Progressive Racism: The Hidden Motive Driving Modern Politics

Progressive politics is rooted in racism. Look carefully at most social or fiscal policies advocated by progressives and you’ll see that underneath their false public rationales lie hidden racist fears and assumptions — some of which the progressives may be too embarrassed to admit even to themselves, much less to the world.

In modern politics, everyone doubts everyone else’s sincerity. Each side automatically presumes that the other side presents a false public justification for its political views. And in most cases it is wise to doubt, because most public justifications are indeed lies — sometimes unconscious lies. But surprisingly often the hypothesized alternative “true” motivation guessed at by the opposing side is itself completely incorrect. Especially when conservatives come up with theories attempting to explain what to them are mystifying progressive obsessions. What conservatives don’t (yet) know is that under the surface, most progressive positions are motivated by racist attitudes and assumptions felt by white progressives, usually against African-Americans. Progressive positions often seem inexplicable to outsiders because the proposals emanating from them usually manifest as colossal social engineering experiments, which the progressives have only devised as a distraction from the shameful racist motivations at the core.

This essay will likely be eye-opening for conservatives, and infuriating for progressives, who often don’t know their own history and never contemplated the origins of their own belief system. But it’s time to finally bring the uncomfortable truth out in the open.

Below you will find eight separate entries, each focusing on a different policy pushed by progressives. Each entry follows the same format:

BOLD: Name of topic.
In yellow: A neutral description of the exact proposal which progressives champion.
In red: The progressives’ stated justification or explanation behind their position, which hides their real purpose.
In red: The inaccurate theory which conservatives mistakenly assume must be the actual progressive motivation.
In green: The true racist reason underlying the progressive policy.
Plain text: Additional notes on the origins of the progressives’ racist attitude and how it led to this specific policy proposal.

If you want to just skim the essay and only read the highlights, then simply look for the green sections and skip the rest. Otherwise, read the whole thing to get a clear step-by-step explanation of the actual racist motivations driving each progressive position.

GUN CONTROL

Progressive position:

Restrict access to guns as much as possible; ultimately ban and confiscate them all.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

Gun violence is a scourge on society; easy access to killing machines unnecessarily facilitates murder and crime.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Progressives want to disarm the populace to prevent armed resistance to the eventual imposition of a leftist totalitarian police state.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: White urban liberals are deathly afraid of black gangbangers with guns, but are ashamed to admit this publicly, so to mask their racist fears they try to ban guns for everyone, as a way of warding off the perception that their real goal is to target blacks specifically.

 
The basic dividing line in American politics is not (as it once was ) North vs. South, nor is it (as many people now assume) Coasts vs. Flyover Country, but rather Urban vs. Rural:

The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either — virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it’s about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy — or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants. …The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election were Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, and Salt Lake City.

Or put more simply: In modern America, liberals live in cities; conservatives live in rural areas. And what else is concentrated in cities? African-Americans, and gun violence:

The 62 center cities of America’s 50 largest metro areas account for 15 percent of the population but 39 percent of gun-related murders.

Putting all these statistics together, we see that large cities have high concentrations of white liberals alongside gun-using black criminals. And yet it is specifically in Democrat-voting big cities where most of the gun-control measures are proposed. Why is that? Are the white progressive urban dwellers afraid of rootin’-tootin’ cowboys? Of backwoods deer hunters? Of hillbillies with shotguns? No: the average white progressive has never even met a cowboy, a hunter or a hillbilly. And frankly, progressives couldn’t care less if rednecks own guns, because progressives aren’t physically afraid of rednecks on a daily basis. Instead, they are afraid of gun violence at the hands of their fellow city-dwellers, the urban African-Americans who commit a wildly disproportionate percentage of the gun crimes in America.

Progressives don’t want to ban guns to disarm resistance to any upcoming police state; that idea has never even occurred to them. Instead, progressives want to ban guns because progressives are afraid of black people.

But God forbid that progressives’ racist motivations be exposed publicly. So to make the gun-control bans appear even-handed and race-neutral, progressives must try to ban guns for everyone, even though the bans are in reality aimed at one specific group. Rural gun-users are just collateral damage of a policy that actually targets inner-city blacks.

 

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JUNK FOOD TAXES

Progressive position:

Impose punitive taxes on all sugary or unhealthy junk food to discourage its consumption; also implement a variety of regulations targeting fast-food chains and producers.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

To improve the overall health of the general public, we should economically pressure people to have a better diet by artificially inflating the price of any food which is bad for them.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Progressives are control-freaks who derive pleasure from micro-managing everyone’s lifestyle; they particularly delight in banishing the exact kinds of food normally enjoyed by “average Americans,” just out of spite.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: Progressives believe that black people are too dumb to make healthy food choices.

