Category Archives: Politically Incorrect

By some counts, the horrific attack at a Buffalo supermarket was the second terrorist attack, and the 202nd mass shooting, that happened in the United States this year. Given Americans easy access to weapons, growing political divisions, racism, and rates of mental illness, there will almost certainly be more. So understanding why this is happening is critical.

In the aftermath of a bloodbath, it is hard to have a nuanced discussion. As has been shown by many scholars, in recent years, our political affiliations have become all-encompassing. We live in partisan bubbles, often geographically defined, and this poses a problem. According to Harvard University political scientist Ryan Enos, Theres a lot of evidence that any separation between groups has a lot of negative consequences. We see this in race and religion, he notes, but we also see this in regard to partisanship in the U.S. Our political affiliations have become so entrenched and calcified that it is often possible to guess what will be said in the wake of a tragedy like the recent attack in Buffalo, NY. Specifically, if the perpetrator is white, the right will emphasize mental illness and the left will focus on gun control. The problem is that both sides are right, and we need to be talking about both the psychosocial variables that help explain why someone would want to commit an act of violence, and also the gun control policies that make it possible for this to happen on a horrific scale.

There isnt much known about the Buffalo shooter at this point, but reporting suggests that he was recently held for a mental health evaluation after making generalized threats at his high school. Understanding the relationship between mental illness and domestic terrorism is critical. We are part of a research team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that is seeking to understand how and why people radicalize, commit acts of violence, and deradicalize. The former violent extremists weve interviewedincluding jihadis, white-identity violent extremists, and othershave complicated stories to tell about their paths into and out of extremism. Some have histories of debilitating mental illness, and they have clear diagnoses reflecting their struggles; others dont have debilitating histories, and because they havent had sustained contact with mental health professionals, they lack the kinds of diagnoses that researchers can use to look for patterns and trends.

Nearly all the formers weve interviewed cite underlying social and emotional difficulties; they talk about experiences of racism and persecution (whether real or imagined); they mention poverty and drugs and childhood trauma; they tell stories about exposure to extremist content; and they talk about the meaning and community that they found in their respective extremist movements. All of these factors are at least as important as intellectual endorsement of the specific theories or conspiracies or beliefs that they came to endorse to justify their violence. Debilitating mental illness (one that interferes with daily functioning and demands professional help) may not be part of every extremists story, but a struggle with mental health is common among the former extremists weve interviewed.

Mental health is only part of the story. Terrorists (even lone actors) adopt and adapt ideologies endorsed by a group, a network, or a movement. These ideologies might be loosely held, and might be adopted to provide a gloss of significance to an act of pure, hateful savagery. Terrorists are increasingly justifying violence with ideologies that combine far right views (such as white supremacy) and violent far left ones (such as radical environmentalism), and their rationalizations may shift over time. The rationale that the Buffalo shooter used to justify his violencehis wish to protect the white race from a perceived threat posed by other racesis a common theme among the network of violent white supremacists weve studied. Rationales for political violence often mask deeper fears, such as the fear of being outclassed, outnumbered, or humiliated by some other. To be clear, such fearscouched by white supremacists in terms of white genocide or the great replacement conspiracy theoriesare no justification for heinous acts of hate. But by studying why people endorse such conspiracy theories, we may be able to find effective ways to stop this kind of violence before it starts.

This type of research has yielded surprising results. as Karen Stenner have shown that diversityracial, ethnic, gender, and even moralis most aversive to those who are innately authoritarian, a latent trait shared by around 30 percent of the population. This is not unique to America; authoritarianism is found all over the world. When a society becomes more diverse or multicultural than such authoritarians can bear, they are prone to becoming overtly racist and even violent. According to polls carried out by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape and his research team, an estimated 21 million people hold two radical beliefs, which, when held together, are defined by the researchers as insurrectionist: they believe the election was stolen and that violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to power. Interestingly, 10 percent of the 21 million who hold both these views are Democrats. The strongest driver for subscribing to these views is the unfounded fear that African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.

These fears are based on perception, not reality, and are no justification for heinous acts of hate. Understanding what really motivated the Buffalo shooter wont undo his actions, heal a community, or make families whole. But it does offer a chance to help those engaged in the work of preventing these acts before they occur.

That said, there is one final piece to this particular story: guns.

The Buffalo shooters manifesto was 180 pages long: 81 were dedicated to discussions of race, ideology, and motivation; and 99 were dedicated to a discussion of plans, weaponry, and gear. The U.S. has a long and complicated history with guns, with a robust gun culture that can be found in both online and offline spaces. More than half of the document was focused on explaining why he made specific choices about his weapons (20 pages), helmet (24 pages), and body armor (38 pages) and suggests an intimate familiarity with the gear he was discussing. Additionally, the manifesto notes that the shooter radicalized on 4chan, and that he started in the /k/ community (one focused on weapons, where guns are the primary topic) before transitioning to /pol/ (a politically incorrect community renowned for its racism) where he learned the truth about the threat to white Americans. Thus a gun community was the gateway from which he transitioned to ideologically extremist content.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter notes that he chose to use a gun because (1) they work and there are very few weapons that are easier to use and more effective at killing than firearms and (2) he imagined that his attack would be followed by a call for gun reform that would rally sympathetic Americans to violence in order to protect their rights. Finally, he writes in multiple instances about laws related to gun control: he writes about circumventing these laws in order to secure the firearm he wanted; he writes about exploiting local gun laws to increase his likelihood of success; and he writes about manipulating the U.S. debate on firearms in order to recruit more people to his agenda.

The path forward from here is complicated. It is critical that we reject simplistic explanations, whether they focus on access to mental-health care, or the spread of dangerous political ideologies, or access to guns. There is no single variable that explains why this terrible massacre occurred, and so there will be no single answer. But this doesnt mean that there is nothing we can do. A mental-health crisis among adolescents and the shortage of mental-health practitioners has been widely covered in the media. Our research team has found that there are especially few clinicians trained and willing to work with individuals who subscribe to violence-endorsing ideologies. We need to support policy decisions that will increase the availability of mental-health clinicians, especially those willing to work with this potentially dangerous community. We also need to both improve digital literacy (which might have prevented the Buffalo shooter from believing the false narratives he found online) and reject the mainstreaming of heinous ideologies like that of replacement theory. And finally, we need to advocate for the kinds of gun control policies that are already supported by more than half of America. Preventing future terrorist attacks of all kinds will require policy changes on all these fronts.

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The Three Factors That Drive Violent Extremists - TIME

Many of us have wondered what our ruling class means by the phrase New India. Is the new relative or absolute? How new is new?

And what are we expected to do with the old India many of us have grown up in? Is there nothing worth reclaiming?

What will we do with our political languages, our music, our films, our constitution, our art, our modern Urdu poetry, our freedom struggle, and above all our political proprieties and civilities? These questions continue to haunt us.

The excessive focus on the irrelevance of the old is puzzling. Do our ruling classes not know that ageism or categorisation and discrimination on the basis of age is considered politically incorrect? The celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her fine book on ageing, suggests that if their (the Wests) first battle was against racism, and the second against gender discrimination, the third will be against ageism.

