leave a bad marriage; or have, like Shakespeare’s heroines, figured out how to get the best out of their husbands and their marriages to satisfy their needs; but most women still have neither sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  

Instead, women go toxic with their bickering, bitching innuendoes and never confront men on the battlefield, equal in strength, open and martial in their intentions, courageous and honest.  They are still confused, caught between their patriarchal upbringing and modern 'Be All You Can Be' propaganda.  They are examples of toxic femininity - the unspoken sequelae of sexual liberation. 

Belinda Potter was one of these women.  Not unintelligent or clueless and a woman with a perfectly good career, social position, and family, and certainly a woman who did not need to resort to the shrewishness of the put-upon wife, Belinda took her daily pound of flesh. 

She, despite her publicly calm, confident demeanor, was petty, nasty, and unpleasant at home.  There was something innately twisted about her, some unavoidable detritus from a patriarchal past, some dutiful warnings from a very harried mother, that made her avoid the usual quid-pro-quo contractual dialogue with her husband - something she was very good at in the office - and go after him with extreme grievance 

Women cannot simply leave men alone - there is some unstated, but hardwired rule - giving an inch means capitulation, losing a hard-won foothold, taking a step back to patriarchy, nominal respect, and demission to second-class citizenship. 

Marriage is no longer the limiting, No Exit prison it used to be; but most women still treat it that way.  Confined within its arbitrary borders because of psycho-social imperatives set down in childhood, women are betwixt and between and cannot help flailing away at the men they have agreed to wed.  They may not be Albee's Martha, but a close approximation. 

Belinda had loving but somewhat imperious father who ruled his mother with draconian efficiency but treated his daughter like the princess in the castle; so from her earliest years she was conflicted - princess or dutiful, obedient consort.  She loved her father but as society began to feminize, she doubted his integrity, and adopted the then-current meme - men were no good. 

She treated her male suitors with diffidence and with an unbendingly critical judgement found none of them suitable.  She was wary of the virile, confident men and dismissive of the demurring and patient.  She was a role model for uncertain women, and a harridan to the men who gave her wide berth. 

Motherhood complicated the issue - men were necessary, and that meant some kind of arrangement. Of course she could opt for single motherhood - picking a genetically suitable lover and having his child whether he agreed to it or not - but that option too had been compromised by her upbringing.  As overweening as her father had been and as complaisant as her mother was, it was still a proper nuclear family, an ideal at the time. 

So Belinda took the middle road and got married to a decent, passably attractive, promising father and acceptable housemate; but it wasn't long after marriage that she resorted to her old ways; but within the confines of marriage her diffidence and judgmentalism became a pound-of-flesh affair. The nitpicking, and low resolution but continuous hectoring began. 

Belinda, however, never counted on this man's reaction.  She erred in her judgment and picked one with more gumption and male prerogative than she thought; and in short time he was in bed with any number of willing, desirous women. 

Now what? she wondered.  This was not in the program, outside the design.  Men were supposed to heel, not jump and run.  

Her first instinct - again thanks to her mother - was to let it ride.  This disruption was only the result of an imbalance,  a temporary maladjustment of ying and yang.  He would come back like all men, and the marriage would return to normal. 

Her second instinct was of course to take him to task, confront him, give him his orders and rechain him to the doghouse.  

When he did return - that is, ceased his tomcatting and resumed normal, expected husbandly duties - she didn't confront him but upped the vixenish pressure, and made life miserable for him, sending an unmistakable signal which only forced him to leave once again.

One might be tempted to feel sorry for Belinda, caught as she was between the Scylla of background and traditional upbringing and the Charybdis of feminism; and overlook the pound-of-flesh syndrome unfortunately common among women in similar circumstances; but generosity is hard to come by.  This nasty transitionary period has simply widened the sexual divide.  Men, emerging from the penumbra of feminism and progressive cant have become more assertive.  Marriage is a porous affair, a permeable arrangement.  Mistresses, lovers, and paramours - always men's privilege - are back, exposed, and out in the open. 

Hard as it might be, women will have to put up or shut up - a harsh, and previously unconscionable idea, but the new algorithm. 

Belinda stuck with it.  Divorce was so tiresome.  Gradually she became like Vita Sackville-West wife of Harold Nicholson in the famous open marriage of the early Twentieth Century.  The hectoring, whingeing, nitpicking, and badgering stopped.  She had fewer lovers than her husband - again a reversion to her early life - but it wasn't quantity that mattered.  It was the paradigm - and no one was happier than her husband who had it all - beautiful young lovers and a wife and children to come home to. 

Why Conservatism Is Gaining Universal Appeal - Natural Law, Common Sense, And Culture

There have been remarkable conservative victories in Latin America, a region historically socialist, and the Presidents of El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Panama have taken strong stances on crime, public spending, taxation, and individual rights.

Nations in Western Europe have followed suit with Italy's President Giorgia Meloni leading the way, followed closely by likely winners in the next elections, Le Pen of France and Farage in Britain, Wilders in the Netherlands; and an Eastern Europe led by Poland and Hungary have become conservative stalwarts. 