 
The white liberal elites who propose and vote for junk food taxes (and other food-related regulations) are not the kind of people who even eat junk food; instead, they paternalistically and presumptively try to dictate what other people should and should not eat. Embedded in this attitude is the unspoken assumption that the people doing the dictating (the liberal elites) are smarter than the consumers who unwittingly choose to eat unhealthy food. And who are those consumers? Disproportionally it is African-Americans, as we are frequently reminded by a steady stream of academic studies, articles in magazines and political rants all coming out of the progressive camp. The entire implicit message of this liberal “food politics” movement can be summed up as: Black people are too stupid to make wise nutrition decisions, too childish to resist enticing packaging and ads, and too illiterate to read labels. We white progressives must therefore intervene and in the role of loving parents help blacks learn to like broccoli nummy num num good for you!
 

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CLIMATE CHANGE

Progressive position:

Institute a variety of penalties, taxes and incentives all designed to discourage production and use of carbon-derived energy by industrialized nations.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

This is not a political position: it’s simply a scientific fact that if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels then the resulting greenhouse gases will render the planet uninhabitable.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

This so-called “crisis” is just the latest in a long series of fabricated environmental pseudo-crises not based on fact but on an irrational Luddite loathing of civilization; your wildly exaggerated hysteria about “global warming” is merely a mechanism to manipulate and control the citizenry and cripple the economy.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: The civilizational “white guilt” motivating the voluntary wealth transfer to undeveloped nations derives from deep racist assumptions about the innate shortcomings of backward peoples.

 
Viewed globally, the real long-term consequence of all the “climate change”-related policy proposals is to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the First World developed nations to the Third World underdeveloped nations, while simultaneously crippling the ability of the developed world to maintain its economic dominance.

What could motivate this seemingly suicidal economic policy by First-World progressives? In a word: Guilt. Specifically, “white guilt” by Europeans (and those descended from Europeans) for having unfairly exploited backward regions and non-white peoples over the last few centuries to establish white economic hegemony over the rest of the world.

This rationale is openly discussed at the annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences, where representatives of Third World nations demand payback and reparations for colonialist exploitation, and where the descendants of those colonialists grovel in abject apology for the wrongdoings of their ancestors.

But deeply embedded in those apologies and guilt is a racism that far surpasses even the naive racism of yesteryear.

If you enter into competition with a rival you deem approximately equal in skill to yourself, and then you win fair and square, then it would never occur to you to apologize for winning nor would you feel guilty about it — because it was a fair fight. On the other hand, if you compete against and then easily defeat an opponent whose very nature you believe makes them inescapably inferior to you — for example, getting in a fistfight with a small child — then afterwards you might very well feel guilty and apologize for taking advantage of a lesser opponent who had no chance against you due to their inherent inadequacy.

So when a modern progressive apologizes for his ancestors’ past colonialist dominance, he is really saying: “I’m so sorry that we smart organized aggressive white people took advantage of you lesser peoples whose inherent cultural and intellectual shortcomings made you incapable of fending us off: it wasn’t a fair fight, and I apologize.”

In other words: Apologizing is an unconscious backhanded way of declaring your innate superiority.

If these modern progressives felt that their ancestors had achieved global dominance by defeating rivals of equal stature, then there’d be nothing to feel guilty about, and thus no need to pay reparations and hence no need to devise the “climate change” crisis and attendant suicidal economic policies.
 

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THE WELFARE STATE

Progressive position:

Maximize benefits and ease qualifications for all entitlement and social welfare programs; ultimately institute a “guaranteed income” for all U.S. residents.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

No one should starve or go homeless in a wealthy nation such as ours; we should always give a helping hand to those in need.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

The ever-escalating magnitude of unnecessary government handouts is just a backdoor route to socialism by confiscating more and more wealth from the productive class and “redistributing” it to the unproductive.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: The true goal of progressive-style cradle-to-grave welfare is to enslave blacks in a culture of dependency and thereby keep them mollified and also a dependable Democratic voting bloc.