But let us put these little, and perhaps irrelevant observations aside, and focus on the New India our ruling class wants us to inhabit. Err, what exactly is New India?

So we read media reports on which leader had said what on the notion of New India. Who can clarify our doubts, hesitations, worries, and perplexity better than the leadership and the spokespersons of the BJP? The reports we read are written by breathless journalists who admiringly cite every word, every pause, and every punctuation in speeches delivered by our undoubtedly knowledgeable ruling class.

Yet confusion reigns. I outline two doubts here, hoping that this will spark off an informative dialogue in the columns of the Wire. I do not speak to our ruling class. Who can dare question its monopoly over wisdom? I speak to scholars and public intellectuals who inhabit a new India, and who will undoubtedly bring further clarity to bear upon the subject.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Are rights old or new?

The first attack on Old India is an attack on rights. Now this is a little bewildering. For anyone who is conversant with the history of the mainstream national movement will know that the demand for independence was couched in the language of rights. Tilak famously said, Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it. Where would Tilak be in Indian history if we took away his understanding of Swaraj as a right, just because rights are old and irrelevant?

Tilak was not alone in speaking of rights. In 1895 a draft of a Constitution of India Bill came to the attention of the political public. No one seemed to know who had authored the Bill, though Annie Besant believed that Lokmanya Tilak had drafted it. The constitutional draft focalised civil rights: the right to express ones thought in words or writing, and the right to publish them without liability to censure. It further laid down that under the provisions of the constitution, nobody can be imprisoned unless a specific crime had been proved against him according to law, no one shall be sentenced except by a competent authority, the law should be equal for all, every citizen has the right to property, and every citizen has the right to elect one member to the parliament of India, and one to the local legislative council.

In 1925, 43 distinguished Indians hailing from across the spectrum of public opinion, signed a memorandum that accompanied a Commonwealth of India Bill that was sent to the Labour government in England. The Bill stated that India has the right to self-government, that it should be placed on an equal footing with Self-Governing Dominions, and that it would share their responsibilities and their privileges.

Also read: How Bal Gangadhar Tilaks 1897 Trial Marked the Criminalisation of Dissent

A Declaration of Rights embedded in the Bill stated that the fundamental right of every person is to liberty of person and security of his dwelling and property, freedom of conscience, free profession and practice of religion, the free expression of opinion, and the right to assemble peacefully and without arms. Each person has the right to form associations and unions. The Bill provided for the right to free elementary education, gender equality, and equality before the law irrespective of any consideration of nationality.

In 1928, an All Parties Conference met under the presidentship of M.A. Ansari, to devise a constitutional framework for an independent India. The objective of the committee was to consider the basic principles of a Constitution for India, and in particular a Declaration of Fundamental Rights. In its recommendation, the committee stated that All powers of government and all authority legislative, executive and judicial are derived from the people.

Foremost on the list was a right that is basic to democracy universal adult franchise. The Motilal Nehru Report stated that any artificial restriction on the right to vote in a democratic constitution is an unwarranted restriction on democracy itself. In the opinion of the Committee, the repeated exercise of the right to vote is in itself a powerful educative factor.

We attach no weight to the objections based on the prevailing illiteracy of the masses and their lack of political experiencePolitical experience can only be acquired by an active participation in political institutions and does not entirely depend upon literacy. There should be equal opportunities available to all to acquire this experience.

The rights discourse may be considered dispensable today, but it is precisely the right to vote that has brought numerous governments to power in independent India. After all the exercise of the right won for the present government two terms of rule.

The demand for rights by the leaders of the freedom struggle was remarkable, because the colonial government had rejected the idea of fundamental rights for Indians right up to the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946. It is only then that the Plan advised the setting up an Advisory Committee for Fundamental Rights and Minority Rights in the proposed Constituent Assembly. These were the very rights that had been demanded by the leaders of the freedom struggle and public intellectuals since the turn of the 20th century. The struggle for the right to independence generated, from the point of view of the colonial government, considerable disorder.

But if there had been no disorder attending the many significant struggles against colonialism we might not have won our freedom. Disorder can be liberating. Order is the property of the prison and the grave yard. Disorder is endemic to the regime of popular movements demanding democracy.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Therefore, there seems to be nothing wrong with our political languages easily dismissed by the Hindutva brigade and its fellow travellers as belonging to Old India. Since the advent of political modernity, the language of rights has been deployed to assert that all human beings have status simply by virtue of being human. In a casteist, patriarchal society, and one that is rapidly verging towards majoritarianism, rights are the only weapon we have to speak back to a history that is not of our own making. In a post-revolutionary world, what other imaginaries and linguistic weapons do we have?

Certainly, sentiments that are independent of a rights-laden tongue, such as care, benevolence, charity, sympathy, pity, love, and responsibility are good things in themselves. Any society which is not marked by the presence of these sentiments would be sadly impoverished. But unless we recognise that obligations supervene upon rights, the recipient of these obligations is rendered dependent on our construction of responsibility, or more dangerously charity. We might feel, for instance, that whereas P deserves our charity, and that therefore we have a moral obligation to her, Q does not evoke quite the same sensibility and, therefore, we owe her nothing. Or that Qs status, or rather her lack of status, is neither here nor there as far as we are concerned.

Bearers of rights, on the other hand, possess irreducible standing as persons who matter, or at least who should matter, equally. That is, obligations are not attached to either P or Q as persons who belong to different communities, but to P and to Q because both P and Q belong to a category that we term human.

Moreover, is it enough to feel responsible for the poor and leave it at that? Is that all we owe the victims of poverty? Should we not be working towards the creation of a moral and political consensus in society that poverty is undesirable, precisely because it massively and fundamentally violates the basic presumption of the right to equality? Should we not, as partners in this shared project, concentrate on thinking through what a just society based on equality should look like?

It might be far better for democrats, let me suggest, to situate and to ground political vocabularies in a political consensus that persons have to be treated in this way and not that. There are certain things that must be done for them-respect for civil liberties, and certain things that must not be done to them-torture. The language may be old, but at least it is tried and tested as an emancipatory force, unless we plan to give up on emancipation, on solidarity and on justice for us and our fellow citizens.

It is difficult to exclude rights from our political language, simply because the language of rights, since 1789 French constitution has been used effectively to fight class domination, racism, casteism, gender discrimination, prejudice against the right to sexual preferences, and for the rights of minorities. Justice has to be wrested out of the closed fists of recalcitrant elites through political struggle.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Do then struggles for rights belong to Old India or the New India? Before we decide let us ask Dalits, our indigenous communities, the transgender community, Indians who have fought for the right to sexual preferences, and beleaguered women, whether we should dismiss the language of rights, howsoever old it might be?

The idea of culture

The other point hammered into our collective consciousness is subjection to our nation and to our culture, a process that has been called Swaraj by our current leadership. This is odd because we had always thought that Swaraj was about freedom.

