Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 149th episode. In this episode I want to give a thorough explanation of the attempted transformation which is taking place in the western world – particularly in the United States – in the year 2020. I titled this episode Learn This and Tell Everyone because I can’t think of a more important moment for this generation to stand up and speak the truth. The groundwork for this transformation has been carefully built for at least the last 30 years. If you live in the United States and you’re listening to this, be certain we are experiencing a revolution which is a pastiche of postmodernism and neo-Marxism. The unrest and the unprecedented government overreach is not going to fix itself. It can only be fixed by a majority of Americans understanding the truth and being courageous enough to speak it. I’m going to walk you through the evidence for all of this today. I’m also going to examine the chain of bad ideas which have caused this kind of collective psychosis to occur repeatedly in various societies throughout history. But before I do any of that I want to make the best case I can in support of the claims of the bad actors who are leading this revolution – namely far-left political activists. I think it’s incredibly important that we search for truth no matter who the source is, and I want to make sure I gather the bits of truth these otherwise insane people are subscribing to.
So first let’s talk about the trio of publications which are functioning as the vanguard of this movement’s pseudo-intellectualism. These documents are to the western world what The Communist Manifesto was to the USSR. The titles are: The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. You should read these publications for yourself, but it’s sufficient for the scope of this episode to boil them down to a basic collection of theses which are being used to rationalize rioting, looting, the restructuring of socioeconomic policy, and the undermining of legal authority.
So here are their claims: America was built on the foundations of slavery and much of this racism has been carried over from history into the institutions our country depends on today. Black well-being is a one-to-one function of systemic racism. If a black person is not doing well or behaving poorly, it’s likely due to institutional racism setting them at a disadvantage. Systemic racism is not limited to, but particularly manifests itself in, our police force. Racism is so deeply ingrained in white people that much of the time they are unaware of it or refuse to acknowledge it. If you are white and you say you’re not a racist, this just means you’re ignoring the problem and your ignorance of the problem proves you are a racist. Not being a racist is not enough, you must unquestioningly support the claims of the leaders of the anti-racist movement otherwise you don’t care about elevating the positions of people of color. White well-being is one-to-one function of white privilege, or how many resources the white community can steal from the black community by way of systemic racism. They claim these issues are so fundamental to American life that the current American system must be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground.
Obviously I think these claims are erroneous and I’m going to debunk each of them in this episode – but I do think they are an honest representation of what far-left activists really believe at this moment. The issue is there are leaders in the movement who are using these claims about the black community to mask their actual agenda. They’re using public misconception about issues in the black community to rally support for the demolition of American governance. They’re doing this because they seek the opportunity to rebuild the system in their own image where they occupy the highest positions of centralized power. The leaders of this movement do not care about black people at all. Woke leaders have sacrificed the well-being of the black community to serve their own lust for power by sowing more racial division in America than there has been since the civil rights movement. Their entire platform depends on racism being alive and well so they have a vested interested in creating more racism in America. The worldview these leaders are purveying doesn’t allow for black people to be successful on their own merit. When you reference successful black people these leaders accuse you of pointing out anomalies as if these individuals simply got lucky.
So let’s go through each claim point by point to understand what’s true versus what isn’t. First is that America was built on the foundations of slavery and much of this racism has been carried over from history into the institutions our country depends on today. The obvious reason so many people accept this claim as being true is the history of American slavery. The enslavement of black people prior to the Civil War is truly a sin of our past. We should not shy away from studying the atrocious ways black people were treated during this time period. We should vow to never let anything like that happen again. It’s also the case that black people were abused during the Jim Crow era which ended in 1965. We should separate the very real and necessary work of Martin Luther King from the work of deceptive activists today. We do have a history of racism in America. History has consequences and that’s why there are negative feedback loops which exist in many black communities today. These negative feedback loops must be addressed in order to ensure our black brothers and sisters have as equal of opportunities as the rest of us. But equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity means every individual should have an equal chance to succeed regardless of gender or skin color. Equality of outcome means anyone who succeeds at a higher rate than someone else is an oppressor and must be taken out. Equality of opportunity is desirable and we should pursue it – but equality of outcome is reprehensible and we should call it out every time we see it.
