Karoline Leavitt is resigning from her post as White House Press Secretary. She says it is to spend more time with her family. TDS sufferers say it is because Trump exposed her to an Iranian assassination plot.
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary
Maggie Haberman and White House spokespeople have stated that Karoline Leavitt was not on the decoy flight out of Turkey. Supposing she was, that would not explain her resignation.
Why haven’t other White House officials on the decoy flight resigned? Marco Rubio (Secretary of State), Scott Bessent (Secretary of the Treasury), Stephen Miller (Deputy Chief of Staff), and several White House staff members were on that flight. Yet they remain loyal to the President.
President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth
President Donald Trump was accompanied on the Air Force C-32A flight by Deputy White House Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Executive Assistant Natalie Harp, Director of Oval Office Operations Walt Nauta, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Does it occur to TDS sufferers that, based on a credible threat that Iran intended to assassinate the President, putting the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Defense on the same plane would involve a monumental lack of judgment by those governing our nation?
The President’s life must be safeguarded above all others. Moreover, since the President was the target of the plot, his presence on board would have exposed others to greater danger. Hegseth is another prime target, so naturally he went with Trump.
This isn’t hard. Leave it to TDS sufferers to see a prudent move as something untoward.
On Saturday, I published an article on the apparent suicide of Jason Arday using Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie as an explanatory concept. Anomic suicide occurs when an individual is subjected to extreme or disrupted forms of regulation. As I was penning that essay, I became aware that the mass media, consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), launched an attack on President Trump by exploiting sailors attempting suicide on the USS Lincoln, currently deployed in the Middle East.
The USS Lincoln
I am sympathetic to the situation of sailors on the Lincoln; however, the media is not telling their audience that sailors attempting suicide is common in naval history. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell is blaming the media for what he called “a false narrative.” Parnell is right; the media is disseminating a false narrative. Before I explain the deeper reasons why, I want to say a bit more about Durkheim’s suicide typology to help the reader see why the media narrative should be understood as false on its face.
One might consider Durkheim’s concept of anomie to explain this, as I did in the Arday article. But Durkheim’s concept of egoistic suicide is more apt in the Lincoln case. In egoistic suicide, the individual is insufficiently integrated into collective life. During a long naval deployment, a sailor may feel detached and isolated, with no meaningful connection to the crew. The longer the deployment, the more detached and isolated the sailor becomes, and suicide is a risk. There are approximately 5,000 service members stationed aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln. Predictably, a handful of sailors will be insufficiently integrated with their crew.
The media is reframing a common phenomenon and making it appear as the result of an extraordinary situation. But there is nothing extraordinary about long deployments during times of war. Sailors may not be fully aware of what they signed up for, but they did sign up for military service. The solution is not to bring the Lincoln to port, but to understand the problem of egoistic suicide and confront it in those terms. Given that the problem of suicide among service members is a chronic one, the Navy has ways of addressing it. This would likely not be news but for the fact that Trump is president.
Supposing that the story originated with popular concern originating in family complaints, rather than explaining this to the public in the terms I just outlined, the media is taking a personal tragedy with known sociological causes and using it to attack the Commander-in-Chief. Media elites are weaponizing egoistic suicide to undermine the command structure of the US military. Why would they do this? This is the more important question.
* * *
Image by Sora
One cannot address the question without understanding the aims of transnational corporate power and the anti-West project. We must therefore move beyond Durkheimian functionalism to conflict theory. The conflict is at scale, so we turn to macrosociology and political economy to orient our observations. Here, the picture becomes clear: China and Iran are strategic partners with significant economic and security cooperation. China is essential to the designs of the globalists who are effectively denationalizing the world order. Trump’s intervention in Iran is, from the globalist standpoint, interference with the transnationalist agenda.
How else would one explain why the transnational corporate order integrated the largest totalitarian communist state in world history into the global economic system? Such a relatively rapid world-changing event doesn’t happen by accident. Indeed, we know who did it. In the United States, the Democratic Party spearheaded the project to fuse the American and Chinese economies. As Senator, Joe Biden played a principal role in this development. It is one of his many betrayals—among others, the opening of America’s southern border and the invasion of tens of millions of illegal alien invaders during the man’s illegitimate presidency.
For what purpose would Biden and the Democrats do such a thing? Is it not obvious? They have deindustrialized the United States by moving manufacturing to China to take advantage of cheap, subjected labor, crash the standard of living for ordinary Americans, demoralize the population, and undermine popular political power. And there is more to it than that. Elites seek to establish a comprehensive control apparatus. China is the paradigm surveillance state of the New World Order. Transnational corporate elites intend to entrench a new mass control apparatus based on surveillance and simulation.
The crisis of late capitalism requires a new model to manage an increasingly disaffected population for the sake of elite power and privilege, concentrated in the hands of a small number of firms and wealthy individuals. The new model is global neofeudalism, where the world proletariat becomes serfs managed on high-tech estates. There will be no democracy or liberty in the future. What may appear as popular participation and individual freedom in the next epoch will be simulacra only—and most observers will be unable to tell the difference. Simulacra are everywhere today, and they are shared by people who believe they are authentic.
How does Iran fit in with this plan? Islam has proven to be an effective weapon in the deconstruction of liberal democracy. Islamized populations are subservient to religious delusions ultimately managed by economic elites. Islam is essentially the fascist design (corporations and financial institutions were behind fascist states like Nazi Germany), but superior to fascism in that Islam explicitly seeks an end to nationalism, which is the greatest threat to globalism. Like communism, Islam envisions a world without nations. However, Islam has proven more effective in colonizing the lifeworlds of Western populations. Tragically, susceptibility to religious delusions is a common disposition, however variable. For every person who resists the siren song of religions promising solutions to man’s problems, there is one or more ready to wreck the ship of society upon the rocks of mythology.
So far in this essay, I have focused on the United States. But we can see the unfolding of the plan in Europe and the regionalization project, i.e., the European Union and the Schengen Area. The United Kingdom, to take the obvious case, has been deindustrialized. The quasi-religion of environmentalism plays a major role in hollowing out the core. At the same time, Europe has been flooded with Muslims. Englishmen now find themselves the minority in their own cities. These developments are driving the nations of Europe to the brink of financial collapse. Out of Europe’s ashes the New World Order will arise like the phoenix.
Those who deny this is happening are of two sorts. The first are those leading the deconstruction project. They control the mass media that confuses popular understanding. The USS Lincoln is a case in point. There are many others. The second sort are the indoctrinated whom the first brainwashed and now mobilize to resist the nationalist reclamation of the West and liberalism. TDS is a sign of the power of brainwashing. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Red-Green Alliance are others. The purpose of mass psychogenic illness is to demoralize and pacify the general population—to render them inert in the greatest conflict of our time.
* * *
It is no exaggeration to say that the free people of the West find themselves in existential crisis. The only way out is through nationalism. The difficulty is that the political party chosen by the moment—the Republican Party—is itself partly captured by transnational corporate power. And with the possibility that Democrats will retake Congress in 2027, the number of captured Republicans will likely grow as the party is forced into a compromise position.
This would already have happened had Trump not prevailed in 2024. That is how close America is to the Republic’s end. Trump is a glimmer of hope. There are glimmers in Europe, as well. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is one of them. But glimmers are not enough. Following the lead of the six US Senators who called on soldiers to disobey Trump’s orders, Germany’s police union has called on officers to defy any “unconstitutional” orders if the AfD takes power.
Defiance of populist governments is part of the elite transatlantic plan. What is needed to counter the plan is mass action by patriots across the Western space and the election of leaders prepared to punish the enemies of freedom. This is no time for compromise. Deconstruct the transnational order.
It appears that disgraced academic Jason Arday has committed suicide. He was found at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon. His family is blaming those behind Arday’s termination. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.” Should the campaigners have affirmed his identity as a university professor? Of course not. Doing the right thing can cause emotional torment. Doing the right thing takes precedent. The right thing is the most important thing, and one’s feelings have to come to terms with this.
Jason Arday
French sociologist Émile Durkheim would likely have described Arday’s death as a case of anomie. For Durkheim, anomie occurs when the norms and expectations that ordinarily regulate people’s lives become disrupted. Anomie is thus a state of normlessness in which the person is disconnected from his moral foundation and alienated from his survival instinct. (See Accounting for Disordered Personalities in Altruistic Suicide: A Note On Durkheim’s Typology.)
