In the wake of what has been widely termed as the riotously rampant kidnapping, detention and the summary deportation of both legally and “off-the-books” or undocumented residents hereabouts the United States of America by Neoliberal Opposition Leaders and Politicians, I have serendipitously chanced across a critically poignant and discursively unimpeachable mini-treatise authored by Matthew Yglesias, the renowned Harvard-educated blogger and journalist and cofounder of the web portal called VOX, titled “Bell Curve Is about Policy. And It’s Wrong.”
The article – or perhaps more appropriately, mini-essay – is subtitled “Charles Murray is an Incredibly Successful – and Pernicious – Policy Entrepreneur,” and it is dated April 10, 2018. My initial pre-reading gut reaction to the aforementioned article was a “Yogi Berraian” sense of the irredeemably trite and decidedly dêjà-vu, being that the White-Supremacist-Themed “Bell Curve” public policy disquisition had been published as relatively far back as the early 1990s, when the present author was a doctoral student at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and had been received with a seismic groundswell of skepticism and massive protests and, one could even aptly add, a missionary disdain by the Ideological Left, on the one hand, and the morally impenitent and unabashed and brazen Neo-Aryan, Right-Wing White-Supremacist Ideological Precursors of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Neo-Slavo-Colonial Nationalists.
The latter imagery immediately recalled for this author, the memorable words and the critical observation of one of our Mega-Nation’s foremost intellectuals and thinkers of what in the discipline of Modern Philosophy is often called “American Pragmatism.” But, of course, Cornel West, the Harvard-educated philosopher and theologian, is much better known as an erudite African American public intellectual with Hip-Hop cultural sensibilities and strong leaning towards Human and Civil Rights Activism.
For the renowned Ivy-Festooned, Hip-Hop-grounded thinker and prolific writer and firebrand social critic – once publicly dressed down by an extant Harvard University President as scandalously lacking in the stereotypically hauteur mannerisms of an Ivy-certified scholar and academic, at the heart and within the soul of all forms and shades of “Nationalism” is a morally untenable magnitude of “Barbarism,” which is essentially the central theme and the thesis of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “Bell Curve” justification for the Social Darwinian thrust of White Supremacist Public Policy Crusade that is, of course, the morally and the practically unarguable modus operandi of the raging MAGA Revolution, which is simply that the Central Government has absolutely no legitimate business pretending as if all species of humanity are, somehow, inalienably entitled to the provision of Equal Incentives and Opportunities for the remarkable or the significant enhancement of their chances for survival among the global comity of nations.
Which is why it comes as all too pedestrian for the first order of business of the MAGA Crusaders to entail the preemptive and the peremptory eradication of all social-welfare programs of our pontifically self-preening “Civilized Society,” classified under the social policymaking category or label of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), formerly known and recognized by the democratically elected legislators of the United States’ Congress as “Affirmative Action.”
For the MAGA Crusaders and the Aryan Supremacist Revolutionaries, it is all a crude albeit a conclusive matter of the “Survival of the Fittest.” In other words, if today the overwhelming majority of the world’s population of Non-White and Non-Aryan Humanity is relatively and significantly socioeconomically far less privileged and ingenious than their MAGA countrymen and women, this is fundamentally because the Non-Aryan species of humanity is irredeemably doomed to endure the unspeakable level and magnitude of socioeconomic and political exploitation and the domination by the MAGA species of “Super-Normal” and “Superhuman” humanity.
In sum, it is all a sheer matter of “Manifest Destiny.” Consequently, DEI policy initiatives are, by and large, a morally and politically and logically an untenable attempt to flagrantly and egregiously and, to be certain, even a criminal attempt by false propaganda-peddling Liberals geared towards upending the Natural Order of the Universe. For that matter, in order to normally and righteously guarantee the restoration of the Natural Order of Things or of the Universe, DEI policies, perforce, ought to be more logically and sensibly and strategically and savvily redefined and reinterpreted in terms of what African American Liberation Theologian Michael Eric Dyson calls the morally and the politically despicable politics of “Denial, Erasure and Intimidation.”
So, in effect, it ought to come as absolutely not the least bit flabbergasting that “Intimidation” at all levels of human endeavor has become the unquestionable rule of “MAGACRACY,” rather than the exception. Just as wanton and relentless military brutalities had in the recent past been used to miraculous effect by the erstwhile Western European Powers, presently strategically morphed into the so-called North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and significantly expanded in recent decades to include some erstwhile satellite states of the Imperial Russia of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), to mold Continental African Humanity into the creation and the operation of contemporary American Civilization, it is only too legitimate and natural that the materially baleful and regressive instrument of Denial, Erasure and Intimidation be continued in usage for the permanent and the eternal maintenance of the Natural Order of the Universe, in consonance with MAGA political philosophy and ideology.
Ultimately, the racial provenance, the ethnicity and the nationality of authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, late, are equally significant as discursive texts and pretextual data here, in view of the strategically convenient fact of recent genocidal attempts by some MAGA revolutionaries and crusaders to effectuate the Complete Erasure of Palestinian Identity and Humanity as a calling card and a veritable proof of MAGA pretence to SEMITOPHILIA or the hermetic semitic defense of American and global Jewry. The good news here, though, is that many Jewish leaders, scholars, intellectuals and thinkers have conspicuously seen through this patently pedestrian and hypocritical gimmickry. And they are beginning to make the theatrically over-aggrieved MAGA sympathizers of the “Zionist Cause” feel the heat in ways never before envisaged and/or experienced.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 18, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]
