Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does Trofim Lysensko

Lone Ranger: Hmm.... We’re surrounded by hostile Sioux Indians. Looks like we are done for, Tonto.

 Tonto:  Wadya mean, “we,” Kimosabe?

From: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. House of Representatives

To Microsoft, Google, Facebook Execs.

Dear Mr. Nadella, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Pichai:

We are writing to you today in light of the important role that your companies play as we prepare to take comprehensive action on climate change…we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference this month in Washington D.C., known as LibertyCon, that included a session denying established science on climate change.

So, you think that a grammatical subject-matter like the rhetorical function of personal pronouns is the high end of boring and inconsequential. Well, think again, as we follow the trail of the “we” in Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s dispatch to three of the biggest Mr. Bigs in the information-tech industry.

“We are writing to you ….  as we prepare to take comprehensive action …. [and] we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies…” etc.  Note the ominous direction: from “we’re just communicating with you, to we’re about to do something very important, to we’re real disappointed because it looks like you are standing in our way by supporting a bunch of reactionaries we don’t like.” Sounds pretty threatening to me, and from someone sitting in the U.S. Congress. Just who is this “we” rapping the knuckles of a Big Enchilada like Zuckerberg? Well, it’s the latest social media sensation, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in good Commissar fashion is wielding the “moral-we,” now one of the virtue-signaling Boss-ladies in the Capital city who knows what is best for us all. It is also an up-and-coming “we” of momentum and power, a bold “we” that takes “comprehensive action” and lets the bigshots who throw their money around know that they’ve been a big disappointment.

Obama some time back set the bar very high for the effective use of the “moral-we.” From the Obama’s 2008 campaign: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Ignoring the disturbing pathological elements in this concoction, if you were hoping for some semblance of genuine humility in this young generation of “leaders,” and if arrogance, unbounded self-regard and immaturity put you off, these know-it-all “we’s” who seem to be running the show are just getting started. There will be many more suspects to fuel their deep disappointment, and they will make life miserable for anyone who fails to recognize their superior virtue and doesn’t snap to.  As Bob Dylan once sang: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

So, we stagger bewilderedly into increasingly muddled times where, for example, the ruling Triumvirate of the tech-media world will likely go wobbly to learn that they had “deeply disappointed” a twenty-nine year old Puerto Rican ex-waitress with a few weeks of seniority in the U.S. House of Representatives and a round of talk show appearances where she recently said she said she gives “zero fucks” about criticism she’s received from members of her own party. This is now how one is supposed to speak “truth to power.”

It’s beyond distressing to see someone like this taken seriously, and the works of Karl Marx, of all people, might be taped to provide some insight into this mess. Surveying his own tumultuous times, he wrote, history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” This apothegm was from his essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Tragedy reappears throughout the course of history as farce. The farce that Marx was contemplating was the French coup of 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, a repeat of the seizure of power by his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte in 1799 and the tragic consequences of his despotism.

Fast forward to the present, if you will, and attempt to comprehend the unfolding of the latest tragedy-as-farce in the person of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.  An instant celebrity and the darling and future of the Democrat party, it seems, she has stepped into a starring role on the political stage as the Queen of Farce. From News Week: “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York, called climate change “our World War II” and warned that the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address global warming on Monday [January 21, 2119]. During an interview Monday at the MLK Now event at Riverside Church in New York with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ocasio-Cortez argued that global warming needs to be addressed immediately to avoid the end of human existence.” 

Note, of course, the predictable scolding “if we don’t address climate change...” But this is a different “we” at work than the moral-we in her memo citied above. This is a fake one overloaded with apocalyptic hyperbole, adolescent bombast and wild hallucinations. You see, she sees herself in charge now, rescuing the world, only twelve years away from oblivion, calling the shots – the Commander in “our World War II.” And the “we” in this outpouring of mental incontinence is actually “us,” those of us who she wants to salute her, take orders, bear the cost, conform to the mountains of rules, regulations and dictates that she wants to cascade down upon us, and suffer the horrific unintended consequences that follow from the whims, fantasies and dictates of an ignoramus who has suddenly found herself with lots of power and showered with attention.