We are now told that Swaraj is about subjection to the cultural community of our nation. But the moment the word culture is uttered, the corresponding question that arises is-whose culture? The conundrum was made clear when a number of distinguished philosophers engaged with the thought of the celebrated philosopher Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyas (KCB) in a 1984 special issue of the Philosophical Quarterly. They focused particularly on his lecture on Swaraj in Ideas delivered to students of Hoogly College in 1929.

In the lecture, KCB engaging with intellectual slavery and colonisation of the mind, suggested that Indian scholars should interpret ideas coming from abroad-provided they were relevant-through the prism of Indian culture. The problem arises at this exact point which culture? Whose culture? I am not speaking of minority cultures but of Hinduism that our ruling class swears by. Let me cite the argument of the distinguished philosopher Dharmendra Goel in the Philosophical Quarterly in response to these vexed questions. In any case, it is impossible to improve upon his thesis on the impossibility of defining culture.

Also read: Meet Badlu Khan, a Symbol of the Syncretic India the Hindu Right Wants to Erase

KCB used the term culture as synonymous with Sanskritic, upper caste, metaphysical and abstract Hinduism. But as Goel argued, the panorama of Indias past extending for more than five centuries, cannot be articulated easily within the limited perspective of Sanskrit traditions, even if we add to the Vedas the dharamshastras, epics, poetic classics, theatre, dramaturgy nitishastras, and attendant social institutions. Within the Sanatana tradition we find adaption and accommodation of varied principles and contingencies to each other, sometimes associated with the locality and the tribe, in the idiom of the universal symbols of Brahmanism, and sometimes deifying tribal symbols and practices in the structure of Sanskrit Brahmanical orthodoxy.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The ahimsa of medieval Brahmanic Vaishnavism, continued Goel, is from Buddhism and other non-Aryan sources. The sexuality of Tantric Shaktism is largely derived from primitive oral beliefs and rituals. Tribals carry Brahmanical texts in their oral myths. There is no homogenous and continuous identity of ideals and ideas throughout Indias historical experience. Kautilyas Arthashastra is incompatible with the usual advocacy of purushastras and varnashrama principles in the epics. And though everyone invokes dharma, no one seems to know what dharma is!

The great grammarian, philosopher and Yogi Bhartrihari of the classical period, continued Goel, wrote, like Shankara, erotic and evocative lyrics even as he advocated purity of desire and penance, staples of the tradition coming down from the Vedas. The tantras and the eroticism of medieval Indian culture challenge the fiction of an austere and incorporeal paradigm of Indian civilisation suggested by deifiers of the great Indian tradition in the last 100 years led by savants such as Aurobindo, Coomaraswamy, KCB and others. For high elite Sanskritic cultures exist along with common Prakrit, Pali and Apabhransha mind; the pre-English vernaculars of India.

What is representative of the Indian spirit asks Dharmedra Goel, a Pandit Raj Jagannath beating about the old poetic conventions in Sanskrit in the Mughal court? Or the new emerging poetry of Guru Gobind in Punjab, and in Avadhi speaking areas by Rahim? For my personal identity, wrote Goel, Agra and Ghalib, Guru Gobind and Amritsar are as much a part of our world view as Ramayana. I, he wrote, would like to explore and consolidate my own world-view not only from Sanskrit classics, but from the rock etchings in central India and Mirzapur, not only from the temples of Kanchi and Bodhgaya, or the painting and sculpture of Ajanta and Khajuraho and Konark, but also paintings by Amrita Shergill, M.F Hussain Jamini Roy, and music by Tansen or Ravi Shankar. These are mine, and their images and memories have echoed and made them my own, this is the way to live.

Reading this wonderful argument that destabilises the notion of a homogenous Hinduism, we wonder who and what culture/Hinduism as a public philosophy that legitimises political power represents? For which strand, which class, and which sub-community does it speak? It is only then that we will be able to understand what obligations to our country and our culture we have. We thought we had understood these. We were wrong.

But this is a New India. We have to ask questions and seek answers afresh.

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What Is This 'New India' That BJP Speaks of? - The Wire

The upcoming fateful negotiations with Azerbaijan are providing yet another opportunity to the opposition. Baku has come up with a five-point proposal, which the Armenian side has accepted while submitting its own six-point list, which has been kept secret so far. But a few days ago, Ambassador-at-Large Edmon Marukyan finally made it public during an interview with Petros Ghazaryan. Basically, those six points refer to the security and the rights of the Karabakh people, a vague formulation which can be interpreted in any way. There is not even a mention of remedial secession, which can be the only viable option.

National Security Commission President Armen Grigoryan reassured the public that both Armenia and Azerbaijan are silent on the specifics of the enclave issue to protect the integrity of negotiations. However, right after that, Khalaf Khalafov, Azerbaijans deputy prime minister, made public claims for some enclaves from Armenia, before even sitting at the negotiation table.

The opposition is asking outright for Pashinyans resignation, without even holding early elections and proposes to form a unity government, comprising 250 technocrats. The names of those technocrats have yet to be released.

Basically, what the opposition is suggesting is let Pashinyan resign, then we will come up with something. This is not a national agenda which will bring together the country. And that is why the movement is not going anywhere.

The first president, Levon Ter-Petrosian, warned that the oppositions actions will only hamper the upcoming negotiations with Turkey and Azerbaijan. However, the government and pro-government forces are comfortable as long as Kocharyan and Sargsyan are in the mix. The people are particularly scared of Kocharyans intentions to see Armenia in a union state with Russia, thus losing its sovereignty.

What the current administration fears most is the emergence of a third party, which is not tainted by the former corrupt regime and has knowledge of statecraft, which Pashinyan and his cadre lack. And indeed, there are names being circulated, including Avedik Chalabyan and Arman Tatoyan, both of whom have high standing among the public. That is why Tatoyan is being harassed and Chalabyan is currently under arrest on trumped-up charges.

Chalabyan is the head of a small political party. He is also the co-founder of a private charity helping Armenian soldiers and residents of border villages in Armenia and Karabakh. He is very articulate and knowledgeable on political and military matters. He has supported the opposition, but his name has not been tarnished in any corruption schemes. This is the type of person who scares the government and provides an alternative to Pashinyans inept group whose merits and education were gained in Pashinyans long march from Gyumri to Yerevan.

Pashinyan has to watch the rise of people like Chalabyan with dread while the population hopes for the emergence of a third force.

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Armenia's Opposition is Running Out of Steam - The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

Rather than take responsibility for inspiring racist violence, 4chan anons blame the FBI

The American rights latest efforts to stoke a moral panic around gender and sexual identity has incorporated a term groomer to smear LGBTQ people as predatory abusers. That rhetoric, like so much that becomes common in political knife fights, migrated from the toxic message board 4chan, where users are now experimenting with another application for it.

Its the individual plus the groomers, wrote an anonymous person on the sites /pol/, or politically incorrect forum on Monday. They were responding to a question about who was ultimately responsible for the racially motivated mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York grocery store that claimed 10 lives on Saturday. I bet we will never learn who he was talking to on that discord because they are in fact feds, the anon speculated, referring to the chat server where the suspected shooter had allegedly laid out his plans for the assault in detail. The claim that federal law enforcement grooms or encourages right-wing terrorists is increasingly common.