In The Sacred Canopy (1967), which builds directly upon the sociology of knowledge that he and fellow sociologist Thomas Luckmann developed in their foundational text The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter Berger takes Durkheim’s concept of anomie and develops it phenomenologically. Berger’s elaboration may help the reader understand the situation Arday was in.
Berger argues that society provides individuals with a nomos—a taken-for-granted world of identity, meaning, and order. People ordinarily do not experience nomos as something society has constructed; it simply feels like reality. When that nomos collapses, the result isn’t merely confusion. The ultimate danger is meaninglessness—what Berger characterizes as the “nightmare par excellence,” in which identity and reality themselves are distorted and terrifying. Anomie, Berger contends, can become unbearable to the point that an individual may seek death in preference to it.
Think about it. A person has a socially defined identity of great reputational import—Arday was a professor, scholar, respected member of an institution—and understands what’s expected of him. If that identity suddenly collapses, as it did in Arday’s case, his relationship to the social order can become profoundly destabilized. Death is preferable to the emotional torment of social rupture.
Arday’s case has all the ingredients of such a rupture. He went from being celebrated as a Cambridge professor and academic marvel (and allegedly marvelous at other things, such as athletics and fundraising) to having his scholarly credentials publicly scrutinized, his biography questioned, and resigning his position—all in a compressed period of time. Arday was a star, so his fall was predictably far. The revelations about his biography and career weren’t edge cases. It appears that he invented a fictitious person: Jason Arday.
One might say that Arday’s situation was something like that of the manufactured pop group Milli Vanilli. For those who missed this epic scandal, Milli Vanilli were a German duo exposed for faking their hit record and live performance. It was a dramatic fall from stardom I shan’t recount here. However, it is relevant that one of the pair, Robert Pilatus, appears to have committed suicide on the eve of the promotional tour for the album—which was never released—on which he and Fab Morvan actually perform their vocal parts. The point is that, when the constructed self has been destroyed, and it is that person’s core identity, self-annihilation becomes an escape route.
There is an important lesson to be learned in cases like this. If a person you know suffers such a degree of social destabilization, it is important to watch them, even sit with them and encourage them to seek help. You may think they are the last person in the world to commit suicide, but that misunderstands the nature of suicide. I have heard too many people say, “But he wasn’t suicidal.” No, not when everything was in place. But Arday was out of place. And he felt he had nowhere to go. For somebody whose identity is everything, losing it is a kind of death itself.
The reality is that surveys find that a large plurality of next-of-kin have no idea that a family member was suicidal. An even larger plurality of those who eventually commit suicide did not admit to suicidal thoughts when examined by health care professionals. Arday was probably not suicidal—until he was found out and resigned (same for Pilatus, having to prove he was something he wasn’t). That is when a man needs those around him the most. Despite what Arday did, he was a human being. Somebody should have regarded him on those terms.
It would be stating the obvious to say that Andrew Wilson destroyed Candace Owens today during the Great Debate, moderated by Patrick Bet-David. One was able to predict the outcome with one hundred percent metaphysical certitude. Owens may be able to talk rapidly and in complete sentences (her constant mispronunciation of basic words notwithstanding); however, she is not smart in the sense of having an analytical mind. She is high in emotional intelligence, for sure, like other manipulative people. But not a rational thinker. Like everybody else, narcissists and psychopaths are on a sliding scale of different qualities of intelligence (see Mistaking Our Species Innate Linguistic Capacity for Native Intelligence). Owens had no answer to Wilson’s steel-trap approach.
Owens, PBD, and Wilson
Wilson embarrassed Owens throughout the conversation, but a standout moment was when she demanded that Wilson name just one of the charges against Tyler Robinson. So he did: murder. Owens responded by saying that aggravated murder is “literally not murder.” She literally said this. Aggravated murder is literally murder. Aggravated murder is murder with aggravating factors, for example, planning the crime out over time or lying in wait. It is known in other jurisdictions as first-degree murder, marked by malice aforethought. Imagine somebody telling you that first-degree murder is not murder. That Robinson planned the crime out over time doesn’t make his murderous action “literally not murder.” You would laugh in the man’s face, wondering how on Earth he came to believe that aggravated murder is not murder. After all, the word “murder” is in the frickin’ name!
Owens doesn’t have the first clue about criminal law. Nor does Owens army of zombies. But she and her army wouldn’t have to know much at all about the subject to get this one right. One could know next to nothing about criminal law and still know that aggravated murder is murder. Can they not see the word in the name? To her credit, she did pronounce the word correctly rather than saying something like “agoravatized.”
— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) August 12, 2026
What did Wilson hope to accomplish with this conversation? It isn’t like he believed that he could change her or her followers’ minds. He knows who they are: they’re Arthur Schopenhauer’s fools. The Candace Owen follower is the paradigm. “Whoever writes for fools always finds a large public,” Schopenhauer once observed. Sensationalism, shallow thinking, and low-substance work attract mass popularity because they require no mental effort to consume. Such content draws those incapable of consuming high-substance work and operating on higher-order thinking. They’re flies on a shit show, to update a hackneyed phrase. Facts and logic hurt their ganglia. Wilson, on the other hand, has a keen analytical mind. And the patience of a saint.
Candace Owens was made for shallow people in search of the sensational. The Church of Owens is a charismatic one. Confronted with her claim that Israel killed Charlie Kirk, she explicitly said that she had no positive evidence for the claim (or any of her claims, for that matter) but that it “feels” that way to her. She actually said this—and defended her entitlement to it! In other words, vibes. No evidence. No reasonable inferences. Just vibes. Wilson can’t reach people who think like that, however patient he is. Owens may seem smart (to gullible people) because she can Gish gallop, but experience tells us that stupid people are capable of blizzard mouth. Polls asking the public who won the debate serve as proxies measuring the extent of gullibility in the population.
“She didn't have a single solid piece of evidence. She had no positive evidence that Israel's involved in anything, no positive evidence that France is involved in anything, no positive evidence TPUSA is involved in anything, no positive evidence that Erika Kirk is involved in… pic.twitter.com/Nvz2jZKtc7
Schopenhauer suggested that the best way to deal with fools is to have nothing to do with them (see The Scourge of the Scold). He argued that trying to reason with a fool is useless because logic has no power over stupidity (see Judgment, Conformity, and Epistemic Distortion). However, the target of debate is not really one’s opponent but the audience. Yet, the stupidity of Owens’ audience makes them unreachable. They find her attractive not because she’s intelligent. (How would they know anyway?) They follow her because she has a charisma they find appealing. Why would anybody follow Jim Jones, Benny Hinn, or L. Rob Hubbard? Charisma. Charisma works on everybody to a degree, so smart people are on guard.
Her followers also find validation in Owens’ refusal to use facts and logic when making the case. They don’t use facts and logic, either! Owens gives them permission to affirm their lazy cognitive style. “Candace is like that, so I can be, too!” They’re too stupid to know how stupid that makes them. They won’t listen to me (or Wilson)—that’s for sure. Not having to use facts and logic makes life easy in a society that tolerates stupid people. So my hat is off to Wilson for not tolerating stupid people. I struggle with it. I feel embarrassed for them. I worry I might sound cruel. I don’t easily suffer fools.
The opportunity Owens’ followers saw was to dogpile Wilson. They’re really good at that—ad hominem, logical fallacies, and non sequiturs. These come naturally to shallow minds. “Why is Wilson’s foot shaking?” (Because he’s a nicotine fiend experiencing withdrawal live and on screen, perhaps. What is that relevant?) “He said he was in the army and didn’t serve!” (What does that have to do with the ass-kicking we just watched?) “Wilson should cancel his podcast immediately!” (Their girl canceled her podcast Wednesday when Robinson’s defense pleading was dropped because it essentially admits he murdered Kirk.)
You remember these people from high school. Think back. They sat at the mean girls’ table in the cafeteria. Their heads were full of designer brands, changing hairstyles, and the names of cute boys they plan to use for clout. They moved like schools of fish down hallways and at malls. They sighed and rolled their eyes a lot.
Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin
A clarification is in order. Wilson kept demanding positive evidence, which Owens found threatening. What does Wilson mean? Circumstantial evidence requires plain facts that suggest other facts—and that requires rational inference. DNA, Fingerprints, the murder weapon, a screwdriver, or shoe prints left at a location are circumstantial. The prosecution has all that and more in copious amounts. Running away from a scene or hiding items. Check. Buying tools needed for a job right before it happens. Borrowing a Dremel from a roommate to inscribing the bullets used in the murder with ideological messages. Check. Check.
“So the case is circumstantial!” Most cases are. So what about direct evidence? By contrast, direct evidence proves itself. Wilson has a lot of that, too. So does the prosecution. The text messages to Twiggs in which he confesses to the crime. The video of Robinson at the scene with a rifle down his pant leg. Those are damning facts. All Owens has is conjecture and speculation. And that is no evidence at all.
This is a slam dunk case. Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, should negotiate a plea deal. I hope his attorneys are advising their client to take that route. Surely, they are. Luigi Mangione (who also killed for ideological reasons) stepped into a Manhattan federal courtroom today and pled guilty to federal charges. “On the morning of December 4, 2024, I shot Mr Thompson in Manhattan, and he died,” he said. “I knew what I was doing was illegal.” Robinson should follow suit.
Remember when Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rolled out the campaign theme of “joy”? Harris presented herself as the “joyful warrior.” Her hyena laugh was not cringeworthy (even though people cringed) but “joyful.” When she said crazy things (which was routine), it was just Harris being silly—which is why she giggled her way through the constant stream of nonsensical ramblings. Readers might be interested in the essay I wrote about this before the 2024 election, A Fool’s Paradise: Democrats Rehash the Fake “Politics of Joy”.
The Republicans? Not joyful at all, Democrats implied. They dismissed Trump’s natural comedic talent (forgetting his appearances on SNL and all other shows and events). They would have Americans ignore the scenes of the conservative family on the lake, their backyard barbecues, hunting and fishing trips, laughing and joking around. There’s no celebration of life on the right side. For Democrats, working-class culture is reduced to signs to be used to manufacture fake affinity with the common man. “Look at me in the hunting outfit my campaign just bought, shooting the gun I borrowed. I’m just like you.” Sure, Elmer.
During an April 2016 interview on The Breakfast Club, Hillary Clinton stated that she always carries a bottle of hot sauce in her bag.
They do the same thing when appealing to black voters. During an April 2016 interview on The Breakfast Club, Clinton told her black brothers and sisters that she always carries a bottle of hot sauce in her bag. On the same program, during the 2020 election, hidden away in his basement, Biden remarked to the host Charlamagne, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Charlamagne responded, “It don’t have nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with the fact, I want something for my community.” Biden shot back: “Take a look at my record, man!” In reality, neither side of that exchange had anything to offer working families—or black Americans—that would allow them to rise.
At the same time, the 2024 campaign branded Republicans as “weird.” Despite their patriotism, belief in equality and fair play, advocacy of the nuclear family and traditional norms, and appreciation of basic biology, Republicans were the odd ones. Communication advisers instructed Democrats to reframe political disagreement into everyday, relatable terms rather than heavy ideological warnings. It would do no good to disagree with orthodoxy; instead, reduce them to a single word. Otherwise, the country sees plainly that Democrats subvert equality with DEI, replace the nuclear family with the village, transgress child protective boundaries, and reject basic biology. To be sure, from their point of view, these aren’t weird. But Democratic operatives know others will see them that way because they are. So Republicans are weird.
Psychologists call this projection. Yet they attend Pride parades where men on estrogen (attempt to) swing their shrunken genitals in the faces of children while wearing leather gimp and puppy masks. They turn the obvious question around and put it to normal people: “Why are you so obsessed with genitals?” That’s strategic projection.
Francesca Hong, who was just defeated in the Wisconsin primary by David Crowley, is a paradigm of joylessness in the Democratic Party. She’s weird, too. You’ve probably already heard that a while ago she tweeted that Thanksgiving should be abolished. She took that back recently, but in the lead-up to feigned regret, she also expressed her dislike of Halloween and Valentine’s Day. Too much love and kindness—and joy. Asked why she didn’t like Halloween, she responded, “I’m just not a fun person.” No shit, Sherlock. None of them are. They’re a bunch of woke scolds. It’s why their conservative family members avoid Indigenous Peoples’ Day. They don’t want to sit through rants about how awful Trump and those who voted for him are. They don’t want to see another “In this House” yard sign. That’s not going “no contact.” It’s avoiding another Maoist struggle session.
Democrats suck the joy out of life. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Valentine’s Day roll around, and progressives grumble about white supremacy, the capitalist cash-grab, or some other terrible thing those holidays represent. They see edgy comedians and smear them as “racists” and “transphobes.” Their own idea of comedy is some activist making unclever politically correct “jokes” to clapter, finger-snapping, or jazz hands (so as not to trigger those with sensory issues). The media transfigured Trump’s joyful rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, into a “Nazi rally.” Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe horrified them. But there’s nothing weird about “Drag Queen Story Hour.”
As I explain in the essay cited at the top of today’s piece, the substance of the projection is familiar to history. Through the state-run “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) program, the Nazi regime explicitly projected a politics of joy. To eyes wide open, the Nazis were covering a dark and grim project for world reordering with propaganda disguised as entertainment. Likewise, the Soviet Union ran an extensive, highly organized network of state-sponsored culture designed to showcase the “joyful” achievements of communism. Some went through the motions because that was the only party in town. But it is always sad to see, because Nazism and Communism are sad ways of living. Joy under totalitarianism is contrived because totalitarian regimes are joyless.
That a party or a state feels compelled to manufacture the appearance of joy distinguishes totalitarian design from the organic joy that naturally emerges from the people who live freely. The administered world of progressivism is inherently joyless because it compels people to live according to institution-sanctioned activities. It sucks joy out of people to tell them how to respond appropriately—and what that will be is determined by organizational doctrine. Humans find jokes about this or that group of people funny. They are scolded for “punching down.” Those who laugh at their fellow humans should feel shame—or be shamed—for laughing. The totalitarian will tell you who to laugh at.
For the totalitarian mindset, humans finding joy in life in ways the state disapproves of is dangerous. It’s a metric for too much freedom. Better that they hate people and things—and to know who and what that is, listen to the totalitarian. It’s as true for humor as it is for any other human expression. Movies set in eighteenth-century Denmark must cast black people, so those who can’t suspend their disbelief in the face of farce can be identified as dissenters (see Helen of Troy and the Falsification of History; The Deceit of AfroTurfing: Resisting the Siren Call of Nolan’s Monster Movie). To cover for how weird and awful that is, the party or state manufactures officially approved joy, which, as it is in any totalitarian situation, is the opposite of what it claims to be.
I noted earlier that Hong lost her bid to be the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor. After her loss, House Democrat Ro Khanna explained to his followers that he and “Fran” were close. You could tell they are close because he called her “Fran,” as if they were family. As I read Khanna’s tweet, my mind drifted to that scene from Elia Kazan’s Waterfront. In the back of a cab, Charley remarked to his brother Terry, “Look, kid, I—how much you weigh, Slick? When you weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.” Terry responded, “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night.’”
I did my part to get Hong into the general. Not just to make it easier for the Republican candidate Tom Tiffany (who won his primary in a landslide), but so the nation could have a good illustration of the lunacy of the Democratic Socialists of America, the totalitarian tendency colonizing the Democratic Party. I wasn’t counting on the establishment to pull out a Crowley win. The polling did not look good for him, as you can see from the polling the day before shared below. Now Tiffany has a fight, and the number illustrative of lunatics diminished. Not by much given the depth of the madness, but Hong was special. She brought a childlike quality to the mix. She doubled the AOC vibe, who recently admitted that “Woke 1 was crazy.” Cortez’s admission was designed to obscure the reality that Woke 2 is crazier.
Polling from the day before
Looking at the polling, and considering the “human error” in Milwaukee, it is hard to believe that Crowley legitimately won the Wisconsin primary. So why did Hong concede? In reflecting on this, I imagined the following conversation:
“Fran.”
“Yes?”
“We’re going to need you to concede. Crowley will win the election.”
“How do you know that? I am way ahead in the polls. Where are all these Crowley votes coming from?”
“Fran, this has to happen because Democrats must win the midterms. Republicans are killing us on the Democratic Socialism thing. You can’t win against Tiffany. But it’s worse than that. Republicans are going to use Wisconsin to portray Democrats as socialists and zero in on all the rest of the things we want.”
