Today’s radical left progressive movement has two main branches. The two share the common element of fundamentally arising from the deep need of wealthy people to expiate their guilt over their sins of economic success and comfortable lifestyle. But in other ways the two branches are totally contradictory.
The two branches of the movement are:
- The environmental branch, now completely swallowed up by the cult of climate alarmism and the demand to rid the world of fossil fuels. Here wealthy and almost entirely white activists and donors form and fund NGOs to protest and lobby to get the government to suppress energy that is cheap and that works, and thereby to drive up the cost so as to force low income people and members of minority groups into energy poverty all in order (supposedly) to “save the planet.”
- The diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) branch, currently focused on the demand for equal economic outcomes in all societal positions and jobs except NBA player. In this branch of the movement, an overlapping group of nearly-as-entirely white and wealthy activists and donors prove their superior virtue by demanding ever more aggressive affirmative action programs that somehow never work to alter economic outcomes among ethnic groups, while simultaneously accusing everyone else of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”
Given the fundamental inconsistencies of the goals of the two branches of the progressive movement, it’s actually remarkable how the two have managed to minimize what could easily turn into major conflicts. But in recent months things have boiled over at an organization called 350.org.
Are you familiar with 350.org? It’s the super-activist environmental NGO founded in 2008 by professor and author Bill McKibben and 8 others described by Politico as “a group of white people.” The 350 of the name, according to the group, is the highest level of atmospheric CO2, in parts per million, that is acceptable for the planet. (The current level is well above that.). The front page of the organization’s website states the mission:
Stop Fossil Fuels. Build 100% Renewables. We are standing up to the fossil fuel industry to stop all new coal, oil and gas projects and build a clean energy future for all.
350.org is perhaps most famous for its role in organizing protests and demonstrations that ultimately blocked the Keystone XL pipeline. The fact that the organization’s program, if adopted, would dash any hope for prosperity among millions of poor people and members of minority groups does not appear to trouble 350.org at all.
McKibben himself phased out of the CEO role in about 2014, and apparently has little remaining active role at 350.org today. His successor and current CEO is a woman named May Boeve. Here is a picture of the two of them:
It would be hard to get any whiter than that pair!
The current difficulties at 350.org are detailed in a long February 20 piece at Politico with the headline “The group that brought down Keystone XL faces agonies of its own.” To summarize the background: It seems that in 2019, under the leadership of Boeve, the organization embarked on a strategic program to greatly increase its size, staff and, consequently, its cost structure. In May of that year, Boeve spent $800,000 on a boondoggle corporate retreat in Ireland:
[A]t the Killarney retreat that May Boeve, the executive director and one of 350.org’s founders, announced that she’d hiked the organization’s annual budget to $25 million. She told staff to dream big. She revealed plans for nearly 130 new hires to make a splash at global climate strikes that September. . . .
The 130 new hires represented a near-doubling of the group’s then level of staff. According to Politico, a main purpose of the staff increase was to “improve the organization’s diversity and equity.” Apparently the organization’s “diversity and equity” up to that point had been deficient, although no amount of searching on my part seems to turn up statistics on their pre-2019 racial and ethnic breakdown. According to Politico as to the organization as of 2019:
It was also hard to tell just how diverse the staff was. 350.org’s reporting on its racial and ethnic makeup has been opaque. The organization said it did not have systems in place for people to identify their race or other demographic information as recently as 2019, and is only just now getting a handle on that information.
I like that excuse about not having “systems in place.” Could they have counted them? My three year old grandson can count to 100.
Anyway, the result of the hiring binge without having the funding lined up was a bloodbath of layoffs later in 2019. Politico interviews some 10 or more ex-staffers as to what happened next. You won’t be surprised to learn that underlying it all is white supremacism. Here was the situation as of 2019:
Even with McKibben’s role minimized, the organization’s power center still ran through white officials at the top who set 350.org’s tone, even as the lower ranks were filled with people of color, according to 10 current and former staff members. . . . White, wealthy liberals have dominated green groups for decades, coloring environmentalism with a reputation for elitism.
350.org hired consultant Hannah Lownsbrough to produce a report as to what went wrong. According to Lownsbrough’s report (via Politico):
“Layoffs in the US have been experienced as disproportionately affecting people of color and with other marginalised identities on the 350 staff team; concerns have been expressed about the emergence of a ‘white supremacy dominance culture.’”
Most of the recently-hired “Black and brown” people in the organization who were not fired then quit. A black woman and 350.org executive named Tamara Toles O’Laughlin was responsible for hiring many of the minority group members on staff. Ms. O’Laughlin herself quit in December 2020. She has this to say about the people she had hired:
“[I left behind] a women-led, majority Black and brown leadership team. . . . I hired just about every one of the Black and brown people on that staff and I do not believe any except for one are still there.”
To top it all off, Politico quotes one Anthony Rogers-Wright of the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest in a statement applying not just to 350.org but also to many other environmental NGOs:
“My question is simple, why do we continue to work with white-led organizations that treat Black people and Black women in particular like shit?”