For years, the denizens of 4chan have suspected and accused one another of being federal agents, nicknamed glowies. Its widely thought that the FBI and CIA comb the forum for incriminating statements or hints of extremist plots, sometimes baiting individuals into committing crimes. That paranoia has led in turn to the presumption that glowies as a kind of shadow cabal are orchestrating massacres like the one in Buffalo. Its the same kind of denialism that gave us conspiracy theories about mass shootings being staged events, false flags carried out with crisis actors. Only in this scenario, the violence is real, and the killer is a impressionable patsy (or, per 4chan, an autist, or retard) set up by government agencies.

This line of thinking is, unfortunately, supported by some of the FBIs known activities: particularly in would-be cases of Islamist terror, the bureau has arranged sting operations to foil perpetrators who wouldnt have acted without support and resources from the undercover feds monitoring them. Of special interest to 4chan, however, is the case of Jerry Drake Varnell, a schizophrenic man who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for trying to blow up an Oklahoma City bank using a fake bomb given to him by the feds. While Varnell supposedly hoped to spark a right-wing, anti-government revolution, his parents pointed out at the time of his arrest that he had no means of doing so on his own, arguing that the authorities had exploited his mental illness in order to entrap him. What if they engineered shootings the same way?

Well, they dont. The feds absolutely deserve criticism for manufacturing terror schemes, but critically, they do it in order to look good. They provide weapons that dont work not functioning assault-style rifles and take the suspect into custody without any victims getting injured or killed, announcing the charges as if their vigilance has once again saved the day. To believe that the FBI or CIA is secretly arranging for one civilian to murder many others, you need to come up with a different justification. On this, the anons are somewhat divided. Maybe its an attempt to jump-start meaningful gun control. Maybe they want to radicalize confused young men into advancing their own racist agenda. Maybe they just want to shut down 4chan.

Of course, its all deflection: The /pol/ users want the freedom to post hate speech and openly fantasize about genocide without getting blamed when someone who namechecked them in a manifesto starts gunning Black people down. Theyre capable of spreading dangerous ideology even while blaming glowie groomers for the bloodshed, as in the post above, where the Buffalo shooting is described as an effort to accelerate the Great Replacement, which is the same white supremacist concept that served as a pretext for the killings.

And as Republicans try to dodge complicity in this pattern of violence, theyll likely resort to similar maneuvers to defend themselves while continuing to sow fear of immigrants and non-white citizens. Their voters are already disposed to believe in a nefarious Deep State, call anyone they disagree with a groomer and dismiss racism and firearm worship as factors in these horrific attacks while doubling down on both. Its this contradiction, alas, that sets the stage for the next nightmare.

Miles Klee is MELs resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. Hes also the author of the novel Ivyland and a story collection, True False.

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The Far Right Thinks Feds Are 'Grooming' Mass Shooters - MEL Magazine

The mass shooting on May 14 in Buffalo, New York, was an atrocity. The killer will pay in this life and the next one for his crime. Unfortunately, however, the Democratic Party, led by President Joe Biden and its allies in the corporate media, wasted no time weaponizing the slain victims.

The suspect left behind a 180-page document outlining a schizophrenic worldview. "On the political compass I fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category," he wrote, while expressing qualified support for the "LGB (drop the t)" community. More importantly, it also described the so-called "great replacement," the idea that, as conservative commentator Michael Knowles put it, "Democrats are using immigration policy to change the demographics of the United States in a way that would seem to help them politically."

Biden and company latched onto that part of the murderer's incoherent screed to pin the shooting on their political opponents, from Fox News to the GOP. In essence, Democrats argue that Republicans' rhetoric and positions on immigration radicalized the shooter.

But there's a small problem: Democrats and progressive activists, based on their own rhetoric over the years, subscribe to "replacement theory" more than anyone else. As vice president, Biden himself said that a "constant" and "unrelenting" stream of immigration would reduce Americans of "white European stock" to an "absolute minority," and that this was "a source of our strength."

Democrats weren't always so sanguine about demographic change, though.

Recall that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) assured concerned Americans that the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration law would "not upset the ethnic mix of our society"it would not, in other words, result in demographic change. That kind of talk from a Democrat is unimaginable today. It was also, in retrospect, simply incorrect. The Hart-Celler Act, which ended nationality quotas in immigration policy, resulted in an influx of non-European newcomers, encouraged illegal immigration and drove rapid demographic shifts. "The people who moved here after the 1965 act made the United States a truly multicultural nation," NPR celebrated in 2015.

Obviously, Democrats have changed their tune since Kennedy's day, abandoning their historic political bloc of white working-class (oftentimes Catholic) voters for the so-called "coalition of the ascendant," in which immigrants are key. This is not a conspiracy theory; it "happens to be the same demographic argument Ruy Teixiera made in The Emerging Democratic Majority," as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro noted.

Shapiro is right, but there's more to it than that.

Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2004. That book argued, in his words, that Democrats should exploit "economic and demographic changes, including the growth of minority communities and cultural shifts among college graduates." And simply put, the "growth" of those communities has been due to policies that have facilitated mass migration. (It is worth also noting that Teixeira has said Democratic activists "bowdleriz[ed]" his thesis as part of their efforts to coalition-build on "identity politics.")

In 2013, Politico concluded that amnesty for millions of illegal aliens "would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily." The following year, James G. Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park, published a study that found the "flow of legal immigrants into the country29.5 million from 1980 to 2012has remade and continues to remake the nation's electorate in favor of the Democratic Party."

A comprehensive report by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress came to a similar conclusion in 2016: In the long run, demography favors the Democrats. And in 2018, CNN host Michael Smerconish discussed with demographer Rogelio Saenz, over a chyron that read, "THE VANISHING WHITE AMERICAN," that demographic trends connected to immigration spell doom for the GOP.

All of this was viewed as a legitimate political strategy for Democrats, and was discussed in the cold language of hard political calculus. It took a harsher turn in the era of former President Donald Trump, who spoke to the anxieties of white working-class Americans. No group likes being told that it is the villain of history and deserving of dispossession. Trump's rise should have been a warning sign to Democrats and progressives to tone down the talk of demographic triumphalism. Instead, they dialed it up to eleven.

Looking back on Trump's election, New York Times opinion columnist Charles Blow reduced Trump's victory to "white extinction anxiety." He cheered that the 2020 Census showed "the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite." Jennifer Rubin, an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, echoed Blow, tweeting that the census results heralded "a more diverse, more inclusive society. She added: "[T]his is fabulous news. [N]ow we need to prevent minority White rule." If anyone is radicalizing people in this country, it's those who have so ostentatiously declared themselves to be on the "right side of history."

Whether and how much immigration is a good thing is a secondary question to the fact of Democrats' disingenuousness about so-called "great replacement theory": "It's not happening, and it's good that it is." Political scientist Michael Anton calls this the "celebration parallax," which states: "[T]he same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it."

Buffalo was a terrible tragedy, but it cannot be weaponized like this. No group has more openly discussed exploiting demographics and immigration for political gain than the Democratic Party, along with its liberal allies in the corporate media. So to their hypocrisy, Democrats now add an unfathomable level of gross cynicism.