 
The toxic addictive effect of an ongoing welfare system has been debated for centuries; as far back as the 1700s in England it was pointed out that giving free food to the lower classes both removed their motivation to work and also increased their numbers; abusing these sociological trends for cynical political advantage dates back even further, when Roman emperors handed out free bread to curry favor with the masses. In modern America, African-Americans disproportionally comprise the lower class, so progressives have devised a racist strategy of lifelong government dependency to not only permanently keep blacks at the bottom of the economic scale but also corrode their sense of self-sufficiency so that they always return to the Democratic Party just as the addict always returns to the pusher.

According to Ronald Kessler’s book Inside the White House, President Johnson explained the rationale behind his “Great Society” welfare programs thus: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” As there is no audio recording of this quote (which was reported second-hand), progressives have spent years trying to cast doubt on its existence, because it confirms the worst assumptions behind the justification for welfare. However, there are other audio recordings from the same era of Johnson obsessing over maximizing black votes and referring to them as “niggers” — for example, listen to this tape of Johnson complaining that he can’t prove black voters are being suppressed because “More niggers vote than white folks.” While this doesn’t conclusively prove he also said the disputed “200 years” quote, it does prove that he spoke in those terms, referred to blacks insultingly, and schemed about ways to maximize the black vote for the Democratic Party — all of which lend credence to the disputed quote’s likely veracity.

What can’t be disputed is that since the institutionalization of welfare, Johnson’s cynical racist vision has come true: generation after generation of inner-city African-Americans have indeed become completely dependent upon welfare, and consequently reliably vote Democratic because the Democrats vow to keep the handouts flowing.
 

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Progressive position:

Give preferential treatment to African-Americans and Hispanics in college admissions and employment; ultimately impose compulsory “minority quotas” on universities and employers.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

The legacy of discrimination suffered by minorities is a terrible historical crime that needs to be reversed; a strong undercurrent of discrimination still exists in America and only by giving a boost to underprivileged minorities can we break the cycle of stereotype-confirming poverty.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Affirmative action is just a form of reparations under a different name, and a way to collectively punish all white people for the long-ago crime of slavery.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: White progressives believe that blacks are intellectually inferior and will never be able to compete successfully in education and the job market, and so seek to create a permanent system in which the assumption of black inadequacy is the starting point for an insulting double-standard of judging blacks on a lower scale.

 
When Affirmative Action was first proposed in the 1960s it was touted as a way to reverse a long history of what had been up until that time real discrimination against various minority groups. At first, the regulations merely (and reasonably) stipulated that all groups be treated equally with no prejudice. Over time, however, the requirements escalated, first from “equal treatment” to “if two candidates of different races are identically qualified, then admit or hire the minority,” and then to “give minorities preferential treatment, even if they are less qualified,” and finally to “institutions must admit or hire a certain number of minorities, regardless of their qualifications and even if there are better-qualified non-minority candidates.” While the courts have since struck down some of the more extreme “quota” laws, progressives in states across the country and on a federal level still strive to preserve and further extend Affirmative Action wherever possible.

In an era when Jim Crow laws were still fresh in people’s memories, the original even-handed version of Affirmative Action made sense. But from the very beginning it was meant only as a temporary measure, to expunge any lingering unofficial racial discrimination after all remaining overtly discriminatory laws were wiped away nationwide by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Starting in 1965, it was illegal to discriminate against minorities anyway, so technically Affirmative Action was not even needed — which is exactly why its backers began the process of escalation, to justify more extreme measures.

The first escalation was to redefine Affirmative Action not simply as a guarantee of non-discrimination, but instead as a way to reverse historical injustices: Since minorities (African-Americans in particular) had endured official disadvantages in the past, they should now receive official benefits, to help them overcome the continuing effects of economic hardship from the bad old days. If we allow more African-Americans into college and give them more high-paying jobs, the argument went, they can more quickly become middle-class and break out of the cycle of poverty. And once that happens, we will end the temporary Affirmative Action programs.

But as the years passed and the expected class mobility didn’t materialize as quickly as hoped, progressives pushed for more and more extreme Affirmative Action measures, until a line was crossed and “Affirmative Action” became little more than an ironic euphemism for overt discrimination against whites and Asians, especially in situations where there were a limited number of openings at prestigious institutions and yet some of the best candidates were being turned away because of the color of their skin. In the final twist, laws originally meant to prevent discrimination had become laws compelling discrimination — albeit against different groups.

Fifty years and several generations have since passed, and the days of official and even unofficial discrimination against minorities in education are but a distant memory. If anything, attitudes and curricula across the country are more minority-centric than they have ever been, and promising minority K-12 students are greeted with open doors, mentoring, scholarships and encouragement at every turn. While we may applaud that, this happy new status quo undermines any justification for maintaining Affirmative Action in college admissions and employment. No longer can anyone believably claim that minorities endure discrimination in school; so why does society continue awarding them benefits not merely denied to others but in fact yanked away from others?