Specifically as to 350.org’s treatment of racial minorities, Rogers-Wright says:
“[350.org] needs to be put on notice.”
I can’t say that I am surprised at all to learn that 350.org is permeated by “white supremacy dominance culture.” The simple truth as to what’s going on is that the people who run and fund the place are wealthy, guilty white liberals who have somehow convinced themselves that they can alleviate their own guilt by further impoverishing low income people and members of minority groups. Of course when push comes to shove they “treat [b]lack people like shit.” What I can’t understand is how the DIE activists think that they can make common cause with these people.
There is a great scandal concealed here. It is the huge amount being spent on worthless NGOs
https://gript.ie/the-new-class-of-the-ngo-elite/
Benefacts Analysis 2020 (Ireland)
32,841 Organizations
165,075 Employees
86,481 Directors/Charitee Trustees
€14.2bn Turnover
€5.9bn State Funding
In 2007, there were 45,000 people employed in 19,000 community and other NGOs with a turnover of €2.5 billion. Now there are more than 165,000 people employed, and turnover is over €14 billion.
(Population increase 2007-2020 14%)
If they are doing this just think how much will be syphoned off for the climate boondoggle.
It all boils down to this.
The NGO’s and media outlets are infested with upper middle class white liberals who are unemployable in any productive way, so they infest these area’s which make these areas nothing more than working welfare for unemployable.
Tell you the truth, I actually am a racist, which leads me to suspect that most other people are too. I’m white, and have lived in Canada since I was born in 1952. When I was a teenager in Red Deer, Alberta (population about 30,000 at that time) there was only one race. Actually we had about 20 or so families who were refuges from Communist China, but the rest of us were all white.
I avoid Black people when I can. Why don’t I like Black people? Well, its’ because they’re ugly, in a brutish, hypersexual way. And you keep running into Black men who are vastly stronger and more athletic that most of the white people you know. So they make me nervous. I’m being honest here. This is not a troll job, and I am posting under my real name.
Also, there is the immutable fact of the I.Q. gap. 15 points. The average I.Q. of a Black American adult is 85. Have you had even a five minute conversation in the last twenty years with someone with an I.Q. of 85? That score is so low that the U.S. Army won’t accept recruits with that I.Q. or lower. And 85 is the mean. Half of American Black people score lower.
Anyway, I doubt if my feelings about race are all that different from most people’s. I think that the reason so many white people (who claim to be not racist) are so certain that racism is prevalent is that they really, deep down, don’t much like Black people. I mean really, how many of the earnest white people who lamented the death of George Floyd would have accepted him as a friend if they had known him when he was alive? He was a large, fearsome-looking drug abuser and an ex-con who had done federal time for a violent crime. He had numerous children whose mothers he had abandoned. He was a rather bad man.
Think of all the reasons you are allowed to dislike people. You can dislike them because of their appearance, or their weight or their evident intelligence levels, and certainly their social class. So why not race?
Once again, this post is not a gag or a deliberate provocation. I mean what I say. Am I a bad person? I don’t think so. I treat everybody, regardless of race or social class, courteously and fairly. But that doesn’t mean, and can’t mean, that I like everybody equally.
I think racism is biologically inherent: fear of the stranger, which mean anyone outside one’s usual acquaintances, and is apt to be stronger if the stranger looks distinctly unlike our usual acquaintances. It is just survival instinct to be cautious in the face of the unknown, a basic reaction below the level of rational thought.
On the other hand, experience and reason, rather than such emotion evaluations, can control one’s behavior and, for the most part, for most people, it does. Courtesy generally does not cost a great deal, and greatly smooths casual one-time interactions. Then, most of us find the stranger not so terrible after all if circumstances, or directed effort, leads to greater familiarity.
Consider the case of George Floyd. If you watch the entire video of Floyd’s arrest and consequent death, at no time did the arresting officers even allude to Floyd’s race. And yet, because, Floyd was black and the policemen who arrested him were other races, it has been assumed from the start that the police were racist. This shows how entrenched racism is. When there is a confrontation between white people and black people, it is immediately assumed that race was the fulcrum of the quarrel.
Racism as it was known in the fifties and sixties has been banished from polite society, because any overt expression of it is severely punished. White people are required to act as if they like Black people as well as white people, but you can’t pass any laws that require them to actually like Black people When you read Black people on the social challenges they face as Black people, the dominant theme is that they’re angry that white people are only pretending to like and trust Black people. So many Black people are so angry that they are infuriated when white people are polite to them, because they take it as condescension.
Microaggressions? That isn’t the same as the murders of Emmitt Till or Medger Evers or Martin Luther King. We are now at a stage where racism has been defined so broadly that most people must be racist, which is where intellectual frauds like Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi come in. If there were no racists, they would recruit them and train them, and pay them wages.