Pedro L. Gonzalez is the associate editor at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Democrats Are Massive Hypocrites on So-Called 'Great Replacement Theory' | Opinion - Newsweek

Three U.S. Air Force Academy cadets whose refusal to get COVID-19 vaccines threatened their May 25 graduation along with the risk of a repayment demand for six-figure tuition costs will be awarded their degrees, officials said Saturday.

Following a standard review of graduation requirements for this years senior class, the Academys board recommended awarding Bachelor of Science degrees for the three cadets refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, a press release from the Colorado Springs, Colorado, school said.

However, the Academy stated, they will not be commissioned into the United States Air Force as long as they remain unvaccinated, and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall will decide whether the graduates must reimburse the United States for education costs in lieu of service.

According to attorney Mike Rose, the unvaccinated cadets will not be allowed to attend the graduation ceremony.

That has been confirmed and is petty, vindictive, disrespectful and unnecessary, Mr. Rose, who represents unvaccinated cadet Jameson Barnard, said via email.

An Air Force Academy spokesperson was not immediately able to verify Mr. Roses claim but said they would investigate.

Originally, four senior cadets, known as firsties, refused the vaccine on religious grounds. Their requests for exemptions were denied, however, and one cadet took the jab.

This is a punishment for their religion, Gordon James Klingenschmitt, a former Colorado state representative and a former Navy chaplain told The Washington Times earlier this week. Its not about the vaccine. Its about their religious conscience and their politically incorrect Christian beliefs. Its a religious purge by the Biden administration, he said at the time.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican whose district includes the Air Force Academy, had decried the potential graduation refusal.

America was founded on the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which encompasses protecting the religious rights of the individual. That includes those who put on the uniform and volunteer to serve our nation. It is imperative that our military leaders uphold the constitutional rights of these cadets, he said in a statement this week.

Michael L. Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, was not pleased with the decision.

He said via email, These 3 USAF Academy cadets should be immediately charged and prosecuted under [the Uniform Code of Military Justices] Article 92 for their wretched failure to obey the lawful order of the Secretary of Defense to receive the FDA-approved COVID vaccines. They should be aggressively tried via a General Court Martial and, if convicted, be imprisoned as well as being compelled to pay back the hundreds of thousands of dollars per cadet which American taxpayers have forked over for their expensive education.

SEE ALSO: Air Force Academy cadets face expulsion, repayment demand over vaccine refusal

The Washington Times has reached out to Rep. Lamborns office and the Air Force headquarters for comment about the Academys decision.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

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Unvaccinated Air Force cadets will graduate Wednesday, but won't get commissions, academy says - Washington Times

People pass a Planned Parenthood clinic March 17, 2017 in New York City. (CNS photo/Justin Lane, EPA)

Taking apparent inspiration from Thomas Malthus hypothesis that there must be a strong and constantly operating check on population for the lower races through birth control and abortion, the new eugenicists of today are already talking about the ruinous societal consequences if Roe v Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. And although faithful Catholics have long rejected these utilitarian arguments for abortion, the Malthusian warnings of increases in poverty, crime, and abuse if abortion is curtailed have escalated since the draft of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs vs Jackson was leaked.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League, which later became Planned Parenthood, devoted an entire chapter of her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization to criticizing the dangers of the overbreeding of the races. Todays Malthusians are warning of crime in the streets and starvation once the Supreme Court issues its ruling in Dobbs. United States Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) recently told an MSNBC interviewer, The fact that things like inflation can happen, and it becomes more expensive to feed your kids and to fuel your car is exactly why people need to be in charge of how many mouths theyre going to have to feed.

Sanger built upon the popularity of eugenics, which had become almost a religion among elites in the 1920s and early 1930s. In her earliest days, Sanger focused her work and her rhetoric on trying to create a superior race. Attracted, like Adolph Hitler, to Nietzsches ideas about humanity as a work in progress and the need to create the godlike Superman, Sanger envisioned a new race of biologically superior creatures who would be as different from us as we are from apes. In her first book, titled Women and the New Race, she advocated birth control and sterilization as tools to prevent the superior race from being forced into a cradle race with rapidly breeding inferiors. In 1939, she produced a pamphlet called Birth Control and the Negro, which asserted that the poorer areas, particularly in the South, are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations.

The dark side of the Sanger legacy continues today in the heavy marketing of abortion in neighborhoods primarily populated by African Americans. An analysis of New York City abortion rates and ratios by ZIP code published by the Chiaroscuro Foundation reveals that Bedford-Stuyvesant has the highest rate of abortion in Brooklyn at 59 percent. This means that there are 59 abortions to every 100 pregnancies. The abortion rates in Jamaica, Queens and Southeast Queens and Central Harlem-Morningside Heights are even worse well in excess of 60 percent. In contrast, while more than half of the pregnancies in New York Citys Black and Hispanic neighborhoods end in death for the unborn child, only 6 percent of the pregnancies for women living on Manhattans Upper East Side zip code of 10162 end in abortion. And only 6.7 percent of all pregnancies in the lower Manhattan Zip code of 10282 end similarly.

From the earliest days of the abortion rights movement led by Sanger, there was an attempt to broaden what was then a radical feminist idea to the larger issue of the general welfare of the whole human race. Sanger argued that controlling the birth of children was pivotal to a rational approach dealing with the threat of over-population and its ruinous consequences in poverty and disease. Her messagelike that of todays Malthusianswas that when women have control over the choice to end the life of the unborn child, they will improve the human race, preventing poverty and crime.

This has been occurring for many decades now. Professors John Donohue and Steven Levitt of the University of California at Berkeley provided a powerful economic argument in favor of abortion that relied on many of the stereotypes first promoted by the eugenicists of the Sanger Era. In a scholarly paper published in 2001 entitled The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime, Donohue and Levitt used elaborate mathematical models to marshal evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to crime reductions. They maintain that crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion was legalized and pointed out that the five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation which legalized it in 1973 with Roe v Wade. States with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s according to the authors. They contend that legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent in the drop in crime. And they warn of the coming violence in the streets if abortion is curtailed in any way.

In the spirit of Sanger, Donohue and Levitt claim their data demonstrates that abortion is the strongest contributor to the reduction in crime rates in society. In fact, they suggest that the social benefit to reduced crime as a result of abortion may be on the order of $30 billion annually and they predicted that any attempt to limit abortion will result in higher crime rates and they subtly offer suggestions for public policy.

Despite criticisms from the pro-life community for their utilitarian argument for abortion, Levitt teamed up with a new co-author, Stephen Dubner, to write about the abortion-crime link, as well as a number of interesting economic questions, in their 2005 best-selling book,Freakonomics. While avoiding the politically incorrect issue of how increased African American abortion rates bear on crime reduction, Freakonomics continues the argument that more abortion yields less crime. But the book takes a more circumspect position by acknowledging that an economic calculation of benefits that abortion may yield in terms of crime rates feels less Darwinian than Swiftianone need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

The idea of abortion being a public good was the one that seemed to be carrying the day from the pro-choice side as corporations increasingly promise workers to help them pay for their abortions if they live in a state that outlaws the practice of abortion. Amazon was just the latest company to promise to pay up to $4,000 for employees travel costs to seek abortion care if they live in a state without access to abortion. Amazon joined Citigroup, Yelp, Uber, Lyft, Bumble, Levi-Straus, and Match Group in helping employees end their pregnancies through abortion.