The average non-racist sensible person believes that African-Americans could do just as well as members of any other race in education and employment, but that cultural attitudes in the black community are what prevents this from happening as much as everyone would want. And all the Affirmative Action in the world won’t fix this, because it’s a mere band-aid that in no way addresses the root of the problem. If anything, Affirmative Action contributes to the cultural problem by communicating to blacks that society expects less of them, and also that they need not strive for excellence because they’ve got a college admission or job awaiting them regardless of how hard they work for it.

Progressives, on the other hand, are that class of whites who think blacks will never ever perform as well as other races because, the progressive has concluded, blacks are just too dumb to succeed in a truly meritocratic society. To address this intractable problem, and simultaneously try to paint themselves as being “helpful” to blacks, progressives have established a degrading and humiliating system of low standards which apply only to blacks (and other “underrepresented minorities” as an afterthought). They give this insulting system the truly Orwellian euphemism “Affirmative Action”; the only thing affirmed by it is that the people promoting this system must have a truly low opinion of blacks. Critics have pinpointed this attitude as the “soft racism of low expectations,” but there’s nothing “soft” about it: By insisting on the permanent institutionalization of Affirmation Action, white progressives are declaring right up front that they expect blacks as a group to always fail due to their average lesser mental capabilities. There’s no other way to explain the progressive stance — even if some progressives are unaware of their underlying assumptions.

Studies have shown again and again that the way to raise performance is to raise expectations. Want African-Americans to succeed academically and economically? Expect excellence. Set high standards and high goals. When you lower the bar, you reveal that you have no faith in their potential.
 

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PLASTIC BAG BANS

Progressive position:

Prohibit businesses from giving plastic bags to customers.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

Discarded plastic bags harm the environment and befoul the landscape; we should be kind to the Earth by using cloth or paper bags instead.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Leftists have an illogical phobia about plastic, because to them it symbolizes artificiality and consumerism; they’re trying to outlaw an extremely useful invention simply to make shopping and capitalism more inconvenient.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: White progressives specifically want to stop inner-city blacks from littering, but don’t want to be perceived as racists who further penalize the black community for its behavior, so rather than focus on whom they believe to be the actual perpetrators of littering, they remove from everyone‘s hands any objects which might potentially become litter.

 
Litter is a problem confined almost entirely to urban areas (suburban and rural areas have much less litter); and the poorer the neighborhood, the worse the litter problem. Rather than admit publicly what they believe to be true — that inner-city African-Americans seem to more cavalierly discard their garbage on the street — progressives seek to solve the problem by penalizing everyone, even those who don’t litter, so that the anti-littering enforcement won’t seem to focus disproportionally on blacks, which would appear racist and discriminatory. In other words, even though progressives believe blacks are primarily to blame for littering, progressives — merely to protect their own public image — will make everyone suffer, rather than implement existing anti-littering laws against whom they think are the actual perpetrators.
 

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ABORTION

Progressive position:

Make abortion as accessible as possible; ultimately remove all restrictions from abortion, eliminating any financial cost, social stigma, and legal constraints.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

Women should have control over their own bodies; legal and shame-free abortion is necessary for sexual freedom; medical choices are a private decision between doctor and patient.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Progressives prioritize their own amoral selfish pleasure over the lives of others; abortion is just another way that the far left is trying to destroy the nuclear family; environmentalists see humanity as the only contaminant in nature; by rejecting God the left has embraced and revels in a culture of death.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: The movement to legalize abortion was from its inception intended as a way to decrease the black and minority population, and the statistics show that a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted babies are black. The desire to preserve “racial purity” and to prevent over-breeding of the “lower” races and classes was the overt and publicly pronounced goal of the pro-abortion progressive eugenics campaign in the early 20th century; only after eugenics fell from public favor did the leftists devise deceptive new narratives to justify abortion. White progressives still believe that blacks cannot control their sexuality and are too irresponsible to use birth control reliably, so the only way to keep them from overpopulating is to keep abortion legal and cheap or free.

 
A recent informal survey of well-educated pro-life conservatives, asked to identify what they think really motivates pro-abortion progressives, revealed what were far and away the five most popular theories:

• Hedonism and Selfishness — Progressives want consequence-free sex and the ability to indulge themselves without guilt or responsibility.