Ocasio-Cortez has with much encouragement risen quickly to become our very own Trofim Lysenko, an ambitious charlatan who led the wreckage of biological science in the Soviet Union along with the ruined lives of many distinguished scientists. Lysenko was a quack agronomist whose theory of environmentally acquired inheritance was, by the man who ran the USSR, eagerly turned into the “established science” that would be career-ending, not to mention physically hazardous, for those in the biological sciences to “deny.” “He [Lyskenko] had no postgraduate  training or higher degree, no formal claim to the title of scientist, yet he aspired to the theoretical heights from which, as he told a Pravda correspondent in 1927, practical problems could be solved by a few calculations ‘on a little old scrap of paper.’” (David Jorasky, The Lysenko Affair, University of Chicago Press, 1970, 189)  

Lysenko’s astounding success was due to his skill in bending his “scientific research” into findings that greatly pleased Stalin, whose authority in all matters of importance – art, history, music, philosophy, sociology, economics and, yes, science, was supreme and unquestionable. The science of genetics that the ignorant Lysenko overturned pointed its researchers toward conclusions that were, unfortunately for the geneticists, incompatible with Stalin’s insights into how any part of the world (social or physical) actually worked. Marx had laid the theoretical groundwork for it all: Stalin fleshed out the details and perfected its applications. Pointing out flaws in any of it, shall we say, was not a prudent decision. The real scientists who noted Lysenko’s deficiencies were also casting shadows over Stalin’s jealously guarded shield of infallibility and were dispatched to the work camps. Lysenko, with Stalin’s imprimatur, shutdown scientific debate and research in much of the life sciences, including genetics, wrecked Soviet agriculture, and put biology in the Soviet Union into a thirty-year deep freeze.

Like Lysenko, Ocasio-Cortez is a science-ignoramus (more on that below) who uses her political leverage, as we see with her memo cited above, to control what scientists get to talk about and to demonize critics. Hence the label “climate change deniers” which is intended to carry the same de-legitimizing stigmatism as “Holocaust-deniers.” “Deniers” are moral-lepers who in Stalin’s reign got shot or sent to the Gulag. In the soft-totalitarianism that now envelops us, “deniers” are shut-out of the conversations and the institutions, their careers destroyed and characters assassinated. Thus, we see Ocasio-Cortez putting the “deniers” in her cross-hairs.  “[W]e were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference … that included a session denying established science on climate change.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez, like Lysenko and the CPSU bosses in earlier times, thinks she should decide who the real scientists are.

It seems to me that the obvious question Messrs Nadella, Zuckerberg and Pichai, the subjects of Ocasio-Cortez’s disappointment, should be asking themselves is: does this woman have the remotest understanding of what the “established science of climate change” is? And, does “established science” ever change? And, finally, is there some good reason she should be dictating the sponsorships of science conventions in any case? The answer to the first question is not a secret. Her formal education consists of a BA degree in economics and international relations from Boston University.  From Wikipedia here is her post-college professional experience:

After college, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender in Manhattan and as a waitress in a taqueria. Her mother, meanwhile, cleaned houses and drove school buses. She launched Brook Avenue Press, a publishing firm for books that portray the Bronx in a positive light. She worked as lead educational strategist at GAGEis, Inc; for the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute (NHI), and served as NHI's Educational Director of the 2017 Northeast Collegiate World Series, a five-day long program targeted at college-bound high school students from across the United States and other countries, where she participated in a panel on Latino leadership.

It is safe to say that her knowledge and theoretical expertise in the area of “climate science” would likely rival her mastery of cardiology, cartography or civil engineering.  Would anyone trust her to design a bridge, construct a map, or read an EKG?  Given what we have seen from her so far, self-promotion seems to be her singular talent, and she shouldn’t be trusted to do much of anything. Here, sadly then is Lysenkoism, twenty-first century style, featuring a blustering, know-nothing egomaniac, threatening the end of the world, like some street-corner crackpot, demanding control over the agendas of scientific gatherings and threatening business executives. This is as about a nightmarish display of arrogance married to ignorance as one can imagine. Like all ideologues, Ocasio-Cortez’s beliefs are absolute and impregnable, only confirmation is permitted. Doubt is heresy and heretics get punished. The Stalinist in Russia shot them; the Stalinists in the U.S. smear them. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in quest of heretics is proselytizing for her religion under the guise of science. As a waitress, nobody needed to pay attention to her; as a United States Representative, with a large following, she is a very frightening woman. That she is taken seriously by so many, particularly, young people, is a signal that the bad times are getting worse. When does the farce turn into a tragedy?

