Pun Salad

The author, Michael Huemer, is a philosophy prof at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I got the relatively cheap paperback edition of this book, it being one of those self-published, printed-on-demand deals. (It's slightly cheaper on Kindle.) I've read a couple of his previous books, Ethical Intuitionism and The Problem of Political Authority. (I found the former kind of daunting, the latter less so.)

Progressive Myths, however, is completely accessible to the lay reader. It is (more or less) a wide-ranging corrective to the worldview promulgated by left-wingers in the media and in positions of political power.

An initial chapter deals with "myths about individuals" that were endlessly reported in the news in past years: allegations that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Jacob Blake were murdered by racists; that Amy Cooper and Kyle Rittenhouse were motivated by racism. Huemer does a good job debunking those cases. And, to his credit, he adds in three "non-myths" where the left's narrative was more factual: George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor.

Subsequent chapters deal with more general topics. A sampling: the male/female "wage gap"; racist police shootings; transgender ideology; anthropogenic global warming; progressive taxation; government regulation. And more.

Why is this important? Huemer's final chapters discuss how progressive mythologies are particularly corrosive to American society, pushing the oppressors/oppressed binary narrative: whites oppressing blacks, males oppressing females, the rich oppressing the poor, the straight oppressing the not-so-straight. (Yes, we well-off white male heterosexuals are evil, I might as well confess.)

I didn't find much new information in the book; Huemer is mostly repackaging and summarizing progressive-refuting arguments that have previously been made by others at greater length and detail. Still, it's a useful and perceptive overview of an ideology that seems to depend on a largely fanciful view of reality.

Huemer also has a substack, Fake Noûs. Heh!