• Marxism and the Destruction of the Nuclear Family — The left seeks to erode the basic man-woman-child family unit because to do so is a necessary precursor for state control over the individual, according to Marxist theory.

• Environmental Extremism – Modern leftism is fundamentally anti-human and regards humanity as a plague infecting an otherwise pristine planet; abortion helps to rid the Earth of people.

• Transgression and the Lust for Power — Some people simply derive pleasure from the subversion of traditional values and engage in transgressive acts for the sheer anarchic joy of overturning entrenched social ethics.

• Evil and Moral Relativism — Having rejected God and the concept of moral absolutism, the left has embraced evil, which is always accompanied by a love of death.

While there may be a kernel of truth to some of these theories, the real explanation is much more prosaic and doesn’t involve guesswork, because it can be plainly found in the historical record: racism.

Wherever you go in the United States, you’ll find that African-Americans account for an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of abortions, sometimes at a rate four times that of whites.

Imagine if the situation was reversed and it was conservatives who championed a policy that directly resulted in the demographic genocide of blacks: we’d never hear the end of it, and it would be cited by pundits daily as conclusive proof that conservatives are racist. But when progressives in fact champion such a policy? Silence.

Is the sky-high rate of black abortion merely accidental? Or was it the long-term goal of the family-planning movement from the beginning?

The answer to this question has devolved into a fight over the motivations of one woman, Margaret Sanger, who was America’s leading proponent of birth control in the early 20th century and who founded the organization now known as Planned Parenthood. Why Sanger? Because she’s basically the only birth control advocate from the era who wasn’t blatantly racist; most of her colleagues in the eugenics movement just came right out and said society would be better off without so many non-whites. Only Sanger was able to construct a reassuring birth control narrative that didn’t focus exclusively on race. Modern pro-choice activists thus realize the need to protect her reputation at all costs, because if Sanger is shown to have had racist attitudes too, there are no other heroes left, and the entire movement will be sullied from its inception.

The online arguments over the reality of Sanger’s racism produce a lot of heat but very little light. Her most combative progressive defenders dismiss nearly every quote attributed to her as an outright fabrication and pooh-pooh the rest as out-of-context willful misinterpretations. On the other side, her detractors have dredged up an impressive mountain of solid evidence about Sanger’s embrace of eugenics and an equally large mountain documenting Sanger’s associations with racists and her dalliance with racist theories.

The problem arises when anti-abortion activists try to pad out all the irrefutable evidence with a few too-bad-to-be-true Sanger quotes about the need to “exterminate” “negroes” — quotes which, upon closer inspection, were either originally said by others and merely re-quoted by Sanger (“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit,” originally said by W.E.B. DuBois, later re-quoted approvingly by Sanger), or are open to interpretation (“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” which she did indeed write, although it’s not clear whether she was trying to suppress a false rumor or instead hide the terrible truth), or in a handful of cases seem to have been simply made up (“Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated,” a purported Sanger quote for which no reliable source has ever been found).

For the purpose of this essay I decided to ignore all second-hand accounts and read some original Sanger source material myself. It only took me an hour to conclusively document several egregious Sanger quotes, which (to keep this essay brief) I uploaded here as a separate post which you can read in detail if you need definitive proof. In short: Yes, Sanger was an unapologetic eugenicist; yes, she sought to decrease the population of the “unfit” and “feeble-minded”; and yes, the unfit included not just “negroes” but also immigrants, foreigners and anybody except those of “pure native white stock.”

One of the problems in pinning down Sanger’s attitudes about blacks is that her public views changed over time. In the 1910s and ’20s she often casually cited “negroes” as examples of the very kind of “feeble-minded” “defectives” which needed to be sterilized or otherwise prevented from breeding; but by the 1940s her tone had changed considerably, arguing that it was for black people’s own happiness and health that they should have only as many children as they could afford.

Sanger herself acknowledged that in the 1920s she gave a speech about eugenics and abortion to the Ku Klux Klan, though she never specified whether she advised the Klan to limit the number of white babies in the world or instead reassured them that she was helping to decrease the black population. The fact that “a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered” immediately after her speech leads one to believe she hadn’t lectured them on the overpopulation of lower-class whites.

Even so, by the 1940s she had somehow reinvented herself as an advocate for black self-improvement. Had she changed with the times, or merely found a better way to package her toxic beliefs?