One cannot dismiss the idea that abortion serves the bottom line for these companies. Just as many companies now encourage and pay for their female employees to freeze their eggs for a future pregnancy in order to enable them to continue working through their childbearing years, providing access to abortion for high-value employees is most likely seen by these companies as a boon to the balance sheet.

It is indeed a Modest Proposal that these companies are offeringand one that should be rejected. The Malthusians have attempted to control the conversations since the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade. Their utilitarian arguments appeared to have won the dayuntil recently. Finally, the Supreme Court decision may be a sign that we are beginning to take steps toward rejecting the culture of death and reclaiming a culture of life.

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Netflix, the Apple of online streaming services when it comes to in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it high pricing, should be renamed Wokeflix, according to a section of the Internet that has been raging about the platforms out of touch with audience content.

For some time now, Netflix has been criticised for producing woke-safe content so married to political correctness and social justice that, at times, it ends up being moral discourse instead of entertainment. Netflix, as Internet favourite Elon Musk put it, suffers from the "woke mind virus". It chooses to live in a dream world that is far separated from the lives of its audiences.

A form of that critique was on display in India this weekend. The trigger was the release of the teaser-trailer of Zoya Akhtars The Archies. There was nothing politically incorrect about the trailer, but the criticism it attracted followed the same refrain: Yet another Netflix release that is oh-so-out-of-touch!

To be fair, it's hard to imagine many Indians connecting with the minute-and-a-half-long cast announcement video. The yellow-tinted teaser-trailer (for nostalgias sake, I guess) had a bunch of teenagers bouncing about in an orchard, picnicking with burgers-cupcakes pulled out of wicker baskets and cool summer drinks sipped from mason jars. The Archies, based on the evidence till now, screams South Bombay and its favourite picnic destination, Alibag.

That got the peoples goat (the fact that three of the six leading cast members are star kids also got the peoples goat, but thats a debate for another day). From Zoya Akhtar making yet another movie of the rich people, by the rich people, and for the rich people to Netflix wasting production money on a show/film that a majority of India wouldnt watch or identify with, the criticism was swift and severe.

But, here's my question to those so torn up over Zoyas latest production: What goes your fathers? Or, to put it in non-woke, cruder, and politically incorrect terms: Tumhare baap ka kya jaa raha hai?

Its Zoya Akhtars time and money that may or may not go down the drain. The film may or may not successfully launch the careers of Shah Rukhs daughter, Amitabhs grandson, and Booney Kapoors daughter. And, Netflix may or may not end up losing even more subscribers upset with the highly-priced platforms woke offerings.

Where exactly is your downside in all this?

Does Netflix have a content problem? Arguably so. The streaming platform has kind of recognised this itself, recently telling employees that if they have issues working on productions they dont agree with, they can take a hike.

Its not my case that Netflix does not have a content problem. But, my case definitely is that the debate and discussion over it belong in the meeting rooms of Netflixs Los Gatos headquarters in California.

Tell me how many of those so taken aback by The Archies teaser-trailers non-Indianness unsubscribed from Netfilx, and youll have the answer for why I believe its meaningless to outrage over it on social media.

Dont like whats on offer? Dont watch it.

Netflix and Zoya Akhtar have a right to produce a niche movie that perhaps a majority wont watch. Just like Ranveer Singh has a right to act in an arguably mediocre Jayeshbhai Jordaar (at least thats whats being said; I havent seen it yet) that, box office collections suggest, isnt being watched.

Not every Zoya Akhtar film has to be a Gully Boy just like how every Ranveer Singh film does not have to be, well, a Gully Boy.

This expectation from the Netflixes and Zoya Akhtars of the world that they must produce content that is bound to be a success, bound to be watched by millions is emblematic of a 'go big or go home streak that seems to be taking hold in society: Dont do anything if you cant do it big, right, or perfectly.

Why bother making a film if its not going to rake in hundreds of crores within the first few days of its release? Why bother launching a social media platform if you arent going to be able to satisfy anybody and everybodys definition of free speech? Whats the point of being a Gandhi if you cannot come up with (or arent interested in coming up with) a game-plan to defeat one of modern Indias sharpest political minds?

If a film isnt a big hit at the box office, it shouldnt be a headache for anybody except its director, producer, and perhaps the cast. If you arent happy with Twitters idea of free speech, quit it. If Rahul Gandhi partying in Nepal annoys you, dont vote for his party.

If the Congress chooses to remain in its existential crisis loop even after losing the peoples votes, as election after election has shown, it shouldnt be anybodys headache but the Congresss. Just like how Zoya Akhtars South Bombay-inspired adaption of The Archies tanking on Wokeflix shouldnt be anybodys headache but hers and Netflixs.

After all, what goes your fathers?

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Yes, Zoya Akhtars The Archies trailer is not relatable for most Indians. But what goes your fathers? - India Today

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has hit out at some political journalists and their coverage of the election campaign, saying it is putting some Australians off politics.

On the eve of a closely fought federal election, the Labor leader described some of the media pack's behaviour and coverage over the past six weeks as "nonsense".

Mr Albanese created headlines at the start of the campaign when he could not name the unemployment rate.

He apologised for the "memory lapse" and insists he "owned it"but, afterwards, he was repeatedly quizzed by journalists to list details of his policies.

Some of his team havebeen increasingly annoyed by the behaviour of a few journalists and media outlets.

Catch up on all the news about the 2022 Australian federal election from May 23 in our blog

During a wideranging interview with 7.30, Mr Albanese made it clear he was frustrated as well.

"With respect, some of the nonsense that's gone on from some of the journalists thinking that the campaign was about them and gotcha moments is one of the things that puts people off politics," he said.

The Labor leader has been criticised by some of his own supporters and pundits for not putting forward more policy ideas, and running a small-target strategy.

However, when asked whether he should be vowing to do more for some of the poorest Australians, he said he would not over-promise and under-deliver for voters.

"What I will deliver is what I say I will deliver," Mr Albanesesaid.

In a final pitch to undecided Australians heading to cast their ballots on Saturday, Mr Albanese also outlined his main priorities if he were to win the nation's highest political office.

"Cheaper child care, cheaper energy bills, a future made in Australia, end the climate wars, a national anti-corruption commission, and move forward with the constitutional recognition of First Nations people with a voice to parliament," he said.

National opinion polls throughout this campaign have consistently suggested Labor has a healthy lead on a two-party preferred basis. Newspoll on Friday had the Opposition ahead 53 to 47.

However, the situation in key seats is considered to be much tighter than those surveys suggest.

Both major parties are spinning that they are favoured or experiencing a last-minute surge.

"I think it will be tight everywhere," a Coalition minister said.

"There is a path for us to win a majority but it is very tight and a hung parliament seems more likely right now."

