2 + 2 = 5

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (George Orwell, 1984) Recently Americans were told that it was imperative during the coronavirus epidemic that all persons remain at home. All “non-essential” businesses would be closed indefinitely. Persons who had to leave home on essential business should wear a mask, keep six feet away from other persons, and avoid large gatherings. Violators would be prosecuted.

Unless one wished to take to the streets to demonstrate against the police, in which case 2 + 2 = 5. Americans are being pressed to voice support for Black Lives Matter. (To utter the words “All lives matter” is a firing offense because, well, because 2 + 2 = 5.) But Black Lives Matter is a virulently anti-American organization that sanctions violence against the police. Consider the following from Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter: “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what its political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.” “Assata” is Joanne Deborah Chesimard, convicted of the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, and added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2013. Nevertheless, Democrat office holders across the land have been joining the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, even as those demonstrations have been directed against the office holders’ own police departments, because 2 + 2 = 5. These same Democrat office holders have been allowing widespread vandalism, looting, arson, and the tearing down of historical monuments to take place and to go unpunished, because 2 + 2 = 5. In the midst of this mayhem, Black Lives Matter advocate the defunding of police departments as a way to make American cities safer, because 2 + 2 = 5. Now dozens of major American corporations are giving moral and financial support to Black Lives Matter, because 2 + 2 = 5.

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Then there is this from Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for New York Times Magazine, "Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” And 2 + 2 = 5. Many American whites have been demoralized by accepting the premise that they are inherently racist. But if we reject out of hand the absurd claim that the content of a man’s mind is a function, either directly or indirectly, of the color of his skin, then we are free to ask what would justify the world’s branding a man a racist. And the answer is that only overt speech or acts of a racist nature can justify such a judgment. Regardless of what a man might think, so long as he behaves in a manner that is not racist, then the world has no grounds to call him a racist. (Just as the world has no grounds to call a man an adulterer who, though attracted to his friend’s wife, never acts on the attraction.) Yet whites of a certain ilk are paralyzed by guilt, and even prostrate themselves before blacks in repentance for their imagined transgressions, as their country is torn down before their eyes, all because they are willing to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. Few things demoralize a man as thoroughly as destroying his ability to make sense of the world. To surrender one’s ability to recognize that 2 + 2 = 4 is to surrender one’s very selfhood. Says Orwell’s villain, O’Brien, of men he has tortured into such surrender, “By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.” But in Orwell’s Oceania it was the exceptional men who needed to be tortured into believing that 2 + 2 = 5. The vast majority were willing to accept the idea voluntarily, as do, it now appears, a great many Americans. We have seen such mass irrationality many times in history, at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-93, in Paris in 1793-1794, and, more recently and on a grander scale, in the Third Reich. These things never end well.