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June
10
2020

Can We Survive Our Collective Stupidity?
Paul Craig Roberts

I have come to the conclusion that collectively Americans are mentally and emotionally stupid.  On any given day there is endless evidence that this is the case.  Just a few selections from news of the last couple of days should suffice to establish the point.

Instead of reforming police training as a rational response to George Floyd’s death from an aggressive restraint technique, the Minneapolis city council voted to disband the Minneapolis police. Council woman Lisa Bender responded to a citizen’s question what she is supposed to do if she faces a threat in her home and there are no police to call:  “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”

In other words, the Minneapolis citizen’s concern is not legitimate and merely reflects her privileged assumption that she is entitled to protection by police. The valid concern is to protect blacks from the police by disbanding the police.

Kristina Roth of Amnesty International wrote to me in a fundraiser that “Police must stop killing black people.”  What about white people, Kristina?  White lives matter, too. The police shoot to death far more white people every year than black people— https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/03/all-races-suffer-from-police-violence/ .  Shouldn’t Kristina be demanding that “police must stop killingpeople?”  Why does Kristina blame racism instead of police training? Kristina needs to read and reflect upon this:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/08/the-sociology-of-police-violence-racism-isnt-the-real-problem/ .  

The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign because of the headline on a reporter’s article. The article was very sympathic to the black rioters but didn’t quite see the point of blacks destroying historic buildings in Philadelphia because of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The editor was done in by the article’s headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”  This incensed the woke morons, and despite his groveling apology the editor was removed— https://www.rt.com/usa/491122-philadelphia-editor-resigns-headline/ . So much for “white privilege.”  White newspaper editors cannot even exercise freedom of speech in the choice of headlines.

Not even editors at the New York Times, which grovels at the feet of blacks and self-righteous woke, can survive their exercise of freedom of the press—https://www.rt.com/usa/491143-nytimes-oped-editor-resigns-cotton/ . The opinion editor and his deputy had to resign for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s call to deploy the military to protect people and property from the rioters and looters. I am confident that the NY Times published Sen. Cotton’s article with the intention of damning Cotton for not being more sympathetic to black looters. But the woke creatures and the NY Times publisher A.G.Sulzberger removed the editors because of “the pain they inflicted.” 

Pain inflicted on who?  The pain inflicted on owners of businesses, buildings, and cars destroyed by rioters using violence to express their disapproval of violence? No. As Lisa Bender put it, these concerns don’t matter as they come “from a place of privilege.” Only  the pain of those privileged to riot and loot counts.

As kids we used to say, “sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  Today for the woke weaklings the wrong word is like a nuclear weapon. They collapse in tears and recriminations. NY Times Staffers claimed that by publishing Sen. Cotton’s article, the opinion editor had put their lives in danger by not validating looting and rioting as a valid exercise of free speech.  Somehow it did not occur to Sulzberger that the protesters must not be so innocent if NY Times staffers are in fear of their lives because of a few words from a US Senator.

JK Rowling is in trouble again from the transgender freaks who reject the word “woman” as transphobic. Rowling took exception to the term “people who menstruate.” and caused “unimaginable pain” by remarking that there used to be a word for “people who menstruate”—women. https://www.rt.com/news/491077-rowling-trans-women-row/ 

A professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina has been denounced by the university administration for “vile and inexcusable comments,” such as “Don’t shut down the universities; shut down non-essential majors like women’s studies” —https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/us/professor-controversy-tweet-university-north-carolina-wilmington-adams/index.html . The UNC administration says “we are very carefully and assertively reviewing our options in terms of how to proceed.”  The hypocritical administration went on to say “Hateful, hurtful language aimed at degrading others is contrary to our university values and our commitment to an environment of respect and dignity. Its appearance on any platform, including the personal platforms of anyone affiliated with UNCW, is absolutely reprehensible.” What nonsense!  Everyday on the UNC campus black studies professors teach students that white people are racists and slavers, and women’s studies professors demonize men as misogynists and rapists.  The hypocrites that comprise university administrations never do anything about this “reprehensible, hateful, and hurtful language” aimed at white people and at men.

A retired US Navy captain had to resign from the US Naval Academy Alumni Association board after a private conversation with his wife was accidentally streamed on Facebook. The captain used the n-word and said that white men “can’t say anything.” His wife complained of Chinese who “steal all of our intellectual property.”  The couple are mortified and deeply sorry to have spoken in derogatory terms “about our fellow man,” a regret that black rioters and intellectual property thiefs do not reciprocate.  The alunmi association said that these private comments are “not consistent with our leadership mission.”  The couple have committed themselves to “using this experience as an opportunity to grow, listen, learn, and reflect . . . and being better people”—https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/us/navy-captain-racial-slurs-facebook/index.html. 

The groveling of Sulzberger at the NY Times, the groveling at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the groveling by the Minneapolis city council and by submissive police officers will only encourage the black violence that decades of being taught to hate white people has unleashed. As I have said so many times, a diverse, multicultural society cannot be built on hatred.  If blacks today had a real leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., that leader would be protesting police violence against people irrespective of race.  Such a protest would be a unifying act instead of a divisive one.  People such as myself could again see hope for American society. 

Perhaps women could also find a leader, and men and women could get back together in loving, mutually supportive relationships.  When I read that feminists have created men who prefer plastic “sex dolls” to a flesh and blood woman with emotions and a brain, I put “#Me/Too” in the catagory of bioweapons—https://www.rt.com/sport/484358-kazakh-bodybuilder-sex-doll-marriage-coronavirus/.  The body builder who is marrying a sex doll might be on a public relations trip to boost his following, but his “marriage” to a piece of plastic is credible only because relations between men and women have been so badly damaged by feminists that it is believable that he prefers a sex doll to a real woman. According to beastiality advocates, some women prefer their dog to a man.

Western civilization is collapsing because allegations from the least credible sources carry more weight than facts.  Emotions have displaced facts as the basis for understanding.  Emotion routinely shouts down facts.  It has become commonplace in universities for distinguished authorities to be shut down because the facts are unacceptable to the ignorant woke students, backed up by a roster of administrative thought police. 

Universities have abandoned their mission of searching for truth. They have become propaganda ministries that spew the acids that eat away foundations of civilization.

In Western Civilization today, the best way to destroy yourself is to stand up for truth. I am getting tired of it as support for the defense of truth is declining away.

There is a lesson for the warmonger neoconservatives in the extraordinary weakness that is now the core of Western Civilization, a civilization that is a discredited concept in every American university and is being damned again by the NY Times’ 1619 Project. It is hilarious that neoconservatives proclaimed a people as divided as the US, with the majority white population on the defensive, to be an exceptional and indispensable people. 

The US armed forces are a hodgepod of men, women, lesbians, homosexuals, a racial medley, and every element in it has been instructed by Identity Politics to hate and distrust the other.  Armies devoid of the homogeneity that gives unity are useless.  Only a fool would put an American or any European army against Russia and China. What will be our fate if the aggressive bombast that the neoconservatives and fellow travelers such as Liz Cheney —keep pumping out of Washington results in concerted Russian/Chinese action against the threat that the West is determined to portray itself to be? 

The hope for humanity is that the Russians and Chinese remain patient as the West continues its collapse under the weight of its own self-hate.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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