The Liberal and National Parties can't afford to lose any seats to retain a majority, while Labor needs to win seven and not lose any to win government.

A majority Coalition government is now considered by campaign strategists to be the least likely outcome.

Five seats are thought to be most at risk of falling to Labor or the Greens:Brisbane (Qld), Reid (NSW), Chisholm (Vic), Boothby (SA) and Swan (WA).

There are also manyother electorates where the Coalition is being closely challenged by the Opposition and high-profile independents.

Those includeWentworth (NSW), Longman (Qld), Leichhardt (Qld), Goldstein (Vic), Higgins (Vic), Nicholls (Vic), Bass (Tas) and Pearce (WA).

Some in Labor say they are now "quietly confident" of at least being the biggest party by the end of Saturday evening and potentially winning a small majority.

However, they expect to have to pick up one or two electorates in every state, as opposed to experiencing the benefit of a big national swing.

There is also some concern about how preferences from right-wing minor parties such asthe Liberal Democrats, One Nation and the United Australia Party could flow, particularly in Queensland.

"If it all goes bad tomorrow and we're trying to work out what happened, that's where I'd start," said one senior Labor frontbencher.

The Coalition is still hoping it can offset some of its losses by taking a seat or two off Labor. Its targets include Blair (Qld), Gilmore (NSW), Parramatta (NSW), Lingiari (NT) and Corangamite (Vic).

It has not been a campaign filled with many major policy announcements. Instead, large periods of time have been focused on "gaffes" or personal attacks.

As a result, neither leader is particularly well-liked and, in parts of the country, the Prime Minister is considered very unpopular.

While campaigning in Perth on Friday, Scott Morrison again shrugged off criticism and declared he could defy the polls, urging the so-called "quiet Australians", presumably referring to undecided voters, to stick with him.

"This isn't an election about me, or Mr Albanese, for that matter," Mr Morrison said.

"It's about you and what your aspirations are. It's about what you're hoping to achieve."

"Those opportunities are there, but we cannot take them for granted."

In his final pitch to voters, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce declared his National Party would continue to stand up for regional areas against what he claimed was the "Zeitgeist that socially belittles those who underpin the wealth of our nation".

"What the Nationals see as providing a fair outcome for people away from the capital cities, the Labor Party sneer at as pork-barrelling," he said.

"We stand up for jobs in mining, which the Labor Party believes [is]politically incorrect," he said.

"The Nats have a plan, to make our nation as strong as possible as quickly as possible and we accept we may be sneered at as we achieve that."

Millions of Australians have already cast their ballot or have applied for a postal vote, which should ease pressure on polling places on Saturday.

The Australian Electoral Commission hadbeen worried about staffing shortages and long lines due to workers pulling out after contracting COVID-19.

However, as of Friday night, all planned polling stations will open on Saturday morning.

"Our 105,000 workforce across Australia has had approximately 15 per cent turnover in the past week alone, and this risk will continue tomorrow morning," electoral commissioner Tom Rogers said.

"To those people working for us tomorrow, thank you for putting your hand up. Please, unless you wake up [COVID symptoms], come in to work to make sure that your polling place can open.

"To voters, if there is a queue, remember to treat our staff with kindness. You wouldn't have a local polling place with them."

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Posted20 May 202220 May 2022Fri 20 May 2022 at 10:26am, updated21 May 202221 May 2022Sat 21 May 2022 at 12:07am

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Labor leader Anthony Albanese slams 'some of the nonsense' election coverage as on-the-day voters set to decide his fate - ABC News

Kendrick Lamar is not a role model. The savior complex bestowed upon him after he echoed agreeable pro-Black politics on To Pimp A Butterfly at the tail-end of the Obama regime has been rejected. He made a whole album reconciling with the title, using DAMN. as a sounding board to chip away at the surface of his traumas, hoping hed done enough good to outweigh the demons he felt were destined to pull him down to internal damnation. To Pimp A Butterfly, for as great as it is, put a curse on Kendrick. He became a Progressive Liberal champion, the neat idea of what a Black man ought to be in this country. But the truth is, Kendrick Lamar is messy, complicated and deeply flawedand hes been trying to tell us since the beginning.

If I told you I killed a n-gga at 16, would you believe me? / Perceive me to be innocent Kendrick you seen in the street / With a basketball and some Now & Laters to eat / If I mentioned all of my skeletons, would you jump in the seat? M.A.A.D City offers a pivot in perspective; the chosen one is only an audience projection and expectation. Kendrick is just another kid from Compton.

Even on the seminal TPAB, near the end of Mortal Man, he questions fans loyalty by bringing up how they denounced accused abuser Michael Jackson: That n-gga gave us Billie Jean, you say he touched those kids? he scolds.

The difference between those times is Kendrick believed he was the new leader of rap and a beacon for Black America. But after years of reflection, Kendrick has finally accepted that he cant solve everyones problemshe hasnt even solved his own.

Therapy lays the groundwork to strip away external expectations and perceptions to reach the root of all past traumas. And this is part of the reckoning Kendrick goes through on his latest album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. The double album plays out like a two-act play, the set never changing from his therapists office. Its reminiscent of the Mr. Robot episode where Elliott is forced to confront his deep-seated trauma with his therapist, wavering over what caused his pain, but eventually finding the heartbreaking truth.

Throughout Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers Kendrick unpacks his sins. His longtime partner Whitney Alford urges him to seek counseling after his various infidelities are revealed. Kendrick, now the father of two children, is told to seek counseling from Oprah-approved German philosopher Eckhart Tolle to get to the root of what would cause his supposed sex addiction.

The production on the album mirrors Kendricks distress. Gone are the pleasant jazz compositions of TPAB and the cleaner rhythms of DAMN.in their place are scattered piano lines, manic drums, distorted vocal samples and panic attack-inducing synths, all designed to give the listener feelings of anxiety and discomfort. The album plays out like an open therapy session, filled with the raw and unfiltered thoughts of one of the greatest rappers to ever pick up the mic. These thoughts are vulnerable, unmanicured and, to the shock of some fans, politically incorrect and ignorant.

The first few songs of the album mimic when a person first starts therapy, complete with the rapid information dump while in crisis (United In Grief), the self-justification due to a broken society (N-95) and the disdain-filled tirade that begins taking account of past mistakes (Worldwide Steppers). These songs are the most confrontational on the album, as Kendrick grapples with his sins and takes a full account of whats brought him to this point of needing help. Its also where most of the considered singles or playlist-worthy tracks lie. The most tailor-made pop-rap earworm, Die Hard, featuring the smooth vocals of West Coast R&B hitmaker Blxst, has Kendrick taking a breath after the intense venting sessions, hoping he can atone for his past transgressions.

Kendrick begins to make a connection between his and others upbringings and the effects of familial trauma on Father Time. Samphas angelic hook powers Kendricks confessions: Tough love, bottled up, no chaser, neat, he sings, with Kendrick expressing how his fathers way of showing he cared created an environment where Kendrick could not show emotion, vulnerability or uncertainty.