These negative feedback loops set black communities at a disadvantage when compared to some white communities. A good example of a negative feedback loop is black communities being assessed at lower property values than white communities because of past redlining. If your property values are assessed lower than comparable communities then you won’t be able to provide effective education. If you can’t provide effective education then your community won’t be able to perform high skill jobs and will remain poor. A poor community will result in lower property values which will feed the negative cycle. But redlining was made illegal in the 1970s. The negative feedback loops we see today are simply footprints of systemic racism which has long been made illegal. This is an important distinction because negative feedback loops cannot be alleviated by restructuring the system as it stands today – because the system as it stands today does not disparage against black people. If anything affirmative action policy has helped shape a system which favors black people. At this moment there are no laws enforced in America which cause black people to be treated unfairly in comparison to white people. There are negative feedback loops from past laws which need to be addressed as separate issues. The church should take on responsibility to love communities of color which suffer from these cycles and we should help to lift them up. But that’s not the same prescription as saying the American system itself is racist and must be torn down. It’s not the same at all.
The values upon which America was founded have produced the most stable, safest, least racist, and most prosperous society on earth. If you want proof then go back and listen to MHB 139. It was the Judeo-Christian values which characterize America that motivated Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was a Christian pastor. The American system benefits black people every bit as much as it benefits white people. And black people will suffer the consequences just as much as white people if we allow a Marxist revolution to destroy the system. In fact they will probably suffer more because they will lose the protections of the system in addition to exacerbating current negative feedback loops. America was not founded on racist ideals and institutional racism has been extinct for over 30 years. The America we know today is the best place in the world to live regardless of your skin color.
The next claim is that black well-being is a one-to-one function of systemic racism. The claim holds that if a black person isn’t doing well or behaving poorly then it must be the consequence of systemic racism. In other words woke leaders believe black people have no agency or control over themselves. They’re not responsible for their actions therefore they should not be punished when making bad choices nor acknowledged when making good choices. There’s no way for a black person to improve him or herself because the quality of his or her life is purely dependent on the measure of systemic racism. If something bad happens to a white person then we must examine his actions and find out whether he bears responsibility. If something bad happens to a black person we must jump straight to racism as an irrefutable cause for their misfortune.
To ask whether the black person bears responsibility in this situation is an inquisition which betrays your inner racism. This claim is obviously false because black people are unique human beings made in the image of God just like white people. Black people are fully capable of making both good and bad choices, and black people are required to live with the consequences of their choices just the same as white people. To deprive black people of this divine agency is to condemn them to a hopeless existence where they must forever view themselves as victims of a corrupt system. No thanks, I won’t do that. There are too many black people who have accomplished great things and I refuse to believe they didn’t earn their own success. There are too many black people who will go on to accomplish great things, and I refuse to snuff out their ambition by pretending they are permanent victims of mythical systemic racism.
Speaking of mythical systemic racism, the next claim to be debunked is the myth that American police are fundamentally racist. Are there a few racist cops? Absolutely, and we should do everything we can to root them out and remove them from the force. But a few racist police officers tells me nothing about the overall condition of police in general. What does tell me about the overall condition is data. I used this data in MHB 139 but I’ll provide it for you again because not enough people are talking about it. This data was presented by Heather Mac Donald in the Wall Street Journal:
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
Not only is the American police force thoroughly non-racist, but they actually go out of their way to avoid hurting black people. You’re in greater danger of suffering police brutality in this country if you’re white. The left-wing woke mob is speaking the opposite of the truth in this regard. Now it is true that black people are racially profiled far more than white people. On average, a black male is far more likely to be pulled over for no reason apart from his race than a white male. And I actually agree that black people should be quite angry about this stereotype. Their anger is righteous indignation because being racially profiled is not fair. But their anger needs to be directed at violent black males. The extreme propensity for black males to commit acts of violence in comparison to males of other races is what fuels the stereotype. Being angry at the police won’t change the root cause of the profiling. If next week blonde white women started committing the majority of violent crime in America then the police would profile blonde white women instead of black males. The data proves American police are not racist and they do everything they can to avoid harming black people.
The next claim is that racism is so deeply inculcated in white people that many of them are either unaware or refuse to acknowledge their own racism. This claim is supported by what are called implicit bias tests. Implicit bias tests attempt to uncover biases you didn’t know you had. But what they really do is manufacture biases through test manipulation. Even the creator of the implicit bias test no longer supports it. The reason is because the implicit bias test forces you to make snap decisions through very small windows of time. The unreliability of the test is revealed once these windows of time are expanded. When given more time make choices, the implicit bias virtually disappears. So why do woke leaders keep pushing this idea of implicit bias? The answer is because it gives them an easy avenue toward circular reasoning. Within their construct of circular reasoning there’s no way a white person can be anything but racist. If you openly admit you’re a racist then obviously you’re a racist. But if you hold your ground and say you’re not a racist then that just means you’re unaware of your own racism. If you point out the metrical problems with implicit bias tests that means you refuse to acknowledge your own biases, which again makes you a racist.
