Are Americans Insouciant?
Paul Craig Roberts
On occasion a reader takes exception to my description of Americans as insouciant. It is not our fault, the reader says. We are misled by disformation fed to us by media and authorities we can no longer trust. In a way the reader has a point, but not really. Anyone who can recognize disinformation and the untrustwortiness of authorities should be more alarmed, not less. To know you are being lied to, yet remain unconcerned certainly indicates a casual lack of concern.
Without getting too deeply into the subject, consider the Gillette anti-male ad inspired by feminist propaganda. Would a profit-seeking company offend their customer base in this way unless the company was convinced that the insouciance of its customers would protect the company’s profits? Men organized no boycott against the company’s products. American men went on their way unconcerned with their public demonization.
Consider Coca-Cola’s recent letter to the law firms the company uses telling the firms that unless the firms achieve more diversity, comply with quarterly reporting of the makeup of the race, gender, and disability of its attorneys, and comply with Coca-Cola’s requirement that unless “at least 30 percent of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys” the law firms will be docked 30 percent of their fees, and those who continue to come up short on diversity will no longer be considered for Coca-Cola work. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/coke-demands-diversity-among-law-firms-it-uses/ [1]
Large law firms that serve large corporations tend to hire from the top 10 percent of graduating classes. Coca-Cola is saying that this discriminates against blacks and other diversity and that the law firms need to hire according to race and gender and handicapped status if they care to have Coca-Cola as a client. James Quincey, a British citizen who is Coca-Cola chief executive, thinks racial quotas means we are “living up to the dream.”
Notice what Quincey is saying. It is racist to staff by hiring by ability if it results in white male hires, but it is not racist to hire by race if it is black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Asian, Hispanic, LGBTQ, Pacific Islander, female, or disabled persons. In other words, discrimination against white males in hiring is permissible, but not against anyone else.
The Civil Rights Act does not legitimize discrimination against white males or rule out hiring according to merit. The law says it is not permissible to use race or gender as a basis for refusing to hire. However, for decades white males have experienced reverse discrimination in university admissions, hiring, and promotion. Therefore, the law has been broken for decades. Now this violation of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment—equal threatment under law— that the Act was passed to support is being imposed on law firms by corporate clients. Quincey thinks that Coca-Cola is the US Supreme Court or the EEOC. We now have law declared by Coca-Cola’s CEO.
Insouciant white males have organized no boycott of Coca-Cola products. Law firms have not refused Coca-Cola as a client for assuming a law-making role and dictating the law firms’ hiring decisions.
There is a STEM high school in Northern Virginia that is being destroyed, because entrance has been based on merit. Admission on merit resulted in about 70% of the student body being Asian and 30% white. It has been decided that merit-based admission is racist. Merit-based entrance reqirements have been dropped, and admission will now be by race and gender quotas. In other words, the remedy is to destroy the prestigeous high school. The same thing can happen to law firms and to the companies they have as clients.
If we as an allegedly democratic society decide that merit-based systems are racist, there should be public discussion about the consequences of moving to a system in which, race, gender, and handicapped status are more important than merit. We should know what we are getting into and not be forced into it by indoctrination. Otherwise, we experience a coup, a revolution about which we were insouciant.
So many generations have been born into racial quotas against white heterosexual males that these quotas seem normal. I turn now to our insouciance to punishment in the absence of guilt.
In his novel, The Trial, published a century ago, Franz Kafka tells the story of a person arrested and prosecuted by inaccessible authority for an undefined crime. The trial takes place in the absence of an identifiable crime. Kafka foretold our own time.
Consider the diversity police at your university, corporation, and government agency. White males can commit violations that are not specified in any rule. For example, a person can be attacked, disciplined, even fired for using gender pronouns that have been in use for millenniums and are embedded in our speech habits. With the new rules imposed on the US House of Representatives by Democrats, it will not be long before a US Representative will be censured for using a gender term. To say “he” or “she” is now offensive and punishable. How did such absurdity come to pass? What kind of legal system is it when a person can be punished because some woke freak invents a new Orwellian wrongthink as an attack weapon? Without an insouciant population, could a system have been set up in which people can be found in violation of unspecified rules?
On occassions as rare as a blue moon, a reader will complain about my favorite term for the media—presstitutes. I don’t know if Victorians still exist in our time when Hollywood cannot make a movie without the F-word, or if I am being had by a humorist. But if the complaint is real, it reflects a remarkable insouciance. The presstitutes demonize white people, declaring all of us to be “systemic racists.” The demonization of white people is institutionalized in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The presstitutes teach blacks to hate whites and women to hate men, a category reduced to abusers and misogynists. The presstitutes speak with one voice in service to the ruling Establishment’s agendas, and I am supposed to show them respect?
The American media has completely and totally failed the role assigned to it by our Founding Fathers, a role protected by the First Amendment. Instead, the media speaks with one voice, censors and suppresses dissent, and creates a false reality by controlling explanations. This is anti-democratic in the extreme. Press prosititute is a precisely accurate term for the media.
Polls, which might or might not be reliable, show that 46 percent of Americans trust the media even after the media’s total failure in covering the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City bombing, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russian invasions, Iranian nukes, Russiagate, violent insurrection at the Capitol. Indeed, far from investigating these events, the media spread the false accounts for the Establishment and is now egging on the impeachment of a former president no longer in office, thus encouraging and supporting an unconstitutional act by the US Congress.
If the elected Congress of the United States itself disrespects the US Constitution, what hope can the American people have?
I rest my case that insouciance is a defining characteristic of the American people. Americans are unmotivated to protect the liberty bequeathed to them by the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 that established the people through their elected representatives as the source of law and required the government to be subject to, not dictator of, law.
In the 21st century American presidents Bush and Obama stripped due process protection out of the US Constitution with the complicity of the Supreme Court, Congress, the media, bar associations, law school faculties, and the American people, and began rule by executive order.
Currently the First Amendment is being stripped out, and the Second Amendment is to follow.
Increasingly, as I predicted, presidents approved by the ruling Establishment (which eliminates Trump) create law by edicts. We are witnessing the Caesars replacing the Roman Republic. Florida is a Republican state that refuses to oppress and bankrupt its citizens by ordering lockdowns. It is an open state. Where I reside life is normal and people are not dropping dead in the streets. As far as I can tell, you wouldn’t even know there was a Covid threat.
Florida has to pay for disproving the Covid narrative of fear. The illigetimate, coup-installed president Biden wants to lockdown interstate travel and prohibit travel to and from Florida. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article249154715.html [2]
You can bet your life that if Biden does, there will be no protest from the presstitutes, the Congress, the judiciary, the bar associations, the law schools. Will there will be Americans in the streets defending their rights?
Will a compliant, insouciant American population accept their dictated role as obedient serfs of the state or will they rebell?
Until I see them rebell, I will call them insouciant.