“How do you know that I can’t beat Tiffany? I am very popular.”
“Yes, you are. But we’ve looked at this closely and have determined that the people are not there yet. Tiffany will win if you are the candidate. We know you are way ahead in the polls. But everything is at stake here. We can’t risk the midterms.”
“Are you sure?”
“Look, you do want Trump impeached and his agenda thwarted, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You do want to continue the project of demographic transformation, right? Our plans depend on it.”
“Yes.”
“We knew you’d understand. After we’ve transformed the country, Democratic Socialism can reemerge. We’re not yet in a position to abolish the American Republic. As I said, the people just aren’t there right now. You’re young and your time will come. You do understand, right?”
“I understand.”
“Will you concede?”
“I will concede.”
“Good girl. The counterrevolution appreciates your service. We won’t forget about you.”
🔥🚨 AWKWARD — NBC ended its live coverage of the Wisconsin Democratic primary as Milwaukee County officials announced a “tabulation error" in the election data.
Five of nine USB sticks with the absentee ballot results contained only audit logs rather than the actual vote… pic.twitter.com/cWjh3uTYSG
Have you seen this meme yet? It is often framed with a question that goes something like this: “Is Elon Musk a robot?” No, Musk is a sympathetic human. He’s right; empathy is a fundamental weakness of Western civilization. Indeed, the concept (like “cultural relativism” and other like concepts) was invented to weaken Western civilization. I have written several essays on this, but The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind” is the most comprehensive. I will follow the meme with a brief treatment here, since I did not discuss Hannah Arendt in previous essays.
A popular meme
The meme is misleading. Hannah Arendt rejected empathy as a guide for political or critical thinking, viewing it instead as an illusion that erases the necessary distance between human beings. Where did she get this idea? In his Moral Sentiments argument (which you can download here for free), Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith argued that morality is rooted in imagination, sympathy, and the impartial spectator.
For Smith, sympathy is the ability to imaginatively understand others’ feelings by placing ourselves in their situations. However, one does not accept the moral frame of the person with whom one is imaginatively swapping places. He does this to gain an appreciation of the man’s situation so he can better understand him. Indeed, unless he is a psychopath, he cannot help but do this. Smith explores the subject to establish the foundations of ethical behavior and to show how self-interest serves society’s broader good. What may seem paradoxical is resolved by grasping human nature and bringing out the best in it.
Empathy, on the other hand, is a recent invention that invites people to assume the perspective of the other person (the drug addict, the alien, the pedophile), and not only imaginatively swap places but judge right and wrong from his perspective. Empathy is associated with the pathology of people identifying with the alien and the criminal. We see it in the demand that society affirm the false gender identity of a delusional man. Empathy negates the impartial spectator and robs a man of discernment. Divorced from rational discernment, a man is unable to judge individuals and right from wrong. He thus, perhaps unwittingly, puts his life, his family, and society in jeopardy.
Arendt makes the same argument as Smith, even down to the observations of imagination and place-taking. For the record, this is the foundation of sociology’s looking-glass self (Charles Horton Cooley’s formulation) and, more broadly, pragmatic ethics. Arendt was well educated in sociology and pragmatic ethics.
In the final analysis, sympathy is a destructive demand. That’s what Musk is talking about. Gad Saad wrote about it this May, in a book appropriately titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. Folks should read Smith and Saad’s work instead of ignorantly posting memes that distort what people think and say.
A question that rightly comes to the mind of a curious and objective observer is why one sees such profound disparities among people within a nation and between nations worldwide. Why are some people affluent while others are impoverished? Collectively at scale, why are some nations affluent, technologically advanced, and politically stable, while others remain poor, technologically backward, rife with political instability? What accounts for these differences within and between societies? The essay focuses on international inequality, although intranational effects can not be ignored. They are connected.
For many decades, sociology attempted to answer the cross-national (or cross-regional) question using theories associated with the school of structural functionalism, what came to be known as modernization theory. According to this school of thought, societies could be understood as existing at different stages of a broad process of social development. The cultural systems (worldviews) and institutions that characterize the modern West are understood as products of a long historical process, through which societies gradually become more rational, technologically sophisticated, economically productive, and politically democratic. What explains these developments is ideas.
Image by Sora
The modernization theorist did not work from a crude idealism. Historical developments shape ideas, and economic systems and technological advances drive these developments. At the same time, systems are fashioned by men with ideas. The ideas associated with modernity are crucial to modernization. History is properly understood, then, as the fashioning of civilizational responses by thinking men whose thought is shaped by the results of collective action.
The functionalist piece enters because ideas that work for whatever purpose men set before them are retained and elaborated. Sometimes these ideas and their realization in cultural and material life yield benefits, such as opportunities for personal self-actualization, which thinking men rightly consider good. Other times, ideas explain impoverished societies that fall short of man’s potential. Such matters are studied empirically, and the inequality between societies is proof of the impact of different ideas.
Useful to understanding this view are what structural-functionalists call pattern variables, a set of five pairs of opposing value orientations that explain how societies organize social action and distinguish different types of social relationships. The five variables are affectivity vs. affective neutrality (whether behavior is guided by emotion or restrained by expectations of emotional neutrality), self-orientation vs. collectivity-orientation (whether people pursue their own interests or the interests of the group), universalism vs. particularism (whether people are judged according to general rules or based on tribal affinity), achievement vs. ascription (whether status is based on what someone accomplishes or on qualities or statuses they are supposedly born with or in), and specificity vs. diffuseness (whether a social relationship is limited to a specific role or encompasses many areas of life).
For the structural-functionalist, pattern variables explain how different institutions and social systems establish attitudinal and behavioral expectations and maintain social order. The question is whether and why the path is progressive, regressive, or stagnant. Modern societies tend to emphasize universalism, achievement, specificity, affective neutrality, and self-orientation, whereas traditional societies tend to rely more heavily on their opposites. This difference explains the intergroup and international/regional inequality. For example, what explains Israeli Jewish success over against Arab Muslim’s backwardness is that Jews are one side of the pattern variable binary, while Muslims are on the other side. Antisemitism is driven by envy and resentment of those whose culture holds them back. They cannot blame their culture, so they blame Jews.
Beginning around the middle of the 1950s, and increasingly during the 1960s and afterward, sociology shifted toward a substantially different explanation for global disparities. It sought to generalize the scapegoating inherent in antisemitism. Modernization theory was portrayed as ethnocentric and even as an expression of white supremacy. The assumption that Western societies, the Global North, represented a particular stage of social development that other societies might eventually—or should—reach was increasingly regarded as an ideology in the service of exploitation and oppression rather than an objective description of historical development and determination of the relative benefit to man in the results. The Global South is not poor because it is on the bad side of the pattern variables, the argument goes, but because those working from on the good side of those variables impoverished the Global South.
The alternative explanation came to be associated with a group of theories concerning development and underdevelopment, in some circles known as Social Change and Development (the old name of my academic unit, which before that was called Modernization Processes), a rather innocuous-sounding school of thought. One of my graduate seminars carried that name. So did the core text.
From this perspective, which is substantially rooted in Marxist-Leninist nd Maoist thought (which informs black nationalism, as well), the condition of what was then commonly called the Third World could not be understood simply as the result of its societies occupying an earlier stage of a universal process of modernization, or the fruit that inferior cultures yield. Instead, their condition was understood as the consequence of historical relationships with the developed world, particularly colonialism (and internal colonialism) and imperialism. In this explanation, the undeveloped nation or region was better classified as underdeveloped, and the reason for its underdevelopment was that the imperialist countries—the Global North—extracted wealth from the colonial subjects that comprised the Global South.
The argument suggests that colonialism deprived many civilizations and nations of the opportunity to develop along their own trajectories. But even this is problematic. The argument presumes that, but for imperialism, these countries and regions would look very different today. This is something of a teleological argument, which is paradoxical given that a major criticism of structural-functionalism is that social scientists of that school substitute teleology for a historical explanation in the abstract model of the social system. Moreover, it begs the question: What would these nations and regions look like if the West had not interfered?
To get around this, the critique of modernism also involved a critique of modernity itself. Why should it be assumed that the way of life in the Global North is good? Aren’t the so-called primitive cultures good in themselves? Here, the teleology is rejected (cultural anthropologists helped with their notions of cultural and moral relativisms). Is poverty a bad thing? Humans lived for millennia in what today observers regard as poverty. Sociology students are taught to distinguish between absolute and relative poverty. In the end, it is all relative.