Words, Weapons and Rituals of the Left, and a Nod to J. L. Austin

 

 Anyone today who attempts to understand what is happening in the West (America, Europe) – the collapse into a cloaca that is the solipsistic Face Book pop culture, the avalanche of nihilism, the ciphers and the soft-totalitarian apparats, now seemingly unimpeded, closing their long, velvet-covered fingers around our necks – might wonder how a resurrected George Orwell would reflect on the rampant corruption that has greased the slide into this sewer.  

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Well, yes. This is, indeed, “our age,” politicized right down to the dictated pronoun assignation of transgendered whatever they fantasize they are and their restroom privileges, and you find yourself chocking on the daily output of the “mass of lies” from the sneering, self-infatuated pygmies resting on their glorified perches in the government, journalism, the entertainment industry, the NGOs and tenured professorships. Not to forget the social justice warrior CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or the vapid, preening Hollywood celebrities who never tire of massaging their bloated egos and publicly wallowing in their invincible ignorance.  

The aftermath of the recent leftist-inspired mob violence in Charlottesville with the Pravda-like organs of the mass media in high dudgeon has given us a clear and terrifying vision of the cultural Marxist monopolized control and manipulation of language that is used to shape the public perception of social conflict.

To get a better sense of what the left is all about with the relentless labeling of any and all opposition as fascist, racist, proponents of hatred, etc., and in the spirit of Orwell to try to understand how language in the service of ideology has become so corrupted, it might be helpful to consider the notion of “performative utterances” (hereafter, performatives) as developed by J. L. Austin, a British language philosopher from the last century.

From: How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

[Defining the Performative]

Utterances can be found… such that:

·      They do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are  not ‘true or false,’ and

·      The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something.

Performatives, as Austin explains, are not, logically speaking, propositions, that is, assertions that can be shown to be true or false. They do not attempt to describe the world or to affirm or deny some aspect of reality. They are “utterances,” actions that change the social world. Austin gives a number of examples, but let me offer a couple to demonstrate the point.

A minister or priest performs a marriage ceremony and at the conclusion utters, “I pronounce you man and wife.” A judge at the conclusion of a trial says to the defendant, “I sentence you to ten years at hard labor.” Neither the minister nor the judge with these sentences describe the world; their utterances are socially sanctioned actions that change it. Now married, the couple has a different social status. The man and woman are viewed and treated differently, view themselves differently and have different roles, expectations and obligations than they had before the performative was made. Likewise, the accused now becomes a convicted criminal who is viewed and treated differently after the judge’s performative.

How then does this notion of performatives apply to the current efforts of the cultural Marxists to control and manipulate public perceptions of politics and morals? The left engages in a profound dissimulation that disguises what are actually performatives as demonstrable true propositions or assertions about reality. While they pretend to be describing someone or something, what they are really about is acting in a way that demoralizes and ultimately de-legitimates the status of those who may compete with them for power or resist their incursions into their lives. As employed by the left, these performatives do not inform; they deform people who refuse to conform. They are weapons the left uses to destroy those whom they always perceive as morally inferior beings, their enemies. Think of Hillary Clinton’s horrific “basket of deplorables” slur during the last Presidential campaign.

How, specifically, do these weaponized performatives work for the left? Let’s begin with oldest, the most reliable and the most predictable: “You are a fascist.” The speaker in making what appears grammatically to be an assertion depicting some feature of reality is really acting out in a well-established social ritual that seeks to alter social reality in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, it elevates the speaker’s social status as a morally superior and courageous person who recognizes evil and stands far above and against it. The speaker becomes immaculate. Second, the moral polarity comes into play and the “authority” of the accuser is established. Very good people must be opposed by very bad people, and what catch-all word seems to work best to capture all those malignancies associated with the villains who occupy the imaginations of the folks who write the opinion columns in the New York Times and who blabber on CNN and MSNBC– bigotry, intolerance, sexism, racism, etc.? “Fascist” works very nicely. There is, of course, no room for Fascists anywhere in “our democracy,” as they like to say (“our democracy” being their euphemism for “our invitation-only clubhouse”). Such an individual is morally contaminated, “irredeemable,” “not part of America” in Hillary Clinton’s parlance, someone beyond the pale, whose ideas and beliefs must be extinguished.

