McMillan: The Transformation of America in the Post Baltimore, Ferguson and Floyd BLM Era

This series began with a discussion on the Rittenhouse case in the context of the post-Baltimore Freddie Gray, Ferguson-Michael Brown, and Minneapolis-George Floyd incidents that led to the current Antifa/Black Lives Matter rioting phenomenon of the 2020 election cycle. This series of articles is shifting to what ‘the transformation of America’ actually means in terms of what is actually changing and how. 

As the Rittenhouse case has died off of public discourse what is not dying off is the ‘transformation of America’ as the Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg Weather Underground and closely affiliated May 19th Communist Organization of the 1970s have evolved into the organizers of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements in the 2020s. The 1960s and 1970s radical Leftists have been gaining ground in the Western University system and fostering the movements from behind the scenes. 

In background, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were on the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives list in connection to an actual bombing of the US Capitol in 1983 until the charges were eventually dropped as other members of the organization were charged with the crimes and made plea deals. Ayers subsequently attended Columbia teaching college and gained a doctorate in Education and later taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was at the UOI in Chicago that Bill Ayers and Barrack Obama became acquainted. 

In the case of Susan Rosenberg, she also attended Bernard College of Columbia University in Northern Manhattan and was a founder of the May 19th Communist Organization that was affiliated with the Black Liberation Movement (the original BLM), the Black Panthers, and the Weather Underground, all of whom were located in the Northern end of Manhattan Island in New York. 

Rosenberg, along with Ayers, was also wanted in connection to the bombing of the U. S. Capitol Building in 1983, but since she was caught in possession of 750 pounds of explosives and illegally obtained firearms in connection to the killing of a policeman and Armored Truck guards in relation to a bank robbery in Nanuet, NY, and a series of other bank robberies in the New Jersey and New York area, Rosenberg was convicted and sentenced to 58 years in prison.  

It should also be known that Rosenberg was an associate of Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a Assata Shakur, who is still wanted in New Jersey for the shooting of an NJ State Trooper after the Nanuet shootings. Chesimard escaped to Cuba and has been living in exile since. She is a hero of the Antifa/BLM movement as evidenced by her picture, from the 1970s, was alongside Che Guevara’s in a wall mural in the Seattle CHOP during the 2020 riots.  

What is of note with Rosenberg, with all of her connections to the May 19th Communist Organization, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Front, and the Black Panthers, was that after spending 16 years in prison, Rosenberg had her sentenced commuted by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office in January 2000. 

Since her release, Rosenberg briefly taught at John Jay College and the City University of New York colleges but was pressured not to be rehired when Giuliani became mayor of New York City.  

She is now director of Thousand Currents nonprofit organization and was a founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement after the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Her name was removed from the website after Fox News aired the issue. Both organizations are rumored to be funded by George Soros’ Open Societies and Tides Foundations non-profit organizations, and these organizations have also been quite adept at grassroots fundraising on their own. 

This section about Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg is added to provide insight into the relationship of radical Marxists, the tendency of the University system to provide them a livelihood, as key leaders in the Democratic Party associate with them and protect them. 

Direction for the articles in this series

The rest of this series of articles will focus on the relationship between Marxist organizations and the Leftward movement of the Western University system which protects them and assists in their funding. The takeaway is that as the 1960s Liberals began taking over the department chairs in the 1970s and 80s and tend to protect fellow radical activists committed to the overthrow of the US government through violence on one hand while favoring Left-leaning students in graduate school on the other. 

Like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Gad Saad and Janice Fiamengo discuss in their many videos, the Western University system has been weeding out conservatives for decades and has moved from being neoliberal to being actual Leftists since the early 2000s. 

In academic literature, many researchers discussed the Leftward movement in Academia as early as the late 1980s and early 1990s. Notably, Barkow, Tooby and Cosmides wrote about this topic in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992), Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1988), and Dinesh D’Souza in Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991). 

I list these decades-old books because the transformation of the University system coincided with the collapse of Communism just as the 1960s radicals were taking over the educational institutions as the traditional Liberals were retiring, and then bequeathing the departments to more radical professors as they themselves retire. 