In the final analysis, contradictions notwithstanding, the poverty of some parts of the world and the relative affluence of others are not independent historical developments. They are interconnected outcomes of a world economic system. And, from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, the world economic system must be altered. Capitalism must be replaced by communism.
There is obviously something to the analytical piece of the argument. It would be absurd to argue that colonialism and imperialism had no consequences, or that the wealth of the industrialized nations can be understood without taking their imperial histories into account. Yet, we are many decades into the post-colonial period, and several societies that escaped direct colonial rule long ago remain poor and technologically underdeveloped. Are we to rationalize this as relative poverty? The critics of the West suggest we not do this. I agree, but for very different reasons.
The upshot is that facts of colonialism and imperialism cannot, by themselves, explain all of the continuing disparities between nations. Plenty of wealth remains in the Global South—now organized as sovereign nation-states. Yet they remain backwards. To return to the previous example, how are the conditions of Muslim Arab countries explained by the success of Israeli Jews? They can’t; the Jews are self-sufficient. Jewish success is explained by Jewishness. It is an idea system—one that other peoples would do well to emulate rather than to resent. If envy is to play any role, it should be to model one’s society after the successful one, not seek to destroy it.
There are also complicating factors on the other side of the Marxist-Leninist formulation. The globalization and industrialization that produced extraordinary wealth in the Global North have also generated significant social and economic problems within those societies. It is not as if everybody in the West is rich and self-actualized. One need only travel through the Rust Belt or the Black Ghetto to see the devastating effects of deindustrialization and progressive social policy. Ideas lie behind societal ruin, as well.
Furthermore, a fact that mustn’t be ignored is that, while it is indeed true that capitalists extracted wealth from the periphery of the world capitalist system, those firms mobile enough to do so also invested capital in the Global South—and they did so to undercut workers of the West. Moreover, investment in the Global South created wealth in those countries, at least for local elites (which Marxist-Leninists characterize as “colonial collaboration”).
Imperialism provided developing nations with the pattern variables necessary for modernization. They left those countries with advanced productive capacities. Why has this not led to widespread prosperity? Any adequate explanation therefore must take into account transnational corporate power and the class structures internal to nations. The majorities of those countries are not poor because of wealth extraction. They are poor because the cultural and political systems maintained by elites and out of ignorance keep them poor. And the opponents of modernization justify their poverty.
What is particularly significant for our own situation is not simply the change in the explanations themselves, but the ideological transformation underlying that change. The movement from modernization theory toward theories of development and underdevelopment was not merely an academic exercise. It reflected—and in turn reinforced—a broader shift in intellectual attitudes and sensibilities toward the West and the Enlightenment.
One must wonder why those concerned with the global poor did not advocate for the widespread adoption of the left side of the pattern variables identified by the structural-functionalists. If affluence was associated with this, then why should societies across the globe not incorporate affectivity, self-orientation, universalism, achievement, and specificity into their attitudinal and behavioral responses? Why diminish or overthrow those societies in which these values prevailed? Would that not result in the impoverishment of the entire globe?
And what of our own societies in the West? Should we not ask whether those in the American Black Ghetto remain trapped in poverty because of attitudes and behaviors that prevail there? Those attitudes and behaviors include support for those very forces that keep them trapped, so it is a necessary question. The vast majority of blacks vote not for the party that fosters entrepreneurship and class mobility but for the party that established and entrenches the welfare state.
Modernization theory is indeed grounded in a broadly pro-Western and pro-Enlightenment conception of history. Rationalism, scientific inquiry, technological development, individualism, and democratic institutions are regarded by the theory as positive achievements. But this is true and good. The historical development of Western civilization can be understood as a process that has produced institutions and intellectual traditions with universal significance. Yet Western Civilization is under attack, and those who do not share its values—indeed, who resist them—are being welcomed into the West.
It is not that the Global North should necessarily be hegemonic, but that Western ideas should prevail globally for the sake of the Global South. One should want the Third World to enjoy the First World life, and that can only happen with the hegemony of Western values—free thought, free speech, property rights, and all the rest of it. That means that China and other anti-Western forces must be marginalized in the world economy and the United States should reassert itself as a world power. We can no longer count on Europe—it has been lost to globalism—so the US will have to take the leading role. Indeed, a major reason why this should happen is to save Europe from itself. After all, Europe is where the superior ideas associated with modernity emerged.
The new intellectual framework dominating today’s university is, to put it charitably, skeptical of the assumptions in modernization theory. I frame it that way in approaching the problem in the classroom. But one cannot be charitable in the end. Moreover, the conclusion one rationally arrives at reframes the premise and methodology. It exposes the new approach as anti-Western ideology.
Influenced by Marxist and, later, postmodernist theories, the scholarly Social Change and Development approach treats the Enlightenment and Western values not as universal achievements but as vehicles for domination, colonialism, and white supremacy. To avoid teleology, it must reject the developmental path taken by the West as desirable. In rejecting the assumption that Western civilization represented a desirable or advanced form of social organization, the ideology elevates the primitive cultures and social systems of peoples who had historically existed outside the Western intellectual tradition. The truth is that they are backwards because they lie outside the tradition. This truth is dismissed as ethnocentrism.
This transformation in academic thought has had consequences extending well beyond the university. It has influenced the way subsequent generations have understood history, capitalism, colonialism, race, culture, and the West itself. Academic theories provide an intellectual framework through which political arguments acquire legitimacy, and the spread of these theories through academic institutions—and increasingly through primary and secondary education—has meant that their assumptions have been transmitted to successive generations. The new approach is a Trojan horse ushered inside the city walls by globalists who smuggle in communism and Islamism as culturally destructive weapons to disorder the left side of the pattern variables.
Theories of development and underdevelopment are not simply a change in sociological terminology brought about by greater scientific precision. Popular acceptance of the ideology represents a fundamental change in the way Western society understands its own historical development. A worldview that once regarded the Enlightenment, rationalism, scientific inquiry, and Western political institutions as achievements with potentially universal significance has increasingly been replaced by one that views those same traditions through the lenses of power, colonialism, race, and domination.
We see this, for example, in critical race theory with the new binaries of “oppressor-oppressed” and “perpetrator-victim.” Advanced values are depicted as oppressive, while those adhering to backwards values are portrayed as victims. We see it, as well, in queer theory, which conceptualizes gender and gender roles as the oppressive constructions of cisnormativity—a construction of a praxis explicitly focused on transgressing the normative systems that sustain Western civilization.
Consequently, a generation—several generations by now—has been raised within an intellectual framework that is at least deeply skeptical of the Western and Enlightenment traditions from which modern Western society emerged. This deep skepticism yields a population susceptible to destructive ideas. Those who fully embrace the framework are adamant that their worldview is the truth of history. Thus, what began as a change in sociological theories concerning development and underdevelopment has become part of a much broader transformation in the political and cultural worldview of the West itself.
I confess to my role as a sociologist in spreading skepticism about Western Civilization. I am not proud of that. It took several years of self-criticism to finally recognize that I had been indoctrinated in anti-Western propaganda. Socialization in what amounts to a total institution is a powerful force. The purpose of Freedom and Reason is to, in a public way, undo that indoctrination to model a path out of it. I was wrong about structural-functionalism and modernization theory. Talcott Parsons was right. My sociology professors were wrong.
In 1848, in a speech on free trade before the Democratic Association of Brussels, Karl Marx, the German philosopher who believed communism and democracy are the same thing, argued that the cheap commodities promised by free-market advocates were a trap designed not to benefit the working class but the capitalist bottom line.
Did he oppose this? You might think so given his pro-worker sympathies. But you would be wrong. Instead, he argued that cheaper products lead directly to falling wages and that accelerating the impoverishment of the working class would set the stage for a communist revolution.
Marx opposed tariffs because they kept wages high, taxes low, and thus the relative cost of living down. He wanted hardship for the workers so that his vision of a totalitarian society could be realized. (Read my analysis of his speech in Marx the Accelerationist: Free Trade and the Radical Case for Protectionism)
At the same time that Marx was endorsing free trade (the modern-day position of the American libertarian), Democrats were agitating to abolish the American System that protected workers and entrepreneurs (tariffs and all the rest of it), and establish in its stead a globalist system that advanced neo-feudalism, a system where slaves take the place of serfs and a new aristocracy rules over the people.