I think racism is biologically inherent: fear of the stranger,
J. Michael Straczynski noticed a very interesting phenomena while working on Babylon 5:
When the day players and extras arrived on set, they generally grouped together by race: blacks together, whites together, etc. But after their makeup was put on, they grouped together by “race”: Narns together, Centauri together, humans together, etc.
I saw a lot similar while working as an extra – the cops tended to group, the doctors, etc.
I doubt anyone has looked much into this, but it definitely suggests something very inherent.
Also, though, groups that previously knew each other, like the main cast, or groups of extras who had worked together a lot in the past, did NOT fall into this pattern, regardless of race, “makeup race”, or role.
It is called “tribalism.” For tens of thousands of years the tribe was the most important social group.
I can’t say that you are a bad person, but your attitudes towards blacks in general are informed 100% from ignorance. If there is any difference between blacks and whites intelligence wise, it’s more like 1 point, not 15, and I’m not sure which way it would go.
I know of no study that shows that blacks on average are either taller or larger than whites.
That your opinions in general are similar to those you grew up with is probably true. That is true for everybody. In turn, that does not mean that your opinions are similar, much less the same as everyones.
You sound like a good person who wants to do good. Please make an effort to learn where your opinions are informed by fact, and where they are informed by ignorance.
Now, Mark, the I.Q. gap is well established and enduring. If you don’t believe that it exists, well, that’s your right, but consider what the the implications must be if it actually does exist as an objective reality. I.Q. tests are quite good predictors of who will succeed. They are bang-on predictors of who will fail. That is, a man with an I.Q. of 120 can get a university degree in a Liberal Art A man with an I.Q. of 110 cannot, although he can learn a skilled trade. A man with an I.Q. of 85 bears a terrible handicap, and in fact will go through life being unable to make friends with anyone but people in is own general I.Q. cohort. This must mean that, in the general case,, no matter how badly anyone wants this, broad social equality between Black and white people in the United States is an impossibility.
Most people sort themselves into groups of roughly similar I.Q. Take an example: Google up the picture of Bill Gates and his early team of software engineers, who I’ll bet had a mean I.Q. of about 145. Nine men and two women, all in their mid-20s, all white, and all with that slightly startled, hyper aware look that I.Q geniuses usually display. Anyway, since most people associate primarily with people of roughly the same intelligence levels, people think that everybody in the world is more or less at that level. And that ain’t so.
As for the physical dominance of Black People, the NFL is now about 80 percent Black. There hasn’t been a white heavyweight boxing champion since Rocky Maciano, in the late 50s. All eight finalists in the 100 meter foot race at the Olympics will be Black men.
These are just facts, impossible to ignore unless you really, really want to.
It just makes me sigh when some people insist that race doesn’t exist, or that there are no broad racial differences that must have real social consequences. It’s not fair? What is? Is class fair? How about the stark outcomes between good-looking and plain people? You can try to impose fairness, but human variability and human nature will thwart you every time.
I prefer to think of myself as a culturist rather than a racist. That is, I think some cultures are better than others, and I dislike some cultures. To me, someone’s behavior is more important than the color of their skin.
I have no objection to the colour of a man’s skin. I will dislike a man because of the shaped of his features.
Think of the movie star Lee Marvin, a white man who had negroid features. He had thick lips and a blunt nose. Until Marvin became a star, his stock in trade was brutish thugs. Even after he became a star, he was rarely cast as a man with a girlfriend. I’ve seen most of his movies, and I can’t remember him in a scene where he kissed a girl.
Or another example: Mick Jagger, who has thick lips. I just look at Jagger and I dislike him. There is something obscene about him. Lecherous and depraved.
Now think about Eddie Murphy. I can’t remember a scene in any of his movie where he kissed a girl.
See what I’m getting at here, Clyde? The line about skin colour trivializes what is a serious problem with negroid ugliness. If we are allowed to shun ugly people, we are then, by extension, allowed to shun many Black people.
I’ll tell you something else. Ta-Nahise Coates and Ibram X. Kendi and Robin diAngelo avoid people with I.Q.s of 85 just like you do. I’ll bet that all of those people live in predominately white neighbourhoods. Intelligence is a terrible and ruthless sorter of people in a way that no other quality is. Half of all the Black people in the the U.S. have a very bad personal handicap.
“Black and brown” people
Black I get. Who are the brown people?
And what happened to ‘people of colour’?
An interesting little example of how ‘important’ 350.org actually is in the eyes of its supporters:
350.org YouTube channel has 13800 subs
Its videos regularly get a few hundred views
What this means? The people who actively support 350 by subscribing to the channel do not watch the content created. Some of these uploads are only 2 or 3 minutes long. Their ‘supporters’ cannot even take 3 minutes out of their lives to see what one of their climate hero groups is talking about.
(and remember you don’t need to be subscribed to watch a channel’s videos)
Bit sad really. If they weren’t a heavily funded group being run as a business I would feel sorry for them.