White progressives specifically want to stop inner-city blacks from littering, but don’t want to be perceived as racists who further penalize the black community for its behavior, so rather than focus on whom they believe to be the actual perpetrators of littering, they remove from everyone‘s hands any objects which might potentially become litter.



Litter is a problem confined almost entirely to urban areas (suburban and rural areas have much less litter); and the poorer the neighborhood, the worse the litter problem. Rather than admit publicly what they believe to be true — that inner-city African-Americans seem to more cavalierly discard their garbage on the street — progressives seek to solve the problem by penalizing everyone, even those who don’t litter, so that the anti-littering enforcement won’t seem to focus disproportionally on blacks, which would appear racist and discriminatory. In other words, even though progressives believe blacks are primarily to blame for littering, progressives — merely to protect their own public image — will make everyone suffer, rather than implement existing anti-littering laws against whom they think are the actual perpetrators.



ABORTION

Progressive position:

Make abortion as accessible as possible; ultimately remove all restrictions from abortion, eliminating any financial cost, social stigma, and legal constraints.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:

Women should have control over their own bodies; legal and shame-free abortion is necessary for sexual freedom; medical choices are a private decision between doctor and patient.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:

Progressives prioritize their own amoral selfish pleasure over the lives of others; abortion is just another way that the far left is trying to destroy the nuclear family; environmentalists see humanity as the only contaminant in nature; by rejecting God the left has embraced and revels in a culture of death.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance:

The movement to legalize abortion was from its inception intended as a way to decrease the black and minority population, and the statistics show that a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted babies are black. The desire to preserve “racial purity” and to prevent over-breeding of the “lower” races and classes was the overt and publicly pronounced goal of the pro-abortion progressive eugenics campaign in the early 20th century; only after eugenics fell from public favor did the leftists devise deceptive new narratives to justify abortion. White progressives still believe that blacks cannot control their sexuality and are too irresponsible to use birth control reliably, so the only way to keep them from overpopulating is to keep abortion legal and cheap or free.





A recent informal survey of well-educated pro-life conservatives, asked to identify what they think really motivates pro-abortion progressives, revealed what were far and away the five most popular theories:



• Hedonism and Selfishness — Progressives want consequence-free sex and the ability to indulge themselves without guilt or responsibility.

• Marxism and the Destruction of the Nuclear Family — The left seeks to erode the basic man-woman-child family unit because to do so is a necessary precursor for state control over the individual, according to Marxist theory.

• Environmental Extremism – Modern leftism is fundamentally anti-human and regards humanity as a plague infecting an otherwise pristine planet; abortion helps to rid the Earth of people.

• Transgression and the Lust for Power — Some people simply derive pleasure from the subversion of traditional values and engage in transgressive acts for the sheer anarchic joy of overturning entrenched social ethics.

• Evil and Moral Relativism — Having rejected God and the concept of moral absolutism, the left has embraced evil, which is always accompanied by a love of death.

While there may be a kernel of truth to some of these theories, the real explanation is much more prosaic and doesn’t involve guesswork, because it can be plainly found in the historical record: racism.

Wherever you go in the United States, you’ll find that African-Americans account for an overwhelmingly disproportionate percentage of abortions, sometimes at a rate four times that of whites.

Imagine if the situation was reversed and it was conservatives who championed a policy that directly resulted in the demographic genocide of blacks: we’d never hear the end of it, and it would be cited by pundits daily as conclusive proof that conservatives are racist. But when progressives in fact champion such a policy? Silence.

Is the sky-high rate of black abortion merely accidental? Or was it the long-term goal of the family-planning movement from the beginning?

The answer to this question has devolved into a fight over the motivations of one woman, Margaret Sanger, who was America’s leading proponent of birth control in the early 20th century and who founded the organization now known as Planned Parenthood. Why Sanger? Because she’s basically the only birth control advocate from the era who wasn’t blatantly racist; most of her colleagues in the eugenics movement just came right out and said society would be better off without so many non-whites. Only Sanger was able to construct a reassuring birth control narrative that didn’t focus exclusively on race. Modern pro-choice activists thus realize the need to protect her reputation at all costs, because if Sanger is shown to have had racist attitudes too, there are no other heroes left, and the entire movement will be sullied from its inception.