Hence the Western University system purposely avoids performing autopsies on failed Marxist experiments because it would no doubt impede their effort to “transform America.” Bureaucratic Socialism is academia’s path to power whether Bureaucratic socialism works or not.

The Frankfurt School and the emergence of the Left in the University System

This Leftward lurch first occurred in the sociology departments run by the Frankfurt School psychologists and Sociologists in the late 1940s, then shifted toward the race and gender studies classes as they emerged during the 1980s and 90s further influenced by the works of Foucault and Derrida’s “deconstructionism.” The various Leftist groups, ranging from Revolutionary Marxists to incremental Socialists now seem to dominate the soft philosophical and social sciences, especially the schools of journalism and Law Schools as Allan Dershowitz has discussed on numerous occasions.  

The law schools no longer are based on the idea of personal liberty and the importance of property rights as Adam Smith explained originally in his Lectures on Jurisprudence and later in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that made equality of opportunity and productivity the objectives, but has switched to Marxian writings and their influence on the many books of John Dewey (1921) that shifted the focus of philosophy away from analyzing ultimate causations from the proximal causations in the empirical social sciences to make broader conclusions, to ‘social justice’ and equity of outcome instead. This was the effect of Dewey’s “Reconstruction in Philosophy.”

Marxian experiments always end up with masses ‘sharing equally in the poverty’ while the elites live in splendor. Chavez and Maduro became enormously wealthy in the process of making Venezuela unlivable for the preponderance of the population, their campaign rhetoric never seems to match the actual outcomes. 

But since the discipline of Philosophy does not make the broader conclusions from comparative ideological systems analysis, the disasters of Communism and Latin American Socialism go under-analyzed by design, Socialism has become revered in the University system. Che Guevara T-shirts are everywhere.

The Rousseau, Marx, and Engels line of thinking is a psychology, not a theory of human behavior

Despite the fact that the Leftist utopia always ends up as a hellscape, academia routinely avoids careful analysis of failed Marxist experiments in their quest to “transform America” into the “completed French Revolution.” 

As was stated in the previous articles in the series, the Rousseau, Marx, and Engels line of thinking has been completely discredited as an accurate theory of human behavior on the basis that bureaucrats acted nothing like what Marx and Engels predicted. 

The worker’s paradise of Lenin and Stalin became a gulag archipelago, while Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, Ho Che Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Allende, and more recently Chavez and Maduro, all followed the tradition of Marxist experiments. Regardless of language, culture, or continent, all Marxist experiments follow the same result path, but there is no overarching comparative systems analysis in the discipline of Philosophy as the discipline has become dominated by Dewey social justice warriors. 

This begs the question that if Marxism is not an actual theory of human behavior, then what is it? In actuality, Leftism is nothing more than a grandiose psychology as explained in immense depth and detail by Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1972). This is a landmark work because it psychologically profiled National Socialist leaders as well as International Marxist Communist leaders in the same book because either type of Socialism tended to produce similar results. 

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness was Fromm’s magnum opus and is the most exhaustive book on psychological personality theories to date in the author’s opinion. What is important to note here is that Fromm’s purpose for writing the book was: (a) to refine and advance Fromm’s “life and death instinct” theory to its logical conclusion; (b) to develop ‘real theory of human behavior’ as a basis for all of the philosophical and social sciences; (c) to reform the Frankfurt School and the New Left that was emerging in the US. 

This effort at reforming the New Left obviously failed as the no-holds-barred tactics of Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, and Bill Ayers have obviously prevailed. The Antifa/BLM riots occurred in over 130 cities in the US during the entire 2020 election cycle while the police were routinely given stand-down orders for several months on end.

The outlawing of rival political parties

Their divisiveness used to win Democratic elections, which seemingly turns urban cities and coastal states into one-party systems, seems to destroy the democratic process, which is not by accident. In the previously mentioned non-market Communism or market Socialism experiments, once the Leftists takeover they tend to outlaw other political parties or even lesser associations to prevent them from becoming a rival political party. 

When this has occurred in the past, both the party and the country are run by a consensus of the very few bureaucratic elites. In other words, once in power, the bureaucratic elites tend to make themselves immune from the democratic process itself. 