Then, in a cloudy haze with just a building piano accompanying him, Kodak Black appears. Kendrick seems to see some of himself in Kodak, much like J. Cole also decided not to denounce the young South Florida rapper. Kodak is one of the most fascinating and important rappers of the 2010s, but his heinous actions (including the 2016 assault of a teenage girl) have clouded his legacy. Kendricks inclusion of Kodak is supposed to be a signal of empathy, understanding that if a few circumstances had broken differently, he, too, may have been involved in the same controversies. His presence dually acts as a provocative commentary on cancel culture, similar to Kanye Wests late additions of DaBaby and Marilyn Manson on Jail Pt.2. But Kendrick brings more nuance to the discussion, and doesnt just platform his guests to scream about metaphorical jails and whine about people not liking them.

If Drake is the embodiment of modern social media caption chasing and tailored image control, then Kendrick wants to be his foil. I would never live my life on a computer / IGll get you life for a chikabooya / More power to ya, love em from a distance / Why you always in the mirror more than the bitches? he taunts on Rich Spirit. For as much as Kendrick claims he isnt paying attention, hes still in touch with rap, because the flow on the chorus (and later the use of mud walkin on Purple Hearts) sounds like a direct homage to the late, great L.A. rapper Drakeo the Ruler.

We Cry Together, a six-minute skit-song, is like if Eminems Kim and Guilty Conscience fused. The scenario is well-acted by Kendrick and Zola star Taylour Paige, feeling authentic, like overhearing the couple next door at your apartment complex getting into a nasty argument. Its more of a long interlude than a song, attempting to make points about the dynamics between men and women and male toxicity, but gets bogged down in the theatrics, making it something most listeners will hear once, then hit skip on forevermore.

As the first disc closes with the hazy and slurred, Summer Walker-assisted Purple Hearts,featuring a meditative Kendrick supported by the hypnotic Ghostface Killah crying out for salvationKendrick begins to find clarity.

Throughout the album, Kendrick actively questions the listener on the artifice of celebrity, the idea that just because we see these people on Instagram Live and Twitter, we know them. Its true the last decadewith the revelations of #MeToo and the horrific actions of once-beloved cultural figures such as Bill Cosbyhas made people more skeptical of the morality of the rich and famous, but still, the projections continue. And if theres one thing Kendrick hates, its projection. If Kendrick is going to accept who he is, he must live his truth. To do that, the idea and image of Kendrick Lamar must be torn down.

Count Me Out, the first breakthrough, is complete ego death. Kendrick begins to let his guard down and lowers his defensive tendencies, taking accountability for the hurt hes caused. His rapping speeds up as his mind races: I care too much, wanna share too much, in my head too much / I shut down too, I aint there too much / Im a complex soul, they layered me up / Then broke me down. As Kendrick reflects amid the mental storm of the savior complex thats been imposed on him (and that he once accepted), he realizes the price of trying to be everything to everyone is neglecting the people he cares about the most. The calm comes on Crown, where he finally accepts that people wont always accept him, and that trying to chase validation will only continue the downward spiral that brought him to this point.

That acceptance sets up the Kodak Black-assisted Silent Hill, one of the main highlights of the album. The track paints a netherworld atmosphere, complete with decrepit keys twinkling in a haunted house and clicks that sound like playing House of the Dead with a light gun in an abandoned arcade. Having Kodak come on after Kendrick has accepted he cant please everybody seems like an intentional choice to illustrate how hes fine with making a decision that may prove unpopular.

Kendricks struggle with cancel culture is rooted in him being afraid to say the wrong thing, and his insecurities over if people will still rock with him if he isnt making anthems like Alright or DNA. Its easy to point out the fallacies in his logicKodaks last album sold 60,000+ in its first week, Kanye Wests Donda was the second-best-selling rap album of 2021 and Dave Chappelle has some of the most-viewed stand-up specials on Netflix. Kendrick is used to admiration, yet harbors insecurities: If shit hits the fan, will you still be a fan?

Savior anticipates the reaction, putting Kendrick on the offensive like hes making his own Kamikaze. Thereve been arguments over the provocative nature of the album and whether Kendrick intended to be this polarizing. But Savior is a blatant needling of anyone clutching their pearls. Kendrick regains his ego and confidence, blasting exactly how he feels to the masses, critiquing fake woke-ism, PC culture and the lack of free thought, and admitting he didnt trust vaccines. Hes cutting out the people who thought he was a role model, delivering divisive views that many will take issue with. Its clear hes been paying attention to how fans of Kanye denounced him after a multitude of controversies.

The albums content, ideas, revelations and attempts at tackling difficult subjects make it quite compelling, but there is an elephant in the room to address: is it something you actually want to listen to? Because for everything Mr. Morale is trying to do, the production elements and song structures of the album dont command replay value. Its most interesting as a musical podcast and act of psychoanalysis, rather than something youd play on the speakers around friends or in the car. Its quite an uncomfortable listen, like a private therapy session you werent supposed to overhear.

The peak of this discomfort manifests on Auntie Diaries, a track where Kendrick tries to unpack the very polarizing topic of how Black families deal with trans-identifying family members. The intentions were good; Kendrick clearly tries to make the song resonate with people who still havent fully accepted, or understood, people who choose to transition. But the execution is quite messy, complete with misgenders, dead-naming and the use of the F-bomb. One could argue its done to be provocative or show the progression of how he became more accepting, but ultimately, it leaves more questions than answers, putting the trans community in an uncomfortable situation, which theyve spoken on. Its another example of a track Kendrick would never have made before, but this newfound freedom from expectation allows him to make a track thats imperfect.

Through the contempt, sidestepping, breakdowns and catharsis, he puts it all together on Mother I Sober. Rapping in a cold whisper, Kendrick brings to the surface a repressed memory where his family believed he might have been molested. As he unthreads the knots of past pain, his voice grows aggressive, culminating in a primal scream when he connects the memory to his mothers sexual assault and the generational trauma that comes with the Black experience. The haunting track is woven together by Portisheads Beth Gibbons crooning like the ghost of the deceased family members who passed down their trauma.

But through this revelation, Kendrick officially rejects being the projection of what his fans want. I choose me, Im sorry, he says flatly on the closer Mirror.

Whereas Kanye and Drake have decided to inflate their images and egos further, Future stayed in his lane and J. Cole has become obsessed with being considered a legendary technical rapper, the true king, Kendrick Lamar, burns his crown, making it clear he is regular, not a messiahnot your savior.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers rejects conformity and leaves its flaws in on purpose, featuring some of Kendricks best and worst songs of his career.

As he steps into the next arc of his career, through finding solace in therapy, Kendrick Lamar destroys the mythology built up by his followers for 15 years. He leaves TDE in a blaze, burning down the persona and idea of innocent Kendrick, Kung Fu Kenny and any other identity but his own.

Josh Svetz is Reviews Editor/Content Coordinator at HipHopDX, with bylines at Passion Of The Weiss, SPIN and Pitchfork. You can find him trying to revive the word swag and arguing about Roscoe Dashs impact on modern music on Twitter and Instagram.

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Kendrick Lamar Tears Down the Persona on Revealing Opus Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers - Paste Magazine