This essay was written after I had spent some time reviewing the work of James Baldwin. That review included watching Baldwin's debate against William F. Buckley at Cambridge University, which the screenshot above was taken from.
Recently right wing propagandist Christopher Rufo managed to rile up attention on Twitter by posting a graphic regarding racial issues in education and citing the educator's contention that "2 + 2 = 4" is a problem. Rufo took the phrase out of context and used it to try to claim that liberals are so caught up in idealistic beliefs that they want to change the entire nature of our system of numbers to make life easier for minority children. The fact that he would argue such a ridiculous proposition suggests that Mr. Rufo has an extremely low opinion of the intelligence of the American people. Unfortunately, many seem to have been caught up in his trap, and are doing all they can to make his job easier.
The phrase "2 + 2 = 4" is a reference to the racists' notion of "common sense". Expressions of this ideology are rife in the daily statements of some white people. "We all know who lives on that side of town where all the shootings are...2 + 2 = 4" The use of that particular phrase and those kinds of euphemisms are meant to express the conservative view that living conditions in America are the result of an unbreakable social order. The white man in America who insists on racial separation carries with him a belief that the squalid conditions in America's ghettos are entirely the fault of the African-American, and that contributing factors such as the long term economic effects of red-lining and white flight in our nation's cities, disparities in policing and prison-sentences and priorities in public spending drilling down to matters as particular as which streets get plowed in winter and which block gets their century old water mains replaced are just "excuses" for the African-American's lack of achievement. Rufo takes that phrase out of context because he wants to pre-empt any discussion of those long term social effects. His method is to mock the shorthand that the person uses, rile up conservatives with wild conspiracy theories about radical changes to the system of American education, and thereby prevent any rational discussion of long-term racial disparities and their effects.
Rufo's method is a continuation of what I referred to in my book The Perpetual Hamster Wheel of Stupidity as "The Confederate Model of Propaganda". Although many Americans discuss information warfare as if it's a relatively new concept, the greatest example of information warfare in our nation's history, an effort that still impacts our politics today, is when wealthy plantation owners in the American South used the venue of the Church pulpit to convince poor rural whites that they should fight and die to preserve an economic system that depressed their wages and kept them dirt poor. The practice of slavery was regarded by educated plantation owners as the ultimate utilization of something known as Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages, a belief which stated that the only way to achieve economic prosperity was to pay one's workers just enough to provide for their subsistence, and absolutely no more. Because the slave was regarded in Antebellum society as property, and did not have the option of offering out his labor at the highest price, the slave owner was able to maintain his labor force at that minimum subsistence level, the lowest possible price point. The uneducated white had no way of comprehending that the existence of all that cheap labor contributed to his own poverty, and created a culture of destitution that persists in Red State politics to this day. It should come as no surprise that the states where slavery made up the largest part of the economy are still, to this day, in the bottom half of all states when it comes to factors such as quality of education, life expectancy, and the percentage of the population able to afford health insurance.
The concept that we regard as "Trumpism", is really nothing more than a resurgence of that Confederate ideology. Although the African-American population has made very clear the desire for equal treatment before the law, in employment and in social settings, the poorly educated white has likewise made it very clear that he's eager to remain as the plantation owner's lackey. The real reason for racial antagonists like Rufo and their on-going wars against Critical Race Theory is no longer about keeping the African-American "in his place" so much as it is a desperate attempt to keep the poorly educated white from recognizing that he's been lied to for over a century, and made into a chump who, in the eyes of the plantation owning class is even more disposable than any slave ever was. As economic out-sourcing led to the shutting down of many factories in America, many rural whites became despondent over their economic condition. The culture of rural America and the deep South means that many of those whites lack the emotional coping and customer service skills to be able to thrive in a posts-industrial, service-based economy and tend to bounce around from job to job, or one failed business venture to another. The wealthy, through an assortment of dark money groups and propagandists like Rufo have sought to advance their own financial and political interests by recruiting this group of socially and economically frustrated voters through the use of radicalizing propaganda.
Individuals attach themselves to a radicalizing mass movement when they perceive the life they are living is no longer tenable. The rhetoric of the movement is adopted as a substitute for the learned values of the super-ego, a set of moral beliefs that the frustrated individual assumes have misled and betrayed him throughout his life. Southern and rural white racism provided an immediate set of beliefs for dark money propagandists to leverage. As James Baldwin said in his debate with William F. Buckley at Oxford University, those whites often console themselves with the belief that no matter what humiliations or privations they suffer, "at least they're not black". This same ideology is rife throughout the MAGA movement. Many followers of the conspiracy theory movement surrounding the "Q" character report having been diagnosed with a mental health issue. The ultimate fear of the industrialists who give hundreds of millions of dollars to propagandists like Rufo is that the poorly educated rural and Southern white will recognize that he is being exploited by the wealthy for political and financial gain, and that the ideology that is being promoted to them will result in nothing but further economic privation, as the rest of the world turns away from the United States, and refuses to partner with us militarily or economically. The greatest victims of Rufo's race-baiting, are those whites who adopt his claims immediately, and repeat his rhetoric with the greatest fervor.
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The worse part is that he doesn't give a link to the tweet, so there is no way if his pic was faked. We need to push him on this to give us the link, or else...no wait scratch "or else" just give us the link to prove he is telling the truth.
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