 

This conservatism is bold, aggressive, and undaunted.  Bukele in El Salvador has redefined civil rights, stating unequivocally that the rights of the ordinary Salvadoran citizen to live in a peaceful, crime-free country trumps the rights of criminals; and accordingly he has rounded up members of the violent MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha gang, incarcerated them without the usual democratic due process, and has turned the country from one of the most violent in the hemisphere to the safest. 

Javier Milei of Argentina has made no bones about calling the socialist Left 'mierda', bloodsucking parasites on the body politic, taking money from the most productive and wasting it on unaccountable, fairy tale programs with no discipline, no objective indicators, and nothing but vain, self-serving, give-away appeal. 

Meloni of Italy has said she is proud of Italy's history, culture, and Christian leadership, and has refused the blandishments of the Left which has led to the uncontrolled illegal immigration from Africa, a Muslim wave which has threatened social stability and cultural integrity.  She has ruled that no LGBTQ proselytizing will not be allowed in Italian schools and that gay marriage and parentage is no longer officially recognized.  

 

Marine Le Pen and Marion Marechal in France have been even more defiant and have vowed if elected to cleanse France of the anti-democratic, divisive, hateful Muslim invasion. Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch of the UK have both denounced illegal, Muslim immigration and have said that legendary English culture is being eroded, derogated, and destroyed because of this unwanted influx. 

Sanae Takaichi, the new president of Japan has said that there will be no Muslim immigration to Japan, that no mosques will be built, and that despite the country's falling birth rate, she refuses to destroy its homogeneous culture.  

China, while officially Communist is socially conservative and committed to the universal extension of Han culture, adherence to Confucian values, and nationalism. Vladimir Putin is as committed to Russian cultural, social, economic, and political hegemony. 

These leaders and their constituents laughed at America during the Biden years - an unrecognizable country of fiction, absurdity, and self-indulgence.  The very idea of the gender spectrum, let alone transgenderism was unconscionable; and the lionization of the black man, former slave drawn from the African forest for his physical strength and fertility, was equally unthinkable.  Integration perhaps, but undeserved honor and privilege? Never.  

Americans might overlook the ghetto in the name of identity but not the rest of the world. Open borders are tantamount to erosion of the state, culture, and the nation. 

The arrival of Donald Trump has been welcomed by these countries.  Even America's adversaries, Russia and China, have given Trump respect.  He is a member of their Machiavellian realpolitik club, and such members can do business together.  The rest of the increasingly conservative world has looked to America for leadership and example. 

This conservatism is fueled by three things - natural law, common sense, and culture.  No one but America's progressives can look at history and see peace and internationalism in the offing - a naive misreading at best and a profound ignorance at worst. 

Self-interest is the driving force of human nature and has been played out in every social arena from family to tribe to region to country. Countervailing force, defiant opposition, territorialism, and hegemony have been the human rule since the first settlements and will continue.  Geopolitics should be based on that understanding, nothing more. 

Americans with their gender focus have rejected natural biological law just as they have dismissed the absolute of human nature.  No one but American liberals claim that sexuality is a matter of choice.  Such ignorance is remarkable. 

It only takes common sense to realize that open immigration will destroy the cultural underpinnings of a culture, will lead to a dismissal of nations' storied past, and will alter the central ethos forever.  It takes only common sense to realize that a nation without border integrity will be overrun, taken over, and weakened. 

Perhaps because America is such a new country without the thousand-year history of its adversaries and allies, and because it has no central moral, religious, or philosophical ethos, it defies the concept of culture.  Yet France, 'the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church', the nation that saved European Christianity from the Muslim invaders, is profoundly and historically 'cultural'.  So is Italy, Russia, China, and Japan. 

No nation has been successful without such a central, universal, cultural core.  Ethics and moral principles are important and the same ones have characterized the highest civilizations since Greece and Rome. 

The Left cries racism, xenophobia, nationalism, sexism, and homophobia; but these are empty threats, built on fictitious, unfounded, fabulist imaginings. National cultural integrity is not xenophobia but an expression defining human society since its origins.  

Traditional marriage and parentage is not homophobic but subscription to natural law, Biblical injunction and demographic reality. Pie-in-the-sky public spending has bankrupted, corrupted, and destroyed the strongest countries.  Idealism is for religious worship not public policy. 

The American Left still cannot get over the victory of Donald Trump and his fulfilled promises of returning the country to its originalist roots. No president has been so hated, vilified, and been the victim of such inchoate attacks.  The Left’s failed vision, one without historical validation and defying logic is empty of policy, salient ideas, or resonance.  Hatred is the only thing left in the armory. 

The Left looks with horror at the conservative wave across the globe and sees it as only a temporary setback to progressive ideals.  Their day will come. 

Perhaps. History has its surprises and vagaries; but such a reversal is unlikely since conservativism is based on historical appraisal, objectivity, human nature, and reality. Progressivism is based only on idealism, hope, utopianism, and fancy.