Exposing the Pretendians

Peter Boghossian Reports on the "Pretendians." An excerpt from Peter's article:

There is an epidemic of primarily white people—and white women in particular—who are pretending to be Native Americans for professional gain. Dubbed “Pretendians,” these individuals are predominantly active in academia and hold tenured faculty positions or even department chairs.

To be sure, this is a cultural oddity. It is not, however, particularly surprising given the career advantages the academy confers on Native Americans. What is bizarre is that once a university finds out that one of its faculty is pretending to be Native American, they do nothing about it. Nothing.

I invite you to ponder this: The same institutions that start meetings with land acknowledgments, champion Native American history, obsess over equity-based racial solutions to contemporary ills, and perseverate on historical tragedies, completely ignore known instances of fraud by white people who are pretending to be indigenous and who receive direct financial reward as a result. I cannot believe that the Pretendian scam is not a bigger story. It is a clear example of staggering hypocrisy on multiple levels.

Here is Peter's interview with Jacqueline Keeler, a Native American author and journalist who has explored the phenomena of Pretendians.

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The Transgender Religion

In his 2021 book, Woke Racism, John McWhorter made the strong claim that Wokism is a religion. Not like a religion. It was literally a religion. At pages 23-24 he writes:

Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. Language is always imprecise, and thus we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today. ... Early Christians did not think of themselves as “a religion,” either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves. In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. ... To make sense of it, we must understand them—partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but as parishioners.

Abigail Shrier, is the unfairly attacked author of Irreversible Damage (2021), has stated that gender ideology (which many people consider to be part of the Woke movement) should also be considered to be a religion. Not like a religion, but an actual religion. Shrier sets forth her reasons at her Substack, in an article titled: "Little Miss Trouble Why I’m Not Waiting for the Gender ‘Pendulum’ to Swing Back."

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly. Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school. There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course.

Because it is a religion, gender ideology "is not a tide, and it will not turn with the gravitational pull of the moon." According to Shrier, the very occasional sparkles of honesty we have seen in the corporate media were "pawn sacrifices" by the movement. It is her opinion that the ground-swell of Believers filling our sense-making institutions will not give any real ground until forced to do so.

So no, I don’t love the sensation of young people screaming in my face. But there is something I fear more than the furor of hundreds of zealots, blaring horns and banging bass drums: the world they aim to create, where truth finds no foothold and fairness, no purchase.

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About “Race”

Writing at Journal of Free Black Thought, Amir Zaki is more than ready to dispense with the destructive idea of "race."

In 2023, It appears painfully evident that the concept of different and distinct races is a myth. From a biological perspective, this is nearly indisputable. Yet, legends die hard. In the United States, perhaps more pathologically than most other places on earth, people seem to hold onto this race myth as if their lives depended on it, as both oppressors and victims. The topic takes up an incredible amount of bandwidth in the media. Statistics show this trend has, ironically, been increasing despite the world's ethnic populations and cultures rapidly mixing with one another. This can be partially explained by America’s unique and tarnished past, exceptionalism, and isolation/provincialism. It can also be partially explained simply by habit. We made this bed. And we’ve been sleeping restlessly in it for centuries now.

Participation in race-based language may have some utility because it’s easy to go along with social conventions, but it is ultimately short-sighted, and I argue that we have to rip off the bandaid sooner or later, and I prefer yesterday. The reification and constant reinvention of the concept of race is deeply regressive and keeps everyone in an endless, discriminatory, divisive loop. As Carlos Hoyt, Jr. beautifully puts it, “For some of us, this false logic justifies discrimination and violence. For some of us, it leads us to try the best we can to bring about some sort of state of separate but equal state of racial equality. But we can’t. Race is predicated on separation. Separations that aren’t equal. Separate and unequal is the essential logic of race.”

The concept of separate and distinct races, as we currently understand it, is somewhere around 400 years old, which counts for roughly 0.1% of our human history on Earth. For comparison, the belief in witches lasted roughly 300 years and seems utterly absurd to almost everyone now . . .

My view is that all parties trafficking in race are serving to maintain the status quo, which will always be inequitable, divisive, and exclusionary, especially toward those who don’t fit into any racial categories. Proof that these strategies are failing can be observed easily by looking at the toxic relationships between racialized groups as expressed by the loudest and most powerful voices on social media. We have a billion-dollar anti-racist movement with an invisible enemy. This is a recipe for an endless battle.

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Judging the Judging of Modern High School Debates

Why have real debates when the judges can prejudge the debaters on the basis of ideology or identity politics? James Fishback writes at The Free Press: "At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer AllowedAt national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked." An Excerpt:

"Once students have been exposed to enough of these partisan paradigms, they internalize that point of view and adjust their arguments going forward. That’s why you rarely see students present arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel, or challenging affirmative action. Most students choose not to fight this coercion. They see it as a necessary evil that’s required to win debates and secure the accolades, scholarships, and college acceptance letters that can come with winning."

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