One can see this with the Chavez and Maduro takeover of Venezuela. It was the general consensus that the electorate of Venezuela would vote them out of office in the election cycles of the late 1990s or early 2000s. But with the use of electronic vote-counting machines and other measures, Chavez, and later Maduro, both kept winning the elections again and again by wide margins. 

Even as Chavez and Maduro destroyed the economy and the supply chains, and people began fleeing to Columbia and Brazil by the millions, Chavez and Maduro kept winning elections. Socialism in practice is a failure in terms of comparative ideological systems analysis, and once the bureaucratic elites run a country, democracy ceases. There is no such thing as “Democratic Socialism” or “Social Democracy.” 

In the real world outside of Academia, Socialism has never been anything more than a psychological temperament where the adherents believe themselves to be the movie directors of a fantastic drama where they control all the actors’ thoughts, movements, and direct outcomes like a movie. 

Or in another sense, they believe themselves to be benevolent Santa Clauses handing out free stuff to an adoring crowd that loves them, or a virtuous Robin Hood taking from the greedy rich and giving to the poor who absolutely adore them for it.

The reality of the concentration camps, gulags, and killing fields in every Marxist experiment as discussed in detail by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and the recent Venezuelan example, means that Leftists are delusional. They are planning a society that is dependent upon the masses to follow their edicts in order to achieve some grandiose outcome, where, in the end, the Leftists think that the people will appreciate their ‘tough love’ and fanciful ideals.  

The false psychological premise of Marxism

In real life, people are not the mindless blank slate automatons that Marx based his psychological concept of man upon as explained in the series of introductions to each new edition of Das Kapital. 

In real life, people are inwardly driven by life-force energy as it passes through their hardwired Darwinian instinctual drives and naturally use their intellect to advance their survival as they instinctively compete for resources and mates, which is seen as people pursue economic gain and social status on a daily basis.

The reality is that people naturally compete for resources and mates for self-survival and survival of the species, which is the product of God, or nature depending upon one’s beliefs, and people either compete constructively or destructively. It is important to note that in Maddi’s Personality Theories: a comparative analysis (1972), all of the major psychological theorists make this dichotomous distinction in one way or another.  

The constructive versus destructive, or facilitative versus debilitative distinctions can be made between Capitalism and Marxism during the Great Ideological experiments of the 20th Century. In applying these basic analytical continuums from early 1970s psychological theory it can be seen that bureaucratically directed Communism and Socialism always results in an extremely destructive behavioral dynamic—as people still compete for resources and mates in a system that produces a lot fewer resources.  

In the context of the Great Ideological Experiments of the 20th Century, people competed for resources and mates, and economic gain and social status infinitely better in Capitalist systems that protect property rights and marital rites than in Communist systems which sought to destroy both. 

The Hume-Smith based Capitalism naturally assumed the hardwired internally driven premise of human behavior because the externally driven blank slate/tabla rasa premise did not come into being until the writings of Marx and Engels in Das Kapital written during the 1870s, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State (1884). 

Marxism is based on an absurd psychological premise and repeatedly brings about results that are the polar opposite of a ‘worker’s paradise.’ The Marxist tabla rasa conception of man as a mindless being waiting for directions from a bureaucratic elite who looks after the interest of the working classes is a farce. Just look at Justin Trudeau’s disdain for the truckers’ revolt occurring in Ottawa currently. 

What is correct, as Steven Pinker explains in The Blank Slate (2002), is that the Darwinian hardwired conception of people competing for resources and mates, and economic gain and social status as advocated by Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi, who fled from Communist Hungary during the Cold War, is correct. Yet, as Pinker further explained, the entire soft philosophical and social sciences Western University system is based on the laughably false Marxian blank slate/tabla rasa premise. 

The point is that the more one understands this aspect of the micro behavioral theory that underpins the macro policy theories, the more one will understand why Leftist policies will always predictably backfire. 

This article will end here and is more in-depth than the previous articles, but the series will move on as the Rittenhouse case fades away while the ‘transformation of America’ continues. This more in-depth understanding of Leftist political theory will provide the readers with ‘the new paradigm’ of understanding the prevailing political trends.