Above, the head of the Black Psychological Association, Theopia Jackson, and the CEO of the American Psychological Association, Arthur C. Evans Jr.
[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
As I start writing here on Friday morning, the news headliner is that Michael Reinoehl was killed Thursday evening in a shoot-out with cops who were trying to arrest him. It seems that no one else was hurt in the shoot-out; it was, as our own inimitable Steve Sailer observes, Mostly Peaceful.
Reinoehl was, by his own confession in an interview with Vice published earlier that same day [Man Linked to Killing at a Portland Protest Says He Acted in Self-Defense, September 3, 2020], the person who shot dead an unarmed Trump supporter in Portland, Ore. last Saturday.
The rioting anarchists of Antifa and Black Lives Matter may be in the service of a cynical elite hoping to bring down Trumpism and restore a happier state of affairs for globalist-corporatist-neoliberalism. They may, like Robespierre and Trotsky, end up under the guillotine themselves. But when I get a glimpse of their actual personalities, they are in the true revolutionary mold, like the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries in the late 19th, early 20th century.
We actually have quite a few specimens now. Reinoehl was a dedicated supporter of Black Lives Matter, with their clenched-fist symbol tattooed on his neck. He'd been arrested and cited in July for possessing a loaded gun in a public place, interfering with police, and resisting arrest [Michael Reinoehl, sought in fatal Portland shooting after Trump rally, killed by officers in Washington, OregonLive, September 4, 2020]. Before that, in June he got a failure-to-appear warrant issued against him; charges there were driving under the influence of a controlled substance, recklessly endangering another, unlawful possession of a gun and driving while suspended and uninsured.
He claimed to be a professional snowboarder; but the firm he named says they never employed or sponsored him. He claimed to be an Army veteran, but the Army has no record of him. His sister disowned him some time ago.
Then there's 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum, the first of the three people shot in self-defense by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was a convicted child rapist. Court documents from 2002 reproduced on the internet list a range of sex crimes against several boys from the ages of nine to eleven years old, including outright rape [HUGE: Court Documents Reveal Shot Kenosha Rioter Joseph Rosenbaum Was a Convicted Child Rapist, by Richard Moorhead, BigLeaguePolitics, September 3, 2020]. His prison record shows 40 disciplinary infractions for arson, disobeying orders, manufacturing a weapon, refusing to work … This guy was a real no-goodnik.
Anthony Huber, the other guy killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, was only 26, but he already had quite a rap sheet going back to at least 2016: possession of drug paraphernalia, and a whole host of charges under the heading "domestic abuse"—strangulation and suffocation, false imprisonment, battery, disorderly conduct, …
The guy Kyle Rittenhouse shot but didn't kill is Gaige Paul Grosskreutz, also 26. He's been comparatively well-behaved: convicted of a criminal misdemeanor in 2016 for going armed with a firearm while intoxicated, and some nuisance offenses.
So of these four anarchists who chance to have come to our close attention, every one could fairly be described as a misfit. These are not normal, stable people. Revolutionaries hardly ever are.
Here's one of them from the 19th century: Sergey Nechaev, Russian of course, supposed to have been the model for Verkhovensky in Dostoyevsky's novel Demons:
A revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose—to destroy it.
[Catechism Of A Revolutionist, 1869, as quoted in Stalin, by Edvard Radvinsky, 1997]
That's the true revolutionary personality. But back of those revolutionaries and their various levels of nihilistic passion there is of course an ideology. It's not just their ideology, either: It is mighty in the land.
APA is the American Psychological Association. Sample text:
Today's inequities, psychologists say, are deeply rooted in our past, and the status quo is no longer acceptable. "Every institution in America is born from the blood of white supremacist ideology and capitalism—and that's the disease," says Theopia Jackson, Ph.D. [Email her], president of the Association of Black Psychologists.
[by Zara Abrams, APA Monitor, September 1, 2020]
Has the Association considered that perhaps "today's inequities" are deeply rooted in biological race differences?
Good heavens, no! Get out of here, Nazi!
The APA is on the case, though. In June it launched a series of virtual town halls for its members, with the aim of "establishing a racially diverse psychology workforce and more efficiently and effectively translating research insights into action."
You don't get very far into an article of this sort before you come to the guilt section. From APA CEO Dr. Arthur C. Evans Jr. [Tweet him] (who also happens to be black):
APA has a long history of taking a stand on these issues, but we also know that we have our own issues as an association and as a field. We have to look at our role as a discipline in perpetuating some of the things that are being protested. That has to be a part of our commitment.
We are guilty, guilty! We are all guilty!
This proposal appears in a multi-author article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine [Blackface in White Space: Using Admissions to Address Racism in Medical Education, by Nientara Anderson, Dowin Boatright, and Anna Reisman, June 29, 2020, pictured below].
Key passage:
Many medical schools have made efforts to address pervasive racism in medical education by forming committees and appointing deans focused on diversity and inclusion, adding health equity classes to their curricula, conducting training on implicit bias and microaggressions, and expanding racial and social-economic equity in admissions.
However, [the authors of the article] believe a more direct way to address racism in medical training is to "stop admitting applicants with racist beliefs."
…For example, essays, resumes, letters of recommendation, and interviews could be used to evaluate whether applicants "hold racist beliefs or invalid and fixed views on biological differences between races."
i.e. a political test.
This is a medical school, dammit! We'll have none of that filthy biology here!
The author of this article is history professor Elizabeth Kolsky, [Email her] author of a book titled Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law. She starts off of course with the death of George Floyd:
The preliminary findings of the Hennepin County medical examiner's report … used the veneer of scientific respectability to advance the outrageous claim that Floyd was partly responsible for his own death—something we know is untrue, given the subsequent reports.
Hm. I wonder how well that will age?
Then Prof Kolsky rambles off into a long tale about how beastly the colonial Brits were to the people of India, and my eyes glazed over. White people bad, dark people good; OK, got it.
This touches me more than the other examples, as I was once a keen reader of Scientific American. I can still remember the first issue I ever read: January 1960, cover story The Green Flash.
The magazine has long since gone CultMarx, though, and I haven't looked into it for years, except when friends send me links to especially egregious specimens of wokeness. Which a friend just did.
Headline: Reckoning with Our Mistakes. Subheading: Some of the cringiest articles in Scientific American's history reveal bigger questions about scientific authority, by Jen Schwartz and Dan Schlenoff, September 2020
Well, no, they don't really. The article does, though, reveal how racked with guilt a respectable old magazine has to be, or pretend to be, nowadays if it wants to stay respectable:
During the 19th century, Scientific American published articles that legitimized racism … By 1871 Charles Darwin had concluded that all living humans were descended from the same ancestral stock … But none of that stopped the rise of scientific racism, including false ideas about biological determinism.
Down with biological determinism! Just because you're a fish, that doesn't mean you need to be in water all the time!
In fact, Darwin had a bit more to say about the descent of man. In fact he wrote an entire book about it (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871). Sample quotes:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world …
Looking at the world at no very distant date, an endless number of lower races will be eliminated by the higher civilized races.
How are Scientific American’s Schwartz and Schlenoff not aware of this? Do we have to Cancel Darwin now?
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