“Fascist” is one of the most important words in the lexicon of the left, wrenched from its historical, political moorings, so vague and protean that it is descriptively useless. Bearing only vague, emotional associations, it has been stripped of its referents, and thus serves as an all-purpose, expandable-contractible label for prospective targets who may pose as obstacles or irritants.

  

Once upon a time there were real flesh and blood fascists, people who were recognized as such because they actually called themselves “fascists,” dressed up in black shirts, took power for a time and talked about how great fascism was as compared to the decadent bourgeoisie. As we know, things turned out badly for them, and Benito Mussolini, the man who brought fascism to the world ended up as a battered corpse hanging upside down from a steel girder above a gas station in Milan next to his mistress, Claretta Petacci in 1945.

That marked the grisly end of fascism as embraced and practiced by people whom everyone, including themselves, recognized as fascists; as an ideology and a movement that attracted a mass following it was kaput, an attraction that has lingered on for a few out on the fringe.

It was Joseph Stalin who recognized the mobilizing power of the word, “fascist” and fashioned an abstract, malleable “fascist,” introducing a being, unlike Mussolini, immortal and ubiquitous (Leon Trotsky was “baptized” by Stalin as one). Fascists who populate the Stalinist universe can only be contained by their antipodes, thus, “anti-fascist,” a word which endows one thus designated with a heroic, moral invincibility. The anarchists during the Spanish civil war who raped and murdered nuns and burned down churches were anti-fascists and thus remain vanquished heroes who fought a losing battle for “democracy.” The antifas who attacked and beat up people recently at Charlottesville and other rallies are lauded predictably by Nicholas Scylla Kristof and Mitt Charybdis Romney as opponents of bigotry and hatred. Stalin’s “fascist” was the gift to the left that keeps on giving and every generation of leftists since his demise has happily and eagerly attached it to whomever displeases them, most recently Donald Trump and his supporters.     

The “You are a fascist” performative is the paradigm for the cultural Marxists’ engagement with all dissent and opposition. It moralizes the speaker, enveloping him with goodness and virtue. As well it immunizes him from (moral) criticism and (legal) accountability and at the same time demoralizes the accused making him into an enemy who represents an existential threat to their fictional “our democracy.” “Politics” for the left is shorthand for conniving at the destruction of the opposition, politically, always, physically, if possible.  

“Racism” works in tandem with “fascism.” “You are a racist” is a weaponized performative camouflaged as a descriptive, yet another one of the expulsion rituals that render the accused “untouchable” while confirming the impeccable moral credentials of the speaker. Like “fascist,” “racist” has migrated from being a word that once perhaps referred to real and distinguishable features of someone to a slippery, nebulous abstraction that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. This is why racism which has risen to the heights of a raging moral plague has of necessity been metastasizing into various strains such as, “covert racism,” “legacy racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism.” There is no relief, no escape from it; with this the left is refereeing a game of whack-a-mole that never ends.  

No one today accused of racism can prove the accusation to be false. This means that the accuser cannot be held accountable, and because of this, as long as the threat of being accused of racism is widely and commonly resisted and feared, the left will use it with increasing recklessness and indifference to whatever damage it does. It has worked to perfection for them; whenever the threat goes down, the white flag always goes up. So, it is a near certain prediction that the racism that plagues the West will continue to mount toward epidemic proportions.  

What Austin’s performative utterances may help us to understand is that for the left politics in all of its manifestations is war with no Geneva Convention-style restrains, with unconditional surrender as its end game. For them there is no compromise, no loyal opposition, no notion of fair play or rules of a civil society that limit what the players should do. We are the enemy. We forget it at our peril.