The online arguments over the reality of Sanger’s racism produce a lot of heat but very little light. Her most combative progressive defenders dismiss nearly every quote attributed to her as an outright fabrication and pooh-pooh the rest as out-of-context willful misinterpretations. On the other side, her detractors have dredged up an impressive mountain of solid evidence about Sanger’s embrace of eugenics and an equally large mountain documenting Sanger’s associations with racists and her dalliance with racist theories.

The problem arises when anti-abortion activists try to pad out all the irrefutable evidence with a few too-bad-to-be-true Sanger quotes about the need to “exterminate” “negroes” — quotes which, upon closer inspection, were either originally said by others and merely re-quoted by Sanger (“The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit,” originally said by W.E.B. DuBois, later re-quoted approvingly by Sanger), or are open to interpretation (“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” which she did indeed write, although it’s not clear whether she was trying to suppress a false rumor or instead hide the terrible truth), or in a handful of cases seem to have been simply made up (“Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated,” a purported Sanger quote for which no reliable source has ever been found).

For the purpose of this essay I decided to ignore all second-hand accounts and read some original Sanger source material myself. It only took me an hour to conclusively document several egregious Sanger quotes, which (to keep this essay brief) I uploaded here as a separate post which you can read in detail if you need definitive proof. In short: Yes, Sanger was an unapologetic eugenicist; yes, she sought to decrease the population of the “unfit” and “feeble-minded”; and yes, the unfit included not just “negroes” but also immigrants, foreigners and anybody except those of “pure native white stock.”

One of the problems in pinning down Sanger’s attitudes about blacks is that her public views changed over time. In the 1910s and ’20s she often casually cited “negroes” as examples of the very kind of “feeble-minded” “defectives” which needed to be sterilized or otherwise prevented from breeding; but by the 1940s her tone had changed considerably, arguing that it was for black people’s own happiness and health that they should have only as many children as they could afford.

Sanger herself acknowledged that in the 1920s she gave a speech about eugenics and abortion to the Ku Klux Klan, though she never specified whether she advised the Klan to limit the number of white babies in the world or instead reassured them that she was helping to decrease the black population. The fact that “a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered” immediately after her speech leads one to believe she hadn’t lectured them on the overpopulation of lower-class whites.

Even so, by the 1940s she had somehow reinvented herself as an advocate for black self-improvement. Had she changed with the times, or merely found a better way to package her toxic beliefs?

A key Sanger essay, overlooked by most researchers, published in 1921 and now hosted by the progressive New York University Margaret Sanger Collection, matter-of-factly spills the beans that her birth control activism is all a deceptive ploy, mere “propaganda” to sneak her real agenda — eugenics — into public policy:

The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda, by Margaret Sanger

…I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics. … Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator. In answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it is possible to use this interest as the foundation for education in prophylaxis, sexual hygiene, and infant welfare. The potential mother is to be shown that maternity need not be slavery but the most effective avenue toward self-development and self-realization. Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race. As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit”, admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.

In another devastating essay hosted by New York University’s Margaret Sanger Collection, Sanger first bemoans the “multiplication of the unfit,” whom she then equates as being “those of low I.Q.,” and then concludes by noting that it is “negroes” who have the lowest I.Q.s:

All over the world, where the subject is studied, we find biologists concerned over the fall in the level of intelligence, and the increase in the number of those of low I.Q. … Although the multiplication of the unfit is a world problem, we are here concerned with its impact on this country primarily.

… The authors in questioning the possibility that such families may be producing children of superior quality point out that one must be optimistic indeed, to believe in such a possibility, if one may judge from intelligence levels in comparable groups elsewhere, which have been found uniformly below par. The Charity Organization Society in New York in testing 451 representative children under its care found the median I.Q. 86. That of 821 children in Indianapolis was the same, while of 1,500 women admitted as charity obstetrical patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, 39% of the whites and 70% of the negroes were found to have a mental age of 11 years or less.

Clear enough? Sanger herself freely declared that birth control activism (which in the modern era has boiled down to the issue of abortion) was just a ruse to implement eugenic policies by another name — and her eugenic policies most definitely had a racial component.