The slave owners represented by the Democratic Party agitated for a counterrevolution against republicanism and liberal capitalism. The nation went to war over it. The Republicans prevailed and governed the nation in the aftermath, before the corporatocracy and the progressives subverted equality and liberty.
Somalis in Minnesota
In the mid-1910s, amid the rise of the progressive corporatocracy, organic intellectuals of the New Aristocracy, most notably Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, used the pages of The Nation to champion transnationalism, mass immigration, cultural federalism (that is, the elevation of ethnic enclaves over the republic), and cultural pluralism (i.e., multiculturalism).
In Kallen’s influential essay “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” (1915), he envisioned the United States not as a republic with a common culture and secure borders, but as a democratic (i.e., socialist), multiethnic federation in which diverse immigrant communities could immigrate and live according to the norms of their distinctive cultural heritages.
Kallen was allied with the same industrialists who advocated for free trade. See my essay An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion to read more about this history. He and Bourne had drawn up the blueprint for mass immigration and demographic transformation the corporate elite used for deconstructing the American Republic.
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society
During the Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson administrations—via the New Deal and the Great Society, respectively—the administrative and welfare states were vastly expanded and entrenched. In particular, the Great Society undermined the family and the work ethic by addicting millions of Americans to government programs. Women were driven into the workforce. A rising proportion of children were born out of wedlock. Progressives portrayed the nuclear family as moribund and framed its decline as a good thing.
Piggybacking off of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, elites reopened the nation to mass immigration the following year. It had been effectively closed to immigration since the mid-1920s thanks to Republican resurgence during the interwar period. Now the floodgates were flung open once again. The new mass immigration program was different this time, however, in that the US now welcomed the Third World. The effect, if not the goal, brought the barbarian inside the Shining City’s walls, the entrenchment of black American ghettoization an entailment.
Concomitant with open borders was the start of America’s deindustrialization. Manufacturers capable of moving jobs overseas began to do so, and elites reorganized the world financial system to facilitate aggressive globalization of production. The Bretton Woods system was dismantled. The dollar’s convertibility into gold was abandoned, and major currencies had shifted toward floating exchange rates.
These changes removed many of the restrictions that had characterized the postwar international monetary system and contributed to the growth of international capital markets. Advances in banking and communications made it increasingly easy for money to move across national borders. The resulting expansion of international lending, investment, and financial markets helped create the infrastructure for the more integrated global economy that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s.
Curricula were implemented in the education system to transform mass consciousness, conditioning America’s youth to respond negatively to nationalism and embrace globalism and multiculturalism. More broadly, corporate command of the media apparatus was mobilized to socialize the new attitudes. The population was trained to believe that traditional social structures were oppressive and reactionary. Those who objected were smeared as xenophobes. Opposition to immigration became a species of racism.
After Richard Nixon moved to fracture the Sino-Soviet alliance to stymie the communist advance in the 1970s, Democrats took advantage of the opening to entrench the global trade regime by welcoming Red China into the fold. Corporations offshored commodity production to China and other Eastern nations. The system handed control over supply chains to the CCP. At the same time, transnational elites ramped up the flow of Third Worlders to Western countries.
During the 1980s and 1990s, George Bush Senior, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton personally facilitated the transformation of America. Clinton’s wife Hillary wrote a book telling Americans that “it takes a village.” The President’s wife unabashedly promoted the diminishment of the nuclear family, seeking to normalize the state as father.
At the same time, the culture industry, the education system, and mass media infused progressivism with postmodernist theories—critical race theory, queer doctrine, and postcolonial theory—to install left-wing progressive consciousness in the public mind. This led to the emergence of woke ethics. By 2010, the corporate media was popularizing obscure academic terms, such as “system racism” and “white privilege,” to portray whites as an oppressor class. The promulgation of anti-white bigotry was followed in short order by growing rebellious sentiment on the streets. (See my recent article Manufacturing Anti-White Bigotry: The Elasticity of an Ancient Hatred.)
In 2014, Obama moved gain-of-function research to Wuhan, China, where SARS variants were weaponized. Five years later, a weaponized SARS virus—its nineteenth iteration—was unleashed on the world. Throughout 2020, states across the transatlantic space locked down their citizens and forced them to accept experimental gene therapies. It was an acid test to determine whether Western populations would willingly submit to power masquerading as authority.
The pandemic came with a color revolution, organized by elites, used in the United States to change election procedures, allowing tens of millions of votes—with little oversight and no chain of custody—to be injected into the 2020 election. The coup that had begun in 2016 was successful, followed by a campaign of aggressive lawfare waged on an ousted president.
The pandemic has passed (perhaps a new one is coming to a theater near you). However, the strategy of color revolutions continues today, bankrolled by global financiers, such as China-based billionaire Neville Roy Singham. It goes under various names, such as “No Kings!” The revelation that the pandemic was a fraud, and the known fact that BLM protests had no basis in fact, has not deterred those hellbent on managed decline.
NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani
A major part of managed American decline—and the West more broadly—has involved the mass immigration of Muslims and domestic empowerment of the Islamization project. Muslims have established ethnic enclaves that resemble their home countries. The Muslim call to prayer is blasted from the rooftops in several of our cities. Americans are electing Muslims to public office. The mayor of New York City is a socialist-jihadist. Michigan Democrats just nominated a socialist-jihadist as their Democratic candidate for the Senate. There are Muslims already serving in the House.
Can you see the thread that would unravel the tapestry of deceit woven for all these decades? Will you pull it? Or will you watch from the sidelines as the American Republic is deconstructed by transnational corporations, anarchocommunists, and Muslims? What will you tell your hijab-wearing daughters? Will you even remember what the world was like when it was free? November is rapidly approaching. The future depends on you.
On the podcast Triggernometry, Helen Webberley, a former physician who trucks in child mutilation, said something quite revealing about gender identity doctrine. She said that gender identity is fixed at birth (or possibly conception, though “we don’t know,” she admitted). Whatever one’s body looks like, it’s the body of one’s gender identity, she explained, which is something one is born with. Bodies don’t matter. Of course they don’t. That’s why Webberley is so obsessed with changing their appearance.
Put simply, in Webberley’s warped worldview, it’s gender identity that determines the person’s gender. A woman is a person claiming to be one. If that sounds circular, that’s because it is.
Both interviews are highly revealing of the Queer worldview. The Triggernometry podcast is perhaps more revealing of the fascistic mind at work here because her debate partner, Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker), provokes her extremism. Keen, for those who may not know, is the British activist who caused a stir several years ago with her anti-trans slogan “adult human female.” I embedded a link to Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast in that podcast. I do the same here:
Konstanine Kisin, one of the hosts of Triggernometry, who moderated the debate, brought up a former guest, the transman Buck Angel, who, while appearing as a male, would not have a body identical to Kisin’s since he had a vagina. He brought this up because Webberley had said that a transman is indistinguishable from a cisman. Kisin said they could not be indistinguishable since Angel has a vagina. Webberley insisted that Angel is a man with a vagina. Some men have vaginas, in her worldview. In fact, some men not only have vaginas, but they also have breasts and all the rest of it. That doesn’t make them women. It all goes back to gender identity. Nothing is really fixed except that. Gender identity is the soul in the religion of Queer. It is a priori and eternal.
Thus, Webberley assumes gender identity. It is an article of faith that undergirds the doctrine. It is known only because individuals testify to its existence—or when others testify to it on their behalf. How would we know Angel has always been a man? Because he tells us he is? (Angel admits to being a woman, for the record.) People tell others all sorts of things. A child might tell his parents he is a cat. It would be naive to accept the child’s claim at face value. He may be pretending he is a cat, but he is not. Although it would be silly to do so, we have objective ways of testing his claim.
Keen wonders whether there is some test to see whether gender identity is real. That question is not so silly. Webberley obscures Keen’s point by talking about the surgical procedure appendectomy. Doctors aren’t always sure that a person is suffering from appendicitis (and apparently, in roughly 40 percent of the cases, they are not). Webberley would like us to accept that, since, like appendicitis, we do not always know for sure whether something is real, it is okay to alter bodies with drugs, hormones, and surgeries.