Why do woke leaders insist on having the option to label anyone they choose as a racist? It’s because being labeled a racist gets you deplatformed and ostracized from the public conversation. It’s a very convenient means of achieving censorship of your political opponents. But the fact that it works reveals the truth that America is far from a racist country. If America were racist to the core like they claim, then wouldn’t being labeled a racist be a badge of honor? The woke cult has constructed a doctrine wherein keeping to yourself and not being racist isn’t enough. You must actively take part in whatever movements they label as anti-racist. If you refuse to unquestioningly repeat their mantras, then you must not care about the well-being of black people and are therefore a racist. They’ve used this cudgel to bully the sane portions of our society into silence and to rally confused people into supporting riots, looting, and targeted censorship. They claim that silence in the face of mythical racism is equal to violence against the black community, and they use this false equivalency to justify real violence against anyone they choose to target.
The next claim to debunk is this: if you’re a white person, then your well-being is a one-to-one function of your white privilege. This means any modicum of success you achieve through competence and hard work is actually just resources you stole from oppressed people. This is why woke leaders do everything they can to ignore police violence against white people. This is why woke leaders do everything they can to ignore communities of white people who are impoverished. These realities punch holes in their pathological narrative. The truth is all people – black, white, and whatever color – are always at risk of suffering death or serious harm. That’s what it means to live in a fallen world. America has managed to produce a society in which nearly all of these dangers have been dramatically reduced. But the dangers are still prowling outside the walls of safety our ancestors have built for all of us. If we tear down the system out of a false assumption that it’s racist, we will see all these dangers flood back in and torment every single one of us indiscriminately. Entropy, scarcity, disease, and human evil will spike like none of us can possibly imagine and our world will become unrecognizable. The activists will shudder in fear as they see warlords rise out of the chaos and true oppression re-emerge in the west. We really don’t want to screw this up – there’s a lot of suffering waiting for us on the other side if we do.
If the racial narrative in America is so blatantly false, why do woke leaders keep pushing it? The answer has nothing to do with social justice. In fact, these Marxist revolutionaries are sacrificing the black community in an effort to become ascendant. Their lies have created so much racial tension in the past six months that all they’ve done is made life harder for most people of color. And the truth is they don’t care about this effect at all – and it’s possible they desire it. If their claim to power depends on America being a horrible, racist country – do you really think they want America to stop being racist? They have a direct power interest in creating as much racism as they possibly can. But what’s the motivation for all of this?
It’s a combination of postmodernism and neo-Marxism. The postmodern part is when you hear people talking about their own beliefs as if they equal reality. So if I’m a biological male but I believe I’m a female, the postmodernist would say in reality I’m a female. Biological reality and actual truth do not matter – all that matters is what I believe to be true. This postmodernism is a rejection of any authority outside of yourself. Postmodernism is more common among Americans than Marxism and that’s largely due to the secularization of society. Most Americans are very uncomfortable with telling others what’s right and what’s wrong because they think: who am I to be the judge? It’s correct that none of us have the authority to be the judge, but reality itself does have the authority. It doesn’t matter how fervently you believe gravity isn’t real – if you jump off a building gravity is going to assert its own reality over your beliefs.
The postmodernist believes there are an infinite number of ways to walk through life. Any limitations on this freedom are simply social constructs designed to invalidate the experience of oppressed minorities. This idea catches a lot of people because on the surface it appears true. But once you play it out you understand the falsehood. There are an infinite number of ways to walk through life – but there are not an infinite number of ways to walk through life successfully. You must walk through life in such a way that promotes your own well-being today, tomorrow, next week, next month, and five years from now. That means you have to sacrifice some things which would be really great in the moment because of what these things would do to your future. Not only does your chosen mode of being have to be iterable across time, but it also has to promote the well-being of your family, your community, your city, and your nation. It has to do all of these things simultaneously and it turns out in order to achieve this you must have a very tight set of constraints on your chosen way of life. And these constraints are set upon you by objective reality. Getting emphysema from smoking too many cigarettes is not a social construct. Starving to death because you used up all your resources in one night rather than planning for the future is not a social construct. These are limitations placed on you from outside of you. This proves postmodernism is false. There is a right and wrong way to conduct yourself in reality and choosing the wrong way will lead to the destruction of yourself and others.