A key Sanger essay, overlooked by most researchers, published in 1921 and now hosted by the progressive New York University Margaret Sanger Collection, matter-of-factly spills the beans that her birth control activism is all a deceptive ploy, mere “propaganda” to sneak her real agenda — eugenics — into public policy:

The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda, by Margaret Sanger

…I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics. …

Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator. In answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it is possible to use this interest as the foundation for education in prophylaxis, sexual hygiene, and infant welfare. The potential mother is to be shown that maternity need not be slavery but the most effective avenue toward self-development and self-realization. Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.

As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit”, admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.

In another devastating essay hosted by New York University’s Margaret Sanger Collection, Sanger first bemoans the “multiplication of the unfit,” whom she then equates as being “those of low I.Q.,” and then concludes by noting that it is “negroes” who have the lowest I.Q.s:

All over the world, where the subject is studied, we find biologists concerned over the fall in the level of intelligence, and the increase in the number of those of low I.Q. …

Although the multiplication of the unfit is a world problem, we are here concerned with its impact on this country primarily.
…

The authors in questioning the possibility that such families may be producing children of superior quality point out that one must be optimistic indeed, to believe in such a possibility, if one may judge from intelligence levels in comparable groups elsewhere, which have been found uniformly below par.

The Charity Organization Society in New York in testing 451 representative children under its care found the median I.Q. 86. That of 821 children in Indianapolis was the same, while of 1,500 women admitted as charity obstetrical patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, 39% of the whites and 70% of the negroes were found to have a mental age of 11 years or less.

Clear enough? Sanger herself freely declared that birth control activism (which in the modern era has boiled down to the issue of abortion) was just a ruse to implement eugenic policies by another name — and her eugenic policies most definitely had a racial component.

 

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NANNY STATISM

Progressive position:

The government should assume the role of a benevolent parent, guiding and prodding people to make better, safer and healthier decisions in their personal lives.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

The average person can become overwhelmed by the infinitude of options and often conflicting pressures of the modern world; by restricting people’s ability to choose bad options, we will enhance individual lives and improve society as a whole.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Progressives derive sadistic pleasure from wielding power over people; leftism is not a valid political philosophy but rather a transparent justification for fascistic population control.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance: White progressives think blacks need constant monitoring and micromanagement to prevent them from misbehaving; but to avoid the perception that they are racists, progressives devise rules which restrict everyone’s freedom, even though the real goal is to control blacks.

 
Several of the entries above — junk food taxes, gun control, plastic bag bans, etc. — are examples of what has come to be known as “nanny statism,” a political philosophy of paternalistic government control which in the public mind typifies modern progressivism.

Do progressives really believe that all Americans need to be told how to live their lives? Well…no. This country managed to exist for 200 years during which time people were pretty much left to their own devices.

But that’s because for most of those 200 years most of the laws and regulations — including the absence of laws and regulations around most topics — were envisioned (to be historically frank) as applying to a mostly white population. As brutal and tactless as that may sound now, the fact is that until the second half of the 20th century the concerns surrounding black Americans (to the extent that they may have differed from those of white Americans) were pretty much near the bottom of the legislative priority list most of the time (Civil War excepted).

But over the last half-century, progressives and the progressive worldview have risen to legislative dominance, starting slowly in the 1960s and increasing in power and stridency in recent years, and suddenly the nation has become entangled in web of intrusive, inconvenient and sometimes downright insulting regulations all designed to manipulate, monitor and control our private decision-making and public behavior. Why now, and not before?

Here’s why: In conjunction with this rise in paternalistic micromanagement, white progressives have proudly stated that for the first time in U.S. history the concerns of blacks will now be given priority. And this is no coincidence. In fact, it is because progressives now aggressively push their agenda and because that agenda often concerns the behavior of African-Americans that we have seen an outbreak of nanny statism. The secret is this:

White progressives believe that black people are too dumb to make rational decisions on their own and too uncouth to behave civilly. So the progressive urge is to heap rules upon rules to control blacks and render them harmless to themselves and others. At the same time, progressives are terrified of being perceived as racist. So they hit upon a solution: Make rules which restrict everyone‘s freedoms, even though the progressives are actually targeting African-Americans. The collateral damage in this cynical equation — law-abiding citizens of all ethnicities — erroneously assume that the intrusive rules are aimed at them. But they’re missing the point: Progressives don’t enjoy restricting their own freedoms along with everyone else’s, but can conceive of no other legal mechanism to deal with what they see as misbehaving blacks while still appearing to be race-neutral.

Nanny statism is the modern progressive version of Jim Crow: regulations whose real intent is to oppress blacks, but now hidden behind the smiley-face mask of universal oppression.
 

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