Webberley represents appendicitis as analogous to gender identity while admitting that there are objective metrics that help doctors feel more confident about whether an appendectomy is necessary, such as white blood cell count. So it’s not analogous. She also skirts the fact that appendicitis is an emergency situation in which committing a Type I error, i.e., removing a healthy appendix by mistake, outweighs the risk of a Type II error, i.e., missing a diseased appendix and sending a patient home. Doctors prefer a Type I error because a burst appendix is deadly.
It was disappointing that neither Kisen nor Keen noted the problems with her analogy. However, the question remains: is there an objective metric for diagnosing gender identity? Of course, there isn’t. Gender identity is a subjective thing and therefore unfalsifiable. It exists only in the minds of those who claim it and the industry that invented it. However, one can test to determine a person’s gender, which is based on gametes, chromosomes, and reproductive anatomy. That is a falsifiable claim. Moreover, if we hold Webberley to her assertion of gender identity, then her entire argument for endocrinological and surgical intervention collapses, since a man’s female-appearing body is already a man’s body.
Helen Webberley
I want to drill down on this because it exposes how cracked Queer theory is. In Webberley’s worldview, a boy can be born with what appears to be a girl’s body. But it’s not a girl’s body; it’s a boy’s body because his gender identity is that of a boy. This identity is innate and fixed. For Webberley, that is the truth of the matter. Those who think it’s a girl’s body—like the doctor who wrongly assigned sex at birth—are in error since boys can have bodies that look like those of girls. Put simply, a boy is a boy whatever his body looks like.
If this is true, why transition the boy to make his body look like a boy’s body? Boys’ bodies can naturally look like girls’ bodies, so what needs to be changed? A boy can have small, feminine hands (Andrew Gold made this point in his interrogation of Webberley). The boy already looks like what he is. This objection is met with the psychiatric construct gender dysphoria. “Because the boy feels uncomfortable looking like a girl.” Oh horror. Girls’ bodies are so awful. How terrible for the boy to be trapped in a girl’s body.
Misogyny aside, would it not be better, instead of pursuing radical medical measures that will rob “him” of sexual function and make “him” a lifelong medical patient, to help the “boy” negotiate “his” dysphoria by understanding that boys’ bodies can look like girls’ bodies? Isn’t the queer argument that such expectations are oppressive? Why change a body with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries if by definition the patient in question already has the right body? The girl won’t ever have a penis, but that’s okay because some boys don’t have penises. Some boys have vaginas instead. They have boy vaginas. It’s just a range of variation. Celebrate diversity rather than compel individuals to conform to stereotypes.
For that very reason, misogyny should not be put aside, but rather confronted, since it is in its internalized form that the girl wishes she wasn’t a girl. She is unhappy because she wants to be a boy. That is the problem to be addressed. Manufacturing a simulated sexual identity does not solve the problem of self-loathing. Amputating breasts and attaching fake penises aren’t analogous to correcting birth defects or the results of accidents.
This is the problem with the prefix “trans.” If gender identity is fixed at birth, then the boy is not changing his identity, only his appearance, and therefore isn’t trans, which literally means “across, beyond, or through.” There is nothing to get across to or beyond. There is nothing to push through. He is already on the correct side. If boys can have vaginas, they aren’t trans anything. They are simply boys with vaginas. Of course, boys don’t have vaginas (not real ones anyway). I am steelmanning the Queer argument.
I’m confident Webberley did not intend to do this, but her argument erases the concept of “trans.” And, if there’s no such thing as “trans,” then there is no such thing as “cis.” We are either boys or girls, some with vaginas and some with penises, neither exclusive to gender identity.
The debate also covered cross-sex hormones. The problem here follows from what was stated above. Webberley says we are merely giving the boy (which he is already, thanks to gender identity) testosterone because he does not have testes to produce it. But, according to Webberley, some boys have ovaries, which produce estrogen. So why would doctors not let him fully develop according to the trajectory of a boy with ovaries? Why work at cross-purposes with the boy’s body? The doctors aren’t fixing anything because nothing is broken. Society needs to accept him for what he is, not how he looks.
Webberley’s argument is entirely circular. A boy is a boy because he or others say he is, a thing that they cannot define. The truth beyond the circularity is that some girls have come to believe, for whatever reason (I have suggested self-loathing, but there could be others), that they are boys. It’s like a girl with anorexia who thinks she’s fat. The appropriate course of action is psychological counseling to help her see herself the way she is objectively: emaciated and on a path to self-destruction. We don’t prescribe her Ozempic or perform bariatric surgery. She’s not really fat; she thinks she is. We do not affirm her delusion. That would be medical malpractice.
Kellie-Jay Keen
As for whether adults should be able to change their bodies, Keen fails to aggressively pursue the relevant ethical point when this subject was raised. It is not whether a person who thinks he is a cat believes he should have the freedom to undergo surgery to make himself appear more cat-like. The ethical question is whether doctors should be allowed to make the delusional man more cat-like. If a man thinks he has one arm too many, we don’t amputate one of them to make him happy. He is clearly suffering from a brain or psychiatric disorder, and the ethical thing to do is deal with that, not manufacture a physical disability. (See The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts.)
Lots of other things were said during the debate, but Webberley went full fascist at the end, saying that people like Keen are not entitled to their views, nor should debates like the one they just had—that she had agreed to participate in—be allowed. What should happen to those who criticize gender identity doctrine?? Criminal prosecution, Webberley said. Only Webberley’s views should be allowed. Every podcast on the topic should be a celebration of gender identity doctrine. I’m not exaggerating. She said this and more. She even said that correctly gendering a queer person should be a crime.
Keen, for her part, agrees with me concerning atrocities. She also agrees with me on free speech. She does not advocate punishment for those who believe gender identity is a thing. One is free to say that some girls are really boys with vaginas. Others are free to criticize this belief. But those who act to harm others—that’s a different matter. Speech acts and atrocities are qualitatively different things. Webberley is a wicked person.
A self-sealing logic is an argument system that negates all outside criticism by treating any challenge or doubt as proof that the challenger is wrong. If the claim that Zionists control US foreign policy is challenged, for example, the challenger is part of the conspiracy to perpetrate Zionist control over US foreign policy. He is more than an apologist for Zionism. He is a fellow traveler. If he denies the claim that there is a genocide in Gaza, then he is the equivalent of a holocaust denier. The genetic fallacy is at work here, as well. At the heart of the compound fallacy is the assumption that Jews orchestrate life and that anybody who rejects the assumption is part of the orchestra.
The theory that “Jews run the world” is a longstanding antisemitic claim asserting that Jews, acting as a coordinated group, control banks, corporations, governments, the media, and other major institutions to manipulate world events for their own benefit. This debunked (absurd on its face) belief has infected the worldviews of both the far-right and far-left. We see it among the Woke Reich, in the content of social media influencers such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. We see it on the left in the Democratic Socialists of America. If one attempts to debunk it, which I do for the benefit of their audiences, he is dismissed as an agent of a Jewish cabal.
The compound fallacy is necessary because, as noted above, the theory has no credible evidence to support it. It relies on fabricated documents, selective anecdotes, and stereotypes. Despite having been thoroughly discredited, these claims have persisted because they offer a simple explanation for complex economic, political, and social problems. The fallacy is protective; it negates rational discernment. The cracked theory is functional, used to scapegoat Jewish communities. Scapegoating is the primitive impulse of the stupidified mind, a distraction from the real causes of human suffering. Thus it persists because it is useful for dividing and manipulating the masses. Because scapegoating is irrational, it depends on the irrational mind.
To say that antisemitism is harmful is to state the obvious. That’s the purpose of it. Antisemitism has played a significant role in justifying discrimination, pogroms, and, ultimately, the Nazi persecution and murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. The theory did not end with the Nazis. It is used today to undermine Israel and justify terrorism against Jewish civilians. The theory that Jews are puppetmasters pulling strings is ancient and perennial, and it has been used to divide the common folk and to obscure the reasons why things happen as they do for centuries. Just and rational minds know this, and are frustrated to see the reemergence of the ancient hatred at scale.