So the postmodernism helps keep people from speaking up because everyone feels a sense of chaotic confusion and no one wants to be the judge of what’s right or wrong. This isn’t a problem if you believe in God as the final arbiter of truth – but the secularization of American society has removed this option for many people. This refusal to speak up has created a power vacuum which has been filled by Marxist revolutionaries who are not afraid to speak up. Woke leaders speak with conviction and zeal as if they themselves are the final authority on moral truth. This zeal is attractive to people who are confused by the chaos – it comes off as a direction to go in. Almost all of our positive emotion is associated with watching ourselves make movements in a desired direction. A directionless person is stripped of his or her positive emotion and all that’s left is negative emotion. That’s why authoritarians are so seductive to lost people – they give them a direction to go in and this sense of direction floods their brains with positive emotion. That’s why it feels so good to get out there and be an activist even if you don’t know what you’re protesting for. It’s the drug of the mob.
Another reason Marxism keeps resurfacing is its attempt to explain several fundamental human experiences. All human beings who are outside of God are saddled with a sense of guilt and resentment. This guilt and resentment is a consequence of our broken relationship with God. The Marxist claims the guilt you feel is solely due to your oppression of others. That’s why they’re using the black community as their pawns. The black community has a history of real oppression, and so it’s not hard to suggest to a person who feels a strong sense of guilt that they are still oppressing black people right now. The Marxist explains resentment by pointing to the oppressor class – namely white people. No one likes to feel guilt and resentment, and the Marxist claims you can purge both of these emotions by targeting white people in the name of social justice for black people.
The other fundamental reality the Marxist leverages is the natural inequality of hierarchies. It’s an axiomatic truth that hierarchies dispossess people at the bottom. The Pareto distribution proves that 80% of creative resources in any domain will collect with the top 20% of creators given enough time. This kind of thing is not a human construct and not a consequence of evil capitalism. It’s built into the universe itself. It’s similar to survival of the fittest. The tallest trees in the Amazon absorb more sunlight and therefore grow even taller. The stars with the most mass have a stronger gravitational pull and therefore gain even more mass. A small percentage of musicians produce nearly all of the music which is played in the mainstream. A small percentage of painters have produced most of the world’s masterpieces. You get the idea.
Anytime you do anything you produce a hierarchy. Hierarchies dispossess and most people stack up at the bottom. The Marxist knows this, but the Marxist lies about the reason for the dispossession. The Marxist claims hierarchies dispossess because they are corrupt enterprises of power based on racial and social oppression. They use this narrative to justify flattening out the hierarchies are creating new ones where they occupy the top spot regardless of their competence or productivity. But here’s the issue with that: we all have real problems to solve or else we die. We need to feed ourselves and our families, we need to stay warm enough and cool enough – all of these basic needs. As soon as we form a society and attempt to solve these problems we produce hierarchies of people who are more effective than others at solving the problems. These hierarchies are not formed on the basis of corrupt oppression, they are formed on the basis of competence.
The Marxist uses compassion for the poor to disguise their hatred of the rich. You can tell the motivation for Marxist revolutions is hatred for the rich by looking at the murders. Nearly everywhere these kinds of revolutions take place there are millions murdered. The murders happen because in order to flatten our the hierarchies you need to dispose of those who are competent and who occupy higher positions than you. What most people don’t realize about Marxist revolutions is that the majority of death happens after the hierarchies are flattened. This happens because once you’ve killed or imprisoned the productive members of your society then cities burn and everyone starves to death.
I hope you’ve been able to see the transformation which is occurring in the western world goes way deeper than politics. It’s a matter of fundamental belief systems. Millions of people have been deceived into a false narrative which explains the universals of guilt, resentment, and inequality. If this narrative becomes ascendant and is allowed to manifest itself in socioeconomic policy – everything people worry about on a daily basis will become worse and new worries which have long since been solved by the American ingenuity will re-emerge from the darkness. And this is not something which will take generations to occur. It didn’t take generations in the 20th century and that was before internet. Information moves so much faster today.
It’s crucially important that we tell as many people as we can about this and we remain steadfast in three characteristics of our daily existence. First is humility. We must be humble enough to admit that we don’t know everything and we need to learn from others. Second is grace. We must be gracious enough to understand human beings say and do stupid things all the time. We must find it in ourselves to forgive them of their transgressions and show them the one who can redeem them. Third is truth. We must remain undeterred in our quest for discovering truth. We must have good faith conversations with those who disagree with us in an effort to get a better understanding of reality. If each one of us commits to live our lives with these three core values then I think we can preserve the greatest society history has ever known. But it’s up to us to do it and that means it begins with yourself. It takes a lot of faith to love your neighbor as you love yourself – but truly miraculous things are possible when you live this way. In the end, don’t let the chaos overwhelm you and break your spirit. Because ultimately, if you are in Christ Jesus, then everything is going to be okay.
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