More recently, many decades now, the logic of this theory has been expanded to include all white people in the hatred. You’ve heard the line before, I’m sure: Whites control banks, corporations, governments, the media, and other major institutions to keep down blacks and other minorities. I show a propaganda film in class called The FBI’s War on Black America. It is told from the perspective of left-wing black activists and intellectuals working from the Black Panther perspective. I want students to experience a narrative from a particular standpoint to gain a deeper understanding of black nationalism. In the documentary, a journalist rants about the “white-owned” and “white-controlled” media. He asserts that the story of the FBI COINTELPRO operation has been warped by white supremacy—even though an almost exclusively white Congress exposed it and other clandestine operations on network television in the 1970s.
Published by Rutgers University Press
The book highlighted above, Global White Supremacy: Anti-Blackness and the University as Colonizer, by Christopher Collins and his coauthors, is one of many academic productions portraying whites in the same way antisemites portray Jews. The spread of democracy, liberal values, and reason is not the persuasion of better ideas, but the work of global white supremacy. Rutgers University Press summarizes Global White Supremacy:
“The trajectory of global White [sic] supremacy is deeply historical and contemporary—it is a global, transnational, and imperial phenomenon. White supremacy is sustained through the construction of inferiority and anti-Blackness. The context, history, and perspective offered by Collins, Newman, and Jun should serve as an introduction to the disruption of the ways in which university and academic dispositions have and continue to serve as sites of colonial and White supremacist preservation—as well as sites of resistance.”
Collins et al.’s book obscures the reality that the university and academic dispositions, captured by the left, press in the opposite direction, recoding anti-white bigotry as “resistance.” Resistance to what? To the Enlightenment and liberal values. For the enemies of freedom and republicanism, whites are the color of the West. It would be better if there were fewer of them, as Joe Biden opined (see Joe Biden and the Ultimate Source of Our Strength: “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop”). Raising the specter of “anti-blackness” is a bogeyman to distract the reader from the anti-whiteness that motivates the authors.
Published in 1994
Need another example? David Roediger’s collection of essays in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness might suffice. According to the publisher’s summary: “At a time when prevailing liberal wisdom argues for the downplaying of race in the hope of building coalitions dedicated to economic reform, Roediger wants to open, not close, debates on the privileges and miseries associated with being white. He closely examines the way in which white identities have historically prepared white Americans to accept the oppression of others, the emptiness of their own lives, and the impossibility of change.”
While most of us know about antisemitism, we rarely hear the parallel between antisemitism and anti-white bigotry. However, it is vital to preserving the West to recognize that the far-left weaponizes identity to advance the project of managed decline of the American Republic. Recall that, around 2010, major US magazines and newspapers flooded the zone with academic jargon, “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy.” Zack Goldberg documented this in his article “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” published in Tablet in August 2020. It wasn’t long before these, and other words, became commonplace.
Some of Goldberg’s evidence
Just as disaffected Germans and the human penchant for scapegoating were marshalled for the National Socialist project, disaffected Americans, prepared by indoctrination in anti-white bigotry, are being marshalled for the woke agenda—democratic socialism, Islamization, and all the rest of it.
“Aren’t you doing the same thing, Andy?” I can hear it now. “Isn’t all that a conspiracy theory? Aren’t you scapegoating?” Not at all. Don’t be absurd. Calling out the anti-West left for its machinations is entirely unlike antisemitism. The far-left is not an ethnic group (nor is the far right that’s jumped on the antisemitic train, while, like its left-wing counterpart, cozied up to Islam). It’s an organized political force that opposes the West and promulgates anti-white rhetoric to advance its cause. It does all this openly. And it’s making strides. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery. Global White Supremacy and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness are real books. Major magazines and newspapers, as well as cultural programming, are real developments.
The true elites and their minions announce their desires. The programming operates in the open. The results are undeniable. Western youth are being indoctrinated to hate America and Western values, and the quickest route to scrambling their minds is anti-whiteness. Elites manufacture guilt and leverage it for power. The Democratic Party—the party of transnationalism—embraces the hate. Who could forget the symbolism on display on June 8, 2020, when top congressional Democrats—including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Chuck Schumer—knelt in Emancipation Hall at the US Capitol for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor the overdose death of career criminal George Floyd and protest police brutality. They knelt while American cities burned. They were endorsing the color revolution that anti-white bigotry fomented.
In many ways, the left today is Maoist in orientation. It is anti-family, anti-tradition, and anti-freedom. The left, bankrolled by global financiers, models Mao’s Cultural Revolution—right down to the struggle sessions. Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to whip up revolutionary fervor, reassert his authority over the state, and eliminate capitalist, cultural, and traditional elements from Chinese society. The figurehead of the Chinese Communist Party formulated a foreign policy focused on promoting global anti-imperialist revolution, branding the United States a “paper tiger” and supporting national liberation movements in the Global South, i.e., those places lying outside the West (the Global North). This is the politics of today’s left.
There’s a reason social influencer Hasan Piker, dressed like Mao, has become the folk hero for democratic socialists. He fuses socialism and Third Worldism, in particular Islamism, in his messaging. His rhetoric is Maoist, and it finds purchase among young Americans prepared for generations to receive the message. Piker has millions of followers. One will watch his content, see a stupid man, and wonder why he is so popular. The tragic fact is that anti-white bigotry has made millions of Americans not only self-loathing but stupid.
Piker began his media career working for The Young Turks—a progressive network co-founded by his uncle, blowhard Cenk Uygur—where he hosted and produced the viral political series “The Breakdown.” The Young Turks are in many ways the mirror image of the Woke Reich—Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene (a Georgian politician who recently resigned from the House of Representatives), and Thomas Massie (overwhelmingly rejected by Kentucky voters in his bid for Senate reelection). On the right, the scapegoating is more exclusively Judeocentric, but the spirit is the same, and the Woke Reich is turning its back on those of European Christian descent.
The Young Turks have become explicitly and virulently antisemitic. Uygur and his sidekick Ana Kasparian post antisemitic content on X daily. They are, moreover, at the forefront of fomenting anti-white bigotry, despite being white themselves, and leaders in advancing the Islamist project. Kasparian, the child of Armenian refugees, appears to have forgotten that more than a million of her people were murdered by Ottoman Turks. The reach of TYT extends far beyond what one might suppose watching their unhinged content. Piker played a major role in Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Piker is also influential on Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, a Shi’a Muslim belonging to the same religious order as the ruling class of Iran.
Social media influencer Hasan Piker discovers Mao’s Little Red Book
The woke left worldview is rooted in anti-Western postmodernism and its offspring—critical race theory, queer activism, and post-colonial studies. The organic intellectuals of Third Worldism, having insinuated themselves into the university, enjoy an endless supply of young people, already confused by the culture industry and prior education, who enter their classrooms to be indoctrinated further in anti-West and anti-white ideology. The university has become the finishing school for anti-Jewish and anti-Western activists.
The Red-Green Alliance, with wealthy financiers bankrolling street-level action, seeks the end of the modern nation-state. In its stead, they intend to entrench a global system controlled by transnational corporations. Rigid ideological systems, such as Islam, and more broadly (what is presented as) socialism, will keep the masses ignorant and passive. Key to this strategy is anti-white bigotry. Be ready for it: they portray those who call them out on it as white supremacists. That’s the trick of the self-sealing logic. The only white person worth listening to is one who self-loathes and nods along with the anti-white bigot.
* * *
We don’t need to speculate about whether the DSA is an apologist for Islamofascism. They will tell you to your face that they are. The DSA has managed to mix together Maoism and Nazism in an ideological stew that is shaping the politics of the Democratic Party. This is the most dangerous development in our lifetimes. One of the two major political parties is openly embracing antisemitic totalitarianism.
Joe Scarborough looks visibly sickened as he hears DSA co-chair Megan Romer say October 7th was "largely inevitable" and admit she "probably would have" attended a pro-Hamas rally the day after the massacre.
Joe Scarborough is right to be shocked. But is he really? He has to realise that he played a major role in this development by portraying the ordinary liberalism and conservatism of Donald Trump and MAGA as “fascism,” while downplaying the twin threats of Islam and socialism. MSNOW and other news networks prepared the ground for DSA’s madness. And the reason for this is that both the culture industry and the Democrats represent transnational corporate power. This is what they pined for. They can’t now claim to be shocked. Scarborough knows it looks bad, so he taps his pen on the table.
Look at who is sitting next to him. Do you know who that is? It’s the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the first director of the Trilateral Commission and National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter. She knows what all this is about. Mika is Joe’s wife.
freedom and reason 